Don’t miss our recap of Day 1.
Though 40% of the Day 2 field was made up of Golos variants, only one Golos deck made it into the Top 8 of Mythic Championship V: Bant Golos in the hands of the Magic Pro League’s Jean-Emmanuel Depraz.
Depraz will be joined by five other members of the Magic Pro League in the Top 8: Andrea Mengucci, Ken Yukuhiro, William Jensen, Lee Shi Tian, and Javier Dominguez. Only two Challengers made the Top 8: Stanislav Cifka and Gabriel Nassif.
The full Top 8 metagame looks fairly diverse at first glance:
- 2 x Simic Food
- 1 x Bant Ramp
- 1 x Bant Food
- 1 x Bant Golos
- 1 x Mardu Knights
- 1 x Mono-Red Cavalcade
- 1 x Gruul Aggro
But the diversity in archetype names is a result of defining very similar decks with small differences as entirely different archetypes. This hides the fact that five of those decks are Simic-based ramp decks that leverage Once Upon and Time (21 total copies) and Hydroid Krasis (20 total copies).
The single Golos deck in the Top 8 is an extremely misleading indicator of the overall success of the Golos variants on Day 2. In fact, every player in ninth through 16th place was on Golos (five Bant, two Fires, and one Four-Color), meaning that nine of the Top 16 decks, or 56%, contained Golos, Tireless Pilgrim or Field of the Dead. The Top 8 of Mythic Championship V could have been dominated by Golos decks if a few matches had gone the other way.
Given the massive success of Golos decks at Mythic Championship V, it seems likely that at least one of Golos, Tireless Pilgrim or Field of the Dead will be banned in the next Banned and Restricted announcement on Monday. Wizards of the Coast moved this B&R announcement up by a month specifically for this possibility in order to prevent Mythic Championship VI in November from being the victim of a broken Standard format.
What remains to be seen is whether a ramp or aggressive deck will win Mythic Championship V in tomorrow’s Top 8 bracket.
The Top 8 of Mythic Championship V starts on Sunday at 12 PM Eastern on twitch.tv/magic.