December Wrap Up

So the experiment with controlling decks in December comes to a disappointing end. Things were going swimmingly, I was 1 win from Platinum with over a week left and then... boom. Ended down in Gold 2.

Oof.

I went from a 60% win rate down to a 55% win rate pretty quickly. What the hell happened? Taking a look at my most played match ups gives a good hint.

The meta shifted hard in the last month to more aggro decks than I was seeing before; Red decks of various stripes, Golgari adventures, and Simic flash all were appearing more frequently and all exposed weak spots in my deck's game plan.

- Red aggro simple got in under my defenses faster than I could set up and if I didn't get a turn 5 Time Wipe or maybe a turn 5 Planar Cleansing I was toast.

- Golgari Adventures either hit me with a turn 3 (!) Questing Beast or used Midnight Rider or Edgewall Innkeeper to draw replacement cards enough to simply start over after I did a board sweeper.

- Simic flash simply got creatures on the board and then counter spelled my attempts to remove them.

All three of those matches I faced more frequently in the last ten days of December and all of them were well below a win rate to climb higher. On the upside I dominated against the mirror match up and had a good handle on any Cat Oven decks.

For the last month of Throne of Eldraine standard I'm going a new/old direction. I'm going to find a Golgari deck to use and climb the ladder with. Its going to be difficult since I only have 6 rares with which to craft a deck with so I'm going to have to leverage my existing collection more than I would like. I'll report on this experiment once I have some matches under my belt.