(This article was written in parts by .5, Balsamic, and Arsteel)
Another season of UOL Pioneer has come and gone with a new Top 8 and a new winner. Big congratulations to Trinket9 for making his 5th straight Pioneer league Top 8!
This season had a few oddities in the metagame. Namely, one team sported nine players on the same brew, Cleansing Red (named after Cleansing Wildfire). Beyond that, this 33 player season had Bant Spirits, Lotus Combo, and Red Deck Wins as the only other decks with two players on them.
Lastly, it’s important to remember that Winota, Joiner of Forces and Expressive Iteration were legal this season because it started before the banning (though no one played Winota and only two were playing Iteration). As always, the UOL metagame brings a lot of odd decks to the table! You can view the full Pioneer metagame in a spreadsheet here.
For this Top 8, we’ll start with some spicier lists. This Top 8 dump will not be based on seeding, because seeding is practically irrelevant in the UOL world. To quote masinmanc, “How many times have we seen a 1-2 seed final? Basically 0.”
Colgate’s Mono Black Aggro
This deck is your classic Mono Black Aggro shell. It uses a metric ton of one-drops, from Knight of the Ebon Legion to Thoughtseize. The raw power of repeatable reanimation on cheap 2-3 power creatures is really what gives this deck the explosiveness it needs to win games. The brand-new Tenacious Underdog from Streets of New Capenna brings another strong recurring creature to this deck, as it’s a cheap 2-mana 3/2 that can be cast repeatedly for card advantage and extra damage.
The real winners of this deck are when you get into the 3 and 4 drops. Rankle, Master of Pranks forces opponents to get rid of vital resources like cards in hand and creatures, which pairs really well with the reanimation abilities of the 1 and 2 drops in Mono Black. Sacrifice your own creature, bring it back later for a small price.
Graveyard Trespasser and Spawn of Mayhem are the perfect 3 drops for this deck, as they can put a lot of pressure on the opponent very fast. Trespasser also helps with casting Spawn and draining the opponent’s life total while protecting yours.
Looking at the sideboard, there are a lot of really nice hate cards and even a couple win conditions. Unlicensed Hearse is starting to become a Pioneer sideboard mainstay; it can exile multiple threats at once and can be very hard to remove in the late game. If you activate it only four times, it becomes an 8/8 monster that must be answered immediately. As for some of the other cards, they provide more removal for problematic creatures like Thalia, Guardian of Thraben and many others.
Overall, this deck’s plan is great, but there is something else here that can help it beat the rest of the field: the fact that this deck has basic lands is a hindrance for the multiple Cleansing Red players in the Top 8, as their game plan partially relies on you not having basic lands in your deck.
Trinket9’s 5-Color Humans
If I were to delve into all the pieces of this massive toolbox, it would take me all day. To give a very basic-ish summary, this deck uses Collected Company and lots of Humans to generate tons of value and tribal synergy. This deck also has lots of disruption, such as the aforementioned Thalia, Guardian of Thraben, Reflector Mage, and Kambal, Consul of Allocation in the sideboard.
It splashes red for one card, the famous Mantis Rider, which applies tons of pressure early and is very hard to block. These are the main cards which make this 5c pile great. However, its lack of basics hurts it severely against Cleansing Red, which two of the Top 8 players are on.
.5’s Pioneer 8-Rack
(Editors Note: this section was written by .5)
Next, let’s take a look at my deck. I may be a bit biased giving this breakdown, but since it’s my first ever Top 8 in any Untap league, I feel like it’s only fair that I get to share my perspective of the story. When I first built this deck, I wasn’t expecting to win any games. Given my usual performances in leagues (2-3, 1-4 and placing 9th and 10th repeatedly), I was not expecting to do well in the slightest.
After my first match, however, something felt like this was the run. I went 4-0-2, beating some of the best players in the tournament with explosive turns thanks to Waste Not and discard value. The deck was somehow able to grind out the likes of Bant Spirits, 5c Charms, UW flash, and Mardu Greasefang. The 2 IDs were just to secure my spot in the Top 8, and hopefully proceed to win a couple matches in the Best of 5 format.
The 8-Rack strategy aims to drag the game into a low-resource situation, one in which it can land some threats that cannot be answered by the opponent. The deck uses Thoughtseize and some delicious Vicious Rumors to try and prevent its opponent from executing any sort of gameplan.
When both players are empty-handed and drawing off of the top of the deck, Murderous Rider and Fatal Push can hopefully sweep up any pesky critters that remain, clearing the way for Rankle, Master of Pranks or Reality Smasher to beat the dazed opponent into dust, or for Davriel, Rogue Shadowmage to sap out their strength in concert with Shrieking Affliction, “The Racks” of the Pioneer 8-Rack.
The main deck is undoubtedly weak to aggressive creature rushes, but the sideboard helps those matchups by bringing in sweepers and removal. It also has a smattering of graveyard hate and tools against combo.
The 8-Rack deck is not one that has ever really broken the surface in Pioneer, and it would be easy to dismiss the success of this one as a testament to the wits and skill of its pilot. However, the list did do very well, despite being more than a year out of date, and perhaps there is something to be said for the power level of the cards in it. The archetype could be explored more and new tools be tried within it.
Decklist 4-5: masinmanc’s & Pinecone’s Cleansing Red
This deck took the league by storm, with a whopping nine players all registering the same ramp/land-destruction/midrange hybrid. This deck abuses the interaction between Cleansing Wildfire and the indestructible lands in the deck, Darksteel Citadel and Cascading Cataracts; targeting your own indestructible land with Cleansing Wildfire turns the innocent sorcery into a Rampant Growth with the added benefit of drawing a card. The deck uses this ramp to cast powerful planeswalkers such as Karn, the Great Creator and Ugin, the Ineffable above curve.
However, Cleansing Wildfire has other uses, namely in that it’s devastating when used in concert with Field of Ruin against opponents who skimped on their basic land counts, a strategy that becomes even more appealing in an open decklist tournament.
The main deck is rounded out with some red midrange all-stars: Fable of the Mirror-Breaker and Bonecrusher Giant. Perhaps the biggest spice is a selection of eldrazi, Thought-Knot Seer and Reality Smasher, which, just as they were six years ago, act as massive blockers against aggro and disruptive beaters against control and combo. The sideboard is devoted mainly to a Karn, the Great Creator toolbox, with a smattering of removal for flavor.
It’s easy to see the appeal of Cleansing Red, as a deck that defies the color-pie role of red. Out of the nine players who piloted the deck in the league, two have made it into the Top 8, an average performance for a 33 player event.
Decklist 6: Arsteel’s Neo-Machus
The Neomachus deck has smashed the “Turn 4 Rule” in Pioneer to smithereens, if it was ever there to begin with. The deck is simple, and many of the cards are simply redundant copies of the same effect.
The first category is card selection and graveyard filling. Taigam’s Scheming and Contingency Plan, which are functionally the same card, find your pieces and fill your graveyard. Otherworldly Gaze and Consider fill the same role in the one drop slot.
The second step is a delve creature, Hooting Mandrills or Tasigur, the Golden Fang. These creatures provide a mediocre fair gameplan, but chiefly they are combined with Neoform as early as turn three to create a 6/6 Velomachus Lorehold using the counter from Neoform.
The Velomachus digs deep into the deck to find extra turn spells, Karn’s Temporal Sundering, Part the Waterveil, or even Invoke Calamity to recast extra turn spells dumped in the graveyard earlier. A 6/6 does not need too many extra turns to win the game, especially when backed up by a motley assortment of delve creatures cast on those extra turns. The sideboard is completely devoted to fighting past various hate pieces.
Neo-Machus is pretty close to the epitome of a glass-cannon deck, and is in that dangerous spot where it can be targeted by all varieties of hate, from counters to discard to creature removal and graveyard hate and even the occasional pesky Soul-Scar Mage to shrink Velomachus Lorehold. However, it is probable that at the moment the deck is under the radar, and the hate that is best against it is not in abundance. Unlicensed Hearse only goes so far against Delve spells.
Decklist 7: Xahhfink’s Mono-W Book
After the release of Adventures in the Forgotten Realms there became a lot of hype about a certain combo in Standard, that being the interaction between Faceless Haven and The Book of Exalted Deeds. When the book was activated targeting an animated Faceless Haven, the haven would retain the “You cannot lose the game and your opponents cannot win the game” even after it turned back into a land. The lack of land destruction in the Standard format made this combo very difficult to interact with, so it was banned until the re-entry of Field of Ruin into Standard.
It did not take long for people to discover this combo in Pioneer, where Mutavault exists as a much less expensive version of Faceless Haven, allowing the combo to be pulled off for just four mana, a pittance compared to six in the Standard version. The combo was placed in Mono-White Devotion decks, which had lost Heliod, Sun-Crowned + Walking Ballista to a ban on the latter. Fink’s deck is a continuation of this archetype, with some exciting new sauce.
The deck runs a basic devotion package, with permanent based removal in the form of Stasis Snare, Skyclave Apparition, The Wandering Emperor, and Portable Hole, and some pip-heavy two drops, namely Knight of the White Orchid and Tomik, Distinguished Advokist.
This creates boatloads of mana with Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx, allowing the deck to overpower more fairly paced opponents. Though Nykthos can just be a means to cast multiple cheaper spells in a turn, it does make the inclusion of Emrakul, the Promised End in the main deck and sideboard more justifiable.
The deck can operate as a powerful fair midrange deck, as many of the best combo decks do, but it also boasts loads of redundancy in accessing the combo. The exciting new card in the deck is Elspeth Resplendent. Elspeth looks strange in the deck until one realizes that her -3 does an exceptional job finding both combo pieces, digging seven cards deep for any permanent card, importantly including lands, that costs less than three mana.
Thalia’s Lancers can tutor up Book of Exalted Deeds, but is also able to tutor a healthy selection of lands and creatures to hand. With a “new” rules change that did not exist when Lancers came out, it can also tutor up planeswalkers, which are now legendary. Lastly, Search for Glory can tutor up any of the cards that Thalia’s Lancers can, while also giving access to a one-of Faceless Haven, a backup piece to Mutavault for the combo.
The sideboard is just as exciting as the main deck, containing some gems like Lyra, Dawnbringer for aggro and Ugin, the Spirit Dragon for a variety of matchups. The deck plays Yorion, Sky Nomad as a companion, for some added blink value but also as an excuse to play more tutor targets.
It has been a while since the initial craze of the Book of Exalted Deeds + Mutavault combo in Pioneer, but Fink’s angle on the archetype is a new, more powerful version of the deck that moves away from the angel tribe.
Decklist 8: FunPheonix’s UR Dragons
FunPheonix’s UR Dragons uses different colors than the old Esper Dragons deck from Standard, but the deck still plays Silumgar’s Scorn as an efficient counterspell and Dig Through Time as a burst of card advantage and selection. However, that is where the similarities halt.
A major reason to build the deck is Goldspan Dragon, a multi-format all-star that provides boatloads of mana as well as a swift clock. Sprite Dragon is a cheap threat that allows the deck to play more of a tempo game; with low-cost spells like Consider and Opt, it can grow massive fast. To round out the dragon package, Niv-Mizzet is a late game powerhouse that is a nightmare for control as a one-of in the deck.
Red gives the deck some of the best removal in Pioneer. Dragon’s Fire is exceptional in this deck as it can deal four damage or more for just two mana and sometimes scales incredibly well with Sprite Dragon.
It’s worth mentioning the deck plays a full four copies of Expressive Iteration which was banned recently. The loss of Iteration significantly damaged any UR shell’s power in the current metagame.
Top 8 Results
The Top 8 fell in a fairly expected fashion. At the top of the bracket, we saw Cleansing Red vs Neo-Machus. The Mono Red deck has a lack of hard hate for the combo, so it struggled even after sideboarding, but was able to combat it somewhat using Field of Ruin and Cleansing Wildfire as land destruction against a deck with no basic lands to buy time. Masinmanc fell in a close 3-2 against Arsteel’s Neo-Machus combo deck. This meant our glass-cannon combo was onto the semifinals.
There Arsteel faced Colgate’s Mono Black Aggro, which had defeated FunPheonix’s UR Dragons with a swift 3-0. The discard, removal, and sideboard hate proved far too strong for Neo-Machus and with another 3-0, we had our first finalist. This also marked the first time where Team UB wasn’t representing both Pioneer finalists in over a year.
On the other side of the bracket, .5’s 8-Rack fell in a close 2-3 against Xahfink’s Mono White Book. .5 seemed to be in a good position in game 5, but it fell prey to a topdecked Book of Exalted Deeds to create the lock with Mutavault.
For our last quarterfinals match, Trinket9’s 5c Humans lost to Pinecone on Cleansing Red. The lack of basics in Trinket’s deck was rough against Cleansing Wildfire and even his Mantis Riders weren’t enough to secure victory. In the end, Pinecone took the match 3-1.
In a much less exciting semifinals, Xahhfink’s Mono White beat Pinecone’s Cleansing Red 3-0. Mono White was able to easily go over the top of Cleansing Red, though it nearly lost game 1 until it topdecked an Emrakul, the Promised End to stabilize the game. March of Otherworldly Light was able to exile a Darksteel Citadel in response to Cleansing Wildfire in game 2, a blowout that Fink had been hoping to execute that match.
That brought us to our finals, Colgate on Mono Black Aggro vs Xahhfink on Mono White Book. Fink had been feeling confident going into the match, having beaten Colgate earlier in the swiss. Recursive creatures were a poor option against the incredible amounts of exile-based removal in Mono White, and Fink’s confidence was rewarded with a 3-0 to secure himself another Pioneer League win!
The invitational points for both players have likely guaranteed their spots for our next Solo Invitational, which begins once the results are in for our Modern and Legacy Leagues. You can check out the leaderboard on our Invitational page.
Our next season of Pioneer has already started, but you can check out our Pioneer page for more information, or read our Get Started page to learn more about how you can participate in our free online Magic tournaments.