Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Pioneer”
A lot can happen from nothing. Last week’s Banned and Restricted announcement was pretty highly anticipated. Many discussions across social media centered around Pioneer — the format’s overall health and the power levels of the proverbial Boogeymen. People even started talking about how the metagame would change after the presumed bans, projecting deck positions and power shifts. It was an …
Mono-Black is one of Pioneer’s oldest archetypes, and has continued to be a mainstay. It’s an aggressive strategy that utilizes cheap, resilient creatures like Bloodsoaked Champion and Dread Wanderer to get the ball rolling, while using the most powerful interaction spells in the format in Thoughtseize and Fatal Push to drive your threats home. Just in case your smaller creatures …
Pioneer was the hot new thing at the end of 2019, and now we’re living through its first big test as a format. As tuned, consistent combo lists like UB Inverter and Lotus Breach take a firm grip on the metagame, many players seem to feel the format is losing the creative spirit that its name evoked. But even with …
This past weekend was yet another showcase for Pioneer, and it did not disappoint. With the Players Tour and Grand Prix happening in Phoenix, as well as the SCG Team Open and Classic in Philadelphia, there was no shortage of the Pioneer metagame on display. Some of the big questions going into the weekend involved Inverter and Underworld Breach decks. …
At Players Tour Nagoya, I played Five-Color Humans. This probably wouldn’t seem odd if you assumed I was playing Modern, but no — I played Five-Color Humans in Pioneer. So, why did I register a Modern deck that was missing half its cards in a Pioneer tournament? At the start of my testing, I didn’t know what was good. I …
Editor’s Note: Inverter of Truth has been banned in Pioneer effective August 3, 2020. Last weekend, we saw the first round of Regional Players Tour events in Brussels and Nagoya. Dimir Inverter was the deck to beat in both events, and things didn’t go spectacularly well for those attempting to do so — Inverter took six of the sixteen potential …
Dimir Inverter has been the talk of the Pioneer community this past week. It was the breakout deck of last weekend’s Players Tour events, earning Piotr Glogowski a second-place finish in Brussels and putting five players into the Top 8 in Nagoya. But Inverter’s dominance all but overshadowed another deck that put up results on both continents: Spirits, the deck …
When most players hear about a Stompy deck, they think ridiculously large threats. They think large power coming into the red zone against the rest of the format’s puny creatures. Stompy decks aren’t trying to play some attrition game or work their way around creature combat. They’re trying to run you over and laugh in post-combat’s wake…assuming there even is …
Five-Color Niv-Mizzet is both one of the hottest decks in Pioneer and my personal favorite deck in the format. This deck can interact with your opponent with a wide array of disruptive spells until you can resolve a creature that generates value, such as Niv-Mizzet Reborn. The key is to get ahead on resources and then use those resources to …
Theros Beyond Death is just around the corner, and all the new cards have been revealed. I’m excited to play with these cards in every format, but I’m most interested in the set’s impact on Pioneer. Pioneer is currently as healthy as it’s ever been: every color is represented well, and there are multiple archetypes within almost every color combination. …
