Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Pioneer”
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. …
A sideboard to your deck. A paintbrush to your canvas. A hammer to your smithing. …That’s all I got. Sideboarding is important because your maindeck can’t cover everything. Sometimes you need some fine-tuning to cover weak points against a match-up, a particular card, or even a player! Sideboard cards can vary from high impact but narrow answers — such as …
The unexpected announcement of the Pioneer format is shaping up to be a Magic highlight of 2019. We’ve seen a ton of unique decks emerge in the weeks since, many featuring cards and strategies which were banned or crowded out of Modern. As Michael Rapp observed in his metagame update, the Big Three decks right now seem to be Mono-Black, …
As the end of 2019 approaches, we’ve seen a lot in Magic over the year in Modern, and a brand-new format emerge in Pioneer. We were lucky enough to get a bevy of events this last weekend to pull data from: the StarCityGames Invitational, a Modern MTGO PTQ, a Modern MTGO Challenge, two Modern PTQs at GP Sao Paulo, a …
By now, you’re probably familiar with Magic’s newest format, Pioneer. (If you haven’t heard of it or need a refresher, check out our intro article.) We’re here today to talk about one of my favorite decks to emerge in Pioneer thus far: Sultai Midrange. Sultai is your classic midrange deck, featuring a suite of interaction, flush with versatile and adaptable …
