Just Add Bacon’s Skyweaver Meta Breakdown, Week of 1/18/22

Kicking off our report is a beautiful rps meta, built around a wisdom trifecta with aggro, control, and combo all represented. Grover Turbo forms the backbone of the triangle with its fast, explosive, and highly interactive combos giving it a strong but fair edge over much of the other competing aggro decks. In response to this aggression, other wisdom tools have been found to be optimal answers, leading to control strategies adopting Axel as their go-to counter. And finally, to counter the oppressive (but respectable) ability of Axel to control literally any aggro matchup, wisdom otk tools, supplemented with the Intellect prism, have been employed to win against axel, at the cost of having a rough matchup against Banjo’s Grover builds. The end result is a beautiful system of checks and balances, not unlike the glorious American Constitution, that keeps the meta fair and equitable for all of the prisms that are allowed to be good. However, to understand this magnanimous triangle, we first need to discuss the Wisdom prism, how it is operating here, and why these decks have pushed out all other competition. 

As a prism, Wisdom specializes in a few areas. The most important of these is simply powerful spells, albeit usually with some catch. Options like {{Whisk Away}}, {{Skychannel}}, {{World Tree}}, {{Seal of Doom}}, {{Eldritch Lore}}, and {{Doomsday}} (to name a few) are frequently employed in most if not all of the wisdom decks I will be discussing, and it’s rather easy to see why. Simply put, when used well these cards consistently punch well above their pay grade, and whatever drawbacks they may have are usually compensated for or downright overshadowed by other strengths inherent to the Wisdom prism.

The first place we see this in action is with Grover Turbo. Grover Turbo has a very simple game plan: use {{Grover}} to dump half of your deck, curve a turn four 8/9 guard {{World Tree}}, maybe {{Soul Forge}} into a turn 5 {{Sky Phoenix}} (which has lead and will summon a 7/7 copy on death), and we go from there. The real kicker comes from our latest expansion, which introduced two key cards for the deck. The first of these is {{Ari’s Insight}}. I’ve discussed the value of 1 mana draw in other places (link to expansion review) so I will not spend much time on it here, but its primary function in the deck is acting as a huge consistency boost. What is much more important to the deck, however, is {{Mercurial Mimic}}. Because of how fast the deck empties itself, {{Desire}}’s summon condition can be reliably triggered. On turn 9, Mimic can be played after Desire, making a 16/20 with guard and barrier. Agility currently lacks effective counters to this, Heart must resort to cards like Wed Dead, Shoal Sprite, Avatar of Light, or Grave Roil, and Strength only has Mortal Blow as a safe answer. Also, if it is not dealt with in some way, the punish is 24 points of face damage, which most decks will not be able to survive on turn 10. Personally, I quite like this combo. It is good to see a Wisdom deck with a reliable and interactive finisher, in that it reliably interacts with the opponent’s face for 24 damage against 3 of the 5 prisms. Wisdom and Intellect have easy counters like {{Waterline}}, {{Doomsday}}, and {{Touch the Sky}} though, so the combo is certainly fair. If you are losing to 24 damage on turn 9, just play Wisdom. 

In response to the Grover deck, some turn to Banjo {{Floodwater}} and Axel Exhaustion, both of which pack far more hard removal than previous dominant control decks. As a side note, I think more hard removal in a control deck is fun and good for the game, since hard removal is binary and not complicated. Having to carefully manage and efficiently use removal makes the game difficult for new players, so it is much better to have 3-mana, 4-mana, 6-mana, and 10-mana cards that can reset the board. The fact that these are all in the same prism and have generally ignorable downsides only further compliments this. In any case, the main differences between Axel Exhaust and Banjo Floodwater are their removal pieces and win conditions (or lack thereof).

Axel Exhaust’s win condition is healing and burning the opponent with ood (out of deck) damage. This is achieved through his numerous healing resources (like {{Archivist}}, {{Earth Golem}}, {{Miss Aya}}, {{Vishiva}} and {{Jakintsu}}) and great draw options (such as {{Ponderous}} and {{Prismata}}). Interestingly, the most successful decks have opted to avoid death packages and {{Grave Roil}}, unlike previous builds. The best reason I have found for this is that death units provide an opportunity for unfair Agility spells like {{Lightning Vial}} to interrupt their strategy. So, by cutting the Roil and by deprioritizing death units, the deck has made itself much more resilient to unfair dusting counterplay. A side effect of this is that games for the deck tend to be much longer, but I see this as a good thing, as longer games allow more time for skill expression. This is evidenced in the technical prowess required to play Doomsday, Study 3 times with Archivist on board, and then passing. 

The final deck, and according to survey results the strongest, is Banjo Floodwater. Banjo Floodwater packs plenty of answers to Grover and other lower tier aggro decks in {{Whisk Away}}, {{Waterline}}, {{Anchor Drop}}, and {{Frigid Blizzard}}. For Banjo Grover builds in particular, the deck also runs {{Doomsday}}. Then, to handle Axel, the deck’s win condition is setting up {{Sapphire}} with 2 {{Octavian}} (with cards like {{Illusion}} and {{Soul Forge}}), summoning {{Archivist}}, and then playing essentially every water card in the deck (most of which are now gain mana). By using this with the aforementioned removal and by drawing cards like {{Lotus’s Reflection}}, {{Hydrate}}, and {{Floodwater}}, it’s quite possible to achieve either 99 mana or health. Then, one simply plays {{Invest}} and wins the game with a 99-damage punch to the opponent’s face. The average turn for this combo tends to be around turns 9-10, which is pretty fair considering that the most fair aggro deck (Banjo Grover) in the meta tends to close games out on turn 10 if it doesn’t get hit by Waterline or Doomsday. 

All and all, the decks in S tier are what I would like to see in every meta report. Every Archetype is faithfully represented, the decks interplay well with each other, and the interesting thought and deckbuilding decisions really show off the diverse strengths of my favorite prism.