This weekend was the 2020 Mythic Invitational, one of the biggest Magic: The Gathering tournaments of the year. Players from across the globe brought their best decks to battle it out for the championship. Despite some delays due to technical difficulties, it was a weekend full of great Magic: The Gathering gameplay that many fans won’t soon forget.
The Mythic Invitational was the first major tournament to use Magic‘s Historic format, which debuted last year. As such, it was the first opportunity to get a clear understanding of the format’s meta when it comes to high level play. Many Magic players paid close attention to the tournament, looking both for ways to improve their own deck building and to see what decks they’ll likely run into when playing Historic.
First place in the tournament went to Hall of Fame Magic player Seth Manfield. After starting top 8 in the losers bracket, he expertly piloted a Sultai Midrange deck all the way to the finals. There he clinched out a win after a grueling two game series against another Magic Hall of Famer, Gabriel Nassif.
Sultai is a term for a deck that uses black, blue, and green Magic cards. Manfield’s Midrange brew proved to be a powerful deck, having a ton of flexibility in the early game, followed up with huge late game threats. It pulled cards from both Standard legal sets and the new Historic Anthologies to create a powerful, well-rounded deck.
The goal of the deck was to ramp into extra lands, remove all threats the opponent played, and then finish the game with powerful creatures and planeswalkers. In the early game, the two key cards were Growth Spiral and Thoughtseize. Growth Spiral costs one green and one blue mana and allows a player to draw a card, and then play an extra land from their hand. It’s a deceptively powerful card that was actually banned from Standard for being too efficient.
It gave Manfield an early mana advantage over his opponents, allowing him to cast bigger spells faster. Thoughtseize, which costs one black mana and two life, allows a player to look at the opponent’s hand and have them discard a card of the player’s choosing. The card did a ton of work for Manfield, as it gave him both information about his opponent’s hand, and allowed him to throw his opponents off their game plan.
In the mid game, the most powerful card in Manfield’s deck was undoubtedly Uro, Titan of Nature’s Wrath. It’s one of the most strongest cards from Magic‘s Theros: Beyond Death expansion, and is a key card in a number of formats. It’s a creature that costs one generic, one green and one blue mana, and upon entering it gains the player three life, draws them a card, and allows them to play an additional land that turn.
Uro is sacrificed when it enters, but then it can be brought back from the graveyard for two green and two blue mana later in the game. The card pretty much does everything, starting off as a ramp and life gain spell before later becoming a powerful creature.
Finally at the top end, Manfield could close out games by combining the Planeswalker Nissa, Who Shakes the World and the creature Hydroid Krasis. Nissa, who costs 3 generic and two green mana, both turns lands into creatures, and makes each forest tap for two mana instead of one. Hydroid Krasis costs one blue, one green and X mana. Players can pay any amount of mana into the X and the Krasis enters as an X/X, draws the player half of X cards, and gains the player Half of X life.
With Nissa allowing forests to tap for two mana each, Manfield was able to create Huge Krasis’ that also gained him life and drew him cards. It’s a powerful combo that was a key part of some of the best performing decks in Standard.
While a number of players brought Sultai Midrange to the tournament, Manfield was the only player who managed to make top 8 with it. Instead, six out of the top eight decks were some form of sacrifice deck. All of these decks used powerful sacrifice and recursion engines in order to create huge amounts of value and kill the opponent using small amounts of incremental damage. The decks were either green red black, black red, or mono-black.
Of these three different color combinations, Jund Sacrifice, that is the green red black deck, did the best. Four different Jund lists made top 8, and one of them, piloted by Gabriel Nassif, took second place. The goal of the Jund Sacrifice deck was to create huge amounts of value through sacrificing and recurring creatures, while also having the ability to steal opponent’s creatures, attack with them, and then sacrifice them before the opponent gets them back.
Two key cards in the Jund Sacrifice deck were Priest of Forgotten Gods and Mayhem Devil. Priest is a creature that costs one generic and one black mana, and it says “Sacrifice two other creatures: Any number of target players each lose 2 life and sacrifice a creature. You add [2 black mana] and draw a card.” Much like Uro, this is a card that does a lot. It removes opponents creatures, drains opponents life, allows its controller to ramp with the extra mana, and draws a card. If not answered right away, Priest of Forgotten Gods can get very out of hand very quickly.
Mayhem Devil is another creature, and it costs one generic mana, one red mana, and one black mana. It has a passive ability that whenever either player sacrifices a permanent, Mayhem Devil does one point of damage to any target. The reciprocal nature of this ability is very powerful, as it both punishes your opponent for playing lands that need to be sacrificed, and it neuters the life gain of a card like Uro. And because the damage can be pointed at any target, it’s can both remove creatures and ping down your opponents life total. When combined with Priest of Forgotten Gods or the Cat Oven combo, Mayhem Devil can start putting out insane amounts of damage per turn.
One of the big takeaways from the tournament is how good multi-color decks are in Historic. While many 1 or 2 color sacrifice decks did well, having access to key green cards like Collected Company and Scavenging Ooze gave the Jund Deck an upper hand. There is quite a lot of mana fixing in the Historic format, and as a result, players are rarely punished for playing a three, four or five color deck.
The Mythic Invitational also reinforced something that most Magic players already knew. Cards that do a lot of things are very good. In order for a card to be playable in Historic, it often needs to generate value in more than one way, like Priest of Forgotten Gods, Growth Spiral, or Uro, Titan of Natures Wrath. While big vanilla creatures may have cut it in the old days of Magic, that is not the case any more.
Overall, it seems like Historic is an exciting format with a number of viable strategies. Going into the tournament many players assumed that mono-red goblins was going to be absolutely dominant, but in the end only one goblins deck made top 8. This is a good thing for the format, because it means the meta has not yet been solved, and there is still room for new decks to spring up. If Wizards of the Coast continues supporting Historic, there’s a good chance it could become one of the most popular Magic Formats.
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