Last weekend I did coverage for my first time. Galactus is the largest store in Rome (and probably in the whole of Italy) and they offered me and popular Italian Streamer (ProfumatoTK) the opportunity to commentate on Saturday’s and Sunday’s MCQ in Rome! I loved the idea as I’ve never done coverage in my life, and since I’ve started streaming 7 months ago, I felt that doing both could help me improve. I love the two days of doing coverage, and even though we were live both days for more than 10 hours, it was a blast.
The tournament was amazing, and while many people have complained about not having a travel award flight with your MCQ win, I want to point out that Galactus (with a 35 € registration), in addition to the free Arcbound Ravager also included a very cool t-shirt, some goodies and a voucher of 1,000 € for the flight to Richmond to the winner of each MCQ! Roughly 200 people competed in each event and the winners were my good friend Marco del Pivo, on my very same take of Hogaak, as well as a player on Mono-Red Phoenix.
Today I want to raise to your attention the coolest decks that made up to the Top 8 and talk about the metagame breakdown at each event.
In both tournaments, Mono-Red Phoenix was the most-represented deck and Eldrazi Tron the second-most. Even though Eldrazi Tron went 1-4 in feature matches, it did dominate the event, as it was by far the most-played deck at the top tables. Hogaak was the third most-played deck on Saturday and the fifth most-played on Sunday, with only 3 total copies among the 16 slots in the two Top 8s.
Best Decks of the MCQ
Nearly everyone had 4 Leyline of the Void in their sideboard, and knew how to mulligan properly to find them–we even had a Burn deck with 4 Leyline of the Void and no Rest in Peace!
Urza’s Tron Lands were 20% of the metagame both days, with 22 copies of Eldrazi Tron and 18 copies of Mono-Green Tron. And it was very likely because of this reason that Francesco De Angelis managed to Top 8 with his pet deck featuring Pillage!
Francesco De Angelis – RG Ponza – Top8 MCQ Roma 08/03/2019
Good old Jund never dies. We knew that it had a bad matchup against Tron, though Davide Canonico didn’t seem to think so, as he showed us during Round 8 on camera while he was busy recurring Field of Ruin with Wrenn and Six.
Davide Canonico – Jund – Top4 MCQ Roma 08/03/2019
His list isn’t anything new, but the addition of Field of Ruin was definitely sweet tech that I could see being good (definitely better than Ghost Quarter) to fight all these Urza’s Tower going around.
On Sunday, we saw a wonderful creation from Alessandro Danesi reach the Top 4. A deck that he called CreatureShift and that revolves around Primeval Titan–not only Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle, but also Field of the Dead.
Alessandro Danesi – Naya CreatureShift – Top4 MCQ Roma 08/04/2019
Danesi put on a show in Round 7 on camera, when he managed to defeat Hogaak 2-0 despite being on the draw and despite Hogaak having drawn reasonably well. Arboreal Grazer did all it could, ramping on the first turn and then blocking a Vengevine and receiving a Path to Exile to power up a third-turn Primeval Titan (backed by two Zombies thanks to Field of the Dead), and then finally dealing more than enough damage on Turn 4!
In Game 2, he managed to deal with a bunch of small creatures and Hogaak on Turn 3 thanks to Anger of the Gods + Path to Exile, showing that the Hogaak menace could be defeated even without major sideboard hate.
The last deck that I want to highlight is Amulet Titan from Simone Corsi, who reanimated an archetype that seemed to be long gone. Simone had 3 copies of Karn, the Great Creator in his deck, and they were great at stopping the many different artifacts around–for example, he defeated Hardened Scales in his quarterfinals because of it.
Karn is great in a deck with Ancient Stirrings, as you can find it off the sorcery and it’s good to have a backup plan in case there’s a Blood Moon. Simone showed on stream during his semifinals how hard is to keep or mulligan with this deck, as you need certain pieces and Amulet of Vigor isn’t everything. He mulliganed very aggressively and still had very solid draws despite being down to five cards in all three games.
Simone Corsi – Amulet Titan – Top4 MCQ Roma 08/04/2019
While the Twitter world and Magic in general is outraged about Hogaak, I didn’t feel that at all this weekend in Rome. Not that many people were playing the deck, and not that many people were winning with it. Hogaak, Arisen Necropolis is an overpowered card that can lead to some broken draws, but I can see the Modern format adapting to it like they did last weekend in Rome.
If you want to watch 20 hours of video from last weekend you can check them at twitch.tv/galactus, and you can see the full decklists of the two Top 8s you can view them here:
