The SNC Championship is in the books. My testing team put four people in the Top 8 and four more into the Top 16. Our outstanding success is in part due to our great performance in the Historic portion of the tournament. While half the team chose Golgari Food, the other half chose Selesnya Humans.

Humans was a force in the metagame in late 2021. It was so prevalent that every deck was preparing to beat it in some way. Young Pyromancer, Anger of the Gods and Dual Shot were cards that saw play in the sideboard of Izzet Phoenix. Golgari Food played three Shambling Ghast in the main deck. Selesnya Heliod was a popular choice due to having a good Humans matchup. Control decks played up to four Archon of Absolution.

To no one’s surprise, Humans did poorly in that metagame. Golgari Food, one of its worst matchups, was on top of the world with Yuuki Ichikawa taking the Innistrad Championship Trophy to Japan. Since then, Humans has vanished from the landscape of Historic, and with it, slowly but surely most sideboard hate for “go-wide” creature strategies. Decks like Selesnya Heliod don’t exist anymore either. The Phoenix lists are a lot weaker nowadays to Humans than six months ago. All those things added up to Humans being well positioned in the metagame again. The tribal deck is excellent against control, good against Phoenix and ahead versus Affinity, Auras and Arcanist. The only popular bad matchup, but by no means unwinnable, is Golgari Food. The archetype was ripe for a comeback.

The metagame at the SNC Championship was worse for Humans than we expected. There was less control and more Food than we had hoped for. Nonetheless, we did put four Humans players in the Top 16 with a total team win rate of 61.5 percent. I personally went 4-4 with the deck, although I only won two die rolls in Historic and had poor draws all tournament.