Why I Chose Simic Cub for AC11

I'm writing this just before AC11. The Arena Championship is the closest thing you'll get these days to a Pro Tour held on MTG Arena, and for that reason I tested for it quite extensively.

While we tried a bunch of off-meta decks and new brews, nothing stood out above the best decks of the format. This is a format where judging the metagame is extremely important, and if you can't do that accurately, just play the deck you know best.

What was my weapon of choice? Well, it's the one deck that going into testing I said I will outright not want to play: Simic Cub. It was decimated at the Pro Tour, and I thought there was no chance the metagame would flip enough to make it viable again so soon. The decks at the Pro Tour trounced Simic Cub and forced it into hibernation.

So what changed?

Well, one deck started to stand out as the clear winner of how the metagame broke down — Izzet Lessons. It was favorable against a lot of the non-Cub decks, and it even closely played decks it was weak against. For the weekend after the PT Lessons, and even Dimir Midrange, were the big winners at events like the ACQ.

What deck has a good matchup against both of those decks? Well, this other Cub deck that's been hibernating, Mono-Green Landfall, destroys Dimir Midrange and has a strong Lessons matchup. It's a strong proactive deck that can go toe to toe with most decks in the format. This isn't a deck that came from nowhere either. When Lessons was dominant prior to Lorwyn's release, the deck was in its preliminary form and was built to attack Lessons.

Mono-Green Landfall got pushed out of the format originally because of its rancid matchup against Simic Cub. As you can see, the wheel keeps spinning. Mono-Green is still an incredible deck and has tools to beat anything in the format. However depending on lists, Simic Cub is as good as it gets in the matchup. Landfall's scariest cards for Cub is Mossborn Hydra, Earthbender Ascension, and Mightform Harmonizer, but everything else is negligible. It's almost a deterministic win from Simic Cub's side if you draw a Nature's Rhythm and a couple of mana-producing creatures on the play.

Simic Cub got smashed at the Pro Tour by decks like Spellementals and other hateful decks, but those decks don't perform as well as once Cub was pushed out of the metagame and not as well against Mono-Green Landfall either. Decks featuring the card Sunderflock are almost non-existent.

Before any event, an exercise I do with my teammates, who are almost always a different group of great players depending on the event, is to make predictions on what we expect the metagame to be.

Here was my prediction for this event:

Actual metagame:

"Not including us" doing some heavy lifting here as we account for 6 of the 14 players playing Simic, and as you can see with Excruciator that brings us to 6.7% of the field with my team withstanding.

I overestimated Demons and Dimir Mid, but Demons is closer than it looks given various similar Dimir Control decks represented in the "other" category. More people than we expected realized just how bad Dimir Midrange is in this metagame. It could come back to being a fine choice if Cub starts to overperform putting a bunch more Elemental and Control decks into the metagame.

I'm proud of my ability to read a metagame, and this is one of the tougher metagames to call because of the high number of ebbs and flows. Not only did I predict the metagame, pen to paper, I put my money where my mouth was and played the deck I felt was best suited for the metagame, or at least the best deck we had access to. It's possible someone has broken it in that other category and maybe the meta gets shaken up once again.

The largest chunk of the metagame (Landfall, Lessons, and Demons) is exactly what we want to see. I won't claim the Demons matchup is great, but it's winnable and not too bad. Lessons and Landfall range from solidly good in Lessons to overwhelmingly favorable in Landfall, depending on how many Mossborn Hydra your opponent has in their main deck. It's a much stronger card in game one than game two when we can bring in some interaction. If we did anything wrong testing for this event, it's not prepping against versions with four main deck Hydra, which would be the best way to build the deck for this breakdown, as it also would be quite good in mirrors to build your deck this way.

Before we play this event, this is the exact reasonable breakdown we could expect. While the card choices of opponents remain to be seen, I'm extremely happy with our process and where we ended up. Hopefully, we can execute and one of us can take it down.

While most of my team played this archetype, none of us played the exact 75, but only some very minor deviations.

Here's my list:

AC 11 Simic Cub

I'm excited to get back in the ring in a high-level event, and there's still the first Arena Champs Qualifier this weekend even if I'm unable to convert. I'll be participating in both either way.

This was an amazing Standard for a deep dive. I'm happy to get back in the ring again, as it's been low on my priority list, and arena tournaments are the only way I'm getting back into the competitive circuit.

Next week, I'll go over my weekend of Magic, discuss my deck, and outline any changes I would have made.

Wish me luck!