VML Season 12 Week 1 Metagame Breakdown

Welcome to the summer of VML! For the 128 players competing for a spot in their Regional Championships, all the cards are on the table (aka, there are no upcoming sets being added to Standard during this season). Let’s take a look at what players picked for the first week of VML Season 12!

With 30 archetypes represented and only one deck with more than 10% metashare, it looks like players were split between old favorites and newcomers to the meta for the first week.

This week’s most popular deck is Temur Analyst, a combo deck aiming to self-mill and discard lands into its graveyard so that it can reanimate them with Aftermath Analyst Aftermath Analyst , get massive amounts of mana with Nissa, Resurgent Animist Nissa, Resurgent Animist , and blast their opponent with Worldsoul's Rage Worldsoul's Rage . 22 players chose to run this deck, for a 17.5% metashare.

The next three most popular decks are some of Standard’s usual suspects: Azorius Control with 13 players and a 10.3% metashare, Esper Midrange with 12 players and a 9.5% metashare, and Domain Ramp with 12 players and a 9.5% metashare. While Azorius Control and Esper Midrange will likely stick around in some form, this summer is a bit of a last hurrah for Domain Ramp, thanks to the triomes rotating out this fall.

The “Other” category of decks, representing all decks with only 1 or 2 players piloting them, contains 19 out of the 30 archetypes this week and represents 18.3% of the metashare.

Spice Corner

This week’s most unique decks include wolfennar’s Dimir Explosive Combo, Ryn’s Boros Control, and Clara Lehenaff’s 4-Color Blink.

wolfennar’s “Explosive Derg” deck is a Hidetsugu and Kairi Hidetsugu and Kairi combo deck that aims to manipulate the top of the deck and cheat out big spells like Explosive Singularity Explosive Singularity and Push // Pull Push Pull
. The deck contains plenty of discard effects that help it get good reanimate targets into the graveyard, like Atraxa, Grand Unifier Atraxa, Grand Unifier and Conspiracy Unraveler Conspiracy Unraveler .

Ryn’s “Boros Clockdown” is a control deck that puts a timer on the game with The Millennium Calendar The Millennium Calendar and All Will Be One All Will Be One . Full of boardwipes like Temporary Lockdown Temporary Lockdown , planeswalkers like Quintorius Kand Quintorius Kand , and targeted removal like Lightning Helix Lightning Helix , this is a classic take on control with a funky wincon.

Clara’s “Vannifar Dinosaurs” is a blink deck aiming to cheat out huge dinosaurs like Vaultborn Tyrant Vaultborn Tyrant with cloaking effects from Vannifar, Evolved Enigma Vannifar, Evolved Enigma and Hide in Plain Sight Hide in Plain Sight . Once the cloaked dinosaurs are on the battlefield, this deck blinks them at instant speed with cards like Getaway Glamer Getaway Glamer and Touch the Spirit Realm Touch the Spirit Realm to take advantage of the big, splashy ETB effects that dinosaurs get.

Full weekly stats can be found here.