What a jammed-pack weekend that was! With the race to be Player of the Year, the culmination of the various ‘Master’ races, the remaining slots at Worlds to be decided and a small matter of crowning a Pro Tour champion, there were certainly a lot of interesting things to pay attention to during Pro Tour Eldritch Moon.

There were many highlights over the weekend including;

• The retirement of Randy Buehler from coverage after an impressive 75 Pro Tours.
• Owen Turtenwald upsetting the Seth Manfield juggernaut and finishing off the weekend, that included being nominated to join the Pro Tour Hall of Fame, by locking up the  US National Champion and Player of the Year races!
• LSV made sure three was the magic number by finishing in his third consecutive PT Top 8.
• Rookie of the Year, Oliver Tiu, finished an outstanding season by clinching Constructed Master.
• The controversial Marcio Carvalho locked up Draft Master beating out Johnny Magic himself, Jon Finkel.
• Lucas Blohon flew home with the Pro Tour title thanks to his trusty Orzhov Control deck.

The big fear heading into the weekend was whether everybody would be subjected to endless Bant Company mirrors, but it turns out that the pro teams had other ideas. A new Standard emerged and everyone was delirious. Let’s take a look at the metagame from Day 2:

The above demonstrates that the metagame is far healthier than it was predicted to be, with numerous archetypes grouped together in ‘Other’, but let’s take a look at some of the more popular archetypes.

Golgari Delirium

With 32 players making it into Day 2, the delirium deck was certainly one of the best performing decks of the weekend. Cards like Traverse the Ulvenwald and Mindwrack Demon have been around since Shadows Over Innistrad, but the introduction of Eldritch Moon has certainly added powerful tools in the form of Ishkanah, Graf Widow, Emrakul, the Promised End and Liliana, the Last Hope.

There were various forms of the deck on display with some choosing the aggressive route of Grim Flayer, Sylvan Advocate and Tireless Tracker, whilst others opted for the dedicated Delirium deck with Vessel of Nascency, Grapple with the Past, Ishkanah and Emrakul. Regardless of the direction, every version had the golden Liliana and it was definitely her homecoming.

Team EUreka showed that the G/B deck could be expanded upon with the introduction of red for Fiery Impulse and Kozilek’s Return, which can be ‘flashed-back’ with one of the big eldrazi creatures in the deck. Whilst I didn’t see any team splashing Blue, I can certainly see a Sultai version with the option for some of the powerful blue sideboard cards such as Negate and, the trump to Emrakul, Summary Dismissal.

Bant Company

This deck just keeps managing to evolve and transform itself to maintain its place at the head of the table, occasionally it gets knocked-down but it picks itself up and taps down everyone else with a Subjugator Angel. The big innovations with the deck have been removing Bounding Krasis and introducing Selfless Spirit and Spell Queller, whilst Tamiyo, Field Researcher has found a spot, or 2, in the sideboard.

Emerge Decks (Various Colours)

These were the standout and surprise deck of the weekend for many spectators. There were many iterations of the deck across the 300+ player field and it is hard to drill down into the key principles of the deck itself, but here goes.

The more commonly played Temur version of the deck aims to build up a ‘tool-box’ graveyard whilst digging yourself deeper into the deck with cards like Vessel of Nascency, Grapple with the Past and Gather the Pack and hoping to put as many different card types into your graveyard as possible (along with maybe even a Kozilek’s Return or two). Whilst you continue to develop your graveyard you’ll be ramping your mana with Nissa’s Pilgrimage and Corrupted Grafstone’s.  The pay-off for all of this development? How about spiders and Ishkanah? Or Elder Deep-Fiend to ‘flash-back’ a Kozilek’s Return? Still not satisfied, then why not take your opponent’s turn with Emrakul? Now that’s more like it!

There is also a Gruul ramp-style deck that plays with similar principles but is designed to play game-ending Eldrazi as early as possible.

Blue-Black Zombies

The other break-out deck, and one that was certainly a spectator favourite, was the zombies! Utilising the graveyard as an additional hand and some near unbeatable recursion, this deck definitely looked like it would have the staying power to make it to the Top 8. The deck engine is built upon the various zombie synergies such as; Cryptbreaker, Prized Amalgam and Voldaren Pariah, with Haunted Dead helping to tie all of the elements together.

That covers the big four archetypes of the Pro Tour, and gives you some insight into how they function. If you want to know more about the Blue-Back Zombie deck then be sure to check out my article later this week.

The Weekend Review will resume in it’s normal format next week where I’ll take a look at the major action from the weekend and how the wider player-base reacts to the results from PT Eldritch Moon!