Premodern: A community-driven format and its European Championship

Premodern is not a cheap format and has a history of cards from the Reserved List (Mox Diamond, Phyrexian Dreadnought, Survival of the Fittest, Replenish, Gaea’s Cradle, among others) but these do not necessarily make the format “Pay to Win” unless you need these cards for your strategy to work: four of the Top 16 lists cost less than 300 dollars, and many archetypes only had absurdly high values ​​​​because they had a playset of some staple from the Reserved List.

This brings us to the last and most important point.

The event took place in Prague on September 21, with 203 players, making it the largest event in the history of Premodern to date. The 2023 edition, which took place at the same time last year, had 185 players. All rounds of the event were streamed live by the organizers.

The Metagame

Accurate numbers for the entire Metagame were not published by the organizers, but an overview of the most played archetypes was presented during the tournament.

Burn / Sligh - 12%

The archetype commonly called Burn or Sligh was the most played deck. The main reason is probably due to an unknown Metagame where Red Aggro benefits from less consistent strategies or the opponent's lack of interaction with their cards, needing only to present the clock.

Parallax Replenish - 8%

Parallax Replenish is a Combo-Control focused on the interaction of the enchantments Parallax Wave and Parallax Tide and their Fading abilities to hold the game until the point where Opalescence turns their enchantments into creatures and makes loopings with triggers on the stack to clean up your opponent's board and then win the game.

Deadguy Ale - 7%

Deadguy Ale is your classic Midrange in its purest form: two-for-one trades, efficient removal, card advantage, and threats that generate value as long as they stay in play and/or win the game in a few turns. It competes with The Rock in this space, each having their advantages or disadvantages in the Metagame.

Goblins - 7%

Goblins is your classic go-wide Red Aggro with synergistic interactions between its creatures. It follows the same pattern that Goblins have had for most of their existence in competitive Magic, but without Aether Vial to cheat on mana costs or Cavern of Souls to play around Counterspells.

Oath Ponza - 7%

Oath Ponza forgoes the attempts to use creatures like Phantom Nishoba with Oath of Druids to add more consistency to another archetype: Terrageddon. This hybrid creates a control combo that destroys both players' lands with Armageddon and uses Sphere of Resistance to tax their spells, and then searches for Terravore with Oath of Druids and has a gigantic creature in play on an empty board.

Stiflenought - 6%

The combo of Phyrexian Dreadnought with Stifle or Vision Charm fits into several variants of blue decks in Premodern, each with a distinct proposition. The most common are Tempo lists that slow down the opponent's game while putting their main threat on the board as early as possible, but there are also variants more focused on combos with Sutured Ghoul.

The Rock - 4%

The Rock relies on accelerating mana early to play his bombs a turn earlier, while taking advantage of the cheap disruption to delay the opponent's plans. Cards like Spiritmonger and Pernicious Deed are historical staples of this archetype that are once again relevant in Premodern.

Madness - 3%

Madness was a classic in competitive Magic in the early 2000s and is one of the most popular strategies in Premodern due to the interaction between its cards and straightforward game plan, but with several micro-decision windows - especially with Survival of the Fittest, which fit perfectly into the already established shell of the archetype.

The Archetypes in the Top 32

Based on the Metagame above, we can also consider which archetypes were in the Top 32 of the tournament to have a scope of which strategies worked. The Top 32 was made up of the following decks:

The Top 8

The Top 8 archetypes were:

If these results show anything, it's that the Premodern Metagame looks pretty diverse right now. It has its own set of best decks or most established strategies (and, as I've mentioned in other articles, Red Aggro is a good "best deck"), but it also has plenty of room for innovation and under-the-radar strategies.

It's worth noting that except for Sligh, all the Top 32 lists depend, in some way, on a card from the Reserved List. On the one hand, this isn't a problem when we're talking about cards like Cursed Scroll that are more affordable, but when we talk about Mox Diamond, Survival of the Fittest or Phyrexian Dreadnought, the values ​​start to skyrocket.

It may seem superfluous for some players to worry about the monetary aspect of Premodern, but this is an important factor when introducing people to the format. While, yes, a significant portion of the people attracted to it are people who probably played back in the day and may even be Legacy enthusiasts who may or may not have some of these cards or easy access to them, I'm sure that many who come to this article have most likely never heard of or had little contact with Premodern before, and this is an essential point when answering “why someone should play this format”.

Jiri Moravec - Sligh

Sligh was the winning deck of the tournament. The combination of efficient clock and cheap damage spells proved fast enough to deal with more elaborate strategies and less straightforward game plans, and red has the recurring damage of Sulfuric Vortex even in the face of Armageddon or other means of denying a player mana.

David Kryńsky - Terragedon

Although variants with Oath of Druids are very popular, Terrageddon is a very efficient deck in Premodern, where you trade the “combo” with the enchantment in favor of a more proactive game plan with Nimble Mongoose and Exalted Angel.

Fabian Sjöblom - Mono Blue Landstill

This version of Mono Blue Control tries to take advantage of Standstill and its interaction with cheap manlands like Mishra’s Factory and Faerie Conclave, in addition to having other specific means of interaction between its cards, like Parallax Tide and Mana Leak or Stifle and Phyrexian Dreadnought.

Pavel Valdir - Oath Ponza

Oath Ponza was one of the most played decks of the format and managed to place a decent number in the Top 32, but only one copy made it to the Top 8.

Michael Duda - Elves

Elves features both Gaea’s Cradle and Survival of the Fittest in addition to the combination of cards like Priest of Titania, Quirion Ranger and Kamahl, Fist of Krosa for unexpected lethal damage. The slight splash to red leaves room for some additions to the Survival toolbox.

Guillem Salvador - Gro-A-Tog

The combination of Psychatog with Quirion Dryad is a classic that has permeated even the top tables of Vintage in the past. In Premodern, the deck relies on Gush to quickly increase its threats, while Meddling Mage prevents certain combos from happening and/or key cards from being played during some turns.

Philipp Altmann - Ill-Gotten Storm

Storm does not have access to Mind’s Desire in Premodern, but it has its own version in the format, with Cunning Wish in the role of searching for Brain Freeze from the Sideboard to win the game.

Gabriel Miklik - Sligh

Without much difference from one list to another in the maindeck, a second Sligh in the Top 8 consolidates how well structured Aggro decks are in Premodern and how they serve as regulators of the format, but that specific choices in the list and a bit of luck can make a difference.

The European Premodern championship was a surprise that the YouTube algorithm brought me this weekend. Amid more than 12 hours of broadcast - with very long pauses - it was fascinating to observe the matches and how the format behaved in comparison to other scenarios that I follow, such as Pioneer, Modern and even Pauper.

There is something unique about it, different in a good way. Its restrictions are obviously a concern and I believe that scenarios around the world are less likely due to the lack of publicity it has outside the European environment and especially for Latin American environments. But that doesn't make it any less of a home for some Magic players than other more popular and sanctioned formats.

If you enjoyed this article and would like to see more Premodern content on Cards Realm, leave a comment! It would be a new experience to cover a format that is not sanctioned and not-so-popular yet, but has a lot of deckbuilding potential to explore possibilities and without having to rush through this study in a two-month window because the next set is just around the corner.

Thanks for reading!