Metagame: The First Competitive Events of 2025

The year 2025 started off big for competitive Magic. In the United States, the city of Atlanta hosted the first tournament in the Magic Spotlight series, large-scale events that are comparable to the old Grand Prix of the past decade, this time in the Standard format and with the victory of a Gruul Prowess running Leyline of Resonance.

On the other side of the world, China had its Legacy championship, with 87 players and a relatively diverse Metagame, but with the victory of a Nadu, Winged Wisdom deck, putting the card back on the radar of those attentive to a possible announcement of future bans.

Meanwhile, Modern seems to finally be gaining more solid shape almost a month after the unbans that shook up the format, and to the surprise of few, Boros Energy is still the most popular strategy in competitive tournaments, but with a much reduced presence compared to the pre-ban format. Pioneer, on the other hand, is showing early signs that it may face another dilemma with the rapid rise of Rakdos Demons this week.

Check out the main news from the first competitive Magic tournaments of 2025 below!

The news for Standard this weekend was the first Magic Spotlight Series of 2025, an event in the style of the old Grand Prix that took place between January 3rd and 5th in Altanta, United States.

The overall Metagame of the event, which had 362 players, was very much on par with what Standard has been presenting on Magic Online in recent weeks, with Dimir Midrange, Gruul Aggro, and Golgari Midrange representing the most played decks while we see the growth of Esper Pixie, as it happened in the Challenges at the end of 2024.

The conversion to Day Two, however, shows that the Esper Pixie is truly the new Standard contender as we approach Aetherdrift, being the third most played deck despite not converting to the Top 8 - a feat that the Dimir variant of the archetype managed to do and made it all the way to the finals.

With each update to the two-color variants, it seems more and more like Dimir Bounce will eventually merge so much with Dimir Midrange that it will become the new iteration of the archetype, repurposing efficient ETBs while using cheap non-permanent spells, removing a natural weakness of the Esper versions.

The winner of the event was Nick Odenheimer with Gruul Prowess, using the most “all-in” list of the archetype with the interaction between Leyline of Resonance and Cacophony Scamp for combo-kills.

This variant has disappeared from the Standard metagame lately, with its most recent appearance being when Jean-Emmanuel Depraz took a similar list to almost reach the Top 8 of the 2024 World Championship. Now, it is likely to return to the competitive radar and have a presence in Challenges and other tournaments in the coming weeks.

It is worth noting that, despite this version winning the tournament, three Gruul Prowess were present in the Top 8, and all three had different engines to complement their game plan, with the other variants including Innkeeper’s Talent and a mix of Kellan, Planar Trailblazer and Inti, Seneschal of the Sun.

Another relevant list in the Top 8 was Zhao Li's Azorius Aggro. This list mixes the already known Azorius Artifacts core, but forgoes the interactions with Zoetic Glyph in favor of the Enduring Curiosity - one of the best cards in the format today - and Faebloom Trick.

In the MTGOnline Challenges, Tulio Jaudy brought a new version of Selesnya Aggro to the Top 8 of the January 5th event, where he uses a wide range of creatures with costs to extract the most out of the potential of Wilt-Leaf Liege, a somewhat forgotten reprint of Foundations, but which benefits greatly from a Metagame where players are maindecking Hopeless Nightmare.

The first week of Pioneer 2025 didn't have any major news, but one detail caught our attention in this week's batch of events: the notable rise of Rakdos Demons in the Top 32 share.

Rakdos Midrange has been the best deck in Pioneer since before the release of Vein Ripper early last year, holding the position of the Metagame's "timeless deck" alongside Izzet Phoenix. In the events from December 30 to January 5, however, the most recent iteration of the archetype reached numbers that border on 25% to 35%, and it now has more than twice the share of the second most popular archetype.

It's still too early to say that Rakdos Demons has broken Pioneer the way its Vampires iteration did last year. The Metagame tends to adapt, and a specific deck has grown every week over the past three months, so we'll have to wait and see how the next few weeks (and Aetherdrift, which comes out in February) will shape the format's behavior.

With almost a month since the last banned and restricted update, it's safe to say that Boros Energy is still the best deck in Modern. Or, at least, the most reliable and consequently the archetype with the most presence in competitive events.

Despite the loss of Amped Raptor and, to a lesser extent, The One Ring and Jegantha, the Wellspring, the heart of Boros Energy remained intact as Wizards planned when keeping Guide of Souls in the format, and its interaction with Ocelot Pride and Ajani, Nacatl Pariah has not only remained strong but now finds complements with Seasoned Pyromancer, which in turn feeds the graveyard for Phlage, Titan of Fire’s Fury, making the archetype still extremely synergistic and with an aggressive game plan backed up by attrition elements capable of playing over Midranges.

The question now is whether Boros Energy has become a good best deck, or if another archetype can still take its place. Today, Mardu variants are declining and other strategies, such as Dimir/Grixis Murktide, Eldrazi Ramp, Ruby Storm, Amulet Titan and Grinding Breach have continued to grow and present good results in Challenges and other events, and the numbers that differentiate Boros Energy from the second most present deck in tournaments are not so high today as to create hegemony in the Metagame.

In the Magic Spotlight side events, $5K Modern brought a sample very similar to what we have seen on Magic Online, and among the various archetypes with results of 6-2 or better, only three Energy lists are present, while the rest shows a very diverse environment with several viable strategies, considered by many to be the ideal Metagame for Modern.

One of these decks was Hammer Time, which finished the event 6-1, using the interaction between Leyline Axe and Mox Opal to enable Puresteel Paladin's Metalcraft faster and thus close the game earlier with Colossus Hammer.

Overall, this week's Legacy Metagame was a continuation of past Challenges, with Mono Red Stompy and Eldrazi standing out in terms of quantity, but not much above the rest of the format. Another novelty this weekend was the 2025 Chinese Legacy Championship, with 84 players.

Reanimator had a slightly larger presence in these Challenges, and we can see how players have sought to adapt their lists after receiving two waves of bans that greatly affected the deck's game plan, especially in the Dimir versions. Despite having some disruptive elements, it seems that Reanimator now needs to focus more on the combo plan instead of playing with Tempo lines and keeping the combo as an efficient alternative plan.

Other players are already trying to mix different strategies with Reanimate and Atraxa, Grand Unifier. Second place in the Chinese Championship, player BalefulStrix tries to reuse the Up the Beanstalk and Uro, Titan of Nature’s Wrath core to complement the combo with a greater focus on Metamorphosis Fanatic, which triggers the enchantment’s ability and generates card advantage.

The winner of the Chinese tournament was Pok Man Chan using an archetype that, as mentioned in recent weeks, players need to monitor the results in tabletop events: Nadu Zenith is a very difficult deck to pilot on Magic Online due to the high number of clicks that its combo needs to work on a platform where the clock is individual and can interfere with tracking the deck’s win rate.

In-person games, on the other hand, may require shortcuts and/or it is more beneficial for the opponent to concede at a time when the Nadu player has the loop closed to optimize the time of a shared clock, so it has a better chance of doing well at the tables rather than in front of a screen.

It is still too early to say whether Nadu, Winged Wisdom should have left with the other Modern Horizons 3 cards that left Legacy at the end of 2024, but his first victory in a large-scale tournament after the ban has been recorded, and we should keep an eye on him in the coming months.

That's all for today!

If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment!

Thanks for reading!