Post-Regionals Metagame.

I was planning on writing my triumphant Regionals report today and saving metagame discussion for later in the week. There's a slight problem with that though. To write my triumphant Regionals report, I would first have to be triumphant at Regionals. That, of course, would require my attending Regionals, which was sadly not possible due to a terrible ice storm that slammed Texas and much of the middle part of the country over the weekend. We tried to brave the elements leaving over 4 hours early to make what would normally be a 2 hour drive to Plano, TX. Unfortunately, about 3/4 of the way to our destination we ran into a closed bridge with a closed detour, and with no viable route that would get us to the tournament site before round 3, we were reluctantly forced to turn back. The news got better on the way home as the highway we had taken that morning was now closed thanks to a truck driver going off road and blocking the entire highway, so we were stuck for about 2 hours while they cleared up the mess. The short version, we didn't make it to the tournament site.

I've done some digging and have top 4's for 10.5 Regionals (I only have the top 2 for San Diego). That leaves 36 Regionals out. I'll post a list of the ones I do have. If you know the top 4 decks from any of the Regionals listed, please leave them here, or email them to me blyonsmagic@yahoo.com. Here are the ones I have.

San Diego (only the top 2)
Ft. Lauderdale
Orlando
Indianapolis
Garden City
Henderson, NV
Berlin, NJ
Brooklyn
Rochester
Butler, PA
Toronto

So far the breakdown of decks that qualified through these tournaments looks like this.

Alliance Hunter 13
Horde Shaman 9
Alliance Warlock 8
Horde Hunter 5
Horde Mage 4
Horde Warlock 2
Alliance Mage 1

So according to the early returns, the Hunters are still on top, and more specifically the Alliance Hunters. Out of the 42 slots we know, Hunters took 18. That's a little less than half. One of the things that I think helped was the addition of Annihilators to a lot of the Hunter decks which is one of the things I feared as I was planning on playing Shaman. In that matchup, Annihilator in place of Krol Blade made the matchup a lot closer than it was otherwise. The fact that Hunters are still on top isn't terribly surprising. They posted better numbers than I thought they would but not significantly so. The real question going into Regionals was what deck(s) will show it firmly belongs in the top tier with the Hunters. From the limited information we do have, it looks like Shaman and Alliance Warlocks will move into the second and third slots in the metagame after the Hunters. Right now, after those three decks it looks like it's a long way down to find the rest of the decks people expected to do well. There were 4 Horde mages but at least 2 of those were aggro decks not the control Mages that a lot of people thought would have a good showing. Also surprising is the complete absence of Gorebelly from these top 4's. I'll keep a running total as more results come in and we'll take a look at the true metagame from Regionals and what is means to us moving forward.