The Rotation Format discord just had its first ever unofficial community tournament with the core set, which is the set of cards that will be permanently legal moving forward while other yet-to-be-released sets rotate out. (For more information about Rotation Format, check out this post)

The results, while largely expected, also had a few surprises. The picture in the post title is the overall breakdown of entrants. And the picture below is top 10:

And the overall winner of the tournament was Quantal Think on a pretty conventional Salad list. The most notable departure imo is the three maindecked Fusion of Fire, which is used in this format to break opposing Salad boards:

As these results show, Salad is - at least based on this limited amount of data - the king of the core set. The deck excels at trading favorably with a Balynx-protected Rage and grinding out games while other brews struggle to keep up. Everyone went in thinking Salad was the best deck, and that seems to be the case.

But a bit more surprising was the performance of a deck that thus far has lurked a bit under the radar: Subterror. Despite making up only around 17% of the initial decks, a full 30% of the top 10 was Subterror. I am not a Subterror expert, but my experience is that the deck in the hands of a competent pilot could really pack a punch, and is hindered only by a tough Salad matchup (but then again, what isn’t?). I’m just excited to be able to side NoC and not feel bad about it.

Other decks significantly underperformed expectations. Utopia had exactly zero representation in top 10 despite having the same percentage of initial entrants as Subterror - ouch. Though the deck can go off if allowed to combo, Utopia may just be too weak to a single point of interaction to be very viable as the format becomes increasingly solved. Iris Control (aka “Lesbian Turbo”), despite being a fan favorite, also had a disappointing day. Iris piles vary widely in what techs they use and what staples they run, but a lvl 8 “boss” that is finicky to get out and easy to brick on may be having a rough time against more consistent archetype-based decks.

Tldr: Salad good, Rage strong, Subterror is a legitimate threat. Will be interesting to see if or how the meta shifts prior to the official MBT tourney projected to occur sometime next week. I’ll be posting a breakdown of that tournament too - try to contain your excitement, everyone!