The metagame at Arena Championship 6 breaks down as follows, excluding one deck submission that consisted of basic lands only.
Godspeed to this hero
Looks like Boros might be overpowered. Seems likely that Phlage is the suspect, given that it powers all the Jeskai decks as well
I think Guide of Souls is the real issue here. Ocelot Pride and Phlage are certainly pushing it over the top, but Guide of Souls is just an insane card for 1 mana and I don’t see how it doesn’t get nerfed in Historic at some point.
Yeah, Guide of Souls is deceptively innocuous at first. I forgot about paper cards getting nerfs in Historic. I’d much rather they just ban things than create an entirely new copy of a card that doesn’t refund any wildcards.
Yes, the R/W cats are overpowered. They even outclass RedDeckWins in their aggressiveness.
And single cards of the overpowered combo can be found in other decks, too. They just introduced a few too strong pieces with [[Ocelot Pride]], [[Guide of Souls]] and [[Ajani, Nacatl Pariah]]. Though [[Unstable Amulet]] and [[Amped Raptor]] are very often part of these decks, or played in other types, as they are also strong by themselves.
It’s really frustrating to play against these. For me, the biggest part of the frustration is the frequency at which these cards are encountered. It feels like 2 in 3 BO1 matches are one of those. Like everybody wants to play with the new big toys. Which is understandable, but the lack of diversity makes the game rather dull at the moment.
Recently, I watched a video about card balancing in trading card games (short version: It’s impossible). Guy talked about engines; multiple cards working together, and how to balance with those in mind. Conclusion was, it is okay to introduce those. Just make sure to make the individual cards slightly less efficient.
I think this is where WotC failed. They introduced a new engine (Ocelot generating tokens, Guide gaining energy from it, Amulet drawing cards with it, all without requiring mana apart from the initial, very low cost), which can easily kill an opponent in 3 or 4 turns. And the single cards by themselves are also so good that they are being included in many other decks.
Strong, versatile, very efficient. It surely is fun to play, even against once in a while, but they went over the top once again, which makes diversity suffer.
