We all knew it was going to be bad. I'm not sure I expected it to be quite this bad, so I gave it a shot. I used my deception deck from last weekend that seemed to perform the best against anubians, but every heirloom deck I faced beat me AND I matched into lots of magic which shut me down with board clears. Dralamar decks are now also running plenty of anti-aggro tools. Went 4/11 with deception. Gross.

Deck

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The deck just wasn't working for me. I thought it had strong synergy between strength steal, Munosian Infiltrator, Umber Arrow, etc. Anubian decks just hold their Priestesses until Land of the Dead, so you can't Umber Arrow them. Seems relatively trivial for them to play around. They also have Curse of Greed and Blight Bomb that make quick work of things like buffed Switch Duelists and Armor Lurkers.

Dralamar decks don't play many creatures to steal strength from. I went second against a control Magic list and thought I drew the nuts. Had a 12/1 duelist. He had enough removal in hand and a Theoretical Thaumaturge on board to bring down to 1/2 or something. Neutered. Lightning Talisman destroys Shadow Cats. Perhaps I just can't play deception?

Happy to hear suggestions for deck improvements. I guess Munosians need to come out in this meta. I'm not running into a lot of creature-heavy decks (Anubians don't count).

Gameplay

One of my few wins. Of course it wasn't against Dralamar or Heirloom. The deck excels against creature-centric decks like most Nature lists.

Top 20

The top 20 is full of Anubian/Land of the Dead decks. Two Dralamar decks made it along with 2 aggro nature and 1 Guild Deception deck.

That deception deck only faced 4 heirloom decks and went 2/4. Whoever the upside down "?" guy is, his Dralamar deck dominated the anubian decks he faced, so kudos to him. The nature deck with 22 wins went 4/0 against anubians also. I don't have Dagan, but otherwise, I'll probably try that deck next weekend.

Anyway, overall, it was another weekend for death.

That nature deck

Here's that top-performing nature deck:

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Note that the overall win % is only 59%, so 22 wins likely involved quite a lot of luck. Even so, it's better than I did this weekend. While Dagan will likely be nerfed, the other cards in that deck are pretty safe.

Conclusion

Facing Dralamar and Anubians all weekend wasn't fun. Anubians are clearly stupidly OP, so I'm hoping that devs do something this week. Another weekend ranked featuring anubians isn't one that I'll be participating in (except to get that 1 win for some GODS). Dralamar remains entirely too easy to pull off and allows the deck plenty of slots for anti-aggro tools (the only threat to it). It prevents any control meta and is also the definition of anti-fun watching for 5 minutes dying by 1000 cuts.

Dark times for GU. Let's hope something changes.