Welcome to the Meta Snapshot!

Today, we here at the Garbage Rollers are re-launching our tier list to better reflect the state of the meta and provide more clarity about what is competitively viable. There are several reasons we’re doing this:

1. FFG has made the job of picking the best decks really hard by designing a ton of competitively viable cards. We initially thought this would be a traditional triangular meta with one aggro, midrange, and control all dominant in Tier 1, but it’s just not that simple in season 1 of SWU. There’re easily a dozen viable decks!
2. The release of the 2nd set is going to blow our initial tier list criteria out of the water. We can’t keep every leader on the list once there are 34 of them – and even every color combo is onerous.
3. A tier list does an OK job of ranking decks by power level but does nothing to describe matchups- which we all know are hugely important.
4. Our original tier list was informational, but very difficult to view succinctly or share with others.

To this end, we’re switching from a traditional tier list to what we’re calling the “Meta Snapshot.” (We need to give credit where credit is due to KTOD for helping inspire this format.)

What you need to know about the Meta Snapshot:

1. A deck’s presence in the snapshot means that the GarbageRollers believe it has a good shot to win a competitive event.
2. Within a column, decks are ordered in terms of how much we trust them, primarily based on matchups with other competitive decks.
3. In general, a column has a matchup advantage over the two columns to its left, with the columns looping around. For example, Tempo decks are favored into Aggro/Burn and Hard Control. If you think your event will have a lot of Control, you might consider Aggro/Burn or Hard Control, as those are the two columns to the right of that one. There will of course be exceptions to this rule, but it should hold largely true.

Please come back every Monday for our Meta Reports and don’t forget to check out the latest version of our revamped Meta Snapshot in its permanent home!