Explorer Tier List Update – July 28, 2022
An explanation of the movements and placements in this week’s Explorer tier list.
The Best-Of-Three Explorer Tier List
The Best-Of-One Explorer Tier List
Best-of-Three
S Tier
Azorius Control (Up from A Tier) – The move into S Tier comes as a result of both Azorius continuing its trend of increased play from last week and the boon it will get from today’s addition of Supreme Verdict.
Rakdos Midrange (Stable) – Rakdos kept the same playrate as UW Control over the week, and managed a couple percentage points higher in winrate. The addition of Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet today will make Rakdos even more of a powerhouse against the smaller creature and aggro decks, but the UW matchup is about to get a bit tougher. We expect these two decks to wage war for the top slot over the next couple of weeks.
A Tier
The post-anthology world kicks off with six decks in A Tier, two of which are getting significant support in today’s release (Mono-Blue Spirits and Fight Rigging). While Spirits has never held an S Tier slot on Explorer or Pioneer since we started publishing them, it’s certainly possible that Mausoleum Wanderer pushes it up or pushes all of the S Tier decks down to A Tier, which would represent a well-balanced best-of-three format.
B Tier
Mardu Greasefang (Down from A Tier) – Over the last two weeks, Mardu Greasefang’s presence and winrate have both dipped below A Tier metrics, largely due to the hyper-awareness of its existence in the meta and the variety of sideboard tools available to combat it.
C Tier
No changes.
D Tier
No changes.
Best-of-one
S Tier
Similarly to UW Control and Rakdos Midrange on the best-of-three side, Selesnya Angels and Mono-Red continue to battle it out on the best-of-one ladder. This week, Angels cut into Mono-Red’s winrate by two entire percentage points, but Mono-Red still holds the crown for the highest winrate on the tier list.
A Tier
Azorius Control and Mono-Blue Spirits remain in A Tier this week, despite UW getting access to its signature boardwipe in Supreme Verdict and Spirits getting a powerful addition in Mausoleum Wanderer in the anthology today. Fight Rigging also gets access to Elvish Mystic (if it wants it) today. We didn’t want to stray from the data and presume anything from these inclusions on the best-of-one side, so all three of these decks remain stable.
B Tier
Esper Greasefang (Down from A Tier) – It seems that the majority of players have moved off of the Esper variant of Greasefang to its cousin, Mardu, over the last week. This decrease in playrate led to its downgrade here.
C Tier
Gruul Aggro (Down from B Tier) – While picking up steam for a bit, Gruul has seen both a major decline in winrate and playrate as of late. This can likely be attributed to the ever-increasing presence of Angels.
D Tier
No changes.
