Hello everyone! As we gear up for this weekend’s Regional Championships in DC, I’m excited to share my top 10 power rankings for Pioneer. With the format continually evolving with the release of Duskmourn, it’s essential to stay informed about where each deck stands. So, let’s dive into the rankings and see which decks are poised to make a splash this weekend! 

10. Mono Green Devotion

Although previously one of the best decks in Pioneer, the Dec 2023 banning of Karn, The Great Creator all but killed the dreams of Nykthos enjoyers around the world. Old iterations of the deck were able to trivially integrate an infinite combo with Karn accessing The Chain Veil, easily winning the same turn that they assembled copious amounts of mana. While the deck isn’t able to execute an infinite combo anymore, it still has the ability to make tons and tons of mana with multiple copies of Nykthos and Kiora in the same turn, eventually winning the game with Ulvenwald Oddity flipping and granting haste to the rest of your team. 

Now in 2024, Mono Green maintains a lot of the strengths of its previous build, including 8 Elves, Kiora, Old-Growth Troll, and Cavalier of Thorns. Additionally, the more recent addition of Leyline of the Guildpact facilitates extremely explosive Nykthos starts far beyond what the previous version of the deck was capable of. The largest issue with the strategy today is the current dominance of Rakdos Prowess, which looks to maintain its spot as the most popular deck going into this weekend's Regional Championship in DC. Prowess’s combination of goldfishing speed, evasion, and consistency makes it at least a full turn faster than Mono Green on average, and that's a major issue when playing this linear strategy. All hope isn’t lost, as devotion does have some tools to fight back post sideboard in Setessan Petitioner allowing us to gain a ton of life when going through our deck. 

Decklist

My Take: Bottom of the rankings for now, but still hanging on to a top 10 slot. Avoid pairing into Rakdos Prowess and you’re in business. 

9. Lotus Field

By far the most consistent combo deck in Pioneer, Lotus Field is a deck that you absolutely need to respect, lest you want to end up dying in a flurry of Pore Over the Pages. Its place in the metagame is extremely variable, ebbing and flowing with the number of damping spheres, and similar hate cards that show up in the average pioneer decks sideboard. Right now that number has definitely been trending down, making it poised for a bit of a resurgence. Due to its extreme difficulty and the precision required to execute comboing, particularly from low resource positions and facing hate, it’s not a deck that I’d expect many players to pick up on a whim. It’s more similar to dredge, in that the default is you will lose to Lotus field if you don’t have a specific game plan that either wins the game early, or effectively interacts with them on several axes. 

Decklist

My Take: Similar to Mono Green Devotion, Lotus field is being kept in check by the large numbers of Rakdos Prowess showing up right now. You’ll likely see a consistent theme across this article where the slow decks need radical plans to fight vs prowess, and every other deck needs to work hard to configure a winning strategy against it. Lotus is an extremely powerful deck that you should get your reps in against, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it occupied one or more top 8 slots at the RC this weekend. 

8. Boros Caretakers Talent 

A relatively new addition to the Pioneer meta, Boros Caretakers Talent is a unique approach to a control/midrange deck. At its core, it's exploiting the fact that Izzet Phoenix and Rakdos Prowess are both structurally very weak to High Noon. It also does an incredible job against creature decks as most of the strategy is a pile of removal and sweepers, with card advantage engines like Fable and Caretakers talent to fill the gaps. In matchups where you just need to kill everything the opponent plays and eventually win the game, Boros will be really successful. The deck suffers from very little card selection, and the inability to kill all that quickly, as well as not being able to interact with spells on the stack all that well.

Decklist

My Take: While Boros Caretakers Talent shows promise, it's still finding its footing in the meta. This is the definition of a metagame choice for this weekend. On paper, it appears to have a very strong matchup spread against Phoenix and Prowess, but I can see it really struggling with the other section in a format as wide as pioneer. Could be awesome, but tread with caution. 

7. Rakdos Transmogrify

Similar to Boros Talent, Rakdos Transmogrify has recently begun popping up all over Magic Online, and the reasons for it are unsurprising to me. It takes the strength of previous decks like Izzet Creativity in its ability to cheat a large creature into play on turn 4, in this case Atraxa, and backs it up with hand disruption + additional card advantage in Reckoner Bankbuster, and Case of the Stashed Skeleton. What the deck's doing well right now: it has a very solid plan B that's quite similar to Rakdos midrange’s plan, while maintaining a threatening combo. Going over the top of the slower midrange decks has a lot of value, and this is certainly an unexpected choice for most players facing it. What I don’t like about it: Transmogrify is a very fragile one card combo that can easily be broken up with a single removal spell. It definitely sucks having to target a creature vs an artifact in the case of Creativity combo. 

Decklist

My Take: It remains to be seen how Transmogrify performs this weekend, but its been picking up a ton of steam online. I wouldn’t be surprised if it shows up in much larger numbers than anyone anticipated. This might be my dark horse pick for the tournament just based on how strong I perceive it relative to its public perception. 

6. Rakdos Midrange

They say an old dog can still learn new tricks… In the case of Rakdos Midrange, that still remains to be seen. It’s shifted a bit in structure since the Pioneer Pro Tour in Chicago earlier this year, adapting Archfiend of The Dross as a mostly stock main deck 4 of to help fight against Phoenix and other smaller midrange decks, but at the same time, RB suffers from some identity issues these days. The main issue is it’s sort of just a want-to-be aggro deck that doesn’t do anything super well.  It doesn’t have many sources of card advantage, our late game is extremely unthreatening, and the ever growing list of value engines entering the format definitely doesn’t help. Maybe the addition of Unholy Annex//Ritual Chamber from Duskmourn can solve some of these issues. I wouldn’t hold my breath for now.    

Decklist

My Take: Rakdos Mid will definitely show up in numbers this weekend, but I don’t think there's many decks in the format that are very afraid to face off against it. I won’t sugar coat it, I don’t think BR midrange is a good choice at all right now. Sorry Graveyard Trespasser fans, but I’d recommend finding a superior Blood Crypt strategy. Might I recommend Cauldron Familiar? 

5. Jund Sacrifice

Sacrifice has made quite a large comeback since the release of Bloomburrow, due in large part to the release of Scavengers Talent and Ygra. Now sacrifice has access to an infinite combo using Ygra and two Cauldron Familiars to drain your opponent for infinite life. Without access to Scavengers Talent, the consistency of assembling two cats and an Ygra wouldn't be possible. Without having practiced against the deck previously it might not be so apparent as to how quickly Talent can tear through your deck, but Witch’s Oven and Cat, with the second chapter of talent make this task relatively trivial. Chapter 3 completes the kill by sacrificing food/additional fodder to return Ygra from your graveyard into play without casting it, a really hard engine to disrupt without enchantment hate or graveyard hate. What I particularly like about Jund is it doesn't really need to win with the combo in order to be threatening. It still gets to play very strong cards like Fable, Fatal Push, and Deadly Dispute, making me pretty excited about this deck as a choice for the RC this weekend. 

Decklist

My Take: One of the better decks although a scary choice if control shows up in super large numbers. Jund is just really strong right now, and it filled a lot of holes that previously made RB Midrange a stronger choice. Definitely a respectable choice for this weekend. 

4. Enigmatic Incarnation

By far the most improved deck from Duskmourn, Incarnation getting the upgrade to its structure via the Overlord cycle means it's now one of the strongest contenders. Overlord of the Haunt Woods allows the deck to have additional ways of triggering Up the Beanstalk early in the game, well fixing some of the Mana base issues and enabling the Leyline Bindings to be cast for one mana. Additionally, Roaring Furnace allows you to have early game removal and also sacrifice fodder for incarnation which increases consistency, and grants another late game mana sink on the other half of the room. One thing that a lot of Incarnation players have already started to incorporate is the addition of main deck High Noon. It's become a staple in most white midrange decks in the format, and particularly makes sense in incarnation given the ability to sacrifice it when it’s not at its best. 

Decklist

My Take:  Incarnation is being talked about everywhere right now, and got second place in Brazil's Regional championships this past weekend. It's quite a solid choice, and a deck I spent a ton of time working on for the Pro Tour in Chicago earlier this year would not be unhappy to have this registered on my behalf.

3. Izzet Phoenix

Phoenix is definitely my pick for the most fun deck in the format, and served me quite well at Pro Tour Chicago earlier this year. The legality of Treasure Cruise means that Phoenix continues to crush in Pioneer,  but that's certainly slowed down a bit given just how much hate it's received. A week ago, I might have said that Phoenix was a decent choice for the RC, but not anything special due to High Noon being played in extreme numbers basically everywhere that can cast it. Every other deck has to have a very specific strategy for this matchup, and your baseline versus it probably will not be super high mostly due to Phoenix's consistency and malleability. Phoenix has the tools to fight through most non enchantment hate, and definitely is rewarded in an open deck list environment. The ceiling is definitely capped on it, but it has game everywhere and you can't go very wrong playing it in such a wide open format. 

Decklist

My Take: Despite the large quantity of enchantment-based hate, Phoenix is quite resilient and has game against everyone. Getting to play 4 Treasure Cruise, my pick for the strongest card in the format, is hard to go that wrong with. I've been singing this deck's praises recently and for good reason. Now for the real question: do I cast Sleight of Hand, Consider, or Opt this turn? Hope you’ve mastered your cantrip sequencing before the tournament. 

2. Azorius Control 

The classic issue with control is the inability to make your deck tuned to beat everyone. The tools are there, but you have to pick and choose where you want to focus your efforts on beating as the reactive cards typically aren’t flexible enough to cover all of the match ups you may face. Current UW control decks are one of the best shells for the enchantment based hate in the form of High Noon and to a lesser extent Rest in Peace, granting a lot of improvement against Phoenix and Prowess. There’s this strange dynamic that occurs where as Control becomes more popular, the deck becomes more inbred for the mirror, in turn making the deck less functional overall, and moving the needle towards control being less good. UW has picked up in popularity in a major way recently, making up 5 of the top 8 in the last MTGO Super Qualifier. 

Decklist

My Take: UW is in a really good position for this weekend with the tools to be ahead against Phoenix and Prowess, but the popularity of the mirror and demand for specific slots to beat a wide metagame will cap how good of a choice it will be. Still a top 3 pick for me. 

1. Rakdos Prowess

Coming in at number one should be no surprise! We’ve spent most of the article talking about this deck and its role in the metagame for a reason, as the speed, consistency and overall resilience to spot removal has made Prowess the format's top boogeyman. Bloomburrow introduced Heartfire Hero into the mix, and while it was completely off everyone’s radar upon release, in a post banning world, the Hero’s showed why it’s here to stay. The speed and powerlevel of the deck comes from the combo of Heartfire Hero along with Burn Together//Callous Sell Sword and pump spells allowing you to deal twice Hero’s power to the opponent's face. The other reason why Prowess has seen so much success is the power level of Slickshot Show-Off being able to produce kills from nowhere, and forcing the opponent to have instant speed reaction while taxing the opponents mana with plotting to avoid it’s immediate death. 

Decklist

My Take: Prowess has an extremely high ceiling of turn 3 kills, while maintaining a solid baseline across the board. Even in bad matchups the deck still wins at such a large capacity because it forces your opponents to execute their game plan and meaningfully interact with your own. Its flexible in sideboarding, and demands the metagame to warp around it in order to stand a chance. Even with the drastic measures that people are taking to defeat it, prowess remains an excellent choice for this weekend. It's the best deck for a reason!

Nathan Steuer’s Pioneer Power Rankings

1. Rakdos Prowess 
2. Azorius Control 
3. Izzet Arclight Phoenix 
4. Enigmatic Incarnation
5. Jund Sacrifice 
6. Rakdos Midrange
7. Rakdos Transmogrify 
8. Boros Caretakers Talent
9. Lotus Field
10. Mono Green Devotion

Thanks everyone for reading, and best of luck for those competing in the upcoming Regional Championships!