This weekend, some of the world's best Magic: The Gathering players will gather in Richmond, VA to compete for a piece of Mythic Championship 6's $500,000 prize pool. While MC6 will occur only three weeks after Mythic Championship 5 took place, a lot has changed with Magic: The Gathering's Standard format over this period of time, and Wizards has offered a snapshot of the Standard metagame going into this premiere event.
As many players already know, Food-based decks, with Oko, Thief of Crowns at their centers, have essentially become MTG's Standard format. While these decks assume a variety of forms, such as Simic Food, Sultai Food, and Bant Food, they all have a similar core, and it appears that there might not be much room for any other decks at this time. Wizards highlights this by providing some numbers from several major tournaments that occurred over the past two weeks.
Specifically, it is stated that in the recent Magic: The Gathering Arena Mythic Championship Qualifier, 67% of the decks that made day two were Food strategies. Furthermore, 75% of the top eight decks from last weekend's Grand Prix Lyon and Grand Prix Nagoya were Food, and 88% of the Eldraine Split MPL Pearl Division decks were Food variants as well. Certainly, these figures are absolutely staggering, and they make one thing perfectly clear: Food is the Magic: The Gathering Standard metagame.
That said, WotC does outline a few strategies that could potentially compete with Oko, Thief of Crowns and Food at Mythic Championship 6. One of these strategies is Azorious Control, which Wizards indicates had a 55.4% win rate against Food at Grand Prix Lyon. It is said that this made Azorious Control the best-performing, major archetype against Food at the tournament, and it is also emphasized that this blue-white deck put a player in the top eight both in Lyon and in Nagoya.
The other strategy that Wizards highlights is Temur Reclamation, which had the highest win rate, aside from Food, against the field in Lyon at 55.8%. This could put this green-blue-red deck in a position to make some waves at Mythic Championship 6, but it seems more likely that this is simply going to be Food's tournament to win. Fortunately, a Magic: The Gathering ban announcement, which many expect to end Oko's reign in Standard, could help shakeup the homogenized metagame on November 18.
Source: Wizards of the Coast