Every weekend, tens of thousands of players put up their best decks to compete in the Weekend Ranked event for a chance at free packs and $GODS. Every week, I post about my experience playing during this heated event.

With two weeks of great weekend results with Tempo Mage, I decided to run it again for the third weekend (boo... boring!) with a few minor tweaks. The recent GUDecks update to include the new Beefy War deck archetype had me facing many more of these decks, but I'm glad to say that this deck has achieved yet another 19-win run, making it 3 weekends in a row with >= 18 wins. Let's jump right in!

Oh yes, if you're only wondering about the surprise giveaway, you can simply scroll to the end of the post.

Deck Overview

Deck Link: GUDecks

GUDecks has now given this deck a new archetype name: Card Draw Magic. Well... I'm not too sure whether that's the perfect name for this archetype, but I definitely am drawing many cards in most games. Last week, I mentioned that I found Defend the Ramparts a little too slow and Warp Engineer too weak in this deck, so I replaced them with two Arcane Transcendents, a Skeleton Heavy, and a Tracking Bolt. Honestly, nothing much needs to be said for the Skeleton Heavy and Tracking Bolt: Skeleton Heavy is a nice 2-cost 2/4, and Tracking Bolt is just another removal spell.

In many cases, Arcane Transcendent functions as a 1-cost 3/3 when playing it together with any 2-or-more cost spell, like a Starshard Bolt, and I found it pretty good in gaining tempo on my faster opponents. As the match draws on, it can also be useful to play Arcane Transcendent to cheapen a Vow of Learning to combo with the Monolith of Storms. A raw Monolith of Storms is pretty vulnerable to many types of removal, but Monolith into Vow of Learning (+Protected, +Ward) can shield it from almost everything. The problem with it is that this combo costs 8 mana without any cost reduction. With Arcane Transcendent, it can possibly make this combo much easier to pull off.

In my opinion, I find Arcane Transcendent to be rather underrated - I haven't seen it ever outside my own deck. Is it mind-blowingly great? No, but I think it functions pretty well in many Magic decks as a way to gain extra tempo.

And on the financial side of things, I think Arcane Transcendent has everything needed to become a highly desired card in the future. As a Genesis card, it's bound to be playable all the time due to the Genesis card set's evergreen status. It only costs 3 mana and has a cost reduction Roar. Cost reduction cards tend to be used in combo decks and will be broken once some sort of card copying card becomes meta, so IMO it's only a matter of time before Arcane Transcendent, together with Warp Engineer and Assistant Alchemist, sees the light of day with a combo Mage deck. Of course, your mileage may vary - when the most annoying Solitaire combo mage deck archetype finally becomes a Tier 1 deck, it's bound to get complaints and may be nerfed to oblivion for making the game un-fun and non-interactive. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Performance and Matchmaking Breakdown

Starting Rank: Mythic
Wins: 19/25
Reward Packs: 2x Core Rare, 2x Core Epic, 1x Core Legendary, 2x DO Rare, 2x DO Epic, 1x DO Legendary
Theoretical pack value based on current pack prices: $43.95

Opponent Deck	Score (Wins / Total Games)
Nature	3 / 4
War	7 / 10
Magic	3 / 4
Death	4 / 4
Deception	2 / 3
Light	0 / 0
Total	19 / 25

Well, it seems like War is now becoming super popular thanks to GUDecks popularizing the Beefy War deck archetype. Thanks but no thanks, GUDecks. Even with all the War nerfs, Beefy War is really strong and feels like it doesn't have many bad match-ups. The combination of cheap and abundant Blitz creatures coupled with strong mid-game cards make for very tough matches. Many of the games that I won felt like I won them by just a small margin and could have very easily gone the other way.

Sadly, Light decks seem to get played less and less. I took a quick look at the current Meta in the Mythic brackets on GU and found the following popularities of the most common archetypes:

Most Popular Archetype	Popularity %
Nature - Wild Zoo Nature + Big Beasts Nature	25.3%
War - Beefy War + Frenzied Aggro War	14.9%
Magic - Card Draw Magic	8.2%
Death - BWD + Zombie Death	10.9%
Deception - Order Deception + Hidden Rush	10.8%
Light - Zoo Light	5.9%

Light seriously needs to get buffed, it's very hard for Light decks to catch up once they lose board control with no board clears at all and minimal single-target removal spells as well. Every other faction has a few ways to deal with lost tempo, but Light seems to be pretty bad on this front.

I had a rocky start with 4 losses in my first 10 matches. Not a great feeling, but I pressed regardless to achieve a pretty good 19/25. Again, I was one short of the fabled 20-win run, but that'll have to wait until another day again, I suppose.

Historical Performance

Three weeks with Tempo Magic, and the results have been rather consistent - 19W, 18W, 19W. Although... things are getting a little stale, and I'll be looking to try out another deck the next weekend. Hopefully with either Light or Deception, but I'll have to find decks that can work reasonably well so I won't get too wrecked. Back to the lab!

Past Weekend Ranked posts and performance in order of recency:

Time Period	Deck	Score (Wins / Total Games)	Starting Rank
Feb 2022 W2 (Current)	Tempo Magic	19 / 25	Mythic
Feb 2022 W1	Tempo Magic	18 / 25	Mythic
Jan 2022 W5	Tempo Magic	19 / 25	Mythic
Jan 2022 W4	Mid-range Nature	17 / 25	Mythic
Jan 2022 W3	Mid-range Nature	15 / 25	Mythic
Jan 2022 W2	Mid-range Nature	11 / 25	Mythic
Jan 2022 W1	Aggro War	18 / 25	Mythic
Dec 2021 W4	Aggro War	19 / 25	Mythic
Dec 2021 W3	Aggro War	16 / 25	Mythic
Dec 2021 W2	Aggro War	21 / 25	Twilight Shadow

Surprise Giveaway - for participants in the Hive GU community!

It's no secret that the GU community on Hive is still pretty small. I'd like to do my part in encouraging more engagement within the community and hopefully enticing new people to join this space, so I'll be starting to do weekly giveaways on my Weekly Ranked Rundown posts! (until I stop doing these posts)

Unlike most other giveaways on Hive, I don't require you to comment on this post, or do anything special - your entries are solely determined by your activity in this community in the last 7 days. I created a little small web tool to help with this at https://gu-picker.vercel.app/. If you'd like to see how it works, click the "Load Stats" button, wait for everything to load, then click the "Roll" button to get a winner.

More posts = more chances to win, but each additional post awards you diminishing chances. The same goes for comments. The criteria for posts is that the post must have at least >= 1 HBD payout, which should filter out most low-effort posts. For comments, only comments that are made on somebody else's post are counted, and only once per post. (e.g. if A comments on B's post twice due to a back-and-forth exchange, it only counts as 1 comment.) If you've made 2 eligible posts and 6 eligible comments in this community, you'll receive a total of log2(3) * 1.5 + log2(6) = 4.96 points.

And the prize for winning? 1 unit of Hive SBI for each winner. Essentially, Hive SBI will upvote your posts periodically based on how much stake you've accumulated. I don't think everyone will agree that this is the best way to reward active users in the community, so if you have other suggestions on how to carry out these giveaways you can always drop a comment to let me know.

As a first surprise giveaway, I'll be giving out 5 SBI units today (all to unique recipients). Future ones will most likely just have 1 or 2 units per giveaway. It's not much but entry to this giveaway doesn't require any additional effort on your part, so I don't wanna be hearing any complaints. 😂

And the winners are...

@chaosmagic23
@kstreet
@feanorgu
@bacon-dub
@lofone

Congrats!

If you're a winner, let me know if you want the prize, or choose somebody else to receive the prize on your behalf. I'll send out the transactions once I receive your confirmation and you can check it out in the Wallet section > Others on Peakd.

Concluding Thoughts

I hope you enjoyed my write-up on my Weekend Ranked experience, as well as the surprise giveaway. Hope everyone's weekend matches went well, and see you again next week!

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