A couple of weeks ago now, the Galactic Open saw 73 decks across 3 events battle it out in about 214 games, giving us an excellent snapshot of the current state of the ARH Standard meta.

The events were taken down by eHan/eJyn/Intelligence Operation (congrats to Norman) in the first GO, eAnakin/eKi-Adi-Mundi (congrats to Hipo) for the second, and for the third it was a three way tie between two eDin Djarin/Rebel Sniper and eMoff Gideon/eGarindan (nice one Hipo again, Gameslayer and Moophisto). It’s great to see such variety in the top decks, but we also want to have a look at how the meta looks as a whole.

First up though, here were the winning decklists:

That’s three quite different decks, even if they are all 2-wide and hero.

Faction and Affiliation Balance

70% of all decks were hero, and 65% were 2-wide. If it wasn’t obvious already from the winning decklists above: this is definitely a hero and 2-wide meta.

Colour balance is also dominated by red/yellow, followed by mono-blue:

26% of all decks were red/yellow, while 19% were mono-blue. It was nice to see every possible combination of colours present, and despite the dominance of red/yellow, I’d say this represents quite a nice balance of colour distribution.

It’s no secret that yellow red have probably the best choice of events right now, so it’s hardly surprising that they were most represented in the event.

Looking at how well factions did based on representation reinforces the idea that hero red/yellow and hero mono blue are the best performing decks:
23% of decks in the field were hero red/yellow, but 30% of the decks that went 4-2 or better were hero red/yellow.
21% of decks in the field were mono blue hero, but 33% of the dekcs that went 4-2 or better were mono blue hero.

By this metric, it would appear that the day, on balance, was won by the Jedi (which was also the Dice Commando take, check out Andrew’s video here).

Deck Variety

Deck diversity at this event was astonishing. Out of the 70 decks we had data for, there were 52 different lineups, which is absurdly high. The most common decks were Jyn/Han and Ki-Adi-Mundi/Anakin at 5 a-piece, which is still incredibly low, especially as 3 of those Jyn/Han decks were played after it took down the first event. There were only 8 lineups that featured more than once across all 3 GOs.

Because of this extreme lineup variety, I can’t even make calculations about deck or archetype power like I normally would. There’s just not enough data about each deck. That being said, Norman’s Jyn/Han list was played by himself and Algeroth in the first GO, and went completely undefeated if you don’t count the mirror match where one of them had to lose. I think it’s a safe bet that this deck is pretty good.

Echoes of Destiny

It’s fair to say that the Echoes of Destiny utterly dominated this event. Approximately 35% of all cards across all decks were taken from The Reprint List. Given that there are 915 cards which are legal in ARH Standard at the moment, and The Reprint List only added 90 cards to the format (there’s 101 cards on the list, but 11 of them were standard already), this means that Echo cards were 3-4 times over-represented.

This is hardly surprising. When you take the greatest hits from the more than 1000 cards which have rotated out of standard, they’re going to end up worth including.

The top decks had no lack of reprint cards. Norman has said that his Jyn/Han really only is Tier 0 because of the reprint list, saying in his deck review that “the reprint list as it is now definitely helps drive this deck. I don’t think it will be nearly as viable without FILP, Easy Picks, and Crait Speeders“. It included Easy Pickings, Friends in Low Places, Logistics, Resistance Crait Speeder, Senate Chamber and Weapon’s Factory Alpha (9 cards).

Ki-Adi-Mundi has also benefitted a lot from the list: Ancient Lightsaber and Shoto Lightsaber have given blue weapons a huge boost, not to mention the incredible Hidden Motive, Beguile, Riposte and Overconfidence (12/30 cards, or 40% of the deck).

Talking of Ki-Adi-Mundi, I’m so glad he’s finally top tier, and that he was the most popular character at the GO, appearing in 10 decks. We wrote about how much we liked him in our blue set review of High Stakes, giving him a 5/5 score. In the first spoiler article about him I wrote: “Yes, there’s some shield hate kicking around at the moment, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that Ki-Adi-Mundi is going to be a big player in the new meta, though it may take a while to develop a well tuned decklist with him.” OK, so it took a long time and the reprint list to make it happen, but Ki-Adi-Mundi has finally arrived.

The Din Djarin deck included 11 cards from Echoes of Destiny: 2 Easy Pickings, Hasty Exit, Into the Garbage Chute, 2 Vandalize (a great counter to Jar’Kai), 2 Dug In and 2 Well-Connected.

Given that a third to almost a half of each winning deck was Echoes of Destiny cards, it’ll be interesting to see how these evolve when the list rotates. Of course that will happen on the day that Unlikely Heroes lands (19 November, just a month to go!), so the meta is going to be overhauled anyway.

We hope those who played a great time, and can’t wait for the next big event on Unlikely Heroes release weekend.

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