This week's Classic event saw Bomberman and Threshold into the finals.  A pair of burn decks made the top eight along with Flash.  Three new decks also made it into the top eight. Aggro Loam, a top extended deck from six months ago that has not made a Classic top eight in many months got there on Sunday.  A mono blue control deck also made top eight.  It was a little different from a MUC deck a few weeks back as it ran Watery Grave, Hallowed Fountain, and plenty of saclands.  This initially threw me off as I saw no white or black cards.  From what I could see the white and black mana are only used for Engineered Explosives though some white or black sideboard cards wouldn't surprise me.  Explosives gave the deck a powerful reset button versus on board threats.  Lastly my clan-mate Rozia made top eight with a BGW aggro deck packing lots of discard, The Rack, and of course Tarmogoyf.  It looked very strong and should be interesting to see if it shows up again.  Gerrard's Verdict is a very good card against the burn decks common in the format while also hurting combo and control.  I have two lists today of a pair of newer decks.  One lost in quarter finals and the other missed top eight on tiebreakers.

Despite the colors this deck should be looked at as a Deadguy Ale style deck.  Tarmogoyf fits perfectly in the deck as he is aggressively costed (biggest understatement of the article) and will grow quickly from the deck's large number of discard spells.  Tombstalker is also included as most Classic decks not running Swords to Plowshares can not deal with a flying 5/5.  Tarmogoyf, Jotun Grunt, and Tombstalker might look odd all in the same deck and feeding off the same graveyard but it is not as much of an issue as one might expect.  Using these three undercosted cards that rely on the graveyard lets this deck pay very little mana for top powerful creatures.  This deck's sideboard is clearly built to destroy combo and control decks with a pair of Jitte's as the only strictly anti-aggro card from the board.  Extirpate can be powerful versus other decks running Tarmogoyf where 'goyf advantage can be huge.  A mulligan to five in the quarter finals contributed to it's loss to Bomberman.  Look out for this deck in future Classic events. 

This is the first time I've included a deck that did not make top eight but I figure as this deck missed it on tiebreakers it'd be okay.  This is a Classic port of the Legacy Dragon Stompy decks.  It aims to get large red creatures into play as fast as possible.  I have no idea how viable this deck is but it looks fun and if you want to try something different give it a shot.

Classic Review

I have six weeks of Classic events to review stretching back to the 2x on October 10th.  That means forty eight decks, and six winning decks.  However due to the incredible popularity of splits online tracking which deck "won" is nearly meaningless.  I instead have tracked the number of times a deck saw the finals.  Finals appearances are shown with a red dot and other top eight results with a black dot.  There are also the percent of top eight slots that deck has taken along with the ratio of finals appearances to top eights.  Decks with only one top eight were clumped into the "Other" category with the exception of decks that have made the finals.

• The top five decks make up 46% of top eights.

• Eleven decks only have made top eight once, those decks take 23% of top eight slots.

• Six decks have made top eight twice for 25% of the slots.

• Three decks have a better than 50% shot of making the finals once in the top eight.

• Three decks that have seen more than three top eight slots have a less than 25% chance of making the finals.