Unpopular Ideas Club

I last ran this experiment circa Worldwake. Since then there have been 6 or 7 new contenders printed, which mandates a revisit.

In print order:
Memnite – Obviously a top tier addition. Goldfishes on turn 4, and has major chump blocking capacity. It even draws with Turbo Slug.
Inkmoth Nexus – A very efficient manland. We’ll see how well it races.
Chancellor of the Dross – Clearly the new champion, immediately wins on turn 0, play or draw. EXCEPT! As Lee Sharpe points out, C. Dross can only deal exactly 21 damage, so Soul Spike dodges this bullet by being able to gain 8 life in response to the triggers, and then has Dross at its mercy. However, this sole weakness still leaves Dross comfortably in first place.
Chancellor of the Forge – Very aggressive. Goldfishes turn 3, but has no staying power against anything that can field some early blockers
Chancellor of the Tangle – Drops a huge Craw Wurm turn 1, which can go the distance vs plenty of decks, but is stymied by anything that can produce a creature every turn, no matter how small.
Surgical Extraction – This has a very narrow game plan that immediately wipes out the library of any card that has to use the graveyard, which there are quite a few, but has no interaction with anything else.
Chancellor of the Spires – Arguable. If these are 60 card decks, then anything that can’t win before turn 4 gets decked, unless their game plan only relies on topdecks, in which case mulling to zero gives them until turn 11.

Also, in discussion, some have suggested errata away legendary status of Rath’s Edge and Tomb of Urami just to make the tournament as broadly inclusive as possible, with minimal rules bending. Rath is pretty much just filler, but Urami is not the worst middle tier contender. Urami’s biggest weakness is damaging itself to make its creatures, which caps its maximum output, which is unfavorable for some of the attrition races. With these two there are 41 total decks. This time I will run a 6 round Swiss tournament with cut to top 8. So without further ado, Round 1 pairings:

Only a few surprises here. In the Round Robin version of the tournament, C. Tangle comes in 15th, but got favorable pairings and made Top 8. Likewise Nether Spirit was not predicted to make it out of Swiss. These bumped Inkmoth Nexus and Zoetic Cavern from the oddsmaker’s top8 list. Poor, poor Surgical Extraction got shat on, facing zero graveyard opponents in six rounds.

Next, because I am a huge geek, here is the comprehensive matchup chart for all 41 decks:

Some interesting matchups with the new cards:
-Surgical Extraction vs Chancellor of the Forge is a draw because if Forge goes first and keeps 7, it will attack for 7, then next turn draw up to 8, attack opponent down to 6 life, then discard, and lose its library, decking before can deal lethal the next turn. If Forge instead mulls to 6, then it attacks for 6, 6, 6 and discards, and Surgical has to pay 2 life to cast anything, so dies. However, when Surgical is on the play, there is no starting hand size that will allow Forge to deal lethal before it has to discard.
-Spawning Pool is a pretty low tier contender, but beats Chancellor of the Tangle by virtue of being able to draw the game when on the draw, but when Pool goes first, its one mana ahead so will have enough to regenerate at the last moment, and then just build up a team at its leisure and attack through with regenerators.
-Inkmoth is comparable to Factory, Mutavault and Zoetic, in that it every card is effectively a 2 power attacker, and races perfectly with all of those. They can’t block, and Inkmoth can’t trade. Inkmoth is however vulnerable to Keldon Megalith’s unique ability to shut down X/1 decks.
-Chancellor of the Spires is a passive deck that has two types of opponents, decks that need a 7 card starting hand to operate, and those that just play off the top. The former are on a 4 turn clock, the latter have 11. Interestingly there are winning and losing decks under both conditions.

And lastly, group photo of the entire tournament:

Now just need Wizards to print some of these totally reasonable cards: