The First Pioneers

Continuing our tradition from last year, Kevin and I over at The First Pioneers own up to the mistakes we made on our Top 5 picks during our Pioneer set reviews (and also gloat about the picks we DID get right in 2022). While The Innistrad Double Feature set released in January, this years set reviews only included: Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty The Streets of New Capenna Dominaria United The Brother's W...

The Bard Class deck in Pioneer has been on everybody's radar for a while now, but it's yet to be played in large numbers. Part of this is probably because many people don't understand how the deck works and how to play it, so in this week's episode The First Pioneers invited ClaudiohMTG on to talk about it and to explain why it joins a larger family of combo decks in Pioneer. While Bard Class is m...

We had a huge weekend for the Pioneer format last week as hundreds of players from all over the world gathered in their countries and other central areas for their Regional Championships. To make sense of it all, we invited Dreams of Ashiok onto the show again to talk about the top 8s, the meta break downs, interesting decks, and what the future holds as other countries plan to hold their events i...

Not going to lie, brewing Pioneer decks with Brother's War cards has been some of most fun I've had in a long time. Don't listen to the people saying that the Brother's War set won't have an impact on the format. Sure, your top tier decks like Rakdos Midrange or mono white humans might not get a lot of new toys to play with, but the sheer amount of enablers for previously fringe decks is mind-bogg...

I for one welcome our robot overlords to Pioneer and hope they have a good time. Following up our last episode on Artifacts in Pioneer, we finally got a look at all of the new artifacts and have found quite a few that could find a home in the format. But that's not all. The First Pioneers go over every card in each color worthy of seeing play and talk about all their implications. Some people play...

With many people expecting the new Brother's War set to bring a number of playable artifact cards to Pioneer, we thought now would be a good time to look into the format and see just how many playable artifacts there are. Look at any eternal format in Magic the Gathering, and you can find some iconic artifacts: Sol Ring in EDH, Metalworker in Legacy, Aether Vial in Modern, but what comes to mind w...

It never stops. Somebody is always calling for a card to get banned. It doesn't matter what format it is, but somebody loses to a card and suddenly they are being loud and vocal online, calling for it to be removed from the format. Pioneer seems like it's a rather balanced format, but some people will never be satisfied until a card is gone. If the card gets banned, is it the end of the line for y...

It's only a matter of time until Pioneer comes to the MTG Arena platform, and the announcement of Shadows Over Innistrad Remastered and the next anthology coming out early next year and late this year brings us one step closer to this realization. Yes there is still a problem with dusting and adding another 50+ rares and mythics to use your wildcards on will only exacerbate this problem, but there...

Are the new Pioneer challenger decks for 2022 any good? Are they worth picking up? Are they playable right out of the box? In this week's episode The First Pioneers break down each of the decks and talk about what we liked, didn't like, and also what opportunities were missed. While they will undoubtedly have an impact on prices (especially the the uncommons) and make Pioneer more accessible overa...

"Omae wa mo shinderu"   Magic the Gathering is a game of numbers. Do you have enough cards left? Do you have enough life left? And most importantly, do you have enough time left? Do you keep playing when you're dead on the board or do you give up and move on to the next game? How do you know you're dead? While deck choice is important for any tournament you go to, knowing when to move onto your ne...

Pioneer is a flawed and imperfect format, but that's not going to stop us from playing it. Sometimes we get to play the best cards available to us, and other times we have to suck it up and play cards that ... kinda suck. That's one of the format's greatest charms in our opinion, that there isn't one card that's an auto include in every deck. Sometimes you have to play a card that isn't great beca...

You might think with a new set out that the August metagame doesn't matter as much, but you'd be wrong. Pioneer is a format with many well established and optimized decks, and it's going to take some time until Dominaria can make bigger waves. Also, with some people going into their regional Pro Tour Qualifiers and last chance trials, knowing what you're up against and why these decks are doing we...

While there are a lot of obvious homes for the new cards from Dominaria United in Pioneer, some cards need to have their home built from the ground up. Others might have to have their homes totally rebuilt to be stronger against the ever changing Pioneer metagame. In this week's episode, the First Pioneers take a look at some of the lesser hyped and largely untested cards from Dominaria United and...

With a gripping story and a cast full of interesting characters, the new Dominaria United set has a lot going for it. But aside from some great new lore, the set is also overflowing with a lot of Pioneer potential. So much in fact that The First Pioneers needed to recruit MTGO grinder Conorman11 to sort through it all. Our guest brings the perfect balance of Timmy excitement and Spike energy neede...

We still have about a week to go until all of the Dominaria United Spoilers are out, but there are simply too many things to talk about in one episode. To get a jump on it, MTGO legend ClaudiohMTG joins us this week to discuss the new mechanics, the cycles, and our favorite cards so far from the new set and also goes into all of the possibilities these cards could bring to the Pioneer format. Whil...

I'm sure that most, if not all of our listeners, are fans of Pioneer. But we might have a friend, or a friend of a friend that just got into Magic through MTG Arena or their local game store and have only been playing standard for the last year or two. They find themselves on a precipice; Do they continue playing standard next season and buy into the next year of sets? Or are they ready for someth...

While most people are talking about what the first Explorer Anthology on MTG Arena didn't have, The First Pioneers thought we'd focus on what it did. What's the phrase, when life gives you lemons, make lemonade? With Explorer Anthology we took the jank and made brews out of them! While some are more straightforward than others, we did try to use as many of the cards from the Explorer Anthology I a...

I don't know if you know this, but Harry13SCO is kind of a big deal in Pioneer (at least that's what we keep telling him to get him to come back on this show from time to time ^_^). With all of the Pioneer WPN qualifiers, MTGO Showcases and leagues, and everything else in between, there is a lot of information about Pioneer to compile these days. MTGO grinder and and TacTeam member Harry13SCO join...

The standard rotation cycle is just over a month away and the Pioneer organized play season will be over soon as well. That means the market will be flooded with cheap cards, especially those that will no longer be in standard. But which ones are worth buying or holding onto from these sets, and which ones should you hold off on getting? This week, The First Pioneers sort through the chaff of Zend...

Yes, we know that most of the Jumpstart cards won't be legal in the Pioneer format, but we recognize the opportunity the set has for Pioneer "lite", or Explorer on MTG Arena. For the first part of the show Kevin and I talk about what cards we'd like to see show up in the 4 new Pioneer challenger decks coming out in October and which reprints would help the format the most. From there, we move on t...

Stop me if you've heard this one; What's red, green, and blue all over? Parhelion decks. The powerful archetype started out in one color combination, but as the Pioneer metagame evolved so did the deck, spreading out into 3 other color combinations. Are they the same deck though? While they do have the same core of cards, Esper, Mardu, and Abzan Parhelion have access to a different suite of cards...

So much happened to Pioneer in June that it might be hard to keep track of it all. From bannings at the start of the month to the shifting metagame, we thought it would a good idea to put all this data and information in once place so that you don't have to go searching around the internet to know what's going on in the format. We talk about how a bunch of green meanies took over after Winota left...

Bacon and Eggs. Cookies and milk. Apples and Oranges? Sometimes a combination works so well it's hard to imagine one part without the other. Other times the two parts bounce off each other to crash and burn. Magic the Gathering is no different. We've seen a number of strategies come and go in the Pioneer format, some lost to time, while others suddenly come back repackaged and better than ever. Ta...

Fresh off a few top finishes and qualifying for the next Pioneer Pro Tour, IslandGoSAMe (Twitch streamer and MTGO Grinder) joined us to talk about his recent experiences with the new Atarka Ramp deck, as well how the Mono green devotion deck has been fairing since the Winota ban. While we did originally have on Dreams of Ashiok to talk about Mono green planeswalkers a while back, we thought it was...

Magic players felt a great disturbance in the Pioneer metagame last week as thousands of Naya Winota players suddenly cried out in terror and then were silenced. The ban hammer dropped hard on the archetype and effectively erased it from existence. While Expressive Iteration was also banned in the same announcement, the shockwave from the Winota banning will be felt for months to come. Just how wi...