PlayMAX 3 Breakdown: Meta, Stats, & Comments

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Written By PlayEDH

Finalists

This time around, we had a wide open field for our players to cut through to get to the Top 4 and, taking it all, we had Xccepted piloting his build of Kenrith, the Returned King (deck embedded at the bottom of this page) as our PlayMAX Champion.

Ironically, he pulled off his final win with the very cards he’ll be receiving as prizes for taking first place: Tainted Pact and Thassa’s Oracle. Likewise, his prize for making Top 4 is the same card that facilitated his victory in his Top 16 match: Ad Nauseam.

PlayMAX 3 Champion - Xccepted

Top Four:

 

Top Sixteen:

Honorable Mentions:

Just_Ice had to drop from the tournament after qualifying for the Top 16. Because this drop happened before the matches took place, we allowed Generic Failure to take their spot as the 16th seed. We wanted to recognize how hard Just_Ice worked to make it to the this far and understand that these long event times leave openings for real life and other responsibilities to cut into the expected hours upon hours of tournament grinding.

 

TO Report:

Smerz

Hi all! My name is Smerz and we’re back with another addition to our series of cEDH Tournaments called “PlayMAX”. This was the third rendition of PlayMAX. The most noticeable change to this event vs PlayMAX 2 was the adjustment of a 2-hour round timer to the Top Sixteen and Top Four rounds.

PlayMAX 2 lasted for fourteen hours, pushing our EU-judges to stay awake way into the morning of the next day. This 2-hour round timer was meant to be a safety net against that happening a second time in PlayMAX 3. However, we are happy to say that timer was never actually used as all Top-16 matches and the Top-4 were finished well before that time limit.

 

Numbers, Formatting, Notes:

Sign-ups for PlayMAX were completed via 'application', with a short approval process. Applications closed three days prior to the event, with all contestants being expected to have finalized their lists before that time. When the form closed, we had 65 unique applicants.

After the first round on game-day, either because of drops or no-shows, the number of applicants who would continue into future rounds was a comfortable 39 contestants. Assuming my math is correct, that would mean that the cut for the Top 16 would be, roughly, the top 41.02% of all competitors who actually participated in matches.

PlayMAX 3 consisted of 3 rounds of Swiss under a 75-minute timer before the cut for the Top 16, after which the timer would be adjusted to two hours. We owe a quick "thank-you" to the Monarch Events and those involved in the writing, editing, and maintaining of the Multiplayer Supplemental Tournament Rules that were applied to this tournament.

 

Decks:

As of writing this report, I wanted to make note of what decks we still have on file and the frequency that some appeared more than others, ranked by popularity (being the number of users that piloted the commander).

  1. Malcolm/Tana

  2. Bruse Tarl/Thrasios

  3. Kenrith

  4. Thrasios/Toggo

  5. Thrasios/Vial Smasher

The PlayMAX 3 meta was incredibly diverse. There were a total of 38 different decks that people registered for the event with a rather interesting distribution of colors.

The following is how common each of the colors were in the lists people registered:

  1. Blue - 32

  2. Green - 27

  3. Red - 25

  4. Black - 20

  5. White - 11

I’ve provided a link to all of the contestants decklists and a metagame Breakdown including some fun data on the frequency of a few different cards in the pool.

 

Honorable Mentions:

To wrap up this report, I wanted to show off some commanders that stood out among all the great decks we saw show up in the event.

Birgi, God of Storytelling//Harnfel, Horn of Bounty
Birgi was a list we wanted to highlight here because of the amazing turn 1 win that we were able to catch on stream as well as the uniqueness that can still show up in Max on the server. Mono color is still very strong and capable of clutching out wins as recent tournament results and the Top 16 Senatorious was able to clutch out this time around.

T1 Birgi Storm

Tivit, Seller of Secrets
Tivit is a brand new commander we just recently got in the precons from New Capenna. It was an incredibly interesting list to look at when the signup first came in due to how well it layers a 1 card win with Time Sieve as well as value plays with the new format all star Displacer Kitten and the multi-format terror Hullbreaker Horror.

Kodama of the East Tree/Silas Renn, Seeker Adept
This was a really interesting deck that we caught on camera during round 1 that I wanted to highlight. It’s a deck capable of going for fast wins while still layering hard to interact with and compact combos and very strong value engines.

 

Special Thanks:

Out of those of us who ran the event, I was the TO who primarily handled a lot of of our pre-event setup this time around but I have to give a huge thanks to Mormonator (Josh)#3167, who handled everything on the day of the event, and Alchmyst#5609, who handled running our stream and did a massive amount of advertising work leading up to PlayMAX 3.
I also have to give a shout out to Natux#8142, Kraum#6697, and cptncomplicated#1661 who were present throughout our event as Judges and kept things moving smoothly in games.
Finally, I’d like to thank Sickrobot#9999, Squirrelmob#9110, and kenbaumann#0077 for coming out and joining us on our stream during the Swiss rounds, bringing a ton of knowledge and energy that we couldn’t be more thankful for having.

 

What’s Next:

With everything that we’ve learned from these past three events, we’re happy to announce the next of our series of events with the PlayEDH Event Series: High Power Tournament on September 24th, 2022. Regularly check our Twitter and our Discord for more information as things become available.
As a note, we will be hosting more PlayMAX events but details for that will be coming later this year. For more information about what you might be able to expect in our next event, take a look at our Power Level Compendium and check out the section on High Power.

I can’t wait to see what everyone brings to fight it out with!

 

Xccepted - Kenrith Layered Evo

 

“This article is unofficial Fan Content permitted under the Fan Content Policy. Not approved/endorsed by Wizards. Portions of the materials used are property of Wizards of the Coast. ©Wizards of the Coast LLC.”

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