Vintage Metagame Update: Insights from March 2026

Howdy folks! It's time yet again for another edition of Vintage 101! I'm your host, and this week we're going to be taking a look at Vintage in the first two months of 2026 and get an idea of where we are. In addition, we've got some Challenge data from last week to look through.

It's been a minute since we did a larger look at Vintage overall, with an eye going back to when Tezzeret, Cruel Captain first appeared in the format (7/29/2025), given that was a more major event than other sets in 2025. This is utilizing the data provided by the MTGO Vintage Discord, and I always make a copy of the sheet so that I can manipulate the dates to show the data period I want to cover.

Let's start by looking at the graphical data for this period of time, which includes a little over 6.1k entries.

card-ref:Initiative is the most played deck since Tezzeret, Cruel Captain's printing, but overall since then the actual performance for the deck isn't great at around 49.8% non-mirror. I think a majority of this is related to the fact that Initiative over time has settled even more within the Vintage metagame and more players are figuring out how to beat the deck. Another part of this is the fact that the deck itself had only really one major iteration on it this last year with Clarion Conqueror out of Tarkir, and a lot of the deck's construction hasn't really shifted that much to meet where the metagame has gone. I do think there is a possibility to improve how this deck looks and operates within the metagame, but it will require a bit of work to get there.

However, I think I am also reasonably okay with Initiative's place in the format, as it seems like a fine deck to have as a "non-Shops aggro" deck that exists.

Dimir Lurrus and Lurrus decks in general filtered a lot into the top number of decks, with Lurrus Breach having one of the better non-mirror win rates at 55%. Dimir Lurrus was the most played of these at 739 copies and it had a 54% non-mirror win rate, which is pretty strong. I think the Lurrus decks, while there are a lot of them, are all rather varied and different enough that they seem to be treating the format fairly well. Having a solid variation of both fair and combo decks does give this major archetype a lot of play to it, and makes the gameplay a little more interesting to figure out what is happening.

card-ref:Dredge also remains very popular, and this comes at no surprise because it's always been a deck that's been popular throughout Vintage for the "Dredge" effect, where it can do well if the players in the event just forget Dredge exists. However, it does seem like people keep remembering Dredge exists. At 545 copies in the metagame, it has around a 45.8% non-mirror win rate, and that's not super great. I do think Dredge isn't having the best time, and a lot of it is just that people keep packing hate for it, and keep putting pressure on it. Also, there's just certain decks that have a really solid Dredge matchup from start to finish.

The Shops decks continue to posit good results across the board, with many of them having just minor good win rates like card-ref:Raker at 52.5% non-mirror with 539 copies in the metagame. Shops does remain one of the firm pillars of the Vintage format, and cards like Tezzeret, Cruel Captain continue to be one of the big reasons for that.

I think it's fine that Shops occupies a reasonable part of the metagame. It certainly has gone through periods where it has been overpowering and even some where it felt nearly nonexistent, and this current space for the Shops builds feels incredibly reasonable and fair.

Overall I think Vintage is a rather healthy metagame and it continues to remain healthy as time has gone on. Lorwyn Eclipsed did give the format a new fun tool in the form of Hexing Squelcher, one that's been rather slow to fully adopt but when I have seen it has looked incredibly powerful.

Last week I asked for some feedback on how we do event coverage on this article, with the intent of working more towards an equilibrium that isn't just a decklist dump. In the meantime, I am going to start with some weekly MTGO recaps that exist thanks to the assistance of our good friend Justin Gennari, who posts these recaps weekly via his social media. For the past week, the most played deck of the event was Lurrus PO at 30 copies (close to 20% of the weekly metagame), but its overall non-mirror win rate was around 50.8%, which seems pretty reasonable. Next in line was card-ref:Raker Shops at 21 copies and a 52.4% non-mirror win rate. This was followed by card-ref:Jewel at 11 copies and a 57.4% non-mirror win rate. Finally, we had card-ref:Initiative in the Top 4 decks of the week also at 11 copies and a 52.4% non-mirror win rate.

Lurrus in general accounted for 58 copies out of the total 151 entries in the data set so close to 40% of the entire week was a Lurrus deck of some type. Again this doesn't really account for the fact that many of the Lurrus decks are individually different strategies, just that you would have faced a Lurrus deck almost 40% of the time during this past week's events.