Affinity is in the background waving and welcoming all of the merfolk players.

What meta-trends do you think would be most beneficial to the archetype doing well?

I agree with most of what Rory has said – I’ve played around quite a bit with UW Merfolk, and mono-U is just better. UG CoCo Merfolk strikes me as not the greatest idea because there’s just no room to do CoCo, enough CMC 1-3 creatures for CoCo, your disruption/interaction suite, and AEther Vial. Losing Vial costs you speed and reliability, losing disruption costs you juice against otherwise favorable matchups, and CoCo won’t work very well without at least 24 creatures. There’s just no room for all of that in a 60-card deck.

I agree with your evaluation of the current Abzan Company decks on MTGO. The build of 2 walls, 4 chord, No Lilis, No main-deck removal, No sideboard Leap is clearly suboptimal to anyone who has played the other configuration. It’s just very frustrating to me as it feels as if they are just so far behind the curve as far as deck construction goes.

I’m not Keith, but I’ll weigh in with my thoughts anyway :). I’ve played around with both U/G and U/W. They are both a lot of fun, but I think Mono-U has the edge:

U/W:
-Path to Exile and Stony Silence are really powerful cards and arguably straight upgrades to Vapor Snag/Dismember and Hurkyl’s Recall.
-I’ve also experimented with a 2-of Ojutai’s command in the sideboard, as it can help a lot vs Burn and grindy match ups.
-Path to Exile REALLY doesn’t play very nice with Cursecatcher and Spell Pierce since it’s giving people land to pay for your counterspells with :). It’s enough of a nonbo that I’d favor playing Cosi’s Trickster (which does have synergy with Path) over Cursecatcher and swapping spell pierce for Negates and Remands.
-Once you ditch Cursecatcher and Spell Pierce, you lose a lot of the cheap and responsive permission that makes Merfolk awesome.

U/G:
-Throwing in CoCo into Merfolk is fun, as there are a lot of things you can hit that make you REALLY happy. Hitting two lords or a lord and a silvergill can really turn a game around!
-However, you have to make some pretty serious compromises. For one, you need to ditch Master of Waves or relegate it to a couple copies in the sideboard. You can’t hit it with CoCo, it’s another 4 drop, and you need the room anyway. That’s kind of a shame since Master of Waves is awesome and a VERY strong card against a ton of match ups, including all Grixis decks, BGx, Burn, and UR Twin.
-Furthermore, CoCo is even more awkward to cast than Master of Waves since occasionally (not a lot but enough that I noticed it), you can cast Master of Waves with Aether Vile, but you’ll always need 4 mana for CoCo. With a 20 land deck, you just won’t always get there in a timely manner.
-To help cast CoCo, you’ll probably want to run 2-3 Kiora’s Followers. They are basically mana ramp than can swing for the kill when needed (can also untap Aether Vial, which is neat).
-With Harbinger of the Tides being another auto include, I’m left wondering how I make room for everything. Between 2-3 Kiora’s Follower, 4 CoCo, and all the usual stuff, it’s tough to make room for Harbinger, and Harbinger is AWESOME.

Both decks have the additional negatives of a slightly more painful manabase and having to do mana fixing. Blood Moon also turns into a legitimate threat. These are relatively minor issues, but when combined with the other compromises you need to make, I favor Mono-U.

@keith, sweet thanks man! I’m building The fish right now and playing on line. Any thoughts on u/g coco fish vs. U/W vs. Mono U? I know that the general consensus is that mono blue is the way to go, but I was looking at some sideboards and the hate options look a bits stronger in the other options. I particularly like u/w’s ability to drop stoney silence and rest in peace.

The best Company deck may end up being Merfolk. Instant-speed 4-mana Harbinger of the Tides plus a Lord? Yes please.

That being said, I feel the quality of lists for Abzan Company is very lacking. Not including Abrupt Decay and suffering a poor Twin matchup because you can’t follow Pod’s example resulting in a 60+% Twin win percentage against Abzan Company on MTGO is ridiculous. Abzan Company does suffer from the MTGO problem of being an infinite combo deck that gains life, and the infinite bolster combo takes so long it’s usually not worth doing. On paper, the deck performs better. My Abzan Company list has a favorable Twin matchup, and I don’t think it loses anything in other matchups, so I’m waiting for the metagame to catch up to the notice that 4 Chord of Calling, 4 Collected Company, 22 Land, 30 Creatures is not a good deck, at least not for the Abzan clan.

Evolutionary Leap is my prediction for the card that will push an Abzan deck back into Tier 1. Both Abzan Midrange and Abzan Collected Company have started testing the card, but it is also a good build-around card in a Pod-style deck, and has infinite possibilities. It makes Lingering Souls even more broken, so that’s exciting. It has some variance involved, depending on how you build your deck, but if you’re a Wilt-Leaf Liege deck, you really don’t mind anything off of Leap. It’s one way fair decks will be able to crush other fair decks (my preliminary Abzan Leap list had a 100% win rate against Jund, Abzan, etc in testing games where Leap was drawn) and may be a resurgence of Pod-style decks in a different way.

Tron’s demise was obvious. It’s weak to most Tier 1 strategies, despite being very strong against Grixis, Jund, and Abzan decks in general. However, all of these decks have land destruction in the sideboard, so the wins are no longer guaranteed or even necessarily expected. That, coupled with poor Twin, Burn, Affinity, Infect, and other matchups, makes Tron a poor choice right now. I’m speaking strictly of RG Tron. Mono-Blue Tron may have some gains in this metagame due to favorable matchups against Twin, Jund, Abzan, Grixis Control, a coinflip matchup against Burn, and a workable Affinity matchup if you pack enough sideboard hate. However, Mono-Blue Tron suffers from the resurgence of Merfolk, which is a very unfavorable matchup. UW Tron continues to disappoint.

I’m iffy on whether Elves is a bad matchup or not. Between Tidebinder Mage, Harbinger of the Tides, Vapor Sang, and Dismember/Spell Pierce, we can disrupt the heck out of their gameplan. My sample size with Merfolk vs. Elves is limited, but I tend to either drop G1 or sweat out a close game, then win G2-3 pretty comfortably.

Super pumped to see Merfolk as a Tier 1 deck. I’ve really been enjoying playing it lately, and with the introduction of Harbinger it’s even more powerful. Aside from Affinity, there aren’t many match ups I get too nervous about facing, though I guess Elves is supposed to be a pretty bad match up?

Keith, I’ll check out that subreddit. Mainly I lurk around the Merfolk Primer board on MTG Salvation, which is also pretty active.

I’m not a huge fan of Abzan Company right now, even with Liliana in the mix. Whenever I play with or against the deck, it just feels a bit weak. It’s capable of some great grindy games against fairer decks, but it’s best plays often feel underpowered compared to the best playlines of other decks. Variance is certainly a piece here, because your bad flips are really really bad, as opposed to Naya Company which can at least get fat dudes on the board. Maybe Lily gives it more ammunition, but I worry that the deck is performance capped right now.

Glad you enjoyed it, and happy to see Merfolk getting its day in the spotlight. It’s a great deck and I always love seeing it climb/swim to the top.

Love the list, but not a huge fan of the Fauna Shamans in this metagame. They are just too fair and slow for Modern in most cases, and I don’t think Kiki Chord is the place for them to shine. I would add in more hate/interactive cards like Fiend Hunter, Linvala, Eidolon of Rhetoric, and others in their place. Definitely a cool list though (especially the maindeck Magus of the Moon!).

If other decks are any indication, the “best” Company deck will be the one that most efficiently combines a proactive game plan with interactive elements. This is what we see in many of the top decks, most notably in Grixis Control’s recent rise. Decks like Amulet Bloom and Grishoalbrand can afford to be largely/purely proactive because their gameplan is so threatening. But there’s a bit too much variance and limitation (i.e. <4 CMC creatures) with Company decks that prevents them from reaching that level of proactivity. Because of that, Company decks need to hit the sweet spot of proactive/interactive as we see in Twin (or as we saw in the late Melira Pod and its Rhino Pod variants).

Elves is very proactive but falls short on interactivity. Abzan Company is middling in both categories. Naya Company is more interactive than Elves, but its threats are a bit too vanilla for a format where Twin can win out of nowhere on turn four or Affinity can blow you away on turns 3-4. Kiki Chord is more proactive than Abzan Company because its win condition is scarier and more compact, and more interactive than Elves because it has more slots for hate cards like Magus of the Moon, Spellskite, Eidolon of Rhetoric, etc. We'll have to see, but my money is on either Elves or Kiki Chord right now.

I would also like to shamelessly share my current deck ans SB plan, which can be accessed on http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/18-04-15-merfolk/

And to Sheridan Lardner, yet another wonderful article again!

Here’s my current list –

Creature (28)
4x Birds of Paradise
1x Deceiver Exarch
3x Eternal Witness
3x Fauna Shaman
1x Izzet Staticaster
1x Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker
3x Kitchen Finks
1x Magus of the Moon
3x Noble Hierarch
1x Qasali Pridemage
1x Restoration Angel
1x Scavenging Ooze
1x Spellskite
3x Voice of Resurgence
1x Phyrexian Revoker

Land (22)
1x Breeding Pool
1x Copperline Gorge
2x Fire-Lit Thicket
1x Flooded Strand
2x Forest
2x Gavony Township
1x Plains
1x Sacred Foundry
2x Stomping Ground
1x Temple Garden
4x Windswept Heath
4x Wooded Foothills

Instant (10)
3x Chord of Calling
4x Collected Company
3x Path to Exile

Sideboard (15)
2x Fiery Justice
1x Fulminator Mage
1x Kataki, War’s Wage
1x Linvala, Keeper of Silence
1x Magus of the Moon
2x Negate
1x Path to Exile
1x Scavenging Ooze
1x Spellskite
1x Choke
1x Aven Mindcensor
1x Stony Silence
1x Thrun, the Last Troll