Notes & Combos

I played Sinful Labrynth Midrange for this season, operating it to a day 1 M1 with little hassle. This list is essentially an encore of successful seasons prior from me, so if you're totally new to this deck and are curious about what's going on please read here (and if you want a bit more, you can check this out too)

This Sinful Spoils / Labrynth / "x" shell continues to be favorable, having high card quality by being on some of the best cards in the game and matching efficient threats to proactive streams of value, not only making controlling boards an easy adventure but trading into the opponent plenty profitable as well. And the shell is fairly flexible; There's enough agency in this paring where you can rotate out that "x" spot for another smaller complementary engine that is best situated for the meta while the common denominator stays the same and still be effective. Previously this shell has hosted Kash in this spot, but here we're running with Bystials and Dogmatika and I'll explain why later in the notes.

Notes

Why not play Unchained Labrynth?

While Labrynth finally got access to Yama and friends and with that a decent raise in the deck's ceiling along with its capacity to interact, they didn’t really solve enough of the deck’s problems. In fact, it actually made some of them even worse and created new ones altogether. Given the furniture limits, Lab's baseline consistency was already less than desirable to such an extent that players were going out of their way to try to pick up the slack, and adding two bricks in Sharvara and Escape only puts salt in the already salted wound. Furthermore, pursuing the Unchained lines was also less reliable with only four furniture (it's now more common of a play you somewhat fall into past the initial turn cycle as opposed to how it plays out in other formats) and actually opens up Lab to a wider range of opposing defensive options that otherwise, they would have been able to avoid or shrug off.

One of the perks of being a Lab player in the meta is that outside of Ash and Belle, we don't particularly care about the large majority of hand traps, as even Imperming Arianna for example, isn't exactly the worst given she can still accrue value later on past the turn she's negated. This begins to fall apart with Unchained as cards like Maxx C are much more painful now along with a pool of other ones, and typically dead cards against us like Nib get realistically put on the table too. We're turning what was a natural strength into a legitimate weakness.

Unchained Labrynth can still (and likely will) win and top events/ranked of course, it's not like it's a "bad" deck despite the blemishes outlined (it's still good enough). Nonetheless, between how it stands mathematically as far as consistency is concerned compared to alternative Lab variants and the vulnerabilities it opens up in general, I didn't think it was ideal for this season's run and passed on it for the time being.

Arias is notably missing from this list

And for good reason. A lot of what I discussed about Transcation Rollback applies to Arias as well. She's not inherently a starter, an extender, or a piece of interaction much like Roll, and also like it, only acts as some of these conditionally. Continuing the similarities, Arias' value is also on a sliding scale that's greatly dependent on your options at the time, and thus, Arias has special potential to brick or have her usage be underwhelming. While the recursion she offers is nice and can be taken more advantage of in certain Lab variants, it didn't make up for how uncompelling the statistics were in actually seeing relevant combinations with her to be impactful without augmenting the list to specifically accommodate her. So I passed on Arias as I didn't need to take on the opportunity cost to make her work well to be successful in the first place.

For what it's worth as there seems to be a bunch of discrepancies on this subject, beyond the confines of her own deck (Arias Lab where she's a 3-of) and similarly aligned trap-heavier builds I do believe she's a 0-1-of card in the vast amount of situations. Rarely do I think this card should be a 2-of right now without some type of unique circumstance as the second copy of Arias is infrequently going to be a clear better option than another piece of relevant tech at that point if you aren't catering to her already.

On Bystials and Dogmatika

As mentioned earlier, Kash was normally the engine here, and while those cards are still very good and can easily be slotted back in and see success - I particularly wanted to push back harder against the trio of Lab, Tear and Branded. Lab distinctly has picked up steam as of late and players only received further encouragement to play it given the result of very recent events and this latest pack.

With that, I also expected a rise in decks that were naturally good against Lab (mainly Branded) as others would recognize this uptick in Lab too so choosing a fuller Bysital engine (as opposed to just a splash like Mag + Dru) helped get out ahead of not only the first trend but the expected counter to this trend as well in a louder way - effectively killing two birds with one stone while staying in front. Beyond those considerations, Bystials were still fine into SE contrary to popular belief (hitting I:P/Kuriboh is actually relevant, especially the former), and the only real margin points that were truly lost by opting for them is against SHS - a tradeoff I was willing to accept as that MU genuinely is only somewhat of an issue going second anyway.

As far as Dogmatika is concerned, it harmonized with the Bystial engine and still brings a nice blend of utility and value in isolation. This engine remains pretty good even with the new limits and what's often forgotten is that it actually got a new toy. While this list just link climbs through it like most, it slips through the cracks that Yama is also a Naidr/Punishment target if desired, a touchpoint that can actually come up from time to time.