Of note in the Death & Taxes discourse: one of the biggest draws the deck has had historically has been that it's mono colored and could be assembled pretty cheaply. Current builds, from what I've seen, have been BW (for their own bowmasters, because that's the best answer to one) and even splashing into green frequently for access to things like Gaddock Teeg in the sideboard. Thus, while the archetype is still statistically competitive based on the statistics shown in an online meta, pilots in paper are likely suffering much more with a suboptimal build as the need for dual lands arises. The win rate likely has some survivor bias as well, since many pilots have recognized that the era of the orc has come and pivoted to other decks they feel are more competitive for the average player in an environment where 2 in 5 opponents are on mainboard X/1 hate. Thus, a large portion of the people that are staying on the deck are probably the die-hard masters of their craft who can put up results in pretty much any field.
Someone asked me about an optimal DnT list in comments on Reddit and your first point is exactly what my assumption was. My gut reaction was that Bowmasters seems strong in the deck and the non-monetary costs associated seemed minimal, but then I actually looked at the decks and it turns out I was super off-base. Of the fourteen copies of DnT counted in my metagame analysis from MTGO, only one copy had a black splash. Your second point is spot on though. MTGO Player IsolatedSystem represents half of the DnT results from March and definitely carried the win-rate of the archetype. Their list is a Mono-White Yorion build. www.mtggoldfish.com/player/IsolatedSystem
Sultai Beans was 1.59% of the field, I categorized it as distinct and different from the 3-5c Bant decks with white removal. It had an overall win rate of 47.12% in 104 matches played. I think the move towards UGW/x Beans and away from Sultai is a confluence of two factors. White removal is much better against the Scam decks including Rescaminator and Triumph of St. Katherine was added to MTGO in the last week of February.
@@Matt_Chow thank you for the very detailed reply! Wow, that is a big decrease in representation, it seems like just a short while ago it had around 5%.
I think that’s the most likely reason. Now that I’m thinking about it more, I also didn’t consider looking at each players deck choice history to see if Dimir Rescaminator is within their range.
