Hello Peasant Community!
We have an announcement to make about the future of the Peasant format. Recently, we have seen concern about the new Channel deck that can win as early as turn 2. The Channel deck has recently won back-to-back FNMs in the hands of Neral, which gave players concern about the power of it. The card Channel has been a card we have looked at for quite some time now and we have our conclusion about it. As the Peasant Council, we are NOT going to ban Channel. We have done multiple tests and gathered information from each other to reach this conclusion and we will explain why we are going to keep it legal.
Reasons why we are keeping Channel legal:
1. Peasant will see more diversity in the metagame.
2. Every color can interact with the deck in some way.
3. The deck is too inconsistent.
4. The sample size is too small at the moment.
"Peasant will see more diversity in the metagame."
At the moment, the Peasant metagame is mostly tempo, midrange decks which the Channel decks prey on. We have tried the Channel deck vs other decks like Faeries, Boros Bully, Burn, Stompy, and all of which beat the Channel deck. The Faeries deck was extremely strong against Channel since cards like Daze meant that Channel had to play around it and it also had to beat Counterspells. Also, Burn/Stompy was very good against it as well since Channel loses a lot of life to play its spells. Decks like Boros Bully were fine against it as well because of Journey to Nowhere to deal with the creature and Rally the Peasants to kill them quickly. With our testing with different decks, we found that we could see different decks and archetypes like Aggro and Daze/Control decks.
"Every color can interact with the deck in some way."
As shown above, many decks can beat the deck in some kind of way. Aggro can beat it with damage, Control can beat it with Daze and Counterspells and midrange can beat it with Journey to Nowhere and Cast Down. We could also see cards like Spell Pierce become more popular as well to deal with the Channel deck. The Channel deck can beat some of these cards, but it seems like every color has some way of dealing with it.
"The deck is too inconsistent."
We did calculations to find the odds of finding a Channel and it's about ~39% chance to see it per hand. If you include the mana that you need and the creatures, it's about a ~10% chance to see all of those per hand for a turn 2 Channel. The chances get even lower if you want to play around Daze (under 10%). For this reason, we think that at the moment, we can keep Channel legal, but if there is a more consistent Channel deck we can look into it further.
"The sample size is too small at the moment."
As we all know, the Peasant format is very small compared to other formats, which means that we don't get that much data since we don't have that many events. Although Neral has proven that the deck is strong, as the Peasant Council, we believe that we don't have enough data to come to the conclusion that Channel is too strong. If the deck continues to be strong and consistent then we may take action.
Hopefully, you all can see why we don't believe that banning Channel is correct at the moment. In the future, if the deck is still winning consistently and the metagame doesn't shift correctly, we may ban it. For now, though, we believe that Channel is fine and it may be a positive for the format keeping it in.
- Peasant Council