GFCEU 2026: Top 8 Deck Lists

Once or twice a year we host a Goat Format Championship with a start time catering to our friends outside the US. The start time of 11/12 EST for us leaves those Euros on a deep run still playing at midnight. Porco Dio! Go to bed! As such, GFC EUs start at in the afternoon of GMT, or 8 AM Eastern. They’re open to all, but the altered timezone does play a heavy hand into who joins. Early risers in the Eastern and Central timezone (like myself) were still likely to join, and Australian players are far more likely to join than the average tournament. We pulled in a clean 128 making the event 7 rounds of Swiss with a cut to top 8. This was our first championship in line with our new policy of top 8 cut regardless of size, and we ended with exactly one X-0 and 7 X-1s.As I predicted in my previous writeup, the GGP Munich meta served as quite the predictor for this weekend’s event. Chaos Control and Warrior continue to duke it out for the title of topdog, while turbo trails closely behind waiting to sit in the throne again. Top 8 was nothing but these three decks. In top 16 we had the GFC 25 first and second place decks (the author on Gumo and Grapesoda on SWAG Cat), as well as Barcode playing a unique form of Soul Control. What a great run for such an underdog deck! 

Also like Munich, the good Warrior players converted best into top 8, but in the end it was it was a Chaos Control player who came out on top. That player was none other than longtime GOAT Carl Waite (read all about it here), followed close behind by Oddisee on Warrior, Ivan on CC as well, and OSV on Warrior as well. 

The spiciest deck in top 8 was OSV’s Warrior deck, which teched main deck two Skilled Dark Magician and Xing Zhen Hou. This author predicted Xing would be an extremely strong card in the current meta, as it punishes the common “set 2” plan for playing around the ever-present Dust Tornado. The side also had a Chaos Turbo worth of flips and a Chaos Sorcerer rather than the standard Warrior side. Nevertheless, congratulations to these four players for riding the wave and earning their invites to worlds!

In fifth through eighth we had Gangsterbro and InsiDS on standard turbo and Dkerke and Valtinos on standard warrior. Congratulations to these players as well!

Looking at the meta right now, I see a very interesting house of cards. This is the first time Turbo has not defined the format in years. Although the format appears a little samey, this author believes something is going to come along and massively disrupt the current order. It is tough for a given deck to consistently beat Chaos Control AND Warrior, but someone will figure out something and everything will change. Will it just be Turbo again, is a Burn deck waiting in the wings for the right time to strike, or will it be something else entirely? I for one am looking forward to finding out!