Eleven Regional Championships in eleven weeks have come and gone. Now it's all down to Atlanta.

That's where the final Regional Championship of the season will take place, kicking off with hundreds of the best players in the United States competing over two days of Pioneer for slots at the Pro Tour and a seat at the World Championship. It's the culmination of a months-long RC season that has spanned the globe, seen format-breaking decks come and go, and featured stories of winners now taking their talents to Magic World Championship 30.

Before we delve forward into the final competitive Magic weekend of the year (coming fresh off the heels of a hugely successful Eternal Weekend), I want to take stock today of where we've come so far in this period of Pioneer polarization.

We started the Pioneer Regional Championship season off with a clear narrative: the format was defined by Mono-Green Devotion and its big-mana engine card Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx. Along with a smattering of combo decks and aggressive shells, we thought we knew how things would play out.

We were very wrong. As players built upon results from previous weekends' event, Mono-Green became something of an afterthought. Heading into the final Regional Championship of the season, the season of surprises has done nothing but increase hype for what we can expect at Pro Tour Murders at Karlov Manor at MagicCon: Chicago early next year.

Let's start with this shocking stat: of the 11 Regional Championships completed so far this season, 10 different decks have won events. Ten.

Diversity among Top 8s is prized among the Magic community. The concept of "any given Sunday with any given deck" has always been an inspiration to players everywhere, and it has driven the dreams of many a deep Day 2 Grand Prix or Regional Championship run. Just look at Elliot Raff, a longtime judge who decided to compete in a Regional Championship earlier this year with an unique Enigmatic Fires build.

We still talk about Pro Tour Shadows Over Innistrad back in 2016 as both a great time in Standard, but also an exemplar of competitive diversity; eight different decks made the Top 8 (Steve Rubin eventually emerged victorious with Selesnya Tokens over Andrea Mengucci's Bant Company).

I don't know exactly how 10 unique decks of out 11 Pioneer matches up to that, but in this fictitious Top 11, you have major deck diversity.

• 2x Rakdos Midrange
• Lotus Field Combo
• Izzet Phoenix
• Boros Heroic
• Rakdos Sacrifice
• Abzan Greasefang
• Boros Convoke
• Jund Transmogrify
• Geoform
• Grixis Phoenix

It remains to be seen whether the Phoenix builds stay unique or if Bitter Downfall is the future of the archetype, but no matter how you cut it that's a huge range of archetypes and gameplans.

Boros Convoke and Boros Heroic are lightning-fast decks that took Brett Girvan and William Araujo to wins at Regional Championships for Australia/New Zealand and Brazil, respectively, while Rakdos Midrange and Sacrifice both excel in drawn-out games. Lotus Field and Abzan Greasefang (winners for Adrián Iñigo Tastet in Europe and Peng Zer Shiuan for Southeast Asia) have traditionally been the format's most common combo deck capable of playing the game on a totally different axis, and Jund Transmogrify (Kenta Masukado in Japan/Korea) and the Phoenix decks that Boston Schatteman and Ha Pham used to win Canadian Regional Championships play their subgame involving a lot of angry birds. And heck, along the way we even witnessed Guillermo Sulimovich winning the South America RC with the now-infamous legal-for-one-week Geological Appraiser Combo deck.

All in all, it's been a very busy three months. And missing from that list? The previous format-defining deck Mono-Green Devotion. The dominance of Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx may not have been overstated, but it has at least been contained over the last few months. The Regional Championship winners all had a robust plan for dealing with the format's most inevitable deck.

Fu Yu's run to victory at the MTG China Open did so by presenting a different kind of inevitability: the dreaded Cat-Oven combo. No, it's not a combo in the way that Abzan Greasefang combos – turboing out a Parhelion II on turn three with the deck's namesake creature. But as anyone who has been burned by the endless feeding of Cauldron Familiar to Witch's Oven over its years-long run of tournament relevance knows, it's a surefire combo that will end the game just as well. It's not an easy way to win, but it certainly is effective.

Nothing came easy for Fu Yu in the win. He dropped the second round of the tournament but rallied to win out on a day in which his final six swiss rounds all came against different decks.

I mentioned the polarization of Pioneer earlier, so I also want to highlight the other end of the spectrum. Brett Girvan and William Araujo had a very different plan for beating Nykthos: go much, much faster.

For Girvan, who picked up his Regional Championship victory early in the season, it was all about a pair of one-drops:

Either of these creatures on the first turn meant that Girvan was off to the races, using a new tool in Monstrous Rage along with Homestead Courage to quickly grow a rather... heroic creature, while protecting it with Gods Willing. The deck went faster than pretty much anything in the format, except perhaps for the other Boros deck to win a Regional Championship this cycle: William Araujo's win at the City Class Showdown in Brazil with Boros Convoke.

Gleeful Demolition is not a card I think anyone would have expected to win a Regional Championship when it was printed, but somehow alongside the classic Ornithopter and Thraben Inspector (and the not-so-classic Voldaren Epicure), Gleeful Demolition is reliable enough to be a staple of the Boros Convoke deck.

Once it's spammed the board with creatures, the convoking begins. Venerated Loxodon is the primary finisher, though Knight-Errant of Eos has made its way into the deck in recent months and given the deck a shot of card advantage to go along with its explosive starts.

Finally, I want to talk about Kenta Masukado's impressive win at the Champions Cup in Japan last month. Japanese teams are rarely caught off guard by new technology, and the Regional Championship was no exception – discover combos were the most popular decks in the room and in fact Masukado played against it twice before the Top 8, splitting matches on his way to a 9-1-2 finish.

But what's so impressive about Masukado's tournament is that he wasn't slogging through the field with a known commodity like Rakdos. Instead, he was one of just five players in a field of almost 250 competitors to bring Jund Transmogrify.

This is without a doubt one of the most interesting decks of the entire Regional Championship season. It's got a lot going on.

Is this a combo deck? A control deck? Thoughtseize plus Torch the Tower plus Careful Cultivation all in the same deck? Masukado's Top 8 run showed the deck can do it all – he defeated two hyper-aggressive Boros Convoke decks before beating the hyper-not-aggressive Azorius Control deck in the finals.

It's All in Atlanta

Our winner's circle has room for one more.

Hundreds of players are converging on Georgia for the final Regional Championship of the season coming at Dreamhack, and this time around players are already buzzing about another new combo deck made possible with The Lost Caverns of Ixalan that has flown under the radar: Amalia Combo.

The deck certainly has chops – Santiago Bigatti took it to the finals of the South American Regional Championship – but it's hard to tell if the deck has been the subject of discussion because of its power level or because of the peculiar way that it can stall out and accidentally draw a game. Fun fact: Magic matches aren't actually best-of-three – they're first to two wins. Drawn games have been a thing ever since Earthquake.

Tournament quirks aside, the deck is poised to break out this weekend at the Regional Championship in Atlanta. Or not – this is the first look we're going to get at the refreshed Pioneer format without Karn, the Great Creator and with the freshly unbanned Smuggler's Copter.

It's going to be a fun ride.