I think it’s important to group to understand the defining characteristics of the format.

It’s equally disingenuous to say a meta us diverse when it is colour variations of the same core.

Twin is 15% of the meta, no matter how you slice it. And that’s fine, because we understand that within that there are variations.

Similarly we have 3 (well really 2 because straight BG is non existent at the moment) variations of The Rock which made up 11% of the day 2 meta for Copenhagen.

The format is healthy because there’s a solid core of decks holding the format together while allowing room for other decks to play with.

I actually believe Twin is still the “best deck” in the format, but in reality, Modern is really a format that rewards deck knowledge and familiarity. So the “best deck” becomes the one you are most experienced with, so long as that deck also fulfills some minimum power requirements. What ends up happening is that a lot of players jump around decks to fit the flavor of the month or keep up with the new hype, which means you have inexperienced pilots playing decks that may or may not be good. But you also have a group of players who stick to their tried-and-tested deck, or metagame against the popular stuff with some tier 2-3 sleeper pick. All of this is at play in the current format diversity.

There’s definitely a lot of room to explore in applying stats to decks themselves. I’m particularly interested in the relationship of cantrips and other low-CMC spells to the delve creatures. Lots of decks are going to try and jam in Tasigur/Angler, especially Tas, and it would be interesting to see what kind of support those cards need.

I think as long as you have a larger low-end % AND a reasonably large high-end %, that will mostly account for the situation you are describing. We do want some number of 1% decks in the Day 2, but as you said, we don’t want 100 of them.

Thanks! It’s fun to do these kind of in-depth articles, especially for a format as rich and fun as Modern. Let us know if there’s anything we could be doing better, or anything you want to see more/less of!

@justaguy: I think it depends on the purpose of the discussion. If we are talking about banning a card, then I agree we can consider grouping SOME of these decks, depending on the card in question. For instance, Wizards definitely grouped Treasure Cruise decks into one category, because there was no single version of Delver with a large metagame share. It was only the combined Temur/Jeskai/UR supergroup that was dominant. The same was also true of Deathrite Shaman, although in that case, most players were using DRS as part of an Ajundi shell anyway.

@Nickolay: Totally agree with this. Jund and Abzan in particular have very different play styles, even if they share core cards. Path/Rhino/Souls/Hierarch vs. Bolt/Terminate/Confidant/Kolaghan’s totally changes how the deck plays. Post-sideboard, it’s even more noticeable. Although it’s convenient for a lot of the ban-maniacs to group these decks to prove a point, there are a lot of differences in how you play the decks and, more importantly, how you play against the decks. The same is mostly true of Twin too, especially in the differences between Grixis and UR Twin.

In other words, a format of 100 decks of 1% each is equally unhealthy in my eyes. In this format you can’t prepare, sideboarding is a nightmare and your performance is largely down to pairings.

You want stability in the format, as well as the ability for rogue decks to come and attack the meta. The current meta is close to this.

Having played and analysed all Twin versions, I can honestly say the game plan between the three is completely different. Well at least when you aren’t trying to T3 Exarch into T4 Splinter Twin.

But I don’t think play style should factor into this discussion. Any deck whose core is discard into Goyf into Lili should be considered together for the same of determining how varied the meta is. Just like most players wouldn’t consider playing the different Twin decks as having played varied games of magic, I doubt subtribe would say they played a bunch of varied decks if they played against Jund and Junk (nuances of the third color aside).

You could potentially make an argument to group the CoCo decks, but given the various colours and the way they played out, I think it’s OK to look at them separately.

Keep up the incredible work.

Twin is a little bit of an oddball in that regard, since even the Goyf version transitions into a controlling game post-board, but generally even if the decks share a card pool, those that take a different approach to the game should be classified on their own.