Ah yes, the oft forgotten yet ever useful swiss army knife of modern. Also the scariest 2 mana card to represent against a twin player.

remember that if your opponent decides to make infinite creatures, you can simply charm their face for infinite damage and win the game. observant, and seasoned players will know to play around it, but I think kiki chord players will certainly not expect to get killed by rakdos charm, at least in paper.

For what it’s worth, this section has been rewritten to highlight this phenomenon more explicitly. The more I’ve thought about it, the more it seems this is the principle cause of the paper/MTGO disparity in Abzan Company results.

I would certainly be interested in something like that. Especially if it came with some nice graphical representations.

This is an awesome idea, and I’m surprised we haven’t done it yet. Something I will keep on my docket for when we find time. I could also just write a one-off article on it, if that sounds interesting to people.

He actually accounted for that in his writeup. Regardless of the reason why a deck may not be particularly prevalent on a given platform (for example, Merfolk was kept out of Tier 1 for months thanks to a Kira, Great Glass-Spinner bug squashing its metagame share), if the results aren’t there, he has to demote the deck.

Aye, but so is Relic of Progenitus, and while it doesn’t kill Dredge or Abzan Company as dead as the Cage does, it demolishes Living End in addition to powering down Jund’s Goyfs and shutting off Nahiri’s Snapcasters pretty effectively. I guess most people are opting for the fire-and-forget power of the Cage (I own both, but I’m only rocking Relic for the time being).

*Looks at Mono U Tron deck*

Awesome, running the worse version of a deck that doesn’t fit the overall meta lol. Oh well, still fun to play.

The rise of living end might have to do with the fact that grafdigger’s cage has no effect on it. People try to hit as many decks as possible with their limited sideboards and cage is very efficient, helping against coco, nahiri, and dredge. It’s also an easy inclusion in a lot of decks since it is colourless and only 1 mana.

Sisters at Tier 3 is an absolute shock – that deck has been lurking in the non-tiered morass forever, and I don’t really think Lone Rider was enough to propel it into this level of discussion. Burn’s meta share isn’t particularly high for its standards, so I’m wondering what’s fueling it right now.