I have actively stepped back from Modern over the last several months for exactly the reason many others have been praising it: complete lack of identity in the format. Yes, “anything” is viable, but what that ends up playing out like is just more lopsided matches, un-prepared-for pairings, wasted sideboard slots, and an increase in feelbad moments that suck much of the fun and excitement of playing. Too many games are just non-games. Win or lose, that’s just not fun.

Modern has ALWAYS been a place of massive diversity, where even the strangest of decks could have taken any given GP at any time (except Eldrazi Winter). But without a focused identity at the top, the format feels so… fractured and random. What cards represent the “face” of the format? Maybe this doesn’t matter much beyond sideboard plans, but it feels like all the “faces” of Modern are a thing of the past.

It seems I am clearly not the player Wizards wants to cater to, at least when it comes to Modern. But lucky for me they have been hitting grand slams year after year with their Commander products and I have something else to focus on in the meantime until another meaningful shift happens to Modern.

When I do get back into playing thresh decks, I’ll include some what’s-the-play puzzles. They come up often in matches. I’ve just been pretty sporadic when it comes to casting Serum Visions lately.

I also dearly miss this dimension of the site, and if it were up to me, re-establishing that sort of content as regular and crucial would be a top priority. Unfortunately, it isn’t, and I don’t have the statistical chops or love for numbers necessary to do it myself. When I came on to MN two years ago, it was as the resident brewer; my articles since then have explored the limits of what’s possible in Modern and tried to push against them when possible. That’s a far cry from the kind of sterile data analysis I agree the site needs. Hopefully, your prayers and mine will be answered in the near future!

As for the metagame, that’s an interesting take I’ve been seeing more and more of. Many players like to have a “best deck” to fall back on, or to attack directly; Modern’s primary goal of format diversity clashes with this desire, since in Wizards’ perfect world, few decks take up large shares so that other decks can share the pie. I don’t want to say to you and players like you to just quit Modern, but know that Wizards is actively working against that sort of metagame and will always favor the “RandomTier2Deck” meta.

They have worked tirelessly for years to create a space that looks just like this one; now, they get to observe it in action, and see if the players actually like it. It’s possible more players like yourself miss bigger decks and Wizards does a 180 on what they want Modern to be about, but I personally don’t see that happening. It seems better to me for the popularity of the format (WotC’s first priority, as it translates to their bottom line) that player X and player Y can play their respective favorite archetypes or cards at a given time. Spikes like Pros are going to play the format anyway, so why cater to them directly?

I’m aware there’s a divide when it comes to those who want more coverage when playing more and more to tide them over when they aren’t, and it differs wildly between players based on those I’ve spoken to.

The brewing idea is great and one I am likely to take you up on. I’ve always been hesitant to write tournament reports for smaller events like FNM, and equally hesitant to bring wonkier brews to events where I actually care about prizing, but I think Pandemonium has one of the more competitive Modern scenes I’ve seen in North America as well as a pair of tournaments weekly. Excited to get cracking on this! Thanks for the comment.

I’m not a regular poster here, but I do read everything that comes to the site, and just wanted to share my personal views on what makes an interesting read.

The first thing I wanted to mention was the fact that “not reading articles because we’re busy playing”, although said with tongue-and-cheek, is probably a long way off the truth. When I’m enjoying my MTG, I tend to look for MORE content, not shy away from it. I get so passioniate about the game, that I want to get as many edges as possible, and content is 1 way I can do that. So although I understand the angle you were coming from, I think there’s 2 sides to that coin!

Secondly, like many others, the match reports are pretty solid. But, as you mentioned in your article (indirectly), you’re likely to enjoy them more if it’s about a deck you play yourself. You also mention that you’re a bit of a brewer. I just went to the “brews” section of the site, and there’s been just 2 posts since May. If you are brewing, and if you’re still playing 2-3 times a week – why not take a brew to an FNM and do a match report on that? It may be that it’s a fairly known deck but still rogue (thinking blue steel / amulet and many many many more), or something completely left-field that you’ve come up. Either way, you’re likely to inspire some readers, and also likely to accidently hit a deck someone else is playing, and get conversation flowing that way. I’m a big fan of brews, and a bigger fan of just stealing rogue ideas and trying to tune them. That sort of content is really hard to find, and I’d love to see more of it. It ticks a lot of boxes in terms of being fresh, passion can come out from the writer, and it gets us the high quality match reports that people enjoy too.

All this to say, there’s some really great content coming from you and your team, but I’d love to see more of the stuff that people don’t know so much about!

I can say for me personally, a lot of my interest in this site fell considerably with the complete lack of number crunching or any meaningful statistical analysis. Now that we don’t even have remotely reliable data anymore, I don’t know if it would be possible, even WITH the resources. But somehow that element (or something similar) needs to come back to differentiate this site from the dozens of other sources of opinion articles and deck techs we see everywhere.

I still follow this site, but it’s rare to find as many things as interesting to read anymore. Perhaps for some of the reasons spoken about here, or perhaps because of a lack of overall focus. It doesn’t help that I think Modern itself is not at its best, but that’s a personal opinion I hold (It feels the format is essentially all “Tier 2” decks, with the idea of Tier 1 and all accompanying identities of Tier 1 decks basically completely eliminated. I do not think the format is better because of this, but I also miss the Jund/Twin/Affinity/Tron/Infect/Burn+RandomT2Deck meta. Now it feels like everything is “RandomTier2Deck.”)

And it’s a horribly designed game, to be sure. The guy who writes the manga created the game on a whim after the game, which was barely featured in the comics, drew unanticipated attention from readers. The biggest problem with Yu-Gi-Oh! from a game perspective is its management; even a game with wonky rules can be smoothed out over time.

And yet, Konami’s doing something right, since YGO outsells MtG despite how hard Magic tries to appeal to new players, retain old ones, create balance, and simplify the game. What exactly are they doing right is the question I find most interesting.

Also, almost everything you said about Yugioh sounds horrible to me. And I’m saying not just as a Magic player, but as a game designer.

I’d like to amend my earlier comment by correcting myself on David’s preordain article. He states quite clearly at the very beginning that it’s a qualitative analysis and I was focusing too much on the last part of the article. Apologies to David.

Without that statistical bedrock, I think quality magic writing tends to fall back on rhetoric, which is what we’ve seen this week.

I’m not saying those statistics magically inspire fresh articles, but their presence allows for a different kind of writing, and a more informative stance while making any assertions.

I think the Nexus crew needs to have a look into this missing component, not to satisfy me or any individual but in order to make their content better informed and more robust. That’s why I started coming here in the first place and I feel like it was a unique take on the journalistic side of magic which has been somewhat put to the side recently. Even the eminent David Ernewein’s normally stat-heavy and labour-intensive breakdown of potential unbans was missing that sort of discussion in his recent post, instead favouring generalisations and opinion in his writing (I’m not saying the numbers weren’t there of course, just that he chose to show his findings in a more conversational way).

I read this article, and I read the CML article linked within. By the end, I am reminded why I won’t shell out $1k for a deck, try to play in the pro tour, or travel more than an hour to play in a tournament. I’m on the verge of just being a collector over a player, except storm is incredibly fun.

The attempt to make MtG an esport is basically a joke. The commentary isn’t bad in terms of structure of the individuals’ ability to communicate what is happening – it is just boring as hell. They try to make it way more serious than it really is. Watch a League of Legends tournament and the way it is discussed you’d think Jhin was a real person engaged in a battle of life or death.

I am a big fan of Travis Woo, who spent a significant amount of time recently discussing cheating, how its done, how to find it, and threw out some ideas to try to prevent it. Meanwhile, there are legit cheaters in the Hall of Fame. That’s not even beginning to discuss Eric Froelich and his idea of concessions, intentional draws, and pro player “equity.”

I love modern. I am a huge fan of your site. I like playing. For a while I wanted to go on that PPTQ grind and find myself in Bilbao…but I don’t think it is worth it.