Hi Zvi, thanks for commenting! You’re right, the playability parameters are far stricter in Modern. As for acceptable hands, it seems like we agree: a kept X-carder under London is going to be stronger on average than one kept under the old rules. I’ve really enjoyed testing the limits of what’s possible under the London, for instance in Colorless Eldrazi Stompy and GRx Moon shells.

I agree that we’ve gone from ‘the best card is a generic good card in isolation like Lightning Bolt or Tarmogyf’ to ‘the best card requires better supports to do its thing’ but the thing that a Modern player might not appreciate is that in Standard the support tends to mostly be ‘cast this spell on the earliest turn possible’ with reasonable follow-up. So the ‘play pattern’ of Nissa is “Turn 3” and the ‘play pattern’ of Oko is “Turn 2” and so forth. Details matter beyond that but they also… kind of often don’t?

In turn, this is because (and you’re fair to call me out for using a vague term ‘messed up’) the modern card designs are ‘if this card costs 3-5 mana it should take over the game on its own with continuous card advantage or other big thing right away’ as opposed to being a generically good-stuff style thing.

But I do think the central argument against London applies even more so to Modern – when I say that you can’t keep ‘perfectly good’ hands I mean literally any hand that doesn’t do the especially powerful thing that gets you to your destination on the correct turn. Yes, throwing such hands back a lot was *already* good advice! But now it gets pretty extreme, etc etc.

Every rose has its thorn…

Couldn’t go an article without mentioning serum powder could you? 🙂