FWIW, UG Merfolk showed up in most leagues this month! Definitely a sign of hope for the archetype.

Dig definitely helps, don’t get me wrong. However, my experience from the start of the year (when local shops were running Pioneer cash tournaments) was that Dig isn’t that important to Inverter. It’s great in the late game for finding the combo, but the main purpose I saw was clearing the graveyard for a combo turn. Things may have changed.

As for Twin, I think it’s nostalgia and a bit of revisionist history. Players fondly remember the deck and how well they did back then, and want to recapture that (even though that is unlikely given how Modern’s changed). Moreover and more importantly, they liked being Modern’s “good guy.” Remember, the narrative both during and after Twin’s reign was that it was the police deck and kept things sane. The data doesn’t back that up, but that’s how Twin’s playerbase remembers it and it’s a very attractive narrative. They weren’t a broken and oppressive combo deck, they were a fair deck keeping out unwelcome brokenness. Everyone wants to be the good guy, even if the reality is more complicated.

And be careful what you wish for with new sets. They finished work on Zendikar before it became clear how busted things had become.

As for the meta broadly, I think it’s nice to see the way the format is shaking out so far. There are more than a few cards which I’d consider serious concerns, so think it’s important to keep a close eye on where things go. But I don’t think that the decks that format is beginning to take shape around should surprise anyone. Even though I’m still not crazy about the power gap between the “haves” and “have nots” of modern, it’s nice to be able to say with a measure of confidence, “I think my deck can compete in a league or next Friday.”

My hope is that Zendikar and other future sets will help bridge the gaps caused by 2019 and the first half of 2020. It’s pretty clear that Wizards wanted to blur the lines between standard and modern to sell packs, but also to push UG and control decks to be “more of a thing”. Which, lets face it, the community had been asking for for years. But cards like Uro, Sanctuary, Veil, and T3feri make it feel like we’re choking on that a fillet we ordered.

I don’t know what the answer to supporting struggling archypes is–except to say I think we should be more focused on bouying specific decks **cough Merfolk** rather than trying to prop up whole archetypes with a few overwhelmingly powerful cards.