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The overwhelming vibe I get from February's data is stability. Players have been trying to disrupt the metagame's equilibrium, but like swinging a pendulum, it just keeps returning to its resting position. These new decks have promise, and I hope they survive to add needed variety to Modern's metagame. However, I have doubts that they'll have any impact on the metagame's equilibrium ahead of March of the Machines (MOM).
The Churn That Wasn't
The first thing to deal with is Phyrexia: All Will be One's impact, or rather lack thereof. Don't get me wrong, players are trying to adopt the new cards, and some have definitely made it into the regular Modern rotation. It just hasn't resulted in the churn that I expected it would in January. The main problem seems to be that, once again, the cards that are best in Modern are best in existing decks.
The Phyrexia card that's seen the most play, by a very long margin, is The Mycosynth Gardens. It naturally fit into Amulet Titan and has been universally adopted as a 3-4-of. I know that other decks were floated as homes for Gardens, but they're not really working out. Gardens is perfect for Titan because it's cheap to copy Amulet of Vigor, and more Amulets allows for more broken starts. I'm told by actual Amulet players that Garden doesn't make the deck that much better, as switching other lands for Gardens made the mana somewhat unstable, but being more broken makes up for instability.
After Gardens, the most played Phyrexia card is Minor Misstep, and that's entirely thanks to UR Murktide's prevalence. Misstep is not universal, but many Murktide players are running one or two main as anti-mirror cards. Some other decks are also running one or two as anti-Murktide cards. After that, Elesh Norn, Mother of Machines and Atraxa, Grand Unifier see some play, the former alongside Omnath, Locus of Creation and the latter in Indomitable Creativity lists and rarely elsewhere. Many niche cards, but nothing redefining.
Modern, Vaccinated
Significantly, and despite my concern, Venerated Rotpriest hasn't made much outside of Standard. This is not for lack of effort. There are a number of Storm lists floating around, and every Infect list I recorded in the data included Rotpriest, seemingly for the reasons I speculated on in my original article. That said, the fact that it's been a month since Rotpriest became legal, plus the extra time from the leak, and there's been no breakout deck suggests that there's no actual danger.
However, I'm not sounding the all-clear yet. Remember, it has proven surprisingly hard to innovate in settled metagames. Rotpriest may be more the victim of inertia than a lack of viability. Its home is also in two decks that have stigma associated in playing with them, Infect and Storm. Storm is a deck that traditionally turns off many players and players really hate getting got by Infect, which provides social pressure against playing them.
Therefore, given the fact that decks running Rotpriest can win and the test decks I've seen perform reasonably well (on video, anyway) I'm sticking to my original assessment. Rotpriest is an inherently dangerous card, but a combination of metagame forces and social pressure are keeping it out. It may take a metagame shift or new printing to overcome the inertia, but there is certainly a Modern where Rotpriest is a player. Stay vigilant.
Humans Returning?
For the first time in a while, Humans made the Tier list. It's the bottom of Tier 3, but that's still a significant achievement for a deck that fell completely out of the metagame after once being the best deck in Modern. This happened thanks to the emergence of the Mono-White Humans list running Chancellor of the Annex and Shining Shoal I highlighted last week. It's still putting up enough results to potentially make March's tier list, but I don't think it will actually make it.
I mentioned that I like the idea of the deck far more than the reality, and nothing in the past week has changed my mind. When everything lines up correctly, the deck is beautiful. An opening curve of revealed Chancellor into Esper Sentinel and Thalia, Guardian of Thraben is crushing agianst Murktide. Having Chancellor to pitch to Shoal targeting Murktide Regent to close out the game is just gravy. The problem is that for each time things line up like that, there are three where Chancellor is drawn late, Shoal is worthless, and the deck is too anemic to compete. Which has been many streamers' experience too.
Consequently, I don't see a long future for this particular deck. However, there's definitely something to it, and a slightly different take could make the deck stick. I'm tooling around with a version that cuts the situational Shoals for more ways to discard Chancellor for value. It's definitely not good, but there's potential, so keep an eye on Humans. They always seem to sneak back into viability.
Dam Repaired
Underworld Breach was the Card of the Month in January. It was winning everywhere, and looked to be taking over Modern. That didn't happen in February. Jeskai Value Breach was a Tier 2 deck and no other version made the list. I recorded multiple version in the data, but only Value hit the threshold. Considering that I said that the upward trend we saw would continue, what went wrong?
The first thing to remember is that it's impossible to know when or if the sheen on The Shiny New Thing will tarnish. Every time some new exciting take on an existing deck comes out, there's a rush to adopt it followed by a crash. Players realize that either they don't like the different play style, or that it requires different skills than they expected, and interest wanes.
There's also the normal resistance of "isn't this just X, but worse?" That stigma isn't always justified, but it certainly dampens any momentum the deck was building. This certainly played a role as I saw numerous takes on Twitter saying that Breach decks are just Murktide, but worse.
There's also the fact that once opponents understood what was going on, the Breach decks became easier to beat than expected. It doesn't appear to me that there's more graveyard hate seeing play, despite my entreaties to the contrary. Instead, players have gotten smarter about employing their hate. They're also playing to minimize the impact of the Breach. Thus, the deck fell off. I expect Value Breach to remain in the mix, but it's up in the air for other versions.
About the Non-Banning
All that said, the really big development is that on Monday, Legacy saw a significant ban and Modern didn't. This isn't entirely surprising, as Wizards is often resistant to bannings unless forced. What's really got a bee in my bonnet (as evidenced by what I said on Wednesday) is that Wizards says that Murktide's lead on the other decks isn't large enough to warrant action. Given all the evidence I have, I can't fathom how they could genuinely believe that statement. However, they obviously do enough to push the line, and this has metagame and financial implications.
Paper is another matter, and I won't be considering it here. To the best of my knowledge, Wizards doesn't make events report decks to them. Thus, they'd only know what individual organizers choose to make public, just like me. Wizards does organize events and often requires decklists, so they can know about those events, but no others. Therefore, if they know more about the paper metagame than me, it isn't much more.
The Statistical Issue
I don't have all the data that Daybreak and therefore Wizards has about the Magic Online (MTGO) metagame. I can only work with the publicly available data on the winning decks from Premier events. They have access exactly what decks enter every event and how they perform from all the Premier events and Leagues. They can know exactly what is actually going on, while I can only guess, and therefore they could be right that outside of the top of Premier events Murktide doesn't show up that much.
However, for that to be the case requires the data to reflect something that seems statistically unlikely. The primary issue is that as the data set increases, the threshold for statistical significance shrinks as a percentage of the population. With a data set of 100 results, the threshold for statistical significance is about 20 negative responses, or 20% deviation. As the set population rises, the needed percentage falls.
Follow the Numbers
The data I have available puts Murktide over Rakdos Scam on MTGO by 6.85%. Given the population of 876 decks, this is a statistically significant deviation, enough to designate Murktide as an outlier above and outlier. For this not to be the case in the totality of the data requires that Murktide shows up at a lower percentage outside of Premier event results. This would mean that players aren't testing out their Murktide lists in Leagues and losing players aren't playing Murktide in the Premier events. Both circumstances are possible, but do seem unlikely.
It then requires that this drop off shrinks the gap by a significant amount. To shrink the gap requires that Murktide shows up in the overall data at a rate lower than 15.87%. In fact, it would need to be at a rate lower than Scam's 9.02% to actually close the gap between them. Even if that happened, the two decks would still be statistical outliers over Hammer Time. All these things are possible, but for it all to happen together seems unlikely and indeed implausible. Thus, I think Wizards is obfuscating.
Monkey on Our Back
Why would Wizards mislead us on Murktide? Every corporation has an incentive to deceive customers for financial gain, but there's a known financial reason for Wizards to avoid taking action. Specifically, Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer is being reprinted on March of the Machines' bonus sheet. He was, in fact, used as part of the announcement of said bonus sheet. The minute I saw that, I knew that there'd be no Modern ban anytime soon. Wizards isn't going to ban Ragavan if it might impact them selling MOM packs. They're just not, especially when the only format to (realistically) play him in is Modern.
Honestly, if Wizards had left it at that, I I'd be fine. They're not going to ban something they're reprinting before it's out, the company has to make money. I get it and can accept that reality. However, once you start saying that there's no need for action based on something that contradicts the visible evidence, I have a problem. That feels like deliberate misdirection and deflection, and I take it as an insult to player intelligence.
Stability Ahead
Thus, given Modern's resistance to organic change over the past year and Wizards being unwilling to ban anything until sometime after MOM, it is safe to assume that Modern will continue to remain as it is for the foreseeable future. Murktide will continue to dominate Modern alongside Scam, Hammer, and Creativity. Therefore, players need to adapt and prepare accordingly.
On the financial side, Ragavan getting reprinted is an opportunity. This is likely to be a Tarmogoyf situation, and the increased supply will stimulate additional demand. I don't know how much of an increase to expect, but if players pull a Ragavan, they'll want to build a deck around him. Therefore, there should be brisk business in the rest of the cards for Murktide, Breach, and other Ragavan decks on the horizon. I'd start building inventory with that in mind.
What Will Be
Modern is in a highly stable period, and unless there's something truly impressive in MOM, it will remain so. The currently viable decks have proven resilient to disruption. We all need to settle in and wait.
