I see players agonize a lot about what deck they're supposed to be playing in Modern. I get asked questions pertaining to what's good in Modern at the moment, though when it comes to the deck registration sheet, the biggest mistake you can make is not being familiar with the strategy you're bringing to the tournament. Perhaps Death's Shadow or Infect will have better percentages against a given set of pairings, but if the only deck you know is Jeskai Control audibling could be disastrous. Ultimately, experience is going to matter more than proper metagaming.

Several years ago I used to play a lot of Legacy. I knew Temur Delver inside and out, and I was a good judge of what quality technical play in Legacy looked like. Back then, Legacy was referred to as wide open, but for the most part a good pilot with a Brainstorm deck was a solid bet against an unknown opponent. People would tell me time and again after I smashed them how good their deck was against mine, and unless they were jamming a fistful of basic Plains and Aether Vial, they were always wrong. I was intimately familiar with my deck and role in any given matchup, and these players were used to preying on inexperienced Brainstorm pilots, and/or had plans that worked in theory but couldn't actually stand up to Force of Will and Daze.

This is more or less my experience with the Modern format, but with the Brainstorm decks replaced with any coherent Modern strategy. Modern rarely has a best deck, but if you show up to a tournament knowing your position in every matchup while playing a functional deck you'll be just fine. In an abstract sense, Eli Kassis's Retreat to Coralhelm combo deck looks confused and kind of clunky relative to other Modern decks, but he puts up results likely because he understands his role in a given matchup far better than the average opponent.

The major similarity that's really pronounced between Legacy and Modern is that, for the most part, your average opponent is just playing the deck they have access to. Whether it's because of monetary restrictions, or idiots like me who insist on jamming one-mana 1/1s in every tournament, the majority of your opponents aren't making serious metagame adaptations to their deck. You'll play against Burn people, Affinity people, Merfolk people, RW Prison people... Just a swath of decks that may or may not be best positioned going into the weekend---but that's what these people came to jam with. The more heavily you metagame, the more this behavior will punish you. You can shave your Leyline of Sanctity from your sideboard because Burn isn't in a great position on a given week, but don't complain too much when you lose to it. Or 8-Rack. Realistically, you just want to prepare for the most possible things and make concessions that are generally consistent.

I heard a high-profile player say this week that he was very lost in Modern as of now. Do you know what you're supposed to be doing in Modern right now? The same thing we do every night, Pinky. Playing an abstractly good 75 that we are familiar with and hoping to get lucky.

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Metagaming Too Hard

A very telling example of the danger of over-metagaming in Modern comes from Eldrazi Winter. Many players identified that Painter's Servant did a great job of hosing Eldrazi, though the problem was that the card was otherwise unplayable. There realistically wasn't a deck that wanted it. My friend and fellow Minnesotan Eric Hawkins sleeved the card up for the SCG Louisville Open with a spicy brew:

Eric felt that his Eldrazi matchup was very positive, which I believe to be true. What he learned that weekend, however, was what happens when you don't get paired against the dominant deck every round: you miss Day 2. Some players on this deck faced the bracket they were looking for, though even when the format has a noteworthy boogeyman there is still significant diversity. The mistake Eric made was that his metagame choice involved playing cards that aren't implicitly powerful. Teysa and Painter's Servant just don't cut it in Modern, and the format is too powerful to water your deck down to try to carve out a metagame position.

Along these lines, when you're trying to prepare for a Modern event, it's a huge mistake to put too much stock in last week's results. If you comb over results from this year's events, you'll come across the Milwaukee Open in late April. This event saw three Abzan Company decks in the Top 8 with one of them winning the whole thing. There was concern then that we might have had a new boogeyman on our hands. A mere two weeks later in Indianapolis we saw a Day 2 breakdown that didn't feature a single copy of the deck. Decks overperform from time to time for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it's simply the fact that the best players decided to sleeve up the deck that week, and sometimes it's just variance. There was a stretch where Temur Delver was just a better deck than Jeskai Delver in Legacy but Jeskai was putting up better results. This was partly because Stoneforge Mystic afforded more free wins than Stifle, but partly because better players were piloting that deck on average. Knowing what happened matters significantly less than knowing why it happened.

Expertise vs. Breadth

Modern has enough viable options that there should be at least one deck that fits your playstyle. For most players, this is their primary deck. Some players branch out by choosing to play what they believe to be well positioned, but when it comes to picking up additional Modern decks, what I recommend is actually immersing yourself in the format from the perspective of that deck. It's not just about beating Jund and Bant Eldrazi. You need to have a plan for Bogles, Lantern Control, Tron, and everything in between. Modern is so wide that any testing done with a specific event in mind will likely not be enough on its own to prepare you for that event. Modern rewards depth of knowledge far more than it rewards breadth. I would be much more confident in the tournament performance of a player who knew one or two decks inside out than that of a player who could pilot five or more decks competently.

I have a friend who pilots Affinity very well. A big tell for a Modern player being great at their deck is that they have a clear plan for sideboard hate and bad matchups. There are some things you can't do anything about though, and my friend will talk at length about how Ancient Grudge and Stony Silence aren't wholly beatable. His weakness is that while he can identify weekends when Affinity isn't a great choice, he doesn't have a second deck that he can play at nearly the same level.

Something that I noticed when speaking to him is that he talks about the decks he's trying to learn very differently than how he talks about Affinity. When I mention a tough matchup or sideboard hoser for Affinity he can speak at length about how to face the problem, though when he tries to pick up a different deck he will often have negative thoughts on the deck very early on. I will certainly grant that some Modern decks are more playable than others, though the difference in speech patterns suggests that he cares more about winning with Affinity than figuring out how to solve the problems with other decks. I do think that emotional investment is important for competitive success, so if he's not feeling these decks it makes sense to put them down. But I think he's largely just looking to stumble across a perfect deck that allows him to be optimistically dismissive of the deck's potential problems.

I strongly believe that if you show up to a Modern tournament with a written sideboard guide you'll need to frequently reference during the event, you have low odds of succeeding. Modern rewards fundamental knowledge and experience. Sideboard guides can be helpful for studying and for obscure matchups, though if you show up with a sideboard full of Kor Firewalkers and you aren't even sure where you want them, you're going to be in serious trouble.

Play What You Know

It wasn't long ago that when people asked me what they should play in a particular Modern event that I would suggest Infect due to its resilience, high power level, and high degree of play. As of late, I've been answering the question by asking what they're most familiar with. Right now I think Dredge and Bant Eldrazi are asking new questions you'll need answers to that you didn't before. The most successful players will find these answers by adapting a deck they were already familiar with, not showing up cold to shoot an angle.

Modern rewards experience. Modern demonstrates nuance. If you show me two players, one with a backpack full of statistics and breakdowns of recent results, and one packing Noble Hierarchs with noticeable wear from riffle shuffling, I'm picking the latter to do better in the event every time.

Thanks for reading.

-Ryan Overturf
@RyanOverdrive on Twitter

If you want to do well in Modern you have to master your deck. Everyone who ever gives advice about improving in Modern says exactly that. There's no way around it---in the non-rotating formats you are much better off playing one deck every tournament. Higher deck diversity, power level, and complexity mean that raw play skill is insufficient to win. Players have to be experienced with their deck as well. The problem for many is that finding your Modern deck is hard. If you don't have a preferred playstyle it is even harder. Worse, some players don't enjoy sticking with one deck tournament after tournament. They like switching decks, either due to getting bored playing only one deck, or because they want to find an edge on the metagame.

I understand that sentiment and sympathize with their frustration. It's fun to explore and look for an opening nobody is exploiting. The problem is that Modern's speed and diversity make that extremely difficult. The latter means that whatever angle you're exploiting has, most likely, already been explored and exploited. This is one reason Lantern Control is so unique. The former limits the time you have to exploit that angle. It doesn't matter how open the format actually is to your deck if it cannot execute its gameplan before Infect kills you. This ruthless efficiency weeds out most attempts to game the system and innovate in Modern.

However, it is not impossible. The rise of Lantern Control last year proves that there are undiscovered decks in the Modern cardpool, just as Bedlam Reveler underscores the importance of innovation and adaptation. The problem is that most players have the wrong approach to metagaming in Modern.

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You're Doing It Wrong

The problem for most players is that when they think about metagaming they are thinking about Standard. That format rewards and even requires adaptation. It's just a kind of adaptation that doesn't translate over to other formats.

I believe from conversations with frustrated players that most players think of metagaming as being Brad Nelson during Theros-era Standard. The story, as I remember it, goes that Brad realized that the Standard metagame was built around the scry lands. This coupled with the power of Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx and devotion limited the number of decks possible in Standard. In turn it meant that while the metagame was dynamic, it was cyclical and predictable. By identifying where a given tournament would fall along that cycle, he was able to identify the best deck for a given week, and then build that deck to only include the good cards for that tournament and be sure he would see them. As a result he was an absolute win machine on the SCG Tour.

Naturally, players want to emulate that feat. The problem is that Theros Standard was as solved as any format can be, making that kind of metagaming easy. Modern and other Standards are orders of magnitude more complicated. Standard will shift weekly, and frequently in dramatic fashion, with certain decks being completely unviable one tournament and unbeatable the next. That rarely happens in Modern. Any deck is viable and likely present at a given tournament. This difference between expectations and reality are what fuel the frustration.

Lag Time Blues

The other problem is lag time. You used to hear about it constantly, though rarely by name, when we had PTQ seasons instead of PPTQs. It still happens, but you don't hear about it as much. Most writers don't talk much about the PPTQ grind so you only notice it when there are a string of SCG Opens and GPs running the same format over several weeks.

What do I mean by lag time? A dictionary definition says it's a period of time between two closely related actions. In Magic terms it's the time between when data is created and made available and then acted upon. I first noticed this as the Dredge Cycle in Extended, but it happens in every format during competition season.

What was the Dredge Cycle? During the first few weeks of the Extended PTQ season, Dredge was non-existent in the Top 8 results. The format was undefined and so players had to be ready for anything and packed their hate. After the first few PTQ's were posted, players would start to adapt to the information, changing their sideboards or decks from what was good against last year's decks to the decks they actually saw winning. As a result Dredge hate would start to disappear until there was a tipping point and suddenly Dredge won everything one week. The following week the hate would return and the cycle would continue.

Those who reacted to the incoming data were always behind the curve. But those who anticipated the cycle were always ready the week when Dredge came back and got free wins thanks to their preparation. The results that you saw posted described what happened the previous week, and the reaction that you have to those results is what is going to happen this week. If you want to be ahead of the curve, take advantage and actually metagame for the tournament, you had to react to the reaction. To appropriate a saying: to be ahead of the trend is to be on the trend. To be on the trend is to be behind the trend. To be behind the trend is fatal.

Beating the Cycle

In Extended, the smart metagamers were actually operating opposite to the Dredge Cycle. Anticipating Dredge players staying away from early tournaments when players were prepared for anything, they wouldn't play their Dredge hate. As the season wore on they started running hate as others took it out. I think of this in graphical terms.

Say the red line represents a given metagame trend. If you are trying to game the trend, you don't want to be anywhere close to the trend. Instead you want to be opposite of the trend. Using the Dredge Cycle example, when the format is at peak hate, you want to play no hate and use the extra sideboard slots to beat everyone else. This obviously takes a great deal of metagame knowledge and skill, but historically the rewards have been great when you succeeded. Of course, if you tried to fight the trend and got it wrong you'd be in for a very rough tournament.

The Modern Problem

The problem with Modern is that even if you overcome both the data and lag problems, and identify where the trend is heading, you still may be off. You see, despite what detractors may claim, the Modern metagame does shift and goes through dynamic cycles. It just does it slowly. Standard will rapidly cycle throughout its lifetime. It has to; its time is short especially with the new rotation schedule. The non-rotating formats are theoretically immortal and can take their time with their shifts.

The overall Modern metagame trend does look like the graph above, but only over the course of a year or more. Any individual month will only see a very small portion of the cycle, and as such it will look like a pretty flat line. If you still have your graphing calculator you can see this yourself by shrinking down the scale on a sine wave. At normal scale it looks just like the lines above. At reduced scales, even the steep parts of the curve will look pretty straight. Therefore it is easier to overshoot the trend in Modern by metagaming too hard. Your analysis of the trend may be correct, but players may not be moving as quickly as you anticipate and suddenly you're out of position and struggling to get a win.

Why does this happen? Part of it is competitive pressure; there are fewer Modern events in a year so there's less pressure to adapt and innovate. Part of it is the difficulty in changing decks due to the aforementioned need to master your deck and the expense involved in owning multiple decks. Part of it is power level. Standard's lower power means that there's more room to maneuver and reposition yourself compared to Modern's ruthless efficiency. Regardless of the why, the simple fact is that it is harder to game Modern than it is Standard.

How to Metagame in Modern

But it isn't impossible. We've seen plenty of instances of correctly gauging metagame trends in the past year, whether it was Todd Anderson's Infect run or the Lantern and Living End surges during Eldrazi Winter. Being successful at metagaming frequently comes down to knowing which answers will be present in what quantities at a given tournament, and that isn't always possible. I prefer a more subtle approach.

Flex Slot Adaptation

I've written about this method quite a bit though never by name. In my PPTQ report, I mention coming prepared to use Harbinger of the Tides instead of Spell Queller if the meta looked right. This is flex slot adaptation. Every Modern deck has an unchangeable core and then some flex slots. Most of the time the flex slots are used to close holes in the core, but you can also use them to subtly reposition yourself relative to the metagame.

Consider Affinity. Recently the trend has been to play Galvanic Blast as your non-artifact spell due to an open but aggressive metagame. Say instead you deduce or learn that the next tournament you go to will feature a higher concentration of combo decks and Jeskai control. That Galv Blast is not going to be very effective at that tournament. Instead you could cut your Blasts for Spell Pierce, which are bad in the overall meta but much better against the spell-based decks you expect to face. That's flex slot adaptation. Simple, straightforward, and effective.

How effective the method is depends on many factors, but I prefer it because it's safe. Flex slots are a tiny portion of a Modern deck, so the impact on an average game will be small. A deck's core should be powerful enough to give it legs against any deck, even if it isn't favored. Playing the wrong card in a flex slot hurts less than misbuilding the core of your deck. The percentage may be small, but it can be enough to boost you to a win. Of course, that's less metagaming than it is tuning. I'm usually okay with that, but more dedicated metagamers need something more.

The key is to recognize that you are hedging rather than truly shifting your win percentages. In my PPTQ example, I knew that the overall metagame would be very open and that I needed to be ready for decks from all over the spectrum. What I was looking for was a way to hedge against slight warps in the meta for that tournament. Contrast this with my Regionals preparation where I was more strongly prepared for aggressive decks. With this method, you're looking to get a small edge in a few games rather than setting yourself up against the meta.

Sideboard Biasing

A more visible method of gaming a tournament is to bias your sideboard against a certain deck or types of decks. You may know that more fair decks will be present than normal, which leads you to take out specialized answers for card draw to win the grind fest. Weird looking sideboards that leave you wondering, "How does <deck> beat <deck not sideboarded for>?" are frequently the result of this technique.

Using our Affinity example again, knowing what we do about the expected metagame might lead us to take out anti-creature cards from the sideboard in favor of more Thoughtseizes and Spellskites than normal. This makes the deck worse against the overall meta, but it will give us an edge against the expected meta. It doesn't matter how open you suddenly are to Jund or Burn if you never see them. If you guess right and have the right sideboard for what you face, it doesn't matter how "wrong" it is in reality.

This is also the problem. If you're wrong about the tournament meta, you will suffer, far more than with the previous method. Biasing your sideboard leaves you more open than normal to matchup variance, and sometimes that deck you didn't expect to see will be there. Maybe the pilot doesn't have anything else to play; maybe they know something you don't. Either way, you were wrong, you weren't prepared, and you lost.

The other problem I encounter is that players don't always go far enough with this method. Altering your sideboard is a fine thing, but if you really believe you've got the read and are willing to commit, why not go all the way? Combine your biased sideboard with adapted flex slots. Back to Affinity, changing the board is all well and good, but leaving Galv Blast maindeck is an admission that you could be wrong. If you are wrong then you shouldn't have done it in the first place and if you're right you gave away win percentage out of fear.

If you're hedging and leaving in cards "just in case," then do you really believe you have the right read? If you really don't then you shouldn't be metagaming in the first place. Fortune favors the bold---if you're going to game against the meta then game against the meta. No fear!

Play Another Deck

Finally, the rarest of successful Modern metagaming strategies: just play something else. I know that I said you need to master a deck to succeed in Modern. This isn't actually antithetical to that idea. You have to be like Todd Anderson, who normally played Twin decks but was also practiced and experienced enough with Infect to run it successfully when the meta called for it. I realize that this requires a lot of time and money to pull off, but if you do it will be rewarding.

To be most successful you need to have mastery of two very different decks. I recommend one fair and one unfair. You normally play one deck, but when the meta is more hostile to that deck you pull the other one out, evade the hostility and take advantage of the warped metagame. Is this easy? No. Is it effective? It can be.

Metagaming is hard, and it gets harder as cardpools expand and power rises. Trying to game a Modern tournament the same way as a Standard tournament is more likely to end in failure than success. However, there are ways to do it and learning when a method is appropriate will produce some extra wins. Do you have another method I didn't mention? Let me know in the comments and I'll see you next week!