Are you a Quiet Speculation member?
If not, now is a perfect time to join up! Our powerful tools, breaking-news analysis, and exclusive Discord channel will make sure you stay up to date and ahead of the curve.
As more cards as spoiled from Eternal Masters we are seeing even more cards that have never previously been printed in foil. In fact, it has now been stated as an official consideration for inclusion in the set.
It may just be coincidence, but the cards featured above, Pyroblast and Hydroblast, are also commons with low supply on
From the perspective of the paper game, a high number of never released foils would certainly increase the expected value of a box, though it's unclear at this point by what margin. I still don't like the idea of purchasing sealed product for inflated prices, though this is a data point that in favor of doing so. Foil Pyroblastss will certainly be sought after by Legacy and Vintage players, and are a dramatic upgrade from the Ice Age printing.
My plan would still be to invest in particular single cards from the set, with a good percentage of the budget going towards these new foils. A couple weeks after the product release will presumably be the best time to move in on these.
Let's take this a level deeper. As many tiering critics object, popularity and performance probably don't have a causal relationship (although there's definitely a correlation). This makes it hard to translate Day 2 standings, or even Top 8 standings, into a performance metric: maybe a deck just shows up in the Top 8 because it had the most pilots. Conversion rates are an effective way to separate a deck's actual strength from how many players are running it. By seeing what percentage of Day 2 decks actually made it to Top 32/16/8, we get a better sense of deck's relative performance, not just how many of them bullied their way to the top through sheer numbers.
After Jund and Affinity, many of the other Tier 1 decks fell right in the same viability bracket with very close conversion scores. This includes Scapeshift (at the top with 1.7), Infect, Jeskai Control, and Abzan Company (at the bottom with 1.4). Although these decks didn't perform quite as admirably as Jund and Affinity, they put up strong numbers all weekend and should still be considered major Tier 1 players. Note Abzan Company's solid but relatively unremarkable performance, another area where measured heads prevailed over unfounded hype.
RG Tron is a weird case. On the one hand, 
There's a widespread myth in my online and paper Modern circles that the BGx kingpin is poorly positioned in open metagames. Underlying this argument is a history of post-Deathrite Shaman Jund never winning a Grand Prix, its weaknesses to rising ramp stars like RG Tron and Eldrazi, and its reliance on perfect sideboard structure to target a metagame. Even selecting the wrong flex cards (e.g. Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet vs. Huntmaster of the Fells) can be disastrous.
Looking at our earlier conversion score table, we also see Jund had by far the best overall ranking. At 3 points, Jund sits a few notches above silver-medalist Affinity (2.6) and almost doubles the score of the runner-ups (Scapeshift's 1.7, Infect's 1.6, and Merfolk's and Jeskai Control's 1.5). This suggests Jund was almost twice as viable as these other decks at the Grand Prix. Further cementing its status, Jund was already the most played Modern deck going into the Grand Prix at 8.7%, and it has only gained ground since then. As of today, Bob and Goyf have secured a 9.2% metagame share as compared to second-place RG Tron at 6.5%.
Other than betting against Affinity in the first place, my major error was in misevaluating pre-Grand Prix data. In the leadup to May 21, Affinity was objectively struggling, occupying a measly 4.6% of the format the Wednesday before Los Angeles and Charlotte. Making matters worse, this represented a -1.2% dip from 
Many look to Games 2 and 3 for Affinity's Achilles Heel, but these hopes can be misplaced. As we saw all weekend, hyper-consistent Affinity can persevere through all but the most oppressive combination of targeted hate (Stony Silence) and general interaction (Bolts and Electrolyzes). Opponent missed their Silence or Grudge draw? Affinity surely didn't miss its lighting fast start, and it has two games to capitalize on a failure to find sideboard bullets. It gets even worse when players shave anti-artifact answers to begin with, whether because they misread the metagame or they traded Terminates for Dreadbores to prepare for Nahiri.
There were two Jeskai hype-trains heading into Grand Prix Weekend, and Nahiri, the Harbinger was conducting both. The first was the more critical and measured hype-train I sold both 
Zooming out from the Grand Prix, Jeskai is riding a promising pre-trend from 3.8% in the April update to 4.5% before the Grand Prix. It's up to 4.8% today. Given how recently Nahiri burst onto the competitive scene (
We won't get more Modern Grand Prix until late August, but we have plenty of metagame information to digest until then. We also get to revel in Eternal Masters previews before playing the pack lottery for 
On a frankly petty note, I would especially like to thank Simon for not playing Harbinger of the Tides. It's nice to be vindicated.
joined by Grixis Control. I am not particularly surprised by this. In a format as wide as Modern and as open as a GP, control suffers from having to focus on too much and spreading itself too thin, which make Corey Burkhart's Top 8 very impressive. His deck was also the only one from either GP to use an unbanned card in Ancestral Vision, which I also don't think is a surprise. 
surprised that Andreas Ganz won the tournament. I'm surprised because during the Swiss, counterspells, targeted discard backed by a fast clock, Meddling Mage, and fast aggro are all hard for Ad Naus to beat (Merfolk is very good against it for those reasons).
Pact of Negation neatly answers counters the turn Ad Naus goes off. Robert Graves' Eidolon of Rhetoric was the best card against Ad Naus present in the Top 8, but he didn't see the card in games two or three (assuming he boarded it in at all) so it makes sense that Ganz just did his thing unimpeded. Maybe if he had hit Death's Shadow or a Jund deck things would have been different, but given the brackets that was unlikely to happen (though the lack of coverage makes that hard to accurately evaluate). Ganz had go through plenty of aggro and Jund to get there in the first place so he presumably knew how to beat them.
I'm also impressed by Eli Kassis' Coralknight list, even if Wizards has given it a far less evocative name. I've been testing Coralknight myself and it always felt like a worse version of Abzan Company since you couldn't find the combo with Collected Company. Eli appears to have made up for this with Courser of Kruphix and Westvale Abbey, the former enabling him to get lands out of the way and the latter letting him use all the Collected Company fodder and mana dorks when he can't win the aggro or value game. It's a solid deck and I'm impressed by the result. Keep an eye on this one, it might turn out to be what brewers have been looking for.
You've probably noticed that I included a number of qualifiers about that combo with Emrakul. There is absolutely no guarantee that the ultimate will win you the game, and I don't just mean combo decks using suspended Lotus Blooms to get around the annihilator trigger. Against sprawling boards and decks that don't damage themselves, a single Emrakul attack will not win the game nor will it turn around a losing position. It's also possible to prevent Emrakul from doing anything thanks to Cryptic Command or Hallowed Moonlight. I never thought a single Emrakul hit was good enough, and if that's how you want to win a game there are much better ways of going about it.
The final issue I have with the Nahiri "combo" is answerability. When you resolve a Baneslayer Angel and your opponent kills it, that's not so bad as long as you have another in your deck that will require another answer. With Nahiri, that works against cards like Celestial Purge and Dreadbore (which actually was played last weekend), but there are other cards that answer the entirety of the combo with a single card.
Nahiri herself isn't that bad and could definitely continue to see play in a more traditional role. The first two abilities are very reasonable and the utility is enough to justify the investment. It isn't impossible that going deep and playing madness cards with her is a viable option. What she should be used for is a value engine that, when circumstances allow, can tutor for whatever win condition you're already running. I've seen Mardu lists that use her to tutor for Grave Titan and that seems like the actual optimal use for her ultimate. Make two zombies, attack for six and two more zombies, replay the Titan next turn for more? That I can get behind!
This results in an extremely high-variance build. You either get ahead and are great at staying ahead, or you fall behind and stay there.
Lingering Souls is literally Delver's worst matchup. It always has been, and I sure hope they never print anything better. Basically, this matchup boils down to whether you can get in early pressure and whether they draw stuff you can interact with easily, or specifically Lingering Souls.
This is why we Delver. Early pressure and hopefully tagging a clutch Sylvan Scrying with Spell Snare is how you win game one. Then in sideboard games you bring in the Spell Pierces to try to cheese Expedition Maps, and Countersqualls to force them to actually get you with one of their creatures.
This was a camera match against Jacob Baugh, which can be viewed 
Pillar of Flame demonstrated why you would want a one-mana removal spell in that slot as it showed up right on time, and I managed to steal game one.
Tragically, the sideboard leaves something to be desired as well, as Nahiri, the Harbinger and Celestial Colonnade demand very different answers. I ended up leaving one Terminate in post-board specifically for Colonnade, and had I drawn it I may have won that game, though multiple copies would have been poor and I ended up coming up short.
When I found out that Phyrexian Crusader was waiting for me in the quarterfinals, I wasn't exactly thrilled.
