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Copying Time Walk has taken over Standard, and it seems to have emerged as a possibility in Pioneer as well.
I’ve written a couple of articles on here about Izzet Phoenix. Since then I've been slowly tuning the deck, and Temporal Trespass has really caught my eye. One issue the deck had was an inability to convert cards into winning the game. You could easily draw your entire deck, but turning the cards into something meaningful was a difficulty.
Converting Card Advantage Into a Win
There are a few ways to convert those cards into an advantage. Jace, Wielder of Mysteries can give you a combo-esque finish. Some enjoy combining Crackling Drake with a Kazuul's Fury // Kazuul's Cliffs or Maximize Velocity. However, these permanent-based win conditions are easier to interact with via a counter or removal spell and can't be found off Pieces of the Puzzle.
The beauty of the Fork is in its compactness and elusive nature. The Fork finish exists more on the stack than the other two, requiring the opponent to have a counterspell for each Time Walk presented.
Potential Drawbacks
This sounds great, but there’s no such thing as a free lunch. “You can easily draw plenty of cards,” I said to myself... Well, this was true in part thanks to Treasure Cruise. Trimming some Cruises to fit Temporal Trespass means you might lose games you would otherwise win if you don’t have enough mana to get to the Trespass. A nice Cruise, on the other hand, could fill up your hand and help power out your Arclight Phoenix or Thing in the Ice // Awoken Horror. Thankfully, you are so good at filtering through your deck, so you can go to as low as even one Temporal Trespass and still be able to consistently use it as a finisher.
Despite the doom and gloom above, I think adding the Time Walk to the deck should improve the deck a lot. The ability to end the game has been a serious issue that this neatly solves. The question then will be how to split the number of Cruises/Time Walks/Forks in the list. Intuitively, two Cruises to one Temporal Trespass makes sense to me as a starting point. The Time Walk will be better later in the game but can cause you to stumble if you draw it in the early stages.
Additional Notes
The idea here is to have more ways to take advantage of taking extra turns/not have control decks run you out of threats as easily. Den of the Bugbear is a lot cheaper to activate, but I am gonna start by trying the blue land as Spikefield Hazard // Spikefield Cave already gives so many red sources. I am very unsure if this will end up causing more harm than good, especially as many control decks have access to Field of Ruin, but it definitely seems worth trying.
The copies this makes won’t count as “cast” triggers towards your Thing in the Ice/Arclight Phoenix, but copying a cheap cantrip will help you keep chaining spells.
I wanted to try this over Entrancing Melody as a way to deal with creatures that the burn spells can’t deal with. It seemed particularly interesting to side in against the mirror as an extra way to interact with their creatures. Melody can steal a Thing in the Ice but it’s a bit more vulnerable to Mystical Dispute and doesn’t work as well VS Arclight Phoenix.
Closing Thoughts
All in all, I am very excited to try this out. While I expect some awkwardness from time to time with the forks and time walks potentially causing you to stumble in the early game, I definitely think it's worth trying. I haven't seen such a compact win condition in the Phoenix deck that can be activated in the mid-game à la Splinter Twin style, as opposed to having to draw your entire deck to win via a Thassa's Oracle type.
sometimes it's happened due to a very open metagame producing lots of unique decks. September and July were the former, August and October are the latter. And if it weren't for some late rogue decks making the list, October would have broken the streak. We'll see what November brings.
I'm a bit incredulous, but for the 
And that's worked well for the past year. However, there's been a shift in deck composition. A new 
On that note, UW (frequently UW splashing Fire // Ice, but that's not a different archetype) is holding strong in the second position. And it's not merely acting as an also-ran but was a genuine threat to Hammer Time's position for most of October. As I mentioned 
But then something weird happened. Towards the end of the month, UW began falling off, and Hammer Time was able to pull away. Given UW's performance up until that point it didn't make much sense. This was coupled with a resurgence of UR Thresh, but I think that UW's drop off led to Thresh's comeback, not resulted from it. I've been looking for some explanation to why this happened on MTGO and I got nothing. It may be that pilots got bored or there was a subtle sideboard tweak that changed everything.
that consistently just squeaks into Top 32 the same weight as one that Top 8’s. Using a power ranking rewards good results and moves the winningest decks to the top of the pile and better reflects its metagame potential.
strength vs. popularity. Measuring deck strength is hard. There is no 
The highest placing high tier deck is 
that informed decision is only as good as the information that informs the decision. Information that is somehow lacking is very unlikely to produce a good final decision. That doesn't mean that poor information is useless or if data is thin guessing will produce better results. It does mean the less there is to go on, the more likely it is that an unknown variable will ruin everything. Less complete data provides a worse basis for decision-making than more complete data. And sometimes thin information is all that's available. In those cases it's better to use the data than not. However, it's critical to acknowledge the weakness and plan accordingly.
metagame does inform paper's metagame. As I've said, the MTGO data is the only data anyone has to work with. Thus it's everyone's starting point. Everything else is based on how they react to that metagame. If they do at all.
Level 0: What Do I Have? This is the most basic level where you're only thinking in terms of what you actually observe. In other words, what do you know based on the things you can control?
Consequently, you drew conclusions based on incorrect assumptions and ended up playing a game that only existed in your own head. As a result, you're highly likely to play around cards that aren't even in the opponent's deck. And they didn't have to do anything; you just out-thought yourself. Therein lies the great danger in leveled thinking.
wins the game based on the read we have on our opponent. Only to fail when that read was wrong. And often lose because the flashy play required giving up a board state that was otherwise winning. We've all leveled ourselves because at some point we weren't as smart as we thought. I'm not excluded.
The casuals are likely to be thinking about their deck selection on Level 0, which is what decks they actually have. The competitive players will be operating on at least Level 1, which is the known metagame. In other words, the more competitive players will be aware of the metagame data and making decisions from it. Whether they'll be operating on Level 2 or higher is impossible to say.
Modern has always been about maximum efficiency. It's a competitive Constructed Magic format. They're all like that. It's just a matter of degree. Standard can never hope to match Vintage's mana efficiency and velocity, but it can be as efficient as its cardpool allows. Modern was no exception, but it wasn't until recently that velocity was really possible. Ponder and Preordain were banned early on and Wizards just didn't print good one-mana cantrips. Thus, Modern players had to focus more on individual card impact than quantity of spells played to win the game. The cardpool also meant that more power was tied up in higher mana costs. Storm was always partially an exception (played more cantrips than anyone else, relied on four mana cards), but for the most part Modern was defined by
The first good non-Storm deck to bring the Legacy-style of gameplay to Modern was Death's Shadow. Both 
This rewriting of Modern's rules was hard to see because it only applied to one deck at a time. Whenever Phoenix or Prowess was good, Shadow wasn't, and vice versa. 2020's Companion Spring changed that. Having an extra card in hand was 
Of course, this is just one part of the metagame. There's a lot more going on throughout Modern than just Lurrus vs Expressive Iteration. However, this conflict is definitely at the forefront of most player's thinking and discussions. UW Control is performing very well on the basis of it being reworked to better deal with the Lurrus and Iteration decks. Burn is also making a resurgence thanks to the drop-off in rival Prowess decks driven by MH2 changes and the meta's evolution. It is telling that the latter still sometimes runs Lurrus even though Bauble is long gone.
However, the metagame has absorbed Ragavan and made it largely a non-issue. Yes, Ragavan can still run away with games in a way Modern hasn't seen since Deathrite Shaman. However, because that can only happen when Ragavan attacks and connects, it's far easier to manage. Every deck these days can block Ragavan on turn 2 and/or has multiple ways to remove it. As a result, Ragavan is quickly becoming just another threat in Modern. For proof of this, when Deathrite was legal in Modern and Legacy, it went into every deck, becoming basically ubiquitous. That isn't happening with Ragavan. Yes, the monkey does show up in 
Meanwhile, Jund Saga would revert to Jund shadow, a Lurrus deck without MH2. Without Lurrus, Jund would have an entirely different character, looking more like 2019 builds. Similarly, Hammer Time would straight up no longer be viable. It was around pre-Lurrus in almost the same form; there's no indication that it would survive without Lurrus. That's two of the best decks taken out.
