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It’s not often I feel as though I’ve been blind-sided by a ban announcement. Not since… well, okay, Mox Opal. But usually, I’m pretty good at predicting this stuff!
Surprise!
Let me explain my thoughts regarding these calls, since in hindsight they may seem unwise. A lot of people were not enjoying the new Modern, but I figured that Wizards focus would be centered more on the non-Modern formats, especially because a vocal part of the community was really enjoying Modern. We have had no major Modern tournaments since the banning of Mox Opal,
Oko, Thief of Crowns and Microsoft Lettuce. So really, what gives? Amulet Titan was most likely the best deck, but have you seen how Shaheen Soorani won North Carolina Regionals?
There’s tons of crazy nonsense going on in Modern right now, and lots of it doesn’t involve Once Upon a Time at all. The card is certainly too good, but right back to what I was saying on the QS Cast post-Opal ban, is it even close to the only card that is considerably better than the rest of the format? I think it would take a pretty narrow perspective of the Modern format to view OUAT as a singularly problematic piece, when it isn’t clear if it’s that much better than a lot of the other broken stuff going on there. Why Wizards did not err on the side of letting people play with their cards is beyond me.
Grinding Breach
As for Pioneer, I genuinely think the winrate they cited for UB Inverter must be skewed somehow. I’ve thought of the deck as being the best for a hot minute now, and I was shocked to see the low winrate. Looking over at Mox Insight’s math, it’s clear that this winrate is reflected in paper Magic as well. I think this is a two-part result of the format being grossly over-prepared for the boogymen in Inverter and Lotus Breach (while underprepared against Spirits, Control, and Mono White), and in pilot error. In the last week I saw a player miss a very clear line to lethal at a WNPQ. I’ll have to play more of it to find out; as I was hesitant to switch off of Lotus Breach before the ban announcement. I’m buying the entirety of Inverter from scratch today.
Honestly, I don’t think the Pioneer metagame is that bad, but I think snagging Dig Through Time really could have given the format some breathing room against these powerful blue strategies. I respect that Wizards is taking their time and handling Pioneer gently though, and we may still see Dig or other cards from the top of this format cut away relatively soon.
Not much to say about Legacy. Sure it’s a little early to be banning something, but I think a lot of people agree that the deck was making the format worse, and at the very least was kicking a few beloved mainstays out to the curb. Not sure if people still play Brawl or Historic, but I sure don’t!
Moving Forward From Here
I’ve already stated how I feel about Pioneer, what with me buying a deck tonight and all, but where do we go with Modern? Well, I basically own the entirety of Shaheen’s deck minus Grinding Station, so I suppose I’ll drop $40 there and sleeve it up. I haven’t started testing Modern yet, so I really don’t know where it’s going to go from here, but I think the financial feeling across both Modern and Pioneer from the community standpoint is one of fear.
Fear was holding the price on Inverter of Truth back at the $4 mark, and I honestly don’t see a reason that this won’t remain the same. It will likely start trending up if it continues to dominate the format, but I'm not expecting a crazy spike or anything. I think with the massive volume of bans over the last few years, coupled with relative economic unrest in the United States, fear is the name of the game in the Magic market these days. Most of my invested money in Magic is in Reserved List stuff and sealed product, and honestly, I want to get out of the reserved list anyway and get into something more stable, like Bitc- oh. Well, then, the stock- huh. The uh… I’ll invest in… uh…
Wrapping Up
Okay, I don’t have a good investment right now. Even WoW Classic gold has been inflating rapidly! Gold selling sites are slashing prices by about 5% every week or so! The U.S. economy is kind of a mess right now and this is above my paygrade… Maybe Ben Friedman knows the move? I'm not sure that this is a good time to be one of the middlemen of Magic finance; such as a speculator or investor. I'm going to buy cards to play with, and continue to build Joslyn's store up.
I could certainly be wrong though. I'm sure someone's making money here, I just don't see the line. Drop me a line with the latest hotness over on Twitter or hit me up if you need someone to tell you to sell! See ya next time gamers!
Those decks already didn't mind playing high-ceiling, high-floor games, and Once is 
Casting Once reduced the variety of opening turns to the point that games were looking too similar to each other. Again, Wizards has mentioned this as a reason to ban Preordain and Ponder, but those hits also came about due to other problems relating to Storm decks. All Once did was reduce variance, which apparently made games unacceptably stale.
instead, but that seems unlikely; if they weren't doing so before, I can't imagine they'd do so now. Always costing two mana and seeing one fewer card are significant power reductions.
For that reason, I predict that Jund and Ux Stoneblade will be the big winners of this banning. How big that win shall be is a different question. They're not directly affected by the ban, and have actually won events. Meanwhile, their ostensible big-mana predators did run Once, so will be somewhat nerfed, and haven't been winning events. Amulet stands at a crossroads, while Tron should recover nicely; it had access to tons of cantrips already, and had just shaved some numbers to run Once.
Stirrings is no replacement for Once. The latter finds creatures and lands, while Stirrings only finds lands and Amulet of Vigor. The one way Stirrings can help make the combo happen is by finding Tolaria West, which finds Summoner's Pact, when then finds the needed Dryad or Primeval Titan. To continue entirely unchanged, these decks will have to replace Once with Seek the Wilds, which again is far worse.
All of which begs the question, why now? And the answer: Uro! Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath is a lot like Oko, Thief of Crowns; the cards share a mana cost, and both slot effortlessly into most decks running UG. Strategically, each provides a standalone win condition while threatening to snowball value.
First up is 
Recalling the 
Then there's the even more reactive side of things. This build of 
This build of 
Nonblack midrange decks, without Thoughtseize and Inquisition of Kozilek, have always lacked effective turn-one plays. Using mana dorks exposes them in the removal-spell mirror; using filtering cantrips like Serum Visions still requires good guessing about an opponent's gameplan. Neither play disrupts opponents, which is what midrange decks need to do early in the game; as such, Temur for instance has always been dependent on opponents laying a one-drop they could Bolt. Arcum's Astrolabe flips the script as an extremely appealing turn-one play—it all but guarantees perfect mana for the rest of the game! It also jump-starts Ice-Fang Coatl, the next card present in all the above decks.
In the late-game, Uro has us covered. The Titan is a card-advantage engine while also being the most imposing body on the battlefield, making it perfect as a win-con—Uro is even useful along the way, drawing and developing the manabase from the hand.
Dryad of the Ilysian Grove
resolved Angel's Grace or Phyrexian Unlife, Ad Naus can cast Spoils of the Vault for a card not in their deck, then cast Oracle for the win. This was never possible with Laboratory Maniac. Part of this was due to costing more up front, but it was mostly because Maniac could be killed in response to the victorious card draw; if Oracle resolves, it wins on the spot.
left Breach out in the cold (in 
I knew that Heliod, Sun-Crowned would see play. It's a combo piece that can be found with Collected Company; why wouldn't that creature combo pile run it? Heliod joins Walking Ballista as an on-plan win condition. Company can even add in Spike Feeder in place of a Kitchen Finks for another combo. It's Company; the more combos, the merrier.
set up required to escape Ox meant that it would only ever be a midgame card. Thus, it could only help Dredge once the engine would either be established or the game was already lost, making it redundant there.
Klothys, God of Destiny got a look because graveyard hate is good in Modern, and hard-to-kill clocks are great against slower decks. I thought that it would be a decent card against Jund in decks that need sticky threats, and that the triggered ability would be the only draw.
I 
The gaping hole in my predictions was the Titans: Kroxa, Titan of Death's Hunger and Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath. I didn't mention them at all in my 
In fact, they are more than good enough. 
All that being said, I still don't think either Titan is as good as their hype suggests. The fundamental problem with Uro and Kroxa is that for them to actually be creatures, they have to escape. There's no work-around. Evoke is clearly the genesis of the Titans, and they're meant to work in a similar fashion. However, Mulldrifter can be rescued from being sacrificed with flicker effects; flickering a Titan kills it. Spell Queller an evoked creature, and the creature lives if recast. Quell an escaped Uro, and it dies with the Spirit.
Finally, I suspect that a lot of value for both cards comes from players not understanding how they work. I had a Legacy player gush to me about Uro winning him an otherwise lost match thanks to multiple escapes. Upon further questioning, it came out that the opponent had been destroying Uro with Pyroblast. They'd forgotten or simply didn't know that escaping Uro isn't like unearthing Hellspark Elemental. The former casts the card while the latter puts in directly into play. Had the opponent understood that and countered Uro rather than destroying it, they might have won the game rather than being grinded out.
very valuable, but more importantly, a 6/6 traded with everything on either side of the board. The final game came down to the Temur deck having slightly more threats than the Sultai deck. As far as I could tell, neither deck ran any graveyard hate.
Best of all, Inverter Oracle is exceedingly difficult to disrupt. Its components are creatures, which can't be stopped by Force of Negation or Stubborn Denial; they have enters-the-battlefield effects, which care little about efficient removal. Graveyard hate in fact bolsters the deck's strategy, and Extraction effects are no match for the deck's multiple interchangeable combo pieces or Talisman's ability to yank one out of exile. So the deck needs to just stay alive long enough to actually cast its cards, which I imagine is around five turns; in other words, many slower decks may struggle to actually beat it.
First up is 
benefits, most notably the ability to pop opposing artifacts that hold back the combo (such as Grafdigger's Cage, a card 
CHERRYXMAN whipped up 
The first thing I want to do is ask if anyone knows Michael Bischoff so they can ask about his deck. Right now SCG is listing Lightning Elemental in his 
There's also a lot of variation between the Titan decks, possibly explaining how they maneuvered through the tournament. While all five decks are running the same general core of Primeval Titan, Dryad of the Ilysian Grove, Sakura-Tribe Elder, Once Upon a Time, and Summoner's Pact, they're positioning themselves very differently. The 
When the metagame is being redefined, red decks are particularly strong thanks to their simplistic, concentrated approach. Everyone else is trying to figure out what they're doing and what they care about, and red decks just go for the face. As the metagame settles, the inefficiencies in other decks diminish, and the relative advantage of red's simple plan erodes. It's not that their power or positioning has weakened in absolute terms, but rather that other decks are catching up. Given its cheap price, I'd expect Prowess to remain a factor in Modern, but it will move out of the limelight and become one of the pack.
Urza's wall of text alone is enough to keep the deck top-tier remains to be seen, but it's making a compelling argument. Company's position also makes sense. It's a deck of many combos that plays a lot of tutors. In a linear format, it can find the right combo for the right situation. With players focused on Titan and Prowess, the spot removal that tears the deck apart isn't seeing enough play.
In a more general sense, what the Indianapolis SCG Classic results indicate is that the metagame has absorbed the recent shockwaves from the 
After Titan, the next target is Prowess. There are a lot of Kitchen Finks and Collective Brutalitys in this Classic. Neither are the 
pack in Top8 (and would be lower without Burn's help) where it's second elsewhere. Part of this is definitely Top8's aggregations, but more generally, it backs up the narrative that has emerged from the actual data I've worked with. Prowess and Amulet Titan are the presumptive best decks, but if they are at all it's not by that much. Modern is well on its way to adapting and normalizing both, and there's no indication of an unhealthy metagame.
Once Upon a Time
Does the strong presence of newer cards indicate that cantrips are experiencing a power creep, and getting stronger over time? Or that Modern decks ask different things of their cantrips than they used to, and that this transition is reflected by the current era of card design? I think we're looking at a combination of both factors, and will split up the list to discuss the types of cantrips we're dealing with, the decks they're featured in, and how they relate to one another.
2. Veil of Summer
Cantrips, Type B: Filtering/Thinning
Looking at the first group of cantrips, only Veil of Summer and Arcum's Astrolabe made the overall Top 5, with the next-most-played added-effect cantrip being Cryptic Command in 7th. I think that's because Veil and Astrolabe are dirt-cheap: they offer unique, relevant effects at an already affordable rate, and then throw a cantrip on top of that.
Which brings us to Type B, or filtering and deck-thinning cantrips. How crazy is it that Ancient Stirrings is nowhere to be seen? The card placed 1st in "
A Question of Faith
