Actual comments from my previous article, “A Defense of the Splinter Twin Ban:” “As someone who has played around extensively with a variety of URx decks, I can tell you that in the past four years or so, Twin is the only one I’ve found viable not because the Twin package is so enticing, but […]
Jordan Boisvert
Jordan is Assistant Director of Content at Quiet Speculation and a longtime contributor to Modern Nexus. Best known for his innovations in Temur Delver and Colorless Eldrazi, Jordan favors highly reversible aggro-control decks and is always striving to embrace his biases when playing or brewing.
My Saturday morning kicks off a lot like yours. I roll out of bed, throw on some Future, have a latte. Get on Facebook. Then, my inbox starts exploding. “Is Modern dead?” “How do you feel about the ban?” Dead? What ban? Wait, there are links. Links from Magic players I’ve never met. The same link, […]
Most Magic players identify with a certain strategy. Some people like goldfishing complicated combos. Others enjoy dropping three Lava Spikes on an opponent under ten life. I prefer attacking with efficient creatures while deploying disruption, and manipulating my library to find what I need. Decks that give me this experience are generally blue, green, and red. […]
The Oath of the Gatewatch spoilers are upon us, and it seems like every other day Wizards reveals a Modern hopeful. Battle for Zendikar, Oath’s universally panned predecessor, is even making waves in the format as Bx Eldrazi Processors continues to pick up steam. New decks don’t always come from new cards, though. Modern’s vast card pool […]
Friday, I began chronicling a Mana Deprived Super Series 3K tournament in Montreal. I piloted Monkey Grow to a 6-2 finish. This article concludes the report and gives some closing thoughts on the deck. We ended Chapter 1 on a high note, following an embarrassing loss to Grixis Twin with a triumphant victory over Abzan Midrange. That match ended […]
Between bouts of jamming Traditional Yu-Gi-Oh! and maniacally sleeving up unplayable cards like Desperate Ritual and Peppersmoke, I haven’t played much competitive Modern lately. In my eyes, participating in two small local tournaments a week doesn’t count, and the last “real” Modern event I played in was a WMCQ in Toronto. As more local gamers started asking me if […]
I once lamented the long waiting periods between metagame shifts. Innovation takes time, I thought. Eye-catching technology doesn’t ceaselessly flow from premier events. Except, it seems, in Modern. UBx Faeries has always seen some amount of play among the tribe’s dedicated fanbase, but nothing could have prepared the Modern community for Anthony Huynh’s shocking 13th-place finish at GP Pittsburgh. Faeries has historically sucked in Modern, but Huynh […]
Two weeks ago, a Christ Kallas article from The Meadery showed up in my newsfeed. “The Complete(ly Serious) Guide to Pre, Post, and Mid Game Social Interactions” lampoons awkward interactions between players by blowing negative stereotypes out of proportion. The article had me laughing out loud, and not because its jokes are funny – they aren’t – but because the “exaggerated” depictions […]
A few weeks ago, I brought up Ryuuta Igarashi’s GR Aggro deck, which grew prodigious Tarmogoyfs and powered out Blood Moon with Pyretic Ritual. The combination of Moon and Goyf so intoxicated me that I built GRx Moon decks all last winter, and had some success with them last summer. When I designed Abzan Moon, I figured I’d optimized the strategy […]
With the tournaments now over for more than a week, I’m doing the last of my lazy Gerry Thompson impressions before everyone forgets about SCG States altogether. (Really) old rogue strategies like Blue Moon and Eternal Command saw some success at States, but I’m primarily interested in the tournament’s brand-new midrange decks. I’ve divided the decks in this article into two categories: […]
When I began paging through the results from StarCityGames’s State Championships, I didn’t expect much in the way of innovation. After all, Modern players are terrified of brewing, or at least of brewing diligently enough to perfect a recipe (Hoogland and Chapin are notable exceptions to this rule). So I was pleasantly surprised to find a host of novel […]
They key to brewing successfully is to work with cards you love. My enduring fascination with Tarmogoyf and Blood Moon led me to develop a strategy that gets the most out of both cards. Last week, we saw the birth of TURBOGOYF and the deck’s first draft. This article tracks the deck’s development, which culminates in a build with Siege […]
My love affair with Tarmogoyf began while I wasn’t playing Magic at all. But “you never really quit,” and as winter ebbed in 2009, I found myself pouring over Legacy decklists to see how the game had changed since I’d begun my hiatus triggered by Kamigawa block (specifically Umezawa’s Jitte) leaving Standard. Anyone who played a […]
