With a few weeks of online events and an SCG Team Event, the metagame is finally taking shape. It’s nowhere near enough for any real analysis to take place, but it is a good starting point. With SCG Indianapolis in the books it’s time to start pulling apart the data and contextualizing it. Modern has […]

Alright Monday, what you got this time? Wow. They actually banned something for once. And something very significant at that. Even better, there’s an in-depth explanation attached. This certainly demands a deeper dive. I’ll start with the obvious part: nothing got unbanned. I’m sorry for those who have their hearts set on playing with Stoneforge […]

Finally, it’s time for everyone’s favorite part of the banlist test: the experimental data. After playing 500 matches with GB Elves over several months, I can finally put some data to the speculation about the impact of unbanning Green Sun’s Zenith. I will be revealing the hard numbers and their statistical significance. As always, these […]

It’s finally time for another banlist testing report. Back in May, readers chose Green Sun’s Zenith as the next banned card to test, which I’ll just call GSZ from here on out. I’ve spent the intervening months grinding games and recording results to test its effect on Modern. This week, I’ll explain my test procedure, […]

There’s an old saw in Standard: play the best deck with the best cards. Standard is about the cardpool’s restrictions and the disparities in card power. Therefore, it makes sense to only play the most powerful cards, or to play as many as can work together. Modern’s far greater size means there are far more options […]

Oftentimes, new mechanics are set aside, to be discussed only in terms of their impact on cards. Today, I am going to flip the script and go into detail about surveil. This mechanic is the most interesting part of Guilds of Ravnica to me, and while it may not happen immediately, I expect that it will […]

After a week off, it’s time to get back on the grind. While there were PPTQ’s last week, they were well outside my willingness to travel. I instead used that time to refine my decks and  get a feel for where the metagame was going. I intended to hit both Modern PPTQ’s this weekend, but […]

The Modern PPTQ season starts this weekend for me. Just like last year, I will be documenting my grind for the RPTQ invite, with all the lessons learned and deck tweaks that entails. Hopefully this edition doesn’t go the whole season, but that’s Magic. In this kick-off article, I will be examining the metagame with an […]

Alright, time for the big reveal. With comment section chatter over possible unbannings increasing, it’s time for the hard data to make its own argument. I had less fun with this test than with previous efforts, mostly because I have a long and difficult history with Bloodbraid Elf. That said, the testing was comparatively easy […]

It has come to this. Time to start rolling out the results of the latest banned card test. Conducting this test has been weird for me. Having a hard deadline was actually a blessing as it helped discipline the testing period and we got done much faster than expected. However, this wasn’t a fun experience […]

Welcome back for the December metagame update. This month saw two large-scale Grand Prix delineate an extremely diverse metagame. Perhaps it’s just my own personal bias, but I believe Modern is in a great spot right now—healthy, diverse, with interactive games and relevant decisions in deckbuilding and sideboard construction. This is the “metagame to beat” as […]

Well, it’s been a long time since I’ve written the full metagame update, but you folks haven’t gotten rid of me that easily. Know that our plans here at Nexus have always been to resume these and make them regular, but in a way that was sustainable moving forward. Rather than make speculative promises I […]

Once again, it’s time to update my paper metagame table! Magic’s had a busy weekend—between the SCG Invitational and the World Magic Cup, it was easy to miss the Roanoke Open. Which feels very odd to say, considering how popular and pervasive Opens are, but it’s the truth. Not that it matters; the data it […]