Another SCG Regionals is in the books. I had to change that link, by the way—in some crazed stupor, I accidentally waded through the results of the Season One Regionals tournaments from February (yes, the ones I even placed in) and wrote a 3,000-word article about all the rogue decks at those tournaments, which I […]

The “Death’s Shadow is the best deck” narrative we saw emerge in force around Grand Prix Vancouver has now split, with some claiming Eldrazi Tron is in fact the best deck. I tend to agree with the former, and will softly make a case for that inclination in this article. Regardless, we can surely agree […]

Everyone is fixated on Grixis Shadow. And rightly so—the deck is very powerful and has been sitting at the top of every metagame chart since April. And I think this is incorrect. I have some reason to believe that Shadow is a symptom of the metagame, not the cause. The Modern PPTQ season starts at […]

Modern tournament decklists are flooding in to the point where the phrase “too much of a good thing” is starting to come to mind. Nah, who am I kidding. I love this stuff. I hope you do too, because today we’re going to dive right in. I plan on recapping and analyzing high-level Magic tournament […]

Tilt is quite a mighty thing. Re-reading my fevered scrawlings from last week proved deeply concerning. I knew I was unwell, but I didn’t know how unwell. While I’m better now, I may need to refocus before things get worse. Therefore, it’s time to torture myself by beginning another Banlist Test. In Moby Dick, Ishmael goes to sea […]

The line between genius and madness is indistinct. The line between epiphany and world-class tilting-off is blurry. I’m in something of a fugue, and uncertain of where I stand anymore. While I am personally certain of the veracity of my forthcoming statement describing the Modern metagame, my ability to perceive normal reality is compromised. I’ll […]

At last, the time has come to reveal the data about my Jace testing. As a reminder, these data come from 500 matches, well over 1000 individual games played over five months. I publish my methods so that you can replicate my experiment if you disagree with the results, but I have to warn you […]

Welcome back for another metagame update. I’m calling today’s the “February update,” even though it encompasses a week-and-a-half of March data as well. As we had extended last month’s data, it made sense to do so this month too in order to avoid a three-week metagame with scant data. The astute reader will notice that […]

No, this isn’t a finance article—I leave those to the geniuses over at Quiet Spec (and Jim Casale of course). What I want to talk about today are individual cards whose “gameplay stock” is trending up or down based on recent trends in the metagame: “what’s hot and what’s not,” if you will. We’ve done […]

I had pretty high hopes for Modern Masters 2017, but I’m not sure anyone had really expected what we got. This set is filled to the brim with value. There are some decks that definitely benefit a lot more from these reprints and some that got completely ignored. Unfortunately I think that is unavoidable in any set […]

Buckle up. The Star City Games Regional event decklists are here, and all of a sudden we have a ton of Modern results to sift through. Today’s goal is to speculate as little as possible—instead, I plan on taking an analytical, systematic look at the data we have available, to provide a framework upon which […]

On January 9th, Wizards of the Coast brought the heavy weight of the banhammer down upon Modern, attempting to target several linear decks that ranked among the best-performing archetypes during 2016. On the one hand we had the aggressive, explosive creature combos with a gotcha! element, headlined by Infect. On the other hand we had Dredge, taxing […]

For the first time this year, welcome to The Beginner’s Guide! For those new to this series, I am trying to simplify Modern to make it more approachable and comprehensible for those players new to the format. Previously I’ve covered sideboarding strategies, deck diversity, and an in-depth look at the aggressive strategies. Today, it’s time […]