You can’t play Modern without hearing about the “Bolt Test”. If a card or deck is soft to the format’s most efficient removal spell, then it might not be a good choice for Modern. The Bolt Test is a big reason otherwise decent creatures, like Figure of Destiny or Vampire Nighthawk, don’t really see Modern play. […]

8Rack is a reasonably strong Modern discard deck that straight up wrecks certain metas, and provides one of the few, good means of playing “hard” control in this format. However, it costs about $700. So maybe you can’t afford it, maybe you’re unsure if it’s your thing or not and just want to test the […]

Delver lives. As anyone who has been playing MTGO, following the results of SCG and TCG States events, or reading this site knows, the rumors of Delver’s death have been greatly exaggerated. Although the traditional UR Delver deck did fade into obscurity following the (in)famous banning of Treasure Cruise, another Delver and another delve card […]

Dragons of Tarkir brought us Avatar of the Resolute to brew Stompy with, and Collected Company to brew Elves with, but there’s plenty more work to do. Today I’m going to put together a Bant goodstuff list built in part around Ojutai’s Command. If you love powerhouse creatures and versatile instants, this article is for […]

In last week’s article, we took a deep dive into the world of unpublished MTGO dailies, capturing performance by both the 4-0/3-1 decks and the 2-2 or worse finishers. This dataset gives us a chance to look at a deck’s performance throughout an event, not just in the winner’s bracket. MTGO statistics in action! We […]

Dean Tolmachoff took 5th place at an SCG States tournament this week running Miracles, of all things. Miracles was a deck in Standard when the sometimes-busted Entreat the Angels and Terminus were format legal and netted then tournament newbie Alexander Hayne a 1st place win (beating down Jon Finkel in the finals, no less). The […]

Wizards made a lot of promises when it founded Modern. Some of these were explicit, like providing a new non-rotating format for high level play. Others were implicit, such as actively supporting Modern with new cards that could improve existing decks. And others were so confusing we are still trying to figure out what Wizards […]

With a mostly refined and complete list in tow, I finally felt confident enough to bring Elves to a daily yesterday. The matchups were R/G Tron, a strange U/B Merfolk list, Grixis Delver, and Affinity. See what happened in the video below. The list is a little different than last time, as I’m still missing […]

I’m a big fan of using MTGO data to analyze deck performance. But one of the biggest issues with data available on the Wizards website is it’s incomplete. We only see 4-0/3-1 decks, we only see one event per day, and we have no idea what matchups happened on the way to those finishes. Although […]

With Avatar of the Resolute now available on Magic Online, I took a renewed Stompy list to the daily queue this week to test the deck’s mettle. Below is what I ran. The sideboard is pretty much what I mentioned last time, except I’ve included extra Aspect of Hydra. As I mention in the video […]

Aggro took the latest SCG Open by storm, and Mike Lanigan is here to pore over the decks, as well as offer a glimpse at some novel Modern decks.

It’s impossible to prepare for every matchup in Modern; there are just too many viable decks and too many fringe strategies out there. And for the most part, it’s okay not to worry about having a positive win chance against every deck in the format. You’ll dodge some, get lucky against others, and lose one […]