I’ll be honest with you. There’s a Standard GP coming up in my hometown and preparing for that has dominated most of my recent Magic time. I haven’t had time to come up with anything new for this week. What I do have are updates on several Modern projects that I just realized I’ve left […]

As we roll down another great year of Magic, we will find card prices starting to bottom out. Modern PPTQ season has been over for a while and the demand for new Modern cards quickly falls with it. After Grand Prix Dallas last weekend, there won’t be another Modern Grand Prix until February. After the […]

America was watching, riveted. Eyes glued to screens across the nation. All signs pointed to a win for blue. But Modern is a strange beast. During the tournament’s final hour, its rust belt of Lightning Bolts exploded into a sea of crimson. Cries of “how did this happen?” and “where did we go wrong?” echoed around the […]

Mike confronts the threat of graveyard decks in Legacy, Modern and Standard – and what we can do about them.

About a month and a half ago I presented a Jeskai Delver build that I had been tinkering with, and today I have some changes to discuss. I was able to play a 61-person event last weekend, piloting an updated version to the semifinals of the event, where I was ultimately felled by Jund, which […]

Happy/Miserable Election Day to all my US readers! Regardless of what actually happens tonight, the world is certainly ending for half of my readership. Before you celebrate or run off to join Jordan in Canada, I have some unfinished business to attend to. Two weeks ago I claimed that the problem with control wasn’t that […]

Well, I realize it’s been a long hiatus since our last Deck of the Week, but we’re back nonetheless. I spent much of the weekend tuned into coverage of Grand Prix Dallas, and if most of the on-camera archetypes were boring mainstays and known quantities, the deck that took it down most certainly was not. […]

In an article last month, I looked at a couple of my unsuccessful concoctions to see what went wrong. One deck I dissected was a Jeskai Aggro deck that used Honor of the Pure to get around Mantis Rider’s measly 3 toughness. My conclusion was that the deck would be better off with Mutagenic Growth and a […]

I’m qualified to play in the next RPTQ for Pro Tour Aether Revolt in Dublin, and I’ve been wracking my brain trying to figure out how to win it all. I know this is going to sound like a cop-out, but I’m really not interested in buying the Dredge or Infect deck, even if one of […]

It’s crunch time. You’ve known this was coming. You had weeks to prepare. You had plans to put on pants, go to FNM, run the Modern gauntlet, and test for Grand Prix Dallas. Instead, you sat on your couch, binge-watched Friends and eating Cheetos off your own bare chest. Now you’re scrambling, wondering what to […]

When they unbanned Golgari Grave-Troll in Modern, we all knew it was only a matter of time. For about a year we heard little from the Zombie hoard, until the release of Shadows over Innistrad brought us Prized Amalgam and Insolent Neonate. From there it didn’t take long for Grave-Troll decks to start popping up […]

Happy All Hallows’ Day, Nexites! Hopefully your diabetic coma isn’t too severe. Otherwise you might miss out on the second part of my discussion of playing with and against Modern’s aggressive decks. Last week we dealt with the classic aggressive decks, linear aggro. Today we’ll be dealing with the less fair versions. That’s not to say […]

Modern’s claim to fame is its diversity. I’m not alone in feeling like a notable portion of the format’s card pool is playable, and Wizards themselves push this narrative heavy-handedly. For many players, though, Modern is less about openness than it is about linearity. There are indeed plenty of options—so long as you’re not set on […]