As a competitively-minded person, winning is important to me. As a human being, I also have an interest in doing cool things. The part of my brain that wants to do cool things is constantly at odds with the part of my brain that wants to win.

Luis-Scott Vargas is very capable of discerning the difference between being creative and being foolish. He has a propensity for drafting seven-drops, but, more importantly, he's willing to sleeve up Tempered Steel for a Pro Tour despite the deck being extremely boring and not having much play to it.

Travis Woo has no such interest in limiting his creativity. While he is capable of doing well at high-level Magic events, he spends more of his free time doing this:

By no means am I saying that creativity is bad. Far from it. I'm merely saying that the desire to be creative as an end to itself inhibits one's ability to be competitive.

Travis is very capable of being competitive. Top 8'ing with his Living End home brew was an incredible feat. LSV is very capable of being creative. I'm sure that he'd have several puns to illustrate this point.

What I'm driving at is that striking a balance is key.

Arguably, the most interesting deck from PT Magic 2015 was Yuuki Ichikawa's Jund Planeswalkers deck. I imagine everybody has seen it by now, but it's a sweet one.

It can be mind-blowing at first glance to see a Nissa deck that isn't really bothering to untap Forests.

Most players--myself included--were blinded by Nissa's ability to untap Forests and, as such, only imagined her in devotion shells.

The problem was that the deck just wasn't very good. Yuuki looked past that though, and,while the devotion deck wasn't good, Nissa sure as hell was. He had the skill to identify Nissa as a great card in a bad deck and the creativity to find a home for it in a dramatically different shell. Creativity properly paired with the drive to win brought Yuuki to back-to-back Pro Tour Top 8's--an admirable feat.

Arguably, another small step can be taken to best utilize the power of our Nissas. Many would argue that the greatest strength of decks like Jund Monsters, Green Devotion and Jund Walkers also lend to their greatest weakness--it sucks to draw just lands and Elvish Mystics, even though Elvish Mystic is responsible for the deck's most explosive draws.

Pascal Maynard had a pretty brilliant idea for his WMCQ and just put Nissa, a powerful card in its own right, into the best deck:

He ended up taking second, but he sure as hell deserves recognition for this innovation.

The evolution of Nissa decks happened so fast that if you blinked, you missed it.

But something huge happened at every level. Phase one was building decks designed to take as much advantage of Nissa as possible, and this meant playing a lot of Forests. Phase two was ditching the truly bad cards from the Nissa shell and slotting her in a deck full of the singularly powerful cards, à la the Mike Flores school of Magic. Finally, Pascal Maynard just took Nissa and put her into what was already accepted as the de facto best deck in the format.

I fully expect to see decks very similar to Pascal's in the months leading up to Khans of Tarkir.

The desire to try something new and to further explore the format brought Nissa to the forefront of deckbuilding. From here, objective analysis of why Nissa decks were winning or losing and whether they were the best version of what they were trying to do brought us from exploring a new archetype all the way to simply updating the best deck.

To analyze this further, in phase one the Nissa deck was perceived as a mana ramp deck, capable of very explosive hands. In reality, it would most often win games based off of the power of singular cards instead of synergies.

In phase two, Yuuki Ichikawa decided that most of the green creatures didn't deserve slots in the same deck as Nissa, and instead elected to just play more haymakers, as the haymakers were what won the games anyhow.

In phase three, Pascal Maynard decided that any mana ramp was superfluous to the haymaker strategy and that Nissa was best fitted with the most consistently successful shell in the format now that the mana was finally good enough to enable Golgari Rock decks.

From the other side of things, we're also seeing a much more forward evolution of Black Devotion. I can't remember the last time Black Devotion wasn't the best deck in Standard. Periodically we would see a number of colors splashed, with straight black usually making its way back to the limelight.

For Pro Tour Magic 2015, the reprinting of enemy colored painlands made the enemy splashes consistent enough to be very serious considerations. Team Channel Fireball picked up Caves of Koilos and announced loudly that Blood Baron of Vizkopa and Obzedat, Ghost Council were stronger options than Grey Merchant of Asphodel.

And now Pascal Maynard is saying that Nissa, Worldwaker is better than Blood Baron of Vizkopa. Abrupt Decay and Courser of Kruphix have spoken for themselves time and again.

It's really interesting to watch decks evolve in this manner. If you looked at SCG Open results from a few months back--particularly immediately after the printing of Temple of Malady--the Golgari Rock deck only looks like a minor evolution. In reality, it often takes a lot of time and effort to come up with even the most elegant of transitions.

Part of the reason for this is the drive to be creative. Most players would much rather develop a sweet new archetype than throw more good cards into a good deck. We're also biased looking at the list now, as in the present we can always wonder why we didn't think of something before, whereas in the past we may very well have been thinking that will never work. I certainly don't recall hearing about Golgari Rock in Standard at the PT.

Another reason we see evolutions like this is that it's very difficult to calibrate the level of correction needed for a deck, even when we know that something needs to change. When you know Nissa is good, it makes sense to hold onto the other good green cards in the deck. In particular, it's not surprising to see Courser of Kruphix in Yuuki and Pascal's decks.

It is more difficult to discern whether you want to be an Elvish Mystic deck, though, particularly without knowing the results of the Pro Tour and seeing how the post M15 metagame has come together. At any rate, knowing that something is wrong while still identifying strengths and continuing to work on ways to capitalize on these known strengths is how great decks are built.

On the lines of this difficulty of calibration, I'm guilty of this myself. I don't have time to jam 1,000s of games, which puts me at a disadvantage anytime I want to play anything other than a stock list--and indeed this disadvantage is felt by everybody who decides to stray from the pack.

One way I try to combat this disadvantage is by making somewhat dramatic changes to decklists in order to acquire more varied experience faster. In order to draw meaningful conclusions from this process, it's important to not give any particular weight to specific games, and I wouldn't recommend this approach for everybody. Most recently I employed such a deck tuning strategy when I tried to convert Izzet Delver into Grixis Delver.

Part of my reasoning was that Dark Confidant added a lot to the deck. In practice, really all that it added was another body. The Grixis list cut a significant portion of spells from the deck, which made Delver worse. This cost didn't strike me as particularly relevant as Delvers are quite good at dying in Modern, which was the entire reason to try to add more creatures. After testing the deck for a week, it occurred to me that a dead Dark Confidant was worth approximately as much as a dead Delver of Secrets.

Playing a deck with fewer spells showed me that I could cut a few while still flipping Delver of Secrets as often as I needed to and that it didn't really matter which extra creatures I was playing, just that I wanted extra creatures. As of now, I think I'm better off with more Vendilion Cliques and staying on a two-color deck.

Finding the exact configuration that I want is turning into a real headache, Modern being as broad as it is. While more experience brings more knowledge, more knowledge brings more frustration.

That said, progress is being made. When I do come up with new answers, it seems they are closer to what the list I jumped from was than the list that I jumped to in order to solve a problem. Magic is a complex game, and even the most simple answers can take a great deal of work to reach.

The Financial Future of Nissa, Worldwaker

If you had any illusion of Nissa dropping in price in the near future, I believe now is the time to dismiss that notion. Nissa is excellent now and very likely to be excellent post Khans. The fact that she has shined in multiple shells is indicative of the fact that she's not going anywhere. Magic 2015 won't be opened for very long, and once Khans launches, I could certainly see her climb well above her $30 price tag. She's very high risk for aggressive speculation, but I would pick up a set for Standard play.

Thanks for reading.
-Ryan Overturf
@RyanOverdrive on Twitter