I think that I’ll appeal to Occam’s Razor here and just say that Simon was running hot, and that he timed his Hurkyl’s superbly. If you’re expecting Affinity in your playgroup (as I am), you end up with a rather different 75 than the one he piloted to victory. Not to take anything away from his accomplishment – if anything, the fact that he mostly had postboard hate makes his victory even more impressive.

Valerion Lee not having Recalls is almost difficult for me to comprehend – you NEED them to hang against Affinity, and it’s almost unfathomable to not run into them at least once in a big event like a GP. They also put in work against some Tier 3 decks such as U-Tron and Lantern Control, particularly the latter.

Nvm that wasn’t in the semi-finals, but in the win ‘n in? Anyway, my point stands!

I don’t much care for how it’s success is mostly attributed to Nahiri when it’s the 55 other cards that are, and has always been doing the work. I’m not saying that you’re doing that but every article on the deck seems more interested on hyping Nahiri than analyzing the deck in general. That semi-finals game against Affinity where he ultied Nahiri with Emrakul in his hand and won anyway pretty much says it all.

Nice article as always!

Merfolk’s finish is great. I wonder if we see more people pick it up, especially now that we know its Affinity matchup might be more manageable than many believed.

Nahiri is definitely the real deal. It’s tempting to oversell her (best walker in Modern, ban in 6 months, etc.) and undersell her (over-hyped, tier 2 material, etc.), but as long as you tow a middle line, it’s easy to see how she’s a solid Tier 1 staple.

So much to talk about, so little space! Need to work on getting these down to the 1,600-2,000 word range, but all the juicy narratives make it hard.

There’s some variation between authors and their opinions, and everyone is free to disagree. That said, I always wanted authors to be referring to Top Decks statistics and staying in dialogue with those numbers, and I believe Jason has approached this the same way. In the future, especially given the differences between today’s article and yesterday’s, I expect to see more careful oversight of how that gets presented. Disagreement is okay but all opinions need to get supported.

Re: Scapeshift
I haven’t been tracking the BTL vs. Temur difference in the spreadsheet, and I realize I should be. Good project for the future and I’ll start noting it from this point onward.

Re: Jeskai
Yeah, there were a lot of misconceptions and hype (in both directions) around that deck. Overall, I’m comfortable classifying it as a viable Tier 1 strategy along with all the other Tier 1 options. Grixis, however, remains solidly Tier 2, although I’m hoping it gets a bit more attention after Chapin’s run.

Re: Merfolk
The weird thing is Slutsky didn’t run Harbinger at all, and only had a single Snag. Lee, 13th at GP LA, did have 4 Harbinger but had ZERO Recall’s in the board. At least Slutsky’s board, with 2 Gut Shot and 4 Recall’s, makes sense there, but it’s still an anomaly to me. Congrats to Merfolk but I’d be curious to see more explanations about how this happened.

I too am very happy about where Modern is. Format has rarely looked better.

In my experience, local metagames are a bit more predictable than larger ones. I use the Japanese circuit as an example of this, where certain players tend to bring the exact same strategies from week to week, or have a backup deck they occasionally sling, depending on the field. There’s variation depending on the field, and you’re always going to have the untiered, random brews, but I find smaller scenes to be more predictable as a whole.

As for UWR, I’ve always struggled to find a fast and efficient threat that would help me not going to time (it’s one of the main reasons I don’t play it in every tournament). Nahiri seems to fix this. She can find answers faster, and hopefully can also end the game faster than before. I imagine that once we have potentially cleared the board with removal and Emrakul is attacking most decks will have a hard time recovering from annihilator 6.

Point of interest; there’s some direct conflict between your article and its immediate neighbor on nexus. The other author makes a rather heavy-handed point about Nahiri being rubbish and how he was right to doubt the hype, going so far as to say that people who bought into playsets of the card must be feeling really bad. Upon reading this, it immediately rang false in my mind, and I was refreshed to see your more quantitative summary, highlighting the jeskai deck with Nahiri as a new strong contender, well worth looking at.

Is modern nexus a wild movable feast between authors when it comes to analysis, or do you tend to need to present a unified front?

Anyway thanks for the article. Always pleased to see scapeshift doing well, and hearing it from your excellent breakdown is even sweeter.

I’m also glad that you’ve set the record straight with regards to Jeskai’s accomplishments in the metagame. While I agreed with David that Nahiri was a tad overhyped by some, I think his piece swung too far in the other direction in terms of criticism. The results show that Jeskai was a deck very much in contention yesterday, even more so than its Grixis cousin that actually made Top 8 (shout-out to Patrick Chapin and his sweet list, though – any Grixis deck that can take matches from Valakut and RG Tron can’t be bad). I think it will be a contender in updates to come.

As for how Merfolk navigated the Affinity-infested waters… as Simon Slutsky showed us, Hurkyl’s Recall cures a lot of ills, and most of the successful Merfolk lists were packing 4. Running Vapor Snag and Harbinger of the Tides also helps. Essentially, if you tempo the heck out of them, you have a chance. You won’t be miraculously favored, but you have enough juice to win the match if your Affinity opponent stumbles and you draw the right pieces.

You mentioned that Affinity thrives in the kind of open Metagame you tend to see in a GP. I’m curious, do you think metagames you tend to see in an SCG Open or even a local mid-level event (say 30-60 people) tend to be less open or more predictable? Speaking personally, aside from going to an FNM, where I literally know what more than half of the field will be, I have a lot of difficulty predicting what I’ll face in any mid-level event. Once a field hits 30 people or so it usually feels pretty diverse, or failing that, kind of random, but I’m wondering if you or anyone else has noticed local trends.

There are always data limitations, but we work with what we have. I would have been much more nervous about the data if it gave us a picture that was radically different from the pre-GP metagame. That might suggest the Top 100 cutoff wasn’t very representative. Instead, it lines up relatively nicely with the pre-GP data, while also giving us some new datapoints to challenge our earlier understanding. That combination of factors means we can definitely draw limited conclusions from the data. Besides, we already know people are going to draw conclusions from this data regardless of those limitations. I’d rather at least unpack those conclusions as much as possible instead of just sticking with a surface understanding of GP shares alone.

Happy to hear you enjoyed it! Fun one to put together.