The Oracle at Delphi was always correct. Every ancient Greek source confirms this truth. No matter what you asked the Oracle, the answer would accurately foretell the future. However, thanks to surviving prophecies, we now know she owes this accuracy to vagueness. The Oracle answered questions in ways that could mean anything. When asked about the outcome of a battle, […]

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 […]

Publication does not mean that an experiment is complete. Oftentimes readers see trends or have insights that never occurred to the author. Other times feedback leads to epiphanies which requires additional investigation. As a result, in academia it is important to revisit old papers and reexamine conclusions. Therefore, I’m going to spend today following up on […]

As I said last week, an opinion is worthless without evidence. This means that I have to actually test whether my initial opinions about Amonkhet cards are valid. I am starting to think I need to keep my pen quiet more often, as this is now a much bigger project than I envisioned. Last week I […]

Idle speculation accomplishes nothing. Speculation is just untested opinion, and is therefore invalid. With that in mind, I’ve decided to test my opinions about Gideon of the Trials and find out if my initial impressions actually hold weight. I don’t have enough data to make any definitive conclusion, but my testing should shine some light on Gideon’s […]

Time for the quarterly spoilers article! I intended to lead off with a pun on Amonkhet, but all the good ones have been done to death. Then I thought that I could come up with something unique, but expended too much energy last week and just couldn’t get going. Many other ideas were assessed and […]

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 […]

And so it begins. I want to start with a general thank-you to everyone who helped out. This was an enormous undertaking logistically and took much longer than expected. Even considering the deck I was using for testing purposes. Thank you for putting up with this insanely ambitious project. And please, please, pleeeease be willing to […]

I’ll be honest, this is not the article I was planning on for this week. I had planned to start rolling out my Jace, the Mind Sculptor results but I’ve run into a problem. Last time, a lot of you asked for more in-depth statistical analysis of the results and I decided to oblige. The […]

This is going to be a controversial month for my column. My banlist testing article series will return shortly, which will incite a firestorm even if readers like my results. Rather than run from this, I’m going to embrace it. Bring on Argument Month! I’m going to defy consensus and defend something many believe is indefensible. First, some background. […]

It’s been a while, but it’s time for another tournament report! TCGPlayer States was last weekend and I never miss the chance to prove my skill in front of the as much of the community that didn’t attend the Standard LCQ. It’s annoying that Star City has cut States entirely, but it’s actually a nice throwback to […]

Here we are, the final category of decks! Well, I say category but it is actually categories. You see, there are a number of archetypes that are either rare or derivative of the other ones and so don’t really require separate articles. This is not to deride their value to Modern or their power. It is simply […]