Well that was fast. It’s only been two months since Oko, Thief of Crowns was banned. It’s pretty rare for Wizards to issue Modern bans in consecutive announcements, except for during emergencies like Hogaak, Arisen Necropolis’s reign of terror. So I wasn’t actually expecting anything to happen in Modern. However, last Thursday, that changed; I […]

Well, everyone should have seen another ban coming. There was no way that Wizards wasn’t going to let their last scheduled banned and restricted announcement go by without doing something about Oko, Thief of Crowns. However, I didn’t expect it to go this far. Three cards banned would be a fairly substantial shift by itself, […]

The competitive year has come to a close for Modern, and now it’s time to look ahead. This means it’s time once more to informedly speculate on the future of Modern’s banlist. It’s been a wild year for the list, and while I always hope that the metagame can adapt to new decks, I don’t […]

Hogaak and Looting are banned, and Stoneforge Mystic is free at last from the Modern banned list. What do these changes promise for our beloved format? And what does equipment searching have to do with fast food chains? Let’s find out! Elephant in the Room Before even thinking about the void left by Hogaak, or […]

Each tournament, Izzet Phoenix’s impressive, sustained numbers start to look less like an outlier and more like a pattern. Patterns like these have a history of being addressed by Wizards via the banlist. So how does Izzet Phoenix stack up against past offenders? Do the deck’s decriers have a case for caging the bird? Let’s […]

When it comes to Modern, I’m always up for a surprise. I penned an article last week declaring the death of midrange as a Tier 1 strategy in an aggro-combo metagame. But it seems the meta has already corrected itself: last weekend’s GP Portland Top 8 featured a finals between Grixis Death’s Shadow and BG […]

Creeping Chill has been sanctioned for a month now, and Dredge is steadily regaining its former status as format boogeyman. David’s article from last week met the deck’s rise with an optimism I’m no longer sure I can personally espouse: despite the hate, Dredge put three copies into the Top 32 of GP Atlanta and, more […]

Bloodbraid Elf and Jace, the Mind Sculptor have been unbanned in Modern for a week now. Contrary to what we’ve heard since the announcement, the format is just fine, and perhaps even better: it’s fresher, to be sure, with new decks popping up abusing Modern’s newcomers and benefiting from the metagame warp. One development I […]

The October 17 banlist announcement came and went, and no changes were made to Modern. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to glean. Wizards dropped some juicy information this announcement, and today we’ll deduce which cards the company has their eye on unbanning. Wizards’s latest “No changes” gave us some valuable insight into how they’re […]

I’ve had my mind on the Modern banned list a lot lately—in December, I optimistically wondered at the possibility of a Preordain unban; more recently, I wrote up some general thoughts on format health. In the conclusion of that article, I offered, “Blue and white do continue to struggle relative to the other three colors, making me think now’s […]

Since the Golgari Grave-Troll banning, the Modern banlist hasn’t been updated. But the format has changed dramatically, welcoming Fatal Push into its upper crust and appropriating Death’s Shadow for a Probeless era. Of course, the format’s recent stability hasn’t stopped detractors from clamoring for bans or unbans. Today, we’ll explore what makes a format healthy, and why the notion of metagame health […]