Today brought one of the most significant bans in recent memory, and at breakneck speed. Surprise?! The August 3rd, 2020 Banned and Restricted announcement is live!

The July 13, 2020 Banned and Restricted announcement is live!

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, […]

Bans have brought uncertainty to the Standard metagame, but the first tournaments have brought some clarity and some appealing speculation targets.

Monday’s Banned and Restricted Announcement has turned the Modern metagame on its head, and Adam is here to explain what it means for the future of the market.

There was much debate a little while back about the Modern bannings. Should Mox Opal get the axe? Is the card selection of Ancient Stirrings too good for Modern? I saw a lot of people making arguments on either side, but I did not see a lot of solid evidence for either case. It was […]

David is out for the holidays until next week. In the meantime, please enjoy his article from earlier this year where he presented results from the Preordain ban test. These results were originally presented in two separate articles (here and here), but I’ve divided them into parts for the purpose of easier reading. Part 1: […]

It is inevitable. Every time a new Banned and Restricted Announcement comes out, speculation runs rampant. Everyone has their pet cards to advocate for or against, everyone is utterly convinced they’re right, and they take offense to disagreement. Every single time. It’s really tiring. I’ve written about this problem before. I have no problem discussing possible […]

This week, I’m doubling down. Modern is returning to the Pro Tour, and with that, banned list discussion is certain to resurface. I’ve chosen to get out ahead of it; my article last week speculated on a potential opportunity for Wizards of the Coast to “solve” the banning problem once and for all. Unsurprisingly, this […]

Modern Magic’s history under the lights has been… complicated. As a format, it was born into fire in 2011 with Pro Tour Philadelphia, and since then, the format has bounced from darling to redheaded stepchild to orphan and back, faster than strobe lights at a Skrillex show. Bannings, Pro Tours, more bannings (as a result […]

April 24th came and went, and besides some misguided grumbling about Death’s Shadow, most Modern players were content. Without one deck consistently surpassing 10% of the metagame, a “no changes” banlist announcement was easy to predict. But Wizards went the extra mile with this particular announcement, including a blurb about Modern despite choosing not to shake it up. […]

In my past articles, when talking about buying a given card, the concept of “risk” has frequently come up. I’ve seen some confusion in the comments about my use of this term, which has lead to misinterpretation of the information I’m trying to convey. Some people were under the impression that I was predicting, or […]