I am always amazed at how often people make relatively simple tasks hard for themselves. There just seems to be something in all of us that gets suspicious whenever anything is unexpectedly easy. We are ready for conflict. We prepare for projects, lessons, and assignments to be hard. When they’re not, we don’t know what […]

A couple weeks ago, I wrote a strategic guide to mulliganing with Colorless Eldrazi Stompy, a deck I’ve championed on Modern Nexus for almost two years now. Today’s follow-up piece focuses on the deck’s second-most-challenging (and important) aspect: sideboarding. This article covers build variations and possible sideboard includes before jumping into the matchup guide. But […]

One important part of brewing is knowing when to plug holes in an existing deck. Sometimes, plugging such holes leads to new decks entirely, or into Frankenstein mashups of multiple decks. Today’s brew falls into the latter category. While messing around with various Death’s Shadow and Bedlam Reveler decks, I had the kooky idea of […]

Hello, Nexites, and welcome to a new edition of Deck of the Week. I must admit that MTGO player 1310HaZzZaRd has been one of my favorite deck brewers, and he was at his best again last week. The deck we’re looking at today is a radical new look for Living End, hybridized with an As Foretold […]

I’ve written that the average Magic player is too afraid of taking mulligans. That goes double for Modern, where card advantage matters less than in other formats, and triple for Colorless Eldrazi Stompy, which is built to mulligan aggressively into lean, powerful openers. Whether it’s because of my own results with the deck, the attention it’s […]

Deep in the Modern annals lies a deck called Boremandos. This deck was the format’s first to feature Delver of Secrets, and was wildly successful in its heyday. It paired Delver with Steppe Lynx, Remand, and a hearty dose of burn spells to gently disrupt opponents and kill them quickly, and eventually inspired the blueprint […]

Ever since I wrote a piece on Chart a Course in Counter-Cat, I’ve conducted routine searches on decklist websites for the card. My motivation was to unearth some sweet new applications for Chart in Modern to further inspire my own brewing. After weeks of the card only appearing in Vintage Delver decks, it started showing […]

If you’re like me, most of the excitement surrounding Standard revolves around which of its cards break into Modern. The worlds-apart nature of both formats guarantees that many Standard all-stars don’t make it over this way, and some Standard duds boast impressive utility in Modern. Every so often, though, a card makes a big splash […]

The past month has been odd for me. I have been advocating UW Merfolk forever, but almost every other Fish player is mono-blue. It made sense. Perfect, painless mana all the time is really appealing. Then Ixalan happened and everyone is experimenting with other colors. I’m not complaining but it feels weird. The fact that they’re still not […]

When Opt was spoiled for Modern, I wrote a piece about how I didn’t think the card would see much play. That didn’t stop me from putting together a bunch of decks with the card. During those experiments, I took a literal “walk” on the wild side, following a tangent deep down the rabbit hole […]

Confession time: one of my pet cards is Smallpox. That might seem weird coming from an attacks-loving aggro-control enthusiast such as myself, but Smallpox has a lot of the elements I prize in a card: its symmetry makes it innocuous; its floor is low, and its ceiling miles high; its conditions ask pilots to build […]

I’ve been a little distracted from Magic lately, and not even grinding the PPTQ season as planned. But all it takes for that to change is a well-timed spoiler from Wizards. Ixalan’s been delivering plenty of those, and between the dripping-with-flavor new cards and the juicy-looking Magic: Arena, I’m back on the proverbial horse—the brewing […]

Rest in Peace wasn’t always a Modern staple. For a long time, its status was similar to Blood Moon’s: the card was relegated to the sideboards of decks fringe and unreliable for the reason that they themselves lacked powerful graveyard synergies, and kept down by synergy-shredding strategies like Jund Rock. But Modern has changed, and […]