Happy Election Day, America! May your vote be counted and the voting process as stress-free as mine. Living in a state that’s been all mail-in ballots for years has considerable advantages in a pandemic year. And if not, take heart. At minimum, you won’t be bombarded by annoying, omnipresent, and pleading political advertising for at […]

As October comes to a close, it’s time for me to wrap up my look into the new decks from Zendikar Rising. Admittedly, it’s mostly been a case of deck evolution rather than outright new decks. Even Belcher had a direct predecessor. And that’s a good thing. Modern’s been churning non-stop for over a year. […]

Zendikar Rising is one of those rare Standard sets that has more than just a few cards with eternal format potential. Joe walks us through five cards he’s got an eye on when considering the future of Modern and Legacy.

A house is not a home, they say, and what is Modern if not a format that houses some of the baddest cards banned from Standard? Well, it’s also got Standard newcomers, be they banned or not. And one among them has had its heart set on turning our beloved format into its own sweet […]

Well, that was fast. Normally we have three full weeks of spoilers, but Wizards has really rushed out Ikoria. I’m guessing the quarantine is a factor here and they’re in a bit of a scramble. In any case, the entire set is now out. And it’s a little mediocre, Modern-wise. As I mentioned last week, this […]

With the new year just days away, every Modern player’s got something on their mind: which new goodies will we get next? What’s the deal with Pioneer? How are winning grinders tweaking their decks going into 2020? While we’ll cover all that in the coming weeks, today I want to focus in on the format […]

Editor’s note: 2019 was perhaps Modern’s wildest year ever, featuring such meta-defining decks as UR Phoenix, Hogaak, and Whirza thanks to monumental shakeups in the form of Modern Horizons and other expansions. That chaos wasn’t without its constants, including one critical element of new spoilers: card evaluation. In this re-run of my favorite self-published article […]

The concept of personal preference heavily influences how I see the world, and subsequently, Magic. So I’m no stranger to writing about playing what you love. Nonetheless, I have felt a bit lost in Modern for the last few months: my colored pet decks lost a key card in Faithless Looting, and the second coming […]

An analysist goes to work with the data he’s given. With Modern on the competitive backburner for the past few weeks, I’ve lacked the means to properly dig into the metagame ahead of GP Columbus this weekend. As a result, I am looking a bit further afield into events that I normally wouldn’t analyze. Fortunately, […]

Why do I write a Brew Report every month? Because Modern is brimming with innovation every month! While many of the decks featured in this column may not go on to win a GP, or even to carve out a sustainable metagame share, they all performed well at least once; it’s not always a cakewalk […]

It has been a frustrating year for analyzing the Modern metagame, as multiple bannings and an influx of new cards have churned its natural state. Things are finally starting to stabilize, which means that a reasonable picture is forming. We’ve got a burst of new data to thank for that quieting down. Nonetheless, the new […]

2019 may well go down in the books as the Year of Enablers. Between the Faithless Looting-fueled Phoenix decks and the Stitcher’s Supplier-abusing Hogaak menace, Modern was defined this year by pushed cards locating, buffing, and ultimately breaking engines and payoffs. Of course, both Phoenix and Hogaak have left us by now. Without Looting in […]

SCG Indi was an important week both for Sam and for Magic at large. Check in with Sam here to find out what he learned over the weekend and what lies ahead.