Play mistakes often amount to a lack of experience. Barring an FNM the day before, SCG States marked my first event with Temur Delver since Oath of the Gatewatch, which had me gleefully—and, soon enough, disinterestedly—casting two-mana, Thoughtseizeing Tarmogoyfs. I’m not unexperienced with Temur Delver; I’ve been playing it in various forms since 2012, and with […]

Sometimes I marinate for minutes (no, tens of minutes) on clever article titles, but today’s came naturally. After months of turning Eldrazi Temple sideways, I’ve returned to my beloved Temur Delver, and fetching out basic Island has never felt more right. I guess you don’t know how dirty some things are until you stop doing them. To […]

Actual comments from my previous article, “A Defense of the Splinter Twin Ban:” “As someone who has played around extensively with a variety of URx decks, I can tell you that in the past four years or so, Twin is the only one I’ve found viable not because the Twin package is so enticing, but […]

It hasn’t even been a full week since Twin got buried on the Modern banlist, and although Exarch is still mourning, it’s time for players to buck up and dive into the new metagame. If you play paper Modern, the controversial January 18th announcement went into effect last Friday the 22nd. MTGO folks had to […]

Between bouts of jamming Traditional Yu-Gi-Oh! and maniacally sleeving up unplayable cards like Desperate Ritual and Peppersmoke, I haven’t played much competitive Modern lately. In my eyes, participating in two small local tournaments a week doesn’t count, and the last “real” Modern event I played in was a WMCQ in Toronto. As more local gamers started asking me if […]

Hey guys! Welcome to Episode 6 of our Modern Nexus Video Series, where we pick a sweet list and run it through some matches on Magic Online. This week we have the old standby, Grixis Delver! Grixis Delver has been slowly falling off the radar in Modern, and while I’m not necessarily sad to see it […]

When I began paging through the results from StarCityGames’s State Championships, I didn’t expect much in the way of innovation. After all, Modern players are terrified of brewing, or at least of brewing diligently enough to perfect a recipe (Hoogland and Chapin are notable exceptions to this rule). So I was pleasantly surprised to find a host of novel […]

Five hours. That’s how long it would take me and a band of Modern-loving francophones to reach Toronto in Milkman’s big van. It took much longer. After an airport shuttle from the hotel, a busride from the airport, and a yellow-line subway jaunt, I arrive at my buddy’s Chinatown apartment five hours late. He’d hit the town without me, so […]

There’s an easy way to break tempo; the archetype just requires ways to turn a previously unused resource into something it craves and has little of. Tempo has no shortage of spare land drops or excess cards in the graveyard that we would gladly trade for more tools to win games with. Cards that offer these […]