All decks aren’t created equal: some are Splinter Twin, others are Mono-Green Aura Stompy. The same goes for every set: some are Dominaria, others Legions. Thus, the impact of every new set will be felt unequally both by Modern as a whole and by individual decks. Not every set can have Modern-playable cards, and not every […]

Everything has to begin somewhere. The Modern metagame is no exception, and last week I used the MTGO metagame as a bellwether for the emerging format. The five decks I examined have done well online. However, as I noted, the data isn’t necessarily accurate or indicative of what players will encounter at a Modern event. […]

That Modern is changing should be obvious: there’s a lower-power set coming out and we just had a major banning. But how Modern is changing is an open question. The only major Modern events for the next month are SCG Classics and Team Opens, which aren’t the most reliable sources for data. So we’ll have […]

Hogaak has been nerfed by a Bridge from Below ban, but the deck is still out in force. While its apparent volatility may contribute to a plummeting of metagame shares in the near future, I personally know many players who continue to swear by the strategy. And Dredge is also on the upswing, profiting from players’ […]

This is an odd feeling for me. For all its flaws, the PPTQ system meant that grinders like me always had competitive level events to grind and keep our skills sharp. The MCQ system is functionally the same as the old PTQ system, which means very few events and very spread out. Since I’m a […]

With Core 2020 and the London mulligan finally legal, the metagame can begin to take shape. Begin being the key word there. So much has changed in Modern over the past month that it is impossible to predict what exactly is changing. At the end of this week, GP Denver looms. I’m not playing the main […]

I had planned to spend today’s article discussing Hogaakvine: what it does, how it does it, how to play against it, and how I’d build decks given Hogaak’s rise. However, that article was mooted this morning by Wizards. Instead, let’s examine what’s happened and where it leaves Modern. Also, once again, nothing got unbanned. This […]

With Mythic Championship II in the books, Chris takes a look at the decks that benefited from the London Mulligan, and their key cards he’s considering as specs.

Is Modern solved? Is Modern stale? Any amount of time spent on a Magic forum or subreddit these days seems to offer countless arguments from both sides of the debate. Indeed, this Phoenix/Dredge/Stirrings (in that order) metagame has proven the most divisive I can remember since Siege Rhino briefly served as hyper-acting format manager in […]

One weekend. Three events. So much data. With an SCG Open and two GPs this weekend, I can better evaluate whether the extreme trends seen in the Regionals data actually have weight, or were the outliers I speculated. Is Phoenix really as good as it looks? The Day 2 Picture For unknown reasons, Channelfireball decided […]

Spinning off from a section in article #23, Eddie starts this new What’s Next series by looking into what could be in store for Modern after the KCI banning.