By the time this piece is published, Mythic Championship London will be streaming, and Modern players will be testing the London mulligan in a high-pressure environment for the first time. The results of that event will have a massive effect on the format’s future. For those who just can’t wait until the Top 8 ends […]
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This is a very busy week. War of the Spark is now completely revealed, and so I have a few final cards to discuss. There have been a number of interesting cards for Modern, but we haven’t seen any obvious all-stars. Of course, that may be a lot to ask for, and more role-players are always […]
At last, War of the Spark is fully spoiled! From a design perspective, I think War bodes well for Modern’s future, and more specifically for the upcoming Modern Horizons. And the set itself has some juicy cards, too. While David’s review sought to quell the excitement surrounding some perhaps-not-excellent War cards, this article goes over […]
With War of the Spark’s spoiler season winding down, testing and brewing is accelerating. As per my usual, I’ve been working through interesting cards to find out how useful they’ll be in Modern. And as is usually the case, the result has been a swath of interesting results, though nothing especially groundbreaking. I expect there to […]
Another eventful week of War of the Spark spoilers is in the books, and with it, another batch of wrapped-up brewing projects. As always, I’ve got some insights to share on that front today; this time dealing not with planeswalkers, but utility creatures. Dreadhorde Arcanist, for all its Snapcaster/Confidant imitations, struck me as a potential […]
A new set is on the horizon, so it’s spoiler time again! War of the Spark is the first set designed as a planeswalker set, which means there are an unprecedented number about to drop. More interestingly, most of them have static abilities rather than the traditional plus, minus, and ultimate combo we’ve become accustomed to. […]
A year ago, Colorless Eldrazi Stompy received a potent new tool in Zhalfirin Void. I described the card’s potential for the archetype in detail, cursing Karn, Scion of Urza under my breath in the intro paragraph. In War of the Spark, the deck is all set to receive yet another potential game-changer, if a less […]
Nothing lasts forever; the mighty will eventually fall; time erases all wounds; change is the only constant. All such platitudes mean for Modern is that one deck can only remain on top of the format for so long. Eventually, the format either adapts to the deck, there’s a structural change to the metagame, or the banhammer […]
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 […]
Modern is vast and diverse enough to make metagaming a frequently terrible idea. However, sometimes it is warranted. With Izzet Phoenix, followed by Dredge, consistently dominating the big tournaments in a way that Modern hasn’t seen in years, it makes sense for the first time in a long time to actively target the top decks. How to […]
Each tournament, Izzet Phoenix’s impressive, sustained numbers start to look less like an outlier and more like a pattern. Patterns like these have a history of being addressed by Wizards via the banlist. So how does Izzet Phoenix stack up against past offenders? Do the deck’s decriers have a case for caging the bird? Let’s […]
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 […]
While chatting with a friend who hasn’t played Modern in a while about mostly unrelated topics, I was asked whether Leyline of the Void could be a reasonable consideration for contemporary mainboards . He’d become interested in the topic after reading this article. “In what deck?” I asked, believing myself aware of the card’s niche […]
