Note: This article was supposed to go up yesterday. Our server troubles prevented that. I really liked the opening I wrote. Pretend it’s still July 4th for me, please. Happy Fireworks Day, America! As you celebrate America’s birthday through the medium of smoldering craters as Ben Franklin intended, remember: safety first. The Founding Fathers spent […]
featured
Hello, Nexites. No doubt you have noticed the repeated downtime issues we’ve been experiencing over the last few months. I’m happy to report that we’ve just finished switching to a new server, which should mean the end of them. As it turns out, we were breaching the terms of service of our old server with […]
Preparation means something unique to everyone, and each player has their own pre-tournament ritual. Mine tends to vary depending on how invested I am in the format, and what other stuff I have going on. The SCG Roanoke Invitational will be underway by the time this piece goes public. In this article, I’ll describe how […]
Modern is going through something of a shake-up right now. Over the last few weeks, we’ve seen the status quo turned on its head with the rise, and subsequent fall, of Grixis Death’s Shadow. For months before Grixis’ ascension, weekly results were the same bland mini-variation of Affinity, Dredge, and Eldrazi Tron. Death’s Shadow Jund […]
I was planning to write a general guide to beating the top decks in Modern, as alluded to last week. However, my discussion kept circling back to Death’s Shadow. Every time I talked about how various decks were constructed, it inevitably involved Shadow. The strategy discussion? Even as I described picking apart Counters Company with Lightning […]
A week ago, if you asked anyone down on the street what the most dangerous deck in Modern was, two times out of ten you would get “Grixis Death’s Shadow” as your answer. The other eight would have no idea what you were talking about, and point you in the general direction of the nearest […]
GP Las Vegas has come and gone, but excitement surrounding Modern still pulses through the community. Vegas saw some very interesting decks make the Top 8, and not only are Hour of Devastation spoilers providing plenty to discuss, but Ixalan’s contraversial rare sheet leak has given format aficionados an unprecedented amount of new information to […]
Grand Prix Las Vegas was massive. You knew that from the coverage, but numbers don’t have the same impact as being there. I had to elbow my way to the match slip box past hundreds of players milling around the Vintage Magic and Quiet Speculation booths while over half of the actual GP contestants played […]
Make no mistake: Grixis Death’s Shadow is by far the best deck in Modern. Last week, I was able to attend SCG Charlotte, and I saw firsthand the levels of devastation and permeation Grixis Death’s Shadow has brought upon the format. While the last match on camera was the Eldrazi Tron/Living End final, don’t think […]
SCG Charlotte is in the books. Grixis Shadow and Eldrazi Tron were the tournament’s clear winners, both in terms of representation and apparent power. But while everyone was distracted by that onslaught of under-costed threats, a smaller tournament was underway. Despite being won by Grixis Shadow, the Charlotte Classic yielded a few especially sweet brews, […]
I originally planned for this article to be about planning for a tournament in an open metagame. The results from the Kobe and Copenhagen GPs and from the SCG Baltimore Classic indicated that the metagame was very open and unpredictable. Results from MTGO confirmed this, although Death’s Shadow decks, particularly the Grixis version, were clearly at the […]
Hey, everybody! I’m back again with some more video content with Modern Nexus! There have been many Modern events of late, and as such I’ve been testing with a lot of decks that I intend to play in those events, tuning them to the best of my ability. Considering the meta at the moment, that […]
I’ve had my mind on the Modern banned list a lot lately—in December, I optimistically wondered at the possibility of a Preordain unban; more recently, I wrote up some general thoughts on format health. In the conclusion of that article, I offered, “Blue and white do continue to struggle relative to the other three colors, making me think now’s […]
