For a long time, control decks in Modern have struggled to gain some inkling of viability. Considering the huge breadth and diversity of Modern, a deck composed of all answers has be tuned just right for the current metagame. While this is already quite the lofty task, the next step is near impossible—getting pairings to […]
grixis death’s shadow
Rest in Peace wasn’t always a Modern staple. For a long time, its status was similar to Blood Moon’s: the card was relegated to the sideboards of decks fringe and unreliable for the reason that they themselves lacked powerful graveyard synergies, and kept down by synergy-shredding strategies like Jund Rock. But Modern has changed, and […]
The “Death’s Shadow is the best deck” narrative we saw emerge in force around Grand Prix Vancouver has now split, with some claiming Eldrazi Tron is in fact the best deck. I tend to agree with the former, and will softly make a case for that inclination in this article. Regardless, we can surely agree […]
Five weeks ago, I made some bold predictions about where I thought Modern was headed for the summer of 2017. Fresh off SCG Baltimore, Modern was firmly in the grasp of Grixis Death’s Shadow, as the format was just beginning to warp around it. Today, we’ll look at those predictions to determine what I got […]
Everyone is fixated on Grixis Shadow. And rightly so—the deck is very powerful and has been sitting at the top of every metagame chart since April. And I think this is incorrect. I have some reason to believe that Shadow is a symptom of the metagame, not the cause. The Modern PPTQ season starts at […]
Modern tournament decklists are flooding in to the point where the phrase “too much of a good thing” is starting to come to mind. Nah, who am I kidding. I love this stuff. I hope you do too, because today we’re going to dive right in. I plan on recapping and analyzing high-level Magic tournament […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
This week, I plan on doing something unique. Event analysis has long been my preferred approach when it comes to writing—and reading—about Magic, and I feel strongly that my skills in methodically sifting through data, testing hypotheses, and arriving at conclusions is one of my biggest strengths in Magic, both as a writer and as […]
