Every few weeks, speculation begins to rise about the next Banned and Restricted Announcement. Whenever something actually does happen, I frequently see laments over being blindsided and calls for Wizards to implement a banning watchlist. While an official list will never happen as it would unduly influence the secondary market, I do think it useful […]

Last weekend was SCG Dallas, a Team Constructed Open that again featured Modern experts duking it out on the big stage. As one of the last datapoints before the upcoming Pro Tour, Dallas gives us a few interesting bits of information to work with. Today, we’ll focus on the cooler deckbuilding choices made by some […]

Welcome back for the December metagame update. This month saw two large-scale Grand Prix delineate an extremely diverse metagame. Perhaps it’s just my own personal bias, but I believe Modern is in a great spot right now—healthy, diverse, with interactive games and relevant decisions in deckbuilding and sideboard construction. This is the “metagame to beat” as […]

The plan for this week was to update my metagame data tables with the results of the Grand Prix. However, Jason surprised all of us with the actual metagame update. Not that I’m complaining, mind you; it was a very nice surprise. I’m glad the more rigorous and comprehensive table is back in action. In […]

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 […]

On January 9th, Wizards of the Coast brought the heavy weight of the banhammer down upon Modern, attempting to target several linear decks that ranked among the best-performing archetypes during 2016. On the one hand we had the aggressive, explosive creature combos with a gotcha! element, headlined by Infect. On the other hand we had Dredge, taxing […]