Mike Lanigan breaks down his deck choice for a local modern tourney and gives a tournament report on his first foray into modern.

With the exception of Splinter-Twin, however, the new metagame is very similar to the metagame before rotation.  Edgar Flores won the first SCG Open with NPH legal with a UW CawBlade list that looked very similar to the pre-rotation lists. In this metagame there are a number of cards that are being underplayed, in my opinion, and here are the top 5.

We’ve had 2 weeks of Opens to see the impact New Phyrexia has had on the Standard and Legacy tournament scenes. I’m going to focus on Standard, since the Grand Prix this weekend is Legacy, and will almost certainly have more players than the SCG Open series gets. Waiting on that will give us a bit of a better view on the format. However, for Standard, there’s no reason to wait, especially since the format hasn’t really undergone much of a change.

Neale takes a reader’s Rafiq deck from common to commanding for head’s up play, and challenges you to do it better. Think you can handle the firepower?

Alan had also brought along the shell for Summoning Trap, which is a deck I had seen and liked initially. After looking at the deck laid out – I figured an audible was in order. Why? I simply wasn’t going to win the tournament with Faeries, so my best chance was to change decks.

[…] One thing I think many people underestimate is Mythic’s ability to last in a long game, which is its biggest asset against Control. Between your Planeswalkers and manlands, it’s not hard to have a significant board presence with only one or two creatures committed. The Knights, in particular, are frequently quite large, which lets you play out a single threat at a time and make the opponent answer it before committing another. […]