I’ve written that the average Magic player is too afraid of taking mulligans. That goes double for Modern, where card advantage matters less than in other formats, and triple for Colorless Eldrazi Stompy, which is built to mulligan aggressively into lean, powerful openers. Whether it’s because of my own results with the deck, the attention it’s […]

Modern remains wide-open, which carries implications for deckbuilding. Last week, I talked about mainboard flex slots. This week, we’ll tackle a significantly thornier topic: sideboarding. Due to Modern’s wide variety of linear decks, and the relative lack of powerful catch-all answers that you see in formats like Legacy or Vintage, ours is a format that puts […]

Sometimes it’s necessary to revisit older topics. Whether it’s previously unavailable data coming in, or assumptions and beliefs evolving, it’s good to revisit previous statements and articles to see if they’re still valid. Today I will first finish off my Regionals update, then I need to revisit some Ixalan cards both because I missed them and […]

Regional PTQs for Pro Tour Rivals of Ixalan start next week, and the RPTQ format is Modern. For those of us who are competing (I’m not one of them, but I know a few), there are a few angles of attack that I wanted to discuss today. I’ll also provide some general thoughts on the […]

If you’ve been playing Modern over the last few months, you may have noticed an interesting trend in the metagame results: no one deck is top dog. While a familiar cast of characters inhabits the top of the charts, it seems as if any one of them can do well in a given tournament, all […]

In “What’s in a Goyf? Benchmark Creature Playability in Modern,” I considered the bar creatures must meet to make the cut in this format. Aether Revolt gave us Fatal Push, and that bar has since changed—but no creature has felt the shift like Tarmogoyf. Today, we’ll zone in on Goyf’s fall from lofty heights and examine the […]

This past week I found myself looking back at some of the first articles I wrote here at Nexus, for some reason or another, and discovered something interesting about my writing. No, it’s not that I love control, or have a tendency to play tempo-oriented decks, or really really like to talk about context in Magic, […]

This week marked some big news for Modern: Opt is finally entering our card pool. I’ve heard some decry the card as a worse Visions that will only see play in draw-go and tempo decks, and others still call Opt a change to our card pool nearly on par with Fatal Push’s impact. For me, […]

This week I wanted to do something a little bit different from my past couple articles. Leave it to me to propose a tonal shift to my article topics, and then immediately afterwards break from the mold to do something different. Still, a couple personal/opinion pieces in a row suggests a shift every now and […]

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 […]

It’s Modern season, time to grind for the Pro Tour! I’ve spent most of my career on the grind and this year is no different. Therefore I will be documenting my attempt to climb back to the Pro Tour for the rest of the summer. If my past experiences are an indication, this will be […]

Hello, everyone. My name is Andrew Dang. I placed 67th in Grand Prix Las Vegas playing an Affinity build of my own design with Bomat Courier. I began experimenting with Courier soon after the release of Kaladesh, and initial results led me to believe the card had promise. After nine months of testing and honing […]

For most players, this week is the start of the Modern PPTQ season. Technically it started last week, but many of those PPTQs were Sealed to coincide with Hour of Devastation’s release. Hopefully you have chosen your deck and are getting in the reps you need. This is Modern, master your deck—you’ve heard this before. What […]