With Core 2020 and the London mulligan finally legal, the metagame can begin to take shape. Begin being the key word there. So much has changed in Modern over the past month that it is impossible to predict what exactly is changing. At the end of this week, GP Denver looms. I’m not playing the main […]

I had planned to spend today’s article discussing Hogaakvine: what it does, how it does it, how to play against it, and how I’d build decks given Hogaak’s rise. However, that article was mooted this morning by Wizards. Instead, let’s examine what’s happened and where it leaves Modern. Also, once again, nothing got unbanned. This […]

New metagames can be hard to pin down, as fresh cards lead to new brews and new tech, forcing established decks to adapt. This forces the new decks to adapt to the new pressure, and their success or failure creates ripples through the metagame. With War of the Spark and Modern Horizons released in quick succession, Modern […]

Modern Horizons becomes legal today in the paper world, but it’s been tearing up Magic Online for a good week. Wizards has published two events since then: a Modern Challenge and a league. Today, we’ll scour each for the hottest tech stirring up the format. Scourge of the Format? In the very first Horizons-featuring event […]

At last, we’ve got the Mythic Championship results. It’s been quite the build up between the ongoing saga of Izzet Phoenix and questions over the proposed mulligan change. We were all looking for definitive answers from London, and while I didn’t get all of them, I think there’s enough evidence to answer some of them. […]

By the time this piece is published, Mythic Championship London will be streaming, and Modern players will be testing the London mulligan in a high-pressure environment for the first time. The results of that event will have a massive effect on the format’s future. For those who just can’t wait until the Top 8 ends […]

Nothing lasts forever; the mighty will eventually fall; time erases all wounds; change is the only constant. All such platitudes mean for Modern is that one deck can only remain on top of the format for so long. Eventually, the format either adapts to the deck, there’s a structural change to the metagame, or the banhammer […]

Modern is vast and diverse enough to make metagaming a frequently terrible idea. However, sometimes it is warranted. With Izzet Phoenix, followed by Dredge, consistently dominating the big tournaments in a way that Modern hasn’t seen in years, it makes sense for the first time in a long time to actively target the top decks. How to […]

Each tournament, Izzet Phoenix’s impressive, sustained numbers start to look less like an outlier and more like a pattern. Patterns like these have a history of being addressed by Wizards via the banlist. So how does Izzet Phoenix stack up against past offenders? Do the deck’s decriers have a case for caging the bird? Let’s […]

One weekend. Three events. So much data. With an SCG Open and two GPs this weekend, I can better evaluate whether the extreme trends seen in the Regionals data actually have weight, or were the outliers I speculated. Is Phoenix really as good as it looks? The Day 2 Picture For unknown reasons, Channelfireball decided […]

With data reduced to a relative trickle and the overall metagame picture clouded, there hasn’t been much information to work with. However, the data from SCG Regionals is always a strong indicator of the US metagame, so today I’ll be looking at the data. While there is very significant result to dig into, the overall […]

Determining a deck’s tiering is a fairly simple process: take the decks that place in tournaments, compile them in a spreadsheet, rank them by population, done. This is a fine system, and is the only remotely objective way to determine the tier list. However, it doesn’t tell the full story because it can’t explain what […]

The Modern format is so diverse, both quantitatively and competitively, that it can prove tough to quantify; certain players subsequently claim there is no metagame, while others focus only on tournament-winning decks. Each approach lacks some degree of nuance. Today, I’m trying to bring some of it back. I was thrilled when I heard that […]