Sig has recently accepted the fact that he has a problem: he’s spending too much time on his smartphone, ignoring the world around him. This week, Sig uses Jeremy’s Grab Bag sale as a case study as he explores ways to cut down on time wasted on MTG finance.
Opinion
Differentiator – one that shows a contrasting element that distinguishes. What sets your store apart from everyone else? David offers his insights.
Hogaak and Looting are banned, and Stoneforge Mystic is free at last from the Modern banned list. What do these changes promise for our beloved format? And what does equipment searching have to do with fast food chains? Let’s find out! Elephant in the Room Before even thinking about the void left by Hogaak, or […]
Beaters, or combat creatures, are among my favorite types of Magic cards. They serve to pressure opponents in the most straightforward way possible: by attacking efficiently. Weaker beaters, such as Delver of Secrets, are at their best when paired with disruption; stronger ones can emerge later in the game to take over or put things […]
In terms of data, it seems Modern is at a crossroads. This is the problem I found myself with last week. Half the data said that Hogaak was a busted, dominate deck. The other said that it was successful, but only as a function of its popularity. The narrative coming out of last weekend is that […]
Magic finance and Magic play are two separate hobbies nowadays. They are frequently in tension with each other–an optimal choice in one may be suboptimal in the other. This week Sig reflects on this tension and shares personal anecdotes for how it has impacted his buy/sell decisions.
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 […]
Have you ever stopped to think about how much time you actually spend on MTG Finance on a weekly basis? This week Sig considers this and makes some personal commitments on how he’ll strategically cut back.
Last week, I unveiled the first part of my Punishing Fire test. With the data compiled and revealed, it’s time for the less-concrete part. The data is the data and speaks for itself. However, that’s not the whole story. Magic isn’t just a numbers game; there are a lot of intangibles. For instance, it’s also supposed […]
The focus of Magic’s newest expansion, War of the Spark, is planeswalkers. These have historically lacked what it takes to consistently make a splash in Modern. Walkers are fair cards, after all, and designed for a Standard power level; besides, in a Turn Four Format, successfully integrating a permanent type that tends to cost four […]
And now it’s time for everyone’s favorite part of the banlist test: the experimental data. With 500 matches of Jund with and without Punishing Fire under my belt, I have developed a very strong opinion on unbanning the card. Today, I will reveal the hard numbers and their statistical significance. As always, these data are […]
The time has come to start rolling out the results of my latest foray into the Modern banlist. In the past, the return of this series was hailed with a public vote for which card I’d work on, followed by months of silence while I actually did the work. This time, extenuating circumstances dictated the […]
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 […]
