Thanks to Wizards’ bombshell unban announcement, Modern is on the cusp of a great age of experimentation. Established and rogue archetypes alike will be examining their 75s in efforts to either combat or incorporate the format’s latest newcomers, and I fully expect some new archetypes to appear in the wake of these powerful additions to […]

David is out for the holidays until next week. In the meantime, please enjoy his article from earlier this year where he presented results from the Preordain ban test. These results were originally presented in two separate articles (here and here), but I’ve divided them into parts for the purpose of easier reading. Part 1: […]

Fair and unfair can prove contentious terms when it comes to deck discussion, perhaps especially in Modern. This week, I’d like to expand upon some of the ways to categorize and define decks that I initially touched upon in my articles on how to tune a deck’s mainboard flex spots and sideboard to an open meta. […]

The time has (finally) come to actually reveal the results of my latest banlist test. Looking back, testing two different decks made this harder than it needed to be. Focusing just on Storm would have yielded more satisfying data, though not a more significant result. As you will see, it appears that Preordain would not […]

Once again, it is time to start rolling out my results from the latest Banlist Test. As usual, I will start with the experimental setup and the unquantifiable results. I know that what most readers care about are the hard numbers, but I’m not done gathering the data yet. That will be coming sometime in […]

In The Bolt Test: Modern’s High-Water Mark, I revisited an old Mike Flores article on toughness. Flores claimed a format was often defined by the amount of damage its red removal spell dealt. Burn spells generally serve as some of the most efficient—and versatile—removal spells in a given card pool, for their cheap costs and ability to […]

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 […]

Immediately following its mainstream introduction to Modern by Josh Utter-Leyton and his crew at GP Vancouver, Death’s Shadow gained significant footing in the metagame. The explosion of Jund Shadow onto the paper scene at roughly 10% has since cooled, with the deck taking a more reasonable 8% share when lumped in with Abzan Shadow builds. Part of the reason for […]

The line between genius and madness is indistinct. The line between epiphany and world-class tilting-off is blurry. I’m in something of a fugue, and uncertain of where I stand anymore. While I am personally certain of the veracity of my forthcoming statement describing the Modern metagame, my ability to perceive normal reality is compromised. I’ll […]

Sideboarding is without a doubt one of the most essential and difficult-to-master skills in Magic: The Gathering. In tournament Magic, you play more sideboard games than pre-sideboard games by a wide margin, and the difference between sideboarding well and sideboarding poorly will frequently be a deciding factor in your eventual match result. In a format as wide […]

At last, the time has come to reveal the data about my Jace testing. As a reminder, these data come from 500 matches, well over 1000 individual games played over five months. I publish my methods so that you can replicate my experiment if you disagree with the results, but I have to warn you […]

And so it begins. I want to start with a general thank-you to everyone who helped out. This was an enormous undertaking logistically and took much longer than expected. Even considering the deck I was using for testing purposes. Thank you for putting up with this insanely ambitious project. And please, please, pleeeease be willing to […]

This is going to be a controversial month for my column. My banlist testing article series will return shortly, which will incite a firestorm even if readers like my results. Rather than run from this, I’m going to embrace it. Bring on Argument Month! I’m going to defy consensus and defend something many believe is indefensible. First, some background. […]