Another SCG Regionals is in the books, and SCG Con is just days away. It’s an exciting time to be a Modern player, or at least a Modern data hound. Today, we’ll look at some of the cooler lists from Regionals, and I’ll give my thoughts both on the recent success of Colorless Eldrazi Stompy […]

There is an old proverb about the best-laid plans. I intended to examine the results from SCG Regionals this week, but at writing time, they had not been officially posted. The few forum and reddit posts provide patchwork at best data, so that article will have to wait. Instead, I will be discussing how I […]

With hard metagame data being increasingly hard to come by, having several events in a row is a relief. Rather than extrapolation and conjecture, data and fact can guide my recommendations. This string of Star City events will provide an excellent guide for those heading to GP Las Vegas, and preparation and information are the […]

I’ve been doing a lot of theoretical work over the past few months. With Dominaria’s release there was plenty of need—and opportunity—to explore and brew. During this process I was constantly underwhelmed by Modern’s ostensible top deck, Humans. It was a fine deck, but it didn’t really shine. As I explained last week, this left me perplexed about […]

I fully intended to play in SCG Milwaukee last weekend. I’d been practicing and preparing for weeks, tuned my deck, and even made the travel arrangements. Then the two great powers of plan ruination, unexpected work and bad weather, derailed my plans. However, I’m not one to let all that work go to waste. Instead […]

Another weekend, another major event to review: this time, GP Phoenix. The paper metagame continues to be hard to pin down. There are significant changes from SCG Dallas which muddy the waters and makes any projection difficult. There appear to be some trends forming but anything can be a trend when you only have two […]

With SCG Dallas in the books, the process of deciphering the metagame can commence. True, there have been plenty of MTGO results to pore over, but selected lists don’t form a random sample. It’s curated with a goal in mind, and so not every deck has an equal chance of being included. In large tournaments, […]

Last weekend, I took down the 400-player SCG Classic in Worcester with my tried-and-true Colorless Eldrazi Stompy deck, losing only four games over 12 rounds. I’ve long championed the deck as a sleeper behemoth in the format, but haven’t had much time over the last year to show it off in tournament settings. My previous […]

It’s only February, and we’ve already seen the most high-profile Modern event of the year. Pro Tour Rivals of Ixalan went totally according to plan: no Eye of Ugin shenanigans; no team of baby-genius-pros breaking the format in half; no flurry of bans raining down on the winning deck. So, business as usual, right? Wrong! […]

Pro Tour Rivals of Ixalan, the first Modern PT in two years, is in the books! And I’m feeling kind of flat about the whole thing. This is probably because I didn’t watch the live version. It’s not the coverage team’s fault. However, I have no interest in watching live drafts, and trying to watch […]

The 2018 Star City Games Team Constructed Open was held in “Philadelphia” (the location of the event was about a half hour drive away from the actual city) this past weekend, and given that it’s the first major paper tournament that’s been held within an hour of me in a long time, I resolved to […]

Last weekend was SCG Dallas, a Team Constructed Open that again featured Modern experts duking it out on the big stage. As one of the last datapoints before the upcoming Pro Tour, Dallas gives us a few interesting bits of information to work with. Today, we’ll focus on the cooler deckbuilding choices made by some […]

Pro Tour Bilbao’s just two weeks away. Soon, all eyes will be on Modern, the now-beloved alternative to Standard and Legacy. And perhaps for the first time as a true replacement for those formats. Wizards has shown us unequivocally that they plan on supporting this format whole-heartedly—with tournaments; with reprints; with heavy-handed (and largely successful) […]