All good stories must come to an end. Hopefully, they’ll be paced better than Game of Thrones’s was. The Throne of Eldraine prerelease is this weekend and the spoiler is finished, so it’s time to wrap up my set review. There haven’t been many interesting individual cards spoiled since my last article, but a number of […]

Thrones of Eldraine spoilers are rolling on, and I’m having more fun watching them than any other set I can remember. That’s not to say that  Modern Horizons was boring nor War of the Spark lacking content. Rather, there are more opportunites to make your own fun with Eldraine than the other sets. Rosewater showed how the cards […]

This has been an utterly insane summer for Magic. Three set releases in close proximity, followed by Hogaak, and then a major banlist update. Modern players are struggling to remember what it means to have a metagame, much less investigate one. We’ve barely had time to catch our breath for the past four months, and […]

The first week of the entirely new Modern is over and nobody has any idea where we’re heading. So far all the excitement has been focused on the unbanning, and with good reason. I imagine most players are as tired as I am of the graveyard heavy format we’ve had for the past year and […]

It’s been a packed weekend for Modern. Not only was there a major event, but there’s been a major, cataclysmic upheaval. August 26 will be remembered as a major turning point in Modern’s history. Which way it’s turning isn’t clear. But turn it will. In this article, I’ll give a quick report of my GP […]

Another event-filled weekend, another data dump, another chance for Modern to adapt and contain the arisen menace. It may not be likely, but as someone locked into making the trip to GP Las Vegas, I feel the need to hope. Barring a sudden abandonment of Hogaak, Arisen Necropolis in Birmingham, I was also hoping against […]

With another GP in the books, it’s time once again to dig into the data. When I last did so right after the big MC weekend, the picture was muddied by contradictory results. Half indicated that Hogaak was a dominant force in the metagame. The other half indicated that it was just another deck. Its […]

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 […]

For the first time in quite a while, I have a massive data dump to analyze! The past weekend contained a Modern GP, an SCG Open, and the Mythic Championship. With all the shocks finally wearing off, we can start to get a handle on the new metagame. But not without first noting that this […]

This is an odd feeling for me. For all its flaws, the PPTQ system meant that grinders like me always had competitive level events to grind and keep our skills sharp. The MCQ system is functionally the same as the old PTQ system, which means very few events and very spread out. Since I’m a […]

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 […]

With all of Core 2020 spoiled and the prerelease looming, it’s time to wrap up spoiler talk. After the flood of clear playables in Modern Horizons, 2020 is back to being mostly about roleplayers and brewing opportunities. This is typical of a non-Modern-specific release, and much like a typical set, 2020 has plenty of interesting cards that need a […]