We don’t get a Modern Grand Prix until September; if you were as pumped about summer Modern as I was, GP Oklahoma City can’t come soon enough. Thankfully, Modern has continued to evolve in the wake of our June GP gauntlet, and the metagame hasn’t looked this open in years. Since our last metagame breakdown […]

The last time I had such an exciting month of Modern was March 2014, back during GP Richmond. And that was just a single GP without any major set releases co-occurring. June saw not one, not two, but three Grand Prix tournaments, along with the Magic Origins spoiler, the MTGO Modern Festival, an SCG Modern Open, and […]

We’ve seen some interest in Saturday articles for a while now, and with the MTGO Modern Festival Finals coming up on Sunday, July 5, there hasn’t been a better time to fire off a pre-event article to prepare players for Sunday’s showdown. The tournament winner goes home with one copy of every single Modern-legal set, […]

Wizards loves to talk about the openness and diversity of Modern. Both the GP Charlotte and GP Copenhagen Day 2 Metagame Breakdowns made claims like this about the format, stating that Modern was “packed with a diversity of archetypes” and that the breakdown “shows the immense diversity of the Modern format.” Although we Modern players like […]

GP Charlotte didn’t just meet expectations. It set a new bar for Modern tournaments. We saw Collected Company and Splinter Twin. We saw Cryptic Command and

It’s a great time to be a Modern player, and as the summer starts, there’s a lot to look forward to. The offseason is almost over! Modern Masters 2015 is driving down prices! GPs, IQs, and PPTQs are coming! New decks are everywhere! With all these factors at play, it’s more important than ever to check […]

The Deep Dive dataset is back! In three earlier articles, I analyzed a collection of MTGO dailies to determine the matchups and win rates of different top-tier decks. Unlike the publicly published MTGO dailies used to inform the Top Decks page, our Deep Dive dataset includes all finishes from a sample of dailies, not just the 4-0/3-1 ones. It also includes […]

Jund is back. After months of neglect at the hands of Abzan players everywhere, Jund has returned to the spotlight as a tier 1 deck. We made this official in early May, classifying the deck as tier 1 based on its consistent paper and MTGO performances, and we have continued to see it succeed in […]

May is here and that means we are a few weeks closer to Modern Masters 2015, a month closer to the sweet GP blitz of June, and ready for another metagame update from Modern Nexus. My last metagame update, covering the 3/1-4/1 period, saw subtle metagame changes including downticks in Abzan, Twin, and Burn, the beginning […]

One of the more frustrating limitations of Wizards-published dailies is the lack of matchup information. You get lists, you get standings, you get win percentages, but you don’t actually know which decks beat which decks en route to their finish. This is fine if you just want to describe the Modern metagame, but far less helpful […]

Delver lives. As anyone who has been playing MTGO, following the results of SCG and TCG States events, or reading this site knows, the rumors of Delver’s death have been greatly exaggerated. Although the traditional UR Delver deck did fade into obscurity following the (in)famous banning of Treasure Cruise, another Delver and another delve card […]

In last week’s article, we took a deep dive into the world of unpublished MTGO dailies, capturing performance by both the 4-0/3-1 decks and the 2-2 or worse finishers. This dataset gives us a chance to look at a deck’s performance throughout an event, not just in the winner’s bracket. MTGO statistics in action! We […]

I’m a big fan of using MTGO data to analyze deck performance. But one of the biggest issues with data available on the Wizards website is it’s incomplete. We only see 4-0/3-1 decks, we only see one event per day, and we have no idea what matchups happened on the way to those finishes. Although […]