Overdriven! 59

Modern: Huge Tracts of Unexplored Land

It has been said of Modern: “The most important thing about Modern is diversity. It’s by and far the most open format right now, there are huge tracts of land no one has explored. It’s the new frontier of competitive Magic.” And “The nice thing about Modern is that the format is very open. There’s a lot of room to explore and find decks that can work.” And just to hammer that point, here are maps from some recent explorations:

It always tickles my funnybone when I see a Glittering Wish deck show up. Way back when Return to Ravnica was first announced, I rambled a bit about how this card might become a player. Since that time, this is only the second time I’ve seen it, so I guess that prognostication was off by a little bit!

This deck appears to have a broad disruption package, culminating in a Cruel Ultimatum to seal the deal. In my own opinion, the deck seems light on beaters, and the reanimation package isn’t there at all! But what do I know? I’m not a “control” player, and as I am so fond of saying: you can’t argue with results.

This looks to be basically a Modern port of Pauper Fae, with a surprise thrown in! Trinket Mage is especially interesting here. All those extra artifacts are a nice little trinket package there in the sideboard.


Meta Madness

Three weeks into the new quarter, and we have a new meta! Woo hoo! You have no idea how happy I am to be able to serve up the madness that is the Modern Meta to you on a platter once again.

The overall meta will be changing again today with the Banned & Restricted announcement. Who knows where the mighty banhammer M’bannor will fall? We saw a Glass Cannon deck go off on Turn 2 for lethal during coverage, so maybe there is a Griselbanned announcement. I don’t know. I wrote this last week.

Of course, we’re still dealing with WotC’s decision to redact the majority of results, but oh well. What we have is close enough for institutional work. This is not to say I’m not still upset about this it.




Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Kiki Pod with Domri Rade has been making inroads. Since Pod decks are almost all creatures, Domri is almost guaranteed to pop a critter to your hand with his +1.

Jund

The new darling of the Jund sub-meta is W Thundermaw. Here is a typical decklist:

Burn, Baby, Burn!

Burn decks are positioned pretty much “same as it ever was.” White Lightning and Jund Bump both show promise.

Control

The Control submeta would actually be at the number two position in the charts if we were counting strictly by appearances.

Premiere Events


Really. Really? REALLY?!?!?!

So. In the time I’ve been offline, apparently we’ve gotten a wonderful new feature: the client now lets us know that it failed to create a game we didn’t ask for. Over and over and over again, Ad Nauseam.

This has been going on for at least three weeks, and WotC is aware of the issue. The latest downtime did nothing to correct it.

This feature only affects the old client, so there’s apparently no hurry for anyone to get up and do anything about it. Oh, no! The old client is going by the wayside soon anyway, so why bother?

In the meantime, since I am still very dissatisfied with the wide beta, I use the old client. Therefore must I suffer the slings and arrows of WotC coding not giving a rat’s ass.

Or being too incompetent to find it, which is worse.

Interesting Tidbits

MTGO will host a Modern Masters Limited PTQ for PT “Friends” on July 6. Woo hoo! So now we know that at the very least, Modern Masters will be available online at that time. I’m hoping that the online release is a little sooner than that, tho! It’d be nice to get some practice in before a PTQ…

I wasn’t able to track attendance during my enforced absence, hence the gap.

 

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