Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “Michael Rapp”
Modern seems to have finally recovered from the banning of Mox Opal and Oko, Thief of Crowns. Out of the rubble, we’ve seen various builds of Amulet Titan emerge as the decks to beat. But an unfortunate side effect to having a best deck is that people will often want to see cards in that deck banned from the format. …
Editor’s Note: Inverter of Truth has been banned in Pioneer effective August 3, 2020. Last weekend, we saw the first round of Regional Players Tour events in Brussels and Nagoya. Dimir Inverter was the deck to beat in both events, and things didn’t go spectacularly well for those attempting to do so — Inverter took six of the sixteen potential …
Five-Color Niv-Mizzet is both one of the hottest decks in Pioneer and my personal favorite deck in the format. This deck can interact with your opponent with a wide array of disruptive spells until you can resolve a creature that generates value, such as Niv-Mizzet Reborn. The key is to get ahead on resources and then use those resources to …
Theros Beyond Death released today! New releases affect Standard more than any other format, but I’m here today to talk about which cards will break out of Standard and into Modern. While I don’t think we have a new Oko, Thief of Crowns in this set, we do get some powerful upgrades for existing decks. Let’s take a look! Heliod, …
This Monday, Oko, Thief of Crowns, Mycosynth Lattice, and Mox Opal were banned in Modern. If you’re like me, maybe you danced a little bit in celebration as Modern’s last sacred cow, Mox Opal, finally got the axe. Many players saw the Oko ban coming — especially after he was banned from Standard and Pioneer — but the Mycosynth Lattice …
Urza was the talk of the town during the StarCityGames Open in Columbus this past weekend — and, given the deck’s recent performance, that’s to be expected. But if you were watching closely, the biggest new development of the tournament was Sultai Titan. As Modern has evolved, the Amulet Titan decks have evolved with it. Before we look at Sulati …
Competitive Magic tends to slow down around the holidays, as players take a well-deserved break from the grind. As such, I thought this would be a good time to take a step back from my normal strategy content and write something a bit more fun. I reached out to the community in request of some categories that I could use …
Long gone are the days where turn one Glistener Elf was among the scariest starts in Modern… or so we thought. Since the banning of Gitaxian Probe, we’ve seen blips on the radar from Blighted Agent and friends when Scale Up and Teferi, Time Raveler were printed, but neither allowed consistent success. However, in the back half of 2019, Infect …
The Modern metagame may not move nearly as fast as Standard, but if you look closely, you can see how the top deck evolve. The Urza decks are a great example of this: In the past year, Urza has been a Whir of Invention-based combo/prison deck, a Paradoxical Outcome combo deck, and (currently) a Simic midrange deck that uses Oko …
As the end of 2019 approaches, we’ve seen a lot in Magic over the year in Modern, and a brand-new format emerge in Pioneer. We were lucky enough to get a bevy of events this last weekend to pull data from: the StarCityGames Invitational, a Modern MTGO PTQ, a Modern MTGO Challenge, two Modern PTQs at GP Sao Paulo, a …
