Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “Michael Rapp”
When Lurrus was banned, I had an initial feeling of, “well what do I do now? I’m flying to a tournament in two weeks” the answer to that question is simple: get into the lab and figure it out. I believe in a relatively public testing process. Today I want to go into my testing process, my experiences along the …
On Monday, Wizards of the Coast made a bombshell announcement by banning Lurrus of the Dream-Den in Modern. Now, there could have been a number of different possible bans, but I’m not here to talk about that today. If you want to read my expanded feelings about Lurrus being banned, you can find them here. We can only play the …
It’s no secret that Lurrus of the Dream-Den is one of the most successful cards in Modern. And once a card reaches a certain level of popularity or success, talk of bans inevitably follows. Today, I want to address the elephant cat in the room. To be clear, I don’t think Modern is in need of bans for balance reasons. …
Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty has only been legal on Magic Online for about two weeks at this point, and the hive mind is integrating new cards into decks faster than ever. By now, we have a solid idea which Neon Dynasty cards are going to make an impact in Modern: six unique cards have made enough appearances across nine different decks, …
Welcome back for the February 2022 edition of the Modern Tier List! Last week, we had not only the two Modern SCG events, but two MTGO Challenges and a MTGO PTQ to pull data from. We normally don’t get to look at five large tournaments in just one weekend, so we have a much clearer picture of the metagame than …
Last week, I covered the Modern decks to expect for any upcoming tournaments, which you can find here. Now, it’s time to check out what is going on in Legacy. Whether you’re playing a local event, a MTGO Challenge, or SCGCON Philadelphia (which is where I’ll be this weekend), it’s important to know what to expect in the metagame. Legacy …
Next weekend is SCGCON Philadelphia, the first large paper Magic event since Las Vegas. For folks that are just getting back into the swing of Modern, or for those looking to fine-tune their decks, knowing what decks to expect is useful. While Modern is too wide to provide a comprehensive list of every deck that might show up, I’d like …
Grixis Death’s Shadow has been putting up great results in Modern since November. In fact, it made the cut as one of just three A-Tier decks in our monthly Modern Tier List last week. But ironically, over the last two months, I’ve been gravitating to Four-Color Death’s Shadow instead. Why stray from such a successful formula? Simply put, to see …
Welcome back for the January 2022 edition of Modern Tier List! Over the last month, we’ve seen three decks really separate themselves from the field, making for a much smaller A Tier than we’re used to. That means that several of the heavy hitters are getting relegated to B Tier this month, while some combo decks are starting to fight …
Modern has 16,117 legal cards ranging from 8th Edition to Innistrad: Crimson Vow. In a card pool this wide, it’s natural for there to be a rather large gap between the best and the worst cards. Once we narrow our focus on cards with competitive viability, the card pool shrinks dramatically. However, there is still a stark difference between the …
