The weekend of Jan. 13 brought us the most competitive Modern tournaments than we’ve seen in a long time. SCG Con New Jersey had both $20,000 and $5,000 tournaments while the LMS Open Qualifier took place in Trieste and the NRG Champs closed things out. Naturally, each high level Modern tournament offers worthwhile results to parse through. Modern is in …
New Tech in Modern Decks
One interesting part of non-rotating formats in Magic is that players learn how the wide array of cards start to work together in new and exciting ways over time, which allows for strategies to crop up using cards that have been available for a long time. This doesn’t happen often, but players have recently discovered a handful of new, viable …
How to Play Your Seat in Casual Commander
Kristen lends a few thoughts on how to navigate a game of casual Commander based on what seat you’re in. I’ve been thinking, lately, about how useful data can be when reviewing games of Commander. A lot of theory and observations on the format skew toward subjectivity and anecdote, and as we all know, that’s not the most reliable type …
Playing Modern at SCG Con New Jersey
SCG Con New Jersey, the first large Modern tournament of the year, is taking place this weekend, and I’ll be in attendance. Naturally that means figuring out what deck I am going to play — a task I’ve been working on for a couple weeks. Those who know me can tell you I have a bad habit of waffling between …
Pioneer Tier List: December 2022
Despite a Standard focused San Diego Regional Championship on the horizon, we’re back to Pioneer Regional Championship Qualifier season again! With eyes turning back to this format, we made a tier list of all the top decks to see where things have shaken out post Dreamhack Atlanta. That way, when the season starts on Jan. 7, you’re ready to lock …
Regional Championship prep, Dec. 2022: Standard
Standard is back in the spotlight now that we are done with Regional Championship 1, almost making it feel like back in the day when the format was what the majority of competitive players cared about. To remind players of what the format is like and help them get ready for upcoming RCQs, we are going over three of the …
Dominaria Remastered: Draft Guide
Surprised to see another Draft Guide already? Sure, not all of us have quite had our fill of The Brothers’ War just a month after I previewed it here on Card Kingdom. But trust me — this is a special occasion. Dominaria Remastered is only the second remaster set to receive a full paper release, and it’s very different compared …
The Cycle of Pioneer in 2022
We as magic players love to have all the answers. How often have you heard players say, “Oh this deck isn’t good,” or, “This deck needs a ban,” only to have time prove them wrong? Magic players are really good at finding a thing that works and then saying, “why play something else?” This is a totally reasonable stance for …
What’s the Deal with Rakdos Scam in Modern?
Chances are if you’ve played Modern on Magic Online or in a paper tournament of any significant size recently, you’ve likely run into Rakdos Scam. This deck’s path to becoming the Modern boogeyman is an odd one for sure, and today I want to dig deeper to see what about today’s metagame allows it to be the top dog. I …
Modern Tier List: Nov. 2022
Welcome back for the Nov. 2022 update to the Card Kingdom Modern Tier list! This month was a bit slow for Modern tournaments, as both SCG Philadelphia and all of the Regional Championships played Pioneer. However, we still have some solid, online data to look at for November. The Brothers’ War has been out for a couple of weeks, and …