Modern Masters and Masters of Modern hype!

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Newsletter
Thursday, March 2nd

Take a weekend to catch your breath, because next week? We're right back in action down in Dallas! Modern is still the name of the game with Death's Shadow being the talk of the town, but with Modern Masters 2017 on the way, there are more decks to sleeve up than ever before. Chas Andres has plenty of reasons for why you should feel good about your Modern collection, and Jeff Hoogland is back evolving his favorite archetype of the past year! And don't forget to check out the lightning-fast Revolt Zoo deck our own Cedric Phillips has been working on!

— Danny West, Content Coordinator

Nicholas Byrd
Modern Open

Eli Kassis
Standard Classic

Alex Williams
Modern Classic

Modern Is Not Dying
By Chas Andres  

Think about it this way: Wizards of the Coast releases between five and six Magic sets every year. Of these, four contain at least 90% new cards set in all-new (or heavily reworked) fantasy worlds. These sets make up the bulk of WotC's sales, but they also make up the bulk of their costs. They have to pay people to design, test, and develop the cards as well as to create the world, paint the art, write fiction for the game's story, market the set, etc.

WotC also designs and develops casual sets, like Conspiracy and the Commander series. The costs here are far lower from a development perspective because these sets tend to be at least 50% reprint-driven. I would also bet that they don't spend as much time world-building as they do on their flagship sets.

Last, WotC prints sets in the Masters series. These are 100% reprints, though the company does commission new art and ensure that the set is balanced for limited play. Even still, these sets have (by far) the cheapest R&D costs associated with them. They also have the highest pack prices, by far, with an MSRP of $9.99/booster.

How can WotC get away with charging $10/pack for sets that cost very little to develop? It's because they contain cards like Tarmogoyf, which sell for over $100 on the secondary market. In fact, as we learned last week, WotC seems to at least somewhat balance these sets around secondary market prices in order to make sure that you are enticed into buying a whole bunch of boosters. If the best cards in Modern Masters topped out at $30, who would play the booster pack lottery at $10/pack, knowing they were probably going to open Stoic Angel anyway? If WotC wants to keep Modern Masters going—and my guess is that they totally do, because it's basically printing free money—they need to make sure that Modern is a well-supported format.

March 24-26
KLD/AER Limited

April 8-9
Legacy

April 29-30
Standard

Let's Talk Kiki Blue
By Jeff Hoogland  

The most common question I have gotten about this card is:

"Is Unified Will really better than Negate?"

The short answer is "Yes."

The longer answer is that, in most matches where you want a counterspell, your opponent will be fairly creature-light. This means that if you do not have more creatures than your opponent, you likely have no creatures, which means you are losing the game regardless. I think this means the upside of having our countermagic stop things like Primeval Titan and Wurmcoil Engine is worthwhile.

Other notables in this decklist are the lack of Qasali Pridemage, the inclusion of Myr Superion, and the return of Courser of Kruphix. Pridemage felt like a safe cut from the maindeck, since we have Nahiri to clean up random enchantments Game 1.

Myr Superion was to account for the amount of Bant Eldrazi and Eldrazi Tron I was expecting at the event. Having a two-mana card we can Chord for that blocks Reality Smasher and Thought‑Knot Seer profitably is huge.

All About Revolt Zoo
By Cedric Phillips  

First things first, I had to get those copies of Dismember out of here. We're trying to kill our opponent, not interact with them. Lightning Bolt is a card, and if I'm playing Wild Nacatl, I'm damn sure playing Lightning Bolt with it.

Next up, I cut the copies of Manamorphose. Look, I get it. Sometimes Hidden Herbalists gives you the wrong mana. The solution? Put more green cards in your deck. Manamorphose is broken in Storm. It's a mana fixer in Zoo. No thanks!

I played in a few Leagues on Magic Online without a sideboard because it was late and I'm lazy, but I had some truly crazy draws that my opponents had no shot on catching up with. Further, my opponents didn't really have any way to kill all my creatures at once except for a few stray copies of Anger of the Gods, and I was actually coming out quicker than Chalice of the Void on the draw, thanks to Simian Spirit Guide.