Metagame Breakdown

With 674 players, the Modern main event set a new record. It took a while to get a handle on 674 decklists, of course, but we got the numbers in. Leading the ranking of the most popular archetypes was, unsurprisingly, the black-green midrange strategy with either white or red; a minor surprise was that white was almost twice as popular as red here.

Next were Death's Shadow decks, commonly in Jund colors with the optional addition of white, although single players also opted for a straight Abzan or even Grixis build. Decks based on the trio of Urza's Tower, Urza's Mine, and Urza's Power Plant rounded out the top three.

Grixis decks ran the full gamut from control to aggro-control, with some picking up the new Bone Picker. The newly popular green-white midrange decks also made good use of a somewhat new card in Renegade Rallier, while Collected Company players were quick to adopt the combination of Vizier of Remedies and Devoted Druid. The influx of new cycling cards from Amonkhet was also featured within some Living End decks.

Of course, as always, the most interesting part of the metagame was hiding under the “Other” label. Established archetypes like Lantern Control, Infect, Ad Nauseam, and Goryo's Vengeance decks almost broke the 1.5 percent threshold, but so did more wacky creations such as Black-White Tokens, Spirits, and Goblins. In total, no less than thirty different archetypes were being played, including strategies based on Eidolon of Blossoms, Madcap Experiment, Smallpox, Protean Hulk, and Enduring Ideal.