Data Analysis: The Top Modern Decks, March–April 2021

End Phase: Concluding the Post-Uro Era

Do you want to know which were the best decks in Modern this past month, and where it will be safe to start after the release of Strixhaven? You've come to the the right place!

The issue with the Wizards website mentioned in my last article took a while to be fixed, and even afterward, we never got the results that went missing in the meantime. So this month's article will only focus on the data from the past three weeks instead of four. Happily, there were two Super Qualifiers in the past few days, so we still have eight official events to cover even though the ones from four weeks ago are unavailable. Here are the events we cover today:

List of MTGO Major Events between 2021-03-22 and 2021-04-12:
Modern Challenge 2021-03-27
Modern Challenge 2021-03-28
Modern Challenge 2021-04-03
Modern Challenge 2021-04-04
Modern Super Qualifier 2021-04-05
Modern Super Qualifier 2021-04-09
Modern Showcase Challenge 2021-04-10
Modern Challenge 2021-04-11

Some Quick Stats:
Number of decks in the data: 256
Number of different players in the data: 201
Number of different cards in the data: 686
Number of exact archetypes in the data: 51
Number of super archetypes in the data: 39
Number of rounds played (with Top 8): 2192
Average number of Swiss rounds: 8.12
Minimum number of Swiss rounds: 7
Maximum number of Swiss rounds: 10
Number of events in the data: 8

Besides, with the Modern metagame about to be shaken up with a new set containing multiple interesting cards for Eternal formats, we will simply have quick look at the results today, and leave for another time a comparison of the metagame depending on the type of event (Challenges versus Preliminaries versus unofficial events). Speaking of metagame, let's see what the view we use (based on the public number of matches played in major events, public meaning it is a deck that reached Top 32) provides for this month.

Archetype Presence

Even with another month, still posts the most results (weighted by matches) with more than 12% of that share, whereas it was under 8% in our previous metagame snapshot. Izzet Prowess also remains in second place, going from 7.4% to 9.2% of the metagame share. So it looks like the meta did not adjust to fight those decks, and people rather applied the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" heuristic, making it appear more disequilibrated than last month. It could be worse though. No need to panic yet, especially with Strixhaven on the way. This set might turbocharge Prowess-like decks, but we shall see about that next month.

Burn sits at around 5.5% of the results; however, it is no longer third. Jund Shadow stole the spot. This is basically the Shadow Prowess deck you used to see in the previous articles, but with a green splash to become stronger against the two most present decks. provides a threat that is not kept in check by or killed by , (not in all the lists yet) also helps dealing with the Champion, and the access to green in the sideboard offers cleaner answers to Heliod such as .

The breakout deck this month is Niv to Light, which Pioneer players should be familiar with. We saw last month that it had the single best win rate in our data set, and it looks like it was no fluke. Functional thanks to the strong mana fixing of the format, it is also full of removal and loads of big card advantage spells, making it extremely strong in fair matchups, and it even gets to be supposedly favored against Heliod. If you wish to learn more about this deck, check out this very recent and in-depth guide, available in both English and Italian.

Closer to the rogue side, Yawgmoth Combo also posted a notable increase in results lately. The aim here is to get into play along with two other undying creatures such as . One can then use Yawgmoth's first activated ability over and over, and win thus from some triggers—such as the Messenger's, or 's. It can also run a high number of singletons due to the number of tutor spells it includes, either to find a combo piece or a silver bullet. You can find a detailed explanation of the combo and reasoning behind some card choices on Reddit. Even though it is a little outdated with regard to card selection, the rulings did not change.

Ranking the Decks

As before, we will use the win rates of each archetype in addition to their presence in order to establish a ranking and a tier list. We can display those win rates for the most present decks the following way:

As usual, the numbers are high since we only have decks that reached the Top 32 of major events. If you do not want to see this as a "true" win rate, simply think about it as how well a deck did on average if it reached a Top 32: if it was rather at the lower end of the Top 32 or rather reached the Top 8 for instance. The confidence intervals are correlated to the number of matches played (which is one of the reasons why it is used as the presence metric): the more a deck was played, the smaller the interval is. This is why Heliod Combo exhibits a relatively small interval for example.

We can see that Green Tron posted results of a high quality, as did Amulet Titan, , and Esper Control, whereas the Shadow variants failed to rack up impressive numbers. Among the very most present decks, it is interesting to note that Heliod Combo, Izzet Prowess, and Burn all seem to have very average results to show for themselves compared to their peers, which might be related to the higher sample size on those decks. Of course, in part due to that high sample size, Heliod still accounts for the highest lower bound on its confidence interval.

If we display both the win rate and the presence for all the decks in the data, we see the following:

Among the decks with the highest win rates—but dubious sample sizes—you should already be familiar with Mill if you read my first article. You should also be quite capable to guess what UBRG Shadow is: a Jund Shadow deck as mentioned earlier, but also splashing blue for counterspells and . Otherwise, you can check out the Top 4 Super Qualifier decklist.

As for Giants, it is a Temur ramp/control deck that quickly appeared after Kaldheim gave us . But it just as quickly got overshadowed by the truly overpowered decks of the time and fell off the radar after the banning of the Giant . Now it reached the finals of Sunday's Challenge, which might lead more people to play it in the coming weeks … if it does not fall into obscurity again with the incoming meta change due to Strixhaven.

For our tier list, as mentioned before, we only keep the decks whose presence is above the average presence in the data. With this "zoom", we get:

We now compute a normalized combination of the presence and the win rate, as detailed in the last article, and get the following values for each deck:

Through a divide in the middle based on the average of those values (in green), to which we add or remove a standard deviation of the value (in red), we can split the decks in four categories, and we get our tier list!

Bonus: Modern Series Full Results

During the period where Wizards did not post Magic Online results, a decently large unofficial Modern event took place: the March NRG Series MTGO Open. As always, the entirety of the results were posted. You can find the breakdown on Reddit and the matchup matrix on mtgmeta.io.

Cleanup

This is it for this month's Modern breakdown. We shall soon see how Strixhaven will impact this metagame, and whether Heliod stays on top or not. Maybe will help deal with it? You can also expect prowess decks to be widely played at the beginning with all the new magecraft options, especially and/or . I saw easily 30 cards from Strixhaven being discussed for Modern, so we can expect at least a few to make a decent impact. Reddit can give you an idea of what to look out for but doesn't cover all cards, so you should definitely read further articles on Cardmarket Insight to find out more.

See you next month to check up on which cards made some waves in the meantime!

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Opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and not necessarily Cardmarket.