Awhile back, I took a friend along to a modern FNM.  This particular friend was a strong and experienced player and a logical thinker.  He thought through his turns carefully and made little mistakes in his own game plan.  I was surprised when he went 1-3 on the night but realized that I could credit this to my own mistake.  While we had a conversation about other modern decks on the car ride to the store, I hadn’t adequately prepared him for some of the most common decks in the meta, how they worked, how they win, and what pieces he needed to account for.  As an experienced modern player, this is easy to overlook but if I compare this to my own understanding of legacy or vintage (which is quite limited), I would expect to have the same sort of challenges playing a new deck in a very foreign format.

In this article series, I’m going to break down the most common builds in Modern and some quick rules of thumb to defend against them, hinder them, race them…or survive their combos.  I imagine that this might be helpful to player tiptoeing with competitive modern play but I am finding that the act of going through this process might be useful to a veteran, too.  Though the modern format has thousands of tournament legal cards, it is helpful to focus your attention on the most common strategies (tier 1 and 2) as they will account for about 95% of the field at a weekend tournament or FNM.  Just as you may be familiar with the functions of every piece on an opponent’s chess board, you can identify the core to an opponent’s deck with very little information.  The activity of breaking these plans down based on the cards and interactions they utilize can be very helpful when playing a match, building a sideboard, or brewing a deck.

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