News & Articles

Modern Before RC Baltimore: The Deck to Beat Is Two Decks, Ten Lists Apart

One Ephemerate on a reanimated Atraxa and the Angel stays forever — that rules trick took Esper Goryo's from 2.7% of Modern lists in February to the top of the format, while Boros Energy fell from 19.5% in March to…

Reality Fracture Debut: Rhystic Study on a Planeswalker and Nine More Cards Your Pod Is Already Arguing About

Reality Fracture's villain draws you a card on every opponent's draw step — Rhystic Study with no tax, on a planeswalker with three loyalty — and 3,911 EDHREC decks had slotted him in before he's legal. We ranked the…

The Best-Performing Card of 2026 Is a Land That Only Works in Commander

The best-performing card printed in 2026 is a tapland that does literally nothing outside Commander. We pulled the full price history of all 1,714 new cards released this year out of DeckCortex's own database and…

The Hobbit, Three Weeks Later: Which Cards Actually Stuck

Standard's most-played Hobbit card is a two-mana common that sits in 120 sideboards and two main decks. Three weeks of DeckCortex decklist data across seven formats, August 11 to September 4: Warg Tactics in 122 of…

A 2007 Common Won cEDH's Biggest Open. It Cost One Green Mana.

Sprout Swarm is a $4.99 common from 2007 with convoke and buyback. Under Witherbloom, the Balancer its total cost with buyback is {4}{G}, affinity for creatures deletes the {4}, and the Saproling it just made taps to…

Casualty Wants a Corpse for Every Spell. Sedgemoor Witch Pays You Two.

Casualty charges you a creature for every copied spell — and Sedgemoor Witch hands you two back, because magecraft reads "cast or copy". We walk Silverquill, the Disputant through all four official rulings (the copy…

Y'shtola Is Magic's Most-Built Commander Ever. Her Tournament Lists Are Quietly Un-Building Her.

The card climbing fastest in Y'shtola's tournament lists is mana value 1 — her trigger needs mana value 3, so it does nothing for her at all. Meanwhile Papalymo Totolymo, the 33-cent uncommon that pings on every spell…

One Cantrip, Three Cards: How a $1.18 Marvel Card Reached cEDH's Top Ten

Cast a one-mana cantrip, draw three cards. That's what a $0.98 aura from 1998 does once it's sitting on Crystal, Inhuman Princess — and it's why a $1.18 Marvel card went from zero tracked cEDH entries in May to the…

The Best Card in the $334.99 He-Man Superdrop Costs One Mana

The most-played card you can actually buy in Magic's $334.99 Masters of the Universe Superdrop isn't the full-art Sol Ring — it's a one-mana white instant from 2009 that sits in 37.8% of our 51,592 cEDH decklists, and…

Standard After the August Bans: Green Was the Target. Green Won the Week.

Wizards banned Badgermole Cub to kill green — then green nearly doubled to 16.5% of post-ban Standard and took three of the week's fourteen Challenge wins, because the real engine was never the Cub: Icetill Explorer…

The Hobbit's Five Most Expensive Cards — and Why the Priciest One Helps Your Opponent

The most expensive card in The Hobbit is a two-mana white enchantment whose own rules text hands your opponent a card every time you use it — and it has never appeared in a Standard decklist. We counted the set's five…

One New Sentence in the Rules Just Made Selvala Answerable

For twelve years, nobody could respond to Selvala's Parley — mana abilities never touch the stack. One new sentence in rule 605.1a ends that: ten cards lose mana-ability status overnight, a $0.55 Pithing Needle now…

Thranduil, the Elvenking: The Commander Deck The Hobbit Won't Sell You

The Hobbit ships no Commander precons — and its most-built new commander is a $2.38 main-set rare. Thranduil, the Elvenking borrows every activated ability of every Elf in your graveyard, and by August 12 the builders…

The Fantasticar Verdict: Banned, Restricted, and Already Worth Six Dollars

The verdict is in: The Fantasticar is banned in Legacy and restricted in Vintage — 45 days after release, with the card already down to $6.05 before Wizards said a word. We grade our own ban-watch predictions (Vintage:…

Miku's Commander Deck Ships With Zero Combos, and One $3 Card Fixes That

We ran the Hatsune Miku Secret Lair Commander deck through DeckCortex on release day: zero complete combos in the box, but 32 waiting one cheap card away. The full day-one review, plus a staged upgrade path from $5 to…

The Hobbit's Best Commanders, Ranked for Your Casual Table

63 new legends, one command zone: we rank The Hobbit's best casual commanders with live EDHREC counts, Oracle-verified rules text, real prices — and a data-backed warning about the combo lines that quietly push your…

The Infinite Combos WotC Ships in Precons

We scanned all 178 precon decklists in our database against Commander Spellbook: 16 ship with a two-card infinite combo straight from the factory — and the rate has jumped from 4% (2011–2022) to roughly one in five…

The Hobbit Set Review: Four Smaugs, 48 Legends, and a Market Making Up Its Mind

Spoiler season closed July 31 with all 193 cards public, and the preorder market immediately started contradicting the "low-power flop" consensus — Beorn up 139% in a week, the One Ring refusing to crash, an $800…

The $545 Million Quarter and the $93 Deck: What Playing Magic Actually Costs

Magic just posted its first half-billion-dollar quarter while its players argue the game has priced them out — so we priced 3,437 July tournament decks card by card across eight formats. The answer runs from a $93 Red…

Pioneer at the Crossroads: Did the Field Finally Answer Greasefang?

Greasefang's share of Pioneer nearly doubled in July — and its top-cut conversion halved. We went through 1,201 published lists and every one of the 61 events with a named winner to settle the question our July piece…

The Game Changers Staircase: Ranking All 53 of Commander's "Equal" Cards

One Rhystic Study flips your bracket exactly like one Panoptic Mirror — but one of them is in 62.1% of the 58,497 cEDH tournament lists we track, and the other is in six. We walked all 53 Game Changers down the…

Fantasticar Ban Watch: One Format Down, 13 Days to Go

The Fantasticar is already banned in one format: Duel Commander pulled the trigger 31 days after release, and Wizards decides on August 10. We lay out the whole case before the verdict — the 16-power trigger, five…

Pauper in July 2026: The Ban Worked, the Format Moved On, and Everything Now Points at a 2/1 Flier

One month after the Seeker of Skybreak ban, Pauper's real story is a forty-cent flier: Sneaky Snacker sits in 23.4% of the 2,561 published 75s we track, the Gates deck that lost its combo nearly tripled instead of…

Nothing Rotates: Premodern, Vintage, and the 2,443-Card Gap

Premodern and Vintage both refuse to rotate — and in the last twelve months one of them gained 2,443 cards while the other gained none. We put 15,417 Premodern and 17,398 Vintage lists through our own corpus, and the…

The Hobbit First Look: Standard-Legal Middle-earth, and What 71 Spoiled Cards Actually Say

The Hobbit lands August 14 as the first Standard-legal Tolkien set, and 71 of its 198 cards are already public. We pulled the live Oracle text for everything that matters and ran the marquee reprints through our own…

Night's Blessed, Table's Cursed: The Y'shtola Commander Guide

Y'shtola, Night's Blessed is EDHREC's #3 commander, and the €1.50 cat comes with her own precon. We rebuild Scions & Spellcraft in four budget stages — backed by 94 tournament lists, flex-slot keep rates, and the…

The Champion's 75: A Simic Neoform Deck Guide

Yuuki Ichikawa's Simic Neoform posted the best Modern numbers at Pro Tour Marvel Super Heroes and left with the trophy. We break down the champion's exact 75 card by card — the Neoform math, the Consign-your-own-Pact…

Reality Fracture First Impressions: Two of Every Planeswalker, and What the Card Text Actually Says

Reality Fracture put a blue Chandra next to the red one on purpose — every booster ships an "echoed pair" from Jace's mirror reality, and only 21 unique cards are public. We pulled the live Oracle text for all of them…

Your Deck Is Bracket 3, Not Bracket 2 — Because of One Card

Bracket 2 allows exactly zero Game Changers — so one beloved staple, like the Rhystic Study sitting in over a million decks, moves your "casual" deck to Bracket 3 by rule. We ran the flip live on a stock Marvel precon…

The One-Mana Answer: How Consign to Memory Became Summer 2026's Defining Card — and Where the Thesis Breaks

The most-played card in Modern is a $3.51 uncommon. Consign to Memory sits in 46.2% of all Modern decklists, has passed Brainstorm in Legacy at 55.4% of all 75s, and shows up in a third of Vintage — we traced the…

Amsterdam in Full: The Pro Tour Marvel Super Heroes Report

Yuuki Ichikawa won the first draft-decided Pro Tour Top 8 in fifteen years — while Modern's two most-played decks posted the event's worst numbers. The full Amsterdam report: Wizards' Day One win-rate graphic…

Star Trek's First Look: What's Real, What Matters, and What the Hype Already Got Wrong

Magic's *Star Trek* set got its First Look — roughly 38 cards of a 280-plus set — so every "this breaks Modern" take is a read off the card text, not a number off a table. We pulled the live Oracle text for all of it…

The July 2026 Price Movers: What Actually Moved the Boards

The biggest gainer on our own board was a two-cent common up 62,650% — so we fixed the board, threw out the basics, the emblems and the oversized league prizes, and asked the question no price tracker can answer: is…

The 49% Deck That Isn't: Dihada, Binder of Wills and How to Read a Conversion Rate

Our cEDH data says the best-converting deck in the format isn't Blue Farm or Kinnan — it's a 0.4%-share Mardu planeswalker deck, Dihada, Binder of Wills, topping out at 49.4%. It's also mostly a mirage: 81 counted…

The Two Decks Beating Modern's Top Tier

Two decks are quietly beating Modern's top tier heading into Pro Tour Amsterdam: Broodscale combo, whose Basking Broodscale + Blade of the Bloodchief loop posts a 57.7% weighted win rate against the six most-played…

Sideboarding Against Combo in Legacy, Summer 2026: What the Winners Actually Board

Consign to Memory now sits in 49.2% of all Legacy decklists, hard graveyard hate is in free fall, and the winning Reanimator boards pack four Show and Tells and a flying car. A data-driven guide to sideboarding against…

Legacy State of the Format, July 2026: The Car, the Turtle, and Tron's Quiet Disappearance

Three DeckCortex snapshots taken nine days apart chart something no single stat can: Trini Tron Karn's top-cut share collapsing from 9.9% to 4.4% since the Candelabra of Tawnos ban — with zero Tron decks making a top…

The Champion Will Be Drafting: The Complete Marvel Super Heroes Guide for Pro Tour Amsterdam

For the first time in fifteen years, a Pro Tour champion will be crowned at a draft table — and the format is Marvel Super Heroes. Live 17lands data (pulled July 9), every card checked against real Oracle text: why…

Modern Before Amsterdam: The Deck to Beat Wears a Very Light Crown

Pro Tour Marvel Super Heroes plays Modern in nine days, and our 2,000-list June corpus shows the metagame the pros are testing against: Boros Energy is the deck to beat at 12.1%, but no deck runs away, dozens of…

What DeckCortex Actually Does: Sixteen Simulations, an AI That Explains Them, and 367,000 Decklists

Standard, Pioneer, Modern, Legacy, Commander or cEDH — DeckCortex runs sixteen deterministic simulations on your exact list (mana, opening hands, kill clock, combo assembly, power level) and hands the numbers to an AI…

One Broken Vehicle, One Dead Common: Marvel Super Heroes Across Ten Formats

Eleven days after release, Marvel Super Heroes has put a Commander-deck Vehicle into 18% of the Vintage corpus, gotten a 1997 common banned in Pauper, and left one format untouched forever. We ran all ten formats…

Commander Staples 2026: The Cards Nobody Credits

Everyone names the same three Commander staples — Sol Ring, Command Tower, Arcane Signet — and that's exactly why they tell you nothing: they're the only cards the competitive and casual rooms actually share. Set our…

Why Your Combo Count Isn't Your Bracket

DeckCortex tells you exactly how many complete two-card combos are in your deck — and that number is not your Commander bracket. We run five real lists through DeckCortex's own bracket engine, including one commander…

Pioneer in July 2026: The Healthiest Format Wizards Aren't Watching

The June 29 B&R gave Pioneer a single line — "No changes" — and our 607-list June corpus shows why: post-Cutter-ban Pioneer has no deck above 15.2%, four different archetypes taking trophies, and real games again. It…

The Seeker Ban: A 1997 Common Dies So a Marvel Card Can Live

On June 29, Wizards banned Seeker of Skybreak — a 1997 Tempest common — so Marvel's Hawkeye's Bow could stay legal in Pauper. Our tournament data tells the fuller story: a combo that was still winning Challenges on the…

The Candelabra Ban: When the Numbers Correct the Narrative in Legacy

On June 29, Wizards banned a $2,275 Reserved List artifact out of Legacy — Candelabra of Tawnos, a four-of in 100% of the format's most-played deck. Our data on 856 tournament lists backs the "rapidly rising" story,…

cEDH State of the Format — Blue Farm Rules, Kinnan Reigns, and the Numbers That Correct the Story

DeckCortex's 106,614-list cEDH corpus confirms the shape everyone expects — Blue Farm is the most-played deck, Kinnan the best commander without a partner — but the conversion data quietly corrects the story: Magda,…

Spider-Man 2099 Is Duel Commander's Deck to Beat — and the Committee Just Told You It's Staying

In our Duel Commander data, Spider-Man 2099 is the runaway deck to beat — 13.7% of the tournament lists we track, roughly 2.5× the next-best commander, built around a 45-cent rare. On May 25 the official Committee…

Standard's Twin Pillars — and the Marvel Takeover Hiding in Plain Sight

"Izzet soup" is only half the story. Across 997 scraped lists from late June 2026, our data shows Standard is a two-pillar format — Izzet Prowess (193 lists) just pulled dead even with a Selesnya green counters deck…

Boros Energy Is Still Modern's Deck to Beat — the Bans Couldn't Kill It, and June 29 Didn't Try

Wizards banned Phlage in May to knock Boros Energy off its perch — and for a week it worked, dropping the deck to #2. Three weeks later it was back on top, and the June 29 B&R left Modern untouched. In our data the…

Doom Prevails Upgrade Guide: Turning the Doctor Doom Precon Into a Focused Connive Deck

Doom Prevails has the best commanders in the Marvel set – but the murkiest plan. This upgrade guide commits the deck to one line: connive, discard, and Doctor Doom's land drain. With concrete cuts and four budget…

Modern After the B&R: Living End Is Back — and the Clock Is Ticking Toward June 29

Living End is back with the unbanned Violent Outburst — but only Tier 2, not the top. Boros Energy and Affinity rule as Modern braces for the June 29 B&R.

Marvel Super Heroes Is Here: The Big Precon Update for Release Day

Marvel Super Heroes is finally on shelves — and the real question isn't what's in the boosters, but which of the four Commander precons to buy. We break down all four decks, from the value-packed but unfocused Doom…