Hello, and welcome back to Metagame Mentor, your weekly guide to the top decks and latest Constructed developments on the path to the Pro Tour. As Magic World Championship 31 competitors eagerly prepared for the season's marquee event and I tracked the evolving Standard metagame over the past few weeks, another story was unfolding in the Modern format. On November 22–23, more than 3,300 players competed across Regional Championships for the United States, Canada, Japan/South Korea, and Europe/Middle East/Africa. Together, these four tournaments offered 96 coveted Pro Tour invitations and 8 precious World Championship slots.
Modern's health and diversity were on full display, with an impressive range of archetypes pushing into the elimination rounds. In this article, I'll break down the Modern metagame, examine win rates, highlight the breakout Magic: The Gathering® | Avatar: The Last Airbender™ cards, and review the finalists' decks from each event. Next week, I'll return with an overview of the spiciest Modern decks that earned a Pro Tour qualification during this enormous Regional Championship weekend.
Modern is a nonrotating 60-card format based on expansion sets, core sets, and straight-to-Modern sets from Eighth Edition forward, save for cards on the banned list. With its deep card pool spanning over 22 years of card history, Modern boasts intricate card interactions and an array of viable strategies.
My latest format primer offers an overview of the format's top decks, their game plans, and their defining cards. Although it was written in October before the rise of Jeskai Blink and Simic Ritual, it remains a useful introduction for new and returning Modern players.
Across the four Regional Championships, a total of 3,364 Modern decklists were available for analysis. After setting archetype names based on the contents of each deck, I compiled the overall metagame share and match win rates for each deck archetype (excluding mirror matches, byes, and…