There is no Modern Metagame. There are pockets of people playing certain decks, usually from the 50 or so competitively-viable decks, but sometimes random piles of nonsense because the cards they like are not good enough for Legacy, but no longer Standard legal.
In an environment like this, trying to play an "answers" deck (like a midrange or control strategy) is a discouraging and often fruitless experience. There are too many decks attacking from too many different angles to have any sort of reasonable success at the hands of your own decisions and play lines. Your match outcomes are often determined by the matchup and whether or not you draw a silver bullet sideboard card. Without a strong, proactive gameplan, being stuck with the "wrong answers" means you lose.
Because of that, the best strategies in Modern are inevitably fast, linear, powerful strategies that are either very consistent, very resilient, and/or very difficult to disrupt. Many of these are handily capable of killing you before turn 4 and can be brutal when they are on the play.
In order to combat this, an interactive "answers" deck either needs to have it's own fast/proactive plan, need to hope to draw the right cards at the right time, or simply hope to dodge their bad matchups.
I have argued for the past 3 years that one of the best solutions to this situation is to give the format back Splinter Twin. It was a mediocre control deck with a strong combo win condition. It was a foundational key that no longer exists that promoted healthy play lines throughout the format. It was a deck which both helped keep linear decks under control while never stifling them out of existence (Affinity, a fast linear aggro deck was the next best deck), and promoting interaction in the forms of highly interactive decks or deckbuilding choices that skewed towards interaction over goldfishing (BGx midrange decks were the next best decks after that).
I have soap-box-argued for Twin for a while, but I also think it is the best solution. If we don't get Twin, we need some justifiable reason to want to run interaction. And we need an interactive/reactive deck that demands respect. Right now we have neither of those, and we will continue to have neither of those until Twin is released, or they accidentally print a card to make a similar deck exist. Because the rate in which we get new answers is outpaced considerably by the rate in which we get threats that break existing linear decks, or create new ones.
Public Mod Note
(Torpf):
Infraction for ban/unban talk outside of the Stare of Modern thread. Please refer to the subforum rules for where to post on these topics
In an environment like this, trying to play an "answers" deck (like a midrange or control strategy) is a discouraging and often fruitless experience. There are too many decks attacking from too many different angles to have any sort of reasonable success at the hands of your own decisions and play lines. Your match outcomes are often determined by the matchup and whether or not you draw a silver bullet sideboard card. Without a strong, proactive gameplan, being stuck with the "wrong answers" means you lose.
Because of that, the best strategies in Modern are inevitably fast, linear, powerful strategies that are either very consistent, very resilient, and/or very difficult to disrupt. Many of these are handily capable of killing you before turn 4 and can be brutal when they are on the play.
In order to combat this, an interactive "answers" deck either needs to have it's own fast/proactive plan, need to hope to draw the right cards at the right time, or simply hope to dodge their bad matchups.
I have argued for the past 3 years that one of the best solutions to this situation is to give the format back Splinter Twin. It was a mediocre control deck with a strong combo win condition. It was a foundational key that no longer exists that promoted healthy play lines throughout the format. It was a deck which both helped keep linear decks under control while never stifling them out of existence (Affinity, a fast linear aggro deck was the next best deck), and promoting interaction in the forms of highly interactive decks or deckbuilding choices that skewed towards interaction over goldfishing (BGx midrange decks were the next best decks after that).
I have soap-box-argued for Twin for a while, but I also think it is the best solution. If we don't get Twin, we need some justifiable reason to want to run interaction. And we need an interactive/reactive deck that demands respect. Right now we have neither of those, and we will continue to have neither of those until Twin is released, or they accidentally print a card to make a similar deck exist. Because the rate in which we get new answers is outpaced considerably by the rate in which we get threats that break existing linear decks, or create new ones.
UR ....... WUBR ........... WB ............. RGW ........ UBR ....... WUB .... BGU
Spells / Blink & Combo / Token Grind / Dino Tribal / Draw Cards / Zombies / Reanimate