Sometimes you just gotta take an L <| sep |> Yeah . Great people , one who spends all her time volunteer teaching in the mountains . <| sep |> I think you ' re twisting things too far . When there is a deck that doesn ' t care too much about matchups because it ' s good against everything out there , then you have the definition of a deck that is un healthy to the format . There ' s no skill involved in ' choosing to play the deck that has virtually no bad matchups '. The goal WotC has for Modern , as I understand it , is to have a format where a variety of decks are not just viable but match up to each other reasonably well i . e . 6040 and 5050 matchups across the board , so that player skill and knowledge can make up the difference between winning and losing the match . Objectively , WotC does indeed want variance to exist in their game , as evidenced by their banning of Brainstorm , Ponder , Preordain and their ilk as well as Sensei ' s Divining Top . Those cards are not banned because they make blue decks too good , they are banned because they enable such strong decksculpting that decks get to be far too consistent . If you can guarantee that every deck can execute its gameplan every single time then we ' re not playing Magic anymore because the game becomes solveable . This is a slightly offtopic rant , but calling ' which decks do I actually end up facing in a tournament ' variance is , to me , a perversion of the term variance . Getting matched up with a tier 1 or tier 2 deck is not ' variance ', it is something you should expect . If there ' s some janky deck that almost nobody plays but which happens to prey exactly on the deck you play which makes up a substantial part of the field then your deck should still have a plan against this deck because it ' s your weakness . That ' s what sideboards are for . If your deck just automatically loses to half the meta and you choose to play the deck anyways , thats a conscious choice . If you end up facing those decks , you ' re not losing to something that ' s outside of your control , you ' re facing the consequences of the risk you took in playing this particular deck . You made a strategic gamble and it didn ' t pay off .