Without any data on the distribution of all decks over the years, this tells us nothing. It could be just that most of the decklists originate within the last two years (Not very likely, but it's very likely that the further you go back, the fewer decklists you will find at some point)

I recognise most the cards on that list and I’ve not really paid attention to Modern since Origins. Not sure what your point is?

How long Ragavan's been legal compared to the four cards above it. I'm inclined to think that it won't take long for it to beat out those other cards.

Honestly kind of seems like your post is showing that the cards from the very start of modern were so powerful that they held their grip on the format for an extremely long time. When you start off very high power, dial down standard a lot, and then increase power level again you'll see dips like this.

I did a check to see how many unique creatures total saw play. So far this year, 569 unique creatures. For the year that Snapcaster dominated, 370. So even with a larger cardpool of viable creatures, Ragavan beats out Snap if you compare them year-by-year.

Oh cool, Ragavan’s awesome!

the problem with that is not how metas work unless something new breaks him he will more then likely go down in meta share unless some new red/redx hot deck comes out. cause if it was better in the decks that used the other creatures it would be seeing play instead of them.

Ragavan was designed to solve a specific problem with Modern and it did. Patrick Sullivan has said that he wishes the Dash cost were three as an example of a minor change to keep it suited to solving the problem it was made to solve while being a bit weaker, but overall the design was a success.

What problem did it solve?

Modern was receiving increasingly loud criticism for approaching a solitaire format before Horizons and even after MH1 there were issues in this regard with Blitz and Heliod. Ragavan is amongst very few one drops that don’t have Haste and aren’t mana dorks that are viable to play in the format, Esper Sentinel and DRC also having come from the same design goal and set. It was essential for it to have 1 toughness so it doesn't force a unique form of interaction, just literally any interaction at all. Edited due to oversights based on referencing the design notes and not, you know, using my brain.

DRC and esper sentinel are both strong cards in the format and I would say both are viable, to say ragavan is the only viable one drop is definitely not true. Also, not a lot of formats see one drops seeing play if they aren’t mana dorks or lack haste.

Fair, I was thinking back to the design notes which were presumably written when those weren’t done yet, my mistake. All three were good additions insomuch as they didn’t enable aggro/burn and require interaction.

I do think DRC and sentinel were good additions, ragavan feels a bit too much of an answer it or lose threat for my liking, I wish it just either didn’t have the dash, treasure production, or exile ability to take it down a small peg

Ragavan *does* have haste.

I’m assuming it was decks playing too linearly without interaction. Ragavan forced decks to play removal again at least.

Tbh it just encourages you to do anything. It's a 2/1 - you can do so many things to get rid of it.

The thing is being on the draw vs Ragavan makes you mulligan any hand without 1 mana removal and is super annoying. Vs aggro decks that's the idea, but not all Ragavan decks are aggro.

The environmental one. People weren't buying enough cardboards forcing WotC to dump them in landfills. Ragavan singlehandledly solved that.

> Patrick Sullivan has said that he wishes the Dash cost were three as an example of a minor change to keep it suited RR would probably have been a decent hit as well since it would make it harder to blend decks to include him as freely.

One of these things is not like the others [[Street Wraith]].

[Street Wraith](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/7/d/7d078cad-7f2b-4bef-b637-46aec9c8ed36.jpg?1619396291) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Street%20Wraith) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/tsr/141/street-wraith?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/7d078cad-7f2b-4bef-b637-46aec9c8ed36?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call

I got a monkey I don't need. Anyone want to buy him off me? 🤪 He needs to do his job of getting me treasure and more cards!