If you didn´t hear this episode of the GAM Podcast(http://www.starcitygames.com/articles/37205_The-GAM-Podcast-The-New-Best-Deck-In-Modern.html) maybe you want to.
They talk mostly Jeskai being the new kid on the block and everything Modern. But they touch on GDS a little bit and i think they hit the nail on the head. GDS became somewhat lackluster when TBR became the way to go. They also talk about Stubborn Denial being medium-bad in this Modern.
PS:Just giving out the info to start walking in a direction that benefits us as GDS players(it's my only deck!). Not bashing it.
I was going to talk about the same thing. Yesterday, MTGO grinder and pro player Kanister(Piotr Glogowski) played GDS and it made it seem very good. He lost his win and in by passing through a Fatal Push that was targeted by Snapcaster Mage, and was going to kill a Dark Confidant which ultimately costed him the game(He says he F6 through it but it could as well be a missplay, not sure).
There were a lot of games where he could have used Faithless Looting technology, and like paulo says above, he says he should have played it in at least a few copies.
He hadn't read the Ben Friedman Brainstorm article yet, and we brought it up in the chat and he seemed to like the idea. I for one will jam Faithless Looting in my next games with GDS for sure.
PS: The Grim Lavamancer/Young Pyro route seems to be working for MTGO, for me it's good news since Liliana and Jace are prohibitevely expensive.
Now that 4 Mishra's Bauble is the new hot tech, can someone with xp in playing that build give me some guidelines of sequencing with Bauble and Cantrips?.
Mana could be an issue, but the problem is that the matchups you want him, you want make some land drops. If you don't it's because you have a fast start and having Jace will serve as an insurance if they manage to slow you. If you flood he is your best draw since he reshuffles lands and draws you tons of gas.
Again, maybe you don't want more than 2, 3 might be ok, but 2 seems like the sweet spot where you aren't Jace-flooding but he can always bring something to the table. Try him and you won't regret it.
So i keep testing a 2-of Jace in place of the LOTVS in the SB. I bringed them against UR Pyromancer(w/Jace) and Jeskai(this time w/o Jace). The card i ALWAYS want to draw is Jace, at pretty much any point in the game. I think he could do good with us to be honest.
It really gives you that solid another threat you want; I know it's 4 mana and all but you want to hit some land drops anyways, and mitigates flooding REALLY well since Brainstorm is just grotesque. Everytime i resolved him i won, it's just that simple.
I expect GDS grinders from MTGO to adequate this deck to fit him in.
PS: Has anyone tested a match against those Disrupting Shoal lists? Those look like fodder to GDS. Maybe in practice they are more powerful?
I think we won't end up trying to go below Jace, we will end up just playing him.
I was thinking in trying to build GDS Bulky. Slower for a slower metagame which might not require to kill out of nowhere because of higher diveristy. There are too many branches in the tree of this unbannings, so i will keep the Jace decks(especially the Grixis ones) on my sight and by the time being i'll just jam Jaces in GDS. I'm 100% sure that they won't underperform, it could be not the best shell for him, but i suspect it won't matter until the metagame develops a little.
Overall, i think people might be overreacting to the unbannings. There will be an adjustment period but i really doubt jamming 4x Jace and call it a day is a good idea while people T3 Karn and T3 Storm and T3.5 Lava Spike. We'll see, but i'm willing to believe GDS will come out okay out of this mess.
I tested Best-of-3 against my friend on Jeskai Geist yesterday. I brought 4 Jace proxies(already thinking on working Grixis Control w/Jace because i'm not sure i'm going into white again), and we splitted 2/2, he played 2 MD and i played 2 SB instead of LOTV.
His deck doesn't play Spell Queller(which makes in my opinion the matchup way harder as our heavy removal G1 gets blanked). He beat me 4-0 through the 2 BO3.
First BO3 he resolves on both games Jace and he takes over from there. It feels really bad to have a Jace come down on your board with only 1 creature or even 2. My initial reaction here is that you must counter Jace, or discard him in order to have a chance.
2nd BO3 he gets to resolve one Jace i think, i got to counter a couple but even then it was the first time he was playing Jace ever(so his use of the abillities might have been not optimal) and Jace got me pretty good. His -1 is great against us, and so is Brainstorm.
If i had to make some takeaways from this, is that GDS will have to change to beat Jace and BBE. Jund will become a bigger thret and better overall, so Jund a previously good matchup, will be closer to 50/50 or even worse. 4 Stubbys are a no-brainer right now. Also i would like to point out that the meta will have a heavy influx of Jace and BBE decks at the beggining, but then, if those cards actually turn out to be safe, the meta will adjust and GDS will remain a great deck. Just some tweaks(More bolts, Young Pyromancer,Lingering Souls, even Deprive?) and we should be good.
To give a little context, i have played the Mardu Pyro matchup about 10-12 times, i won about 7-8 of those. The pilot of the Mardu deck was a friend of mine testing the deck, he is not an amazing player but he's pretty smart and whenever he made a bad choice or a simple missplay(like wrong fetch) he could take it back and play correctly.
First thing i noticed about the matchup is that you want to grind but in a tempo fashion rather than a midrange one. What i mean by this is that Stubborn Denial is great, and you win a lot of games by resolving a Delve threat and protecting it with counter. Discard is still good to get things hard to beat out their hand, like Blood Moon, Young Pyro and whatnot.
Fatal Push is kind of bad here because YP is the only target, and the thing that makes more damage is the tokens which you will have to deal with a good SB hate against X/1s like Staticaster, Pyroclasm, Liliana Last Hope,etc.
Again, the most important thing i got from the limited amount of testing was the fact that you win by out tempoing them. Their deck is kind of clunky, and the card that beats you hard is Lingering Souls and YP(if he gets to generate too much value). Nihil Spellbomb is great against them since they are secretly leaning on GY shenaningans like flashback Looting, Souls and Bedlam Reveler.
The list my opp was playing had no Path(which i think is the norm), 2 Pushes, 4 Bolts and 2-1 Terminate/Dreadbore. I think you should play around getting Bolted out of the game on G1, G2 they'll probably SB out those.
My list is 18 land, 2 TBR stock, and 2 Kommands because i hate Chalice of the Bored.
I SB the following cards: -3 Push, -2 TBR, -1 Street Wraith
+1 Lili Last Hope, +2 Nihil Spellbomb, +2 Stubby D, +1 EE
I think you need to play Discard spell on T1 all the time unless you are packing Serum Visions as you card selection, and you are in a 1 lander.
If you have 2 lands(or know you will have two lands by T2) then discard is step 1 almost all the time, unless the matchup specifically asks you to hold those(like grind mirrors or else).
If your card selection is Opt and you are on a 1 lander and you hand contains both Opt and TS/IOK, i think the line is still T1 discard since waiting and turn lets you see 1 more card and Opt lets you dig deeper for said land(in mainphase T2) than Serum Visions.
I hope i explained myself, the cantrips/discard thing in GDS is what makes it such a hard deck to pilot. If you somehow master that aspect, your winrate with Shadow will increase a lot.
You are not in the wrong place if you are looking for Grixis Shadow w/ Baubles. There have been some 5-0 lists running Bauble as 4 and 3 of. I don't have an educated opinion on them because i haven't played with them yet, but in paper, they don't seem like a bad choice.
So, under the premise that you will face a diverse metagame:
1)Lightning Bolt: This card is very good in general. The problem is that sometimes it just feels underwhelming in contrast to the rest of the deck. It's versatile and helps in bad matchups like go wide and PW-based control(BGx and UWx). I think playing 1 is right more often than not, but 2 could be a stretch. Test them yourself and see, i think you will end up in a split with Push IF you really want 2 Bolts. 4 Push and 1 Bolt is my personal split, i consider 3-2 to be correct too. Also, 6 one-mana removals should be a little too much, even if you expect lots of creature based combo and go wide. This brings me to the next point.
2)TBR: This card is very good, even if we don't pack giant Goyfs, it still holds its value with DS because those two are that good. I play 1 MB, and 0 SB. I'm pretty sure 0 is incorrect, and more than 2 is also incorrect. 1-2 are the preferred copies, you can manage yourself whether you want them MB or SB. This card basically accomplishes much of what Bolt does against said strategies, but instead of answering, it just kills you opponent. There has to be a crapload of D&T to prefer the extra removal over TBR. TBR also make SBing very easy, if they play too much removal, it's out.
3)Liliana the Last hope: This is in my opinion a very good card in DS strategies. It helps in a variety of matchups which goes from Go Wide to Control and Midrange. It's really all over the place, which makes your SB bigger for broader applications. I think this card deserves a nice 1-2 of in the SB, along LOTV(which probably should be a 2-3 of).
4)Explosives: I've been on and off this card. It's lights out when it's good, and medium to inefficient otherwise. There are few decks that get completly wrecked by it(like Bogles) but it does a good impression of other good cards like By Force and Izzet Staticaster, Dreadbore and whatnot. It remains in my list of cards that stretch your SB large enough to cover a bigger meta(which seems very important in nowadays Modern), which is why i would put it 1-2 in my SB if i can't predict the metagame to some extent.
Other than that, 2-of Dismember without TBR is going to give you a headache, because Dismember doesn't like long games in GDS(because of Snapcaster Mage). I'm still skeptical of "Battle Rage Grixis" builds since we pack less punch that our Green counterpart, but we grind much better. This has been in my opinion the biggest challenge Grixis Shadow players have had since its inception. Players can simply not decide whether it's right to go all in, or maintain a control approach. The metagame in Modern changes too fast and this led to people believe that being all in was the right approach, but i'm not sure it's right, i think the controlling nature of the Grixis shard is what makes this deck good, right now i'm trying all builds and haven't made a choice yet.
If you have any other question i'm happy to help and give you my opinion.
I actually think that the printing of new black cards like Fatal Push and Collective Bruality could have made Tron too good for the format, since those cards are aggro/combo stoppers on their own, and they don't sacrifice nothing to play them as efficiently as possible. The basically fix Trons bad matchups, while being super easy to play and having almost free wins against midrange. I think slowly, Tron has become the boogeyman of the format again, suplanting Grixis Shadow.
All in all, Tron is not getting banend in the near future, and Modern STILL looks pretty healthy diversity-wise. Happy to see all those control/midrange players doing well in the GP. Also happy to see that the format actually could handle Death's Shadow, and it's looking promisingly self-regulating.
1) How many Fatal Push and how many Terminate and Lightning Bolt in the maindeck? How many in the sideboard?
2) Do you play Opt? If yes, how many pieces? How many number of lands do you prefer?
3) 4 or 3 Street Wraith?
4) Do you play Temur Battle Rage? How many pieces?
5) Young Pyromancer? How many of those?
6) Liliana Of The Veil? How many of those?
7) Sweepers? What kind of?
8) What question would you like to exist, so that you can answer it yourself- and of course if you'd like, answer it yourself!
1) 4 Push, 1 Bolt and 2 Terminates. 0 Copies of any in the SB. I'm just about to trim to 3 Pushes and add 1 more Bolt(3 Push and 2 Bolt conf.) because Bolt is an absurd Magic card and it's very flexible along Snap+ it kills GDS hosers and checks bad matchups like Elves,D and T, etc.
2&3) I'm playing 3 Street Wraith and 1 Sleight along 18 lands. 19 lands flooded me a lot but they ensure you hit your land drops without looking for them agressively via cantripping. I think what Spooly said is somewhat true, being full Turbo Xerox is risky in Modern. I think 19 lands is correct, and 18 could be too. Below 18 you are just playing kind of a different game(not saying it's bad, it's just different, you are less controlish). Street Wraith should be 4 of, but my meta is too agressive and it SB them out in almost every matchup, so i wanted to be kind of preboarded vs my projected field. To mitigate the loss of Wraith and 19th land, i play Sleight which is better at helping you hit land drops(also i think Sleight is the better 1 of and Opt is the better 2 of, if that makes any sense).
4) 1 TBR MB. Not sure if it's any good in the MB, i just know that you SHOULD play at least 1 in your 75.
5)YP is seen in several 5-0´s and succesful lists, but i'm not sure it's good. The times i've tested it, it counteracts against your gameplan of agressively disrupting and then presenting clocks. I think that's how you win most games anyways, especially the bad ones. Against decks you want to play Control, you rarely want to control the board in the ground, you might be better off with a good sweeper and closing the game fast afterwards. I wouldn't play this card unloess there's a crapload of control and midrange in the projected metagame.
6) This card is much better since it's more powerful and fits your gameplan smoother. It's bad when you want it alongside counterspells and Snapcaster, but overall it's too powerful to pass on, and it acts as an alternative win con. Ii'm almost sure the right grindy package is 2 LOTV and 0-1 Last hope.
7) 2 KReturns for me. Anger if the meta is very swung towards GY strategies like CoCo and Dredge.
I have played that matchup a LOT. I have tried various thing, and the plan i'm more comfortable right now is: -2 Fatal Push
-1 Stubborn
-1 Street Wraith
-1 Tasigur
//
+2 Rejection
+1 Disdainful Stroke
+1 Kolaghan's Command
+1 Liliana of the Veil
For context purposes, my list at the moment is 18 lands, 2 Opt, 1 Command, 3 Snaps and 2 Terminates, plus 1 TBR MB and 2 Stubbs. That's why the 2nd Kommand comes in.
Liliana is pretty medium against Etron tbh. Ballistas and Hangarback makes her awkward at times, and she plays bad with Ceremonious Rejection and counterspells in general(that's why i don't like her that much in GDS tbh).
I have to say though, that i think the Etron matchup is probably more about in game decisions than sideboarding. Of course, if you draw your SB you will be more favored to win, but the key to the matchup is knowing well your role in the early game and midgame(and that role varies depending on their hand and your hand so there's the trick).
Play Aggro against them all the time, don't bank on your Grixis Control cards like Snap and Termiante. Thoughtseize and Death's Shadow are your best bets to win the game. Chalice is lights out so bring all the artifact hate(so it gets other hosers like Hangarback and Wumcoil too), and Rejection is always good because they have 1-2 Caverns to play around it.
Tasigur comes out because their GY hate + their fatties being 5/5 makes him medium minus. You keep one to make sure you can land a threat at some point(and t2 Tasigur is always good eitherway).
Keep all discard, trim pushes, and you can cut all Stubbs(i did that in the past) but i like having one to have an out against All is Dust and Karn. Street Wraith is the last card i cut, but that could be wrong, i like Wraith because it makes us faster but sometimes the games go long and you die by them. Pick your poison i guess.
Also, don't let them block your creatures, this means kill all Reshapers and Ballistas you see they throw to chump block, that leaves them with less draws, and less chance to cheese you out with haymakers(their late game is much better than ours, especially because of Walking Ballista and Endbringer).
It's clear that the definition of 'healthy' is so abstract that it's impossible to be objective about a certain format metagame.
WOTC stated what seems to be their definition of healthy when they re-stated their goals for the format. Diversity among top tiers was at the top, speed of the top tier decks was also the other big takeaway.
The problem is that most vocal Modern players DO NOT care about diversity among top Tiers as much as they care about specific gameplay patterns and other factors such as variance, which are OBJECTIVELY very important in Modern. That's why lots of people recall the Twin/Jund/Pod format as being a better one than the post Pod-ban ones. It was a less diverse format from the archetype standpoint, but it was slower, less variance driven, and atop of that, those 3 decks being juggernauts made metagaming and SBoarding more narrow, so less variant.
They talk mostly Jeskai being the new kid on the block and everything Modern. But they touch on GDS a little bit and i think they hit the nail on the head. GDS became somewhat lackluster when TBR became the way to go. They also talk about Stubborn Denial being medium-bad in this Modern.
PS:Just giving out the info to start walking in a direction that benefits us as GDS players(it's my only deck!). Not bashing it.
There were a lot of games where he could have used Faithless Looting technology, and like paulo says above, he says he should have played it in at least a few copies.
He hadn't read the Ben Friedman Brainstorm article yet, and we brought it up in the chat and he seemed to like the idea. I for one will jam Faithless Looting in my next games with GDS for sure.
PS: The Grim Lavamancer/Young Pyro route seems to be working for MTGO, for me it's good news since Liliana and Jace are prohibitevely expensive.
Thanks in advance!
Again, maybe you don't want more than 2, 3 might be ok, but 2 seems like the sweet spot where you aren't Jace-flooding but he can always bring something to the table. Try him and you won't regret it.
It really gives you that solid another threat you want; I know it's 4 mana and all but you want to hit some land drops anyways, and mitigates flooding REALLY well since Brainstorm is just grotesque. Everytime i resolved him i won, it's just that simple.
I expect GDS grinders from MTGO to adequate this deck to fit him in.
PS: Has anyone tested a match against those Disrupting Shoal lists? Those look like fodder to GDS. Maybe in practice they are more powerful?
I was thinking in trying to build GDS Bulky. Slower for a slower metagame which might not require to kill out of nowhere because of higher diveristy. There are too many branches in the tree of this unbannings, so i will keep the Jace decks(especially the Grixis ones) on my sight and by the time being i'll just jam Jaces in GDS. I'm 100% sure that they won't underperform, it could be not the best shell for him, but i suspect it won't matter until the metagame develops a little.
Overall, i think people might be overreacting to the unbannings. There will be an adjustment period but i really doubt jamming 4x Jace and call it a day is a good idea while people T3 Karn and T3 Storm and T3.5 Lava Spike. We'll see, but i'm willing to believe GDS will come out okay out of this mess.
His deck doesn't play Spell Queller(which makes in my opinion the matchup way harder as our heavy removal G1 gets blanked). He beat me 4-0 through the 2 BO3.
First BO3 he resolves on both games Jace and he takes over from there. It feels really bad to have a Jace come down on your board with only 1 creature or even 2. My initial reaction here is that you must counter Jace, or discard him in order to have a chance.
2nd BO3 he gets to resolve one Jace i think, i got to counter a couple but even then it was the first time he was playing Jace ever(so his use of the abillities might have been not optimal) and Jace got me pretty good. His -1 is great against us, and so is Brainstorm.
If i had to make some takeaways from this, is that GDS will have to change to beat Jace and BBE. Jund will become a bigger thret and better overall, so Jund a previously good matchup, will be closer to 50/50 or even worse. 4 Stubbys are a no-brainer right now. Also i would like to point out that the meta will have a heavy influx of Jace and BBE decks at the beggining, but then, if those cards actually turn out to be safe, the meta will adjust and GDS will remain a great deck. Just some tweaks(More bolts, Young Pyromancer,Lingering Souls, even Deprive?) and we should be good.
PS: I didn't draw Jace in neither of the 4 games.
First thing i noticed about the matchup is that you want to grind but in a tempo fashion rather than a midrange one. What i mean by this is that Stubborn Denial is great, and you win a lot of games by resolving a Delve threat and protecting it with counter. Discard is still good to get things hard to beat out their hand, like Blood Moon, Young Pyro and whatnot.
Fatal Push is kind of bad here because YP is the only target, and the thing that makes more damage is the tokens which you will have to deal with a good SB hate against X/1s like Staticaster, Pyroclasm, Liliana Last Hope,etc.
Again, the most important thing i got from the limited amount of testing was the fact that you win by out tempoing them. Their deck is kind of clunky, and the card that beats you hard is Lingering Souls and YP(if he gets to generate too much value). Nihil Spellbomb is great against them since they are secretly leaning on GY shenaningans like flashback Looting, Souls and Bedlam Reveler.
The list my opp was playing had no Path(which i think is the norm), 2 Pushes, 4 Bolts and 2-1 Terminate/Dreadbore. I think you should play around getting Bolted out of the game on G1, G2 they'll probably SB out those.
My list is 18 land, 2 TBR stock, and 2 Kommands because i hate Chalice of the Bored.
I SB the following cards: -3 Push, -2 TBR, -1 Street Wraith
+1 Lili Last Hope, +2 Nihil Spellbomb, +2 Stubby D, +1 EE
If you have 2 lands(or know you will have two lands by T2) then discard is step 1 almost all the time, unless the matchup specifically asks you to hold those(like grind mirrors or else).
If your card selection is Opt and you are on a 1 lander and you hand contains both Opt and TS/IOK, i think the line is still T1 discard since waiting and turn lets you see 1 more card and Opt lets you dig deeper for said land(in mainphase T2) than Serum Visions.
I hope i explained myself, the cantrips/discard thing in GDS is what makes it such a hard deck to pilot. If you somehow master that aspect, your winrate with Shadow will increase a lot.
1)Lightning Bolt: This card is very good in general. The problem is that sometimes it just feels underwhelming in contrast to the rest of the deck. It's versatile and helps in bad matchups like go wide and PW-based control(BGx and UWx). I think playing 1 is right more often than not, but 2 could be a stretch. Test them yourself and see, i think you will end up in a split with Push IF you really want 2 Bolts. 4 Push and 1 Bolt is my personal split, i consider 3-2 to be correct too. Also, 6 one-mana removals should be a little too much, even if you expect lots of creature based combo and go wide. This brings me to the next point.
2)TBR: This card is very good, even if we don't pack giant Goyfs, it still holds its value with DS because those two are that good. I play 1 MB, and 0 SB. I'm pretty sure 0 is incorrect, and more than 2 is also incorrect. 1-2 are the preferred copies, you can manage yourself whether you want them MB or SB. This card basically accomplishes much of what Bolt does against said strategies, but instead of answering, it just kills you opponent. There has to be a crapload of D&T to prefer the extra removal over TBR. TBR also make SBing very easy, if they play too much removal, it's out.
3)Liliana the Last hope: This is in my opinion a very good card in DS strategies. It helps in a variety of matchups which goes from Go Wide to Control and Midrange. It's really all over the place, which makes your SB bigger for broader applications. I think this card deserves a nice 1-2 of in the SB, along LOTV(which probably should be a 2-3 of).
4)Explosives: I've been on and off this card. It's lights out when it's good, and medium to inefficient otherwise. There are few decks that get completly wrecked by it(like Bogles) but it does a good impression of other good cards like By Force and Izzet Staticaster, Dreadbore and whatnot. It remains in my list of cards that stretch your SB large enough to cover a bigger meta(which seems very important in nowadays Modern), which is why i would put it 1-2 in my SB if i can't predict the metagame to some extent.
Other than that, 2-of Dismember without TBR is going to give you a headache, because Dismember doesn't like long games in GDS(because of Snapcaster Mage). I'm still skeptical of "Battle Rage Grixis" builds since we pack less punch that our Green counterpart, but we grind much better. This has been in my opinion the biggest challenge Grixis Shadow players have had since its inception. Players can simply not decide whether it's right to go all in, or maintain a control approach. The metagame in Modern changes too fast and this led to people believe that being all in was the right approach, but i'm not sure it's right, i think the controlling nature of the Grixis shard is what makes this deck good, right now i'm trying all builds and haven't made a choice yet.
If you have any other question i'm happy to help and give you my opinion.
All in all, Tron is not getting banend in the near future, and Modern STILL looks pretty healthy diversity-wise. Happy to see all those control/midrange players doing well in the GP. Also happy to see that the format actually could handle Death's Shadow, and it's looking promisingly self-regulating.
1) 4 Push, 1 Bolt and 2 Terminates. 0 Copies of any in the SB. I'm just about to trim to 3 Pushes and add 1 more Bolt(3 Push and 2 Bolt conf.) because Bolt is an absurd Magic card and it's very flexible along Snap+ it kills GDS hosers and checks bad matchups like Elves,D and T, etc.
2&3) I'm playing 3 Street Wraith and 1 Sleight along 18 lands. 19 lands flooded me a lot but they ensure you hit your land drops without looking for them agressively via cantripping. I think what Spooly said is somewhat true, being full Turbo Xerox is risky in Modern. I think 19 lands is correct, and 18 could be too. Below 18 you are just playing kind of a different game(not saying it's bad, it's just different, you are less controlish). Street Wraith should be 4 of, but my meta is too agressive and it SB them out in almost every matchup, so i wanted to be kind of preboarded vs my projected field. To mitigate the loss of Wraith and 19th land, i play Sleight which is better at helping you hit land drops(also i think Sleight is the better 1 of and Opt is the better 2 of, if that makes any sense).
4) 1 TBR MB. Not sure if it's any good in the MB, i just know that you SHOULD play at least 1 in your 75.
5)YP is seen in several 5-0´s and succesful lists, but i'm not sure it's good. The times i've tested it, it counteracts against your gameplan of agressively disrupting and then presenting clocks. I think that's how you win most games anyways, especially the bad ones. Against decks you want to play Control, you rarely want to control the board in the ground, you might be better off with a good sweeper and closing the game fast afterwards. I wouldn't play this card unloess there's a crapload of control and midrange in the projected metagame.
6) This card is much better since it's more powerful and fits your gameplan smoother. It's bad when you want it alongside counterspells and Snapcaster, but overall it's too powerful to pass on, and it acts as an alternative win con. Ii'm almost sure the right grindy package is 2 LOTV and 0-1 Last hope.
7) 2 KReturns for me. Anger if the meta is very swung towards GY strategies like CoCo and Dredge.
-1 Stubborn
-1 Street Wraith
-1 Tasigur
//
+2 Rejection
+1 Disdainful Stroke
+1 Kolaghan's Command
+1 Liliana of the Veil
For context purposes, my list at the moment is 18 lands, 2 Opt, 1 Command, 3 Snaps and 2 Terminates, plus 1 TBR MB and 2 Stubbs. That's why the 2nd Kommand comes in.
Liliana is pretty medium against Etron tbh. Ballistas and Hangarback makes her awkward at times, and she plays bad with Ceremonious Rejection and counterspells in general(that's why i don't like her that much in GDS tbh).
I have to say though, that i think the Etron matchup is probably more about in game decisions than sideboarding. Of course, if you draw your SB you will be more favored to win, but the key to the matchup is knowing well your role in the early game and midgame(and that role varies depending on their hand and your hand so there's the trick).
Play Aggro against them all the time, don't bank on your Grixis Control cards like Snap and Termiante. Thoughtseize and Death's Shadow are your best bets to win the game. Chalice is lights out so bring all the artifact hate(so it gets other hosers like Hangarback and Wumcoil too), and Rejection is always good because they have 1-2 Caverns to play around it.
Tasigur comes out because their GY hate + their fatties being 5/5 makes him medium minus. You keep one to make sure you can land a threat at some point(and t2 Tasigur is always good eitherway).
Keep all discard, trim pushes, and you can cut all Stubbs(i did that in the past) but i like having one to have an out against All is Dust and Karn. Street Wraith is the last card i cut, but that could be wrong, i like Wraith because it makes us faster but sometimes the games go long and you die by them. Pick your poison i guess.
Also, don't let them block your creatures, this means kill all Reshapers and Ballistas you see they throw to chump block, that leaves them with less draws, and less chance to cheese you out with haymakers(their late game is much better than ours, especially because of Walking Ballista and Endbringer).
WOTC stated what seems to be their definition of healthy when they re-stated their goals for the format. Diversity among top tiers was at the top, speed of the top tier decks was also the other big takeaway.
The problem is that most vocal Modern players DO NOT care about diversity among top Tiers as much as they care about specific gameplay patterns and other factors such as variance, which are OBJECTIVELY very important in Modern. That's why lots of people recall the Twin/Jund/Pod format as being a better one than the post Pod-ban ones. It was a less diverse format from the archetype standpoint, but it was slower, less variance driven, and atop of that, those 3 decks being juggernauts made metagaming and SBoarding more narrow, so less variant.