Thanks for putting the effort into an amazing primer. I'm a new burn player and this has been extremely helpful. I'm definitely a converted anti-burn player, there are so many lines of play and intricacies that you don't see from the other side. I never thought I'd enjoy playing burn this much.
I'm glad you found it useful. I don't get much time to do updates anymore, and it used to be much more active here but it fell off after they said MTGS was going to close.
what do you think about lurrus of the dream-den ?
it's basically free, an 8th card every match for 1 sideboard card less.
I think it can replace a Kor Firewalker pretty easily if you play those. I'm not sure how much value I place on having a 3/2 Lifelink for 3 whenever you want it. Obviously it's an 8th card in your hand and that's something, but I'm not convinced it's as phenomenal as some people make it out to be. It's irrelevant in a lot of situations (ie. you cast it and lose anyway), but if you're on T6 and drawing for burn spells and draw a land, you can at least a 3/2 Lifelink and maybe buy a turn. I wouldn't place much value on the rest of the text and I wouldn't play Seal of Fire/Vexing Devil with the goal of re-casting them. Obviously you're guaranteed to have it available when you're at 4 lands, but I wouldn't want to play sub-par cards along the way.
It certainly isn't a fun experience, no. It's part of why I got disillusioned with Legacy Burn. I could run over Delver decks all day long, but then "Entomb, Reanimate, Iona name red" and other similar situations led me to the conclusion that I'm often just donating my entry fee with Legacy Burn.
I think that a decent barometer for a deck's acceptability in Modern is whether it's too fast of a combo for Burn to play fun-police against. My gut feeling is that if such a deck is consistently too fast for Burn, it's not acceptable for Modern and gets banned eventually.
Fast combo is a weakness for Burn. There's not much you can do to change that.
Grafdigger's Cage will stop Neoform, but they'll bring in artifact hate to blow it up. You can try slowing them down with Skullcrack/Path. You can try killing Lab Man in response to drawing a card, but it won't work if they can draw another at instant speed.
Reality is that you should treat such things like Legacy combo decks vs Legacy Burn, accept that you're up a creek without a paddle against them, and accept defeat. Otherwise, you're forced to drastically alter your sideboard and then you're weaker in winnable matchups.
I played a variant of Burn yesterday, with 4 Seeker of the Way, 4 Soulfire Grand Master, 2 Exquisite Firecraft, 2 Anger of the Gods and 3 Deflecting Palm in the main deck, instead of Goblin Guide, Eidolon, Skewer the Critics and some Rift Bolt. I thought these cards would help in the current metagame, heavy with Dredge, Phoenix and UW Control. The deck is obviously slower, but the big life cushion is pseudo card advantage (as is, a lot more turns to top deck the final burn spell).
I don't think that many of those cards are good at all in Burn. Seeker and Soulfire are way too slow for a Burn deck, and you're going to just get wrecked by damage from fast decks before those cards make an impact at all. I've played board wipes in the side before and never really liked them. I love and hate Deflecting Palm because I've busted someone with an Emrakul with it and I've had it sit dead in my hand while my opponent stabilized and I could have just won with a real burn spell instead of that reactive card. I think it's a significant mistake to take out Guide, Eidolon, Skewer, and Rift for those cards. You're losing your speed (Guide), oppression (Eidolon), and key pieces of the Burn strategy and replacing them with slow cards that don't do enough to justify their slowness.
UW Control should be kind of straight forward, I think. It comes down to knowing how to play around their counters by bottlenecking their mana.
I won 2-1 vs CoCo Vizier and Discard Combo, but lost 0-2 vs UW Spirit. This deck bugs me a lot, and there seems to be no way out of it. Between Mausoleum Wanderer, Rattlechains, Drogskol Captain, Selfless Spirit and Spell Queller, it’s pretty hard to interact with the board. Simply ignoring it and going to the face seems the best option. But even then, Wanderer and Queller can counter my spells (and Exquisite Firecraft isn’t even a safe bet against Queller, because it exiles), and it’s super hard to burn Queller and get the spell back.
Is there any tricks in how to play or sequence the spells? Or special cards that would do the job from the SB?
They'll gum up the board, so you should unload creatures as fast as you can and get damage out of them before they're irrelevant. Eidolon should do a lot of work in games where they aren't dumping their hand with Vial. However, you're going to have trouble with aggressive decks that are as disruptive as they can be. I think it's just going to be a race. The same "bottleneck mana" strategy should buy you something in this matchup, too. Blaze and Blood should do a good job, too.
Thoughts on Jared Day's list from last weekends Star City Games Invitational Qualifier.
What's interesting to me are the zero fetches to, I assume, helps preserve his life total. The major thing I noticed with this list was the cut of Goblin Guides down to 2 to make room for a single lavamancer and shard. Personally I don't think I'd cut guides but I do like the manabase and would properly do something like 4 sunbaked, 3 vantage.
That's going to feel really bad when an opener has Mountain Mountain Charm Charm. It also makes the Firewalker in the side very hard to cast in time. I also strongly think cutting any Guides is wrong until a better "R: 2/2 Haste" gets printed.
R3: vs Grixis Urza (L2-1)
I don't know anything about the deck. I haven't played modern in two months. It showed. Let's move on
Me too, man. I've finally got the local Modern night open and I can play some Modern more often. Congrats on the finish. I've also only gotten to play with 2 Canyons, but I have 4 ready for the next time. I'm still on 19 lands though.
In other news, I've been working on updating the matchup section of the primer. My intention is try to go in depth on important ones like the Humans re-write a bit ago. I think I'll also add a "retired" section to dump less relevant older ones, or perhaps move several up to a "tier matchup" section (let's say the top 10 on goldfish or something). It's coming along, though.
Updating everything is on the list of things to do. I'll get around to it soon. There's only so much time in the day.
I'll start updating a handful per day after the holiday weekend. That should mean it's finished within a few weeks. I'll keep it at it is now, though, with a list of playables rather than a 15 card sideboard guide.
Hogaak probably has a slightly lowered meta presence because people don't want to sink money into something that everyone assumes is going to get banned.
Update on the scraper: it seems to be crashing less frequently, and I'm saving copies of the data more frequently so that I can kill the script and restart it where it left off before. I'll be able to make the usual post at the beginning of the month.
Also, I finally got to play some Modern this past week on the local Modern night. Went 3-0-1, beating humans, tron, and merfolk. I only had 2 Canyons at the time, but I've got 2 more now and I'll be playing with 4 going forward. My manabase for now is 3 mountain, 2 foundry, 4 canyon, 2 vantage, 8 fetches.
If the game doesn't go long, you're more likely to see it in your opener than a later draw. If in situations where you're going to steamroll someone with it (say the mirror), it's worth the risk. Another deck that relies on targeting you or your permanents is going to be worth it as well.
I have been having a hell of a time updating my deck database from mtggoldfish, and I don't know what the problem is. Sometimes, it grabs 3 decks then freezes trying to connect. Sometimes it lasts much longer. It's freezing on an ssl handshake, but it seems that bypassing ssl doesn't help. I'm not sure if I'll be able to continue doing the hate updates (I know I missed the last one, apologies). I don't know if they put in some functionality on their end to stifle scrapers or what. It's possible that I could just rely on mtgtop8 instead, though. There's significant overlap between them.
That's likely too dangerous on their end. They should mill themselves to make the zombies and they can likely just wait for the attack step. If they target you with the Leyline in play, they run the risk of getting low enough that you can kill them at instant speed.
You're acting as if people have said it's a guaranteed 4-of in every sideboard. All I've said is that it's going to get added the my extended sideboard binder for now. It can join the Deflecting Palm that I don't generally play, the Kor Firewalker that I don't generally play, the Volcanic Fallout/Anger of the Gods that I don't generally play. Surely you've got a pile of potential sideboard cards that aren't part of your 15?
8rack isn't a problem for Burn, but it certainly flattens that deck in situations where you might find yourself running into it often (perhaps locally). Against Storm (which I also don't think we need help against), it's a must-answer effect that comes down on T0 and can't get remanded. It similarly flattens the mirror, but it does it painlessly where Kor Firewalker doesn't. Kor Firewalker is far more narrow than the Leyline is.
I don't think it's actually necessary for the Leyline to flip matchups around to be worthwhile. I think it's worthwhile even in situations where it's just a 0 mana Shock, and there are matchups where it's going to either trigger repeatedly or make the opponent stumble.
I would also argue that you're somewhat already familiar with sideboard cards that only do something if they're in your opener. Sure, you can topdeck a Rest in Peace by T2 and it's fine, but if you don't see it in your opener, you're not likely to see it this game. In that sense, it's either in your opener and "does something" or it's not in your opener and it "does nothing".
This Leyline is bad on T4 because you're generally well beyond it's effective period. You'd never want to pay mana for this effect. You want it on T0 when you get Inquisitioned or your Guide gets Bolted. I'd never cast a topdecked one unless I had nothing else to do.
I haven't played in a while, so I don't have any insight on how it would do now.
I'm glad you found it useful. I don't get much time to do updates anymore, and it used to be much more active here but it fell off after they said MTGS was going to close.
I think it can replace a Kor Firewalker pretty easily if you play those. I'm not sure how much value I place on having a 3/2 Lifelink for 3 whenever you want it. Obviously it's an 8th card in your hand and that's something, but I'm not convinced it's as phenomenal as some people make it out to be. It's irrelevant in a lot of situations (ie. you cast it and lose anyway), but if you're on T6 and drawing for burn spells and draw a land, you can at least a 3/2 Lifelink and maybe buy a turn. I wouldn't place much value on the rest of the text and I wouldn't play Seal of Fire/Vexing Devil with the goal of re-casting them. Obviously you're guaranteed to have it available when you're at 4 lands, but I wouldn't want to play sub-par cards along the way.
I think that a decent barometer for a deck's acceptability in Modern is whether it's too fast of a combo for Burn to play fun-police against. My gut feeling is that if such a deck is consistently too fast for Burn, it's not acceptable for Modern and gets banned eventually.
Grafdigger's Cage will stop Neoform, but they'll bring in artifact hate to blow it up. You can try slowing them down with Skullcrack/Path. You can try killing Lab Man in response to drawing a card, but it won't work if they can draw another at instant speed.
Reality is that you should treat such things like Legacy combo decks vs Legacy Burn, accept that you're up a creek without a paddle against them, and accept defeat. Otherwise, you're forced to drastically alter your sideboard and then you're weaker in winnable matchups.
I don't think that many of those cards are good at all in Burn. Seeker and Soulfire are way too slow for a Burn deck, and you're going to just get wrecked by damage from fast decks before those cards make an impact at all. I've played board wipes in the side before and never really liked them. I love and hate Deflecting Palm because I've busted someone with an Emrakul with it and I've had it sit dead in my hand while my opponent stabilized and I could have just won with a real burn spell instead of that reactive card. I think it's a significant mistake to take out Guide, Eidolon, Skewer, and Rift for those cards. You're losing your speed (Guide), oppression (Eidolon), and key pieces of the Burn strategy and replacing them with slow cards that don't do enough to justify their slowness.
UW Control should be kind of straight forward, I think. It comes down to knowing how to play around their counters by bottlenecking their mana.
They'll gum up the board, so you should unload creatures as fast as you can and get damage out of them before they're irrelevant. Eidolon should do a lot of work in games where they aren't dumping their hand with Vial. However, you're going to have trouble with aggressive decks that are as disruptive as they can be. I think it's just going to be a race. The same "bottleneck mana" strategy should buy you something in this matchup, too. Blaze and Blood should do a good job, too.
That's going to feel really bad when an opener has Mountain Mountain Charm Charm. It also makes the Firewalker in the side very hard to cast in time. I also strongly think cutting any Guides is wrong until a better "R: 2/2 Haste" gets printed.
Me too, man. I've finally got the local Modern night open and I can play some Modern more often. Congrats on the finish. I've also only gotten to play with 2 Canyons, but I have 4 ready for the next time. I'm still on 19 lands though.
In other news, I've been working on updating the matchup section of the primer. My intention is try to go in depth on important ones like the Humans re-write a bit ago. I think I'll also add a "retired" section to dump less relevant older ones, or perhaps move several up to a "tier matchup" section (let's say the top 10 on goldfish or something). It's coming along, though.
I'll start updating a handful per day after the holiday weekend. That should mean it's finished within a few weeks. I'll keep it at it is now, though, with a list of playables rather than a 15 card sideboard guide.
Hogaak probably has a slightly lowered meta presence because people don't want to sink money into something that everyone assumes is going to get banned.
Also, I finally got to play some Modern this past week on the local Modern night. Went 3-0-1, beating humans, tron, and merfolk. I only had 2 Canyons at the time, but I've got 2 more now and I'll be playing with 4 going forward. My manabase for now is 3 mountain, 2 foundry, 4 canyon, 2 vantage, 8 fetches.
I have been having a hell of a time updating my deck database from mtggoldfish, and I don't know what the problem is. Sometimes, it grabs 3 decks then freezes trying to connect. Sometimes it lasts much longer. It's freezing on an ssl handshake, but it seems that bypassing ssl doesn't help. I'm not sure if I'll be able to continue doing the hate updates (I know I missed the last one, apologies). I don't know if they put in some functionality on their end to stifle scrapers or what. It's possible that I could just rely on mtgtop8 instead, though. There's significant overlap between them.
8rack isn't a problem for Burn, but it certainly flattens that deck in situations where you might find yourself running into it often (perhaps locally). Against Storm (which I also don't think we need help against), it's a must-answer effect that comes down on T0 and can't get remanded. It similarly flattens the mirror, but it does it painlessly where Kor Firewalker doesn't. Kor Firewalker is far more narrow than the Leyline is.
I don't think it's actually necessary for the Leyline to flip matchups around to be worthwhile. I think it's worthwhile even in situations where it's just a 0 mana Shock, and there are matchups where it's going to either trigger repeatedly or make the opponent stumble.
This Leyline is bad on T4 because you're generally well beyond it's effective period. You'd never want to pay mana for this effect. You want it on T0 when you get Inquisitioned or your Guide gets Bolted. I'd never cast a topdecked one unless I had nothing else to do.