I do agree with the assessment that Urza's performance was likely do to a lack of artifact hate. When I looked over the deck lists for the MC, there seemed to be a lot of Nature's Claims, but not a lot mass artifact removal/negation like Stony Silence or Shattering Spree. If the meta opens up in such a way where people cut back on grave hate, I wouldn't be surprised if better artifact answers took those spots
Thread in general's been pretty slow since a lot of the regulars moved to MTGNexus. There's also a lot of data tables there from users sifting through the data and segregating the Limited portion from the Modern Portion as well as links to other people's analyses. Some highlights:
Hogaak over-performed. Despite a tournament where there were more copies of Leyline of the Void in people's 75 than any other card, it still had the highest MWR at about 56%
Phoenix did all right, but it's MWR was only about 50%, which is about the same range as most of the other popular decks
UrzaSword was surprisingly high, with a MWR at about 55.4%, almost the same as Hogaak
It's also nice to see a BGx deck so well-positioned after what seemed like an eternity of BGx decks struggling to remain relevant
Day 1 stats matter way less than day 2 stats. At Pro Tour Oath of the Gatewatch, there were about 5 times as many Infect decks as there were Eldrazi Aggro decks day 1. By day two there were 26 Eldrazi decks and 25 Infect decks. Decks with relatively high day 2 conversion rates are the ones people should be worried about. That's not to say Hogaak won't have those, but when Leyline of the Void is the most played card in people's 75 and when RiP and Grafdigger's Cage are among the most played sideboard cards, we can at least conclude that people aren't treating Hogaak as some nerfed rogue deck
Actually, most of this thread's actve posters have been posting in MTGNexus, which is why it's been quiet here. The format does seem to be doing all right. Maybe a little Phoenix heavy, but nothing blatantly egregious in my opinion
Again, I agree with the ban, I never said they should have given it more time, just that they didn't need to cherrypick data to justify it.
My concern is: if they cherrypick data in an obvious ban like this, how can we trust they won't do the same in future situations where it isn't obvious that a ban is needed?
The numbers themselves may be hidden, but looking at the last two sentences in that particular paragraph:
It has only two unfavorable matchups among the other ten most played decks and a high win rate against lesser played "rogue" decks. Especially telling is its Game 1 win rate of roughly 66%, requiring most decks to sideboard heavily against it.
We can infer from this that its win rate against at least 8 other decks is above 50% and has at least a 50% match win rate against most rogue decks. Going back to when cards were hit out of Temur Energy and Ramunap Red in Standard (the article for reference) we know that simply having a positive match rate across nearly the whole meta is a concern for Wizards, even if most of those positive matches are just over 50%.
I do agree that posting a match win rate chart like they did for Ramunap Red and Temur energy wouldn't kill them, but if I had to hazard a guess, the goal wasn't to hide Hogaak's match win percentages. Rather, I think the goal was to hide what the 10 most popular decks were after Hogaak so as not to influence deck choices or tip people off on how to side for the upcoming Mythic Championship. A rather fruitless effort, I know, but these are the same people that still think that hiding MtGO data stops metas from being solved, so there's that. I also may be giving them too much credit, but they were at least willing to post numbers for the Ramunap Red and Temur Energy bans, which I assume would be more controversial bans given the number of cards that had already been banned in Standard.
also, wth do you guys/girls have going with SFM? why the obsession with this friggin' creature? it's only a win package. there's things way less deserving of being on the list, like jitte.
I'd argue the opposite. As you say, SFM is a win package. That means that unbanning it can potentially create new decks using Stoneforge as a win condition. In particular, if Legacy is any indicator, it'd open the way for more midrange oriented decks like Abzan or UWx midrange. That's not to say that this is guaranteed or even likely in any way, but it at least gives a possibility.
On the other hand, what does Jitte do for the meta? It doesn't really create new decks. It mostly just acts as an anti-creature tool and an anti-burn tool, neither of which is really necessary given Modern's card pool. So while a deck running Jitte likely won't be meta-defining because of Jitte, it won't generate anything new either.
So if I had to choose between the two, I'd much rather have Stoneforge back, and unless there's a huge spike in the quantity and quality of creature decks, I'd rather see other cards come off the list before Jitte.
Pretty sure with Hogaak, it'll depend on 3 things:
Is the data they have sufficient enough to determine if Hogaak needs a ban?
Is the strain it's putting on sideboards too high?
Is it winning too often before T4?
If they believe the answer to question 1 is "no", the answer to the other two questions won't really matter right now since that'll mean that they're withholding judgment for another month. Question 2's probably the biggest question because GGT got banned for doing just that, except the post Hogaak meta seems to require no less than 6 anti-grave cards in every deck, which is more than what people were running before GGT's ban. I don't know what the answer to question 3 is, but I'd be interested if anyone knows anyone who's done a lot of grinding with the deck who can give a more definite answer.
In order to try and better quantify Wizard's vague definition of "pushing the format too far toward a battle of sideboards", I actually checked the top 8 results of the last few paper tournaments that GGT was legal prior to its second ban via MTGTop8, namely GP Dallas '16, the SCG Milwaukee Open and VIII Edición Arcanis Deluxe '16. Interestingly enough, decks seemed to actually be carrying less hate for Dredge back then than people are carrying now for Hogaak decks. The most hate I think I found in any one deck was the Skred Red deck that won GP Dallas '16 with 4 Relics main and a Grafdigger's in the side. However, I also noticed that Anger of The Gods seemed more prevalent in people's 75, which could have led to less dedicated graveyard hate since Dredge was the only major Grave deck you needed to prepare for. There also seemed to be a lot more decks like Infect looking to just straight race Dredge, which might have also led to finding fewer decks with a lot of dedicated hate.
I couldn't find any data on the MTGO meta during that same time period, so there could have been more pieces of dedicated grave hate on average at the time online that I'm unaware of, and there's also a chance I'd find more if I started digging into top 16s, but from what I've gathered, Hogaak Bridgevine has driven the meta to rely on either racing, finding hate faster, and/or finding more hate within a short number of turns the same way Dredge did with GGT post-Kaladesh. It's also shaped the meta this way in a matter of weeks, not months.
If WotC doesn't hit Bridgevine in July for doing exactly what Dredge did, I would imagine that it's because they want to have more tourney results to cite in their justification and because they have the benefit of only having to wait another month for another chance to pull the trigger as opposed to the 3-4 month waiting period they used to have. That being said, I would sincerely doubt people are going to start dropping GY hate when Hogaak decks are still taking top 8 spots in spite of the 6-8 hate pieces decks are running, and hopefully WotC figures this out as well.
There's always going to be an artificial boom when a card comes off the ban list. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm fairly certain even Thopter Sword saw a boom when it was released, and people were fairly certain that it was going to do literally nothing in Modern. If Wizards were going to ban cards out of decks that would use unbanned cards, we would have seen something hit out of Lantern Control when Sword of the Meek was unbanned(silly I know but Wizards did think Lantern was going to use it) or something from Jund/Blue Control when BBE and Jace were unbanned. Ultimately, any high-profile card being unbanned is going to see a great deal of use from the get-go for no other reason than because it's a new tool. There would be no reason to treat Twin any differently than BBE and Jace in this regard
So I finally got to a point to where I can attend LGS tourneys regularly, and I was wondering what matchups Jeskai has over UW Miracles. I'm generally more comfortable with Jeskai, but my LGS meta is mostly Aggro and Control with a splash of Midrange, so I wasn't sure if using Miracles would yield me slightly better matchups over Jeskai. Sorry if this is the wrong place to ask, but I felt more comfortable asking Control players directly than asking the What to Play threas
Being asked to run 8 main decked removal cards is not nearly as bad as the other examples you presented. If you're running Control or Midrange, you should already be running 8-12 removal spells main deck just by the nature of those decks. Moreover, even if you're not running Midrange or Control, Burn by design is full of spells to throw at small creatures if you really need to, more traditional aggro decks like Affinity can trade off creatures or maneuver themselves into positions with better tempo, and combo decks can just straight-up ignore the board and kill the opponent. The only decks I can really think of that can't jam a lot of removal into the deck or creatures to deal with combat are Ramp decks, which seems perfectly acceptable and something they can deal with post-side.
I agree with KTK here for the most part, but I really hope that they simply unban Preordain if they do anything at all. If there were a longer history of legitimate, unquestionable dominance in Stirrings decks (as opposed to simply having a decent number of T1 decks with no egregious meta shares) I might support a Stirrings ban, but I'd much rather boost the power level of other decks and save bans for truly broken decks like Pod or Eye of Ugin Eldrazi. I don't acknowledge that it's fair that Stirrings is OK but Preordain isn't when we have maybe 3 notable T1 decks that'd use it (UWx Control, GDS and Storm, add to the list if I'm wrong), but I also don't like the idea of removing options when we could just shorten the ban list and see if everyone else can catch up before crippling others.
For those that are saying that Pod would now be okay in this meta, I'm curious as to what would currently prey on Pod decks that would prevent it from reaching the same level of dominance it had back when it was banned. I didn't play Modern when it was legal, but it seems to have all the tools it would need to maintain the dominance it had then even in this meta
Out of the 90 or so day 2 decks 0 of the 8 Twin decks made even top 32. Does anyone know how to calculate the odds of that happening?
Logically you can't. Twin topping isn't determined solely by chance. The power level of Twin in comparison to the rest of the meta factors into its ability to top, and that unto itself is not mathematically quantifiable. To give another example, if I walk into any Modern tournament with a Standard RB Aggro deck, getting blown out of the tournament likely has less to do with probability and likely a lot more with the fact that the standard Modern deck either can do what I want to do but better or simply has a removal package good enough to deal with my deck before I can gain any ground.
Others have mentioned that it could be lack of preparation by players thinking it would be a combo fest. Ironically, such an environment could be undone by Modern's greatest aggro deck. Eldrazi has Affinity's speed and both TKS and Reality Smasher to mess with midrange and control. I wouldn't have guessed that Eldrazi would steal the tourney, but the results don't surprise me in hindsight
- Hogaak over-performed. Despite a tournament where there were more copies of Leyline of the Void in people's 75 than any other card, it still had the highest MWR at about 56%
- Phoenix did all right, but it's MWR was only about 50%, which is about the same range as most of the other popular decks
- UrzaSword was surprisingly high, with a MWR at about 55.4%, almost the same as Hogaak
It's also nice to see a BGx deck so well-positioned after what seemed like an eternity of BGx decks struggling to remain relevantI do agree that posting a match win rate chart like they did for Ramunap Red and Temur energy wouldn't kill them, but if I had to hazard a guess, the goal wasn't to hide Hogaak's match win percentages. Rather, I think the goal was to hide what the 10 most popular decks were after Hogaak so as not to influence deck choices or tip people off on how to side for the upcoming Mythic Championship. A rather fruitless effort, I know, but these are the same people that still think that hiding MtGO data stops metas from being solved, so there's that. I also may be giving them too much credit, but they were at least willing to post numbers for the Ramunap Red and Temur Energy bans, which I assume would be more controversial bans given the number of cards that had already been banned in Standard.
On the other hand, what does Jitte do for the meta? It doesn't really create new decks. It mostly just acts as an anti-creature tool and an anti-burn tool, neither of which is really necessary given Modern's card pool. So while a deck running Jitte likely won't be meta-defining because of Jitte, it won't generate anything new either.
So if I had to choose between the two, I'd much rather have Stoneforge back, and unless there's a huge spike in the quantity and quality of creature decks, I'd rather see other cards come off the list before Jitte.
- Is the data they have sufficient enough to determine if Hogaak needs a ban?
- Is the strain it's putting on sideboards too high?
- Is it winning too often before T4?
If they believe the answer to question 1 is "no", the answer to the other two questions won't really matter right now since that'll mean that they're withholding judgment for another month. Question 2's probably the biggest question because GGT got banned for doing just that, except the post Hogaak meta seems to require no less than 6 anti-grave cards in every deck, which is more than what people were running before GGT's ban. I don't know what the answer to question 3 is, but I'd be interested if anyone knows anyone who's done a lot of grinding with the deck who can give a more definite answer.I couldn't find any data on the MTGO meta during that same time period, so there could have been more pieces of dedicated grave hate on average at the time online that I'm unaware of, and there's also a chance I'd find more if I started digging into top 16s, but from what I've gathered, Hogaak Bridgevine has driven the meta to rely on either racing, finding hate faster, and/or finding more hate within a short number of turns the same way Dredge did with GGT post-Kaladesh. It's also shaped the meta this way in a matter of weeks, not months.
If WotC doesn't hit Bridgevine in July for doing exactly what Dredge did, I would imagine that it's because they want to have more tourney results to cite in their justification and because they have the benefit of only having to wait another month for another chance to pull the trigger as opposed to the 3-4 month waiting period they used to have. That being said, I would sincerely doubt people are going to start dropping GY hate when Hogaak decks are still taking top 8 spots in spite of the 6-8 hate pieces decks are running, and hopefully WotC figures this out as well.