Then thats spam, because rhis isnt the place for wizards of the coast management bashing.
This isnt the place.
Thank you for making this clear. It makes this forum hard to read at times with all the adjective-laden tirades that seem to be solely a source of venting and completely devoid of constructive merit. I used to learn a lot about the game reading this forum, I'd like to see that come back
If diversity is a "good" thing, I can't find anything positive about the format because diversity is the reason I hate the format. If Magic is supposed to be just a "game", it certainly isn't priced appropriately to be sold in such a fashion. You literally have to spend an amount of money that the large majority of people really cannot afford and wealth redistribution is a complete joke and why MTG cannot be considered an e-sport. That's why if you have to make profit, the only path to doing that is winning all your matches. Any result that isn't first place in a lot of tournaments means you are losing money and time, especially when the format you are forced to play in PPTQs for 3 months of the year is a format you hate. I think if I was going to start liking Modern again, you'd would need to begin with needing better answers to everything. Anything that would reduce the amount of non-games you have to play. As it stands, any deck I choose to register, I am at the mercy of a poor pairing which is completely out of my control. I want to play games of Magic in Modern, but I cannot when the tools are not available to help with that purpose. I have no problem losing to someone who is head and shoulders better than me at playing Magic, I do however have a problem when I am losing to someone who just happened to have the perfect counter deck to my deck of choice and plays like garbage and I chose not to prepare for it because I didn't have room in my 75 to try and beat it. That's what diversity does, you have to gamble and coinflip your matchups that you have no control over.
Magic is a game. It is a high cost hobby, similar to other hobbies like Warhammer, or collecting guitars, of any number of hobbies that cost a decent amount of money.
You can't really "make a profit" off of Magic, unless you're a member of a team so you can borrow the cards instead of buying them. You don't "make back" any money you've spent on Magic; once you've spent it, it's locked up in the cards until you want to cash out.
Your perspective on this game is antithetical to what the game actually is; your complaints show that you don't understand what playing Magic involves. Go and play another game like Poker where you can edge out a profit, or Chess, and save your money on Magic cards, because you are never going to get what you want out of it because you don't understand what Magic actually is.
What we are all forgetting when we tell sisi to play a game with less variance is that he wants to pay to win. You can't spend a few hundred on an awesome chess set and bring it out and beat the other "plebs and casuals" who have just started or are pathetic enough to simply play the game for fun. He wants to prey on those who are less competitive and/or have less money to throw at the game. It's a hideous, unsupportable stance to take.
EDIT: It's actually pretty ironic that he is so bothered by being disadvantaged by bad matchups when the ultimate goal in his ideal meta (eldrazi winter) is to punish players in a 1 deck meta for not playing that 1 deck
I have taken the time in the past to crunch hard numbers to back this claim up before. However, school is back in session and I have nearly 200 kids to worry about, so the time to do that again (or for other time periods/other events) is not something I have right now. You can look back at my previous analysis of GP Top 8s and perhaps do another one, expanding to other years and SCG Top 8s yourself. But I will firmly stand by the claim that large diversity among decks at a Top 8- (and definitely T32) level has essentially been the norm in Modern for just about every period in its history OTHER THAN 2016. If you want to make this hard claim about diversity, I would love to see it supported by the same level of evidence and reasoning I require from my 8th grade students. If someone wants to do that analysis, I'd love to see the results.
If I recall correctly, those analysis you posted were from before the gitaxian probe banning, so they do not hold up as accurate for today's numbers. Modern is widely regarded as the most open it has ever been, you see it mentioned all the time in posts here and in articles from the pros (in both positive and negative contexts.) Where do you think this impression is coming from? We're a little far removed from Eldrazi winter to say it just feels better in comparison, this sentiment has grown steadily since the GGT and gitaxian probe bans.
Yes, you have top tier strategies built around exploiting nonbasic lands. There should be more than one card in modern that can be sideboarded to effectively attack all nonbasic-based decks. Not as pure mana denial, but as a specific measure against the abilities of those nonbasics. We dont have 50 card sideboards to work with, and options are great. Some decks would use blood moon because they can and moon is king. Others might still use fulminator because they can exploit it being a creature, others might go with seas because they can leverage the card type or flickering it or islandwalking. Just like some play revelry, some play dsphere, some play stony, some play creeping corrosion, some play vandalblast, etc.
And metagaming is the biggest joke in magic. Step one: predict the future. Step two: only draw the prominent matchups from your predicted future. That is, nailing step one is a one in a million shot, and when it works you gain a 5 percent advantage due to step two being a one in a zillion shot.
Bad, after reading discussion on the UB Tezz thread this really does feel like it's coming from a place of wanting to eliminate bad matchups rather than format balancing. There are options for affecting lands, lots of them, and lots of tier 1 and 2 decks run them effectively - but none will change your tron matchups into good ones with the decks you (we) run.
Should there really be multiple cards that can effectively attack all nonbasic abilities? I think that statement is bigger than you think it is.
Tezz is a super fun, powerful and underexplored deck with tiering potential imo but it pretty much can't beat Gx Tron without compromising the deck by overtuning and that's okay.
Metagaming can certainly help, although people tend to make it seem easier than it really is. It can be as one dimensional as guessing what people pack hate for, but it can be a lot more than that with hype, new printings and recent results. The words are simple but the concept can be really hard. Metagaming is not a sole defining factor for winning a tournament, but it is one of those intangible elements that influences success where less critical observers might only see luck.
p.s. don't know how many welding jars you run but they help huge in titanshift. I am 2 mb 1 sb.
The one who must not be named is banned.
Pod is banned.
Tron now runs Eldrazis and is midrange.
Jund was eaten by Eldrazis, and split into many variants.
Valakut dropped blue and is now pure ramp.
But Affinity always stood there through the ages as a pillar of the format.
Midrange vs midrange modern was so cool. I liked when there were only a few format defining decks
Sure, there was less diversity, but most of the games were high quality with very few loopsided matchups (mostly Tron's fault).
I liked Cawblade vs Cawblade standard.
It was cracked wide open with bannings and has surged in popularity since/during that time. The current management philosophy for the format favours diversity over a stable meta with a few top dogs. As much as it baffles me personally, some players like yourself and sisicat want to see a format dominated by (an) overpowered deck(s). This is not likely to happen, and if it does for sure it won't last. The only answer you have is to adjust your expectations for modern because it is purposefully moving away from what you prefer and has been for years. Cawblade era is an often-cited example of a very badly designed block and to hope for it's return is actively hoping that WotC fails at their own goals.
Other people have described the probe ban as surgical and subtle and completely successful/ in it's goals. You make valid points but your post succumbs to your habit of presenting any opposing viewpoint as naive and moronic. Even with push's presence, you can't always have it in your hand and any time you don't have it a probe will show the aggro-combo mage it is safe and contribute to another possible turn 4 violation. This is always be the primary problem with the card when coupled with cantriping and no mana cost.
Considering the result of the ban (along side printing of Push) outright destroyed multiple decks, and AF's own words tell us that they (at least publically) hold the opinion that they would rather weaken a deck without "nuking it out of existence," I'd say it was less successful than a "surgical and subtle" ban should be. The Probe ban destroyed no less than 5 decks, though two "survived" by morphing into very different decks with different construction and gameplan. To me, the Probe ban looks like a big sloppy hammer that happened to get lucky that a after a couple months we found suitable shells for a two of the killed decks.
I'll say this again: Gitaxian Probe, a "free" cantrip + Peek, was never a problem in Modern whatsoever, until it was being abused by T4 violators. The sins lie with the T4-violating decks, not in Probe. Those decks could have actually been surgically hit with a ban of Become Immense, since surgical precision usually implies a lack of collateral damage and a surviving patient. Not a shotgun trying to blast 2 decks and hitting an additional 3 innocents in the crossfire. That's not the image I think of when I think of "surgical" or "subtle."
Weird how Become Immense stopped being a problem after they banned probe, eh?
If you have the option to target a specific deck (or decks) with card A and card B, and both cards hit the same deck(s), but one hits 3 other non-problem decks too, which option do you think would be a better choice? Which do you think would be the "surgical" choice? What decks that were running Probe were ever a problem, outside of Zooicide and Infect?
You remove the card(s) at the root of the problem you are trying to solve. In this instance it was t4 violators in an aggro-combo focused meta. The subtle aspect I mentioned earlier refers to how the card was not the most obvious choice to slow the meta and but rather it was the best choice to achieve that goal. Surgical may be a silly adjective to apply to a ban as there will always be damage but at the time of the ban it was not clear which decks would survive, probe was not a lynchpin card but rather a hyper-efficient enabler (too efficent for WotC.) Surgical meant it was a precise and hopefully non-fatal extraction from certain decks, which is a fair impression to have at the time of the ban not knowing delver and infect etc. would get hit hard (delver shares also suffering from GDS being awesome, I don't think it's that bad of a deck.)
Let's also not forget that people did not like how prominent infect, zooicide and bloo were at the time (yourself included) and the meta is now slower and more interactive.
Other people have described the probe ban as surgical and subtle and completely successful/ in it's goals. You make valid points but your post succumbs to your habit of presenting any opposing viewpoint as naive and moronic. Even with push's presence, you can't always have it in your hand and any time you don't have it a probe will show the aggro-combo mage it is safe and contribute to another possible turn 4 violation. This is always be the primary problem with the card when coupled with cantriping and no mana cost.
Considering the result of the ban (along side printing of Push) outright destroyed multiple decks, and AF's own words tell us that they (at least publically) hold the opinion that they would rather weaken a deck without "nuking it out of existence," I'd say it was less successful than a "surgical and subtle" ban should be. The Probe ban destroyed no less than 5 decks, though two "survived" by morphing into very different decks with different construction and gameplan. To me, the Probe ban looks like a big sloppy hammer that happened to get lucky that a after a couple months we found suitable shells for a two of the killed decks.
I'll say this again: Gitaxian Probe, a "free" cantrip + Peek, was never a problem in Modern whatsoever, until it was being abused by T4 violators. The sins lie with the T4-violating decks, not in Probe. Those decks could have actually been surgically hit with a ban of Become Immense, since surgical precision usually implies a lack of collateral damage and a surviving patient. Not a shotgun trying to blast 2 decks and hitting an additional 3 innocents in the crossfire. That's not the image I think of when I think of "surgical" or "subtle."
Weird how Become Immense stopped being a problem after they banned probe, eh?
Because Path isnt also an answer, or even bolt in some cases, and they will ALWAYS have a turn 3 kill lined up....
That's exactly my point - path and bolt existed then and aggro-combo was still a problem. Changing the colour on the 1 mana answer you don't have doesn't help you at all...
Disagree. Goyf would also disagree.
You seem to be under the impression that I'm arguing Fatal Push had no effect on the meta. This is not the case. I am arguing that the perfect information provided by Gitaxian Probe fueled turn 4 violations because it worked so well in aggro-combo decks.
1 removal spell is the difference between a turn 2/3 win and a card advantage blowout loss when you're a aggro-combo mage and you decide to swing. Wouldn't it be nice to know if they had removal for free while advancing your gameplan? Because no matter how good the answers in a format are, you can't cast them if you don't have them in your hand. Whenever they aren't in your hand the potential for a quick death skyrockets in a format with probe. Probe wasn't strong because of a lack of answers for low-cost creatures.
Because Path isnt also an answer, or even bolt in some cases, and they will ALWAYS have a turn 3 kill lined up....
That's exactly my point - path and bolt existed then and aggro-combo was still a problem. Changing the colour on the 1 mana answer you don't have doesn't help you at all...
The big problem with the Gitaxian Probe ban is that basically every single deck at the time that got usage out of that card was weak to Fatal Push. Death's Shadow Zoo? Infect? Kiln Fiend? Pyromancer Delver? Fatal Push is stellar against all of those decks. Banning Gitaxian Probe without first observing Fatal Push's impact does seem questionable in retrospect.
If push had text letting you draw it from your deck on turn 0 I would agree with you
But in all seriousness, you could easily swap Probe for Become Immense and be fine, especially with Push, Path, and Thoughtseize being the most played cards in the format
Can you imagine Grixis Shadow with the full playset of Gitaxian Probe available? I have, and in fact, I have tested it. It's disgustingly good. If it was unbanned, it would have to be rebanned, because Death's Shadow is not the problem(the problem is the fact that you can go at low life so quickly+get informations for free).
Even in Become Immense's case, this delve card is not the problem. Probe and fetchlands are.
With the multitude of ways decks can systematically wreck Shadow and the fact that Shadow has to cut 4 cards to make room for another playset of "2 damage to myself", I'm sure it'd be fine. This post reminds me of the cries about how broken Shadow is, despite it being mostly absent from prominent tournament Top 8s.
You are absolutely wrong. Updating Street Wraith into Gitaxian Probe and adding 2 - 3 Street Wraith in it means the deck would be easily Tier 0(more ways to lower life, getting free information for free)
And tbh, I don't think Grixis Shadow is broken atm, I think it's just a Tier 1 deck with problems, but Gitaxian Probe would push it too much(not theorycrafting here, I am talking after having tested the deck with the card, unlike you).
I know you want Probe to play Grixis Delver again(I want too), but this is not happening, because it would be just wrong for the reasons I stated.
Let's just look at the facts: Gitaxian Probe was in the format since the beginning of Modern and was never a problem in any deck. So if the card was inherently broken on its own, it would have been banned long ago. The "does too much for free" excuse is nonsense. The only reason it was banned was to specifically hit T4 violators like Infect and Zooicide, something which could be easily accomplished by targeting Become Immense (the #1 cause for Turn 4 violations). Never mind that Wizards completely ignores the future impact Fatal Push would have on those decks. Probe was just another wrong decision, made for lazy reasons, because Wizards was incapable identifying the correct problem card without killing the decks and totally unable to see or predict the impact of the ban alongside the obviously-powerful new card: Fatal Push.
Also, I don't know how much you played GDS yourself (I know you have switched to UW/Jeskai recently), but the life loss is a real thing. Adding in MORE life loss may add velocity to a small number of great opening hands, but is a real price to pay against a number of decks (also remember Probe is sorcery speed only). And these fanatical claims of a Tier 0 deck are completely unfounded. They're made worse by the fact that it does nothing to change the deck's gameplan, mode of attack, or do anything to improve its terrible matchups.
Banning Probe completely destroyed multiple decks that didn't need to be destroyed, including ones that weren't even the focus of the ban. Become Immense dealt with the targeted decks without screwing over other players. I don't think Probe will ever be released, based on their stubbornness to take away all reasonable card draw, but it was an innocent card that was incorrectly targeted for the sins of extremely specific decks that could have been hit more elegantly. Like many of their bans, it was sloppy, lazy, and careless.
Edit: all this aside, this is why I am so thrilled about the Play Design team. Hopefully with the help of actually knowledgeable and skillful players, we can avoid stupid decisions like this moving forward.
Other people have described the probe ban as surgical and subtle and completely successful in it's goals. You make valid points but your post succumbs to your habit of presenting any opposing viewpoint as naive and moronic. Even with push's presence, you can't always have it in your hand and any time you don't have it a probe will show the aggro-combo mage it is safe and contribute to another possible turn 4 violation. This is always be the primary problem with the card when coupled with cantriping and no mana cost.
Oh, and WotC is full of smart, hard working people who try their best and make a great product that we all enjoy
Pros complain because they may go up against someone on mono green stompy and get rolled as a burn player or something. But you know the thing about matchups, pairings and the inherent chaos thereof? Its fair. If you pick a decent deck and know what you are doing, the odds of you facing three awful matchups is about the same as LSV. I understand why the pros say it, every bit of variance lowers the odds of making Day 2, top 8, or winning a major event. I just don't really care, because the WOTC cartel of pro play bothers me on a fundamental level.
I don't actually care for pros either, but this is the crux of one of my main complaints about Modern: bringing a deck with positive matchups against a predicted metagame is significantly more beneficial than simply being skillful with any one particular deck. It would be nice to have the flexibility to switch on the fly between several $1,000+ decks that have virtually no crossover cards. As such, most players simply play what they have and deal with the matchups they are given. It leads to wildly swingy outcomes that are heavily influenced by things outside of your control.
So you believe that diversity is bad? Or is it just a matter of diminishing marginal returns? The standard comparison has already been made, and I can tell you if the entire format literally was Grixis Shadow, E-Tron, let's say Burn and Affinity, no other deck existed that had a shot at going X-2 at a GP, I'd quit the format. That's standard to me. Hell, add Valakut and call it five decks and not only is that standard but that's a healthy standard!
Still worth noting how there aren't a ton of 80/20 matchups in modern nonetheless.
From my point of view, if it is the main contributing factor to my win percentage decreasing, yes it is bad. There's no deck in Modern that has no bad matchups, that's normally how I would try to control variance in matchups, but due to how Modern is designed for the masses and not for people who want to play low variance mistake punishing magic, diversity is a big negative for me. I'd rather play Eldrazi winter mirrors than what we have now, only because I have to prepare for the mirror and that my deck will crush everything else that tries to stand in it's way naturally.
Would you acknowledge that the type of metas you prefer are generally considered poorly designed and unappealing to players?
Thanks for the report! Let your friend on Etron know that a Chalice on 2 will counter a chalice on 1 (X counts as cmc while a spell is on the stack.) Don't want him getting burned in a more competitive setting
Thank you for making this clear. It makes this forum hard to read at times with all the adjective-laden tirades that seem to be solely a source of venting and completely devoid of constructive merit. I used to learn a lot about the game reading this forum, I'd like to see that come back
What we are all forgetting when we tell sisi to play a game with less variance is that he wants to pay to win. You can't spend a few hundred on an awesome chess set and bring it out and beat the other "plebs and casuals" who have just started or are pathetic enough to simply play the game for fun. He wants to prey on those who are less competitive and/or have less money to throw at the game. It's a hideous, unsupportable stance to take.
EDIT: It's actually pretty ironic that he is so bothered by being disadvantaged by bad matchups when the ultimate goal in his ideal meta (eldrazi winter) is to punish players in a 1 deck meta for not playing that 1 deck
If I recall correctly, those analysis you posted were from before the gitaxian probe banning, so they do not hold up as accurate for today's numbers. Modern is widely regarded as the most open it has ever been, you see it mentioned all the time in posts here and in articles from the pros (in both positive and negative contexts.) Where do you think this impression is coming from? We're a little far removed from Eldrazi winter to say it just feels better in comparison, this sentiment has grown steadily since the GGT and gitaxian probe bans.
Bad, after reading discussion on the UB Tezz thread this really does feel like it's coming from a place of wanting to eliminate bad matchups rather than format balancing. There are options for affecting lands, lots of them, and lots of tier 1 and 2 decks run them effectively - but none will change your tron matchups into good ones with the decks you (we) run.
Should there really be multiple cards that can effectively attack all nonbasic abilities? I think that statement is bigger than you think it is.
Tezz is a super fun, powerful and underexplored deck with tiering potential imo but it pretty much can't beat Gx Tron without compromising the deck by overtuning and that's okay.
Metagaming can certainly help, although people tend to make it seem easier than it really is. It can be as one dimensional as guessing what people pack hate for, but it can be a lot more than that with hype, new printings and recent results. The words are simple but the concept can be really hard. Metagaming is not a sole defining factor for winning a tournament, but it is one of those intangible elements that influences success where less critical observers might only see luck.
p.s. don't know how many welding jars you run but they help huge in titanshift. I am 2 mb 1 sb.
It was cracked wide open with bannings and has surged in popularity since/during that time. The current management philosophy for the format favours diversity over a stable meta with a few top dogs. As much as it baffles me personally, some players like yourself and sisicat want to see a format dominated by (an) overpowered deck(s). This is not likely to happen, and if it does for sure it won't last. The only answer you have is to adjust your expectations for modern because it is purposefully moving away from what you prefer and has been for years. Cawblade era is an often-cited example of a very badly designed block and to hope for it's return is actively hoping that WotC fails at their own goals.
Timmy is pretty happy that it's there.
You remove the card(s) at the root of the problem you are trying to solve. In this instance it was t4 violators in an aggro-combo focused meta. The subtle aspect I mentioned earlier refers to how the card was not the most obvious choice to slow the meta and but rather it was the best choice to achieve that goal. Surgical may be a silly adjective to apply to a ban as there will always be damage but at the time of the ban it was not clear which decks would survive, probe was not a lynchpin card but rather a hyper-efficient enabler (too efficent for WotC.) Surgical meant it was a precise and hopefully non-fatal extraction from certain decks, which is a fair impression to have at the time of the ban not knowing delver and infect etc. would get hit hard (delver shares also suffering from GDS being awesome, I don't think it's that bad of a deck.)
Let's also not forget that people did not like how prominent infect, zooicide and bloo were at the time (yourself included) and the meta is now slower and more interactive.
Weird how Become Immense stopped being a problem after they banned probe, eh?
You seem to be under the impression that I'm arguing Fatal Push had no effect on the meta. This is not the case. I am arguing that the perfect information provided by Gitaxian Probe fueled turn 4 violations because it worked so well in aggro-combo decks.
1 removal spell is the difference between a turn 2/3 win and a card advantage blowout loss when you're a aggro-combo mage and you decide to swing. Wouldn't it be nice to know if they had removal for free while advancing your gameplan? Because no matter how good the answers in a format are, you can't cast them if you don't have them in your hand. Whenever they aren't in your hand the potential for a quick death skyrockets in a format with probe. Probe wasn't strong because of a lack of answers for low-cost creatures.
That's exactly my point - path and bolt existed then and aggro-combo was still a problem. Changing the colour on the 1 mana answer you don't have doesn't help you at all...
If push had text letting you draw it from your deck on turn 0 I would agree with you
Other people have described the probe ban as surgical and subtle and completely successful in it's goals. You make valid points but your post succumbs to your habit of presenting any opposing viewpoint as naive and moronic. Even with push's presence, you can't always have it in your hand and any time you don't have it a probe will show the aggro-combo mage it is safe and contribute to another possible turn 4 violation. This is always be the primary problem with the card when coupled with cantriping and no mana cost.
Oh, and WotC is full of smart, hard working people who try their best and make a great product that we all enjoy
Would you acknowledge that the type of metas you prefer are generally considered poorly designed and unappealing to players?