yeah, i'm not 100% familiar with the newest version of WUR control, but the midrange and older control lists had some difficulty with pod. but who knows. maybe they've solved it by playing gideon...
My suspicion is that players shied away from Pod because it was the obvious deck to choose for the tournament and that meant a lot of hate. No one wanted to deal with Ooze as a Pod pilot, so they switched to a more interactive deck that had better matchups across the board. Also, the 4 copy Snappy + Angel version of UWR has extra removal power against Pod, even if Pod starts bringing in Voice. The maindeck Shadow of Doubt is yet another bullet.
This still doesn't explain why there was 0 Twin or Pod (two decks that are all over both MTGO and paper scenes and performing well in every event), but it gives some explanation as to why the metagame was so sharply skewed towards the UWR decks.
From a deck diversity perspective, I would much rather have Dread Return off the list than GGT. GGT helps Dredge and Dredgevine...maybe. DR, however, helps Dredge and enables a host of other mill and reanimator based strategies. It is much more interesting for the format. I would prefer that DR get unbanned alone and GGT stay where he is.
To that end, I would like to test Dredge lists, or really any DR powered list, that uses DR without GGT. This would help us isolate the effect of just DR on the format as independent from its 6 Dredge enabler. But it also means that Flayer is a lot less valuable as a win condition because we can't just return the GGT. I'm also generally skeptical of Flayer in Modern with no good sac outlets. How would you all navigate around that? Would it make sense to stick with FKZ, which I actually find to be a fairly robust win condition in this metagame? You can't remove him in response and he makes your horde massive. We would still probably want to stick with a low-creature version just to dodge removal.
No offense but thats an old list. You dont utilize any of the newer self mill cards from Inn block. Flame kin isnt played anymore in Legacy. (I know, dont compare)
Thats the problem with the play testing. Playing old lists and ignoring what could be huge additions to the decks by using new cards that were not around from the time of the deck lists tested.
Well, FKZ/Bridge is the only way that Dredge is getting an actual turn 3 win in this format. Virtual wins, via revived Ionas, do not count. And as far as a win condition goes on turn 3, it's pretty darn effective and is itself immune to removal. If you have a better win con or list, I would love to see and test it.
As to the other bit, no, I am not "ignoring" the potential additions to the list. They were also tested, both empirically in matches and theoretically with some probabilities, and found to be less efficient than those older alternatives. Faithless Looting and Thought Scour could maybe be squeezed in if we shaved some copies off of the 4 ofs, but that would impact deck consistency elsewhere. Ultimately it's the lack of the 1 CMC discard outlet like Putrid Imp or Tireless Tribe that makes those cards a lot worse.
So what you are saying is that if you actually had an opponent, you would almost never win before turn 4.
That's a good question. It would depend how much my opponent can interact with my strategy. I'd happily test the Dredge list against other lists in the format. Pod, with minimal interaction, would probably lose a lot. But I could check it out against, say, Jund or UWR Flash Control to see how the deck does when faced with actual interaction. But decks like Pod and Affinity, and to a lesser extent Gruul Zoo, would be pretty handily crushed.
Why does it say on there that you were able to deal 50 points of damage by turn 3?
Whenever I won a game, I checked to see what my lethal damage attack would have been with my FKZ powered zombie horde. I recorded that number for every turn 3 win. On average, it was 50 damage. My low end kill was 22. My high end kill was a hilarious 110. Again, this is only in a solitaire game with no interaction, but those numbers are pretty silly.
Personal reasons? I'm fine with a tier 1 dredge list. I might be even be fine with Dread Return coming off, if something took its place (I was thinking Bridge from Below). If you want, I'll ask Ktkenshinx to test whether dredge with Dread Return and GGT would be okay. If it would, I'll start saying that both should be unbanned.
I actually already did some test on GGT and DR back in an older version of this thread. You can find the post here:
Using DR and GGT in a fairly unoptimized Dredge list, I was able to get turn 3 wins in 36% of my 50 solitaire games. That win percentage is less than what I got testing a solo infect list (40% for turn 2 or 3 wins), and roughly what I got for a pre-ban Storm win rate (~33% by turn 3).
The deck is very vulnerable to removal, as many turn 3 wins required me to have an active Hedron Crab or Drowned Rusalka for at least 2 turns. It is also very vulnerable to countermagic, because if you have Glimpse or Ideas countered, you are pretty screwed for the next turn. Finally, and most obviously, it's very vulnerable to graveyard hate.
If GGT hadn't been in the mix, I guess that my win percentage would drop to around 30% or so just because of the suboptimal dredgers I would have to use.
No Mesmeric Orb: I love this card, and for the longest time it occupied the 3 slots that are currently occupied by the 3 IoKs. Unfortunately, Orb had a few problems which ultimately got it cut. For one, it has no synergy at all with Peer. Two, it was much easier to interact with than the rest of our mill through Decay, Pridemage, Pulse, etc. Three, and this is the most important, it was the weakest piece of mill that I felt comfortable removing in order to address the number one problem that the deck had: Lack of interaction. UB Mill, for the most part, can just blast on ahead and try to win the game. But in some matchups, namely Affinity and Zoo, you really need to have a little interaction with their game plan. The only way that we beat aggro is with Crypt Incursion. We run 4. Aggro beats us with almost any permutation of their dozens of threats. They are more likely to overpower us than we are to draw a Crypt Incursion. And in the case of Affinity, Incursion wasn't saving us from Inkmoth. I wanted to add interaction to the deck, and that meant cutting the mill spell that was doing the least work. This could also have been Breaking, and in time those might reverse.
Inquisition of Kozilek: This card has helped out my aggro matchup a lot. It slows down fast hands by 1-2 turns, which can give us extra time to win or find an Incursion. It also has awesome synergy with Surgical Extraction (which I upped to 3 for its power in a lot of different matchups), so the deck now has 3 different ways to get a turn 1 extraction: Archive Trap, IoK, Thought Scour. IoK got the nod over Thoughtseize because we don't want to give aggro a free Shock. Our clock just isn't fast enough to justify that.
Breeding Pool + Nature's Claim: I don't want to autolose to Leyline of Sanctity, and Claim was the most efficient answer I could find. As an added bonus, it also helps out the terrible Affinity matchup. I initially wanted to deal with Leyline using something like Vanishment, but that was too cute, expensive, and inconsistent. Regular bounce, like Truth, doesn't work on Leyline because we can't just win on the same turn that we bounce the enchantment. Claim gives us an economic and permanent answer, and it works well with Extraction.
Note that I would NOT run more than 2 lands that produce green mana, especially not Tomb. This deck has a lot of spells that need U to cast, so an Overgrown Tomb can sit around and do very little for you if you get unlucky.
It's not set in stone, and some of those thoughts (particularly IoK) have some flexibility. I also upped the land count to 22 to try and smooth out our opening hands and improve our mulligans.
Breach was kind of a silly deck, I remember that from way back. Tried to play turn 1 or 2 through the breach into Emrakul. Its probably for the best that sort of strategy is no longer viable
TfB is most devastating against an aggro deck on turn 3, when the opponent likely has exactly 5 or 6 permanents in play for Emrakul to annihilate off the board. Waiting until turn 4, however, tends to be too late. Affinity will definitely have 7+ permanents at that point and will either modular counters over to a last-man-standing creature, or have you at such a low life (or high poison) total that you can't recover even after Emrakul comes out. It's the same with Gruul Zoo. Against such a deck, you can expect to take on average 15 damage by turn 3 through some combination of burn, bloodrush, hastey attacks, and E1/Goyf beaters. Even after you hit with Emrakul, if you are already at <5 life, you have probably lost anyway.
That means that decks using TfB really need to resolve it on turn 3 to compete with aggro. Control decks can easily deal with it via countermagic. A variety of midrange decks can stop it through Thoughtseize or IoK. Sure, aggro would be left dead in the water to a turn 3 hasted Emrakul, but I'm quite frankly okay with aggro losing to a combo deck. Modern doesn't have to be a carbon copy of other formats to maintain some semblance of the archetype trinity (or its more nuanced version of hybrids).
Hive Mind was a fun little deck, but doesn't need Seething Song to work. It used Pentad Prism quite fine if I can recall.
I strongly disagree on the Hive Mind assessment. Pentad Prism is much worse than Song in a metagame full of Abrupt Decay. It's also a poor way to waste your turn leading up to the combo. I would much rather leave mana open for Remand, removal, EOT Gigadrowse, transmuting for Mind/Pact, or any number of other plays. If you drop Prism on turn 2, then you don't have to worry as much about all that, but it's a much smaller window. Also, Prism won't let you combo out on turns 4 or 5 if you draw into it. The card only gets you bonus mana on the following turn, not the turn you cast it.
Hive Mind was hardly a dominant deck, but we saw it win plenty of Dailies and place at some PTQs in 2012. Since the song banning, however, it has been completely removed from the metagame. There are other reasons for that too (Pod, for example, can actually just use mana dorks to pay for Pact, which forces you to have double Pact to win). But overall, the loss of Song has been a death sentence for Hive Mind.
Well, then we have a serious problem. With a cast in stone turn 4 rule, there is no reason to play spell based combo. It can't outrace aggro.
Add to that the fact that aggro can't beat the top mid range decks that we have in the format and you have an even bigger problem. Add to that the fact that it doesn't make sense to play control since spell based combo doesn't exist and you have an even bigger problem.
Am I really the only one who sees this?
I agree that this is a serious problem, but I also think that Storm in its old form might have pushed the envelope too much. As we have talked about in the past, a Grapeshot ban could have toned the deck down a lot and forced it to use the less consistent Ignite Memories or the much more interactive Empty the Warrens. The real crime is that the Song banning, aimed at Storm, gutted a bunch of other combo decks that could have competed as well.
After all this, I think we can all agree on Vision not leaving the ban list in the next announcement, right?
Worlds isn't exactly the most representative event for Modern decks, and there are a lot of reasons for that. But the power and resilience of UWR Control is pretty clear even if we account for those differences between Worlds and, say, GPs and PTQs. If Wizards had considered bringing Vision off the banlist, my guess is that it is strongly reconsidering that idea. It's not going anywhere anytime soon.
I'm working to update the OP so we have some current information on the deck available to visitors. What are some suggestions that people have for the new content? I am going to include the post and no-post versions of the deck along with some card explanations for each build. Matchup section will also be included. What else do people want to see / is there anything specific that you all think I should add?
Ohmahgahd is that a Phyrexian Arena that I see? That is a majorly old school BG Rock showing right there as played by Josh Utter-Leyton. Very excited to see that list.
Welcome to the forums! Glad to hear you are looking to get in on the Modern scene. What sort of stuff are you looking for in a deck? Modern has a relatively high powerlevel of all the constructed formats, so a traditional "Beasts Deck" might not cut it on its own. What sort of cards are you looking to play? Do you have a sample decklist that we can all look at?
And hate bears takes the first game, MVP to manlands 4 toughness butt. And Smiters 4 butt. And liege's 4 butt... Turns out bolts cant kill 4 toughness. Who knew?
Thrun is going to be brutal in this next matchup, even with Wrath and Hallowed Burial out of Stark's board.
My suspicion is that players shied away from Pod because it was the obvious deck to choose for the tournament and that meant a lot of hate. No one wanted to deal with Ooze as a Pod pilot, so they switched to a more interactive deck that had better matchups across the board. Also, the 4 copy Snappy + Angel version of UWR has extra removal power against Pod, even if Pod starts bringing in Voice. The maindeck Shadow of Doubt is yet another bullet.
This still doesn't explain why there was 0 Twin or Pod (two decks that are all over both MTGO and paper scenes and performing well in every event), but it gives some explanation as to why the metagame was so sharply skewed towards the UWR decks.
To that end, I would like to test Dredge lists, or really any DR powered list, that uses DR without GGT. This would help us isolate the effect of just DR on the format as independent from its 6 Dredge enabler. But it also means that Flayer is a lot less valuable as a win condition because we can't just return the GGT. I'm also generally skeptical of Flayer in Modern with no good sac outlets. How would you all navigate around that? Would it make sense to stick with FKZ, which I actually find to be a fairly robust win condition in this metagame? You can't remove him in response and he makes your horde massive. We would still probably want to stick with a low-creature version just to dodge removal.
Well, FKZ/Bridge is the only way that Dredge is getting an actual turn 3 win in this format. Virtual wins, via revived Ionas, do not count. And as far as a win condition goes on turn 3, it's pretty darn effective and is itself immune to removal. If you have a better win con or list, I would love to see and test it.
As to the other bit, no, I am not "ignoring" the potential additions to the list. They were also tested, both empirically in matches and theoretically with some probabilities, and found to be less efficient than those older alternatives. Faithless Looting and Thought Scour could maybe be squeezed in if we shaved some copies off of the 4 ofs, but that would impact deck consistency elsewhere. Ultimately it's the lack of the 1 CMC discard outlet like Putrid Imp or Tireless Tribe that makes those cards a lot worse.
That's a good question. It would depend how much my opponent can interact with my strategy. I'd happily test the Dredge list against other lists in the format. Pod, with minimal interaction, would probably lose a lot. But I could check it out against, say, Jund or UWR Flash Control to see how the deck does when faced with actual interaction. But decks like Pod and Affinity, and to a lesser extent Gruul Zoo, would be pretty handily crushed.
Whenever I won a game, I checked to see what my lethal damage attack would have been with my FKZ powered zombie horde. I recorded that number for every turn 3 win. On average, it was 50 damage. My low end kill was 22. My high end kill was a hilarious 110. Again, this is only in a solitaire game with no interaction, but those numbers are pretty silly.
I actually already did some test on GGT and DR back in an older version of this thread. You can find the post here:
http://forums.mtgsalvation.com/showpost.php?p=10228328&postcount=1430
Using DR and GGT in a fairly unoptimized Dredge list, I was able to get turn 3 wins in 36% of my 50 solitaire games. That win percentage is less than what I got testing a solo infect list (40% for turn 2 or 3 wins), and roughly what I got for a pre-ban Storm win rate (~33% by turn 3).
The deck is very vulnerable to removal, as many turn 3 wins required me to have an active Hedron Crab or Drowned Rusalka for at least 2 turns. It is also very vulnerable to countermagic, because if you have Glimpse or Ideas countered, you are pretty screwed for the next turn. Finally, and most obviously, it's very vulnerable to graveyard hate.
If GGT hadn't been in the mix, I guess that my win percentage would drop to around 30% or so just because of the suboptimal dredgers I would have to use.
4 Darkslick Shores
3 Watery Grave
1 Swamp
3 Shelldock Isle
1 Scalding Tarn
2 Oboro, Palace in the Clouds
3 Misty Rainforest
3 Island
1 Ghost Quarter
1 Breeding Pool
4 Hedron Crab
Spells: 35
4 Visions of Beyond
4 Thought Scour
3 Surgical Extraction
2 Mind Funeral
4 Glimpse the Unthinkable
4 Crypt Incursion
3 Breaking/Entering
4 Archive Trap
3 Peer Through Depths
3 Inquisition of Kozilek
1 Surgical Extraction
2 Doom Blade
2 Echoing Truth
2 Hurkyl's Recall
4 Ravenous Trap
4 Nature's Claim
A few notes on card choices and omissions.
No Mesmeric Orb: I love this card, and for the longest time it occupied the 3 slots that are currently occupied by the 3 IoKs. Unfortunately, Orb had a few problems which ultimately got it cut. For one, it has no synergy at all with Peer. Two, it was much easier to interact with than the rest of our mill through Decay, Pridemage, Pulse, etc. Three, and this is the most important, it was the weakest piece of mill that I felt comfortable removing in order to address the number one problem that the deck had: Lack of interaction. UB Mill, for the most part, can just blast on ahead and try to win the game. But in some matchups, namely Affinity and Zoo, you really need to have a little interaction with their game plan. The only way that we beat aggro is with Crypt Incursion. We run 4. Aggro beats us with almost any permutation of their dozens of threats. They are more likely to overpower us than we are to draw a Crypt Incursion. And in the case of Affinity, Incursion wasn't saving us from Inkmoth. I wanted to add interaction to the deck, and that meant cutting the mill spell that was doing the least work. This could also have been Breaking, and in time those might reverse.
Inquisition of Kozilek: This card has helped out my aggro matchup a lot. It slows down fast hands by 1-2 turns, which can give us extra time to win or find an Incursion. It also has awesome synergy with Surgical Extraction (which I upped to 3 for its power in a lot of different matchups), so the deck now has 3 different ways to get a turn 1 extraction: Archive Trap, IoK, Thought Scour. IoK got the nod over Thoughtseize because we don't want to give aggro a free Shock. Our clock just isn't fast enough to justify that.
Breeding Pool + Nature's Claim: I don't want to autolose to Leyline of Sanctity, and Claim was the most efficient answer I could find. As an added bonus, it also helps out the terrible Affinity matchup. I initially wanted to deal with Leyline using something like Vanishment, but that was too cute, expensive, and inconsistent. Regular bounce, like Truth, doesn't work on Leyline because we can't just win on the same turn that we bounce the enchantment. Claim gives us an economic and permanent answer, and it works well with Extraction.
Note that I would NOT run more than 2 lands that produce green mana, especially not Tomb. This deck has a lot of spells that need U to cast, so an Overgrown Tomb can sit around and do very little for you if you get unlucky.
It's not set in stone, and some of those thoughts (particularly IoK) have some flexibility. I also upped the land count to 22 to try and smooth out our opening hands and improve our mulligans.
TfB is most devastating against an aggro deck on turn 3, when the opponent likely has exactly 5 or 6 permanents in play for Emrakul to annihilate off the board. Waiting until turn 4, however, tends to be too late. Affinity will definitely have 7+ permanents at that point and will either modular counters over to a last-man-standing creature, or have you at such a low life (or high poison) total that you can't recover even after Emrakul comes out. It's the same with Gruul Zoo. Against such a deck, you can expect to take on average 15 damage by turn 3 through some combination of burn, bloodrush, hastey attacks, and E1/Goyf beaters. Even after you hit with Emrakul, if you are already at <5 life, you have probably lost anyway.
That means that decks using TfB really need to resolve it on turn 3 to compete with aggro. Control decks can easily deal with it via countermagic. A variety of midrange decks can stop it through Thoughtseize or IoK. Sure, aggro would be left dead in the water to a turn 3 hasted Emrakul, but I'm quite frankly okay with aggro losing to a combo deck. Modern doesn't have to be a carbon copy of other formats to maintain some semblance of the archetype trinity (or its more nuanced version of hybrids).
I strongly disagree on the Hive Mind assessment. Pentad Prism is much worse than Song in a metagame full of Abrupt Decay. It's also a poor way to waste your turn leading up to the combo. I would much rather leave mana open for Remand, removal, EOT Gigadrowse, transmuting for Mind/Pact, or any number of other plays. If you drop Prism on turn 2, then you don't have to worry as much about all that, but it's a much smaller window. Also, Prism won't let you combo out on turns 4 or 5 if you draw into it. The card only gets you bonus mana on the following turn, not the turn you cast it.
Hive Mind was hardly a dominant deck, but we saw it win plenty of Dailies and place at some PTQs in 2012. Since the song banning, however, it has been completely removed from the metagame. There are other reasons for that too (Pod, for example, can actually just use mana dorks to pay for Pact, which forces you to have double Pact to win). But overall, the loss of Song has been a death sentence for Hive Mind.
I agree that this is a serious problem, but I also think that Storm in its old form might have pushed the envelope too much. As we have talked about in the past, a Grapeshot ban could have toned the deck down a lot and forced it to use the less consistent Ignite Memories or the much more interactive Empty the Warrens. The real crime is that the Song banning, aimed at Storm, gutted a bunch of other combo decks that could have competed as well.
Worlds isn't exactly the most representative event for Modern decks, and there are a lot of reasons for that. But the power and resilience of UWR Control is pretty clear even if we account for those differences between Worlds and, say, GPs and PTQs. If Wizards had considered bringing Vision off the banlist, my guess is that it is strongly reconsidering that idea. It's not going anywhere anytime soon.
Thrun is going to be brutal in this next matchup, even with Wrath and Hallowed Burial out of Stark's board.