MTG Salvation

Yeah, as much as the control player in me shudders at the though of getting my face smashed in repeatedly by DSA, the real takeaway IMO is that the meta has a powerful new deck that punishes you for not interacting. That's a good foil for the ramp decks I was expecting to dominate (and which put up a ton of strong results on day 1).

I imagine Jund's Terminate/Decay suite and Abzan's Path/Decay suite are pretty potent in the matchup. BWx could do well too with Path and Push, and RIP is pretty beefy against it. The thing is that lots of decks have good answers or ways of punishing DSA, but all the discard makes you unlikely to be able to interact in time.

Also Chalice on 1 seems damn strong, as does Bridge. Problem is K-Command answers them at advantage. White's sideboard cards – RIP, Leyline, Halo, etc. – may be stronger hosers for that reason.

Quote from cfusionpm »

Quote from Jenoz »

why do I get the feeling that this Death's Shadow deck is actually terrible, but was just well positioned in this meta?

Playing Kolaghan's Command gives the deck resiliency. Otherwise, it just plays 8 ridiculously overpowered creatures for their cost and another 4 ways to find them, backed up by discard spells and kill spells. It's a fantastic deck.

It's a little more than that. Liliana, the Last Hope seems like a good inclusion, so that's another 2-3 ways of recurring those creatures. And it's a 52-card deck because of Bauble and Wraith, so about 15% slimmer than your average pile.

Along with K-Command, I think the discard suite is part of the deck's resilience. Even removal-heavy decks have a hard time dealing with a bunch of vanilla beaters with huge butts when all their removal spells get binned turns 1-2.

Quote from idSurge »

Honestly, some of the coverage issues, sure, but these have been REALLY good games almost every game I've sat and watched. This Merfolk/Shadow game is tight.

Yeah, that was definitely some of the best Magic I've watched since Corey Burkhart won his Mox Emerald.

Quote from ktkenshinx »

I'm one Top 32 away from writing a very strongly worded article about how bad reactive blue decks are in Modern and how badly we need to consider a few unbans. A few near misses in the T16 would complicate the picture, but it's not looking promising.

Do it!

Quote from Sabertooth »

Ktkenshinx: I think that jace or preordain, even ponder wont help blue. What cards would you unban to help a color which indentity has been nerfed?

I've seen this argument several times today, and I don't get where it's coming from. Unbanning cards that are more powerful than Blue currently has access to (even being strictly better than a current staple in the case of Preordain) absolutely does help blue. Would it completely fix the problems Blue has? No, it won't. Is it a good step. Yes, absolutely.

So if I heard rightly just now, 3/4 of the Vancouver Semifinals at is going to be composed of 3 of the 5 people who brought Death's Shadow Aggro.

Holy *****.

Boy, Chalice of the Void sure is putting in reps at Vancouver. Also looks like the coverage has cause a Basilisk Collar buyout.

Quote from Spsiegel1987 »

Corey is fantastic on hosting, really like his input and his narrating

That man is just an upstanding Magic man all around.

i missed his games (and his hosting). Anyone fill me in quick?

Quote from Valanarch »

Kenji's Storm deck looks amazing.

I've been experimenting with Gifts Storm with Baral and Electromancer and it's both tons of fun and surprisingly robust. I don't know what his list is exactly, but it looked pretty similar to what's brewing here at MTGS.

Saffi Eriksdotter takes it vs. Grishoalbrand 2-1 on-camera. Legit tech in Abzan Co, or flash in the pan?

Agreed that Burn (and Cheeri0s) are great meta calls. Also, I'm not surprised (and very pleased!) to see my tribe of choice putting up good results! It's very weak to GR Tron and probably folds hard to Cheeri0s, making it risky, but the elfball threat is real and super fun to run!