I have 0 interest in debating around any of the laughable Twin nonsense I've heard a million times already. I just wanted to laugh at that notion that Twin's Twinless plan was so good. I have done that already, I'm fine now, thanks. You can safely move on.
Do you realize how genuinely unkind and mean you sound in so many of your posts?
Twin won plenty without the combo. I once took 6 to 8 damage from an exarch at a 1k, terrified to die from the combo. Bolt snap bolt is also 8 damage alone, along with pain from fetching.
The deck won plenty with beat down
But the point of the comment is that this backup plan (hit in with a 1/4 and eventually finish with Snapcaster Mage) is a terrible plan if you don't have the fear of the combo. It's slow and clunky and relies on your opponent holding back their plays. When the best plan in Modern is to vomit your hand as soon as possible and mostly ignore, play through, or play past the opponent, this plan is awful.
Given some of the kinds of cards on the banned list, their stances on consistency, their praise of the current meta, and their restriction on data, it seems this is EXACTLY what Wizards wants...
Diversity =\= variance. Diversity means you have lots of decks in a format. Variance means games just come down to the luck of the draw. I know you seem to hate the current Modern and think decks do come down to the luck of the draw, but many authors have explained why this isn't really the case.
I believe one of Modern's largest problems is player inflexibility. Players would rather complain than adapt their decks and card choices. This is why we don't see breakout decks more often and it takes a while for them to take root; players immediately doubt any new strategy. See ETron for many months. See JDS and GDS dropping their shares through natural shifts after many cried for bans. See Humans going undefeated at Cincinnati. I'd go even further to say that some Modern critics actively cheer against these decks because they want their negative format view to be validated. Wizards is partially to blame for this with the absurd number of bans, but players are responsible too.
That's not what I was referring to at all. Wizards WANTS a format with high variance, because they keep banning or not printing good consistency cards. They would love to have players randomly win against better skilled opponents due to lopsided matchups because it makes new players feel good to get wins with their weird brews. Their philosophy has been consistently to reduce consistency which in turn increases variance.
Opt.
The card worse than Serum Visions, and often worse than Sleight of Hand? That came 13 years after Fifth Dawn (Serum), 12 years after 9th Edition (Sleight)? That really only sees play after running a full 8 Serum/Sleight because Probe/Ponder/Preordain/Cruise/Dig are all banned? And because they'll never print Brainstorm again? OK. I guess they want us to be consistent!
I can't really not want a BBE unban. I've spent my Modern life cursing and battling Jund, but to be honest, I can't see how more Jund would be bad for the format.
I would rather play against Jund than just about any other top deck today. Those games, win or lose, were always rich and engaging games of back-and-forth decision making and resource trading. Massively fun.
Given some of the kinds of cards on the banned list, their stances on consistency, their praise of the current meta, and their restriction on data, it seems this is EXACTLY what Wizards wants...
Diversity =\= variance. Diversity means you have lots of decks in a format. Variance means games just come down to the luck of the draw. I know you seem to hate the current Modern and think decks do come down to the luck of the draw, but many authors have explained why this isn't really the case.
I believe one of Modern's largest problems is player inflexibility. Players would rather complain than adapt their decks and card choices. This is why we don't see breakout decks more often and it takes a while for them to take root; players immediately doubt any new strategy. See ETron for many months. See JDS and GDS dropping their shares through natural shifts after many cried for bans. See Humans going undefeated at Cincinnati. I'd go even further to say that some Modern critics actively cheer against these decks because they want their negative format view to be validated. Wizards is partially to blame for this with the absurd number of bans, but players are responsible too.
That's not what I was referring to at all. Wizards WANTS a format with high variance, because they keep banning or not printing good consistency cards. They would love to have players randomly win against better skilled opponents due to lopsided matchups because it makes new players feel good to get wins with their weird brews. Their philosophy has been consistently to reduce consistency which in turn increases variance.
Given some of the kinds of cards on the banned list, their stances on consistency, their praise of the current meta, and their restriction on data, it seems this is EXACTLY what Wizards wants...
Of course there isn't. No other deck can kill on Turn 3.5 with extreme consistency while still dedicating a large chunk of the (23-27 cards) protecting its combo kill. Doesn't mean the deck is good for the format.
See, comments like this are why we can't have honest conversations. It does not kill on "turn 3.5." It can kill on turn 4, at sorcery speed, during your combat step. And even that only happened naturally about 13-25% of the time, assuming your opponent did nothing to interact or pressure you into using your mana on something else, you hit all your land drops every turn, had RR available, and had both combo pieces. But at that point, if your opponent spends 4 turns ignoring you, they should either be winning themselves anyway or they absolutely deserve to lose.
Uh huh. Remember, this is the MTGS ban list thread. We don't talk about the turn you die. We talk about the turn the game is effectively over. So if they commit the horrible sin of tapping out on Turn 3, they die during that end step when Twin flashes in Exarch/Mite. It doesn't matter that they ACTUALLY lose the game on Turn 4 when a billion Exarchs/Mites hit. They died on Turn 3.
When I first started playing the deck, of the 13-25% of the time I actually had a turn 3 creature and tried to jam the combo turn 4, I was totally blown out by a removal spell a LOT of the time (assuming one of my pieces wasn't Thoughtseized in the meantime). If you think Twin is a "Turn 3.5 deck" because you refuse to interact, that's your fault, not Twin's.
I call Twin a Turn 3.5 deck because I saw it kill on Turn 3.5 a great deal.
Thanks for assuming I'm a ship-passing-in-the-night player. I play MartyrProc, and did back then. 4 Path. 4 Orzhov Charm. Didn't help if I didn't have one in hand.
You have an 85.7% chance of drawing one of those 8 cards by your 4th turn on the play or 3rd turn on the draw (10th card seen), as opposed to the 13-25% chance of an opponent having turn 4 combo. "A great deal" is extremely anecdotal.
The likelihood that you DO NOT have removal and your opponent DOES have turn 4 combo is about 2-4%
Of course there isn't. No other deck can kill on Turn 3.5 with extreme consistency while still dedicating a large chunk of the (23-27 cards) protecting its combo kill. Doesn't mean the deck is good for the format.
See, comments like this are why we can't have honest conversations. It does not kill on "turn 3.5." It can kill on turn 4, at sorcery speed, during your combat step. And even that only happened naturally about 13-25% of the time, assuming your opponent did nothing to interact or pressure you into using your mana on something else, you hit all your land drops every turn, had RR available, and had both combo pieces. But at that point, if your opponent spends 4 turns ignoring you, they should either be winning themselves anyway or they absolutely deserve to lose.
Uh huh. Remember, this is the MTGS ban list thread. We don't talk about the turn you die. We talk about the turn the game is effectively over. So if they commit the horrible sin of tapping out on Turn 3, they die during that end step when Twin flashes in Exarch/Mite. It doesn't matter that they ACTUALLY lose the game on Turn 4 when a billion Exarchs/Mites hit. They died on Turn 3.
When I first started playing the deck, of the 13-25% of the time I actually had a turn 3 creature and tried to jam the combo turn 4, I was totally blown out by a removal spell a LOT of the time (assuming one of my pieces wasn't Thoughtseized in the meantime). If you think Twin is a "Turn 3.5 deck" because you refuse to interact, that's your fault, not Twin's.
Of course there isn't. No other deck can kill on Turn 3.5 with extreme consistency while still dedicating a large chunk of the (23-27 cards) protecting its combo kill. Doesn't mean the deck is good for the format.
See, comments like this are why we can't have honest conversations. It does not kill on "turn 3.5." It can kill on turn 4, at sorcery speed, during your combat step. And even that only happened naturally about 13-25% of the time, assuming your opponent did nothing to interact or pressure you into using your mana on something else, you hit all your land drops every turn, had RR available, and had both combo pieces. But at that point, if your opponent spends 4 turns ignoring you, they should either be winning themselves anyway or they absolutely deserve to lose.
This is exactly why Twin fostered a more interactive format, and why it was considered too good by WotC and by a lot of players.
What prominent voices in the community (articles, pros, tweets, etc) actually and legitimately thought Twin was too good and should be banned? Because it seems this work of fiction has been retroactively inserted into everyone's memories. Other than a joking satire article, I can't remember any large concerns or pitchforks and cries for its ban, especially when Bloom was public enemy #1 at the time and BGx/Affinity held such strong numbers. After the ban it was petrifying shock across the entire community.
One of the comments from that article above sums up my position on Twin nicely: "Punish the twin deck because the other decks don't play enough "hate cards" such as spellskite to stop the combo? It's a dog eat dog world. If you're going to play modern, a format with powerful cards and combo's don't bring cute to the table and expect not to lose a few. As a former Twin hater I also use to think rats I'm dead on turn 4 every time I played it. Once you actually pilot the deck you see that often that's not the case. The real advantage of it is how much your opponent is forced to respect a turn 3 exarch even if you don't have the twin in hand."
That respect for the other player is completely gone in Modern. Your best strategy is often to completely disregard your opponent's plays and just jam your proactive plan as quickly as possible. I do NOT think that makes the format a better place.
As for all your other concerns, if those were actually included in the ban announcement, we could have a discussion. For essentially ALL the reasons Wizards wrote in words and published, the Twin ban was both a mistake and a failure.
Do you have an alternate source for data that you feel is more reliable that you would like to share?
There IS no reliable data. Or at least the closest thing we have is aggregates of paper tournaments that are incredibly small snapshots, fairly far apart from each other, and rarely statistically relevant. Like I said, the data coming from MTGO is not even worthless, it is ACTIVELY misrepresentative because they do not allow for a true representation of the meta to be made known. In addition to cutting from 10 lists to 5, they went from 10 random lists to 5 lists which do not share cards between them. Let's look at an exaggerated example: If out of 100 5-0 Leagues on a given day, 96 of them were functionally the same deck (+/- a few flex slots and sideboard cards), but 4 random brews happened to spike the non-swiss, 5-round event, Wizards will post 5 different decklists. We will see 5 different lists and the aggregate websites will list these 5 decks as each representing 20% of the format from this sample size. But reality says that Deck A is ~96% of the meta and decks B-E are only 1% each. So this method of deck selection actively skews meta representations to LOOK more diverse than they actually are by lowering the numbers of top decks and raising numbers of low decks.
I mean, if we refuse to use data at all, then are we not just arguing talking points and hoping that others just agree with us?
That's pretty much what this thread has been since Modern Nexus stopped making updates and we had to rely on automated cites like Goldfish and Top8. Since Wizards redacted any meaningful data, there's really nothing left but talking points.
I went through and searched and filtered a good deal. Feel free to ignore Abzan, Jund, etc., but their classification was the same when Twin was legal as it is now. In both time frames, it was classified as aggro. Just remove it Feel free to present some numbers for us to see to back up your opinion.
When you only have three categories, you aren't really representing what's going on. Unless you think BGx and Affinity are basically the same deck. That doesn't even get into the numerous other erroneous listings such as "Delver" decks with no Delver, "Nahiri" decks with no Nahiri, "Scapeshift" decks with no Scapeshift, etc. Their naming system is sloppy because it's a combination of automated and user-generated. Mistakes everywhere and difficult to pull any meaningful conclusions from.
As an aside, if you had the choice to play Twin or Grixis Control, which would you choose and why?
I would play Twin for the same reason I wouldn't play Grixis Control today: Grixis Control is a bad deck. I would also play Delver over Grixis Control. And Shadow over Grixis Control. The real question is would I play Twin over Shadow... and that's harder to answer, especially since Shadow would have an amazing matchup against Twin while still holding game against many other decks.
@Albegas, What do the numbers show? *Why* were those decks bad?
Because URx decks lacked good answers, good cantrips, and good, timely win conditions. Twin allowed us to use the crippled and weakened blue cards allowed in Modern because the win condition was timely and powerful and not a slow manland or a planwsalker that took several turns to ultimate. Without Twin, these are essentially just bad fair decks. Delver was at least OK because it could ride cheap threats to victory, but between banning Probe and printing Push, even that is dead. The only deck that is actually consistently having success is a black deck splashing for value cards that plays a 1 mana 10/10, 1 mana 5/5, 1 mana 4/5, 1 mana Negate, and 1 mana take-your-best-card. Anything else just sees sporadic, random results, usually based on great pairings and timely draws.
Removing Twin didn't make them any less bad. They are only "less bad" now because Jeskai got Spell Queller and a black deck is recasting their spells and playing a few cantrips.
1) We can't rely on current data, especially MTGTop8, who is notorious for terrible naming and categorization, because data elements (such as League results) are actively and purposely chosen to represent false diversity. MTGTop8 (as well as Goldfish and most aggregate websites) pull their data from Leagues, so their data is actually worse than worthless, it's intentionally misleading.
2) They classify BGx decks like Abzan and Jund as "Aggro"? lol.
3) Even if we DO use MTGTop8's terrible sorting metrics, we see the following distribution of percentages for top decks: 11, 9, 8, 8, 6, 5, 5, 5, 4, 4, with representations from fast aggro, different flavors of interactive midrange, some big mana, some combo, and some control. Good distribution spread with lots of different, interactive archetypes represented, without snuffing out aggressive or linear strategies. Honestly I think this was the peak of Modern.
It wasn't just the "highest meta share". It was that you would have to combine nearly all of the other URx decks during each time period together to get over half the metashare that Twin had. That's not just high, that's absurdly high. If we compare that to the current metagame:
25SEP2017-25OCT2017:
45 Storm
32 UWx Midrange (includes Jeskai Control, Midrange, Geist...)
27 Grixis Shadow
17 Jeskai Control
6 Blue Moon
3 Scapeshift (RUGx)
3 Twinless Exarch
3 Grixis Control
3 4/5 Color Goodstuff
2 Jeskai Nahiri
1 RUG Aggro
1 Jeskai Aggro
1 UR Control
We have two archetypes that are above 50% of the highest URx deck metashare, whereas this did not happen in the four 2-month intervals that I shared in my previous post. Additionally, there are more unique URx decks in the meta (13, as opposed to 8 at the peak in the data I shared above). Thus, banning Twin does seem to have increased the diversity of the format.
EDIT: @Shockwave07, all of the data I listed was from winning decklists. So it was those decks in the data I presented that were winning. For all of 2015, we have 13 winning Delver lists that were URx, vs. 305 winning (top 8) Twin lists.
If you only want to count decks that placed 1st, we have 2 URx Delver lists vs. 72 Twin lists.
This is exactly why I never use MTG Top 8 as a reference for anything. Their classifications for decks are so wildly random that it makes categorization almost completely useless. First, "Jeskai Midrange" is listed with (Jeskai Control, Midrange, Geist, etc). Then later, "Jeskai Control" is, for some reason, listed separately. Further down, Jeskai Nahiri is also listed; all basically same deck, except for a handful of cards. Second, how is UR Control different from Blue Moon? Or is there some UR control list NOT running Blood Moon? If so, why in the world are you running those colors? They are terrible without Blood Moon. (Second and a half: could probably lump Twinless Exarch with Blue Moon/UR Control. Basically same deck with 6 cards swapped for different win conditions). Third, why in the world is 4/5-color goodstuff lumped with URx? That's laughable.
Lord Seth hit the nail on the head: "despite no one having a problem with it being top tier as consistently as Affinity until after its banning, when people retroactively started claiming it was an issue"
Nobody had a problem with Twin when it was around, and it was regularly praised as the posterchild of Modern, a staple pillar of the format, and essential for good format health. Kind of like keeping it from being mindlessly overrun by fast linear decks... which is exactly what happened in 2016... and keeping big-mana decks from being overpowering it.... which is exactly what was happening in 2017. But hey, at least you can play 50 different kinds of fast aggro, big mana, and glass canon decks nowadays!
There are many many decks that are winning tournaments and making top 8s across the board. From lantern to 5-color humans to affinity and death and taxes.. i mean sure theres alot of aggro but please point me to a time when aggro hasnt been a viable or dominant stratehy.. and sure theres linear decks as that is a pretty broad archetype to be honest and i dont believe its even considered an official archetype now that i think about it.
So I want to know what you consider healthy? And when was modern healthiest in your opinion?
I feel like I'm just engaging a troll at this point. I have repeated this so many times, I feel I could just copy and paste a previous response.
Also, being "a viable" strategy and being "a dominant" strategy are two very, very, very different things. When the meta was full of heavy interaction (like when Jund and Twin were Tier 1 staples), aggro was not dominant, but was certainly a viable strategy (and represented in multiple Tier 1 strategies: Burn/Affinity/Infect). Today, fast/aggro/linear decks are about your only real competitive option, unless you want to willingly put yourself at a gambler's disadvantage and hope for good matchups.
u have to give benefit of the doubt man, i mean not everyone will read the whole thread. those who do often get frustrated by repeating arguments.
I'll remember that next time some of the more prominent posters complain about "people making the same arguments over and over and over." While I understand giving benefit of the doubt, this has literally been the main conversation line in this thread for the past several days and weeks.
So, is it correct to say that what you're missing are the fair midrange strategies that used to have more or less even match ups? From what I gather, you'd like matches that actually last for a while and involve decision making on trades, card advantage, and value - such as snapcaster decks, GBx.
You're not wrong to say these strategies have become less popular, mostly because of e tron. But it should be noted that as more combo decks emerge to fight etron, which is already happening, midrange decks will have their day in the sun again. At this point in time midrange is represented by death's shadow, because its the only "fair" deck that can actually clock tron, and hence not be knocked out on day 1.
We shall see what happens. I'm not optimistic, to say the least.
There are many many decks that are winning tournaments and making top 8s across the board. From lantern to 5-color humans to affinity and death and taxes.. i mean sure theres alot of aggro but please point me to a time when aggro hasnt been a viable or dominant stratehy.. and sure theres linear decks as that is a pretty broad archetype to be honest and i dont believe its even considered an official archetype now that i think about it.
So I want to know what you consider healthy? And when was modern healthiest in your opinion?
I feel like I'm just engaging a troll at this point. I have repeated this so many times, I feel I could just copy and paste a previous response.
Also, being "a viable" strategy and being "a dominant" strategy are two very, very, very different things. When the meta was full of heavy interaction (like when Jund and Twin were Tier 1 staples), aggro was not dominant, but was certainly a viable strategy (and represented in multiple Tier 1 strategies: Burn/Affinity/Infect). Today, fast/aggro/linear decks are about your only real competitive option, unless you want to willingly put yourself at a gambler's disadvantage and hope for good matchups. Remember that calling users trolls is prohibited. --CavalryWolfPack
"If people genuinely like and want the ETron/Storm/Affinity/Titanshift/GDS meta..."
Dude how is this something you can complain about.... You just named 5 decks... We have 5 top decks....that are ALL very beatable...thats not including any top rogue decks that will sprout and win here and there and excluding the top 8s of the recent SCG tournaments.. I mean I just dont know how you think that the "ETron/Storm/Affinity/Titanshift/GDS meta" is so bad or is even a thing.. how is that a meta?.. it doesnt make sense to me. The diversity is so high that the only issue you run into is what deck to play yourself.
A number of people have answered that a number of times over the past several pages. The short version is these particular decks do not promote good or healthy gameplay because they create an ecosystem of extremely high variance matchups with mostly fast/linear decks, and reward the gamble of narrow hate cards rather than broad, generalized answers. If people genuinely find that "healthy" then I just fundamentally disagree with what "healthy" means for a competitive game.
I've said this before and I'll say it again: it sounds like you would prefer Legacy with much narrower diversity but much more traditionally interactive matches between a narrow band of viable deck. Incidentally, almost all of which are blue-based, which I know is your preference. Wizards has been very clear that diversity is their top priority and they literally called this Modern iteration "healthy" just last week. This Modern is definitely diverse from a T8 and Day 2 perspective (MTGO is unknown), so I don't anticipate the kind of changes you care about.
I'm curious to see what they do in February. That will solidify whatever I do moving forward in this format. As for Legacy, I could probably justify the prohibitively expensive cards needed to play if it had remotely close to the paper support that Modern has. Basically speaking, nobody plays Legacy. Local events are few and far between with <10 people, if they even get enough to fire. But yeah, I would love to play Legacy. The format looks fantastic; full of rich decision trees and lots of manipulation, interaction, and bluffing/representation. Basically the opposite of Modern, which is: vomit my hand to the battlefield and say "deal with it."
UR ....... WUBR ........... WB ............. RGW ........ UBR ....... WUB .... BGU
Spells / Blink & Combo / Token Grind / Dino Tribal / Draw Cards / Zombies / Reanimate
The card worse than Serum Visions, and often worse than Sleight of Hand? That came 13 years after Fifth Dawn (Serum), 12 years after 9th Edition (Sleight)? That really only sees play after running a full 8 Serum/Sleight because Probe/Ponder/Preordain/Cruise/Dig are all banned? And because they'll never print Brainstorm again? OK. I guess they want us to be consistent!
I would rather play against Jund than just about any other top deck today. Those games, win or lose, were always rich and engaging games of back-and-forth decision making and resource trading. Massively fun.
UR ....... WUBR ........... WB ............. RGW ........ UBR ....... WUB .... BGU
Spells / Blink & Combo / Token Grind / Dino Tribal / Draw Cards / Zombies / Reanimate
That's not what I was referring to at all. Wizards WANTS a format with high variance, because they keep banning or not printing good consistency cards. They would love to have players randomly win against better skilled opponents due to lopsided matchups because it makes new players feel good to get wins with their weird brews. Their philosophy has been consistently to reduce consistency which in turn increases variance.
UR ....... WUBR ........... WB ............. RGW ........ UBR ....... WUB .... BGU
Spells / Blink & Combo / Token Grind / Dino Tribal / Draw Cards / Zombies / Reanimate
Given some of the kinds of cards on the banned list, their stances on consistency, their praise of the current meta, and their restriction on data, it seems this is EXACTLY what Wizards wants...
UR ....... WUBR ........... WB ............. RGW ........ UBR ....... WUB .... BGU
Spells / Blink & Combo / Token Grind / Dino Tribal / Draw Cards / Zombies / Reanimate
You have an 85.7% chance of drawing one of those 8 cards by your 4th turn on the play or 3rd turn on the draw (10th card seen), as opposed to the 13-25% chance of an opponent having turn 4 combo. "A great deal" is extremely anecdotal.
The likelihood that you DO NOT have removal and your opponent DOES have turn 4 combo is about 2-4%
UR ....... WUBR ........... WB ............. RGW ........ UBR ....... WUB .... BGU
Spells / Blink & Combo / Token Grind / Dino Tribal / Draw Cards / Zombies / Reanimate
When I first started playing the deck, of the 13-25% of the time I actually had a turn 3 creature and tried to jam the combo turn 4, I was totally blown out by a removal spell a LOT of the time (assuming one of my pieces wasn't Thoughtseized in the meantime). If you think Twin is a "Turn 3.5 deck" because you refuse to interact, that's your fault, not Twin's.
UR ....... WUBR ........... WB ............. RGW ........ UBR ....... WUB .... BGU
Spells / Blink & Combo / Token Grind / Dino Tribal / Draw Cards / Zombies / Reanimate
See, comments like this are why we can't have honest conversations. It does not kill on "turn 3.5." It can kill on turn 4, at sorcery speed, during your combat step. And even that only happened naturally about 13-25% of the time, assuming your opponent did nothing to interact or pressure you into using your mana on something else, you hit all your land drops every turn, had RR available, and had both combo pieces. But at that point, if your opponent spends 4 turns ignoring you, they should either be winning themselves anyway or they absolutely deserve to lose.
UR ....... WUBR ........... WB ............. RGW ........ UBR ....... WUB .... BGU
Spells / Blink & Combo / Token Grind / Dino Tribal / Draw Cards / Zombies / Reanimate
What prominent voices in the community (articles, pros, tweets, etc) actually and legitimately thought Twin was too good and should be banned? Because it seems this work of fiction has been retroactively inserted into everyone's memories. Other than a joking satire article, I can't remember any large concerns or pitchforks and cries for its ban, especially when Bloom was public enemy #1 at the time and BGx/Affinity held such strong numbers. After the ban it was petrifying shock across the entire community.
One of the comments from that article above sums up my position on Twin nicely:
"Punish the twin deck because the other decks don't play enough "hate cards" such as spellskite to stop the combo? It's a dog eat dog world. If you're going to play modern, a format with powerful cards and combo's don't bring cute to the table and expect not to lose a few. As a former Twin hater I also use to think rats I'm dead on turn 4 every time I played it. Once you actually pilot the deck you see that often that's not the case. The real advantage of it is how much your opponent is forced to respect a turn 3 exarch even if you don't have the twin in hand."
That respect for the other player is completely gone in Modern. Your best strategy is often to completely disregard your opponent's plays and just jam your proactive plan as quickly as possible. I do NOT think that makes the format a better place.
As for all your other concerns, if those were actually included in the ban announcement, we could have a discussion. For essentially ALL the reasons Wizards wrote in words and published, the Twin ban was both a mistake and a failure.
UR ....... WUBR ........... WB ............. RGW ........ UBR ....... WUB .... BGU
Spells / Blink & Combo / Token Grind / Dino Tribal / Draw Cards / Zombies / Reanimate
There IS no reliable data. Or at least the closest thing we have is aggregates of paper tournaments that are incredibly small snapshots, fairly far apart from each other, and rarely statistically relevant. Like I said, the data coming from MTGO is not even worthless, it is ACTIVELY misrepresentative because they do not allow for a true representation of the meta to be made known. In addition to cutting from 10 lists to 5, they went from 10 random lists to 5 lists which do not share cards between them. Let's look at an exaggerated example: If out of 100 5-0 Leagues on a given day, 96 of them were functionally the same deck (+/- a few flex slots and sideboard cards), but 4 random brews happened to spike the non-swiss, 5-round event, Wizards will post 5 different decklists. We will see 5 different lists and the aggregate websites will list these 5 decks as each representing 20% of the format from this sample size. But reality says that Deck A is ~96% of the meta and decks B-E are only 1% each. So this method of deck selection actively skews meta representations to LOOK more diverse than they actually are by lowering the numbers of top decks and raising numbers of low decks.
That's pretty much what this thread has been since Modern Nexus stopped making updates and we had to rely on automated cites like Goldfish and Top8. Since Wizards redacted any meaningful data, there's really nothing left but talking points.
When you only have three categories, you aren't really representing what's going on. Unless you think BGx and Affinity are basically the same deck. That doesn't even get into the numerous other erroneous listings such as "Delver" decks with no Delver, "Nahiri" decks with no Nahiri, "Scapeshift" decks with no Scapeshift, etc. Their naming system is sloppy because it's a combination of automated and user-generated. Mistakes everywhere and difficult to pull any meaningful conclusions from.
I would play Twin for the same reason I wouldn't play Grixis Control today: Grixis Control is a bad deck. I would also play Delver over Grixis Control. And Shadow over Grixis Control. The real question is would I play Twin over Shadow... and that's harder to answer, especially since Shadow would have an amazing matchup against Twin while still holding game against many other decks.
UR ....... WUBR ........... WB ............. RGW ........ UBR ....... WUB .... BGU
Spells / Blink & Combo / Token Grind / Dino Tribal / Draw Cards / Zombies / Reanimate
Because URx decks lacked good answers, good cantrips, and good, timely win conditions. Twin allowed us to use the crippled and weakened blue cards allowed in Modern because the win condition was timely and powerful and not a slow manland or a planwsalker that took several turns to ultimate. Without Twin, these are essentially just bad fair decks. Delver was at least OK because it could ride cheap threats to victory, but between banning Probe and printing Push, even that is dead. The only deck that is actually consistently having success is a black deck splashing for value cards that plays a 1 mana 10/10, 1 mana 5/5, 1 mana 4/5, 1 mana Negate, and 1 mana take-your-best-card. Anything else just sees sporadic, random results, usually based on great pairings and timely draws.
Removing Twin didn't make them any less bad. They are only "less bad" now because Jeskai got Spell Queller and a black deck is recasting their spells and playing a few cantrips.
UR ....... WUBR ........... WB ............. RGW ........ UBR ....... WUB .... BGU
Spells / Blink & Combo / Token Grind / Dino Tribal / Draw Cards / Zombies / Reanimate
2) They classify BGx decks like Abzan and Jund as "Aggro"? lol.
3) Even if we DO use MTGTop8's terrible sorting metrics, we see the following distribution of percentages for top decks: 11, 9, 8, 8, 6, 5, 5, 5, 4, 4, with representations from fast aggro, different flavors of interactive midrange, some big mana, some combo, and some control. Good distribution spread with lots of different, interactive archetypes represented, without snuffing out aggressive or linear strategies. Honestly I think this was the peak of Modern.
UR ....... WUBR ........... WB ............. RGW ........ UBR ....... WUB .... BGU
Spells / Blink & Combo / Token Grind / Dino Tribal / Draw Cards / Zombies / Reanimate
This is exactly why I never use MTG Top 8 as a reference for anything. Their classifications for decks are so wildly random that it makes categorization almost completely useless. First, "Jeskai Midrange" is listed with (Jeskai Control, Midrange, Geist, etc). Then later, "Jeskai Control" is, for some reason, listed separately. Further down, Jeskai Nahiri is also listed; all basically same deck, except for a handful of cards. Second, how is UR Control different from Blue Moon? Or is there some UR control list NOT running Blood Moon? If so, why in the world are you running those colors? They are terrible without Blood Moon. (Second and a half: could probably lump Twinless Exarch with Blue Moon/UR Control. Basically same deck with 6 cards swapped for different win conditions). Third, why in the world is 4/5-color goodstuff lumped with URx? That's laughable.
Lord Seth hit the nail on the head: "despite no one having a problem with it being top tier as consistently as Affinity until after its banning, when people retroactively started claiming it was an issue"
Nobody had a problem with Twin when it was around, and it was regularly praised as the posterchild of Modern, a staple pillar of the format, and essential for good format health. Kind of like keeping it from being mindlessly overrun by fast linear decks... which is exactly what happened in 2016... and keeping big-mana decks from being overpowering it.... which is exactly what was happening in 2017. But hey, at least you can play 50 different kinds of fast aggro, big mana, and glass canon decks nowadays!
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Spells / Blink & Combo / Token Grind / Dino Tribal / Draw Cards / Zombies / Reanimate
I'll remember that next time some of the more prominent posters complain about "people making the same arguments over and over and over." While I understand giving benefit of the doubt, this has literally been the main conversation line in this thread for the past several days and weeks.
We shall see what happens. I'm not optimistic, to say the least.
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Spells / Blink & Combo / Token Grind / Dino Tribal / Draw Cards / Zombies / Reanimate
I feel like I'm just engaging a troll at this point. I have repeated this so many times, I feel I could just copy and paste a previous response.
Also, being "a viable" strategy and being "a dominant" strategy are two very, very, very different things. When the meta was full of heavy interaction (like when Jund and Twin were Tier 1 staples), aggro was not dominant, but was certainly a viable strategy (and represented in multiple Tier 1 strategies: Burn/Affinity/Infect). Today, fast/aggro/linear decks are about your only real competitive option, unless you want to willingly put yourself at a gambler's disadvantage and hope for good matchups.
Remember that calling users trolls is prohibited. --CavalryWolfPack
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Spells / Blink & Combo / Token Grind / Dino Tribal / Draw Cards / Zombies / Reanimate
I'm curious to see what they do in February. That will solidify whatever I do moving forward in this format. As for Legacy, I could probably justify the prohibitively expensive cards needed to play if it had remotely close to the paper support that Modern has. Basically speaking, nobody plays Legacy. Local events are few and far between with <10 people, if they even get enough to fire. But yeah, I would love to play Legacy. The format looks fantastic; full of rich decision trees and lots of manipulation, interaction, and bluffing/representation. Basically the opposite of Modern, which is: vomit my hand to the battlefield and say "deal with it."
UR ....... WUBR ........... WB ............. RGW ........ UBR ....... WUB .... BGU
Spells / Blink & Combo / Token Grind / Dino Tribal / Draw Cards / Zombies / Reanimate