Jace and Teferi work hand in hand, in my opinion. It's pretty rare that I'd want to play one and not the other... but I'm also not a control player, so my opinion is quite useless here.
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Well, I can saw a woman in two, but you won't wanna look in the box when I'm through.
If Twin ever comes back... will be sure to sell my playset Spellskite once they rise in price again. ^____^
Although if that happens, probably many of the people who play at our LGS would be on Twin.... and would have to maindeck two aether spellbomb on my UW azorius titan deck again.
Ugh I'd prefer we go back to a ban on talking about twin. No reason to be reminded every few days that some people will never ever be happy with modern unless that card is unbanned (it won't be). In fact, I'd go further and argue that the negativity around modern now isn't that decks are broken, but rather as Sheridan pointed out how the old guard has been entirely supplanted by a new one. Burn and tron are the only two decks more than a year and a half old seeing meaningful representation by most metrics. We have entirely new aggro, tempo, combo, and control decks at the top tables. I mean I get it, UW control conceptually is about as old as competitive play itself when Serra Angel was winning games. But at this point there are so many new cards and so much evolution I'd argue it is a pretty different from something people may have been trying a couple of years ago, maindeck spreading seas/mana denial type control.
The pillars of modern are dead. Long live the pillars of modern.
UW is a horrible match up for Hollow One... where is this 50/50 meme coming from? UW has a ton of very favorable match ups right now. Hollow One, GDS, Affinity and Modular, Humans is decent, same with KCI.
UW is a horrible match up for Hollow One... where is this 50/50 meme coming from? UW has a ton of very favorable match ups right now. Hollow One, GDS, Affinity and Modular, Humans is decent, same with KCI.
It might be the best deck in Modern right now
I think he just meant 50/50+, not 50/50. But yes, it has many good matches and is clearly Tier 1. Blue mages should be happy.
UW is a horrible match up for Hollow One... where is this 50/50 meme coming from? UW has a ton of very favorable match ups right now. Hollow One, GDS, Affinity and Modular, Humans is decent, same with KCI.
It might be the best deck in Modern right now
I think he just meant 50/50+, not 50/50. But yes, it has many good matches and is clearly Tier 1. Blue mages should be happy.
Death's Shadow isn't very favorable for UW control if Shadow player knows how to play and sideboard that matchup. It is still favorable for UW but not laid back favorable.
UW is a horrible match up for Hollow One... where is this 50/50 meme coming from? UW has a ton of very favorable match ups right now. Hollow One, GDS, Affinity and Modular, Humans is decent, same with KCI.
It might be the best deck in Modern right now
I think he just meant 50/50+, not 50/50. But yes, it has many good matches and is clearly Tier 1. Blue mages should be happy.
Death's Shadow isn't very favorable for UW control if Shadow player knows how to play and sideboard that matchup. It is still favorable for UW but not laid back favorable.
I think the premise of 50/50+ isn't that its favored against the field, but most matchups are close while a few are really good.
I do not like the fact that past Twin players switched their narrative from "there is no viable true control deck" to something else, now that UW Control is great!
As much as I agree with the rest of this post, I don't think anyone has said "there is no viable true control deck" for months. It's just that for some of us, UW control doesn't scratch the itch, so we play suboptimal decks like Blue Moon and shrug off our mediocre success. Because we'd rather play decks we like than play something that could be considered objectively better, but we don't like the play patterns.
The pillars of modern are dead. Long live the pillars of modern.
While it might be mostly subjective, it's not that players specifically miss those pillars (even though they were massively fun to play with and against), it's that the new ones are fairly miserable to play against at every angle and lead to significantly more high-variance non-games. They usually attack on narrow, difficult to interact with axis, and often boil down to "mulligan to hate card and cross your fingers." More and more of these decks rise up every day and frankly, they make the game less and less fun to play.
I re-ran the numbers from the April 2015 - November 2015 dataset. In that time, the MTGO dataset tracked about 28,000 matches. This included 338 Twin vs. BGx matchups. Including ALL of the BGx variants, Twin was 186/338 or 55% MWP. If we only look at traditional Jund, we're either at 49% (42/86) or 68/128 (53%) depending on how many of the miscellaneous BRG decks were truly Jund and which were merely rogue. Either way, no matter how we cut the actual data, BGx vs. Twin was 50/50.
Did you happen to see vs Delver?
Twin vs. Grixis Delver: 56/118 (47.5%)
Twin vs. UR Delver: 10/28 (35.7%)
Twin vs. URx Delver: 66/146 (45%)
This is what I would characterize as a classic unfavorable 45/55 matchup.
Are those numbers for all varieties of twin?
Maybe this seems like a reach, but its not surprising that grixis twin, or tarmotwin, would have better jund matchups than straight UR. In exchange, they give up percentage against other decks, but you can't build 1 twin deck that has the jund matchup of grixis twin, the affinity matchup of jeskai twin, the mirror percentage of tarmotwin and the burn matchup of UR twin, but when pulling numbers from broad archtypes, you'll get stuff like that.
I broke it down for UR Twin specifically. N obviously shrinks but the stats don't change: 35/72 (48.6%). This is a 50/50 matchup no matter how you swing it.
Didn't those decks have Gitaxian Probe.... and Treasure Cruise the previous 3 months from the January 2015 announcement?...
twin also had dig through time in those periods. regardless its not worth splitting hairs. what we do know is that twin won a hell of a lot, and could never really be kept down.
on that note i think a defining aspect of any true 50/50 deck is that they dont move with the meta like other decks do. the meta tends to shift around them. get a decent number of these types of decks, and thats how you run into the whole pillar situation; because they may infight among one another, but ultimately leave no gaps for 'lesser' decks to ever get a foothold. id also posit that such situations also stifle new deck innovation.
i dont think there is nearly enough evidence to support a claim that UW control is such a deck. its currently what i am playing with at the moment, but i cant say that my experience leads me to believe its objectively better than other control variants (particularly jeskai). mostly its just a showcasing of how good exiling or similar effects are at the moment. terminus is a pretty stupid card, both in a good and bad sense.
humans is the only deck id consider within the realm of calling itself a 50/50 deck, and even then its fairly mediocre GP showings (for what is considered the best deck in the format) leave plenty to be desired.
ill agree that the topic of how many 'new' decks (by whatever standard) really define modern at the moment is interesting. maybe im just getting old, but it does seem like the deck turnover rate is absurdly high.
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Modern: UWGSnow-Bant Control BURGrixis Death's Shadow GWBCoCo Elves WCDeath and Taxes (sold)
twin also had dig through time in those periods. regardless its not worth splitting hairs. what we do know is that twin won a hell of a lot, and could never really be kept down.
And I believe that is the reason it got banned.
ill agree that the topic of how many 'new' decks (by whatever standard) really define modern at the moment is interesting. maybe im just getting old, but it does seem like the deck turnover rate is absurdly high.
Well, it would be boring if we always had the old decks from 2 or 3 years ago. Having some new ones that are strong like Bridgevine.. is a breathe of fresh for Modern.
I re-ran the numbers from the April 2015 - November 2015 dataset. In that time, the MTGO dataset tracked about 28,000 matches. This included 338 Twin vs. BGx matchups. Including ALL of the BGx variants, Twin was 186/338 or 55% MWP. If we only look at traditional Jund, we're either at 49% (42/86) or 68/128 (53%) depending on how many of the miscellaneous BRG decks were truly Jund and which were merely rogue. Either way, no matter how we cut the actual data, BGx vs. Twin was 50/50.
Did you happen to see vs Delver?
Twin vs. Grixis Delver: 56/118 (47.5%)
Twin vs. UR Delver: 10/28 (35.7%)
Twin vs. URx Delver: 66/146 (45%)
This is what I would characterize as a classic unfavorable 45/55 matchup.
Are those numbers for all varieties of twin?
Maybe this seems like a reach, but its not surprising that grixis twin, or tarmotwin, would have better jund matchups than straight UR. In exchange, they give up percentage against other decks, but you can't build 1 twin deck that has the jund matchup of grixis twin, the affinity matchup of jeskai twin, the mirror percentage of tarmotwin and the burn matchup of UR twin, but when pulling numbers from broad archtypes, you'll get stuff like that.
I broke it down for UR Twin specifically. N obviously shrinks but the stats don't change: 35/72 (48.6%). This is a 50/50 matchup no matter how you swing it.
Didn't those decks have Gitaxian Probe.... and Treasure Cruise the previous 3 months from the January 2015 announcement?...
As I said, this data reflects matchups from April 2015 through November 2015. TC and DTT were banned in January 2015 after being legal for the winter of 2014. They are not in the dataset in any way.
The Delver decks did, however, use Probe and that would be included in the data.
As for why Twin was banned, let's stop speculating on reasons. Here is why Twin was banned: https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/news/january-18-2016-banned-and-restricted-announcement-2016-01-18 "We also look for decks that hold a large enough percentage of the competitive field to reduce the diversity of the format." "Decks that are this strong can hurt diversity by pushing the decks that it defeats out of competition. " "They can also reduce diversity by supplanting similar decks. "
As evidence of the first two points, Wizards cited Twin's GP/PT T8 performance. No other deck has matched that performance in a one-year period since then.
The only unofficial reason worth discussing is the PT shakeup factor, which I and others indirectly proved through Tweets, later updates/announcements, metagame context, etc. All other ban reasons are speculative, at best, or fabricated, at worst.
A major point about twin/control that I haven't seen brought up:
At pretty much any point in time since twin was banned, the #1 most popular/flavor of the month/whatever blue control deck is always a reasonable choice.
Jeskai nahiri, UW ponza, jeskai queller, jeskai teferi, now UW miracles, etc, were/are acceptably powerful choices in their given metas.
The problem is that the second best choice is consistently much weaker. Jeskai control or blue moon right now are playable, but they're not particularly powerful, and they're not at the level of the current top tier.
On the other hand, combo and aggro (and most other macro archtypes) consistently offer diverse choices. You could play humans, or burn, or hollow one, or bridgevine, or spirits, or affinity if you want aggro, and they're all different, and they're all powerful.
Secondly, this has been mentioned before, but there aren't good decks that actually replicate twin's gameplay. Tempo is another heavily underrepresented archtype in modern, and it definitely shows for a lot of ex-twin players. Grixis shadow is pretty much the only mentionable deck in that category, and has pretty much been the only mentionable deck since twin was banned.
If there were consistently more options in tempo and control decks (to the extent that it matches the combo/aggro diversity), the twin ban would almost certainly sting less.
yeah, best to just start talking about other things.
maybe when i have more free time ill try to break down the rate at which new decks enter (and leave) spots of dominance over various time periods. might also be a good idea to look at specific cards coming from new sets, which would include empowering established archetypes.
could probably turn it into some sociology research about fads gaining increased levels of traction within a relatively insulated community. who remembers that deck E-tron. yeah screw that deck.
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Modern: UWGSnow-Bant Control BURGrixis Death's Shadow GWBCoCo Elves WCDeath and Taxes (sold)
I've been thinking on some of Maro's tweets, but I believe that they will keep cards banned because they want newer cards to be played in modern that fill the same role. For example, Twin might be safe to unban along with GSZ, but if they unban those than they likely will fill the role of future cards they print since they are so good and efficient at what they do. I'm sure this is what the difference between eternal and non-rotating formats is supposed to be in the companies eyes. Technically, all cards are legal in modern, but only a specific set of cards will ever see play and those cards should shift.
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1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
I've been thinking on some of Maro's tweets, but I believe that they will keep cards banned because they want newer cards to be played in modern that fill the same role. For example, Twin might be safe to unban along with GSZ, but if they unban those than they likely will fill the role of future cards they print since they are so good and efficient at what they do. I'm sure this is what the difference between eternal and non-rotating formats is supposed to be in the companies eyes. Technically, all cards are legal in modern, but only a specific set of cards will ever see play and those cards should shift.
That completely is contrary to the concept of non-rotating. Every card which has been banned in recent times (not the Extended/Modern cut over bans) has been problematic, and has had nothing to do with simply shifting old cards out for new ones.
If there were consistently more options in tempo and control decks (to the extent that it matches the combo/aggro diversity), the twin ban would almost certainly sting less.
could probably turn it into some sociology research about fads gaining increased levels of traction within a relatively insulated community. who remembers that deck E-tron. yeah screw that deck.
I've thought on this as well. Is Jund REALLY not as good as Mardu? I find that hard to believe. Is Affinity a bad deck? I highly doubt it. Is Infect dead?
well thats the thing about those class of cards that could be cornerstones of an archetype. they will either:
-not be good enough within the context of the current format, and relegated to irrelevancy
-rise to the top and supplant similar effects, decks, whatever
-beautifully coexist with similar top tier decks, and we all rejoice in the bountiful diversity that ensues.
1 bad, 1 neutral, 1 good. 2 out of 3 acceptable options doesnt sound bad right? however without extensive testing, the risk of the bad happening is just going to outweigh the others unless wizards goes out on a limb. for cards like that they are risking mockery when they unban, and even more mockery in the event the worst case happens. add on top of this that some of the cards wouldnt really have any integration period (ie twin or pod), and there is the added risk of things going bad without any of the novelty that comes along with discovery.
GSZ is slightly different because its 'reign' of dominance was transient. however its possible wizards would prefer green toolbox decks to suffer rather than risking cards like CoCo, chord, or eldritch evo disappearing entirely; because like Colt pointed out the chance of something changing that down the line is just so implausible. also its long absence in the format makes it even harder to determine if anything truly broken would come of it.
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Modern: UWGSnow-Bant Control BURGrixis Death's Shadow GWBCoCo Elves WCDeath and Taxes (sold)
On GSZ, it's probably because unbanning it would create something along the lines of the Noble Hierarch vs Birds of Paradise. GSZ into a Dryad Arbor is pretty powerful, and having the ability to also pull out a late game drop makes it one of the best cards in green.
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1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
The format doesn't need to slow down. It is fine. There are interactive options in UW miracles, grixis shadow, and mardu pyromancer. That fifty minute match clock is a limitation, not a goal line.
I think the only arguments really that could be made.
1. It would put a limit on decks that have zero interaction. Forcing them to slow their game plan. If we had multiple Turn 3 killers, this could be an issue.
2. It has no real reason to stay banned, since it would be handled fine by the power level of the meta now, in a post Jace, Post Teferi, Post GDS world.
Item 2 is obviously not a valid reason for unban. Item 1 however, in the right scenario, could be.
If you/we want Twin unbanned, we had better use real arguments, such as "Twin could make Modern more interactive" and "Twin would force full linear decks play some amount of interaction, thus be slowed down, or else, face the T4 oops I kill you scenario".
I have been making exactly those arguments for nearly two years. /shrug.
I would like a Twin unban to force some interaction in today's linear decks but I have to admit that even playing Jund or Abzan, sometimes Twin could get free wins by forcing you to Abrupt Decay their creature in response to them tapping your land, then untap on their turn and deploy Blood Moon which usually meant GG
This is fine for me as it punishes greedy manabases but many people forget these games and maybe those are the reason why that matchup is not as favorable to Jund as most people would expect and leans more towards the 50/50 ktkenshinx was pointing out
A lot of decks are good. The question isn't s matter of deck building but what you are fighting. Humans is good because the decks that beat it lose to other popular decks. The only one that I think was putting up results in this meta was tron, since humans policing cards cznt shut them down effectively. They also got horrible card draw and card advantage.
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1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
I would like a Twin unban to force some interaction in today's linear decks but I have to admit that even playing Jund or Abzan, sometimes Twin could get free wins by forcing you to Abrupt Decay their creature in response to them tapping your land, then untap on their turn and deploy Blood Moon which usually meant GG
This is fine for me as it punishes greedy manabases but many people forget these games and maybe those are the reason why that matchup is not as favorable to Jund as most people would expect and leans more towards the 50/50 ktkenshinx was pointing out
Let's not forget that Jund and Abzan have gotten considerable upgrades over the past few years. Not the least bit are new cards like Collective Brutality, grindy cards like Tireless Tracker, and great cards like Bloodbraid Elf. When playing with a grip of discardspells and goodremoval backed by Goyfs and other great cards, BGx could actually be relevant again in this hypothetical context, instead of getting run over by the narrow and degenerate nonsense currently at the top of the format.
Although if that happens, probably many of the people who play at our LGS would be on Twin.... and would have to maindeck two aether spellbomb on my UW azorius titan deck again.
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Want to play a UW control deck in modern, but don't have jace or snaps?
Please come visit us at the Emeria Titan control thread
The pillars of modern are dead. Long live the pillars of modern.
It might be the best deck in Modern right now
I think he just meant 50/50+, not 50/50. But yes, it has many good matches and is clearly Tier 1. Blue mages should be happy.
Death's Shadow isn't very favorable for UW control if Shadow player knows how to play and sideboard that matchup. It is still favorable for UW but not laid back favorable.
Modern
WUBRG
I think the premise of 50/50+ isn't that its favored against the field, but most matchups are close while a few are really good.
As much as I agree with the rest of this post, I don't think anyone has said "there is no viable true control deck" for months. It's just that for some of us, UW control doesn't scratch the itch, so we play suboptimal decks like Blue Moon and shrug off our mediocre success. Because we'd rather play decks we like than play something that could be considered objectively better, but we don't like the play patterns.
While it might be mostly subjective, it's not that players specifically miss those pillars (even though they were massively fun to play with and against), it's that the new ones are fairly miserable to play against at every angle and lead to significantly more high-variance non-games. They usually attack on narrow, difficult to interact with axis, and often boil down to "mulligan to hate card and cross your fingers." More and more of these decks rise up every day and frankly, they make the game less and less fun to play.
UR ....... WUBR ........... WB ............. RGW ........ UBR ....... WUB .... BGU
Spells / Blink & Combo / Token Grind / Dino Tribal / Draw Cards / Zombies / Reanimate
Didn't those decks have Gitaxian Probe.... and Treasure Cruise the previous 3 months from the January 2015 announcement?...
on that note i think a defining aspect of any true 50/50 deck is that they dont move with the meta like other decks do. the meta tends to shift around them. get a decent number of these types of decks, and thats how you run into the whole pillar situation; because they may infight among one another, but ultimately leave no gaps for 'lesser' decks to ever get a foothold. id also posit that such situations also stifle new deck innovation.
i dont think there is nearly enough evidence to support a claim that UW control is such a deck. its currently what i am playing with at the moment, but i cant say that my experience leads me to believe its objectively better than other control variants (particularly jeskai). mostly its just a showcasing of how good exiling or similar effects are at the moment. terminus is a pretty stupid card, both in a good and bad sense.
humans is the only deck id consider within the realm of calling itself a 50/50 deck, and even then its fairly mediocre GP showings (for what is considered the best deck in the format) leave plenty to be desired.
ill agree that the topic of how many 'new' decks (by whatever standard) really define modern at the moment is interesting. maybe im just getting old, but it does seem like the deck turnover rate is absurdly high.
UWGSnow-Bant Control
BURGrixis Death's Shadow
GWBCoCo Elves
WCDeath and Taxes(sold)And I believe that is the reason it got banned.
Well, it would be boring if we always had the old decks from 2 or 3 years ago. Having some new ones that are strong like Bridgevine.. is a breathe of fresh for Modern.
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As I said, this data reflects matchups from April 2015 through November 2015. TC and DTT were banned in January 2015 after being legal for the winter of 2014. They are not in the dataset in any way.
The Delver decks did, however, use Probe and that would be included in the data.
As for why Twin was banned, let's stop speculating on reasons. Here is why Twin was banned:
https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/news/january-18-2016-banned-and-restricted-announcement-2016-01-18
"We also look for decks that hold a large enough percentage of the competitive field to reduce the diversity of the format."
"Decks that are this strong can hurt diversity by pushing the decks that it defeats out of competition. "
"They can also reduce diversity by supplanting similar decks. "
As evidence of the first two points, Wizards cited Twin's GP/PT T8 performance. No other deck has matched that performance in a one-year period since then.
The only unofficial reason worth discussing is the PT shakeup factor, which I and others indirectly proved through Tweets, later updates/announcements, metagame context, etc. All other ban reasons are speculative, at best, or fabricated, at worst.
At pretty much any point in time since twin was banned, the #1 most popular/flavor of the month/whatever blue control deck is always a reasonable choice.
Jeskai nahiri, UW ponza, jeskai queller, jeskai teferi, now UW miracles, etc, were/are acceptably powerful choices in their given metas.
The problem is that the second best choice is consistently much weaker. Jeskai control or blue moon right now are playable, but they're not particularly powerful, and they're not at the level of the current top tier.
On the other hand, combo and aggro (and most other macro archtypes) consistently offer diverse choices. You could play humans, or burn, or hollow one, or bridgevine, or spirits, or affinity if you want aggro, and they're all different, and they're all powerful.
Secondly, this has been mentioned before, but there aren't good decks that actually replicate twin's gameplay. Tempo is another heavily underrepresented archtype in modern, and it definitely shows for a lot of ex-twin players. Grixis shadow is pretty much the only mentionable deck in that category, and has pretty much been the only mentionable deck since twin was banned.
If there were consistently more options in tempo and control decks (to the extent that it matches the combo/aggro diversity), the twin ban would almost certainly sting less.
maybe when i have more free time ill try to break down the rate at which new decks enter (and leave) spots of dominance over various time periods. might also be a good idea to look at specific cards coming from new sets, which would include empowering established archetypes.
could probably turn it into some sociology research about fads gaining increased levels of traction within a relatively insulated community. who remembers that deck E-tron. yeah screw that deck.
UWGSnow-Bant Control
BURGrixis Death's Shadow
GWBCoCo Elves
WCDeath and Taxes(sold)1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
That completely is contrary to the concept of non-rotating. Every card which has been banned in recent times (not the Extended/Modern cut over bans) has been problematic, and has had nothing to do with simply shifting old cards out for new ones.
This, is very true.
I've thought on this as well. Is Jund REALLY not as good as Mardu? I find that hard to believe. Is Affinity a bad deck? I highly doubt it. Is Infect dead?
You get the point.
Spirits
-not be good enough within the context of the current format, and relegated to irrelevancy
-rise to the top and supplant similar effects, decks, whatever
-beautifully coexist with similar top tier decks, and we all rejoice in the bountiful diversity that ensues.
1 bad, 1 neutral, 1 good. 2 out of 3 acceptable options doesnt sound bad right? however without extensive testing, the risk of the bad happening is just going to outweigh the others unless wizards goes out on a limb. for cards like that they are risking mockery when they unban, and even more mockery in the event the worst case happens. add on top of this that some of the cards wouldnt really have any integration period (ie twin or pod), and there is the added risk of things going bad without any of the novelty that comes along with discovery.
GSZ is slightly different because its 'reign' of dominance was transient. however its possible wizards would prefer green toolbox decks to suffer rather than risking cards like CoCo, chord, or eldritch evo disappearing entirely; because like Colt pointed out the chance of something changing that down the line is just so implausible. also its long absence in the format makes it even harder to determine if anything truly broken would come of it.
UWGSnow-Bant Control
BURGrixis Death's Shadow
GWBCoCo Elves
WCDeath and Taxes(sold)1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
1. It would put a limit on decks that have zero interaction. Forcing them to slow their game plan. If we had multiple Turn 3 killers, this could be an issue.
2. It has no real reason to stay banned, since it would be handled fine by the power level of the meta now, in a post Jace, Post Teferi, Post GDS world.
Item 2 is obviously not a valid reason for unban. Item 1 however, in the right scenario, could be.
Spirits
I have been making exactly those arguments for nearly two years. /shrug.
UR ....... WUBR ........... WB ............. RGW ........ UBR ....... WUB .... BGU
Spells / Blink & Combo / Token Grind / Dino Tribal / Draw Cards / Zombies / Reanimate
This is fine for me as it punishes greedy manabases but many people forget these games and maybe those are the reason why that matchup is not as favorable to Jund as most people would expect and leans more towards the 50/50 ktkenshinx was pointing out
1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
Let's not forget that Jund and Abzan have gotten considerable upgrades over the past few years. Not the least bit are new cards like Collective Brutality, grindy cards like Tireless Tracker, and great cards like Bloodbraid Elf. When playing with a grip of discard spells and good removal backed by Goyfs and other great cards, BGx could actually be relevant again in this hypothetical context, instead of getting run over by the narrow and degenerate nonsense currently at the top of the format.
UR ....... WUBR ........... WB ............. RGW ........ UBR ....... WUB .... BGU
Spells / Blink & Combo / Token Grind / Dino Tribal / Draw Cards / Zombies / Reanimate