Why? Because if WotC was actually true to their notion of pushing modern they would have realized that getting rid of the newer mistakes (DRS) rather than going after older ones that already had a deck (BBE) was a better route. DRS was the thing that made Jund ridiculous recently. Hasty, moronic decision from them.
Now to the real issue why WotC failed (and if they continue down this path, will compromise the format's popularity to rival new extended). At the very least two things were solidified from this:
1. Modern is an unstable format, where people who invest in it hope that their deck doesn't do too well or else it's on the chopping block.
2. Even if a ban is not necessarily warranted for a card, they will do it to please their agenda. (Though we knew this one to an extent beforehand, this only reinforces it)
I'm a twin/tron/burn player. Neither of these cards affect my decks but I'm afraid that there's the potential that these decks will certainly get hit soon as wotc continues their assault on top tier decks.
I'm going to give it time to sink in, but I feel divestment from modern is inevitable for me.
hrmmm, i think the ban of bloodbraid elf was totally legitimate.
Jund held ~ 20% of the metagame and ~30% of top8 placings, this is a clear indicator of a deck that has become too powerful.
banning bloodbraid elf is the most elegant solution to nerfing jund. Its banning does not particularly disrupt the deck, as it will continue to be a force to be reckoned with, and affects other aggro variants minimally
its banning also allows other aggro variants like Zoo, Junk, Maverick, and Bant to compete more effectively.
furthermore, bloodbraid elf is a cheap card, so players won't be crying to much in the financial way.
seething song... i am confused about?
the best i can come up with is that they realized that storm was 2nd behind jund, and feared that without a pre-emptive nerf, it would come to be, if not as dominant as jund, the top deck in the format. I feel like they dislike the idea of a "non-interactive" combo deck becoming the dominant force in the meta, and so nerfed it.
however, even if this was the case, the proper card to ban is Goblin electromancer, not seething song.... seething song is almost necessary to run the deck....
in addition, with jund weaker, control decks are better able (devote more cards) to fight storm anyway :l, it probably wouldnt even have become "best deck", though it would certainly have been top tier.
wizards needs to realize that the power of this format will only grow, rigidly adhering to a "4 turn" rule is as bad as trying to keep the reserve list
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Moronic choice, DRS is the obviously broken card but i guess it's best for them to cut down on the uncommon they aren't getting money off than to ban a money rare from their latest set.
Deathrite is far more fair than BBE, yes, he is strong, but BBE advantage is far higher. Also DRS can find home in decks other than jund now that jund lost some power, BBE wouldn't.
Baning DRS would hurt other builds that might rise. BBE only hurt jund.
Bloodbraid Elf makes some sense. If they were going to ban anything from Jund, that made the most sense. I suspected it might be in Modern Masters, but the ban either means:
1) It wasn't.
2) It was early enough they could remove it.
3) They're going to look awfully stupid when a banned card is in the set.
It's also one of the easier cards to replace with, due to Huntmaster of the Fells being such an easy replacement. It's possible that Bloodbraid Elf being banned will make people turn to Junk (as I've seen speculated), but you can still keep your Jund list nearly identical without much difficulty other than the $100 the Huntmasters will probably cost you. So this hits Jund, but it's not that hard to keep playing pretty much the same Jund list due to the way Huntmaster can slide right into that slot.
Seething Song...hrm. This one was a really big shock and seemed like it came out of nowhere. Storm didn't seem to be making that many waves to be honest. It was played, certainly, and was a strong deck, but it really wasn't dominating in any way. Assuming they're correct that Storm was beating the turn 4 rule, it does make me call into question how rigidly they should be sticking to the "turn 4" rule when the decks that can win before then aren't dominant. I've seen almost no one say they wanted a ban in Storm.
I also wonder if Seething Song was the right choice. Now, previously I stated that a ban of a support card would be preferable to banning the actual combo pieces, because you can at least kind of play the deck. I stand by that, but I wonder if they banned the right support card. From my understanding, it was Goblin Electromancer that powered Storm up to this degree, so why not ban that? Storm was a deck before then, and people can go back to those lists. It honestly seems to be the best card at banning if you want to take down Storm but try to annoy Storm players the least amount possible.
However, assuming both bans were required and correct, I think Wizards of the Coast really dropped the ball by not making any unbans. With the Magic players I know, Modern was really just getting over the perception that it was a format where Wizards of the Coast constantly just banned whatever happened to be doing well. And then they go and do it again.
An unban or two would've really helped them save face, especially considering the number of cards on the ban list that seem reasonably safe. They just printed Illness in the Ranks, so Bitterblossom and Sword of the Meek get a brand new hoser. Bloodbraid Elf being banned nixes an argument for Ancestral Vision to stay banned ("Jund can splash for it and cascade into it"). And the fact Golgari Grave-Troll is banned at all when Dread Return is already banned is still baffling to me. There were some good candidates for unbans, and it could've helped cancel out the frustration we're seeing right now.
But no, instead we get more bans and no unbans, further cementing the negative perception some people have of Modern. Of course.
On a more positive note, as a Tron player, these changes only serve to benefit me by making my Jund matchup even better and weakening Storm, a rather poor matchup.
Seething Song...hrm. This one was a really big shock and seemed like it came out of nowhere. Storm didn't seem to be making that many waves to be honest. It was played, certainly, and was a strong deck, but it really wasn't dominating in any way. Assuming they're correct that Storm was beating the turn 4 rule, it does make me call into question how rigidly they should be sticking to the "turn 4" rule when the decks that can win before then aren't dominant. I've seen almost no one say they wanted a ban in Storm.
I also wonder if Seething Song was the right choice. Now, previously I stated that a ban of a support card would be preferable to banning the actual combo pieces, because you can at least kind of play the deck. I stand by that, but I wonder if they banned the right support card. From my understanding, it was Goblin Electromancer that powered Storm up to this degree, so why not ban that? Storm was a deck before then, and people can go back to those lists. It honestly seems to be the best card at banning if you want to take down Storm but try to annoy Storm players the least amount possible.
The deck is more abundant online than in meatspace Magic, I've noticed. I don't know how important it was to ban it, since Ethersworn Canonist pretty much just turned the deck off until they could kill her, and if you managed to somehow equip her with Sword of Fire and Ice they'd just scoop. It seems strange, especially since Storm kept Birthing Pod and Tron in check.
I think people are overreacting. The BBE ban will be good for the format, the Seething Song ban is Wizards being overly careful to make sure we don't get another combo winter with Jund weakened. I don't think Song being banned kills Storm either, if anything it opens up design space for a new powerful red ritual.
The first few years of Modern were always going to be like this. It's going to settle down over time.
Huntmaster of the Fells still generates card advantage and lifegain and can be a real pita to deal with but it is not the same. I just grinded out a little against Jund deck that had the BBE replaced with Huntmaster and it was not as demoralizing. Jund actually felt like you could disrupt it and it wasn't quite as good at answering your own threats.
I do think it's more fun to play against Huntmaster than BBE, which always seems to cascade into Liliana for some strange reason.
Every article has a feedback button. Not that it will do much, but anyone can ship them an email expressing your thoughts. I know I did.
As for my thoughts: I mostly echo what seems to be the dominant opinion on these boards. The Bloodbraid ban was easy to predict, if not the most appropriate card out of that deck (my vote would have gone to Lily, with Deathy right behind). Seething Song seems like an insult and totally uncalled for.
My biggest gripe is of course that they didn't unban anything. With the relative success of their Valakut experiment, I don't see how they could justify keeping some of those cards on the list. I'm looking particularly at BB and Sword (Illness in the Ranks is giggling), GGT (Let's stay scared of a deck that is barely T1.5, if that), and AV. AV seems like the biggest punt, as the only real reason to keeping it on was the broken interaction it has with BBE. If we are pushing this "turn four" agenda so hard, remind why a card that does literal nothing until then is on the banned list?
All in all, it feels like a wasted opportunity and another sign that Wizards just indiscriminately bans the best deck. This direction is sad and unhealthy.
For some reason I have a good feeling about red-Affinity (Galvanic Blast and Shrapnel Blast). It definitely isn't going to be any more neutered than it is now, and it has all the positives of burn while being simply more degenerate.
It's good against pod when they have to pay life for multiple activations, and (solely from my own [meager] personal experience)it is great against infect. It's flexible enough to be meta-gamed well (Etched Champion vs Master of Etherium, Steel Overseer vs Arcbound Ravenger, Welding Jar against removal). And last but not least, I like any deck that can play Blood Moon in this format--it just leads to so many wins out of the side. Just my $0.02.
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Storm was playable and wasn't as good before goblin electromancer, why did they ban seething song, if they axed the goblin people wouldn't complain, at least they got back to the build previous to the latest block.
Also may i say they just effectively killed a slice of red's pie? They keep talking crap about how they want red to have more unique effects and how it feels always the same, yet they just confirmed we won't see any good rituals in the future, why WOTC, WHY?
JTMS won't ever be unbanned now. Maybe if they didn't try to cripple their stupid format things could have figured out themselves, as long as they avoided the turn 4 kill enablers they could have let an entire season for decks to adapt to each other, instead they just ban the best card of every archetype and if the deck is still good, not even the best deck or unbeatable, they ban another card...
I bet BBE would have been fine in a world with JTMS and that there was a decent chance this could have helped control which in turn keeps storm in check... but we will never know because WOTC thinks its dangerous to have shiny toys.
If a card didn't help turn 4 wins, why ban it before it has proven to be too strong??? It's obvious that the FFL is really really bad at their jobs and the way the format developed has shown that you just can't stop good decks from emerging with such a big card pool... they should have just accepted it.
The BBE ban was fine, and will probably be good for the format overall. Once Jund went to Lingering Souls, aggro decks had a very hard time beating Jund. Zoo might actually be better without BBE, as it now has a chance of actually beating Jund. Additionally, other mid-range decks, like Junk, might have a chance to shine as well.
The Seething Song ban, however, is pretty weird. Storm wasn't placing in paper events, and its presence online was highly skewed by the fact that the deck is so cheap to build. It might have had the most consistent Turn 3 kill game one, but it's win % plummeted dramatically post board. It was barely T1, and with BBE gone, it would have gotten worse anyways. Snapcaster decks already destroyed Storm, and now that their nemesis BBE is banned, they just got much stronger.
I'm still just baffled how anyone could argue for keeping Ancestral Vision on the banned list. Even if you have it in your opener, it will not do anything until turn 5. After turn 3, it is nearly a blank.
They probably didn't unban AV because they now don't know if blue is good enough without it, and I think the answer is blue doesn't need it anymore.
Bitterblossom on the other hand, I don't see it bad for the format, but testing is needed with these changes.
To everyone saying jund will still be a deck- it won't. There's no reason to play red now that bbe got the axe. Red was for card advantage and reach, but for bolts isn't going to give much reach without the bbe haste. Huntmaster is no better than finks or lingering souls, so why not just lower the curve and play those?
In fact this is great! People will make the conventiona jund into a BGx build, where you can use W, R or B. Jund was jund only because of BBE, now "jund" can split into 3 variants.
Zoo is also dead because of bbe banning.
It was already dead, maybe now they might bring back Nactal to revive it. (A man can dream, love the Kitty)
How often exactly did UR Storm with Seething Song break the Turn 4 rule? I've played a lot of games against it and own it myself and my experience has been that the turn 3 kills were uncommon. Mostly happened on Turn 4-5 for me if I wanted to be sure of going off. Maybe it was a different version of the deck than I played? (For example, I play the non-Epic Experiment version, but 4x Electromancer and Peer Through Depths).
Every one keeps forgetting that these were the only banns since an entire year!
I still think they should have banned anything with cascade, storm, or phyrexian mana since the formats inception, these mechanics are blatant mistakes. So delighted to see that elf FINALY get axed, it has been a bane of this game for far to long. I think we can safely say that this points to powering the format down and we can't expect to see jace stone forge or blossom ever coming off the list unless legacy completely dies out, not currently likely for some years. The all in creature combos like infect, auras, and niv magpies are far more fragile and in consistent than how storm operates. Jund will still be a deck along with all sorts of rock, mid range, or tempo brews! Disruption plus powerful creatures is still a winning strategy.
DRS is a very flexible card that might see play i other decks. BBE see play only on jund. Huting a lot of potential decks in the process of making jund weaker don't seems a smart way to increase the diversity. BBE ban only hurts jund.
The word that strikes me as odd here is "might." DRS is already being slotted into every non-combo black and/or green deck that it can be. And some are splashing just for it.
Jund is not the reason this card should have been banned. It needed to be banned in its own right. In fact, being a requirement in every deck is a reason for certain bannings in the first place(looking at mox and top). The fact that it hurt Jund to lose it should have been irrelevant to the card ban, but the ban would in fact have hurt Jund and might have allowed BBE to stay.
Sometimes banning a card that only hurts a specific deck is the way to go. Others, banning the card that every deck is using is better. In this case, I think a lot of people would have opted for the latter(Or perhaps both, time will tell if that's the right choice).
TL:DR version - Was there anyone else out there who was disappointed that they wouldn't even get one last tournament in with their current jund/storm deck?
I just spend $440 on mint condition Tarmogoyfs, and another $200 in store credit on the rest of the cards I was missing for Jund, and you know what? Bloodbraid Elf doesn't bother me about this banning, but something does.
Aside from the comical fact that I'm just about to win a bid on 4 bloodbraid elf promos on ebay (please... someone out bid me!!!), something is bothering me about this banning that I really want to voice to WotC. The length of time between announcing the ban, and it going into effect.
Pre-gatecrash we had a two week window where we could:
Trade/sell our cards away
Trade/buy new cards
Play out what we had for the last remaining weeks
Test what we were going to play later on
Now, I'm a little biased because I just finished the deck, and sure I could have gotten the last lands I needed before the pre-release but I felt like waiting to save a few bucks and trade/open them (I did, woohoo). Unfortunately though, I won't have a chance to play the deck one last time (or even one first time), and had I been someone else testing their jank deck at FNM this past friday, only to see this banning on monday, I too would have missed out on a chance to get one last run in.
Maybe my complaint is insignificant, maybe I'm just looking for an outlet to complain, but I really would like to know why this particular decision was made, and whether or not my views on the issue are shared.
I haven't missed their explanation, I just don't buy it.
The better thing to do would have been to up the stakes and release some of the more powerful cards into the format which were banned at the beginning with little or no rational explanation.
That would have increased diversity, while this will just mean that all the Spikes will migrate to the winning deck from GP Bilbao for the rest of the PTQ season and hopefully when something gets banned from that deck people will start saying that this banning spree needs to be stopped.
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In my dream, the world had suffered a terrible disaster. A black haze shut out the sun, and the darkness was alive with the moans and screams of wounded people. Suddenly, a small light glowed. A candle flickered into life, symbol of hope for millions. A single tiny candle, shining in the ugly dark. I laughed and blew it out.
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Keep in mind that much of the disruption came from Jund discard. Now that BBE is banned Jund will be played less so maybe the Seething Song was a preemptive ban to prevent Storm from spinning out of control.
Good point. DRS and the popularity/dominance of Jund made storm much weaker. Without as many people playing t1 hate on pyromancer's ascension, storm would probably bounce back.
Modern doesn't need bannings. It need UNbannings. The only reason Jund is so much better is because every card that would make a great archetype viable are banned. If Bitterblossom and Wild Nacatl were legal, there would be no Jund dominance. So why ban Bloodbraid Elf, which was clearly the less broken card of the deck? Now, green based aggro is pretty much dead, the one survivor is Hate Bears, which was never a good enough deck.
The unbanning of Valakut was a great call. Why not unban more stuff?
Also, today's update on the DCI made me think if those guys played Modern at all. Storm is only heavily played because it's a cheap deck, not because it's broken. If enough people play the deck, some people will do good with it, and reach good results. It's not broken, and since the banning of Rite of Flame (which was a good thing) it was a fun deck to play that crushed unprepared oponents and was easily hated out. That seems like a great deck to me. Seething Song being taken out is a big mistake.
Entering the format now will be even more expensive. A cheap deck was destroyed, the "only" cheap card in Jund is banned, green aggro is basically dead... Now we will be forced to buy 20 dollars Olivias and 25 dollars Huntmasters... Great!!!
If Bitterblossom and Wild Nacatl were legal, there would be no Jund dominance
There would Zoo dominance. If just Bitterblossum was unbanned, Faeries would rule Modern.
Neither of those cards should ever get unbanned. They push their respective archetypes to the absolute top of the pack, and turn Modern into "Play this deck or you probably lose", just like Jund was.
Now UWx and Pod will dominate Modern.
Why is that better/worse?
Pod is a lot softer against hate than Jund was though, and I don't mean hate against Pod itself either. A well timed Instant can rain on Splinter Twin's or Merila Pod's parade. Jund was much more resilient than all that. Burn and hyper aggro decks like Affinity can deal with control based UWx pretty well. If you mean UWx tempo like Delver...I think Delver's going to continue what it's been doing, Jund or not.
I agree with the bans, personally. I distinctly remember people saying here that Jund was getting out of control, and I played new Jund enough to see how versatile it was. It was smart to do something and I really don't think Wizards wanted to take away Jund's new toy, especially if it had potentially wider use in other decks.
Deathrite Shaman - Banned
Why? Because if WotC was actually true to their notion of pushing modern they would have realized that getting rid of the newer mistakes (DRS) rather than going after older ones that already had a deck (BBE) was a better route. DRS was the thing that made Jund ridiculous recently. Hasty, moronic decision from them.
Now to the real issue why WotC failed (and if they continue down this path, will compromise the format's popularity to rival new extended). At the very least two things were solidified from this:
1. Modern is an unstable format, where people who invest in it hope that their deck doesn't do too well or else it's on the chopping block.
2. Even if a ban is not necessarily warranted for a card, they will do it to please their agenda. (Though we knew this one to an extent beforehand, this only reinforces it)
I'm a twin/tron/burn player. Neither of these cards affect my decks but I'm afraid that there's the potential that these decks will certainly get hit soon as wotc continues their assault on top tier decks.
I'm going to give it time to sink in, but I feel divestment from modern is inevitable for me.
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Jund held ~ 20% of the metagame and ~30% of top8 placings, this is a clear indicator of a deck that has become too powerful.
banning bloodbraid elf is the most elegant solution to nerfing jund. Its banning does not particularly disrupt the deck, as it will continue to be a force to be reckoned with, and affects other aggro variants minimally
its banning also allows other aggro variants like Zoo, Junk, Maverick, and Bant to compete more effectively.
furthermore, bloodbraid elf is a cheap card, so players won't be crying to much in the financial way.
seething song... i am confused about?
the best i can come up with is that they realized that storm was 2nd behind jund, and feared that without a pre-emptive nerf, it would come to be, if not as dominant as jund, the top deck in the format. I feel like they dislike the idea of a "non-interactive" combo deck becoming the dominant force in the meta, and so nerfed it.
however, even if this was the case, the proper card to ban is Goblin electromancer, not seething song.... seething song is almost necessary to run the deck....
in addition, with jund weaker, control decks are better able (devote more cards) to fight storm anyway :l, it probably wouldnt even have become "best deck", though it would certainly have been top tier.
wizards needs to realize that the power of this format will only grow, rigidly adhering to a "4 turn" rule is as bad as trying to keep the reserve list
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Baning DRS would hurt other builds that might rise. BBE only hurt jund.
I still sad for no unban. The could ban Mistbind Clique to bring Bitterblossom back =/
1) It wasn't.
2) It was early enough they could remove it.
3) They're going to look awfully stupid when a banned card is in the set.
It's also one of the easier cards to replace with, due to Huntmaster of the Fells being such an easy replacement. It's possible that Bloodbraid Elf being banned will make people turn to Junk (as I've seen speculated), but you can still keep your Jund list nearly identical without much difficulty other than the $100 the Huntmasters will probably cost you. So this hits Jund, but it's not that hard to keep playing pretty much the same Jund list due to the way Huntmaster can slide right into that slot.
Seething Song...hrm. This one was a really big shock and seemed like it came out of nowhere. Storm didn't seem to be making that many waves to be honest. It was played, certainly, and was a strong deck, but it really wasn't dominating in any way. Assuming they're correct that Storm was beating the turn 4 rule, it does make me call into question how rigidly they should be sticking to the "turn 4" rule when the decks that can win before then aren't dominant. I've seen almost no one say they wanted a ban in Storm.
I also wonder if Seething Song was the right choice. Now, previously I stated that a ban of a support card would be preferable to banning the actual combo pieces, because you can at least kind of play the deck. I stand by that, but I wonder if they banned the right support card. From my understanding, it was Goblin Electromancer that powered Storm up to this degree, so why not ban that? Storm was a deck before then, and people can go back to those lists. It honestly seems to be the best card at banning if you want to take down Storm but try to annoy Storm players the least amount possible.
However, assuming both bans were required and correct, I think Wizards of the Coast really dropped the ball by not making any unbans. With the Magic players I know, Modern was really just getting over the perception that it was a format where Wizards of the Coast constantly just banned whatever happened to be doing well. And then they go and do it again.
An unban or two would've really helped them save face, especially considering the number of cards on the ban list that seem reasonably safe. They just printed Illness in the Ranks, so Bitterblossom and Sword of the Meek get a brand new hoser. Bloodbraid Elf being banned nixes an argument for Ancestral Vision to stay banned ("Jund can splash for it and cascade into it"). And the fact Golgari Grave-Troll is banned at all when Dread Return is already banned is still baffling to me. There were some good candidates for unbans, and it could've helped cancel out the frustration we're seeing right now.
But no, instead we get more bans and no unbans, further cementing the negative perception some people have of Modern. Of course.
On a more positive note, as a Tron player, these changes only serve to benefit me by making my Jund matchup even better and weakening Storm, a rather poor matchup.
The deck is more abundant online than in meatspace Magic, I've noticed. I don't know how important it was to ban it, since Ethersworn Canonist pretty much just turned the deck off until they could kill her, and if you managed to somehow equip her with Sword of Fire and Ice they'd just scoop. It seems strange, especially since Storm kept Birthing Pod and Tron in check.
Because we care about facts.
The first few years of Modern were always going to be like this. It's going to settle down over time.
I do think it's more fun to play against Huntmaster than BBE, which always seems to cascade into Liliana for some strange reason.
As for my thoughts: I mostly echo what seems to be the dominant opinion on these boards. The Bloodbraid ban was easy to predict, if not the most appropriate card out of that deck (my vote would have gone to Lily, with Deathy right behind). Seething Song seems like an insult and totally uncalled for.
My biggest gripe is of course that they didn't unban anything. With the relative success of their Valakut experiment, I don't see how they could justify keeping some of those cards on the list. I'm looking particularly at BB and Sword (Illness in the Ranks is giggling), GGT (Let's stay scared of a deck that is barely T1.5, if that), and AV. AV seems like the biggest punt, as the only real reason to keeping it on was the broken interaction it has with BBE. If we are pushing this "turn four" agenda so hard, remind why a card that does literal nothing until then is on the banned list?
All in all, it feels like a wasted opportunity and another sign that Wizards just indiscriminately bans the best deck. This direction is sad and unhealthy.
It's good against pod when they have to pay life for multiple activations, and (solely from my own [meager] personal experience)it is great against infect. It's flexible enough to be meta-gamed well (Etched Champion vs Master of Etherium, Steel Overseer vs Arcbound Ravenger, Welding Jar against removal). And last but not least, I like any deck that can play Blood Moon in this format--it just leads to so many wins out of the side. Just my $0.02.
Standard: N/A
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Also may i say they just effectively killed a slice of red's pie? They keep talking crap about how they want red to have more unique effects and how it feels always the same, yet they just confirmed we won't see any good rituals in the future, why WOTC, WHY?
I bet BBE would have been fine in a world with JTMS and that there was a decent chance this could have helped control which in turn keeps storm in check... but we will never know because WOTC thinks its dangerous to have shiny toys.
If a card didn't help turn 4 wins, why ban it before it has proven to be too strong??? It's obvious that the FFL is really really bad at their jobs and the way the format developed has shown that you just can't stop good decks from emerging with such a big card pool... they should have just accepted it.
The Seething Song ban, however, is pretty weird. Storm wasn't placing in paper events, and its presence online was highly skewed by the fact that the deck is so cheap to build. It might have had the most consistent Turn 3 kill game one, but it's win % plummeted dramatically post board. It was barely T1, and with BBE gone, it would have gotten worse anyways. Snapcaster decks already destroyed Storm, and now that their nemesis BBE is banned, they just got much stronger.
Bitterblossom on the other hand, I don't see it bad for the format, but testing is needed with these changes.
In fact this is great! People will make the conventiona jund into a BGx build, where you can use W, R or B. Jund was jund only because of BBE, now "jund" can split into 3 variants.
It was already dead, maybe now they might bring back Nactal to revive it. (A man can dream, love the Kitty)
Speculate less. Test more.
I still think they should have banned anything with cascade, storm, or phyrexian mana since the formats inception, these mechanics are blatant mistakes. So delighted to see that elf FINALY get axed, it has been a bane of this game for far to long. I think we can safely say that this points to powering the format down and we can't expect to see jace stone forge or blossom ever coming off the list unless legacy completely dies out, not currently likely for some years. The all in creature combos like infect, auras, and niv magpies are far more fragile and in consistent than how storm operates. Jund will still be a deck along with all sorts of rock, mid range, or tempo brews! Disruption plus powerful creatures is still a winning strategy.
The word that strikes me as odd here is "might." DRS is already being slotted into every non-combo black and/or green deck that it can be. And some are splashing just for it.
Jund is not the reason this card should have been banned. It needed to be banned in its own right. In fact, being a requirement in every deck is a reason for certain bannings in the first place(looking at mox and top). The fact that it hurt Jund to lose it should have been irrelevant to the card ban, but the ban would in fact have hurt Jund and might have allowed BBE to stay.
Sometimes banning a card that only hurts a specific deck is the way to go. Others, banning the card that every deck is using is better. In this case, I think a lot of people would have opted for the latter(Or perhaps both, time will tell if that's the right choice).
I just spend $440 on mint condition Tarmogoyfs, and another $200 in store credit on the rest of the cards I was missing for Jund, and you know what? Bloodbraid Elf doesn't bother me about this banning, but something does.
Aside from the comical fact that I'm just about to win a bid on 4 bloodbraid elf promos on ebay (please... someone out bid me!!!), something is bothering me about this banning that I really want to voice to WotC. The length of time between announcing the ban, and it going into effect.
Pre-gatecrash we had a two week window where we could:
Trade/sell our cards away
Trade/buy new cards
Play out what we had for the last remaining weeks
Test what we were going to play later on
Now, I'm a little biased because I just finished the deck, and sure I could have gotten the last lands I needed before the pre-release but I felt like waiting to save a few bucks and trade/open them (I did, woohoo). Unfortunately though, I won't have a chance to play the deck one last time (or even one first time), and had I been someone else testing their jank deck at FNM this past friday, only to see this banning on monday, I too would have missed out on a chance to get one last run in.
Maybe my complaint is insignificant, maybe I'm just looking for an outlet to complain, but I really would like to know why this particular decision was made, and whether or not my views on the issue are shared.
The better thing to do would have been to up the stakes and release some of the more powerful cards into the format which were banned at the beginning with little or no rational explanation.
That would have increased diversity, while this will just mean that all the Spikes will migrate to the winning deck from GP Bilbao for the rest of the PTQ season and hopefully when something gets banned from that deck people will start saying that this banning spree needs to be stopped.
Many thanks to HotP Studios. Special thanks to DNC for this great sig.
Good point. DRS and the popularity/dominance of Jund made storm much weaker. Without as many people playing t1 hate on pyromancer's ascension, storm would probably bounce back.
The unbanning of Valakut was a great call. Why not unban more stuff?
Also, today's update on the DCI made me think if those guys played Modern at all. Storm is only heavily played because it's a cheap deck, not because it's broken. If enough people play the deck, some people will do good with it, and reach good results. It's not broken, and since the banning of Rite of Flame (which was a good thing) it was a fun deck to play that crushed unprepared oponents and was easily hated out. That seems like a great deck to me. Seething Song being taken out is a big mistake.
Entering the format now will be even more expensive. A cheap deck was destroyed, the "only" cheap card in Jund is banned, green aggro is basically dead... Now we will be forced to buy 20 dollars Olivias and 25 dollars Huntmasters... Great!!!
There would Zoo dominance. If just Bitterblossum was unbanned, Faeries would rule Modern.
Neither of those cards should ever get unbanned. They push their respective archetypes to the absolute top of the pack, and turn Modern into "Play this deck or you probably lose", just like Jund was.
Pod is a lot softer against hate than Jund was though, and I don't mean hate against Pod itself either. A well timed Instant can rain on Splinter Twin's or Merila Pod's parade. Jund was much more resilient than all that. Burn and hyper aggro decks like Affinity can deal with control based UWx pretty well. If you mean UWx tempo like Delver...I think Delver's going to continue what it's been doing, Jund or not.
I agree with the bans, personally. I distinctly remember people saying here that Jund was getting out of control, and I played new Jund enough to see how versatile it was. It was smart to do something and I really don't think Wizards wanted to take away Jund's new toy, especially if it had potentially wider use in other decks.
U Memnarch
RWU Zedruu the Greathearted