is anyone else seeing UR breach lists around? they're built similarly to the UR twin lists of old, just with 4 through the breach and 4 Emrakul instead
my buddy are having success with the list
Isn't that just worse than kiki/exarch though? breach and kiki same cmc but exarch is a card where emrakul is not? Most TTB lists I've seen are RG valakut or RBx for goryo's.
I think the strength behind breaching emrakul over copying exarch is just protection from removal and being in the Ur controlling shell
My LGS is stopping all modern event.
Because nobody plays modern anymore.
Why ? Too many full linear aggro archetype making the format disgusting, boring, annoying.
Since the last set, and the new dredge, death shadow etc... decks, with infect and affinity rampant in the format for years, dominating it. All my friends get bored, all the dudes who were at modern events didn't show for month.
We were usually 16, sometimes even more, every week, playing together at magic, in modern. I'm playing for 4 years, and the only thing i saw was the format getting worse and worse.
Since few month, we were barely 8... sometimes we can't even play the event because we were too few.
So yeah, wizard did a great job, they wanted to makes people stop modern, they did well.
The problem is it's not making people play standard, it's just making people stop magic.
I'm gonna sell my collection, stoppin magic as well, and wish good luck to all of you in your sweet linear non interactive stupid turn 3 win meta.
Good lord, the drama in here is befitting a middle school theatre class. Modern is still popular where I am and has started picking up in other shops around me. Events are constantly being run in my area.
Modern is still active here in my area, and I enjoy playing it. Well, the meta is indeed full of aggro.. I often see the usual suspects each week.. all kinds of Burn, Abzan aggro with Witness - Resto and Rhino, Merfolk, colorless Eldrazi aggro, Infect, Affinity, various UR delver decks. Dredge is being talked about a lot, but I have not seen one yet in our shop. Have not seen a Tron deck for months now.
There are also sometimes homebrew decks that show up like RB vampire nocturnus, kiln fiend / nivix cyclops combo, and a RW equipment deck with grafted wargear + Heathfire Hobgoblin.
I have an idea on what the problem is. It's not the format, it's the people.
Modern is incredibly diverse right now. With that diversity comes the likelihood of any given deck having one or more bad matchups. People don't like facing bad matchups, they get the "feelbads". People don't like losing, and often want to try to shift blame to something other than themselves for their losses. In this case, the blame can often be attributed to the diversity of the format (and often to their own misplays). But to say that something good is the reason for them feeling something bad doesn't quite make them feel better, so they have to create new justifications.
So they'll use catchphrases, like, "The format is too linear", or, "the format is non-interactive". Those statements are vague on the details (as are the supporting arguments), but they sound technical enough to make them feel like they are smart, and therefore right. They'll argue that one or more decks need to have one or more cards banned, and then create a magical-Christmasland concept of what the format would look like with those bans. They'll argue that one or more cards are "safe to unban", and again, create a magical-Christmasland concept of what the format would then look like. Anything to imply that something that is bad is the reason for them feeling bad.
Sometimes the format is broken. That's usually not too hard to see, though. For example, during the Eldrazi winter. Or, if we look at the trend of decks to beat in 2015, as Splinter Twin decks slowly crept to the top and pushed other decks out of tier 1. People clamored (and still do) over how unjust the ban was. The irony there is that WotC has data that we don't have - They have the percentages of decks on MTGO that run Twin, and their win percentages. The best we have is the historical data from sites like MTGGoldfish and MTGTop8, and even they imply that Twin was dominating the format. But somehow the data that we have that implies that Twin was, with holes, is more accurate than the data that WotC has? That detail doesn't seem to be brought up when people attempt to make their arguments against Wotc banning Twin.
But the key here is to note the major indicator of a truly broken format - Lack of diversity. The more diverse the format, the healthier it is. But, again, the more likely that any one of us will have one or more bad matchups. That means we just have to accept that as part of the game and not get butthurt when we face a bad matchup. Sure, it makes winning something like a GP a bit more about predicting major metagame shifts and dodging bad matchups, but so be it. If someone pays the entry fee, that person's gambling that their deck will dodge those bad matchups. If they lose that bet, so be it. If they don't like losing bets, then it's probably best that they don't gamble in the first place.
So, overall, the format is fine. There are some hiccups, but WotC has far more accurate data on what they are than we do, and all we can do is trust them. Sure, they make mistakes (FNM Promos recently, but there might even be a reasoning behind those), but without the data that they have, we are far more likely to make mistakes.
I have an idea on what the problem is. It's not the format, it's the people.
This is entirely possible. Though it calls into question what data are we looking at? Local personal stories? Or aggregate data? And what kind of data?
Modern is incredibly diverse right now.
Sort of. There is a lot of diversity in the specific collection of cards with which you can win, but there is a greatly disproportionate level of fast, aggressive decks that seek to win as quickly and efficiently as possible and interact as little as possible. So there is diversity between individual deck types, but not as much gameplans and archetypes.
With that diversity comes the likelihood of any given deck having one or more bad matchups. People don't like facing bad matchups, they get the "feelbads". People don't like losing, and often want to try to shift blame to something other than themselves for their losses.
This is projecting words into the mouths of others. I for one have no issue losing based on my own gameplay decisions, my own actions, and the choices I make throughout a match, etc. I have had some of my most enjoyable matches be losses because they were long, well-fought games where player decisions mattered more than our opening 7. What I cannot stand is a format in which matches are often decided by the pairings board and the die roll. Matches that can be so lopsided that you might as well sign the slip and go across the street for beer and snacks than play a deck you have almost no chance beating. Then there are the decks which require a narrow and specific answer or you simply lose. Draw that card and you win, don't drat that card and you lose. It does not create fun, engaging, entertaining, or enjoyable games. Blaming players for not enjoying this kind of gameplay is extremely callous.
So they'll use catchphrases, like, "The format is too linear", or, "the format is non-interactive". Those statements are vague on the details (as are the supporting arguments), but they sound technical enough to make them feel like they are smart, and therefore right.
Take a look at this list of the top 12 decks in Modern on Goldfish and go ahead and tell me that the format is not linear and that the format has a lot of interactivity:
Sometimes the format is broken. That's usually not too hard to see, though. For example, during the Eldrazi winter. Or, if we look at the trend of decks to beat in 2015, as Splinter Twin decks slowly crept to the top and pushed other decks out of tier 1. People clamored (and still do) over how unjust the ban was.
Your single-point data with no context is a horrible representation of what Twin did for the format. It was a 10% deck (with less metagame presence than BGx currently has), and did nothing to push decks out of tier 1. That list is laughably bad, placing things like Jund into Tier 3.... Tier 3??? Let's remember some perspective here: 2015 saw more than 30 different deck types placing in their GP Top 8s all year with 6 of 7 completely different winners (7 of 7 different if you count Jeskai kiki/resto/elspeth Twin as different from standard UR Twin). The deck was not oppressive, was not too dominant, was not suppressing decks, and was definitely not supplanting them. There has been piles of analysis covering those very topics, which is why the ban was so controversial; it did not line up with the criteria observed for every other diversity ban Modern has ever had.
The irony there is that WotC has data that we don't have - They have the percentages of decks on MTGO that run Twin, and their win percentages. The best we have is the historical data from sites like MTGGoldfish and MTGTop8, and even they imply that Twin was dominating the format. But somehow the data that we have that implies that Twin was, with holes, is more accurate than the data that WotC has? That detail doesn't seem to be brought up when people attempt to make their arguments against Wotc banning Twin.
Wizards also runs a business and makes business decisions. Their decision was that they didn't like seeing Twin all the time at the top tables (especially at Pro Tours). Based on informal comments from key people in Wizardse (as well as laughably incorrect text in the ban announcement itself), it's pretty safe to assume Wizards made the ban to shake up the Pro Tour and used some extremely questionable and borderline justifications for masking this reason. But as you said, we don't have access to the data Wizards does, so until someone comes out and says it, we can only analyze the data we have access to.
But the key here is to note the major indicator of a truly broken format - Lack of diversity. The more diverse the format, the healthier it is. But, again, the more likely that any one of us will have one or more bad matchups. That means we just have to accept that as part of the game and not get butthurt when we face a bad matchup. Sure, it makes winning something like a GP a bit more about predicting major metagame shifts and dodging bad matchups, but so be it. If someone pays the entry fee, that person's gambling that their deck will dodge those bad matchups. If they lose that bet, so be it. If they don't like losing bets, then it's probably best that they don't gamble in the first place.
So, overall, the format is fine.
So you support the idea that the format is healthy, despite the roulette wheel of matchups and sideboard lottery variance often used to decide games? A format defined where the best dozen decks are almost entirely linear aggressive decks attacking from completely different angles, making the act of trying to answer them almost impossible? And since answers are so difficult and ineffective relative to the array of threats, it's just better to try and race them, roll the dice, and hope for the best? That is not the kind of format I would classify as "healthy."
Sort of. There is a lot of diversity in the specific collection of cards with which you can win, but there is a greatly disproportionate level of fast, aggressive decks that seek to win as quickly and efficiently as possible and interact as little as possible. So there is diversity between individual deck types, but not as much gameplans and archetypes.
How many different gameplans and archtypes do you feel are necessary in order to consider a format healthy, if not individual decks? Where do you set the bar?
This is projecting words into the mouths of others. I for one have no issue losing based on my own gameplay decisions, my own actions, and the choices I make throughout a match, etc. I have had some of my most enjoyable matches be losses because they were long, well-fought games where player decisions mattered more than our opening 7. What I cannot stand is a format in which matches are often decided by the pairings board and the die roll. Matches that can be so lopsided that you might as well sign the slip and go across the street for beer and snacks than play a deck you have almost no chance beating. Then there are the decks which require a narrow and specific answer or you simply lose. Draw that card and you win, don't drat that card and you lose. It does not create fun, engaging, entertaining, or enjoyable games. Blaming players for not enjoying this kind of gameplay is extremely callous.
My original comment:
With that diversity comes the likelihood of any given deck having one or more bad matchups. People don't like facing bad matchups, they get the "feelbads". People don't like losing, and often want to try to shift blame to something other than themselves for their losses.
So yeah, you will face a roulette of possible getting a bad matchup. What do you think the alternative is? The meta being consolidated enough that you have a pretty good idea as to what you're going to face? That doesn't seem to imply a diverse meta.
Take a look at this list of the top 12 decks in Modern on Goldfish and go ahead and tell me that the format is not linear and that the format has a lot of interactivity: ...
Would you mind qualifying your definition of the terms "linear" and "interactivity"? I specifically pointed out how people will use those terms without qualifying them with:
So they'll use catchphrases, like, "The format is too linear", or, "the format is non-interactive". Those statements are vague on the details...
. What does it mean for something to be "linear", or "interactive"? After qualifying those words, what do you feel is the threshold of decks that are "linear" or "non-interactive" in a meta before it becomes unhealthy?
...if you count Jeskai kiki/resto/elspeth Twin as different from standard UR Twin...
They are slightly different, yes. But they are essentially all shells built around the same exact combo. You seem to imply that these should be considered "separate", but that decks in the top tier right now that are all aggro (but using a wider variety of card differences) should be grouped together?
...which is why the ban was so controversial; it did not line up with the criteria observed for every other diversity ban Modern has ever had.
It seems to depend on how you want to look at the data. Again, you seem to want to group all of the aggro decks in the top tiers together, despite them using different cards, but want to distinguish the different Twin variants as separate. I'm inclined to think that what happened was that WotC saw a trend of some variant of a Twin core being prevalent in a variety of different shells. Of course, to know this for sure would require that WotC said this outright, although they did seem to say this by their very announcement. It's just that people don't want to see Twin as a core that was occupying a large portion of the meta, and would rather separate the decks by their shells rather than see their common cores.
So you support the idea that the format is healthy, despite the roulette wheel of matchups and sideboard lottery variance often used to decide games? A format defined where the best dozen decks are almost entirely linear aggressive decks attacking from completely different angles, making the act of trying to answer them almost impossible? And since answers are so difficult and ineffective relative to the array of threats, it's just better to try and race them, roll the dice, and hope for the best? That is not the kind of format I would classify as "healthy."
I feel that it is relatively healthy, yes. Sure, you do have to worry about fast decks in the current meta. I plan Lantern, I'm familiar with trying to survive them. Five of those twelve decks you screenshot are not "fast creature decks". Yes, they attempt to interact with the gamestate quickly. That's kind of how games work. For example, in chess, if we play slow and irrelevant moves while the opponent quickly sets up a dominating position, then we have earned the inferior position. Every single game in existence involves this, but somehow the Modern format is at fault for having this same feature. Sure, some formats are slower than others. Limited, pretty slow. Standard, a little faster. Even Legacy and Vintage, where people claim that the games are longer, are very often determined by the first few turns of interaction with the gamestate. The winning "move" may have not been played yet, but a delay in struggling to get there will spell doom for anyone.
So, again, I'm very interested in what how you define the words "linear" and "interactive", how many different archtypes you feel should be represented (and at what percentage of the metagame), and what those archtypes should be. And not just "all of them", but specifically name them. If they don't exist yet, then please make some up that you feel should be classified as an archtype.
How many different gameplans and archtypes do you feel are necessary in order to consider a format healthy, if not individual decks? Where do you set the bar?
Our top decks used to span Aggro, Midrange, Ramp, Combo, and Control, with relatively even distributions between the various top archetypes. Currently, it is almost entirely fast linear decks and BGx Midrange.
It seems to depend on how you want to look at the data. Again, you seem to want to group all of the aggro decks in the top tiers together, despite them using different cards, but want to distinguish the different Twin variants as separate. I'm inclined to think that what happened was that WotC saw a trend of some variant of a Twin core being prevalent in a variety of different shells. Of course, to know this for sure would require that WotC said this outright, although they did seem to say this by their very announcement. It's just that people don't want to see Twin as a core that was occupying a large portion of the meta, and would rather separate the decks by their shells rather than see their common cores.
It definitely had nothing to do with its meta share percentages. When it was banned, it had a lower combined share of all Twin variants than BGx midrange has right now. It has everything to do with the perception it gave at Pro Tours and other high end events. All numbers correlate with this analysis, and is covered in depth in this article from shortly after the ban: Link.
I feel that it is relatively healthy, yes.
I would like to understand why you feel this is healthy. Specifically, why is the Modern we have today more healthy than 2015? What criteria do you use to judge this? The following sentences don't really give any justification as to why the current Modern meta is "healthy" relative to what Modern was or should be, just a reference to its hypothetical place among other formats and an irrelevant reference to chess.
So, again, I'm very interested in what how you define the words "linear" and "interactive", how many different archtypes you feel should be represented (and at what percentage of the metagame), and what those archtypes should be. And not just "all of them", but specifically name them. If they don't exist yet, then please make some up that you feel should be classified as an archtype.
Even though those have both been defined many times by many people in different incarnations of the Banned List thread, I'll go ahead and put mine here:
Linear: A deck which executes a single plan with little to no deviation. It wins through a repeatable and predictable pattern without any real variety in the way it attacks. Whatever the opponent is doing doesn't really change the goals or game plans of your deck.
Interactivity: The amount of attention or care a deck pays to what their opponent is doing, or the level with which you have to acknowledge what your opponent is doing at all. Decks with high interactivity are seen as "reactive" and seek to answer what the opponent is doing. Decks with low interactivity are seen as "proactive" and seek to either ask more questions than the opponent has answers for or seeks to invalidate the opponent's pieces of interaction. A simple way to classify would be asking how much does your deck seek to goldfish a victory.
Unfortunately, Modern Nexus is months behind on their Metagame Update posts, so we have to rely on stuff like Goldfish, so that's what I reference. Looking at their list, I would qualify them as this:
Guys, please, for heaven sakes, no do not things like the mtgtop8 and goldfish metagame list for any discussion. Both of them are super flawed, since they lack a ton of paper events (if they included Paper events at all like MTGGoldfish), even some bigger ones (thinking about the MKM series for example). Hence, ALWAYS use the Modern Nexus Top Page for this. It includes both online results as paper tournaments and is by far the most accurate one.
Tier 2:
Jeskai Control - 3,0%
RG Valakut/Titan Breach - combined 4,6%, seperated 1,6/3,0
Ad Nauseam - 2,1%
Death and Taxes - 1,5%
So, if I group everything the "fair" and "unfair" together, it looks like this:
"fair": BGx, Jeskai, Eldrazi, DnT - 24,2%
"unfair": rest - 34,1%
The MTG Goldfish metagame shows this:
"fair": (including Lantern Control and WR Prison Control) - 17,82%
"unfair": rest - 40,86%
Look at the differences and think about it and than both of you will hopefully realise, that using a flawed statistic for argumentation is just a brainfart.
Greetings,
Kathal
PS: I have been doing this since a while (so comparing different data sets) and the one from Modern Nexus is by far the most accurate and trustworthy one. I also do those "fair" vs "unfair" check ups quite frequently (combining Tier 1 and 2 basically) and we had way worse times, were we had roughly 52% of "unfair" decks in Tier 1/2. However, since the amount of DIFFERENT "unfair" decks increased (be it Suicide Bloo, Zooicide, Dredge or w/e other deck you are thinking about) the whole issue got noticed, since you cannot have those universal good SB cards vs most of the unfair decks anymore but you need to include silverbullets of some form in the MD/SB.
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What I play or have:
Modern/Legacy
either funpolice (Delver, Deathcloud, UW Control) or the fun decks (especially those ft. Griselbrand)
Guys, please, for heaven sakes, no do not things like the mtgtop8 and goldfish metagame list for any discussion. Both of them are super flawed, since they lack a ton of paper events (if they included Paper events at all like MTGGoldfish), even some bigger ones (thinking about the MKM series for example). Hence, ALWAYS use the Modern Nexus Top Page for this. It includes both online results as paper tournaments and is by far the most accurate one.
I'd love to if I could cite current data. They are months behind and their most recent update is from September. There have been several large events since then without an additional update.
Guys, please, for heaven sakes, no do not things like the mtgtop8 and goldfish metagame list for any discussion. Both of them are super flawed, since they lack a ton of paper events (if they included Paper events at all like MTGGoldfish), even some bigger ones (thinking about the MKM series for example). Hence, ALWAYS use the Modern Nexus Top Page for this. It includes both online results as paper tournaments and is by far the most accurate one.
I'd love to if I could cite current data. They are months behind and their most recent update is from September. There have been several large events since then without an additional update.
Life circumstances have moved me away from Nexus data since the summer, but I encourage users to reach out to the site via Twitter or email to ask about the update. That was definitely one of the site's strongest features.
Guys, please, for heaven sakes, no do not things like the mtgtop8 and goldfish metagame list for any discussion. Both of them are super flawed, since they lack a ton of paper events (if they included Paper events at all like MTGGoldfish), even some bigger ones (thinking about the MKM series for example). Hence, ALWAYS use the Modern Nexus Top Page for this. It includes both online results as paper tournaments and is by far the most accurate one.
I'd love to if I could cite current data. They are months behind and their most recent update is from September. There have been several large events since then without an additional update.
Life circumstances have moved me away from Nexus data since the summer, but I encourage users to reach out to the site via Twitter or email to ask about the update. That was definitely one of the site's strongest features.
On their Twitter feed they said that the probably won't do October's update but that November's is supposedly going to be on time.
Guys, please, for heaven sakes, no do not things like the mtgtop8 and goldfish metagame list for any discussion. Both of them are super flawed, since they lack a ton of paper events (if they included Paper events at all like MTGGoldfish), even some bigger ones (thinking about the MKM series for example). Hence, ALWAYS use the Modern Nexus Top Page for this. It includes both online results as paper tournaments and is by far the most accurate one.
I'd love to if I could cite current data. They are months behind and their most recent update is from September. There have been several large events since then without an additional update.
That's why I always look into the spreadsheet instead of the listed ranking. It is kinda updated (the whole October is included regarding Paper and Online + the Novemeber Data from Online events afaik).
Than again, just using the MTGGoldfish metagame is wrong. It has not a single paper event and is just based on the Leagues finishes. I would rather use MTGTop8 instead, which is also pretty flawed, but has at least both online + a decent paper database for metagame analysis.
That Modern Nexus is currently "dying" to say it this way (not a lot of activity, their most crucial aspect (Metagame updates) are not done and several other things) is sad, but than again, hardly something we can do against it :/
I always find i amusing when people complain about modern beeing bad/linear or whatever.
Yesterday i played in a Standard PPTQ at my LGS. It was the first and for sure the last time i've played that format. 10 out of my 12 games started with me facing a turn 1 Thraben Inspector into t2 Copter into open mana for a turn 3 Spell Queller or a Depala. There where literally no decks that weren't UW Flash, Copter Madness or some sort of Vehicles beside me and two of my friends playing interactive UR or Jund decks. I was so happy dropping at 1-3 after round 4 to get to the sideevents and most people agreed with me that modern is miles better than boring Copter-Standard.
If you look at legacy on the other hand, Blue is dominating the whole format. The decks may vary and there are looots of options but typicsally all you face at tournaments are Storm/Reanimator Combo, Miracles, Eldrazi, D&T and the various flavours of Delver. Everyone is throwing around Dazes and Brainstorms or trying to lock you out of your own gameplay. You either play blue or better have another dirty trick. Loosing on T1 before you even get to draw a single card happens quite often and still you rarely hear any complaints about it because its a great and fun format even due to its "colour linearity".
Modern is by far the most fun and diverse format. As others have mentioned, its the players that make the format "worse" not the cards available. Linear decks like Infect/Suicide Zoo etc. do only well against a field of other linear/ramp decks. Interactive decks on the other hand can do much better than the latest results may indicate and are just underplayed due to many people try to take the easier way and play Infect/Titan Breach or whatever. If my LGS would only consist of Suicide/Infect/Affinity/Reanimator, i would be happily sleeving up Delver each weekend.
Modern had so many awesome decks and a good and skilled player can do pretty well with his brew even if its not a T1 deck, blue, linear or kills before turn 4.
People just need to fight against the myriads of linear decks instead of simply joining them to have some autowins and easier/shorter games.
Just asking, have you ever played Legacy? I doubt it, since that statement comes always from people, who just looked at it and say: "Meh, only turn one combos and Brainstorm decks." It would be the same for somebody, who never played Modern and just said: "Just turn 3 goldfish decks and a little bit of BGx." and we both know, that this is not true at all.
I currently enjoy Legacy more than Modern, but this is mainly because I can play those strategies I can hardly play in Modern (Tempo and Toolbox decks). I play a ton of different archetypes in Modern (be it Midrange/Tempo (RUG Ruse), Tempo (Delver), Ramp (UR Tron), Combo/Control (Ritual Gifts) or Combo (Griselbanned)) and I enjoy Modern a great deal. I just personally think, that Legacy, as a format, offers more than Modern, especially for some strategies, which are sadly not viable at all (Loam based decks). There were times, where it was exactly the opposite (TC times, pre RTR) and sometimes they are quite even (post DRS ban) regarding diversity and especially deck viability. But that doesn't change the fact, that statements like yours (Legacy is a herp derp format) are just wrong.
Greetings,
Kathal
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What I play or have:
Modern/Legacy
either funpolice (Delver, Deathcloud, UW Control) or the fun decks (especially those ft. Griselbrand)
So, again, I'm very interested in what how you define the words "linear" and "interactive", how many different archtypes you feel should be represented (and at what percentage of the metagame), and what those archtypes should be. And not just "all of them", but specifically name them. If they don't exist yet, then please make some up that you feel should be classified as an archtype.
Even though those have both been defined many times by many people in different incarnations of the Banned List thread, I'll go ahead and put mine here:
Linear: A deck which executes a single plan with little to no deviation. It wins through a repeatable and predictable pattern without any real variety in the way it attacks. Whatever the opponent is doing doesn't really change the goals or game plans of your deck.
Interactivity: The amount of attention or care a deck pays to what their opponent is doing, or the level with which you have to acknowledge what your opponent is doing at all. Decks with high interactivity are seen as "reactive" and seek to answer what the opponent is doing. Decks with low interactivity are seen as "proactive" and seek to either ask more questions than the opponent has answers for or seeks to invalidate the opponent's pieces of interaction. A simple way to classify would be asking how much does your deck seek to goldfish a victory.
I disagree with your idea of proactive and reactive. Because Jund, a highly interactive deck, is very proactive.
The difference between proactive decks and reactive decks is reactive is about your opponent doing things and responding, whereas proactive is about pre-empting your opponent. While proactive can mean uninteractive, in the case of something like Jund, you're being proactive because your disruption doesn't wait for your opponent. Turn 1 Thoughtseize is a proactive play; you're not waiting for your opponent to do something and then thwart it, you're using your interaction to stop them from doing anything in the first place. And then, after that, you try to aggressively beat down on them with your creatures while continuing to disrupt them with Liliana.
Basically: Reactive is interaction, proactive can be interaction or non-interaction.
Unfortunately, Modern Nexus is months behind on their Metagame Update posts, so we have to rely on stuff like Goldfish, so that's what I reference. Looking at their list, I would qualify them as this:
High Interactive decks - Jund, Eldrazi (borderline)
Low Interactive decks - Infect, GW Tron, Dredge, Burn, Affinity, Suicide Bloo, Zooicide, Ad Nauseam
Tough to classify - Lantern, RW Prison (seek to remove opponent's ability to interact through static lock pieces).
I wouldn't call Tron High or Low interactive; it's sort of in the middle. The deck actually is very concerned with what the opponent is doing. Sweepers are most definitely interaction, and that's what Oblivion Stone and Ugin are, and Karn does basically nothing but interact (removal or discard). It's a highly linear deck, though.
Lantern Control isn't tough to classify at all; it may be the most interactive deck in the format. No deck cares about what the opponent is doing more than Lantern Control, quite frankly. It's a bit ironic, but when you think about it, the more interactive a deck is, the more it's trying to stop the opponent from performing interaction.
I don't think anyone is going to argue that modern isn't popular. The problem with modern is the strength of the answers vs the strength of the stronger cards in the format, along with the mana base. A common scenario would be "I'm playing three colors, so is the guy across from me playing blood moon and just going to shut me down? Is the other guy playing Living End and going to spam destroy non-basics with Fulminator mage? What about Leyline of Sanctity?" Yeah you can potentially deal with them, but those cards shut down decks and are super heavy policing cards. When a format has to have cards that strong to police other decks, it leads to a lot of lopsided match ups that aren't really about playing magic anymore just as much as facing down a fast linear strategy like Infect.
So really it's more so an issue of people love to collect and play with their collection, but the tournament format that exists for these players is sort of brutally one sided and the fun usually goes one way.
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 fact that "linear" aggro decks are so popular has nothing to do with the format being "unhealthy" but everything to do with those types of decks being a naturally strong strategy against BGx decks. In the past BGx has restructured its build to deal with such shifts in the meta-game but decks like Bant Eldrazi exist now which can prey on BGx by going over it with a bigger better Mid-range strategy forcing BGx to continue to divide its attention and keep it vulnerable to both strategies.
What most of the complaints about the format seem to boil down to is "the format is bad because Jund/Junk isn't the best deck to play forsure"
So really it's more so an issue of people love to collect and play with their collection, but the tournament format that exists for these players is sort of brutally one sided and the fun usually goes one way.
I totally agree with you. Game 1 is generally nice, until you move to G2 where either you or your opponent suddenly says "sorry mate, not allowed to play anymore, thanks for coming" because some side options can indeed totally shut you down. Siding becomes then a tedious game of not having answers for your opponents' deck, but answers for their sideboard strategies.
Anyone have any idea why Merfolk seems criminally underplayed on modo? Is there a bug I'm missing or something. It's last 5-0 appearnce was November 17th and it seems to average about one a month, which seems at odds with the reasonable success it has in paper.
Anyone have any idea why Merfolk seems criminally underplayed on modo? Is there a bug I'm missing or something. It's last 5-0 appearnce was November 17th and it seems to average about one a month, which seems at odds with the reasonable success it has in paper.
Merfolk just seems too fair for an agro deck right now
I saw the top 8 from a recent RPTQ (think it was last weekend) and I saw that UR kiln fiend put 2 copies in the top 8. am I missing something and that deck is better than I'm giving it credit for?
Anyone have any idea why Merfolk seems criminally underplayed on modo? Is there a bug I'm missing or something. It's last 5-0 appearnce was November 17th and it seems to average about one a month, which seems at odds with the reasonable success it has in paper.
IMO it is because the decks ability to overwhelm their opponent hinges on t1 vile. If they are not deploying multiple threats a turn by t3 (hard casting one, vile in the other) the deck isn't that hard for most other decks to beat.
Than again, just using the MTGGoldfish metagame is wrong. It has not a single paper event and is just based on the Leagues finishes.
Where are you getting that idea from? There are clearly paper events listed on mtggoldfish, scroll down and you'll see them. My only gripe with them is they sometimes separate decks into two separate archetypes when it's really just the same deck with a couple different card choices.
Lantern Control isn't tough to classify at all; it may be the most interactive deck in the format. No deck cares about what the opponent is doing more than Lantern Control, quite frankly. It's a bit ironic, but when you think about it, the more interactive a deck is, the more it's trying to stop the opponent from performing interaction.
While I think what you're saying here is technically true, I don't think that prison decks are the type of interactivity that we want. Decks like GBx and Uxx control are about answering threats and pulling ahead on card advantage to take control in the late game, but prison decks are more about just stopping their opponent from getting to play magic. I think it's fine for prison decks to exist, but that's not the kind of interactivity that people are saying they want more of in Modern.
The fact that "linear" aggro decks are so popular has nothing to do with the format being "unhealthy" but everything to do with those types of decks being a naturally strong strategy against BGx decks. In the past BGx has restructured its build to deal with such shifts in the meta-game but decks like Bant Eldrazi exist now which can prey on BGx by going over it with a bigger better Mid-range strategy forcing BGx to continue to divide its attention and keep it vulnerable to both strategies.
What most of the complaints about the format seem to boil down to is "the format is bad because Jund/Junk isn't the best deck to play forsure"
So are you saying that the entire meta warped itself around beating Jund? Because I think that's kinda silly. People aren't playing these turn 3 decks because they're good against Jund, they're playing them because there aren't enough interactive decks to stop them. If no one is playing interaction, the best deck is the one that goldfishes the fastest. We just happen to have a lot of decks that can consistantly goldfish turn 3 kills, so that's why the meta is being dominated by linear aggro decks. And yes, I think this is unhealthy. When you're building a deck or chosing a deck to play, the first step is to ask, "How fast can I build this deck to kill my opponent, and what's the cost to building my deck this way?" There were a lot of turn 3 capable builds last year, but the cost to being a glass cannon like that was too high when you folded to Twin. So these decks had to run some interaction, which slowed them down. Without Twin in the format, there's currently no cost for these decks to drop their interaction and become as glassy of a cannon as they can be.
I saw the top 8 from a recent RPTQ (think it was last weekend) and I saw that UR kiln fiend put 2 copies in the top 8. am I missing something and that deck is better than I'm giving it credit for?
The deck is probably better than you think, yeah. The only really bad matchup it has is Burn, which is like a 35-40% winrate. Jund is unfavorable, but still very winnable at like a 45-50% rate. Basically everything else is pretty favorable. It especially crushes Dredge, that's like a 65-70% matchup.
H0lydiva wrote a pretty long post about this on the deck's page, but to paraphrase what she said: people underestimate the deck because at first glance it looks like just a "worse Infect" or "worse Suicide Zoo," but what they are missing is that Bloo has different gameplans it can go to to pick up some win percentage in matchups where Infect and DSZ can not. For instance, the Blood Moon sideboard plan actually helps give Bloo a positive matchup against control decks, which Infect could never hope to have. The deck is suprisingly non-linear when you get more familiar with its ins and outs.
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On the topic of a diverse format, and how much of each type of deck is needed for it, I'll first define some archetypes. Note that decks don't always fit within a single archetype, but for the purposes of these definitions, control decks never fit within more than one archetype.
Aggro: This is the simplest archetype. Aggro decks typically have every card in their deck aiming to help them win the game directly, usually through dealing damage to the opponent in an efficient way. They usually don't have very much interaction, or even many lands, most of their cards being low cost to play, and relatively reliable. They usually aim to dump their hand and win by out-racing their opponents, and usually only play minimal interaction, and that interaction that they do play tends to be stuff only effective against early-game problems, or that has drawbacks when played in the long run. Aggro tends to be willing to take some sacrifices in order to pay for efficiency in harming the opponent, although usually not too much, as they know other aggro decks are also a threat against them. Aggro tends to be able to overwhelm many opponents playing different deck types early game, playing more threats than they have the ability to interact with, but can be weak to certain types of defenses, such as life-gain, damage prevention, large blockers, or sweepers.
Control: Control decks aim to play the long game, they are harsh upon the opponent's actions, creating (importantly to define it away from midrange and tempo) permanent solutions to those actions which work regardless of the point in the game. They tend to get defeated by aggro decks, which rely less on specific individual cards or card combinations, and can push through before control develops the advantage they aim for. After establishing 'control' via various methods (such interactivity, counterspells, discard, prison locks, etc.) the control deck begins building advantage, both card advantage with spells that gain them such directly, or in addition to another feature useful to the control deck. They then continue to use the 'control' methods while playing one of their win conditions, which will generally be a single, very hard to remove and reliable threat that helps turn the game around, usually one of a higher CMC than most decks can play, but not as high as you might pull off in certain combo or ramp decks. Control decks tend to play large sweepers to stabilize, reliable ones that often make them strong against midrange decks. Because they rely on the long-game, control decks generally avoid cards that have drawbacks that can weaken their ability to reach that long-game or continue playing during it. Control decks tend to be very strong against combo decks, because they almost always have answers at the ready, and combo decks usually can't just win with any card in their deck, they usually need at least two specific cards being successfully played to win, and control is one of the decks most likely to stop at least one of those two cards. Control decks are interesting in that they are usually not very vulnerable to 'hate', usually not having any sideboard cards that are effective against them, which is one of the things that best defines their separation from some interactive type combo decks, due to the relative simplicity and resilience to interaction that their win conditions have, and the protection their heavy amounts of interaction help provide on top of that. They are also one of the more patient deck types, willing to truly wait for the long game and win in it slowly now that they have advantage against pretty much every other deck type if they can survive to that stage.
Quintessential things related to control include things like: Cryptic Command and man-lands (which are both hard to interact with and relatively costly to play, so good for late-game play)
Midrange: Midrange is one of the two major types of deck that lie 'between' aggro and control, the other type being tempo. Midrange decks have slightly more mana than aggro decks, but less than control decks, and tend to play a combination of slightly higher cost creatures than aggro which effectively defeat creature based aggro decks' creatures in combat, and are often difficult for some aggro decks' interaction to deal with, usually being mildly resilient in some way, although not to the same degree as control creatures. Midrange decks plan slightly longer games than aggro, but still relatively short games, as the highly efficient interaction they prefer becomes weaker in the long game, and the win conditions they prefer, such as efficient 'midrange' creatures tend to get overwhelmed by the more powerful win conditions of control or ramp decks. Midrange often tends to play lower end low cost partial sweepers or conditional sweepers which help clear out attempts at aggro to flood the board, but these are sometimes relegated to the sideboard, sometimes they are also ones effective against fellow midrange decks, transitioning post-board into more control-like strategies. Midrange decks tend to be very strong against aggro decks, have game against some types of combo decks, but not as reliably as control, and be weak against control decks, who their normally efficient but less reliable late game interaction is poor against, and they can't overwhelm in any way. Midrange is more willing to take sacrifices themselves than most decks, paying high prices for advantages, partially because they are good at walling off aggro decks that are best at taking advantage of the weaknesses created by such strategies.
Tempo: Tempo is the other of the two major types of deck that lie between aggro and control. Where midrange tends to play efficient interaction first, and threats second, tempo tends to do things the other way around. Tempo lands efficient threats as early as possible, then augments them with interaction to speed up the game and push their win condition through, while buiding up advantage steadily, and protecting their threats. Tempo aims to win quickly, because while efficient, and good at gaining advantage in multiple ways, tempo's interaction tends towards the... well... temporary nature. They don't lastingly remove threats like control or even midrange usually, do, instead prefering to try to slow down more than one threat at a time, or both slow down threats against them while pushing through their own, or some combination along those lines. They want to win before the opponent can establish an overwhelming position, disrupting and delaying the opponent's plan in an efficient way while putting most of their resources towards a quick win with their efficient, if somewhat less reliable, threats. Where midrange and control like to have threats that are hard to remove, tempo actually is fine with very delicate threats, so long as they win very efficiently, prefering to stop the opponent's attempts at disruption with their own anti-disruption, and push past either with their disruption or with things like evasion abilities. Tempo wants to win quick, potentially just as quickly as aggro, just with a different way of doing so, using disruption to pave the way for more fragile or less reliable but more dangerous threats, and small bits of incremental advantages. Tempo is a more delicate type of strategy than midrange, if their threats fail, they are in trouble. They tend to do better than aggro against things aggro is weak against due to it's lack of interaction, but not so well if the game runs into the long game, or their plan fails. They are delicate in ways that resemble combo decks to some degree. They vary in exactly what types of decks they are best against depending on the nature of the interaction and threats they play to some degree, but they tend to become weaker if the game goes on a long time, even against aggro decks, which are normally weak in such situations against most other types of decks, because their interaction tends to 'fall off' in some way, often involving effects like bouncing back to the hand or tapping things down or dealing small amounts of damage to one or two creatures before big creatures come down or the board can be flooded with tons of small creatures. Unlike midrange and control, tempo rarely plays sweepers, or if they do, it tends to be more partial or temporary effects, like multi-target tapping, bouncing, or low-damage, this is partially because their own threats are more vulnerable and they can't afford the sort of 'affects both players' threats' effects most proper sweepers tend to have. They are surprisingly good against some sorts of combo decks, perhaps even better than midrange, because not only can they interact, but they can often win just a hint faster, and many sorts of combo decks utilize types of interaction that are more effective against combo threats, although this isn't a universal thing. The exact nature of some tempo decks' interaction can also allow them to have better games against ramp decks than midrange decks do, since they've been probably saving up at least some good delaying tools once the ramp deck's threats come out, and ones that still work on larger threats, unlike many of midrange's interaction (which is more likely to fall off entirely late game), giving them the turn or two they might need to finish pushing through their own win.
Combo: Combo decks aim to win through some sort of 'cheat'. They want to win quickly and dirtily with a combination of cards that allow them to win nearly instantly, or at least guarentee their position once it comes out. There are generally two types of combo decks, those that aim to pull out their win condition before the opponent can respond, and rely on 'all out' luck based strategies that try to race the opponent, and tend to dedicate their deck to finding some way to draw the combo, or 'controlling' combo decks, which aim to use control, tempo, and/or midrange based interaction cards to prevent the opponent from winning before they draw and manage to play their combo. Once the combo is out, they tend to win instantly so long as the opponent can't stop it, and many combo decks either rely on the opponent not having the answers, or having methods to stop or prevent the opponent's answers, or having a type of combo that most decks don't have the answers for (except typically, control and some midrange and tempo decks). Combo decks that aim to win ASAP are often referred to as 'linear' combo decks, and many of them have unreliable potential wins that can happen before turn 4, or at least before aggro decks tend to win, which can happen when they get a good hand and the opponent doesn't manage to interact properly with it. Interactive combo decks tend to have a backup plan, usually in the form of a less reliable form of tempo-like and/or midrange-like strategy, while using the combo as a threat to keep the opponent from using their mana efficiently or using all their interaction cards, creating a sort of 'virtual card advantage' through the _threat_ of a combo. The backup threats used by this sort of deck are often more control related ones, or tempo related ones, because it doesn't take many of them in the deck, and the type of interaction they favor tends to support those better than midrange threats, especially since they want to bait out the opponent's interaction to make way for the combo. Combo decks tend to be weakest against control decks, vary in quality against individual midrange and tempo decks, depending on the types of threats and interactions used and the exact densities, and be strong but somewhat luck reliant against other decks, with good odds of winning with their average hand, but a higher chance of busting and essentially losing against themselves than other deck types, at least for the linear combo, while the interaction based combo can lose out to superior efficiency and focus of other decks willing to take risks against them.
Quintessential stuff related to combo include stuff like: graveyard revival (such as Unburial Rites/Gifts Ungiven) or 'infinite' combos that can do things like arbitrary amounts of damage, or 'just enough chunks' types like storm combos or scapeshift. Really though, combo decks aren't easily locked into quintessential pieces, and can vary quite widely based on their interesting win conditions.
Ramp: Ramp bears a lot of similarities to combo, but tends to be more reliable in some respects. Ramp tends to be weak to decks that out-race it and win before it can. Ramp's objective is to play very large threats sooner than they normally can be played, but playing cards that put them ahead on mana or sometimes other resources, and having a few, very large threats that only rely on a single card to win. The kind of cards ramp plays are often similar to the ones played by control, but often even higher cost, and able to win the game more quickly, because ramp is often in a more delicate position than control is once their threats come online. There are essentially two types of ramp, 'fast ramp' which is similar to linear combo, and goes all out to get their threats onto the board as fast as possible, often using slightly more delicate methods and slightly cheaper and more efficient at winning the game quickly threats, but less resilient ones than might be used by the likes of control, although still ones that will smash equivalent midrange threats and ignore most midrange type interaction. Interactive ramp decks tend to be more similar to the same sort of combo decks, seeking to disrupt the opponent's plan just enough for them to reach their larger ramp targets, which they play slightly less of, but are more resilient and often larger and more quickly game-winning than the more linear 'fast ramp' versions. While ramp decks are less likely to lose 'to themselves' than combo decks, they have some interesting quirks of strengths and vulnerabilities in comparison. Ramp decks tend to be particularly strong against midrange decks, who don't win quite fast enough to out-race them, and who generally have interaction of the exact sorts that completely fails against all the threats that ramp plays. They basically end up using similar strategies against midrange as midrange uses against aggro, using their attempts at efficiency against them. They tend to have a lot of weaknesses however against certain strategies, depending on which version of ramp they are, and the exact methods they use.
Iconic ramp stuff include stuff like: various high end ramp targets like Primeval Titan and the legendary eldrazi's and such, as well as the famous 'Tron' deck and it's Urza-lands (which has combo elements to it, given how it relies on a 'combo' of the different lands turning each-other on, and replaces doing things like playing ramp creatures or extra lands with searching out specific lands).
There are other deck types out there of course that don't fit well into the above categories, like discard and prison and land-destruction decks, but I won't include them in required archetypes for various reasons.
I think that there should be in a good metagame at least:
10% 'true' control (which isn't actually leaning more towards combo, ramp, midrange, or tempo, and really is strong against pretty much all types of combo decks, this is generally a thing that doesn't really exist in Modern these days)
5% tempo (a lot of tempo decks and tempo/combo decks are mistakenly called control decks, and many of them get close to such, but I'd like to create a distinction here, partially because with the current card pool, they don't tend to actually be reliable enough against linear combo, which might be a bit too much of the metagame right now)
5% midrange (likely to be higher, just based on how it interacts with various archetypes and the cards that already exist in modern and WotC's current balance patterns for new Standard prints, BGx midrange is likely to keep this category higher than what I'd consider a safe minimum unless something else does something crazy and weird and probably ban-worthy and hates on it hard, I suspect this is one of the safest archetypes that WotC needs to do little work on maintaining)
10% aggro
5% linear combo
5% interactive combo
5% linear ramp
5% interactive ramp
10% multi-archetype (except control)
The remainder can be any of the above getting extra, but no archetype should have _more_ than 30% of the metagame, and no individual general type of deck (such as 'infect' or 'affinity' or 'jund midrange' or 'bant eldrazi') should be more than 2/3rds of it's own archetype, and each archetype should have at least 3 decks with 1% meta-share, and at least two different decks with at least 2% meta-share. Also, the following archetypes or sets of archetypes should have at least one deck in T1:
'pure' control
Combo
Aggro
Midrange and/or Tempo
--
For a long time, decks of the categories midrange, tempo, and interactive combo have been trying and failing to take the place of pure control, which is why certain types of decks, particularly some kinds of combo, are hard to police effectively in the format. This is largely because the card pool doesn't have all the proper tools needed, and attempted control decks are either a bit too weak, or wind up using ineffective substitutes in the form of tempo based or midrange based interaction for part of their card pool, with cards like Lightning Bolt, Remand, and Inquisition of Kozilek, and generally neglecting the type of card advantage tools that control decks typically need to work in the long-game they are seeking, because they aren't well designed for control decks or are too expensive for modern in CMC, even if they are fine for standard (like Sphinx's Revelation). This kept the metagame under relative stability for two main reasons, BGx midrange and Twin. Twin is basically the god of interactive combo decks, with Nahiri being a replacement that takes a similar metagame role, and was basically such a threatening combo that even aggro decks were tweaking their interaction and sideboards heavily around it. BGx midrange is essentially made up of stuff that is at least a bit too strong for it's mana cost (the core of Inquisition of Kozilek, Thoughtseize, Tarmogoyf, Abrupt Decay, and Liliana of the Veil, on top of the 'shock-fetch' mana base so classic to modern being very advantageous to midrange strategies more than many other archetypes), combined with the advantage of most of the modern worthy stuff that WotC prints these days being midrange creatures in the 3-4 cmc range, a cmc range for creatures that is nearly exclusive to Midrange in Modern's metagame. These are decks that weren't fulfilling control's position because they were as good as control decks should be at what control is meant to be good at, but because they were/are overpowered enough to make up the difference. Twin was an easy ban for WotC, but perhaps a mistake without having a proper control suite ready to help reign in on what Twin was helping police, since it is proving hard for BGx midrange decks to do that on their own. BGx midrange's suite, IMO, is just as ban-worthy as twin was, but is also just as hard to replace in the current metagame and card-pool, and at this point, might be one of the few things keeping the meta from turning entirely linear and interaction dying almost entirely in favor of races to the win.
I think it's time for WotC to start being more serious about printing more options for tempo creatures, control interaction, control card-advantage, and lower-powered midrange tools but ones still good enough for modern if the better versions are banned and a proper control T1 deck exists to stabilize certain meta portions that BGx midrange's currently overpowered suite is helping reign in on, although bans there (once it would be safe) might not be necessary there as the degree of overpoweredness isn't completely insane.
So, in general, I think Modern needs more new cards filling certain roles in certain archetypes (particularly control), more than it needs anything else, like bans, but that the current metagame isn't really as healthy as I'd want it in terms of meta share to different archetypes.
Guys, please, for heaven sakes, no do not things like the mtgtop8 and goldfish metagame list for any discussion. Both of them are super flawed, since they lack a ton of paper events (if they included Paper events at all like MTGGoldfish), even some bigger ones (thinking about the MKM series for example). Hence, ALWAYS use the Modern Nexus Top Page for this. It includes both online results as paper tournaments and is by far the most accurate one.
I'd love to if I could cite current data. They are months behind and their most recent update is from September. There have been several large events since then without an additional update.
Life circumstances have moved me away from Nexus data since the summer, but I encourage users to reach out to the site via Twitter or email to ask about the update. That was definitely one of the site's strongest features.
On their Twitter feed they said that the probably won't do October's update but that November's is supposedly going to be on time.
It's now 2 weeks until 2017, and the metagame breakdown is still listed for September. What the heck is going on with MN? Has no one been able to pick up the slack in number analysis? The site has devolved into a bunch of fluff piece, clickbait, opinion articles.
I think the strength behind breaching emrakul over copying exarch is just protection from removal and being in the Ur controlling shell
That's what I learn today.
My LGS is stopping all modern event.
Because nobody plays modern anymore.
Why ? Too many full linear aggro archetype making the format disgusting, boring, annoying.
Since the last set, and the new dredge, death shadow etc... decks, with infect and affinity rampant in the format for years, dominating it. All my friends get bored, all the dudes who were at modern events didn't show for month.
We were usually 16, sometimes even more, every week, playing together at magic, in modern. I'm playing for 4 years, and the only thing i saw was the format getting worse and worse.
Since few month, we were barely 8... sometimes we can't even play the event because we were too few.
So yeah, wizard did a great job, they wanted to makes people stop modern, they did well.
The problem is it's not making people play standard, it's just making people stop magic.
I'm gonna sell my collection, stoppin magic as well, and wish good luck to all of you in your sweet linear non interactive stupid turn 3 win meta.
Enjoy, and goodbye.
It's almost like each area is different.
URW Control
WBG Abzan
GRW Burn
EDH
GR Rosheen Meanderer
There are also sometimes homebrew decks that show up like RB vampire nocturnus, kiln fiend / nivix cyclops combo, and a RW equipment deck with grafted wargear + Heathfire Hobgoblin.
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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
Modern is incredibly diverse right now. With that diversity comes the likelihood of any given deck having one or more bad matchups. People don't like facing bad matchups, they get the "feelbads". People don't like losing, and often want to try to shift blame to something other than themselves for their losses. In this case, the blame can often be attributed to the diversity of the format (and often to their own misplays). But to say that something good is the reason for them feeling something bad doesn't quite make them feel better, so they have to create new justifications.
So they'll use catchphrases, like, "The format is too linear", or, "the format is non-interactive". Those statements are vague on the details (as are the supporting arguments), but they sound technical enough to make them feel like they are smart, and therefore right. They'll argue that one or more decks need to have one or more cards banned, and then create a magical-Christmasland concept of what the format would look like with those bans. They'll argue that one or more cards are "safe to unban", and again, create a magical-Christmasland concept of what the format would then look like. Anything to imply that something that is bad is the reason for them feeling bad.
Sometimes the format is broken. That's usually not too hard to see, though. For example, during the Eldrazi winter. Or, if we look at the trend of decks to beat in 2015, as Splinter Twin decks slowly crept to the top and pushed other decks out of tier 1. People clamored (and still do) over how unjust the ban was. The irony there is that WotC has data that we don't have - They have the percentages of decks on MTGO that run Twin, and their win percentages. The best we have is the historical data from sites like MTGGoldfish and MTGTop8, and even they imply that Twin was dominating the format. But somehow the data that we have that implies that Twin was, with holes, is more accurate than the data that WotC has? That detail doesn't seem to be brought up when people attempt to make their arguments against Wotc banning Twin.
But the key here is to note the major indicator of a truly broken format - Lack of diversity. The more diverse the format, the healthier it is. But, again, the more likely that any one of us will have one or more bad matchups. That means we just have to accept that as part of the game and not get butthurt when we face a bad matchup. Sure, it makes winning something like a GP a bit more about predicting major metagame shifts and dodging bad matchups, but so be it. If someone pays the entry fee, that person's gambling that their deck will dodge those bad matchups. If they lose that bet, so be it. If they don't like losing bets, then it's probably best that they don't gamble in the first place.
So, overall, the format is fine. There are some hiccups, but WotC has far more accurate data on what they are than we do, and all we can do is trust them. Sure, they make mistakes (FNM Promos recently, but there might even be a reasoning behind those), but without the data that they have, we are far more likely to make mistakes.
Lantern Control
(with videos)
Uc Tron
Netdecking explained
Netdecking explained, Part 2
On speculators and counterfeits
On Interaction
Every single competitive deck in existence is designed to limit the opponent's ability to interact in a meaningful way.
Record number of exclamation points on SCG homepage: 71 (6 January, 2018)
"I don't want to believe, I want to know."
-Carl Sagan
This is entirely possible. Though it calls into question what data are we looking at? Local personal stories? Or aggregate data? And what kind of data?
Sort of. There is a lot of diversity in the specific collection of cards with which you can win, but there is a greatly disproportionate level of fast, aggressive decks that seek to win as quickly and efficiently as possible and interact as little as possible. So there is diversity between individual deck types, but not as much gameplans and archetypes.
This is projecting words into the mouths of others. I for one have no issue losing based on my own gameplay decisions, my own actions, and the choices I make throughout a match, etc. I have had some of my most enjoyable matches be losses because they were long, well-fought games where player decisions mattered more than our opening 7. What I cannot stand is a format in which matches are often decided by the pairings board and the die roll. Matches that can be so lopsided that you might as well sign the slip and go across the street for beer and snacks than play a deck you have almost no chance beating. Then there are the decks which require a narrow and specific answer or you simply lose. Draw that card and you win, don't drat that card and you lose. It does not create fun, engaging, entertaining, or enjoyable games. Blaming players for not enjoying this kind of gameplay is extremely callous.
Take a look at this list of the top 12 decks in Modern on Goldfish and go ahead and tell me that the format is not linear and that the format has a lot of interactivity:
Your single-point data with no context is a horrible representation of what Twin did for the format. It was a 10% deck (with less metagame presence than BGx currently has), and did nothing to push decks out of tier 1. That list is laughably bad, placing things like Jund into Tier 3.... Tier 3??? Let's remember some perspective here: 2015 saw more than 30 different deck types placing in their GP Top 8s all year with 6 of 7 completely different winners (7 of 7 different if you count Jeskai kiki/resto/elspeth Twin as different from standard UR Twin). The deck was not oppressive, was not too dominant, was not suppressing decks, and was definitely not supplanting them. There has been piles of analysis covering those very topics, which is why the ban was so controversial; it did not line up with the criteria observed for every other diversity ban Modern has ever had.
Wizards also runs a business and makes business decisions. Their decision was that they didn't like seeing Twin all the time at the top tables (especially at Pro Tours). Based on informal comments from key people in Wizardse (as well as laughably incorrect text in the ban announcement itself), it's pretty safe to assume Wizards made the ban to shake up the Pro Tour and used some extremely questionable and borderline justifications for masking this reason. But as you said, we don't have access to the data Wizards does, so until someone comes out and says it, we can only analyze the data we have access to.
So you support the idea that the format is healthy, despite the roulette wheel of matchups and sideboard lottery variance often used to decide games? A format defined where the best dozen decks are almost entirely linear aggressive decks attacking from completely different angles, making the act of trying to answer them almost impossible? And since answers are so difficult and ineffective relative to the array of threats, it's just better to try and race them, roll the dice, and hope for the best? That is not the kind of format I would classify as "healthy."
UR ....... WUBR ........... WB ............. RGW ........ UBR ....... WUB .... BGU
Spells / Blink & Combo / Token Grind / Dino Tribal / Draw Cards / Zombies / Reanimate
How many different gameplans and archtypes do you feel are necessary in order to consider a format healthy, if not individual decks? Where do you set the bar?
My original comment:
So yeah, you will face a roulette of possible getting a bad matchup. What do you think the alternative is? The meta being consolidated enough that you have a pretty good idea as to what you're going to face? That doesn't seem to imply a diverse meta.
Would you mind qualifying your definition of the terms "linear" and "interactivity"? I specifically pointed out how people will use those terms without qualifying them with:
. What does it mean for something to be "linear", or "interactive"? After qualifying those words, what do you feel is the threshold of decks that are "linear" or "non-interactive" in a meta before it becomes unhealthy?
They are slightly different, yes. But they are essentially all shells built around the same exact combo. You seem to imply that these should be considered "separate", but that decks in the top tier right now that are all aggro (but using a wider variety of card differences) should be grouped together?
It seems to depend on how you want to look at the data. Again, you seem to want to group all of the aggro decks in the top tiers together, despite them using different cards, but want to distinguish the different Twin variants as separate. I'm inclined to think that what happened was that WotC saw a trend of some variant of a Twin core being prevalent in a variety of different shells. Of course, to know this for sure would require that WotC said this outright, although they did seem to say this by their very announcement. It's just that people don't want to see Twin as a core that was occupying a large portion of the meta, and would rather separate the decks by their shells rather than see their common cores.
I feel that it is relatively healthy, yes. Sure, you do have to worry about fast decks in the current meta. I plan Lantern, I'm familiar with trying to survive them. Five of those twelve decks you screenshot are not "fast creature decks". Yes, they attempt to interact with the gamestate quickly. That's kind of how games work. For example, in chess, if we play slow and irrelevant moves while the opponent quickly sets up a dominating position, then we have earned the inferior position. Every single game in existence involves this, but somehow the Modern format is at fault for having this same feature. Sure, some formats are slower than others. Limited, pretty slow. Standard, a little faster. Even Legacy and Vintage, where people claim that the games are longer, are very often determined by the first few turns of interaction with the gamestate. The winning "move" may have not been played yet, but a delay in struggling to get there will spell doom for anyone.
So, again, I'm very interested in what how you define the words "linear" and "interactive", how many different archtypes you feel should be represented (and at what percentage of the metagame), and what those archtypes should be. And not just "all of them", but specifically name them. If they don't exist yet, then please make some up that you feel should be classified as an archtype.
Lantern Control
(with videos)
Uc Tron
Netdecking explained
Netdecking explained, Part 2
On speculators and counterfeits
On Interaction
Every single competitive deck in existence is designed to limit the opponent's ability to interact in a meaningful way.
Record number of exclamation points on SCG homepage: 71 (6 January, 2018)
"I don't want to believe, I want to know."
-Carl Sagan
RGTron
UGInfect
URStorm
WUBRAd Nauseam
BRGrishoalbrand
URGScapeshift
WBGAbzan Company
WUBRGAmulet Titan
BRGLiving End
WGBogles
It definitely had nothing to do with its meta share percentages. When it was banned, it had a lower combined share of all Twin variants than BGx midrange has right now. It has everything to do with the perception it gave at Pro Tours and other high end events. All numbers correlate with this analysis, and is covered in depth in this article from shortly after the ban: Link.
I would like to understand why you feel this is healthy. Specifically, why is the Modern we have today more healthy than 2015? What criteria do you use to judge this? The following sentences don't really give any justification as to why the current Modern meta is "healthy" relative to what Modern was or should be, just a reference to its hypothetical place among other formats and an irrelevant reference to chess.
Even though those have both been defined many times by many people in different incarnations of the Banned List thread, I'll go ahead and put mine here:
Linear: A deck which executes a single plan with little to no deviation. It wins through a repeatable and predictable pattern without any real variety in the way it attacks. Whatever the opponent is doing doesn't really change the goals or game plans of your deck.
Interactivity: The amount of attention or care a deck pays to what their opponent is doing, or the level with which you have to acknowledge what your opponent is doing at all. Decks with high interactivity are seen as "reactive" and seek to answer what the opponent is doing. Decks with low interactivity are seen as "proactive" and seek to either ask more questions than the opponent has answers for or seeks to invalidate the opponent's pieces of interaction. A simple way to classify would be asking how much does your deck seek to goldfish a victory.
Unfortunately, Modern Nexus is months behind on their Metagame Update posts, so we have to rely on stuff like Goldfish, so that's what I reference. Looking at their list, I would qualify them as this:
Linear Decks - Infect, Dredge, Burn, Affinity, Suicide Bloo, Zooicide, GW Tron, Ad Nauseam, Lantern
Nonlinear Decks - Jund, Eldrazi (borderline), WR Prison
High Interactive decks - Jund, Eldrazi (borderline)
Low Interactive decks - Infect, GW Tron, Dredge, Burn, Affinity, Suicide Bloo, Zooicide, Ad Nauseam
Tough to classify - Lantern, RW Prison (seek to remove opponent's ability to interact through static lock pieces).
UR ....... WUBR ........... WB ............. RGW ........ UBR ....... WUB .... BGU
Spells / Blink & Combo / Token Grind / Dino Tribal / Draw Cards / Zombies / Reanimate
Current top 12 decks:
Tier 1:
Bant Eldrazi - 9,2%
Burn - 8,1%
Infect - 7,6%
Jund - 6,5%
Affinity - 7,5%
Dredge - 4,2%
Abzan - 4,0%
Tier 2:
Jeskai Control - 3,0%
RG Valakut/Titan Breach - combined 4,6%, seperated 1,6/3,0
Ad Nauseam - 2,1%
Death and Taxes - 1,5%
So, if I group everything the "fair" and "unfair" together, it looks like this:
"fair": BGx, Jeskai, Eldrazi, DnT - 24,2%
"unfair": rest - 34,1%
The MTG Goldfish metagame shows this:
"fair": (including Lantern Control and WR Prison Control) - 17,82%
"unfair": rest - 40,86%
Look at the differences and think about it and than both of you will hopefully realise, that using a flawed statistic for argumentation is just a brainfart.
Greetings,
Kathal
PS: I have been doing this since a while (so comparing different data sets) and the one from Modern Nexus is by far the most accurate and trustworthy one. I also do those "fair" vs "unfair" check ups quite frequently (combining Tier 1 and 2 basically) and we had way worse times, were we had roughly 52% of "unfair" decks in Tier 1/2. However, since the amount of DIFFERENT "unfair" decks increased (be it Suicide Bloo, Zooicide, Dredge or w/e other deck you are thinking about) the whole issue got noticed, since you cannot have those universal good SB cards vs most of the unfair decks anymore but you need to include silverbullets of some form in the MD/SB.
Modern/Legacy
either funpolice (Delver, Deathcloud, UW Control) or the fun decks (especially those ft. Griselbrand)
I'd love to if I could cite current data. They are months behind and their most recent update is from September. There have been several large events since then without an additional update.
UR ....... WUBR ........... WB ............. RGW ........ UBR ....... WUB .... BGU
Spells / Blink & Combo / Token Grind / Dino Tribal / Draw Cards / Zombies / Reanimate
Life circumstances have moved me away from Nexus data since the summer, but I encourage users to reach out to the site via Twitter or email to ask about the update. That was definitely one of the site's strongest features.
On their Twitter feed they said that the probably won't do October's update but that November's is supposedly going to be on time.
URW Control
WBG Abzan
GRW Burn
EDH
GR Rosheen Meanderer
That's why I always look into the spreadsheet instead of the listed ranking. It is kinda updated (the whole October is included regarding Paper and Online + the Novemeber Data from Online events afaik).
Than again, just using the MTGGoldfish metagame is wrong. It has not a single paper event and is just based on the Leagues finishes. I would rather use MTGTop8 instead, which is also pretty flawed, but has at least both online + a decent paper database for metagame analysis.
That Modern Nexus is currently "dying" to say it this way (not a lot of activity, their most crucial aspect (Metagame updates) are not done and several other things) is sad, but than again, hardly something we can do against it :/
Just asking, have you ever played Legacy? I doubt it, since that statement comes always from people, who just looked at it and say: "Meh, only turn one combos and Brainstorm decks." It would be the same for somebody, who never played Modern and just said: "Just turn 3 goldfish decks and a little bit of BGx." and we both know, that this is not true at all.
I currently enjoy Legacy more than Modern, but this is mainly because I can play those strategies I can hardly play in Modern (Tempo and Toolbox decks). I play a ton of different archetypes in Modern (be it Midrange/Tempo (RUG Ruse), Tempo (Delver), Ramp (UR Tron), Combo/Control (Ritual Gifts) or Combo (Griselbanned)) and I enjoy Modern a great deal. I just personally think, that Legacy, as a format, offers more than Modern, especially for some strategies, which are sadly not viable at all (Loam based decks). There were times, where it was exactly the opposite (TC times, pre RTR) and sometimes they are quite even (post DRS ban) regarding diversity and especially deck viability. But that doesn't change the fact, that statements like yours (Legacy is a herp derp format) are just wrong.
Greetings,
Kathal
Modern/Legacy
either funpolice (Delver, Deathcloud, UW Control) or the fun decks (especially those ft. Griselbrand)
I disagree with your idea of proactive and reactive. Because Jund, a highly interactive deck, is very proactive.
The difference between proactive decks and reactive decks is reactive is about your opponent doing things and responding, whereas proactive is about pre-empting your opponent. While proactive can mean uninteractive, in the case of something like Jund, you're being proactive because your disruption doesn't wait for your opponent. Turn 1 Thoughtseize is a proactive play; you're not waiting for your opponent to do something and then thwart it, you're using your interaction to stop them from doing anything in the first place. And then, after that, you try to aggressively beat down on them with your creatures while continuing to disrupt them with Liliana.
Basically: Reactive is interaction, proactive can be interaction or non-interaction.
I wouldn't call Tron High or Low interactive; it's sort of in the middle. The deck actually is very concerned with what the opponent is doing. Sweepers are most definitely interaction, and that's what Oblivion Stone and Ugin are, and Karn does basically nothing but interact (removal or discard). It's a highly linear deck, though.
Lantern Control isn't tough to classify at all; it may be the most interactive deck in the format. No deck cares about what the opponent is doing more than Lantern Control, quite frankly. It's a bit ironic, but when you think about it, the more interactive a deck is, the more it's trying to stop the opponent from performing interaction.
So really it's more so an issue of people love to collect and play with their collection, but the tournament format that exists for these players is sort of brutally one sided and the fun usually goes one way.
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!
What most of the complaints about the format seem to boil down to is "the format is bad because Jund/Junk isn't the best deck to play forsure"
I totally agree with you. Game 1 is generally nice, until you move to G2 where either you or your opponent suddenly says "sorry mate, not allowed to play anymore, thanks for coming" because some side options can indeed totally shut you down. Siding becomes then a tedious game of not having answers for your opponents' deck, but answers for their sideboard strategies.
Merfolk just seems too fair for an agro deck right now
I saw the top 8 from a recent RPTQ (think it was last weekend) and I saw that UR kiln fiend put 2 copies in the top 8. am I missing something and that deck is better than I'm giving it credit for?
IMO it is because the decks ability to overwhelm their opponent hinges on t1 vile. If they are not deploying multiple threats a turn by t3 (hard casting one, vile in the other) the deck isn't that hard for most other decks to beat.
Where are you getting that idea from? There are clearly paper events listed on mtggoldfish, scroll down and you'll see them. My only gripe with them is they sometimes separate decks into two separate archetypes when it's really just the same deck with a couple different card choices.
While I think what you're saying here is technically true, I don't think that prison decks are the type of interactivity that we want. Decks like GBx and Uxx control are about answering threats and pulling ahead on card advantage to take control in the late game, but prison decks are more about just stopping their opponent from getting to play magic. I think it's fine for prison decks to exist, but that's not the kind of interactivity that people are saying they want more of in Modern.
So are you saying that the entire meta warped itself around beating Jund? Because I think that's kinda silly. People aren't playing these turn 3 decks because they're good against Jund, they're playing them because there aren't enough interactive decks to stop them. If no one is playing interaction, the best deck is the one that goldfishes the fastest. We just happen to have a lot of decks that can consistantly goldfish turn 3 kills, so that's why the meta is being dominated by linear aggro decks. And yes, I think this is unhealthy. When you're building a deck or chosing a deck to play, the first step is to ask, "How fast can I build this deck to kill my opponent, and what's the cost to building my deck this way?" There were a lot of turn 3 capable builds last year, but the cost to being a glass cannon like that was too high when you folded to Twin. So these decks had to run some interaction, which slowed them down. Without Twin in the format, there's currently no cost for these decks to drop their interaction and become as glassy of a cannon as they can be.
The deck is probably better than you think, yeah. The only really bad matchup it has is Burn, which is like a 35-40% winrate. Jund is unfavorable, but still very winnable at like a 45-50% rate. Basically everything else is pretty favorable. It especially crushes Dredge, that's like a 65-70% matchup.
H0lydiva wrote a pretty long post about this on the deck's page, but to paraphrase what she said: people underestimate the deck because at first glance it looks like just a "worse Infect" or "worse Suicide Zoo," but what they are missing is that Bloo has different gameplans it can go to to pick up some win percentage in matchups where Infect and DSZ can not. For instance, the Blood Moon sideboard plan actually helps give Bloo a positive matchup against control decks, which Infect could never hope to have. The deck is suprisingly non-linear when you get more familiar with its ins and outs.
UBR Grixis Shadow UBR
UR Izzet Phoenix UR
UW UW Control UW
GB GB Rock GB
Commander
BG Meren of Clan Nel Toth BG
BGUW Atraxa, Praetor's Voice BGUW
Aggro: This is the simplest archetype. Aggro decks typically have every card in their deck aiming to help them win the game directly, usually through dealing damage to the opponent in an efficient way. They usually don't have very much interaction, or even many lands, most of their cards being low cost to play, and relatively reliable. They usually aim to dump their hand and win by out-racing their opponents, and usually only play minimal interaction, and that interaction that they do play tends to be stuff only effective against early-game problems, or that has drawbacks when played in the long run. Aggro tends to be willing to take some sacrifices in order to pay for efficiency in harming the opponent, although usually not too much, as they know other aggro decks are also a threat against them. Aggro tends to be able to overwhelm many opponents playing different deck types early game, playing more threats than they have the ability to interact with, but can be weak to certain types of defenses, such as life-gain, damage prevention, large blockers, or sweepers.
Quintessential things related to aggro include things like: Lightning Bolt and Goblin Guide
Control: Control decks aim to play the long game, they are harsh upon the opponent's actions, creating (importantly to define it away from midrange and tempo) permanent solutions to those actions which work regardless of the point in the game. They tend to get defeated by aggro decks, which rely less on specific individual cards or card combinations, and can push through before control develops the advantage they aim for. After establishing 'control' via various methods (such interactivity, counterspells, discard, prison locks, etc.) the control deck begins building advantage, both card advantage with spells that gain them such directly, or in addition to another feature useful to the control deck. They then continue to use the 'control' methods while playing one of their win conditions, which will generally be a single, very hard to remove and reliable threat that helps turn the game around, usually one of a higher CMC than most decks can play, but not as high as you might pull off in certain combo or ramp decks. Control decks tend to play large sweepers to stabilize, reliable ones that often make them strong against midrange decks. Because they rely on the long-game, control decks generally avoid cards that have drawbacks that can weaken their ability to reach that long-game or continue playing during it. Control decks tend to be very strong against combo decks, because they almost always have answers at the ready, and combo decks usually can't just win with any card in their deck, they usually need at least two specific cards being successfully played to win, and control is one of the decks most likely to stop at least one of those two cards. Control decks are interesting in that they are usually not very vulnerable to 'hate', usually not having any sideboard cards that are effective against them, which is one of the things that best defines their separation from some interactive type combo decks, due to the relative simplicity and resilience to interaction that their win conditions have, and the protection their heavy amounts of interaction help provide on top of that. They are also one of the more patient deck types, willing to truly wait for the long game and win in it slowly now that they have advantage against pretty much every other deck type if they can survive to that stage.
Quintessential things related to control include things like: Cryptic Command and man-lands (which are both hard to interact with and relatively costly to play, so good for late-game play)
Midrange: Midrange is one of the two major types of deck that lie 'between' aggro and control, the other type being tempo. Midrange decks have slightly more mana than aggro decks, but less than control decks, and tend to play a combination of slightly higher cost creatures than aggro which effectively defeat creature based aggro decks' creatures in combat, and are often difficult for some aggro decks' interaction to deal with, usually being mildly resilient in some way, although not to the same degree as control creatures. Midrange decks plan slightly longer games than aggro, but still relatively short games, as the highly efficient interaction they prefer becomes weaker in the long game, and the win conditions they prefer, such as efficient 'midrange' creatures tend to get overwhelmed by the more powerful win conditions of control or ramp decks. Midrange often tends to play lower end low cost partial sweepers or conditional sweepers which help clear out attempts at aggro to flood the board, but these are sometimes relegated to the sideboard, sometimes they are also ones effective against fellow midrange decks, transitioning post-board into more control-like strategies. Midrange decks tend to be very strong against aggro decks, have game against some types of combo decks, but not as reliably as control, and be weak against control decks, who their normally efficient but less reliable late game interaction is poor against, and they can't overwhelm in any way. Midrange is more willing to take sacrifices themselves than most decks, paying high prices for advantages, partially because they are good at walling off aggro decks that are best at taking advantage of the weaknesses created by such strategies.
Quintessential things related to Midrange include stuff like: Inquisition of Kozilek, Abrupt Decay and Tarmogoyf
Tempo: Tempo is the other of the two major types of deck that lie between aggro and control. Where midrange tends to play efficient interaction first, and threats second, tempo tends to do things the other way around. Tempo lands efficient threats as early as possible, then augments them with interaction to speed up the game and push their win condition through, while buiding up advantage steadily, and protecting their threats. Tempo aims to win quickly, because while efficient, and good at gaining advantage in multiple ways, tempo's interaction tends towards the... well... temporary nature. They don't lastingly remove threats like control or even midrange usually, do, instead prefering to try to slow down more than one threat at a time, or both slow down threats against them while pushing through their own, or some combination along those lines. They want to win before the opponent can establish an overwhelming position, disrupting and delaying the opponent's plan in an efficient way while putting most of their resources towards a quick win with their efficient, if somewhat less reliable, threats. Where midrange and control like to have threats that are hard to remove, tempo actually is fine with very delicate threats, so long as they win very efficiently, prefering to stop the opponent's attempts at disruption with their own anti-disruption, and push past either with their disruption or with things like evasion abilities. Tempo wants to win quick, potentially just as quickly as aggro, just with a different way of doing so, using disruption to pave the way for more fragile or less reliable but more dangerous threats, and small bits of incremental advantages. Tempo is a more delicate type of strategy than midrange, if their threats fail, they are in trouble. They tend to do better than aggro against things aggro is weak against due to it's lack of interaction, but not so well if the game runs into the long game, or their plan fails. They are delicate in ways that resemble combo decks to some degree. They vary in exactly what types of decks they are best against depending on the nature of the interaction and threats they play to some degree, but they tend to become weaker if the game goes on a long time, even against aggro decks, which are normally weak in such situations against most other types of decks, because their interaction tends to 'fall off' in some way, often involving effects like bouncing back to the hand or tapping things down or dealing small amounts of damage to one or two creatures before big creatures come down or the board can be flooded with tons of small creatures. Unlike midrange and control, tempo rarely plays sweepers, or if they do, it tends to be more partial or temporary effects, like multi-target tapping, bouncing, or low-damage, this is partially because their own threats are more vulnerable and they can't afford the sort of 'affects both players' threats' effects most proper sweepers tend to have. They are surprisingly good against some sorts of combo decks, perhaps even better than midrange, because not only can they interact, but they can often win just a hint faster, and many sorts of combo decks utilize types of interaction that are more effective against combo threats, although this isn't a universal thing. The exact nature of some tempo decks' interaction can also allow them to have better games against ramp decks than midrange decks do, since they've been probably saving up at least some good delaying tools once the ramp deck's threats come out, and ones that still work on larger threats, unlike many of midrange's interaction (which is more likely to fall off entirely late game), giving them the turn or two they might need to finish pushing through their own win.
Quintessential stuff related to tempo include stuff like: Remand and Delver of Secrets
Combo: Combo decks aim to win through some sort of 'cheat'. They want to win quickly and dirtily with a combination of cards that allow them to win nearly instantly, or at least guarentee their position once it comes out. There are generally two types of combo decks, those that aim to pull out their win condition before the opponent can respond, and rely on 'all out' luck based strategies that try to race the opponent, and tend to dedicate their deck to finding some way to draw the combo, or 'controlling' combo decks, which aim to use control, tempo, and/or midrange based interaction cards to prevent the opponent from winning before they draw and manage to play their combo. Once the combo is out, they tend to win instantly so long as the opponent can't stop it, and many combo decks either rely on the opponent not having the answers, or having methods to stop or prevent the opponent's answers, or having a type of combo that most decks don't have the answers for (except typically, control and some midrange and tempo decks). Combo decks that aim to win ASAP are often referred to as 'linear' combo decks, and many of them have unreliable potential wins that can happen before turn 4, or at least before aggro decks tend to win, which can happen when they get a good hand and the opponent doesn't manage to interact properly with it. Interactive combo decks tend to have a backup plan, usually in the form of a less reliable form of tempo-like and/or midrange-like strategy, while using the combo as a threat to keep the opponent from using their mana efficiently or using all their interaction cards, creating a sort of 'virtual card advantage' through the _threat_ of a combo. The backup threats used by this sort of deck are often more control related ones, or tempo related ones, because it doesn't take many of them in the deck, and the type of interaction they favor tends to support those better than midrange threats, especially since they want to bait out the opponent's interaction to make way for the combo. Combo decks tend to be weakest against control decks, vary in quality against individual midrange and tempo decks, depending on the types of threats and interactions used and the exact densities, and be strong but somewhat luck reliant against other decks, with good odds of winning with their average hand, but a higher chance of busting and essentially losing against themselves than other deck types, at least for the linear combo, while the interaction based combo can lose out to superior efficiency and focus of other decks willing to take risks against them.
Quintessential stuff related to combo include stuff like: graveyard revival (such as Unburial Rites/Gifts Ungiven) or 'infinite' combos that can do things like arbitrary amounts of damage, or 'just enough chunks' types like storm combos or scapeshift. Really though, combo decks aren't easily locked into quintessential pieces, and can vary quite widely based on their interesting win conditions.
Ramp: Ramp bears a lot of similarities to combo, but tends to be more reliable in some respects. Ramp tends to be weak to decks that out-race it and win before it can. Ramp's objective is to play very large threats sooner than they normally can be played, but playing cards that put them ahead on mana or sometimes other resources, and having a few, very large threats that only rely on a single card to win. The kind of cards ramp plays are often similar to the ones played by control, but often even higher cost, and able to win the game more quickly, because ramp is often in a more delicate position than control is once their threats come online. There are essentially two types of ramp, 'fast ramp' which is similar to linear combo, and goes all out to get their threats onto the board as fast as possible, often using slightly more delicate methods and slightly cheaper and more efficient at winning the game quickly threats, but less resilient ones than might be used by the likes of control, although still ones that will smash equivalent midrange threats and ignore most midrange type interaction. Interactive ramp decks tend to be more similar to the same sort of combo decks, seeking to disrupt the opponent's plan just enough for them to reach their larger ramp targets, which they play slightly less of, but are more resilient and often larger and more quickly game-winning than the more linear 'fast ramp' versions. While ramp decks are less likely to lose 'to themselves' than combo decks, they have some interesting quirks of strengths and vulnerabilities in comparison. Ramp decks tend to be particularly strong against midrange decks, who don't win quite fast enough to out-race them, and who generally have interaction of the exact sorts that completely fails against all the threats that ramp plays. They basically end up using similar strategies against midrange as midrange uses against aggro, using their attempts at efficiency against them. They tend to have a lot of weaknesses however against certain strategies, depending on which version of ramp they are, and the exact methods they use.
Iconic ramp stuff include stuff like: various high end ramp targets like Primeval Titan and the legendary eldrazi's and such, as well as the famous 'Tron' deck and it's Urza-lands (which has combo elements to it, given how it relies on a 'combo' of the different lands turning each-other on, and replaces doing things like playing ramp creatures or extra lands with searching out specific lands).
There are other deck types out there of course that don't fit well into the above categories, like discard and prison and land-destruction decks, but I won't include them in required archetypes for various reasons.
I think that there should be in a good metagame at least:
10% 'true' control (which isn't actually leaning more towards combo, ramp, midrange, or tempo, and really is strong against pretty much all types of combo decks, this is generally a thing that doesn't really exist in Modern these days)
5% tempo (a lot of tempo decks and tempo/combo decks are mistakenly called control decks, and many of them get close to such, but I'd like to create a distinction here, partially because with the current card pool, they don't tend to actually be reliable enough against linear combo, which might be a bit too much of the metagame right now)
5% midrange (likely to be higher, just based on how it interacts with various archetypes and the cards that already exist in modern and WotC's current balance patterns for new Standard prints, BGx midrange is likely to keep this category higher than what I'd consider a safe minimum unless something else does something crazy and weird and probably ban-worthy and hates on it hard, I suspect this is one of the safest archetypes that WotC needs to do little work on maintaining)
10% aggro
5% linear combo
5% interactive combo
5% linear ramp
5% interactive ramp
10% multi-archetype (except control)
The remainder can be any of the above getting extra, but no archetype should have _more_ than 30% of the metagame, and no individual general type of deck (such as 'infect' or 'affinity' or 'jund midrange' or 'bant eldrazi') should be more than 2/3rds of it's own archetype, and each archetype should have at least 3 decks with 1% meta-share, and at least two different decks with at least 2% meta-share. Also, the following archetypes or sets of archetypes should have at least one deck in T1:
'pure' control
Combo
Aggro
Midrange and/or Tempo
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For a long time, decks of the categories midrange, tempo, and interactive combo have been trying and failing to take the place of pure control, which is why certain types of decks, particularly some kinds of combo, are hard to police effectively in the format. This is largely because the card pool doesn't have all the proper tools needed, and attempted control decks are either a bit too weak, or wind up using ineffective substitutes in the form of tempo based or midrange based interaction for part of their card pool, with cards like Lightning Bolt, Remand, and Inquisition of Kozilek, and generally neglecting the type of card advantage tools that control decks typically need to work in the long-game they are seeking, because they aren't well designed for control decks or are too expensive for modern in CMC, even if they are fine for standard (like Sphinx's Revelation). This kept the metagame under relative stability for two main reasons, BGx midrange and Twin. Twin is basically the god of interactive combo decks, with Nahiri being a replacement that takes a similar metagame role, and was basically such a threatening combo that even aggro decks were tweaking their interaction and sideboards heavily around it. BGx midrange is essentially made up of stuff that is at least a bit too strong for it's mana cost (the core of Inquisition of Kozilek, Thoughtseize, Tarmogoyf, Abrupt Decay, and Liliana of the Veil, on top of the 'shock-fetch' mana base so classic to modern being very advantageous to midrange strategies more than many other archetypes), combined with the advantage of most of the modern worthy stuff that WotC prints these days being midrange creatures in the 3-4 cmc range, a cmc range for creatures that is nearly exclusive to Midrange in Modern's metagame. These are decks that weren't fulfilling control's position because they were as good as control decks should be at what control is meant to be good at, but because they were/are overpowered enough to make up the difference. Twin was an easy ban for WotC, but perhaps a mistake without having a proper control suite ready to help reign in on what Twin was helping police, since it is proving hard for BGx midrange decks to do that on their own. BGx midrange's suite, IMO, is just as ban-worthy as twin was, but is also just as hard to replace in the current metagame and card-pool, and at this point, might be one of the few things keeping the meta from turning entirely linear and interaction dying almost entirely in favor of races to the win.
I think it's time for WotC to start being more serious about printing more options for tempo creatures, control interaction, control card-advantage, and lower-powered midrange tools but ones still good enough for modern if the better versions are banned and a proper control T1 deck exists to stabilize certain meta portions that BGx midrange's currently overpowered suite is helping reign in on, although bans there (once it would be safe) might not be necessary there as the degree of overpoweredness isn't completely insane.
So, in general, I think Modern needs more new cards filling certain roles in certain archetypes (particularly control), more than it needs anything else, like bans, but that the current metagame isn't really as healthy as I'd want it in terms of meta share to different archetypes.
It's now 2 weeks until 2017, and the metagame breakdown is still listed for September. What the heck is going on with MN? Has no one been able to pick up the slack in number analysis? The site has devolved into a bunch of fluff piece, clickbait, opinion articles.
UR ....... WUBR ........... WB ............. RGW ........ UBR ....... WUB .... BGU
Spells / Blink & Combo / Token Grind / Dino Tribal / Draw Cards / Zombies / Reanimate