MTGO should NEVER be used to assess paper metagames, especially if you're preparing for a 15 round event. MTGO dailies and leagues are basically FNMs because of the number of rounds. The quality of play may be higher, but the variance inherent to such a small number of rounds skews it too much for quality of play to truly matter.
It's great for practicing but horrible for predicting.
Actually, to those using goldfish as a metric, do this for me. Go to the modern meta, and click recent events. Ignore all of the leagues, pay attention to only the wmcq, ptq, and iq results. You will see exactly what I'm saying. In the entire visible history on goldfish, i found 1 dredge deck and 1 zooicide deck that made top 8. The top 8's of these are exactly what you would expect, lots of jund, lots of jeskai (some geist, some nahiri, even one thopter sword!) lots of infect, and lots of tron.
ok let's assume that there is a bump in the said linear decks, unless you actually want to ban them i'm not sure how is that related to the BL discussion
not banning but there needs to be decks that do a better job of policing them...
or do you actually mean that Twin would police them? because this has proven to be nonsense many times over, i'm fairly certain that we could ban whatever we want and it's bad MUs won't see any significant rise, remember that Jund has evolved into an agro-killing machine, CoCo is naturally favored vs aggro (which is absent for Modo due to ***** client not having a mechanic to handle infinite loops) and Jeskai is also a solid deck against most aggro
doesn't necessarily have to be twin but twin was the most popular deck that did have decent matchups against them.... you have the coco, jund and nahiri but in aggregate i don't think they are enough...
so maybe the reasons behind the said rise is that:
a) those decks are new and are being explored + pretty cheap to build
they've all been around forever.... when a deck gets popular it's due to results... all metrics record the winners anyway
b)their worst MU is a non-factor on modo?
it's not a mitigating factor.. coco has been on the decline for a few months... jeskai has put up mediocre results... but yes you are correct in that coco/kiki chord decks are skewed due to the issues they have on that platform...
btw even if you actually do believe in 'policing decks' CoCo is much more capable to punish aggro than Twin ever was, so it's absence should be a way bigger factor than Twin getting banned
coco and nahiri aren't capable to do as well a job even though it's presumably better against those decks... it's the same reason why jeskai/grixis control had amazing aggro matchups before but did a poor job policing those decks... because it wasn't popular because it had bad matchups everywhere else...
in other words, if you come across a deck or a group of decks more ... even though it's probably a better matchup you'll do worse overall...
this very awsome line, is the most epic bull***** i've ever seen for quite some time, it takes logic, washes it with gasoline, tosses a lighter at it and walks away like a boss, man the politicians of this place need you, how on earth did you think of that? you had me laughing for like 20 secs, what math teacher you joking? you should work on Trump's compaign, he's looking for people with your skills, but you don't actually expect me to reply to this seriously right?
btw i really appreciate you being so objective despite your love of Twin and UR decks, unlike my dear cfusion which takes the Top8s of Twin in 2015, substracts the Top8s of affinity in 2015 and compares that number with the estimated total population of magic players of all formats in unspecified time to conclude that the number is small, right before proudly anouncing that he's a math teacher... mind=blown!, anyways, kudos!
I'm only correcting and expanding on your argument, which was: "the margin was not minimal, like i've said before in regards to PT and GP Top8s within 2015, Twin's Top8s were slightly over 70% more than affinity's top8s which was the 2nd most successful decks at the time". When looking at what is relevant (since PTs are no longer a factor, nor should they ever have been, unless you consider draft performance relevant to Modern constructed), your own statement of dominance boils down to the performances of exactly three people (10 Twin decks vs 7 Affinity decks). I'm curious under what context do you consider the performance of 3 people as being representative of the meta and justification for a banning which affects all players of the format (especially when none of the other numbers from any other diversity-banned deck line up)? I happen to love numbers and I understand math is a difficult subject for most people. That's exactly why I made the career change later in life in the first place. But this is some pretty basic stuff, even without having to get into statistics and population representation. You can belittle it all you want, I'm definitely used to it. There are far too many people here in the US that are proud to be ignorant of math and sciences. This mocking post seems to show it's the same story elsewhere in the world too. And for the record, Trump is a complete tool; a joke and an insult to our electoral system.
this very awsome line, is the most epic bull***** i've ever seen for quite some time, it takes logic, washes it with gasoline, tosses a lighter at it and walks away like a boss, man the politicians of this place need you, how on earth did you think of that? you had me laughing for like 20 secs, what math teacher you joking? you should work on Trump's compaign, he's looking for people with your skills, but you don't actually expect me to reply to this seriously right?
btw i really appreciate you being so objective despite your love of Twin and UR decks, unlike my dear cfusion which takes the Top8s of Twin in 2015, substracts the Top8s of affinity in 2015 and compares that number with the estimated total population of magic players of all formats in unspecified time to conclude that the number is small, right before proudly anouncing that he's a math teacher... mind=blown!, anyways, kudos!
I'm only correcting and expanding on your argument, which was: "the margin was not minimal, like i've said before in regards to PT and GP Top8s within 2015, Twin's Top8s were slightly over 70% more than affinity's top8s which was the 2nd most successful decks at the time". When looking at what is relevant (since PTs are no longer a factor, nor should they ever have been, unless you consider draft performance relevant to Modern constructed), your own statement of dominance boils down to the performances of exactly three people (10 Twin decks vs 7 Affinity decks). I'm curious under what context do you consider the performance of 3 people as being representative of the meta and justification for a banning which affects all players of the format (especially when none of the other numbers from any other diversity-banned deck line up)? I happen to love numbers and I understand math is a difficult subject for most people. That's exactly why I made the career change later in life in the first place. But this is some pretty basic stuff, even without having to get into statistics and population representation. You can belittle it all you want, I'm definitely used to it. There are far too many people here in the US that are proud to be ignorant of math and sciences. This mocking post seems to show it's the same story elsewhere in the world too. And for the record, Trump is a complete tool; a joke and an insult to our electoral system.
Twin's PT results ARE relevant though. We know for a fact that they were used by WOTC in determining whether something violated their wishes for the format. Twin was banned before Modern was removed from the PT. There's no plausible reason whatsoever to disregard Twin's PT numbers.
i never said anything about policing decks.... it could be a deck like twin or it could be a group of decks... but overall linear decks won't come down in numbers until there are substantial more decks that can prey on them... twin led to more interaction in the format which sort of helped the matchups better against creature aggro... just matching up against twin in itself isn't going to do much...
and for the record... as i stated before... suicide zoo has been its current form for well over a year....
is gitaxian probe the most popular blue card yet? if it isn't.. it probably will be soon... and that's when you know the format has officially jumped the shark... we're pretty close to that point as it is...
for all you guys who wanted twin gone.. you got the format you deserved....
What does the popularity of Gitaxian Probe have to do with the format "jumping the shark"?
Also, what's with the massive overuse of ellipses?
i never said anything about policing decks.... it could be a deck like twin or it could be a group of decks... but overall linear decks won't come down in numbers until there are substantial more decks that can prey on them... twin led to more interaction in the format which sort of helped the matchups better against creature aggro... just matching up against twin in itself isn't going to do much...
and for the record... as i stated before... suicide zoo has been its current form for well over a year....
your suicide zoo arguement is too weak to make any link with the Twin ban (if that was the goal at least), Bloom was also legal for ages and it only got in the spotlight in mid 2014, also i kinda doubt that suicide zoo has a 'current form' even the creature package is up to debate as of now
now what you're searching for to drive down the linear decks is generic answers, cards no decks, that will in turn give tools to a whole number of fair decks against linear ones, it's generally accepted that Modern needs at least some better counterspells and potentially removal too, but it's off topic for this thread
If generic answers were better in Modern, I would not be complaining about Modern being a "two ships passing in the night" format that a majority of games I've experienced since the Birthing Pod banning. The decks that were freed from decks that violated rules in my opinion did not create a more interactive environment or enjoyable for anyone who wanted to leverage skill. A majority of decks literally demand you to just execute your gameplan, if your opponent was more prepared with his 75 cards to beat you they usually won barring cheating/variance. Modern also has the problem of, counterspells and land destruction are not fun so anytime a Big mana with busted lands strategy becomes dominant, there's not an efficient way of dealing with it outside of using the banlist (ie. Amulet Bloom, Cloudpost, Eye of Ugin). It's not coincidence that people say the threats >>>>> answers, because that's how the card pool is. Unfortunately I'm not optimistic about WOTC printing cards like Counterspell in Standard legal sets to bring into the Modern format, since that would literally kill their main source of income when you do that to a Standard format. Even Mana Leak, barely playable in Modern is too strong to reprint in Standard. But if WOTC wants Modern to be unique in that it's a "two ships passing in the night format with not much meaningful interaction", that's fine too, I'm clearly not the target audience that WOTC wants for Modern. Because that's how I uniquely identify Modern currently from other formats.
your suicide zoo arguement is too weak to make any link with the Twin ban (if that was the goal at least), Bloom was also legal for ages and it only got in the spotlight in mid 2014, also i kinda doubt that suicide zoo has a 'current form' even the creature package is up to debate as of now
are you really comparing bloom with suicide zoo? the learning curve is vastly different for one and bloom also had ban talks since it's first appearance... they have very different reasons on why its taken so long to gain steam....
now what you're searching for to drive down the linear decks is generic answers, cards no decks, that will in turn give tools to a whole number of fair decks against linear ones, it's generally accepted that Modern needs at least some better counterspells and potentially removal too, but it's off topic for this thread
i did not say that either... you can accomplish balance in a number of ways but twin was just one example... printing more generic answers has it's own set of problems and i never ever said that was a solution... you just need more of the type of decks that prey on linear decks to be successful.... that might mean banning a tron piece(not advocating that btw) or unbanning twin (i am advocating for this) or printing a decent card that can slot into multiple tempo/control builds...
and a pretty poor example, what does Twin even have to do with balance? if anything balance is about having as much decks as possible equal (and since this is a competitive game starting from the top), Twin was above the other T1 decks disrupting balance, Modern is more balanced right now because a number of T1 decks are competing for the title of the best deck in Modern and we don't even know what that deck is, if there will be one
2015 was probably modern's most balanced year and it even had a problematic deck in bloom.... this year we had eldrazi and i bet that aggro will become a problem in short order....
the most popular deck is jund... whether it's the best deck remains to be seen but it's only a few percentage points away from twin's metagame #s..
as for suicide zoo i just don't get what's your problem with this deck and why you're bringing it up all the time, the deck is alot more complicated than you seem to believe (aggro is one thing simple is another you can search Sam Black's articles fore more on this), while even if it was that easy it has nothing to do with it's 'discovery', which is a matter of deck building and inovation, sometimes even easy to pilot decks take a lot of effort to fine tune, zooicide was simply put not there in 2015
i don't have a specific problem against suicide zoo... it's a fine deck in itself... i just used it as an example of a deck that basically hasn't changed and probably got helped immensely with the twin banning... and not so much that twin wasn't a great matchup for it....
it's absurd to imply that the deck was alway there and always T1 material and people simply didn't play (less than 1% of the meta) it because they were afraid of Twin , if this sort of reasoning had any merit Jund would be a homebrew by now, considering what a 'colossal jerk' Tron is to that deck
that said if the deck proves to be a problem, we ban immense and move on with our game, that's all really
i don't get why it's absurd... suicide zoo popped back up at the pro tour... and if it wasn't for the eldrazi probably would have made it's big splash then... it's been floating under the radar since and ppl have been picking it up in droves...
I mean if twin was supposedly able to keep suicide zoo at 1% despite it being secretly busted, why didn't twin do the same to affinity? The only deck twin Did any real policing of was Tron, and even there, it mostly just meant a 4-of rending volley in the side.
Also, bill, while I believe you're facts are straight (even if I think wotc pulled the trigger on twin a bit too soon), you're getting a bit flamey and it doesn't help anything.
like i said with my reasoning on metashifts.... suicide zoo's bad matchups are affinity, burn.. and when it was legal, twin.... that was a sizable chunk of the meta in 2015.. not so much this year... also one of it's most favorable matchups is infect... so no.. it's not solely because of twin but it's a huge contributing factor....
I mean if twin was supposedly able to keep suicide zoo at 1% despite it being secretly busted, why didn't twin do the same to affinity? The only deck twin Did any real policing of was Tron, and even there, it mostly just meant a 4-of rending volley in the side.
Also, bill, while I believe you're facts are straight (even if I think wotc pulled the trigger on twin a bit too soon), you're getting a bit flamey and it doesn't help anything.
again it's not solely because of twin.. it's a huge contributing factor... it's kind of silly to think that you could remove close to 20%(bloom + twin) of the meta and not have repurcussions....
again i never said it was busted... i actually said in itself.. it's fine....
but the fact that aggro is probably close to or over 50% of the meta... that's not fine... in aggregate you probably had to deal with the big 3 aggro decks with infect probably more tier 1.5.. it's probably closer to 4-5 now...
in any case... the deck is identical to what it was in 2015... 17 lands, the spells and the creatures only differ on if you play a single goyf or not which is the same as it was last year... it's virtually unchanged....
initially i was going to let this pass, but i just changed my mind, so i decided to have a little demonstration of how seriously ****ed up is your logic, so:
you made the claim that: ' It's from a statistically irrelevant sample size (56 decks over 7 events and a year's time). Which is why it's interesting that you defend a position based on the performances of literally three people in a game 20 million play. ' , bigger bull***** was never spoken in this thread, as long as i was following at least
i decided to use this Simian Spirit Guide level logic (i use the ape since you seem to be offended by the Trump comparison), to examine whether Eldrazi is broken or not:
for the time full powered Eldrazi was legal we had a PT and 3 GPs (an obviously statistically irrelevant sample) during which the most successful decks was Eldrazi with 20 Top8s, the second most successful deck was affinity with 3 Top8s, for a difference of 17 decks in a period of some months, if anything i find it extremely interesting that some folks defended this ban based on the performances of literally 17 people in a game 20 million play
17 in 20 million my friends! this is a travesty! i DEMAND that Eldrazi be unbanned right NOW! i will not stand for this injustice! or maybe i should remove the PT? if I do it's 14 in 20 million
if you're a maths teachers i already feel sorry for your students, back in elementary school they teach to not compares apples to oranges, ofc you can argue that they said nothing about apples and spaceships but still...
In case you forgot, after the PT everyone from Wizards said "wait and see," and AF didn't come out and actually say anything until there were back to back to back large events that had 50%+ Eldrazi decks with 80%+ conversion rates to go along with the dominating hold on 40%+ of the paper meta and 50%+ of the MTGO meta. All of which are metrics that hold significantly more value than simple Top 8s or wins when representing the health of a format. So when Twin has accompanying numbers like that to go along with it, then sure, I'll agree that it's oppressive. But at 1.4 copies per Top 8, 2 out of 7 GP wins, and a 10% metashare? That doesn't sound overly dominant and oppressive to me, especially with the PT gone. The comment on 3 decks was in order to highlight the absurdity of the dominance claim as based solely on GP Top 8 performance (because there are no supporting numbers to go along with it, such as abnormally high metashare holds or massively unbalanced conversion rates). At this point, I'm having a hard time understanding what you're trying to accomplish. Are you implying Twin is as bad as Eldrazi? Or are you disregarding your own "apples and orange" rules in an attempt to discredit something under completely different circumstances? Either way, at least it gives me something to do on these hot summer days besides catching pokemon.
i never said anything about policing decks.... it could be a deck like twin or it could be a group of decks... but overall linear decks won't come down in numbers until there are substantial more decks that can prey on them... twin led to more interaction in the format which sort of helped the matchups better against creature aggro... just matching up against twin in itself isn't going to do much...
and for the record... as i stated before... suicide zoo has been its current form for well over a year....
your suicide zoo arguement is too weak to make any link with the Twin ban (if that was the goal at least), Bloom was also legal for ages and it only got in the spotlight in mid 2014, also i kinda doubt that suicide zoo has a 'current form' even the creature package is up to debate as of now
now what you're searching for to drive down the linear decks is generic answers, cards no decks, that will in turn give tools to a whole number of fair decks against linear ones, it's generally accepted that Modern needs at least some better counterspells and potentially removal too, but it's off topic for this thread
If generic answers were better in Modern, I would not be complaining about Modern being a "two ships passing in the night" format that a majority of games I've experienced since the Birthing Pod banning. The decks that were freed from decks that violated rules in my opinion did not create a more interactive environment or enjoyable for anyone who wanted to leverage skill. A majority of decks literally demand you to just execute your gameplan, if your opponent was more prepared with his 75 cards to beat you they usually won barring cheating/variance. Modern also has the problem of, counterspells and land destruction are not fun so anytime a Big mana with busted lands strategy becomes dominant, there's not an efficient way of dealing with it outside of using the banlist (ie. Amulet Bloom, Cloudpost, Eye of Ugin). It's not coincidence that people say the threats >>>>> answers, because that's how the card pool is. Unfortunately I'm not optimistic about WOTC printing cards like Counterspell in Standard legal sets to bring into the Modern format, since that would literally kill their main source of income when you do that to a Standard format. Even Mana Leak, barely playable in Modern is too strong to reprint in Standard. But if WOTC wants Modern to be unique in that it's a "two ships passing in the night format with not much meaningful interaction", that's fine too, I'm clearly not the target audience that WOTC wants for Modern. Because that's how I uniquely identify Modern currently from other formats.
and that couldnt have been said any better. I think wotc is targeting another type of audience than us and ive accepted it by now, havent played the game in a while and wont until it moves away from its current state.... which will probably be never.
again i never said it was busted... i actually said in itself.. it's fine....
but the fact that aggro is probably close to or over 50% of the meta... that's not fine... in aggregate you probably had to deal with the big 3 aggro decks with infect probably more tier 1.5.. it's probably closer to 4-5 now...
in any case... the deck is identical to what it was in 2015... 17 lands, the spells and the creatures only differ on if you play a single goyf or not which is the same as it was last year... it's virtually unchanged....
then compare that to any random list you see nowadays...
i did compare the list and apart from the obvious inclusions it's very different than Sam Black's list (over 10 different MB slots, with a totally different creature package- 8 different creatures-): http://mtgtop8.com/event?e=12484&d=271873&f=MO
the list you gave me is extremely clunky, with cards that really don't help at all with quick kills, it's dramatically worse than Sam Black's list which is pretty much what sparked the people's interest in the deck
While MTGO data shouldn't be ignored, league results are inherently unreliable to draw conclusions from thanks to 5 rounds w/ random pairings. Larger events on the platform like PPTQ, PTQs, WOCS, and the like paint a better picture, but there is a huge reason that MTGO results and Paper results don't line up with a lot of these decks.
i'm not disregarding Modo, i'm just stating that there are some technical faults that reduce it's reliability (a T1 deck is boarderline viable and infinitely frustrating due to bugs), while it's no secret that various trends take Modo by storm from time to time, there was a time in 2015 when everyone was going nuts with Grixis control, by djphan25's logic we should start considering unbaning cloudpost to police it...
also this whole discussion started fundamentally flawed because it was 'sneakily' assumed that a)Suicide Zoo is too good, b)Twin was supressing suicide zoo which are both extremely dubious claims
and even if suicide zoo proves to be a solid deck why is that a problem? aggro is part of the game, linear is part of the game
and even if indeed aggro is TOO high it is absurd to assume that Twin is the solution, i mean some say unban Twin, i say unban Pod, way better aggro police, if we start by taking flawed assumptions as basis we can claim whatever we want, doesn't mean there's any merit to those claims
currently no deck is causing problems in Modern, currently every single Top8 of every GP and every SCG Open had at least one Blue control/scapeshift deck in it, which means that Blue is definately viable, now if some folks get goosebumps from the excitement everyime they win a counterwar that's their problem and it has more to do with enforcing others to play Blue rather than not having the ability to play blue themselves
and again if Suicide Zoo is busted, common sense dictates that we ban something from this deck (Immense or Mutagenic probably) and not unban whatever we want to 'police' it, when Jund was busted we banned DRS we didn't unban cloudpost, when Eldrazi was busted we banned Eye of ugin, we didn't unban Brithing Pod, when TC Delver was busted we banned TC we didn't unban DRS...
Heh. I know you're not actually suggesting the unban of Pod, but do you really think Become Immense/Mutagenic Growth should be banned or is this just for the sake of argument?
i'm not disregarding Modo, i'm just stating that there are some technical faults that reduce it's reliability (a T1 deck is boarderline viable and infinitely frustrating due to bugs), while it's no secret that various trends take Modo by storm from time to time, there was a time in 2015 when everyone was going nuts with Grixis control, by djphan25's logic we should start considering unbaning cloudpost to police it...
also this whole discussion started fundamentally flawed because it was 'sneakily' assumed that a)Suicide Zoo is too good, b)Twin was supressing suicide zoo which are both extremely dubious claims
and even if suicide zoo proves to be a solid deck why is that a problem? aggro is part of the game, linear is part of the game
and even if indeed aggro is TOO high it is absurd to assume that Twin is the solution, i mean some say unban Twin, i say unban Pod, way better aggro police, if we start by taking flawed assumptions as basis we can claim whatever we want, doesn't mean there's any merit to those claims
currently no deck is causing problems in Modern, currently every single Top8 of every GP and every SCG Open had at least one Blue control/scapeshift deck in it, which means that Blue is definately viable, now if some folks get goosebumps from the excitement everyime they win a counterwar that's their problem and it has more to do with enforcing others to play Blue rather than not having the ability to play blue themselves
and again if Suicide Zoo is busted, common sense dictates that we ban something from this deck (Immense or Mutagenic probably) and not unban whatever we want to 'police' it, when Jund was busted we banned DRS we didn't unban cloudpost, when Eldrazi was busted we banned Eye of ugin, we didn't unban Brithing Pod, when TC Delver was busted we banned TC we didn't unban DRS...
honestly right now by the stats, no deck is too good. so no bans would be needed, however unbans could be fine along with better main deckble tools to police this ever growing linear format as long as it didnt cause a decks utter dominance.
I would appreciate it if wotc would focus on such things. the av and sotm unbans seems to be a step in that direction, now for the better police cards......and we wait.....
It's great for practicing but horrible for predicting.
Standard: lol no
Modern: BG/x, UR/x, Burn, Merfolk, Zoo, Storm
Legacy: Shardless BUG, Delver (BUG, RUG, Grixis), Landstill, Depths Combo, Merfolk
Vintage: Dark Times, BUG Fish, Merfolk
EDH: Teysa, Orzhov Scion / Krenko, Mob Boss / Stonebrow, Krosan Hero
UWRjeskai nahiri UWR
UBRgrixis titi UBR
UBRgrixis delverUBR
UR ur kikimite UR
EDH
RUG Riku of Two Reflections RUG
UBR Marchesa, the Black Rose UBR
UBRGYidris, Maelstrom Wielder UBRG
UBRJeleva, Nephalia's ScourgeUBR
not banning but there needs to be decks that do a better job of policing them...
doesn't necessarily have to be twin but twin was the most popular deck that did have decent matchups against them.... you have the coco, jund and nahiri but in aggregate i don't think they are enough...
they've all been around forever.... when a deck gets popular it's due to results... all metrics record the winners anyway
it's not a mitigating factor.. coco has been on the decline for a few months... jeskai has put up mediocre results... but yes you are correct in that coco/kiki chord decks are skewed due to the issues they have on that platform...
coco and nahiri aren't capable to do as well a job even though it's presumably better against those decks... it's the same reason why jeskai/grixis control had amazing aggro matchups before but did a poor job policing those decks... because it wasn't popular because it had bad matchups everywhere else...
in other words, if you come across a deck or a group of decks more ... even though it's probably a better matchup you'll do worse overall...
I'm only correcting and expanding on your argument, which was: "the margin was not minimal, like i've said before in regards to PT and GP Top8s within 2015, Twin's Top8s were slightly over 70% more than affinity's top8s which was the 2nd most successful decks at the time". When looking at what is relevant (since PTs are no longer a factor, nor should they ever have been, unless you consider draft performance relevant to Modern constructed), your own statement of dominance boils down to the performances of exactly three people (10 Twin decks vs 7 Affinity decks). I'm curious under what context do you consider the performance of 3 people as being representative of the meta and justification for a banning which affects all players of the format (especially when none of the other numbers from any other diversity-banned deck line up)? I happen to love numbers and I understand math is a difficult subject for most people. That's exactly why I made the career change later in life in the first place. But this is some pretty basic stuff, even without having to get into statistics and population representation. You can belittle it all you want, I'm definitely used to it. There are far too many people here in the US that are proud to be ignorant of math and sciences. This mocking post seems to show it's the same story elsewhere in the world too. And for the record, Trump is a complete tool; a joke and an insult to our electoral system.
UR ....... WUBR ........... WB ............. RGW ........ UBR ....... WUB .... BGU
Spells / Blink & Combo / Token Grind / Dino Tribal / Draw Cards / Zombies / Reanimate
Standard: lol no
Modern: BG/x, UR/x, Burn, Merfolk, Zoo, Storm
Legacy: Shardless BUG, Delver (BUG, RUG, Grixis), Landstill, Depths Combo, Merfolk
Vintage: Dark Times, BUG Fish, Merfolk
EDH: Teysa, Orzhov Scion / Krenko, Mob Boss / Stonebrow, Krosan Hero
and for the record... as i stated before... suicide zoo has been its current form for well over a year....
Also, what's with the massive overuse of ellipses?
If generic answers were better in Modern, I would not be complaining about Modern being a "two ships passing in the night" format that a majority of games I've experienced since the Birthing Pod banning. The decks that were freed from decks that violated rules in my opinion did not create a more interactive environment or enjoyable for anyone who wanted to leverage skill. A majority of decks literally demand you to just execute your gameplan, if your opponent was more prepared with his 75 cards to beat you they usually won barring cheating/variance. Modern also has the problem of, counterspells and land destruction are not fun so anytime a Big mana with busted lands strategy becomes dominant, there's not an efficient way of dealing with it outside of using the banlist (ie. Amulet Bloom, Cloudpost, Eye of Ugin). It's not coincidence that people say the threats >>>>> answers, because that's how the card pool is. Unfortunately I'm not optimistic about WOTC printing cards like Counterspell in Standard legal sets to bring into the Modern format, since that would literally kill their main source of income when you do that to a Standard format. Even Mana Leak, barely playable in Modern is too strong to reprint in Standard. But if WOTC wants Modern to be unique in that it's a "two ships passing in the night format with not much meaningful interaction", that's fine too, I'm clearly not the target audience that WOTC wants for Modern. Because that's how I uniquely identify Modern currently from other formats.
are you really comparing bloom with suicide zoo? the learning curve is vastly different for one and bloom also had ban talks since it's first appearance... they have very different reasons on why its taken so long to gain steam....
i did not say that either... you can accomplish balance in a number of ways but twin was just one example... printing more generic answers has it's own set of problems and i never ever said that was a solution... you just need more of the type of decks that prey on linear decks to be successful.... that might mean banning a tron piece(not advocating that btw) or unbanning twin (i am advocating for this) or printing a decent card that can slot into multiple tempo/control builds...
2015 was probably modern's most balanced year and it even had a problematic deck in bloom.... this year we had eldrazi and i bet that aggro will become a problem in short order....
the most popular deck is jund... whether it's the best deck remains to be seen but it's only a few percentage points away from twin's metagame #s..
i don't have a specific problem against suicide zoo... it's a fine deck in itself... i just used it as an example of a deck that basically hasn't changed and probably got helped immensely with the twin banning... and not so much that twin wasn't a great matchup for it....
i don't get why it's absurd... suicide zoo popped back up at the pro tour... and if it wasn't for the eldrazi probably would have made it's big splash then... it's been floating under the radar since and ppl have been picking it up in droves...
https://www.reddit.com/r/spikes/comments/4sue9t/modern_aggregated_wmcq_results/
those results line up closely to what's happening online... it's not an accident...
Also, bill, while I believe you're facts are straight (even if I think wotc pulled the trigger on twin a bit too soon), you're getting a bit flamey and it doesn't help anything.
again it's not solely because of twin.. it's a huge contributing factor... it's kind of silly to think that you could remove close to 20%(bloom + twin) of the meta and not have repurcussions....
but the fact that aggro is probably close to or over 50% of the meta... that's not fine... in aggregate you probably had to deal with the big 3 aggro decks with infect probably more tier 1.5.. it's probably closer to 4-5 now...
in any case... the deck is identical to what it was in 2015... 17 lands, the spells and the creatures only differ on if you play a single goyf or not which is the same as it was last year... it's virtually unchanged....
here's karsten's deck tech in 2015...
http://www.channelfireball.com/articles/brew-of-the-week-modern-suicide-zoo/
then compare that to any random list you see nowadays...
In case you forgot, after the PT everyone from Wizards said "wait and see," and AF didn't come out and actually say anything until there were back to back to back large events that had 50%+ Eldrazi decks with 80%+ conversion rates to go along with the dominating hold on 40%+ of the paper meta and 50%+ of the MTGO meta. All of which are metrics that hold significantly more value than simple Top 8s or wins when representing the health of a format. So when Twin has accompanying numbers like that to go along with it, then sure, I'll agree that it's oppressive. But at 1.4 copies per Top 8, 2 out of 7 GP wins, and a 10% metashare? That doesn't sound overly dominant and oppressive to me, especially with the PT gone. The comment on 3 decks was in order to highlight the absurdity of the dominance claim as based solely on GP Top 8 performance (because there are no supporting numbers to go along with it, such as abnormally high metashare holds or massively unbalanced conversion rates). At this point, I'm having a hard time understanding what you're trying to accomplish. Are you implying Twin is as bad as Eldrazi? Or are you disregarding your own "apples and orange" rules in an attempt to discredit something under completely different circumstances? Either way, at least it gives me something to do on these hot summer days besides catching pokemon.
UR ....... WUBR ........... WB ............. RGW ........ UBR ....... WUB .... BGU
Spells / Blink & Combo / Token Grind / Dino Tribal / Draw Cards / Zombies / Reanimate
and again look at the wmcq lists.... those probably line up more closely to what's going on....
Oh, I get it now... Looked like a Umezawa's yellow ghost.
decks playing:
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decks playing:
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Heh. I know you're not actually suggesting the unban of Pod, but do you really think Become Immense/Mutagenic Growth should be banned or is this just for the sake of argument?
I would appreciate it if wotc would focus on such things. the av and sotm unbans seems to be a step in that direction, now for the better police cards......and we wait.....
decks playing:
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EDH: RWB Edgar Markov The current updated decklist is here
EDH: WUB Oloro, Ageless ascetic The current updated decklist is here
EDH: UWG Phelddagrif, The current updated decklist is here
EDH: WUB Yennett, Cryptic Sovereign The current updated decklist is here
EDH: WUB Alela, Artful provocateur The current updated decklist is here
EDH: GB Hapatra, vizier of poisons The current updated decklist is here
By doing so you make miracles a thing and you introduce a host of tournament logistics implications into the format. The card isn't good for modern.
Was good for extended I would ban Counterbalance and un-ban the top, everybody happy
EDIT: If only Crystal ball costed one mana, it would be a "good" replacement
EDH: RWB Edgar Markov The current updated decklist is here
EDH: WUB Oloro, Ageless ascetic The current updated decklist is here
EDH: UWG Phelddagrif, The current updated decklist is here
EDH: WUB Yennett, Cryptic Sovereign The current updated decklist is here
EDH: WUB Alela, Artful provocateur The current updated decklist is here
EDH: GB Hapatra, vizier of poisons The current updated decklist is here