I'm still down for a faithless looting ban, however with Horizons coming up I think it's fair to sit it out and see if it really does shake up modern (I doubt it).
I'm also rooting for the London Mulligan getting implemented. It removes some non-games for all decks universally, makes sideboarding more impactful and is more skill intensive than the current rule. That it makes linear decks even more powerful is a tradeoff that can be fixed with bans if needed.
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Bearscape posted a message on The State of Modern Thread (B&R 11/03/2019)Posted in: Modern Archives -
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Bearscape posted a message on The State of Modern Thread (B&R 21/01/2019)IdSurge's signature quote from Renegade Rallier stung so deep it made me post on mtgs for the first time in like a monthPosted in: Modern Archives
The difference in how people experience modern right now baffles me. Since the printing of phoenix and the rise (and fall) of KCI, to me, modern is the worst it has ever been sans eldrazi winter and maybe treasure cruise (and at least cruise decks were generally interactive). But somehow there are also people that experience current modern as being one of the best formats ever!
Modern has always had this double-edged sword of limitless variety where, since everyone plays yank they like, you can play the yank you like. But if you actually would try to max your win percentage to steal a big tournament, there are at most 5 decks you should seriously consider. Isn't it just common sense that if you have to submit to the matchup lottery, the winning strategy is to linear as hard as possible and steal at least game 1?
People sticking with decks they've played for years is also a big factor. I've played Jeskai Control since basically the inception of modern, and I still jam it at FNM because I love the deck. But I did buy into Grixis Death Shadow for big tournaments because honestly there is no reward to playing any form of control now. But if this "meta memory" didn't exist, if people's card collections and all memory of Modern would disappear over night, a massive portion of the decks people still to this day register at tournaments would never exist. Because why in the world would you buy into Jeskai Control, or BGx, or a CoCo deck, when there's so much linear nonsense to completely invalidate your deck game 1?
It has become incredibly frustrating to discuss changes in modern, where at the start of this increase in linearity I'm arguing with people that this plate of pasta would be much better if we removed the gravel from it, and people insisting the gravel is just fine. And now months later I see people happily devour an entire brick, and I see people likeminded to me also be baffled at these people eating bricks, but the brickpeople are discussing their favourite flavour of brick, telling me to adapt and take another plate of brick. -
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izzetmage posted a message on The State of Modern Thread (B&R 26/11/2018)I'm of the opinion that Ancient Stirrings has got to go. Most people would say that the results of GP Oakland brought to our eyes the problem that is KCI. I would say that it brought to our eyes the problem that is Ancient Stirrings. That card has been overperforming at GPs all throughout the last year.Posted in: Modern Archives
Facts:
- There were five GPs with 16 or more copies of Ancient Stirrings in the T8: Lyon, Las Vegas, Sao Paulo, Atlanta, and most recently Oakland.
- Four different Ancient Stirrings decks have won five separate GPs: RG Eldrazi at Lyon, KCI at Hartford and Las Vegas, Hardened Scales at Prague, Tron at Hong Kong. Amulet also came close, losing to (what else?) KCI in the finals of Hartford. Wanna count PTs too? OK, then notch another win for Lantern at PT RIX.
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ktkenshinx posted a message on The State of Modern Thread (B&R 01/10/2018)Posted in: Modern ArchivesQuote from racerxen »I'm always amazed at how this thread always circles itself back to Twin. With modern seeing a resurgence of GB/x Midrange, UW control being viable, and a very diverse meta; This thread always asks "Why is twin still banned"?
Almost all Twin discussion in this thread originates from a small group of vocal Twin defenders who have defended that card since 2016. When the format appears unhealthy, they bring up Twin as a way to fix it, and/or use that lack of health as a justification to bring Twin back because other things are powerful too. When the format appears healthy, they also bring up Twin as a natural addition to a diverse Modern. The fact that their argument remains unchanged even as the conditions of Modern change makes me very suspicious. I do not believe many of these pro-Twin arguments actually consider the format, Wizards' unbanning trends, other players, etc. I think they are made almost purely, or entirely, out of personal preference shared by Twin pilots in the face of any and all evidence to the contrary.
Quote from idSurge »Notice how dead this thread is between Twin discussion? Its the only topic of relevance, until something is busted.
I've mentioned if Creeping Chill is making waves anywhere but online.
I mentioned the rise of the Steam-Kin deck, we saw a few posts talking about Frenzy, but in the end it will always come back to one thing, because only one thing is missing in Modern.
That is an extremely generous interpretation of why the thread returns to Twin. The overwhelming majority of threads on this forum exist without any Twin discussion. The overwhelming majority of Reddit threads exist without Twin discussion. I bet if we went through Modern articles in the past 12 months, we'd also see the overwhelming majority of them never mention the word "Twin" once. It's not a Modern issue, it's not a health issue, it's not a popular issue. Twin doesn't even win the unbanning polls here or on Reddit, which is the surest time for the argument to land!
I think a much more accurate explanation is that a few users, that are disproportionately vocal and participatory in this thread, want to play Twin. As such, they continue to bring the thread back to Twin in subtle and less subtle ways. This is most noticeable in the shifting arguments in favor of Twin's unbanning. The most recent argument in the past few pages appears to have something to do with Modern having an alleged lack of blue-based Snapcaster/Bolt Tempo decks that play threats before disrupting an opponent/protecting the threat. Never mind that Twin doesn't actually do this and is only a tempo deck in some roundabout way (despite GDS not being tempo in a comparable roundabout way?). This reminds me of the same shifting arguments that Twin players made in 2017 and 2018 around a lack of viable top-tier blue decks. Then we got those decks and the argument shifted again.
I get it. A few people will never be happy with Modern until Twin is unbanned. That's all well and good but those posters need to a) stop regressing this thread to Twin talk every few weeks, b) stop framing it as a defining Modern-wide issue (e.g. "only one thing is missing in Modern.), c) stop using immaterial arguments to defend unbanning Twin (e.g. "Tron is okay, lantern is okay, storm is okay, but twin is not okay? LOL"), and d) stop changing the arguments in favor of unbanning Twin as the format satisfies the requirements of old arguments. -
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Shmanka posted a message on The State of Modern Thread (B&R 10/02/18)Posted in: Modern ArchivesQuote from BlueTronFTW »Eh I dunno. SFM sees play in legacy, which has all the stuff modern has plus some more craziness.
But hold on, that's not even fair contextually. Primarily, because that format has Umezawa's Jitte. Yet as for "how much" play it actually sees, take a look here. Stoneforge Mystic is in 23rd position for format staples overall. Being included in 11.27% of the metagame. Green Sun's Zenith is even dramatically lower with 40th place.
I'm not going to say it won't have an impact if unbanned, because it will, but it doesn't seem dramatically far-fetched in a world with Bloodbraid Elf and Jace, the Mind Sculptor. -
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FoodChainGoblins posted a message on The State of Modern Thread (B&R 10/02/18)Posted in: Modern ArchivesQuote from idSurge »What is a 1 drop going to do? Get Pushed and die?
Get Bolted?
I mean what kind of pushed 1 drop are we talking about here. Kytheon, Hero of Akros levels?
I personally think that Stoneforge Mystic would be fine. I hope the Bloodbraid Elf/Jace, the Mind Sculptor "experiment" gives Wizards some ideas. I think Preordain, Green Sun's Zenith, and maybe even (the mentioned above) Punishing Fire. Stoneforge Mystic is a super powerful White card ... and that is a good thing! White should be able to play the card that matches up at least a little bit with ScM, Goyf, Dark Confidant, and Young Peezy.
Regarding a strong White 1 drop, you absolutely CAN'T do Mother of Runes, so please don't take it there. This would make creature battles stupid if the opponent can't kill the Mom before its summoning sickness goes away. -
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Pokken posted a message on The State of Modern Thread (B&R 10/02/18)Death's Shadow, Tasigur and Angler say hi. But I'm clearly not talking about mono colored decks. Jund is a black deck (though it's very strong G as well these days with goyf/ooze/bbe), Abzan company is a green deck, RG scapeshift is a green deck, UWR control is a blue deck, Grixis death Shadow is a black deck. That help?Posted in: Modern Archives
It's not strictly about beaters either although that is one of the deficiencies; obviously colors are going to be better at some things than others, but white just struggles from an efficiency perspective in modern. There're really only two good white cards in the midrange spectrum: Thalia and Path. The rest are sideboard cards or super fringe.
People slum it with Gideons and such but they're just not really very efficient in comparison to cards like Tasigur, Angler, Bob, Shadow, Goyf, Snapcaster, BBE, Liliana, etc. In Legacy White is fairly well represented largely because of Stoneforge picking up the slack from a closing it out perspective as well as the efficiency perspective. And StP of course
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I did this exercise a few years ago and it's even worse now. If you look at established decks in the format that have results, here's how the core colors break down:
Black: GDS (U), Jund (G)
Green: Tron, Titanshift, Ponza, Gx Company, Elves, RG Eldrazi (I guess)
White: D&T, Humans (Rainbow),
Red: Burn, Dredge, Hollowed One, Living End (B)
Blue: UWx, URx, Merfolk, RUG Scapeshift, Storm
Brown: E-Tron, Ironworks, Affinity, Lantern (Arguably U/B? Hard to classify)
It doesn't take long to see that White sucks. It's not even a popular splash color anymore in decks that perform, outside of company decks. Not even confining it to the midrange / control spectrum there're basically no core white decks because the cards are largely trash.
What I'd love to do is dump all the decklists/manabases and such of established decks into some analytics, show the color distribution of cards played and so on. I'm pretty sure we would see that Green is the dominant color of modern with Red/Black/Blue kinda in the middle and White in last place both from a mana and card distribution perspective. -
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FoodChainGoblins posted a message on The State of Modern Thread (B&R 10/02/18)Posted in: Modern ArchivesQuote from tronix »besides the risks and long reaching ramifications on the modern card economy?
jace and bbe had adequate explanations for coming off the ban list. i just dont see their successful incorporation into the format as a justification to try stuff out just for the sake of trying stuff out.
if unbans arent looking to address a specific problem, then it turns into a process of doing so just to 'shake things up'.
this is reminiscent of one of the largest concerns people brought up during the series of bannings prior to modern being dropped as a pro-tour format. it was difficult to not look at them as veiled attempts by wotc to artificially induce shifts in the format.
how would this be functionally any different? unbannings can kill decks just as easily as creating them.
I can answer this from my perspective. If a card doesn't break something in Modern, it should be unbanned. Modern gets stale otherwise. You can't tell me that players were not bored of the Holy Trinity of Twin/Affinity/Jund had for years. It's not so much to shake things up, as to keep the format somewhat fresh. There's only so long players will enjoy getting turn 2ed by a Glistener Elf, Splinter Twinned out because they tapped for a 3 mana creature, Summer Bloomed on turn 3, or Eye of Ugin...don't get me started there.
If a card is worse than what is currently going on in Modern, then it SHOULD get unbanned. Yes, Stoneforge Mystic, Preordain, Green Sun's Zenith, and potentially some others all fit this criteria. Do you honestly want a newer player to go onto the format of Modern and notice that Death's Shadow is not banned, but Stoneforge Mystic is? It doesn't make sense to some people, sorry. Some people like me compare it to seeing Shock on a ban list, but Lightning Bolt is not. That one is obviously more obvious, but do you get what I'm saying? -
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Lord Seth posted a message on The State of Modern Thread (B&R 15/01/18)So, I wanted to take a note of something.Posted in: Modern Archives
An argument some people bring up about Bloodbraid Elf being so powerful is that it can cascade into really powerful things, with Bloodbraid Elf into Liliana being the top example. But here's the thing. That play was legal for a year before Deathrite Shaman was printed. Now, to be fair, until the Punishing Fire ban the metagame was in a weird place so perhaps that time period can't be counted, but that's still 9 months in which you could Bloodbraid Elf into Liliana. Did anyone think that synergy was too powerful?
I didn't think people did, but I decided to try to get some more concrete evidence on it by looking back at the banlist threads for that time period. This one went from the start of 2012 (after all the initial bans had been sorted out) until June and this one continued from that point until Return to Ravnica was released. During this entire time period, Bloodbraid Elf was not only legal, but you could pull off the dreaded cascade into Liliana. What did people think of it?
I didn't go through every single page to figure it out. Instead I had the forum search for "Bloodbraid" and "BBE" and looked at what popped up. There was some discussion, but not about banning it... instead, it was more about how it might related to unbans on things like Ancestral Vision or Jace, the Mind Sculptor. There were only, in all of those over 150 pages of posts, a handful of suggestions for Bloodbraid Elf to be banned. But those suggestions weren't even doing it on power level! This post advocates a ban because they think it's too random, and this post suggests banning it as part of a massive change to the format in which a lot of cards were banned. But even those posts don't claim it should be banned for power reasons!
So, in all of the discussion about the banlist during that time period--when, again, Bloodbraid Elf and Liliana of the Veil were both legal--Bloodbraid Elf was seen by basically no one as being of a problematic power level, with the very, very few suggestions for bans having nothing to do with power level. It was only when Deathrite Shaman came along that people started complaining about it. - To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
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If you don't like ban talk, then don't enter a thread specifically talking about the State of Modern and B&R.
Crazy, I know.
Edit: Everyone is a critic. :^)
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One thing that is never brought up is the influx of players returning to a format after a ban - you can only try to "git gud" for so long before you grow tired of the format.
Lastly, the notion that a majority of Modern players are just salty that their pet decks keep losing is plainly ignorant. My Jund deck loses to Tron, I'm not calling for a ban, unless it somehow starts placing multiple copies in the Top 8 or swells to over 20% of the day two metagame. Additionally, people called for Deathrite Shaman, Treasure Cruise and Eye of Ugin to be banned, and those people were labeled ban wagoners, however, those complaints were definitely justified. Instead of sealing yourself in an echo chamber chanting "Modern is fine! Bans are bad!" people should take what other people say more seriously, as in the case of DRS, Probe and Summer Bloom, there was some merit to their arguments.
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Simple fact is cards will get banned. Maybe not this year, or next, but someday, that is just the unfortunate risk you take playing in a constructive MTG format; WoTC will make mistakes. On the flip side, cards will also get unbanned over time, if deemed safe enough.
Bans do cause some strife within the MTG community but you can't hold a whole format hostage simply because a select few are unwilling to give up their broken toy. If that were the case than we'd still be dealing with Treasure Cruise and Deathrite Shaman.
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This a problem I have with discussing Modern bans and unbans, people often put too much faith in what Pros' say or write, without treating their opinion with a healthy bit of skepticism. Not so say all Pros are wrong, they are good players for a reason, but basing your opinion solely on what they say is foolish.
Not even among Pro players is there a concise opinion regarding SFM, almost as if people are flawed and have innate biases.
Jeff Hoogland ( I know, not the best example ) has stated BBE, Jace and SFM are fine, same with Shaheen Sorani. Brian Braun-Duin also wrote an article discussing the pros of cons of unbanning SFM.
Ari Lax is against SFM, but he also once said if they unban Bitterblossom that he'll show everyone why it was banned. Still waiting on that one, Ari Lax. Peter Ingram is staunchly against SFM, but him along with Ari Lax think Jitte is fine.
Those are just a few examples. You could sift through every pro's opinion on the subject but you'll find just as many contradictory opinions as well.
First, instead of mislabeling it as an "echo chamber" why not stand back and see if they are on to something?
Second, no card is 100% safe to unban. There is always going to be unknown factors but "A life without risk is a life not lived."
To further reiterate the first point, the reason so many people here believe SFM is safe is because she fits well within Modern's current power level. Yes, she nets you advantage upon summoning but plenty of cards legal already do that. In an increasingly fast format you need to tap out, wait a turn before deploying a 4/4 with Life Link and Vigilance; that's not really impressive given the competition.
The only sensible argument against SFM is homogeneity, but again, that is more of an unknown factor. Some of said SFM would slot into Bant Eldrazi, now Bant Spirits, and others have stated Death & Taxes wouldn't even cut Leonin Arbitor. I have recall someone saying Burn would run SFM. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Think the best part of mentioning KCI on Twitter is summoning this one guy who adamantly defends Ancient Stirrings no matter what.
Hilarious
Pros whinging about Modern is like falling in the ocean and complaining about getting wet.
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In my opinion, I strongly believe there is plenty of users who read this thread on a regular basis but are intimidated from posting due to their opinions being contrary to the predominately Pro-Twin narrative here, hence this thread reads like some passive-aggressive echo chamber at times.
If you are that unhappy with the game than just quit. You are not doing yourself a good, and you'll probably alienating people who would at one time be willing to listen.
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A year ago people were singing Shaheen Soorani's praise when he was on a crusade to free Jace. Now that he's against Splinter Twin it's "Pfftt, you shouldn't take his opinion seriously."
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Now it has just devolved into "The State of Splinter Twin - Current Status: Still Banned"
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Splinter Twin was off the table.