This is a bad curve. You have a 4-of one drop, no two drops (snaps is a three drop minimum), you're crowded on the three drop slot, and you go as high as a 3-of four drop. How many lands are you going to run to support casting 3 resto angels and a bunch of 3 drops on curve? Keep in mind that the more lands you run, the less chance you have of flipping delver, since you're already running 18 creatures (which is way too high). The max I'd go is 15 creatures, since even with 18 lands, you still only have 27 spells to flip delver with (I wouldn't go lower than 26 instants and sorceries in a delver deck). If you're running both geist and snaps, you probably can't support more than 2 snapcasters and 3 geists and still have a low enough land count to get the number of spells that you need to reliably flip delver.
I don't think Reflector Mage really belongs in this type of deck. Or rather, he's a tempo card, but his power level isn't high enough. When you cast him, your opponent doesn't whisper a barely audible "****" under their breath. I would take him and resto out, cut snappy down to a 2-of, and run something like 4 delver, 4 myth realized, 3 geist, and 2 snapcaster. And I still think that's not as good as a more aggressive 4 delver, 4 swiftspear, 4 stormchaser, 3 snapcaster with a super-lean burn burn package of 4 bolts, 3-4 boros charm, some vapor snags, disrupting shoal, and some combination of dispels/spell pierce/spell snare (maybe a 1-of deprive).
You can't pay more than one alternate casting cost for a spell. Flashing back a spell using snapcaster mage counts as an alternate casting cost, so you need to hardcast disrupting shoal if you target it with snappy's ETB.
Your post is a complete joke and it doesn't make any sense as that. Where did you get from that blue is in such a bad spot and that green is the best colour in Modern? UWR Control is at 3.8% (by kenshin's modern metagame breakdown it's the most popular tier 2 deck), Grixis control at 2.8% is also not that bad and Scapeshift at 3.5%. This is far from blue decks being deck, not to mention that many other goo decks (Infect for example) play blue too (cantrip spells which are important part of them and blue as a color with that consideration).
Also green is not over-represented and other colors aren't under-represented, especially not blue. If any color is under-represented in Modern and has ever been it is white and definitely not blue. These information shows that meta is balanced regarding colors and none of them is too dominant or too weak compoare to others, except already mentioned white but even that is not that bad.
If you don't understand numbers, that's hardly my problem. The best part is that you used the same metagame data that I used to show that green is over-represented, and you presented it verbatim -- without any kind of basic analysis -- to argue that green isn't over-represented. And you have the audacity to call my post a joke? It's right there in the metagame data.
You need to look at the average numbers a deck in modern runs if you want to know what the color balance looks like. You do this by going through all the decks, and tallying the colors those decks use, and then finding the percentage breakdown of each color (this is what kenshin did). If you sum those values together, this will come to a total greater than 100%, so you divide by 5 (the number of colors in magic) to find the expected percentage of decks of any given color assuming an even distribution. For example, if every deck in the format is one color, you would expect 20% of decks to have, say, red (100%/5). If every deck in the format runs three colors, you would expect 60% of the decks in the format to run red (300%/5). Dividing your expected representation by 20% gives you the average number of colors per deck (20%/20% is 1 color, 60%/20% is 3 colors). Once you have that, you can take your original percentage breakdown of each color in the format, and find the difference between the actual value and the expected value. E.g. green is represented in 49.5% of all decks in the format, but the expected representation is only 36% (1.8 colors). Thus, green is over-represented by about 37%, and this is true for both tier 1, and the total format.
If you do this for all colors, you find out that white isn't the worst color at all (I was surprised, though I think siege rhino has a part in this), as both blue and black are worse off (though all colors other than green and red are heavily under-represented). Even black, which is the most under-represented color in the format, is only slightly more under-represented than red is over-represented, and green is much more over-represented than red. Green is the big issue, because it makes up almost 50% of the total format, and is seeing play in almost 40% more decks than one would expect in a perfectly color balanced format.
That's what I pointed out. And as I mentioned in a later post, this is a valid way of analyzing color (I would say the only fair way) since any deck that runs spells of a given color also has to have lands of that color. Ergo, it is that color, never mind silly arguments about color pie and whether or not infect is blue (it has blue lands and blue spells -- it's blue, end of discussion). Even taking into account outliers like affinity and tron, it doesn't change the results that much.
Now you and bill seemed to take offense at my post since I claimed it showed that green is the strongest color in modern, and I stand by that. Green is the most prevalent color in the format, which is almost certainly an indication of how good it is. Players will play what they need to in order to win (even I play green who I do play), so if one color is seeing more play than all of the others, Occam's razor would suggest that it probably has some advantage. As for what green has that is so broken, I would say it's a combination of the best creatures (goyf, scooze, rhino, even nacatl is more efficient than anything any other color gets), some of the best engines (the late summer bloom and pod, but also cards like primeval titan, even infect is amazing in conjunction with pump spells) and the fastest mana in the game. Green doesn't have to have completely busted cards in order for it to be better than other colors, it just has to have a big enough chunk of good ***** in order for it to be the best, and that's exactly what it has.
No, I want the strategic diversity of legacy, with all archetypes represented. I specifically said that blue being the only color with stack interaction is fundamental design mistake, so I don't see how you got that from my comments. I want all colors to have identity-specific ways of interacting with the stack.
Blue is more powerful in legacy because it has stack interaction. In fact, this is the whole reason to play blue -- it's the only color that interacts on every axis of the game, and the only color that can hit every zone in the game. This is what I was hinting at when I said that stack interaction being confined to blue is the real issue. This has led to the following sequence of events:
1) Blue is the only color capable of shutting down the stack. Players often identify with a color, and those who don't identify with blue find this unfun and unfair since there is literally nothing they can do in response.
2) Wizards hears these long running complaints, and nerfs counters in standard (this actually started taking place around a decade ago) since they aren't "fun".
3) Old formats where combo runs rampant require players to run blue. Players call out legacy and vintage because they are heavily blue formats, and this is seen as unhealthy.
4) In modern, the "eternal" format where counters are much weaker after a long campaign to weaken them, combo runs rampant, leading to a lot of bans.
Old formats have combo -- this is an inescapable part of the game. As the available card pool approaches infinity, so too does the number of potential interactions. As a result, you need to have some form of mechanism for shutting these interactions down on the stack. Pod and twin generally weren't seen as problematic, because every color had access to disruption in the form of removal. A spell-based combo is no different, it just takes place in a different zone; they are problematic because blue is the only color that is able to reach into that zone.
As for your final points: I'm not asking for fair, and I rarely play modern nowadays (in fact, I rarely play magic at all). I haven't posted on this forum for almost two years precisely because I think modern is a lost cause. The issue as I see it is that people like me who want something that is akin to legacy light with wild interactions don't really have anywhere to go. We're beholden to the modern playerbase at large, and so eventually, we just fade away and do something else.
Okay, so we've at least established that green is the best color in modern, statistically speaking. That's a reasonable start. Can you see that green dominance in modern is at least as unhealthy as blue dominance in legacy? I mean, being over-represented by almost 40% is a large skew. If a trend like that is stable over a long period of time, it's an indication to me that the problem is deep, probably in the design of the game (in fact, I've suspected this to be the case for a while). In modern, the overprevalence of green and the underprevalence of things like stack interaction -- which is primarily blue -- means that combo needs to be hit with a banhammer, and control (which relies heavily on stack interaction) struggles to exist. What blue needs is not another unbanning, because the cards it needs don't exist in the modern card pool.
Personally, I think the issue with modern is fundamental to modern design rules, and the way the format was set up. In fact, it's not even about color -- the color skew is just a symptom of WotC's design philosophy for standard and limited. We get amazing creatures, but no good stack interaction, and so green -- the color with the most efficient creatures -- is the best color in modern, bolstered by a campaign of banning out problematic combos. In contrast, colors like blue and black -- which rely on powerful interactive spells like counters and removal -- have suffered. Everything points to this being the case, from modern's color skew, to its historical issues with linear decks, and control continually under-performing.
What blue needs is for a paradigm shift to take place in Seattle. In fact, I'd go even further than that and say that Mark Rosewater confining stack interaction to blue's slice of the color pie was a major design **** up that the game is still feeling the effects of decades later, and it's at least as problematic as having card draw be confined to blue and black (as it was for a long time). As long as blue is the only color with stack interaction, it cannot be balanced relative to the other colors. It's akin to having creature removal only exist in one color. This is the root cause of all of these issues, and is what has led to the current design paradigm.
This is why I encouraged anyone who wants to play blue to play either MNBL or legacy, because even though they still suffer from the same overall design mistakes, blue has access to powerful enough spells in those formats to level the playing field between the colors and strategies. But unless there's a change in how cards a designed, I'm skeptical that we'll see a tier 1 control deck in modern in the foreseeable future. I mean, I don't think I've posted on this forum in a good two years, and the discussion is still almost exactly the same. That should probably tell you something.
I love it when Jund players take a break from eating soap to pat themselves on the back. Skilled wizards! Most of you are arguing bull***** fringe cases without any logical justification. If you had to represent something mathematically -- that could be analysed -- none of you have actually provided anything of worth other than an opinion. "Jund is a black deck because of color pie". So? It's also a green deck because of green creatures. To actually look at the issue you need an impartial way to analyse the numbers, which is what kenshin attempted to do when he posted those figures. They're as good a starting point as any, for two reasons:
1) If a deck plays even one card of a given color, it needs lands to play it. If a deck plays both lands and cards of a given color, it is that color. Infect is UG, Abzan is BGW, Jund is BRG etc. This includes cases like affinity and tron which are mostly colorless, because they still play colored lands and spells. This is the fairest way to break things down.
2) As the number of archetypes that are analysed increases, the effect of fringe cases decreases. From what I posted before based on kenshin's quick numbers, the skew is stable across both the whole format (with a high number of archetypes) and tier 1 (with a low number of archetypes). For the patty cake players out there, this indicates that counting decks like affinity as, say, UR isn't drastically decreasing the accuracy of the count. i.e. the numbers have a reasonable amount of validity.
Blue does have a tier 1 deck in infect (and let's be generous and throw affinity in there as well to give blue the best possible representation), but currently every single deck in the tier 1 mtgsalvation forums aside from affinity runs green. I'm sorry, but the numbers don't lie. Statistically, green players are unlikely to be any better at the game than any other color, so the over-prevalence of green is an indication that the color is too good relative to the rest of modern. I mean, people have been making arguments here about how green is a support color in X or Y deck, without realising that green is one of the few colors with the luxury of being both a primary color that wins games, and a supporting color. These are the same people who will tell you in one breath that blue is mainly a supporting color, and it's okay if it's just a tier 2 color, because the tiers are measures of popularity, not power. This is -- at best -- disingenuous, and at worst, an outright lie, since popularity is at least in part a function of a deck's strength.
I mean, the last excuse was twin, and now it's snapcaster, and blue being okay as a tier 2 color. Most of you just want to faceroll and call it skill, and the excuses for why it's okay that green be as prevalent in modern as blue is in legacy are just endless. As we all know, when the situations are reversed, the children howl.
Interesting numbers. These suggest that the average deck in modern consists of 1.8 colors, but the tier 1 decks average 2.55 colors. No surprises there, multicolored decks have access to better tools. When you take the expected number of colors per deck into account to look at the color skew, the numbers are remarkably consistent for both the whole format, and for the tier 1 decks, it just looks slightly better for the total format numbers since the expected number of colors is lower. Green is over-represented by a massive 37% relative to the expected color distribution for both total and tier 1 decks, red is over-represented by 24% in the total format and 23% in tier 1, white is under-represented by 11% (both), blue is under-represented by by 22% (total) and 21% (tier 1) respectively, and black is under-represented by 27% (both). Most people are agreeing that black is in need of help, but red -- the second most over-represented color -- is almost as over-represented as black is under-represented. Green and Red are taking up a huge amount of space in the format, and I'd be interested to see the overall pattern over time.
The guys defending green in this thread are laughable; I actually got dumber reading some of these arguments, and I feel bad for kenshin because he has to read this drivel every day. Blue is in a bad spot, and green is probably the best color in the format. I've suspected this to be the case for a long, long time now, but I'm just a guy with an opinion. Personally, I think blue is still paying for its past sins, and that any players who enjoy playing blue should try MNBL instead. There's no home for blue in modern, not under current design rules.
The rule of thumb is that for every cantrip playset in your deck, you can reduce your land count by around 1.5 to two lands. If you work it out for a deck like delver, which runs around 12 cantrips (give or take), that gets you to the magic 24 lands. This obviously has its limits depending on the deck; the original tempo decks invented by Alan Comer got away with as few as 10 lands, though nowadays 14 seems to be the lower limit for legacy, and in modern it's probably around 16.
Blue has the greatest control over the outcome of the game, because it's the color best able to stack the library. It has the distinction of being able to help you win an otherwise un-winnable game, but a poor player can just as easily lose the game for themselves. Serum Visions alone is a more complex card to play well than most of Junk (with the exception being the black discard spells, with black being probably the second most skill intensive color). Blue is also the most interactive color, because it's the only one able to interact with all zones and remove objects while they're still on the stack, making it essential in formats like vintage and legacy where you can get blown out on turns one and two by some decks.
Some people are in denial, and blue's slice of the color pie has earned a lot of scorn over the years, because deep down, those players know I'm right. I particularly liked the comment someone made that blue wasn't more difficult, just less forgiving. If a color is less forgiving, doesn't that by definition make it more difficult to play? But hey, who am I to criticize someone else's mental gymnastics?
Dont you find sylvan scrying 1 turn slower than a regular 2-mana creature drop?
You can still play it as your regular two drop creature by tutoring up an inkmoth and playing it, but you'll won't be able to pump as much on turn 3 unless you're holding a mutagenic growth or two. That said, I think theres a lot to be said for playing sylvan scrying in BUG, since I find myself losing to mana screw or color screw a lot of the time. I'm actually considering dropping plague stinger altogether, keeping the black splash for the side, and then running 2-3 sylvan scrying. I'm finding that stinger is generally the worst card in the deck.
Well, with reddit and here this appears to be an actual thing now. With the "how to fix modern" threads popping up on reddit and now this, as well as anyone who's paid attention to the modern ban discussion on here in the last month I think we can assume a lot of people are really unhappy with this format. So, let's assume we create our own modern do we raise the size of sideboards, do we unban anything not super broken (IE: clamp, misstep, hyper etc(, do we bring it back to "no reserved list", do we reprint FoW, etc. Legacy was created in nearly the same way and look at it now.
Take it back to 7th/invasion like overextended, player run banlist, give new cards a 6 month probation before they can be banned, and do so only based on format data. French commander runs fine with a player run banlist. As long as there are clear standards set in place, and the decision-making process is reasonably transparent, I think people will be happy. Give them the meta data, so there isn't any confusion about what is actually happen. One of the things that annoys me more than it should is that I keep seeing inaccurate stats being thrown around, and being used to make decisions. That shouldn't happen.
i love french edh and didnt realize it was bc of the player run ban list until just now. Clearly, the concept works, and we just need the player and pro support as well as an actual diagram of a ban list to make this happen bc' modern is not going to last if it keeps up the way it has.
I agree. I think at this stage the best way would be to treat it as a casual format for testing purposes. I think a small group of people would need to get together to organise the initial cutoff (i think invasion is the best, as this doesn't cut any blocks in half, and gives us counterspell, cool mechanics like madness, decks like tog and astral slide), and to put up a website that holds meta data, banlist, deckbuilding rules etc. I think the key point would be to take it slow and make sure the banlist is done right; one of modern's biggest issues is that the initial banlist was poorly thought out and arbitrary, and we're still dealing with the fallout of that. Once a banlist has been hashed out and tested pretty extensively, the format could then be rolled out to people the way TL was, hopefully with one or two pro articles supporting it.
Well, with reddit and here this appears to be an actual thing now. With the "how to fix modern" threads popping up on reddit and now this, as well as anyone who's paid attention to the modern ban discussion on here in the last month I think we can assume a lot of people are really unhappy with this format. So, let's assume we create our own modern do we raise the size of sideboards, do we unban anything not super broken (IE: clamp, misstep, hyper etc(, do we bring it back to "no reserved list", do we reprint FoW, etc. Legacy was created in nearly the same way and look at it now.
Take it back to 7th/invasion like overextended, player run banlist, give new cards a 6 month probation before they can be banned, and do so only based on format data. French commander runs fine with a player run banlist. As long as there are clear standards set in place, and the decision-making process is reasonably transparent, I think people will be happy. Give them the meta data, so there isn't any confusion about what is actually happen. One of the things that annoys me more than it should is that I keep seeing inaccurate stats being thrown around, and being used to make decisions. That shouldn't happen.
This is a bad curve. You have a 4-of one drop, no two drops (snaps is a three drop minimum), you're crowded on the three drop slot, and you go as high as a 3-of four drop. How many lands are you going to run to support casting 3 resto angels and a bunch of 3 drops on curve? Keep in mind that the more lands you run, the less chance you have of flipping delver, since you're already running 18 creatures (which is way too high). The max I'd go is 15 creatures, since even with 18 lands, you still only have 27 spells to flip delver with (I wouldn't go lower than 26 instants and sorceries in a delver deck). If you're running both geist and snaps, you probably can't support more than 2 snapcasters and 3 geists and still have a low enough land count to get the number of spells that you need to reliably flip delver.
I don't think Reflector Mage really belongs in this type of deck. Or rather, he's a tempo card, but his power level isn't high enough. When you cast him, your opponent doesn't whisper a barely audible "****" under their breath. I would take him and resto out, cut snappy down to a 2-of, and run something like 4 delver, 4 myth realized, 3 geist, and 2 snapcaster. And I still think that's not as good as a more aggressive 4 delver, 4 swiftspear, 4 stormchaser, 3 snapcaster with a super-lean burn burn package of 4 bolts, 3-4 boros charm, some vapor snags, disrupting shoal, and some combination of dispels/spell pierce/spell snare (maybe a 1-of deprive).
If you don't understand numbers, that's hardly my problem. The best part is that you used the same metagame data that I used to show that green is over-represented, and you presented it verbatim -- without any kind of basic analysis -- to argue that green isn't over-represented. And you have the audacity to call my post a joke? It's right there in the metagame data.
You need to look at the average numbers a deck in modern runs if you want to know what the color balance looks like. You do this by going through all the decks, and tallying the colors those decks use, and then finding the percentage breakdown of each color (this is what kenshin did). If you sum those values together, this will come to a total greater than 100%, so you divide by 5 (the number of colors in magic) to find the expected percentage of decks of any given color assuming an even distribution. For example, if every deck in the format is one color, you would expect 20% of decks to have, say, red (100%/5). If every deck in the format runs three colors, you would expect 60% of the decks in the format to run red (300%/5). Dividing your expected representation by 20% gives you the average number of colors per deck (20%/20% is 1 color, 60%/20% is 3 colors). Once you have that, you can take your original percentage breakdown of each color in the format, and find the difference between the actual value and the expected value. E.g. green is represented in 49.5% of all decks in the format, but the expected representation is only 36% (1.8 colors). Thus, green is over-represented by about 37%, and this is true for both tier 1, and the total format.
If you do this for all colors, you find out that white isn't the worst color at all (I was surprised, though I think siege rhino has a part in this), as both blue and black are worse off (though all colors other than green and red are heavily under-represented). Even black, which is the most under-represented color in the format, is only slightly more under-represented than red is over-represented, and green is much more over-represented than red. Green is the big issue, because it makes up almost 50% of the total format, and is seeing play in almost 40% more decks than one would expect in a perfectly color balanced format.
That's what I pointed out. And as I mentioned in a later post, this is a valid way of analyzing color (I would say the only fair way) since any deck that runs spells of a given color also has to have lands of that color. Ergo, it is that color, never mind silly arguments about color pie and whether or not infect is blue (it has blue lands and blue spells -- it's blue, end of discussion). Even taking into account outliers like affinity and tron, it doesn't change the results that much.
Now you and bill seemed to take offense at my post since I claimed it showed that green is the strongest color in modern, and I stand by that. Green is the most prevalent color in the format, which is almost certainly an indication of how good it is. Players will play what they need to in order to win (even I play green who I do play), so if one color is seeing more play than all of the others, Occam's razor would suggest that it probably has some advantage. As for what green has that is so broken, I would say it's a combination of the best creatures (goyf, scooze, rhino, even nacatl is more efficient than anything any other color gets), some of the best engines (the late summer bloom and pod, but also cards like primeval titan, even infect is amazing in conjunction with pump spells) and the fastest mana in the game. Green doesn't have to have completely busted cards in order for it to be better than other colors, it just has to have a big enough chunk of good ***** in order for it to be the best, and that's exactly what it has.
Anyway, I'm done here.
Edit: legacy also has tempo, which isn't really a thing in modern.
Blue is more powerful in legacy because it has stack interaction. In fact, this is the whole reason to play blue -- it's the only color that interacts on every axis of the game, and the only color that can hit every zone in the game. This is what I was hinting at when I said that stack interaction being confined to blue is the real issue. This has led to the following sequence of events:
1) Blue is the only color capable of shutting down the stack. Players often identify with a color, and those who don't identify with blue find this unfun and unfair since there is literally nothing they can do in response.
2) Wizards hears these long running complaints, and nerfs counters in standard (this actually started taking place around a decade ago) since they aren't "fun".
3) Old formats where combo runs rampant require players to run blue. Players call out legacy and vintage because they are heavily blue formats, and this is seen as unhealthy.
4) In modern, the "eternal" format where counters are much weaker after a long campaign to weaken them, combo runs rampant, leading to a lot of bans.
Old formats have combo -- this is an inescapable part of the game. As the available card pool approaches infinity, so too does the number of potential interactions. As a result, you need to have some form of mechanism for shutting these interactions down on the stack. Pod and twin generally weren't seen as problematic, because every color had access to disruption in the form of removal. A spell-based combo is no different, it just takes place in a different zone; they are problematic because blue is the only color that is able to reach into that zone.
As for your final points: I'm not asking for fair, and I rarely play modern nowadays (in fact, I rarely play magic at all). I haven't posted on this forum for almost two years precisely because I think modern is a lost cause. The issue as I see it is that people like me who want something that is akin to legacy light with wild interactions don't really have anywhere to go. We're beholden to the modern playerbase at large, and so eventually, we just fade away and do something else.
Personally, I think the issue with modern is fundamental to modern design rules, and the way the format was set up. In fact, it's not even about color -- the color skew is just a symptom of WotC's design philosophy for standard and limited. We get amazing creatures, but no good stack interaction, and so green -- the color with the most efficient creatures -- is the best color in modern, bolstered by a campaign of banning out problematic combos. In contrast, colors like blue and black -- which rely on powerful interactive spells like counters and removal -- have suffered. Everything points to this being the case, from modern's color skew, to its historical issues with linear decks, and control continually under-performing.
What blue needs is for a paradigm shift to take place in Seattle. In fact, I'd go even further than that and say that Mark Rosewater confining stack interaction to blue's slice of the color pie was a major design **** up that the game is still feeling the effects of decades later, and it's at least as problematic as having card draw be confined to blue and black (as it was for a long time). As long as blue is the only color with stack interaction, it cannot be balanced relative to the other colors. It's akin to having creature removal only exist in one color. This is the root cause of all of these issues, and is what has led to the current design paradigm.
This is why I encouraged anyone who wants to play blue to play either MNBL or legacy, because even though they still suffer from the same overall design mistakes, blue has access to powerful enough spells in those formats to level the playing field between the colors and strategies. But unless there's a change in how cards a designed, I'm skeptical that we'll see a tier 1 control deck in modern in the foreseeable future. I mean, I don't think I've posted on this forum in a good two years, and the discussion is still almost exactly the same. That should probably tell you something.
1) If a deck plays even one card of a given color, it needs lands to play it. If a deck plays both lands and cards of a given color, it is that color. Infect is UG, Abzan is BGW, Jund is BRG etc. This includes cases like affinity and tron which are mostly colorless, because they still play colored lands and spells. This is the fairest way to break things down.
2) As the number of archetypes that are analysed increases, the effect of fringe cases decreases. From what I posted before based on kenshin's quick numbers, the skew is stable across both the whole format (with a high number of archetypes) and tier 1 (with a low number of archetypes). For the patty cake players out there, this indicates that counting decks like affinity as, say, UR isn't drastically decreasing the accuracy of the count. i.e. the numbers have a reasonable amount of validity.
Blue does have a tier 1 deck in infect (and let's be generous and throw affinity in there as well to give blue the best possible representation), but currently every single deck in the tier 1 mtgsalvation forums aside from affinity runs green. I'm sorry, but the numbers don't lie. Statistically, green players are unlikely to be any better at the game than any other color, so the over-prevalence of green is an indication that the color is too good relative to the rest of modern. I mean, people have been making arguments here about how green is a support color in X or Y deck, without realising that green is one of the few colors with the luxury of being both a primary color that wins games, and a supporting color. These are the same people who will tell you in one breath that blue is mainly a supporting color, and it's okay if it's just a tier 2 color, because the tiers are measures of popularity, not power. This is -- at best -- disingenuous, and at worst, an outright lie, since popularity is at least in part a function of a deck's strength.
I mean, the last excuse was twin, and now it's snapcaster, and blue being okay as a tier 2 color. Most of you just want to faceroll and call it skill, and the excuses for why it's okay that green be as prevalent in modern as blue is in legacy are just endless. As we all know, when the situations are reversed, the children howl.
The guys defending green in this thread are laughable; I actually got dumber reading some of these arguments, and I feel bad for kenshin because he has to read this drivel every day. Blue is in a bad spot, and green is probably the best color in the format. I've suspected this to be the case for a long, long time now, but I'm just a guy with an opinion. Personally, I think blue is still paying for its past sins, and that any players who enjoy playing blue should try MNBL instead. There's no home for blue in modern, not under current design rules.
Some people are in denial, and blue's slice of the color pie has earned a lot of scorn over the years, because deep down, those players know I'm right. I particularly liked the comment someone made that blue wasn't more difficult, just less forgiving. If a color is less forgiving, doesn't that by definition make it more difficult to play? But hey, who am I to criticize someone else's mental gymnastics?
You can still play it as your regular two drop creature by tutoring up an inkmoth and playing it, but you'll won't be able to pump as much on turn 3 unless you're holding a mutagenic growth or two. That said, I think theres a lot to be said for playing sylvan scrying in BUG, since I find myself losing to mana screw or color screw a lot of the time. I'm actually considering dropping plague stinger altogether, keeping the black splash for the side, and then running 2-3 sylvan scrying. I'm finding that stinger is generally the worst card in the deck.
I agree. I think at this stage the best way would be to treat it as a casual format for testing purposes. I think a small group of people would need to get together to organise the initial cutoff (i think invasion is the best, as this doesn't cut any blocks in half, and gives us counterspell, cool mechanics like madness, decks like tog and astral slide), and to put up a website that holds meta data, banlist, deckbuilding rules etc. I think the key point would be to take it slow and make sure the banlist is done right; one of modern's biggest issues is that the initial banlist was poorly thought out and arbitrary, and we're still dealing with the fallout of that. Once a banlist has been hashed out and tested pretty extensively, the format could then be rolled out to people the way TL was, hopefully with one or two pro articles supporting it.
Take it back to 7th/invasion like overextended, player run banlist, give new cards a 6 month probation before they can be banned, and do so only based on format data. French commander runs fine with a player run banlist. As long as there are clear standards set in place, and the decision-making process is reasonably transparent, I think people will be happy. Give them the meta data, so there isn't any confusion about what is actually happen. One of the things that annoys me more than it should is that I keep seeing inaccurate stats being thrown around, and being used to make decisions. That shouldn't happen.