MTG Salvation

Quote from wpgstevo »

I've also often argued that blue decks are underrepresented, at least in part, because of a much bigger spread in the skill ceiling vs skill floor for the decks. It's a really nuanced part of the discussion, and frequently online its not the lowest hanging fruit and is therefore passed over for more binary arguments that are easily supported/rejected.

The fact that some people have said stuff like 'only cory burkhart' can play grixis demonstrates that people are even aware of this, and yet ignore it when discussing the decks.

No one is going to argue that burn is harder to play than Uxx reactive decks. However, most people just equate 'harder to play' with 'worse' - which is a mistake and lacks nuance. Sometimes 'harder to play' does mean 'worse', but not always. Some decks just have many more decisions, which is a big part of it.

It's a challenging topic because we really don't have a way to incorporate how challenging a deck is to pilot with its tiering. I think amulet bloom is the most obvious example of deck that is hard to play, but has a very high skill ceiling that only the most dedicated and talented pilots can ever see.

Quote from Wraithpk »

Quote from Kovo »

Talk about cognitive dissonance! Im not denying blue isnt in the high tiers. But Im also not going to keep repeating myself.

And would you like to take a stab on why blue decks aren't in the high tiers?

Quote from Kovo »

70+ matches online with a 68% win rate. Im not just spitting bull***** here. You can play good blue decks and win.

If you're doing that well with Temur Delver online, where are all your comp league 5-0s? And to be clear, you're playing against bad players or decks if you have a 68% win rate online and 70%+ in paper. When MTGGoldfish did their data dump on Modern matchups a year and a half ago, the deck with the best win rate was only at 57%. The ever oppressive UR Twin only had a 53% win rate. Interestingly, Temur Delver was a deck at the time, and its win rate according to their data sample, which is a lot bigger than yours, was 46%. In that time, Temur Delver lost Probe and the meta became much more hostile towards blue decks, so my intuition is that it would be even worse than that now. So yeah, either you play against really bad players or you're secretly Jon Finkle and trolling us all on these boards.

Quote from Spsiegel1987 »

Kovo, even though you may not mean to, it's very much condescending to point the finger and wag it while saying, "All you netdeckers!"

Not everyone likes to brew, and it's insulting to hear you say, "hey, brah, come up with a deck of your own instead, brah".

I don't like brewing, like, at all. I have a lot of fun tweaking numbers and optimizing them for the meta, but I want to focus more on playing, not creating the deck. Same with videogames, I'll let someone else innovate and follow closely with whats proven and works (this goes for anything, fighting games, FPS, etc).

Quote from cfusionpm »

I can 4-0 with Grixis Delver too. FNMs are all over the place in terms of decks and skill levels, and it's really easy to dodge bad match ups. Last time I played, I beat up on small creature decks all night (Infect, Bant Company, Affinity, and Burn). The true testament of a deck's power and consistency is how well it does over 9-16 rounds. And in that setting, outside of a few flukes and oddball cases, blue Snapcaster decks generally get their teeth kicked in.

Quote from jwf239 »

Quote from Kovo »

Quote from jwf239 »

Quote from cfusionpm »

Quote from Kovo »

That deck already exists. And I play it, a lot. And I win, a lot. And Im not even a pro with it, yet.

That must be why it shows up in so many GP and SCG Top 8/16/32s, right?

If a deck actually existed like that with the strengths you claim, it would be putting up the results to show it. Good decks rise to the top in popularity because players who want to win play good decks.

No, we are all just bad players because blue is so skill intensive no magic player has learned to master it yet. In a few years I'm sure we will see monkey gro take over the format as all of us complaining blue mages learn all the in and outs of the deck...


I seriously don't get how people can think there isn't any problem here but apparently wizards agrees so we must be the crazy ones. You and most people on this forum know that spikes want the best chance to win and don't care about color or deck bias. These are pros that have tons of time to learn every trick of every deck in the format. Anyone that can claim with a straight face that blue mages just need to practice harder are delusional.

Keep that attitude. I guess its working for you. Spikes play whatever gives them the easiest wins. If all you do is follow pros and play what they play, I find you will continually find yourself being disappointed.

People who think pros have (or should have) the final say on what should be played, are delusional.

I'm not saying pros should have the final say in what should be played at all, and in fact many of them don't care about modern and will gladly hop on "the best" deck. Totally willing to admit that. But you said rug delver is better with more practice. Great, don't you think Jund is better the more you practice with it also? There is always a bit of an over correction to the best deck by players that don't want to put in the work and just want what is collectively going to give them the most wins. So of course there are some decks whose win rates are better than their meta share suggests it should be. RUG delver may be one of those (bant CoCo from a few months ago comes to mind) but each deck has a certain likelihood of winning against each other deck and play testing really only maximizes your chances inside those percentages. As ktshinx already stated previously, you are improving your odds of winning testing with inferior decks, but you aren't improving your odds as much as if you were playing with a better deck to begin with.

I play BW deadguy ale as my main deck and I have UW tallowisp spirits with disrupting shoal and shining shoal, bant CoCo, grixis delver, abzan company, and a GW hardened scales human tribal deck. I've gone undefeated with each of these decks at least once at FNMs. Clearly not listening exclusively to what pros are saying but to discount them completely as some big inbred meta fest is clearly ignoring a huge part of the equation, which is reactive decks are just worse than proactive ones. I don't even care about color balance or getting a new deck myself, I just want to be able to watch some interactive matches every once in awhile. Watching the SCG Indy open was just thrilling watching a bunch of DS mirrors.

Quote from Kruphix7 »

I have never played with or against RUG Delver and as others have stated I haven't seen notable results from the deck posted anywhere, but lets all remember that every deck from DS Jund to Eldrazi started off as some person's jank brew until other people picked it up and it got enough interest and spotlight to be refined and perfected by the community. If Kovo's doing well with the deck than I say good for him and I hope we can see it put up some results somewhere because an interactive blue deck would be a breath of fresh air that many people have been asking for. I'm not saying anyone is actually wrong in the current debate, high performing and highly played decks are high performing and highly played because they have proven success and saying "people are uncreative" is not fair to all the brewers. However to say that just because something doesn't have top tier results yet it is bad is also not fair. BW Eldrazi processors was a cute pet deck until it morphed into heartless summoning eldrazi and ate the format.

Quote from Spsiegel1987 »

It's true that blue is bad, but the format as a whole looks good, and full of diversity. Oh, well. I was very for the preordain/SFM unban, but after reading Todd Stevens article I had a feeling there'd be no unbans.

Quote from Lord Seth »

Quote from Kovo »

I see. Well, you are allowed to have your own private set of rules and regulations on what is and isnt interactive.

Just as you are apparently allowed to evade every single point I bring up, which you have been quite an expert on doing, it seems.

But I do wonder what is private about it. If Liliana of the Veil is interaction, then so is Karn. If Wrath of God is interaction, then so are Ugin and Oblivion Stone. If Collective Brutality is interaction... well, then Collective Brutality is interaction. Or are you arguing that Liliana of the Veil and Wrath of God aren't interaction?

I think the general consensus here on the board is in disagreement with you.

People are, I believe, confusing the level of interaction someone can have with Tron and the level of interaction that Tron itself engages in.

Quote from cfusionpm »

Quote from ashtonkutcher »

Quote from Wraithpk »

Quote from h0lydiva »

So in the face of them banning Splinter Twin, the card itself, the combo enabler, the one that names the deck, explaining in several ways how it was too strong, contrary to what they have done mostly in any other ban in which such core card existed... you refuse to accept that they might just wanted to kill it dead.

Why would they do that, though? Stoddard even said in that article that they look to diminish decks instead of outright killing them, and their bans throughout the existence of Modern bear that out. The only ban before Twin that pretty much killed a deck was Second Sunrise pretty much killing Eggs, but that's because the deck was creating logistical problems in tournaments. Every other deck that's been hit with a ban has continued in some form that's still in the Tier 1 - Tier 3 range. And Twin wasn't even the most toxic deck in the history of Modern, Eldrazi and Dredge were both worse for the format by far.

The biggest tell, though, is how Stoddard said in his article "unfortunately, we didn't have any other options with Twin." That screams to me that it didn't even occur to them to ban Exarch. Things like this and AF's comment about Sword of the Meek being played in Lantern really leads me to believe that they don't have a very good pulse on Modern.

One obvious possibility is that they don't want Modern to be a bluefest like Legacy. Stoddard saying they didn't have other options suggests to me that they did want to kill Twin dead, since Exarch is such an obvious option itself.

"We considered what one would do with the cards from a Splinter Twin deck with Splinter Twin banned. In the case of some Jeskai or Temur, there are very similar decks to build. In other cases, there is Kiki-Jiki as a replacement."

http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/news/january-18-2016-banned-and-restricted-announcement-2016-01-18

Quote from Kovo »

When is the next B&R?

Quote from Spsiegel1987 »

It's most likely Bauble or Street Wraith.

The deck operates on 18 land, it needs the zero mana cantrips, it makes the deck and it's opening hands incredibly consistent and makes most games play out the same way, which is against WOTC's regulation against cantrips in modern

It is HIGHLY unlikely they ban Shadow itself