BR Vampires are being brewed for standard and it looks like they have a real shot at being a thing, since 3 colors will be hard to do, and BR has one of the best instants available to standard (Kommand). With the vampires being spoiled the deck is almost building itself.
In modern, though, the synergy looks a mite expensive to really explode. the tribe needs lords, or at the very least some kind of acceleration like how elves has heritage druid.
without these, its going to be hard to do better than even, say, bogles or mono G stompy.
Thank you for disagreeing with me in a way that does not assume that I have never played Modern or suffered a recent massive head injury.
For what it's worth, I'm not saying they're definitely good. I'm saying they're interesting to look at and less tedious to discuss than the enormous arguments over scalable Steam Augury.
for tribals to be competitive there needs to be some extremely potent synergy that sets them apart, as individually they have no hope standing againt modern's powerhouses like the iconic goyf
the most succesfull tribal is ofc merfolk due to the unique advantage of having 2 cmc lords and being in the right (or wrong) color, than it's elves due to the tons of mana + Ezuri, Renegade Leader synergy and having the fortune of being in the CoCo color
vampires have no such edge unfortunately, their tribal synergies are thin and their lords overcosted, while black has only disruption to offer, so not really, unless something completely crazy gets printed they're doom to being a casual tribe
generally the crash tests for Modern are Jund and affinity: Jund is naturally favored against such creature decks (resilience standard),while affinity sets the speed standard
I'm having trouble dealing with this much misguided condescension. I'm going to try to make a reasonable post in response.
I am well aware of all of those things. Very nearly everyone already knows all of those things. I am well aware that synergistic decks have to do a lot to challenge Tarmogoyf. I am well aware that they would not be a faster deck than Affinity. Everyone who has ever played a single game of Modern is aware of those things. Don't assume that people are incompetent so readily, it makes you look like a shmuck.
My point, entirely, was that several vampires with strong tribal synergy that could allow them to compete were just spoiled, and may be "something completely crazy", or at least good enough to promote a decent tier 2/2.5 deck that can be fun at FNMs and occasionally surprise a larger event.
Falkenrath Gorger, Indulgent Tormentor, and Olivia's Bloodsworn are all cheap vampires that synergize well with other vampires, including powerful but fringe cards that lacked a good shell like Bloodghast, Blood Artist, andVampire Nighthawk, as well as known good cards like Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet and Olivia Voldaren. I'm sure there are other interesting cards I could point out, but I'm logging out of MtGS now instead of digging deeper because I don't think my psychological state needs to have a big goofy argument about fake vampires on the internet.
Is that Flinthoof Boar trading in the condiontal +1/+1 for flying, a relevant tribe, and the ability to haste other creates in that tribe as well as itself?
I guess it can't block, but that's not too much of a drawback in the decks that would want to play it.
It also exiles, unlike Pulse, which can be a huge deal.
I wouldn't say that it's always better, though. Abzan decks will likely want to consider the metagame a lot before deciding between the two. Not losing life and sometimes killing multiple things are both pretty big upsides for Pulse, exile and instant-speed are both big upsides for Unmaking, and which of the two sets is more valuable at the moment will decide which ones take that slot.
If there are enough cheap, easy to trigger transform creatures, this could actually be playable in constructed, even possibly Modern. 1to play and equip is incredibly cheap for +3/+3 and First Strike. Unfortunately, it's probably not very good with Delver (Which you want to flip before you can equip anything to it), but the new discard vampire is strong with it.
Relentless Dead is an excellent card and I can't wait to run it in mediocre zombie brews.
And hey, maybe they'll accidentally zombies in this block like they accidentally Eldrazi in the last one? Probably not to the same degree, but if they're willing to print something like Relentless Dead, my hopes are up.
I legitimately might have to start running U in my jank zombie brew for Compelling Deterrence. It can't hit a land, but is otherwise just directly better than Recoil in decks running Gravecrawler.
I think people are misunderstanding how a metagame works.
The decks that beat Eldrazi don't have to beat the entire rest of the format to be good in a format with lots of Eldrazi. Choosing a deck with a strong matchup against one or two major decks, but an even or poor matchup against the rest of the format, is an entirely reasonable option.
You also don't have to personally play those decks for them to stabilize the metagame. Don't like playing Ensnaring Bridge? Well, when all the bridge decks jump in to beat Eldrazi, play a deck that beats those decks.
That's what a healthy metagame looks like. No deck beats every deck. Once Eldrazi's predators start coming out in force, decks that beat those decks can start to flourish, especially if Eldrazi has to compromise its strategy to gain ground against Bridge. And boom, once you have three types of decks that all beat each other, you have the core of a metagame. T2 decks start finding weird niches, BGx starts having a 50% matchup against the entire field besides one deck again (Now Eldrazi instead of Tron, though I don't think Tron stops existing or anything, just becomes less relevant), weird combo and Affinity steal games from players who don't expect them, and everything goes back to how it was but with a bunch of the positions shuffled around.
So, here's my analysis of how this occurred, and why I think the problem is overblown:
1: A new viable deck is introduced to Modern via BfZ. Most people don't realize its potential immediately, and while it sees some successes, it isn't really given the metagame consideration it deserves besides a few excited murmurs amongst brewers.
2: A major, format-defining deck is essentially banned out of existence. The metagame scrambles to react to this, primarily by focusing on extremely linear strategies that are powerful, but not difficult to hate out.
3: A larger number of viable cards for the new deck are released simultaneously, but pull it in a pretty different direction, leaving two new powerful archetypes that, while very similar, take different tools to combat.
4: While the broader metagame does not have time to adapt to this change, multiple professional players do. Noting a lack of effective hate to the new strategy, and a very predictable metagame, they enter the Pro Tour with decks that are all-in on vomiting out Eldrazi, with little interaction outside of one extremely powerful hate card that takes out most of the linear decks that had just overtaken the meta.
5: This strategy works for these pros, and for the few others who picked up the deck. The community notes that said strategy works, and, quite honestly, is both a cool deck designed around playing big nasty aliens, and very fresh in a Modern meta that is otherwise hard to break into. It thus sees huge amounts of play and price-spiking, in a rather intense flavor-of-the-month effect.
This might be wrong, but I don't really think so. Eldrazi is a powerful new strategy, but it is nothing above what Modern has historically dealt with. The metagame will adapt. It may be somewhat slow to do so, due to the sheer amount of fear and hype around the deck, but I strongly believe that it will.
I really feel like Eldrazi in general is weak to lockdown strategies. They generally have no way of dealing with resolved enchantments/artifacts, especially when combined with land hate. When I was testing my (Admittedly not-optimal, but still pretty close to what ended up winning the PT) Aggro-Drazi list, the decks that generally beat me were the ones that just said "No, you don't get to do things".
Guys, the top 8 was dominated by pro-tour teams playing identical decks. That's not the same thing as a single deck organically dominating.
The format will adjust. Hell, it'll probably over-adjust to what is almost certainly an atypical result for the format as a whole.
I kind of disagree. Two top teams both came up with a similar deck - the UR Eldrazi deck and the Colourless Eldrazi deck, and one of the people who top 8'd who wasn't on a team at all also more or less ran a deck with the same engine.
That has to show that the engine of the deck is very strong.
"Very strong", sure. Not "Incredibly broken such that it is impossible for the metagame to adapt".
The Pro Tour metagame almost always has a deeply atypical metagame, and sometimes that leads to weird top 8's. A larger, more representative sample size is needed before we can proclaim anything whatsoever about the health of Modern.
Thank you for disagreeing with me in a way that does not assume that I have never played Modern or suffered a recent massive head injury.
For what it's worth, I'm not saying they're definitely good. I'm saying they're interesting to look at and less tedious to discuss than the enormous arguments over scalable Steam Augury.
I'm having trouble dealing with this much misguided condescension. I'm going to try to make a reasonable post in response.
I am well aware of all of those things. Very nearly everyone already knows all of those things. I am well aware that synergistic decks have to do a lot to challenge Tarmogoyf. I am well aware that they would not be a faster deck than Affinity. Everyone who has ever played a single game of Modern is aware of those things. Don't assume that people are incompetent so readily, it makes you look like a shmuck.
My point, entirely, was that several vampires with strong tribal synergy that could allow them to compete were just spoiled, and may be "something completely crazy", or at least good enough to promote a decent tier 2/2.5 deck that can be fun at FNMs and occasionally surprise a larger event.
Falkenrath Gorger, Indulgent Tormentor, and Olivia's Bloodsworn are all cheap vampires that synergize well with other vampires, including powerful but fringe cards that lacked a good shell like Bloodghast, Blood Artist, andVampire Nighthawk, as well as known good cards like Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet and Olivia Voldaren. I'm sure there are other interesting cards I could point out, but I'm logging out of MtGS now instead of digging deeper because I don't think my psychological state needs to have a big goofy argument about fake vampires on the internet.
Having Indulgent Aristocrat, Bloodghast, and Blood Artist in the same deck seems pretty fun.
I guess it can't block, but that's not too much of a drawback in the decks that would want to play it.
I wouldn't say that it's always better, though. Abzan decks will likely want to consider the metagame a lot before deciding between the two. Not losing life and sometimes killing multiple things are both pretty big upsides for Pulse, exile and instant-speed are both big upsides for Unmaking, and which of the two sets is more valuable at the moment will decide which ones take that slot.
Both work well with Gravecrawler, Relentless Dead, and Geralf's Messenger, though, so obviously I want both.
And hey, maybe they'll accidentally zombies in this block like they accidentally Eldrazi in the last one? Probably not to the same degree, but if they're willing to print something like Relentless Dead, my hopes are up.
The decks that beat Eldrazi don't have to beat the entire rest of the format to be good in a format with lots of Eldrazi. Choosing a deck with a strong matchup against one or two major decks, but an even or poor matchup against the rest of the format, is an entirely reasonable option.
You also don't have to personally play those decks for them to stabilize the metagame. Don't like playing Ensnaring Bridge? Well, when all the bridge decks jump in to beat Eldrazi, play a deck that beats those decks.
That's what a healthy metagame looks like. No deck beats every deck. Once Eldrazi's predators start coming out in force, decks that beat those decks can start to flourish, especially if Eldrazi has to compromise its strategy to gain ground against Bridge. And boom, once you have three types of decks that all beat each other, you have the core of a metagame. T2 decks start finding weird niches, BGx starts having a 50% matchup against the entire field besides one deck again (Now Eldrazi instead of Tron, though I don't think Tron stops existing or anything, just becomes less relevant), weird combo and Affinity steal games from players who don't expect them, and everything goes back to how it was but with a bunch of the positions shuffled around.
1: A new viable deck is introduced to Modern via BfZ. Most people don't realize its potential immediately, and while it sees some successes, it isn't really given the metagame consideration it deserves besides a few excited murmurs amongst brewers.
2: A major, format-defining deck is essentially banned out of existence. The metagame scrambles to react to this, primarily by focusing on extremely linear strategies that are powerful, but not difficult to hate out.
3: A larger number of viable cards for the new deck are released simultaneously, but pull it in a pretty different direction, leaving two new powerful archetypes that, while very similar, take different tools to combat.
4: While the broader metagame does not have time to adapt to this change, multiple professional players do. Noting a lack of effective hate to the new strategy, and a very predictable metagame, they enter the Pro Tour with decks that are all-in on vomiting out Eldrazi, with little interaction outside of one extremely powerful hate card that takes out most of the linear decks that had just overtaken the meta.
5: This strategy works for these pros, and for the few others who picked up the deck. The community notes that said strategy works, and, quite honestly, is both a cool deck designed around playing big nasty aliens, and very fresh in a Modern meta that is otherwise hard to break into. It thus sees huge amounts of play and price-spiking, in a rather intense flavor-of-the-month effect.
This might be wrong, but I don't really think so. Eldrazi is a powerful new strategy, but it is nothing above what Modern has historically dealt with. The metagame will adapt. It may be somewhat slow to do so, due to the sheer amount of fear and hype around the deck, but I strongly believe that it will.
"Very strong", sure. Not "Incredibly broken such that it is impossible for the metagame to adapt".
The Pro Tour metagame almost always has a deeply atypical metagame, and sometimes that leads to weird top 8's. A larger, more representative sample size is needed before we can proclaim anything whatsoever about the health of Modern.
The format will adjust. Hell, it'll probably over-adjust to what is almost certainly an atypical result for the format as a whole.