On the one hand, I respect a healthy dose of uncertainty and hesitation regarding Counterspell. It's a powerful card and could make a big impact, perhaps too big, on the format. On the other hand, the alarmism around the card is nuts. So are suggestions that Modern was deliberately designed around CS or that pre-8th cards are necessarily too strong for the format. It's the exact same anti-blue and anti-control hyperbole we saw with BB, AV, and Sword unban opponents; look how that turned out for the doomsayers.
I don't know if CS is the card Modern actually needs, but I'm relatively confident it wouldn't be nearly as broken as people here are claiming.
It's not that it's broken.
It's that it's unfun to be on the receiving end of it all.
And hell, it's actually kinda boring just twiddling two sources of Blue mana to threaten a counterspell.
Also I really don't want to reward people for playing Cavern of Souls. That card only gets stronger with each maindeckable counterspell that sees play.
I play UB Faeries, counterspells are my bread and butter, I live to ruin the opponent's plan at any step of the game. So when I say Counterspell the card is nothing but an invitation for attendance drops, excessive feelbads and disturbing metagame developments, at the very least I don't want people to accuse me of being some privileged linear aggro deck in an attempt to dismiss my opinions.
If you don't have the top players with tiebreakers and high level play skills on fair decks then you aren't likely to see these fair decks at the top all the time. I wouldn't be super worried about it. If a bunch of pros were on Jund or Nahiri then that would have better showings.
Maybe a lot of those pros decided against it because the coin-flip possibility of simply walking away with game 1 in the first 3 turns. And that the speed advantage outweighs having to fight through someone else's fast linear deck in hopes that the "answers" deck can get there over 15 rounds + Top 8.
Honestly some of the pros on twitter cannot stomach Modern in it's current state at the GP level, Ben Stark wishes it's removed from GPs and Kai Budde realized how stupid he was for wanting the format to stay on the Pro Tour.
If your primary source of income is competitive Magic, you have an incentive to complain about a format being too big and wide-open.
No wonder Wizards doesn't listen to the masses. (At least LSV and Gaby agreed it was unfair.)
Fair/Unfair was the subject of a FoF, and I came real close to screaming at my monitor that the problem with calling things fair/unfair right now is that overwhelmingly it seems that it's
>fair is anything I have a positive matchup rate against
>unfair is anything I have a negative matchup rate against
The whole thing is really arbitrary and varies based on the individuals inevitably-biased idea of what constitutes fair Magic. At some point it apparently became accepted that BANT ELDRAZI is a fair deck; BANT ELDRAZI, still capable of the occasional TURN 2 TKS TURN 3 REALITY SMASHER curve-out, is a fair deck!
Sometimes it kills me what kind of language is used to talk about Magic, because it just seems perfectly engineered to breed some form of stupidity. I recall LSV having a slip of the tongue and lumping Modern in with eternal formats, you know what that unintentionally adds fuel to the fire to? Those inane requests that Modern have an alternative channel for card influx that sidesteps Standard, something that makes sense for an eternal format but is incompatible with the particular quirk of Modern's design (that only Standard-legal cards can enter the format) that BY DEFINITION MAKES IT IMPOSSIBLE TO CALL AN ETERNAL FORMAT.
Now that I've gotten those triggers off the stack, I think it needs to be emphasized, AS IT ALWAYS SHOULD, that everyone is bad at Magic.
Everyone.
Even the people who are good at Magic are bad at it.
...that all being said, I appreciate the intent of the segment, and I actually think it should stay. I just also happen to think it's pretty much a goldmine of garbage opinions to roast and ridicule people over.
I would've rather had an actual game than
>is there something relevant on the opponent's top?
>yes? mill it, go back to the beginning
>no? untap, play stuff that doesn't actually advance the game state, and go back to the beginning
Venarian Glimmer is hilarious up until you realize that instant speed isn't worth the amount of mana you have to dump into ganking a card, unless you're playing kitchentable Magic or you really want to handicap yourself against less capable opponents.
If it came with another effect attached, or hell if it made the opponent discard all nonland cards of cmc <= x, then maybe it'd be more than a novelty card.
But as is it's just a novelty card.
I'd sooner try and make Pongify work, and Pongify is one of the jankiest novelty spells that Timespiral block ever gave to Blue.
So what is a stranger decision? Reprinting Splinter Twin 8 months before banning it, or reprinting Deceiver Exarch 8 months after? I'd love to believe there is something smart going on behind the scenes, but it's probably just a decision made before the ban and production was already in process. Oh well.
Obviously it's a sign they're going to ban DExarch.
Sell off Inquisition of Kozilek for half tcgplayer Medium price or take the hit from reprint? I'm thinking hold since it will cost me about what I sell them for to pickup a set latter.
Looks like original art Inquisitions will stay somewhat higher than CN2 version. Subjective, I know, but the new art is really ugly. I can't even tell what it's supposed to look like.
It's a guy under Kozilek's control (implied by the bone-white face mask and floaty triangle weirdness above his head) violently headbutting himself, presumably a visualization of the struggle the guy is having within his mind to resist Kozilek's bad cop / worse cop routine.
I'm kinda on-off between it and the original art from ROE which was just "interplanar fleshy crack in space-time massages local bald man at an agreeable cost."
You can stay salty.
I don't want it. Nobody needs it.
Vulgar display, Wizards. Absolutely hideous. I enjoy a nice rousing game of no fun allowed myself but this is not cool by far.
Well, Amalgam is their biggest free creature.
Golgari Grave-Troll dredges for 6 and can get huge if they decide to play a fair game, and spot removal options for us don't exactly have much of a way to shut down regen on a 5 mana creature of arbitrary p/t.
Faithless Looting lets them dredge twice and/or set up two future dredges, and can be flashed back on the third mana source, and Ross Merriam pegged it as the card to ban to nerf Dredge.
I think the actual correct move is to board in both boardwipes and something that shuts down the Narcomoeba-Bloodghast-Amalgam parade that'll kill you early. Like, I dunno, a mix of Damnation plus Kalitas sounds like it'd do a number, assuming you can survive long enough to stabilize with 4cmc spells.
It's not that it's broken.
It's that it's unfun to be on the receiving end of it all.
And hell, it's actually kinda boring just twiddling two sources of Blue mana to threaten a counterspell.
Also I really don't want to reward people for playing Cavern of Souls. That card only gets stronger with each maindeckable counterspell that sees play.
I play UB Faeries, counterspells are my bread and butter, I live to ruin the opponent's plan at any step of the game. So when I say Counterspell the card is nothing but an invitation for attendance drops, excessive feelbads and disturbing metagame developments, at the very least I don't want people to accuse me of being some privileged linear aggro deck in an attempt to dismiss my opinions.
If your primary source of income is competitive Magic, you have an incentive to complain about a format being too big and wide-open.
Fair/Unfair was the subject of a FoF, and I came real close to screaming at my monitor that the problem with calling things fair/unfair right now is that overwhelmingly it seems that it's
>fair is anything I have a positive matchup rate against
>unfair is anything I have a negative matchup rate against
The whole thing is really arbitrary and varies based on the individuals inevitably-biased idea of what constitutes fair Magic. At some point it apparently became accepted that BANT ELDRAZI is a fair deck; BANT ELDRAZI, still capable of the occasional TURN 2 TKS TURN 3 REALITY SMASHER curve-out, is a fair deck!
Sometimes it kills me what kind of language is used to talk about Magic, because it just seems perfectly engineered to breed some form of stupidity. I recall LSV having a slip of the tongue and lumping Modern in with eternal formats, you know what that unintentionally adds fuel to the fire to? Those inane requests that Modern have an alternative channel for card influx that sidesteps Standard, something that makes sense for an eternal format but is incompatible with the particular quirk of Modern's design (that only Standard-legal cards can enter the format) that BY DEFINITION MAKES IT IMPOSSIBLE TO CALL AN ETERNAL FORMAT.
Now that I've gotten those triggers off the stack, I think it needs to be emphasized, AS IT ALWAYS SHOULD, that everyone is bad at Magic.
Everyone.
Even the people who are good at Magic are bad at it.
...that all being said, I appreciate the intent of the segment, and I actually think it should stay. I just also happen to think it's pretty much a goldmine of garbage opinions to roast and ridicule people over.
In the form of MLG montage parodies.
With copious amount of air horn.
What exactly is the numerical value of "AirSe" supposed to be?
>is there something relevant on the opponent's top?
>yes? mill it, go back to the beginning
>no? untap, play stuff that doesn't actually advance the game state, and go back to the beginning
I'd rather watch Eggs go off.
If it came with another effect attached, or hell if it made the opponent discard all nonland cards of cmc <= x, then maybe it'd be more than a novelty card.
But as is it's just a novelty card.
I'd sooner try and make Pongify work, and Pongify is one of the jankiest novelty spells that Timespiral block ever gave to Blue.
Just saying.
Obviously it's a sign they're going to ban DExarch.
Obviously.
It's a guy under Kozilek's control (implied by the bone-white face mask and floaty triangle weirdness above his head) violently headbutting himself, presumably a visualization of the struggle the guy is having within his mind to resist Kozilek's bad cop / worse cop routine.
I'm kinda on-off between it and the original art from ROE which was just "interplanar fleshy crack in space-time massages local bald man at an agreeable cost."
ayy lmao
But seriously I love *****posting accounts like these, reading the post history is good for a quick chuckle.
You can stay salty.
I don't want it. Nobody needs it.
Vulgar display, Wizards. Absolutely hideous. I enjoy a nice rousing game of no fun allowed myself but this is not cool by far.
It doesn't even stop creatures.
NO.
SHUT UP.
WE DON'T NEED IT.
WE DON'T NEED PSEUDO-CHALICE EFFECTS. ESPECIALLY THOSE THAT DON'T STOP CREATURES.
JUST NO.
N.O.P.E.
Like seriously what kind of sicko makes this kind of card?
Is there some sort of D&T agenda being pushed behind the scenes?
Time to crash this $5 value into the ground super hard.
Well it has no evasion.
It enters tapped when resurrected.
It's a Blue spell in Modern.
...it's totally fair!
I think I got ripped off for selling mine at $24.99.
I could've gotten a Serum Visions worth of extra profit the way people are hiking what's left on TCGPlayer.
Golgari Grave-Troll dredges for 6 and can get huge if they decide to play a fair game, and spot removal options for us don't exactly have much of a way to shut down regen on a 5 mana creature of arbitrary p/t.
Faithless Looting lets them dredge twice and/or set up two future dredges, and can be flashed back on the third mana source, and Ross Merriam pegged it as the card to ban to nerf Dredge.
I think the actual correct move is to board in both boardwipes and something that shuts down the Narcomoeba-Bloodghast-Amalgam parade that'll kill you early. Like, I dunno, a mix of Damnation plus Kalitas sounds like it'd do a number, assuming you can survive long enough to stabilize with 4cmc spells.