Quote from Makaro »Quote from Shodai »Could someone inform me what Twisted Image is for in this deck? Is it really just there to be a cantrip and fill the graveyard for Cruise? Is there some sort of interaction I'm missing that makes it main deck material? I can only think of how it kills Spellskite, otherwise we are literally just play Reach Through Mists which doesn't seem like a card I want in my deck when I could Thought Scour.
kills Spellskite/Hierarch/Birds, does "damage" to creatures w/ higher power than toughness (getting Restoration Angel in to bolt range for example), sometimes protects your guys from removal, gives your Swiftspear 2 more power while drawing a card
There's also this really great interaction when someone flashes in Clique to block your flipped Delver and you make there Clique a 1/3.
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Im going to have to say no, they don't tend to encourage compact combo's. For instance look at decks like UR Wildfire which was a great standard blue based control deck, or Rainbow Efreet or Frenetic Efreet decks blue actually facilitates these kinds of decks in which you primarily look to answer all of your opponents threats, draw more cards than your opponent to ensure you can answer their threats and then use a either a very powerful affect like Wildfire which with the Signets would leave the blue mage with access to a considerable amount of mana and hopefully leaving the opponent with little or none and then sticking a powerful often expensive creature like Keiga, the Tide Star. These kinds of decks are actually more in line with what Blue has always done. Even Lock decks tend to play in very similar way, decks like Pickles played a long game to get to the lock out.
It would be more correct to say that compact combo's have often splashed for blue to gain access to the cheap card filtering and cantrip affects. Decks like Legacy Storm or Show and Tell are not that compact; one relies on a high velocity of spells being cast in a single turn and the other requires multiple pieces for the combo and counter magic to protect it which makes the combo not very compact at all.
Twin Combo is actually more like Channel Fireball combo, which was ran in what was otherwise a very fair looking decks because the 2 cards alone just win you the game so that you can draw one keep playing a fair game eventually you draw the other and you win. Most Channel Fireball combo decks were Green Red exactly so that you could simply cast extra Fireballs and such early off of elves. When I started playing magic my first deck was a RUG deck that ran Serendib Efreet , Erhnam Djinn and Birds of Paradise along a bunch of counterspells, burn spells and card draw and just jammed the Channel Fireball combo it was like 90% totally fair essentially Channel was the only unfair part of the combo since birds helped make Fireballs and disintegrates good anyways and you just play 4 channel's so you can have a opps I win card. Twin is really the only deck I've played since Channel combo decks that felt like that , I get to play a bunch of fair cards that probably don't cut it quite often enough to warrant a deck and get to have a opps I win card that is both a combo piece and just a card that is okay to cast without the other half of the combo.
Channel like Twin is such a low cost, just four cards that if you draw it with a specific card which you tend to run 6 to 8 of wins you the game on the spot if resolved. This is why Channel is banned in Legacy and Vintage but things like Storm are allowed to stay in the format. Combo's like Storm or Ad Naus carry with them deck design restrictions that are far heavier than that of Channel. Twin is similar in that the creature half of the combo is okay similar to Fireball/Disintegrate being okay on their own, not the best thing you could run by any measure but okay. Its the broken card that turns okay cards into instant wins. Neither deck needed win with the combo and could just get there by "fair" means but threatened to win on the spot at any given moment.
This is why I would also say that it is completely incorrect to say that no precedence for banning a card like Twin existed because it certainly did with the banning of Channel, and has been reaffirmed with the banning of Combo Cat.
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to quote you back at your self (and the "dude" i guess) that is your opinion man.
To me Twin is problematic in same way that Channel is, its a super easy to facilitate combo win that gets to slide into a otherwise fair deck. WotC has a history of banning out such cards, Channel, Twin, the Cat being the most recent. I played Twin from the start of the format and would jump right back on if it was unbanned but Me liking a deck doesn't mean the deck is healthy.
Only a very bias person would say that the format with Twin around was more diverse in regards to competitive decks. Can you find a copy of a deck that existed while Twin was around sure, but that doesn't mean it was a viable competitive option.
It is the constant stream of people who feel compelled to use any situation as a reason to say "bring back Twin" that is are constructing a false narrative. It wasn't that good they say, but it was. It wasn't unfair they say, but it was. It kept linear decks at bay, but it didn't. etc... it was a unfair combo deck that happens to be in my personal favorite colors but it wasn't something its not which is what people keep trying say it was.
Format has a problem Twin will fix it
If deck X is doing this unfair thing why can't we unban Twin and let me do a far better unfair thing?
got herpes? I heard Twin will fix that too.
etc...
Some people are obviously not over it being banend.
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I'll admit that UR deck diversity didn't increase after the ban and that is fine as it showcases the reality of how good Twin was and how bad the cards surrounding it actually are. Essentially every other deck that caught a ban survived as a viable deck because the core cards were still powerful enough to maintain a viable T1-2 deck, why not for the UR core of Twin? Only a single card banned and every other card becomes garbage?
It was noxious to fair decks imo, in a similar way to Pod but probably not quite as heavily.
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And the evidence is all of those years that Twin drifted in and out of T1 status, oh wait that never happened.
Twin was oppressive and would most likely reassert its oppressive status over the format.
Against the Aggro heavy slant of the format as is now, I imagine a more focused Combo build like the one that won the first Modern Pro tour would be the best build.
If WotC decides to unban channel in Legacy then I will think they might unban Twin as they represent the same kind of problems
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Discard was highly prevalent when twin was legal, it wasn't like Jund/Junk players just noticed TS/IoK after they banned Twin.
Only need to look at how good Twin was in ever meta-game while it was legal to know that it would still be the best combo deck in Modern.
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Nothing on the list helps mid-range with its current situations
those situations being that big mana is better than it was for the vast majority of Modern
And DS strategies being better at the attrition strategies and DS itself invalidates the mid-range creatures on board. Mid-range lives and dies by its threats trumping and invalidating opposing threats Jund was great when the best aggro threats were Goblin Guide, Swiftspear, and Nacatl, slamming Gofy and friends was effective at stonewalling those while playing the aggro role against slower decks. Those days are gone 1c.c. 5/5's and T2-4 Eldrazi threats with relevant abilities have either provided aggro trumps to Jund mid-range's threats while using all of its traditional discard/removal against it and even adding Denial and Eldrazi just has better mid-range threats period.
Perhaps if you can't beat them join them is in order and Jund Mid-range players should be dropping R for 0 in favor of a Eldrazi threats over what red adds.
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the real question would be then would it be okay for WotC to print cards more powerful or equally as powerful as TS/IoK? Currently unless you are playing a highly redundant deck like Burn, Merfolk etc.. in which you are essentially playing 12-18 copies of the same affect, Essentially every color is mostly a splash color outside of black. Even UW control which has a fantastic DS match up does so by overloading on removal affects to the point in which the deck is soft to anything that isn't centered around creatures.
WU both need a slew of spells that actually compete with TS/IoK in regards to deck design to actually creep up from splash color status. Most of the cards that are MD worthy in both of those colors are very old and don't nearly reach the level of what Black has to offer.
I personally do not care about "balance" between colors, imo something is always going to be superior to the rest of the options available and its strict dominance will invalidate the types of strategies that it is naturally dominate against.
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TS/IoK don't cause people to make sub-optimal plays? I would say that the hyper prevalence of 1cc targeted non-conditional discard has created a "use it or lose it" format in which you cannot play certain types of strategies in any way but sub-optimally. This idea that TS/IoK are benign cards is really unwarranted imo, I am not saying that they should be banned but this intentional mass delusion that people seem to have that these very powerful cards have no affect on the meta-game and the way games play out and hence the types of strategies that are viable is really strange. It is almost as if admitting that TS/IoK have like almost anything in life positive and negative qualities would some how make them vanish from the face of the earth.
Would it for example be okay for WotC to print a card that is stronger than TS?
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Infect was in the same boat as Burn, it can be difficult to compare some of the current aggro decks because while they did exist in some form many of them rely on cards that didn't exist while Pod was legal things like the revolt Burning Tree, or the Surge +1/+0 guy etc.. they didn't have the critical mass of redundant affects to warrant seeing near as much play as they did. Burn and Infect both suffered because of Pod and essentially that was a match up that you just had to hope to not be paired against. I point this out because people will incorrectly point to Twin as the reason these decks didn't see as much play when in fact both Infect and Burn type hyper linear aggro/combo decks are a good choice against Twin because against a deck like Twin you only have a few options of effective strategies going under the combo which Infect and Burn could and would do, BGx attrition strategies with access to targeted discard and Abrupt decay, or going over the the deck with a Control deck but this was a probably the least effective of the strategies as Combo decks are favored against pure control because a single instance of answer not matching up to threat will result in a instant loss. I would consider the combo v combo match up as near even and draw dependent.
Pod was simply the best creature deck since it was a tool box of the best creatures and two of the best combos which happen to share 2/3rds of the required pieces. It was the infinite life combo that invalidated Burn/Zoo strategies as they simply cannot win through the opponent gaining a arbitrarily large amount of life, and infect was invalidated by the set up for the combo including Melira as a key piece.
The version of Pod you pointed to was the "inbreed" highly meta-gamed version of Pod which like in many meta-games is a instance of a strictly dominate strategy being so focused on the Mirror that it would give up the natural edge it would have against other dominated strategies in the format. This happens all the time a deck is so good that the mirror becomes highly prevalent and it becomes vulnerable to some of the strategies in which it was dominating in its previous incarnations.
I would also point out that Burn and Infect not becoming T1 instantly after the ban doesn't really prove anything to your point. Essentially every deck takes some measure of time for players to gravitate towards it unless it has a "break out" event to push it into a sudden high profile status, look at Grixis Shadow, it was considered a fine deck prior to its break out event's the deck itself hadn't really changed much it was just that most players will not invest time and energy into a deck that hasn't "proven" its dominate status. It simply took time for enough players to gravitate towards Infect which had previously been a known weakly dominated strategy prior to the banning.
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First 24 is very close to the needed 26 needed to run 3 4cc spells and I would imagine that a deck like Grixis Shadow would only want 1-2 putting it at closer to 24 than 26.
Again how would brainstorming every turn in a attrition deck be bad? how would fate sealing your opponents draw step in top deck wars would be bad? Jace would see play in every U deck that isn't running some wonky card intensive combo and DS would easily accommodate some number of him likely 1 of.
Now if your done asserting things with absolutely nothing to support your assumption thanks.