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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I hardly think that someone attempting to force a thought experiment is a cry to remove them but is instead to enlighten people as to the impact they actually have on how formats play out and what types of strategies are viable.
I'm in favor of WotC printing spells that would actually rival TS/IoK in other colors preferably U since controlling elements is supposed to be a segment of its slice of the color pie that it is intended to excel at. But TS/IoK are the status quo and I doubt that if a new non-black attrition based spell that rivaled and competed for deck space in a meaningful way it would be rejected and banned after the out cries of people being mad that suddenly their targeted discard is slightly diminished in its status as best thing.
I agree with the rest of your statement entirely, getting rid of TS/IoK wouldn't make Remand a suddenly fantastic option.
It goes to show just how busted the Twin combo really was as it made what is otherwise a pile of under powered cards seem like a T1 deck.
Your Nacatl point is kind of off base a bit as Pod infinite life combo actually kept linear aggro decks in check, it wasn't Twin like some would like to insist. If you look at the meta-game shares Post Pod banning you see both Burn and Infect start to creep up month after month until they are both solidly T1. Twin did nothing to stop linear aggro-combo decks as going under the Twin combo with your own broken/ hyper fast linear kill was is a very viable strategy against the Twin deck since going under Combo's is great way to beat them and going under Tempo-Control is a great way to beat that angle of the deck also.
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Not when you have people claiming with absolute certainty that they know exactly what impact it would have. And the "response" other decks would have is part of the affect it would have on the meta-game. They go in tandem and you cannot have one without the other, it doesn't matter if I can design and test a deck that has Punishing Fire and that the deck I made looks fair and fine in regards to lines of play etc... the actual concern is the second point, what affect would Punishing fire have on the overall meta-game? That is the only real important aspect of the question not how does it look in some narrow testing I did.
I would also argue that testing a card like SFM is essentially useless as you did not redesign every deck and establish a actual reflection of what other decks will look like. This is why I said that those types of articles are interesting and can help form opinions but they actually show nothing in regards to the potential risk of any given card.
I play lots of NBL Modern and I actually use SFM a lot, am I supposed to extrapolate that because I SB out my MM more often than my SFM that MM is a safer unban because in a format where everything is legal MM is less useful than SFM? I don't think so.
Also I do not hold a position of 100% certainty, I posted earlier just above or below the comment you responded to about how WotC made a risk assessment of SoM and took the gamble and it so far has turned out fine, same with AV and GGT. GGT was fine until they made Amalgam and friends, so it actually had a very low risk at the time of the unbanning. So I don't appreciate the insinuation that I hold such a view.
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Also remember that in this forum the oh so wise collective said things like "banning probe isn't going to kill Infect"..."or Bloo" "they will still be competitive just slightly slower", where are all of the "twin ban was unjust/warranted/a conspiracy by a evil cabal" lamenting the death of Infect as a T1 U deck?
I would not characterize WotC in such a dismissive and some what slanderous way, they obviously make a estimation based on the 20 something years experience in handling the game and attempt to formulate reasonable hypothesis. The fact that they unbanned SoM regardless of a hypothesis that it might put Lantern over the top only shows that they will make such a hypothesis and measure and make a reasonable risk analysis and if it seems low enough will pull the trigger on the experiment. Are they perfect? No and not because they are incompetent or grossly negligent but because we are all human and capable of being wrong.
The fact is that not a single one of us has knowledge of "a cards true strength" if it has been banned and hasn't seen play in the format. All we have are likely far less informed hypothesis regarding what would occur and really to claim otherwise it to pretend to have knowledge that not you nor I nor any other player posting in here can possibly have.
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SFM isn't getting off the list, its rise in play in Legacy recently is pushing it back into fulfilling the "don't want it in modern because of legacy" standard that put it MM and JtmS. Just because some players want to arbitrarily ignore this this rationality doesn't mean WotC will.
I hope when they say the new core set will be designed differently that they mean it will not be designed as a draft ing set but only a constructed design in mind
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It is pretty absurd to attempt to draw a comparison between a deck like Twin which literally had years of data to a singular event in which a deck put up great numbers. A single instance of a occurrence proves absolutely nothing.
I do disagree fundamentally with this notion that bannings cannot correct meta-games in a game like magic. While in general I am not for any cards being added to list or removed currently banning cards can fix certain types of issues in the meta-game. I don't think issues like "king of the hill" can be solved unless it is a clear singular card creating the outcomes, like Bloom was a great ban in this vein. While the banning of Bloom over all didn't "kill" the entire strategy it was so much better at what it does than any other option was able to achieve that it made the strategy much more over all easily dominated by fair.
I also don't think that unbanning any particular card would be very beneficial regarding the types of issues that people tend to express concern regarding. I am of the opinion that WotC needs to print better non-creature spells and in some instances perhaps creature spells to help raise specific strategies and color representation. Most anything people consider unbanning slots into a BGx mid-range shell better than it does anything to actually bolster its own color identities representation as the primary color of a deck.
This is by design and we need future design to correct it as the actual things needed to achieve say a primary Wxx or Uxx deck to be able to exist. They would still struggle with the reality that the plays available to them in the key turns in the format are seriously under powered when held in comparison to the options available in BG. This didn't occur by accident but was the out come of the entire format consisting of cards designed in a period intended to reorganize the game into one in which decks like the Rock are not piles of garbage.
The only other real option would be banning a absurd amount of cards until the format is watered down enough to achieve that balance. but again that would be absurd as it is generally no one's desired outcome.
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come back in 6 months to year with sustained results like this and then we can start considering perhaps a ban is needed.
I hate that people instantly jump to comparing things like Grixis Shadow to Twin and trying to build up a false equivalency between then. Twin was around for years and nothing WotC did to curb it worked so yes a ban was needed.
Glade that the results however bolster all of the statements I have been making about the meta-game
Grixis best of the DS decks because its better in the Mirror.
Pretty much everything else is either highly redundant or deck that can ignore TS/IoK(Eldrazitron dodges IoK and Push)
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I think that my aspiration for the most part don't line up with overall magic design. Most of the problems that the kind of strategies I enjoy suffer from is a kind of lost identity for U WotC decided that they wanted creature based mid-range to be the main draw for Standard. U being good in the ways it used to be was antithetical to mid-range strategies and I understand this on a game theory level but I would like for WotC to at least cycle through various phases of Strategic Dominance in Standard to help enrich non-attrition based mid-range.
But that really is to my other point, I don't think that any new cards outside of this established norm would be acceptable to the player base. Part of IEDS relies on is the majority of players being happy or at least okay with the current situation in the Strategic Dominance spectrum of viable decks. Look at Treasure Cruise, the biggest crime it committed in Modern was that it invalidated all of the black based attrition decks, I think this would likely be true of any widely playable U modern card draw. Card draw in Modern is essentially only playable in a few types of decks UW can play Visions with a deck designed to try and make it to the late game, or mid-range Black based decks that run things like Painful Truths for the attrition mirrors and of course Bob. This is a identity crisis for U in Modern that I don't think would actually be accepted if reversed by WotC anyways as the one time in a long time that WotC printed a card powerful enough in U to make U a player in Modern it was rejected by the players.
I don't see how we see WotC print Modern playable cards that don't in some way invalidate the very types of decks that the draw back in power level was designed to empower in first place? WotC has intentionally reduced the power level of essentially every thing in U's color identity because they are strong against the widely loved mid-range attrition strategies that are by design the main feature of most all modern decks.
This is in my opinion one of the most informative articles written about modern MTG design and game theory.http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/midrange-archetype-2007-03-26
I have had people criticize the dating of the article but I think it is actually the dating that makes it so informative as it was written at the time in magic design history that WotC started actively shifting the game into the direction it has headed ever since.
I also think that the opinions of a person like Ken Nagle on the issue of Mid-range and MTG game theory such as the bits about what make mid-range bad.
Nagle was and is still currently designing MTG sets, his credits are actually very enlightening when informed by his views given in the articles.
designing, Morningtide, Eventide, Shards of Alara, Conflux, Zendikar, Woldwake, Morrodin Besieged, New Phyrexia, Magic 2012, Avacyn Restored, return to Ravinica, Theros, Born of the God, Khans of Tarkir, Fate Reforged, Oath of the Gatewatch, Shadows over Innistrad, Eldritch Moon, Aether Revolt, Hour of Devastation, and Ixalan.
Sorry to put all that in but I want to deflect undue criticisms with a slight preemptive rebuttal.
edit: revomed conspiracy from the list because I intentionally ignored every other non-Modern legal set or product he was on the design team for.
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How is that at all true, Modern by all measures has only gained in popularity year after year. And many of the bannings in the format have aided in this as it has allowed for less established decks become playable by IEDS.
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The make things like clamp, say won't happen again, make things like jitte say it won't happen again, make BS say it won't happen again.....
Have I ever ran a business? What a non sequitur. Design errors are always going to occur in a complex game like MTG its not as if every other instance of bad card designs had been developed with the intended consequences of making the game bad for a period? Part of playing this game for a long time is recognizing that WotC will occasionally just mess up, its to be expected when you are designing thousands of new unique elements to system on a yearly basis. After all they are humans and mistakes happen and I still play the game, maybe less when a mistake makes it overwhelmingly miserable. The chances for negative unintended consequences are even higher for a format like Modern given that they do not test for the format at all and as Treasure Cruise showed recently something can be completely fine for Standard and a black hole that warps modern around it. And the risk of Treasure Cruise wasn't lost on WotC as functional ancestrals have always been dangerous and powerful(brainstorm for example) but WotC still goes back to bite at the apple time and time again because they have to or the game will get boring.
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So only never make a mistake why didn't WotC think of that before.