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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IMO the fact that WotC can ban 1-2 cards out of a strategy like Jund, Eldrazi, Pod and those bannings didn't completely render the shells as non competitive actually shows actually how powerful the Combo was. The only other bannings in Modern that really come close are the banning of Bloom and Probe and even in the case of Probe 1 of the 3 decks "targeted" with the ban actually survived and evolved to be competitive without it.
Again none of those Combo's you pointed out are actually 1 or 2 card combo's. Ad Naus is a 3 card minimum unless you think drawing your entire hand instantly wins you the game on its own. Goryo's is a 3 card minimum Goryo, the fattie your bringing back and the method for placing it into the yard, and again Goryo's while a very solid combo can fizzle out so its not even as good as Twin on the bar of winning you the game. Valakut does nothing without all of the ramp spells, even with Valakut and Scapeshift together they are pretty bad if you are just waiting to naturally hit land drops up to 7. The idea that you are calling Storm a 1 card combo is pretty strange as it is almost certainly the most dependent on having a critical mass of spells to achieve the combo kill.
the Banning of Twin is in keeping with the tradition WotC has of banning broken 2 card combos since Channel+Fireball
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Twin is really not very much like any of the decks you listed, all of those except Titan Shift are dedicated combo decks that are essentially doing nothing if they don't combo and not a single one is a 2 card combo.
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New Magic TV interesting pretty long discussion about Modern.
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exactly, terrible comparison.
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100% this, its not luck if you intentionally designed your deck to have the card in it. People should start saying that its "opportune" rather than lucky as luck implies no forethought regarding deck design. It would be luck if you only had a 13 card sideboard and randomly just filled it with 2 cards that later turned out to be the nuts in a unexpected match up. If I choose to put 2-4 of a card in my 75 and I happen to draw it that isn't luck is opportune timing.
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You are correct no body of evidence similar to Twin exists for DS. Actually pointing out Ad Naus, Storm, and Living End only showcases why Twin was a good ban and unhealthy for the format. The best combo deck shouldn't also be the best Mid-range/Tempo Deck the Twin package doesn't put heavy deck building restraints on the Twin player you just get to play a good deck that also has a Channel/Fireball style instant win combo in it and just like the Channel/Fireball combo it was banned because that type of combo isn't healthy(like you know copy-cat wasn't healthy in standard).
Again pointing to Standard having a viable control deck does nothing to bolster any claim that any such deck must exist in Modern, in fact my argument against it isn't that it would be bad but that the nature of larger formats with multiple enumerations of decks in various archetypes prevents one from sustaining competitive status. Control decks have never been a vanilla just shuffle it up without radical changes strategies it's value is dependent on the payoff relative to the pay off of the opponents plays, if your control deck isn't consistently accruing more value in the payoffs of its actions then it is a bad control deck. This isn't true for aggro/tempo decks like DS because DS' payoff is self contained and not often relative to the value of the actions made by your opponent.
Control decks are by their very nature intended to be Strictly Dominate Strategies, Just look at the RTR/Inn standard you pointed to, UW control was viable for a relatively short period between RTR and Dragons Maze WotC printed enough control hate within the block that control wasn't really a thing after the second set of the block was released and UW settled into Sphinx's Rev mid-range decks, as soon as Control wasn't Strictly Dominating and shifted closer towards Weakly Dominating it was not a real deck and its tools got worked into Mid-range decks which had stronger self contained payoffs.
Rise of the Eldrazi is nearly a decade old and Black hasn't received a new tool on par with IoK as far as comparable affects. I don't think its even fair to attempt to compare Push to a counterspell simply because they serve different functions generally. If they printed a U : counter target creature spell, it probably still wouldn't be as good as push simply because it is only reactive and if your opponent plays around it etc.... it has lost its value while Push will retain its value unless the creature has protection from black or instants. A better comparison would be Push to Vapor Snag as both are methods of dealing with resolved threats and this better shows why U tempo/control strategies are generally poor in modern. Vapor Snag is great when your opponent is trying to play Mid-range creatures (i.e. creatures costed 3-6 which is the actual mid-range phase of the game) its not so great when your opponents are simply playing a collection of the best 1/2 cost creatures available since the tempo gained is easily recouped by the opponent.
Its also worth note that the entire span of the Modern card pool is within the post counterspell era of magic. Every set within moderns card pool is has been designed with the Modern R&D 2c.c. counters with stipulations and 3c.c. hard counter paradigm. I doubt WotC will abandon this design philosophy as the game has sold better since the abandonment of classic Draw-go control as a perennial feature of the game in favor of Mid-range Value creature decks, people voted with their dollars and the Value creature focused game play has brought more new players in and kept more players around than the other.
Another consideration is also that U is the most dominate color in every other non-rotating format (legacy and vintage) and WotC has to be considerate of those formats when producing new cards and unfortunately any color that isn't blue could tolerate a reason to play it in those formats.
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Okay you want a top Tier control deck, I'm going to assume you mean T1 as we have had T2 control decks pretty consistently lately.
I would say that your SOL on this desire and not because of some nefarious plans working against you etc....But because WotC has stated that a objective for the format is to have a large viable deck pool and this is antithetical to Control decks. Control decks never flourish in wide open meta-games they need narrow meta-games with few viable decks in order to function. This is why you don't see traditional control decks do well consistently in formats like Modern/Legacy/Vintage there are just to many variables to account for and this is why Control doesn't function well in these formats.
Control is only really a viable strategy when it is a strictly Dominate Strategy or rarely when its a weakly Dominate Strategy. This can be attested to by looking at the types of meta-games in which traditional control decks have done well, when they do well they are the best thing that can be played and Control mirrors abound. When they are bad, such as in the start of new standard they are generally very bad. For control to do better and you need a more constricted viable deck pool, as the format currently with its wide variety is and will remain a weak strategy.
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And is Storm real to everyone now that its dubious online results got some street cred.
Very good to see Jeskai and Esper doing well.
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Why not try and find out what? If you think MTG is above strategic dominance I would point to the reality that nearly all interactive games have a dominant strategy(even tic tac toe has a dominate strategy even if it is nothing more than a victory/draw strategy).
The idea of equity between say mid-range and control is some what arbitrary.
If you like most others mean "why can't U reactive control be as good as BG attrition/aggro decks like jund, junk, and DS; this is the assumption I am speaking from as you where not clear.
I would argue that no you cannot have U based draw go style control be = to BG attrition/aggro decks. One will always be a superior strategy to the other and the other gaining more dominance might foster a strategy pool that it drives the dominance of the other to even greater heights.
I say "no they cannot be =" is because the strategies themselves are diametrically opposed. One revolves around absolute resource denial(BGx decks which look to drive the game into top deck mode in which their individual plays are stronger than yours) and the other revolves around accruing excess resources in which to beneficial respond to the other players actions(blue based draw go control). These are a case study in polar opposite game plans and when you make one better you are making the opposite worse. We saw this play out in the actual meta-game with the Treasure Cruise era, U got a great card and it made BG essentially unplayable.
I would say that Jace is actually a Mid-range card and not a control card. I would be all for unbanning jace as long as we unban every other card that is similarly banned at the genesis of the format because it is not deserving of special treatment just because you might happen to like it(I mean you in the sense of a broad nameless advocates for the card as a generalization)
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because proactive things have gotten better than reactive things have. 1c.c. to take the best card from your opponents hand and gain perfect knowledge of its contents would still be a better and more efficient rate than 2c.c. counter target spell. People are not casting the same type of garbage creatures as they had to in the long off past, like I said in the previous post being reactive in the past was less of a risk because if you failed to stifle your opponent with your counter wall and they managed to sneak a creature on board and you couldn't answer it immediately it wasn't a big deal because it was likely nothing that could stand alone kill you in 1-2 turns by which time you should have drawn a answer.
I actually would like for reactive strategies to get a boon, but even if it did it wouldn't push it into even footing with proactive strategies.
I think people generally fail to understand what "equality" between strategies would mean. I think people believe that we could have both Mid-range proactive decks be great and have reactive control decks be great; but their is no evidence to support this claim. In fact it is the opposite, the status that Mid-range has gained over the last decade of MTG has been built on the nerfing of control elements. WotC wants players to be able to play their creatures and other permanents and the easiest means of achieving this was by making counter magic worse. Mid-range used to be a very sketchy and often a losing strategy in the age of counterspell, casting 3-6 mana spells in face of 2cc hard counters was often just a bad plan. This is why that affect has been costed higher and only offered at the original cost with some hoops attached. The concept of Pareto efficiency seems to be unknown to many who post in this forum. Strategic dominance is a real thing and while we can talk about how to achieve a weak-dominance in a game like MTG it is likely impossible to achieve such a meta-game short of banning all but one strategy out of the strategy pool. The best we will ever have is a situation in which a Nash equilibrium can be achieved but that doesn't afford any specific strategy a place in the viable strategy pool.
fyi, I would love for counterspell to be reprinted and for better card draw spells to be printed, I do not think that this would move reactive control out of the weakly dominated status it currently holds but might make proactive decks over all worse, which is what would be needed to make them better.