There's a difference in thinking a card is powerful and wanting it banned. Banning Lootings would just eliminate a totally new archetype... and for what reason? People don't like playing against it? If anything, Aether Vial decks are and have been the most oppressive decks in Modern within the past year. Calling for bans is honestly somewhat immature.
I've seen it so many times on this forum. Remember the Grapeshot/ PiF discusion a year ago? It's ridiculous with the ban craze
I think it's laughable that the cantrips Ponder and Preordain are on the banned list. Besides Storm, what other blue combo decks even exist? At the end of the day it's just a cantrip, and the only real reason a card like Ponder or Preordain should be banned is to avoid the situation they have in Legacy where Brainstorm warps the meta, skewing Blue heavily. This is far from the case in Modern and realistically only would buff decks like Storm or Grixis Death's Shadow.
I think you are underselling the power of the blue cantrips. There is a reason they are eternal all-stars. Magic after all is a game of chances. We are playing with a randomized deck so variance is a thing and so no game plays out like the last one. How often have you heard "I didn't draw card X in time so I lost" or "I drew only lands and no gas so I lost?
The blue cantrips make every blue deck more consistent at whatever they are doing. It's silly to think only about its implications in Combo when it's good in everything besides Aggro. Suddenly that removal spell, board wipe, counter spell, threat or hate card always seems show up at the right time while a deck like Jund would have drawn a useless discard spell for example. "I hope he doesn't have card X" is far less likely to happen against a blue deck.
I mean don't get me wrong. If they are getting unbanned I will play them gladly and I won't complain about it. Im not arguing for them to stay banned here.
But Im realistic and can see beyond my own selfish desires. At the end of the day less variance is always better than more variance. That's only logical and while you might not notice it if you look at single games Im sure over a large sample size blue decks would show themselves to be generally more consistent than non-blue decks. That is the case in every single format where those types of cards are legal and so saying that for some reason it would not be so in Modern has no ground to stand on.
Sure we would still have no Brainstorm but Ponder is still a powerhouse of a card and the number 2 card in Legacy and an automatic 4-of in every blue deck. Preordain sees less play sure but it still sees a decent amount of play and you can say that is only because Brainstorm and Ponder are better and already automatic 4-ofs.
There was a Modern Nexus article a few months ago testing Preordain and it only made the decks slightly better. There's a huge difference in Lgeacy where the quality of cards become better, which makes cantrips better in turn. Also Brainstorm is broken.
Which decks would benefit from ponder and Preordain? Storm obviously, but what else? To me, mostly fair decks would
I think it's laughable that the cantrips Ponder and Preordain are on the banned list. Besides Storm, what other blue combo decks even exist? At the end of the day it's just a cantrip, and the only real reason a card like Ponder or Preordain should be banned is to avoid the situation they have in Legacy where Brainstorm warps the meta, skewing Blue heavily. This is far from the case in Modern and realistically only would buff decks like Storm or Grixis Death's Shadow.
The real fear of Punishing Fire would bring is the total elimination of Aggro, which I can't see as a reality. Combine this with Umezawa's Jitte and/or Stoneforge Mystic and Aggro could easily fall heavily. This is especially concerning that Stoneforge is candidate #1 currently for unbanning, making Punishing Fire a little less appealing, at least for now. However, I'm on board with Jitte and SFM coming off soon, since these two card would probably add more diversity than killing it, as well as being less powerful than other things you could be doing in Modern at the moment.
Jitte also creates subgames that usually result in who ever gets Jitte online first wins, essentially warping any Aggro/Midrange matches around it.
Birthing Pod is in a similar vein as its old Modern Pillar partner Splinter Twin. I personally don't have strong feelings for these two cards staying on or coming off the banned list either way, but if you're going to make the argument, as the guy did in the article, that Splinter Twin "eliminated all other options in its class, as well as made enemy combo decks atrocious in comparison." Or in other words, lessened diversity and pushed out many decks due to its presence, you have to make the same conclusion for Birthing Pod as well. Imo, Pod is a much scarier card, especially since the printing of so many cards that would slot into the archetype since its banning, that if he's going to advocate for Splinter Twin staying on the banned list, he's gotta do the same for Birthing Pod.
Lastly, Glimpse of Nature most likely just adds another degenerate linear combo deck in the top of the meta. Is that something we really need in Modern right now?
He strangely doesn't even mention Green Sun's Zenith when going over cards remaining ont he banned list. He says " The artifact lands, free spells, card draw that should have never been printed, fast mana, and mana boosts should all be kept out of a format that's currently infested with turn 3 and 4 wins." Yet, GSZ doesn't fit on any of these, but he's advocating for a obvious combo enabler with Glimpse of Nature, so I'm kind of confused by this. I advocate that Birthing Pod is a stronger card than GSZ in general in regards to Modern, so my conclusion is that GSZ should be in consideration for unbanning way before we begin to talk about Birthing Pod.
As someone who'se favorite "format" is Vintage Cube, which should showcase just how much I enjoy combo and broken nonsense, I have to say that even I am not enjoying the current modern format. I find it funny yet sad that basically all of these strategies emerged or got significantly upgraded by very recent printings of cards cheating on mana in Hollow One/Baral/Creeping Chill/Phoenix, (heck even Cheerios got another medallion bear to potentially unlock another arguably obnoxious combo deck, that one didn't pan out though) or enabling busted gy synergies with the likes of Stitchers Supplier.
The main difference of Cube and Constructed, even with Vintage cards, is huge. Not only is combo hard to draft just due to the limited cards you can select, but when you play the games out, you are still only playing a singleton format for the most part.
Does anyone feel as though modern is---bad right now? My entire meta is in on a graveyard deck or aggro. MTGO is pretty much graveyard linear decks, humans/spirits, Tron, which isn't utilizing the graveyard and loving this meta, or KCI/Affinity.
This modern is very much shaping to feel like the summer of Dredge/Infect. I really hope the meta isn't like this 8 months from now. Modern is looking very ugly and unhealthy, and I have no clue what should be done.
*raises hand in the back*
Yes. To me, its literally unplayable. You are playing Stirrings, or Looting or Vial, or you are kidding yourself (as per my signature) and making your life more difficult by not playing them.
Its easily the worst its been since Eldrazi Winter, and its not even close. I'm not even playing it. The last match I had was the Hollow One player who lamented his own deck doing what it was supposed to, because it just feels lame to pump out multiple hollow ones on Turn 1, and essentially lock up the game. His own words, about his own deck!
Its a joke, and the gameplay in Standard is MILES better.
By all means, ban nothing. 2 Unbans change everything, without a single person 'losing' their deck.
I have to disagree here, if an unban suddenly brings forth a solid tier 1 deck, especially combo, and it just invalidates your pet deck giving it feel bad losses as Twin does, then for me it is almost the equivalent of losing your deck. That is for example the case every time Dredge rises to prominence, it generates feel bad games where you feel powerless if you are playing midrange.dec and you end up wondering why in the world you are even playing your deck.
I would take having to warp my deck (like UW and UWR warped) to account for a toxic meta (if it could even get that toxic...) than literally not having the option of playing, every day, all day.
In a Storm style combo deck that runes Yawgmoth's Will and Past In Flames, the extra mana could be the difference of casting it a turn earlier and extra card could be irrelevant.
Also, lets say Gifts is just better. Does it warrant being banned though?
Both Gifts Ungiven and Intuition do a similar effect, yet Gifts is banned and Intuition is not. I would even argue that Intuition can be the more powerful card at 3cmc. Doesn't make sense to me
This thread is again going off the rails. I feel this happened last time too; we had a "No Changes" update, people went crazy in the thread, and after a few weeks of venting, everything chilled out. By October, the thread was largely a ghost town of some sporadic Twin arguments and discussions about Stirrings and Preordain. Now we're back at the anger cycle where people are making wild accusations and allegations about the format and Wizards' format management.
After a long time of being mostly happy with the state of modern I'd now want several cards banned even though not much has really changed for modern since then other than having a good standard to conpare it to. So many matchups in modern end up being "can you beat my sideboardcard" now, and I've really started to see these matches as a chore I have to finish before I actually get to go have fun and play the game I went to FNM for. I've been an exclusive modern player for so many years it is an odd realisation to look at a good standard and think "wait a minute, insta-losing to blood moon actually doesn't have to be 'just how it goes' at all!".
I thought this comment was going to be about the battle of sideboards element that got GGT banned. Then I read about Blood Moon and realized it's the typical Modern complaints we've seen and debunked for years. Moon is not a strong card. That's why few top decks use it. If it was the kind of insta-losing SB tech you allege, we would see it more. We would see Blue Moon played more as a deck, and we would see more Grishoalbrand (a deck that should check off all your boxes of what makes a powerful Modern deck). We don't see any of those things, however, because the "broken" Modern you allege exists is not the overall experience of the format. It might be your personal experience due to the deck you play, the area you play in, and/or the game decisions you make, but it's nothing Wizards will develop banlist policy based on. It hasn't been for 3 years now. Nothing about cards like Moon has changed in that time. Might Modern have issues? Yes, and those issues could be with Dredge (see stuff like MD RIP in UW Control) and Stirrings. But unless someone has an actual data-driven case about other issues to make, I haven't seen anything else worth discussing from a ban perspective.
I want WotC to return to the turn 4 rule with a vengeance. I would not mind seeing a large list of bans, just straight up ending storm, tron, dredge, KCI and the likes. There are so many decks and cards in modern that solely exist to create non-games where the pre-sideboard game is basically irrelevant. They are much, MUCH more obnoxious than twin ever was which, although powerful, at least was a matchup where both players got to play cards and interact with eachother without needing enchantments out of the sideboard.
T4 rule misinterpretations are a clear sign to me that the thread is going off the rails. Decks must be both top-tier AND consistently winning pre-T4 to violate this rule. No decks are currently doing this.
Standard is bad- nochanges we need to fix standard.
Standard is good- no changes we want people to play standard.
Modern is bad- no changes we want people to play standard.
Modern is good- we should keep an eye on things so we can push people into playing standard.
This kind of pithy comment is all too common in the Twitch chat and Reddit age. It sounds good and garners upvotes, but it doesn't remotely describe what literally happened this year. See BBE and JTMS being unbanned when Modern was good and Standard was bad just to improve Modern more. When you have a literal counterexample to your allegation in the last 12 months, it's clearly an allegation that needs reworking.
Let me put it in another way; the way current modern works, it pushes the influence of variance in the game to the absolute maximum. You HAVE to accept you will have 80-20 matchups no matter what you play, and you HAVE to accept that plenty of games will end up revolving around maybe 8 out of your 75 cards and the entire game is decided around drawing those few cards. Of couse variance is always a factor in a card game, but modern ends games before they start with much fewer degrees of freedom on these luck factors.
There are no top-tier 80/20 matchups in Modern. There haven't been for 3 years. I have debunked this outrageous claim numerous times. To reiterate, top players have the same MWP in Modern as in other formats. They also have the same MWP variance and MWP ceiling. Notably, they further have the same Modern MWP as they do in BOTH Legacy and Standard; the only outliers are player-specific (e.g. Reid Duke is better at Modern than Standard), but across the board, the averages and spread are identical. If Modern was packed with 80/20 matchups as you and hoards of Modern critics have alleged, this would not be the case.
I understand that people are dissatisfied with a "No changes" update, and I understand that people want more communication from Wizards. Those are reasonable desires; arguing for an SFM unban or better Wizards updates and transparency are great topics. A meaningful "battle of sideboards" discussion through the lens of GGT might be fine too. Or Stirrings analysis. But fuming about long-debunked Modern issues is not the way to go, even if it happens every time Wizards does a "No changes" update on a metagame that some people perceive issues with.
It is not powerlevel that I complain about - I would honestly say that Blood Moon is a poor card to run right now in Modern. What I have gotten tired of is the amount of matches I sit down for that are very often immediately ended once it is established my opponent is playing a certain archetype. There are currently many Modern decks that demand hard sideboard hosers that are often almost impossible to interact with without these kinds of cards and I think this creates poor gameplay.
When I talk about good and bad gameplay I would say R&D agrees with me; I'd want modern to be more in line with the current design philosophy, shying away from abilities like intimidate and protection that are hard to balance since they are game ending in some matchups whilst being completely inconsequential in others. I use Blood Moon as an example of this not because I deem the powerlevel too high, but because I think this design adds poor gameplay; imagine making a new card game from the ground up, would you design a card like Blood Moon? Blood Moon does either nothing, or ends the game on the spot. I would say this is poor and frustrating game design. The same goes for the plethora of decks that demand sideboard hosers; you will not hear me claim that storm is in any way overpowered, but if I sit down at FNM and play 3 rounds of storm in a row (this happened once) I do not feel like I got to play the game I wanted to play. Yes, that is anecdotal, but there are so many decks in modern right now that promote this kind of "do you have the one relevant card" matchups, regardless of that matchup is bad or good, that it has worn me down after 5+ years of playing Modern.
This setiment I see all the time on this fourm. Its the idea of "what I want Modern to be" vs what Modern actually is. Modern is an Eternal format, thats it. Its a way to play with a gigantic pool of cards from sets that span across many years of magic. It isn't the fantasy land that Jeff Hoogland wants it to be, where Thoughtseize becomes Thought Erasure, and Blood Moon doesn't exist. Super weird, unique, and sometimes "toxic" interactions of cards are eventually bound to come about. Lantern of Insight + Codex Shredder, who would of thunk? Amulet of Vigor + Simic Growth Chamber, who thought of this? Street Wraith + Burning Inquiry = Hollow One. That's the beauty of Modern, it's the reality of Modern, the reality of thousands of cards printed from 15 years of magic. Maybe we need a police card like Force of Will, like Legacy, maybe we don't. But unlike Legacy, we don't have turn 1 or 2 kills.
"80/20" matchups are more of a way of saying "very poor" matchups than an actual statistic and I shouldn't have used it. But if I compare what is deemed a poor matchup in current standard and a poor matchup in modern, in standard at least you most of the time still get to play a game of magic instead of praying for your sideboard hosers to stick. It is true that some pros consistently thrive in Modern and thus are doing something right, but it is also true that plenty of pros have complained about the matchup lottery in modern making it very hard to prepare for.
This forum in particular has proven with statistical evidence that the "matchup lottery" is more myth than reality. The mindset I see with new or bad players in Modern when building their 75, is that they look to their sideboard to silver bullet cards. Stony Silence for KCI and Hardened Scales, Alpine Moon for Tron. If you build your 75 to only function that way, then of course it feels like a lottery. The way to be successful in Modern is understand your deck's matchups, and squeeze those percentage points in losing machups as hard as you can, because at the end of the day, your opponent is playing magic, not chess, and you can always out play and out draw them. If this wasn't the case, the players like Caleb Scherer of Benjamin Nikolich wouldn't constantly be at the top of the points leaderboards for the SCG tour so consistently.
Apart from maybe dredge, I would not argue any of the current decks in modern are inherently too powerful. But for years I've taken the mindset of just accepting non-games due to matchup lottery as a fact in Magic, when it really doesn't need to be. This doesn't mean modern is "ruined" or even bad, I still go to Modern FNM every other week. However it definitely is a big flaw of modern and judging from the last few pages it seems I have people who agree with me on this.
Dredge is powerful, but not the best deck in Modern. The only problem that exists with Dredge is it's "sideboard battle" gameplay, where it tells you to draw your sideboard cards or die. This might seem contrary to my above comment where I said Modern isn't sideboard lottery. But this is the single case where it happens to be true. This is the only reason Dredge is a toxic deck, and the only reasonable point of why there can be a chance that a card from dredge could be banned in the future.
I want WotC to return to the turn 4 rule with a vengeance. I would not mind seeing a large list of bans, just straight up ending storm, tron, dredge, KCI and the likes. There are so many decks and cards in modern that solely exist to create non-games where the pre-sideboard game is basically irrelevant. They are much, MUCH more obnoxious than twin ever was which, although powerful, at least was a matchup where both players got to play cards and interact with eachother without needing enchantments out of the sideboard.
I think Twin comes with not so many upsides, but SFM would help create W's idendity and open up diversity.
Instead, Twin and diversity do not come hand in hand, as we probably know.
Why play Ur Phoenix, blue moon, or Through the breach, if Twin is always the best combo? This is basically the Wizard's argument. There is no reason because it will (probably) reduce diversity, while there doesn't seem to be a direct upside.
To be honest, I think this is a legitimately good reason to keep Splinter Twin on the ban list. I feel that a card like Arclight Phoenix would never be able to breath in Modern due to Splinter Twin. People could go on about how Arclight Phoenix only creates another linear combo deck with little interaction and how we need Splinter Twin to police the format so it doesn't just become Two Ships Sailing Past one another silently in the night, but I really don't think that's the case. I think the un-interactivity of Modern is blown out of proportion by people that deep down just want to go back to the "Pillar Format" (pointed out in Kathal's amazing post in the previous thread) but it just can't happen anymore.
Standard is really good. The reason I have doubts is not because of how good or bad it is. I have doubts because Modern is already super popular, and adding yet another format is just strange. To a person who plays all 3 major formats, what would be the reason to add yet another one outside of Arena?
Sidenote, diversity is only one criterion for a good format, and doesn't necessarily mean a format is good. To you, that list might look great, but to me it looks like mostly boring decks in a boring format
I have doubts about any new format. Didn't they already try a new one with Frontier, or whatever it was called? I never played it, but from other people I asked about it, the format was absolutely terrible and was basically all the worst things from Standard.
I think that people that like Eternal formats like playing with old cards and having a huge amount of cards available at their disposal. The only problem with old cards in paper is price. Tbh, I think more people would play, or even just try Legacy out if it wasnt so expensive.
Outside of Arena, I think there's some good things about Standard formats, but I think most people would prefer an older format if they were exposed them equally. I like Arena, and even bought and played Standard a few times at my LGS. But i really just prefer modern and dont mind mtgo
I've seen it so many times on this forum. Remember the Grapeshot/ PiF discusion a year ago? It's ridiculous with the ban craze
There was a Modern Nexus article a few months ago testing Preordain and it only made the decks slightly better. There's a huge difference in Lgeacy where the quality of cards become better, which makes cantrips better in turn. Also Brainstorm is broken.
Which decks would benefit from ponder and Preordain? Storm obviously, but what else? To me, mostly fair decks would
The real fear of Punishing Fire would bring is the total elimination of Aggro, which I can't see as a reality. Combine this with Umezawa's Jitte and/or Stoneforge Mystic and Aggro could easily fall heavily. This is especially concerning that Stoneforge is candidate #1 currently for unbanning, making Punishing Fire a little less appealing, at least for now. However, I'm on board with Jitte and SFM coming off soon, since these two card would probably add more diversity than killing it, as well as being less powerful than other things you could be doing in Modern at the moment.
Jitte also creates subgames that usually result in who ever gets Jitte online first wins, essentially warping any Aggro/Midrange matches around it.
Birthing Pod is in a similar vein as its old Modern Pillar partner Splinter Twin. I personally don't have strong feelings for these two cards staying on or coming off the banned list either way, but if you're going to make the argument, as the guy did in the article, that Splinter Twin "eliminated all other options in its class, as well as made enemy combo decks atrocious in comparison." Or in other words, lessened diversity and pushed out many decks due to its presence, you have to make the same conclusion for Birthing Pod as well. Imo, Pod is a much scarier card, especially since the printing of so many cards that would slot into the archetype since its banning, that if he's going to advocate for Splinter Twin staying on the banned list, he's gotta do the same for Birthing Pod.
Lastly, Glimpse of Nature most likely just adds another degenerate linear combo deck in the top of the meta. Is that something we really need in Modern right now?
He strangely doesn't even mention Green Sun's Zenith when going over cards remaining ont he banned list. He says " The artifact lands, free spells, card draw that should have never been printed, fast mana, and mana boosts should all be kept out of a format that's currently infested with turn 3 and 4 wins." Yet, GSZ doesn't fit on any of these, but he's advocating for a obvious combo enabler with Glimpse of Nature, so I'm kind of confused by this. I advocate that Birthing Pod is a stronger card than GSZ in general in regards to Modern, so my conclusion is that GSZ should be in consideration for unbanning way before we begin to talk about Birthing Pod.
The main difference of Cube and Constructed, even with Vintage cards, is huge. Not only is combo hard to draft just due to the limited cards you can select, but when you play the games out, you are still only playing a singleton format for the most part.
https://www.mtggoldfish.com/tournament/scg-modern-iq-roanoke-2018-11-25#paper
2 Jeskai top 8
https://www.mtggoldfish.com/tournament/scg-modern-iq-toronto-2018-11-25#paper
2 UW top 8
Also, lets say Gifts is just better. Does it warrant being banned though?
This setiment I see all the time on this fourm. Its the idea of "what I want Modern to be" vs what Modern actually is. Modern is an Eternal format, thats it. Its a way to play with a gigantic pool of cards from sets that span across many years of magic. It isn't the fantasy land that Jeff Hoogland wants it to be, where Thoughtseize becomes Thought Erasure, and Blood Moon doesn't exist. Super weird, unique, and sometimes "toxic" interactions of cards are eventually bound to come about. Lantern of Insight + Codex Shredder, who would of thunk? Amulet of Vigor + Simic Growth Chamber, who thought of this? Street Wraith + Burning Inquiry = Hollow One. That's the beauty of Modern, it's the reality of Modern, the reality of thousands of cards printed from 15 years of magic. Maybe we need a police card like Force of Will, like Legacy, maybe we don't. But unlike Legacy, we don't have turn 1 or 2 kills.
This forum in particular has proven with statistical evidence that the "matchup lottery" is more myth than reality. The mindset I see with new or bad players in Modern when building their 75, is that they look to their sideboard to silver bullet cards. Stony Silence for KCI and Hardened Scales, Alpine Moon for Tron. If you build your 75 to only function that way, then of course it feels like a lottery. The way to be successful in Modern is understand your deck's matchups, and squeeze those percentage points in losing machups as hard as you can, because at the end of the day, your opponent is playing magic, not chess, and you can always out play and out draw them. If this wasn't the case, the players like Caleb Scherer of Benjamin Nikolich wouldn't constantly be at the top of the points leaderboards for the SCG tour so consistently.
Dredge is powerful, but not the best deck in Modern. The only problem that exists with Dredge is it's "sideboard battle" gameplay, where it tells you to draw your sideboard cards or die. This might seem contrary to my above comment where I said Modern isn't sideboard lottery. But this is the single case where it happens to be true. This is the only reason Dredge is a toxic deck, and the only reasonable point of why there can be a chance that a card from dredge could be banned in the future.
"I dont want combo to exist"
To be honest, I think this is a legitimately good reason to keep Splinter Twin on the ban list. I feel that a card like Arclight Phoenix would never be able to breath in Modern due to Splinter Twin. People could go on about how Arclight Phoenix only creates another linear combo deck with little interaction and how we need Splinter Twin to police the format so it doesn't just become Two Ships Sailing Past one another silently in the night, but I really don't think that's the case. I think the un-interactivity of Modern is blown out of proportion by people that deep down just want to go back to the "Pillar Format" (pointed out in Kathal's amazing post in the previous thread) but it just can't happen anymore.
Sidenote, diversity is only one criterion for a good format, and doesn't necessarily mean a format is good. To you, that list might look great, but to me it looks like mostly boring decks in a boring format
I think that people that like Eternal formats like playing with old cards and having a huge amount of cards available at their disposal. The only problem with old cards in paper is price. Tbh, I think more people would play, or even just try Legacy out if it wasnt so expensive.
Outside of Arena, I think there's some good things about Standard formats, but I think most people would prefer an older format if they were exposed them equally. I like Arena, and even bought and played Standard a few times at my LGS. But i really just prefer modern and dont mind mtgo