It would be super sad to see Death's Shadow in the banlist. I don't think it is worth banning as much as unbanning Splinter Twin or Stoneforge Mystic. Banning the card Death's Shadow itself would be nothing short of incompetence and taking steps backwards in regards of format health and player trust. The DS strategy is powerful and as efficient as it gets in Modern. It doesn't win on T3 and goldfished T4 kills are against decks that many people hate playing against(like Tron and Valakut). It punishes you for trying to play solitaire and not caring about the board. As a bonus, it rewards you for playing boat loads of removal and powerful finishers like Planeswalkers.
My take is: Let's instead give it one more round to prove itself worthy of remaining as a viable strategy in Modern and unban Stoneforge Mystic to compensate and push a little more reactive decks. They can easily deal with her via Kolaghan's Command and even Tarfire if well timed. She will bring a new angle of attack and super interesting gameplay with the nowhere-to-be-seen Swords. Finally, it serves as an incentive to play control decks too(especially blue decks) even if Eldrazi and Abzan could potentially abuse her even more. That added with a good blue answer or CA spell and the format could be pretty well balanced.
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- Billiondegree
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A strict upgrade to Flame Slash? Doubtful
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Tell me again how control is unplayable in modern
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I mean it still has to eventually cast a bunch of different cards (multiple rituals, gifts, past in flames, grapeshot) during the combo turn.
Compare this to something like Splinter Twin where you are only casting two different cards and then winning.
This matters most for deck building because you have very few flex slots left afterwards.
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Nobody is talking about this card? I think it's actually pretty good.
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Storm may not even become the best turbo Xerox style deck once Opt becomes legal. There could be something else lurking in the shadows that is ready to abuse 12+ decent cantrips and requires fewer pieces to assemble (let's face it, storm still requires a lot of different cards to execute the kill).
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This exactly.
They have to test the waters with printing effects like these or else they could end up completely busted. Even though they have a play design team that doesn't mean they will catch every mistake. It's much easier to print something like this and if it doesn't prove good enough for modern they can come out with a slightly upgraded version later on down the road.
While this land is debate-able, Opt is certainly going to see a fair to high amount of play just based on the currently available cantrip suite in modern.
I do hope they are taking similar risks with new counterspells.
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