Grixis delver is the most played deck on modo and runs 4 snapcasters, 4 thought scours, some of those black/red commands and anywhere from 4-7 delve spells. If you're able to land a turn 2 rest in peace there's 0 cards in a typical 75 able to remove it and you make the deck far less threatening. It's also nice against junk though they'll almost certainly have multiple answers to it to the point that it's not even worth the effort.
I tried playing with Lightning Angel in an aggressive creature heavy UWR shell. There are matches where a 3/4 vigilante haste is awesome for racing but it's such a bad card against any blue decks. Trying to slam this on turn 4 to get it remanded/leaked and then have them untap and drop a planeswalker or twin or scapeshift etc is miserable. What put me over the edge is how unwinnable games are against twin. You just can't afford to tap 4 mana for this until late in the game so it just sits dead. I was always just siding them out. Better to run resto. EoT flash it in and it either gets countered and you're then able to resolve your own planeswalker or whatever or it lives and you can do angel beats and hold up counter magic the rest of the game forcing them to do something.
There were always the rumblings that Twin should get banned in modern and that it might get banned. Given the spoiler for MM2 confirming twin today it stands to reason that at this moment in time wizards have no intention of touching the deck.
I'm fed up of playing tap out on turn 3 and I'll kill you and play basics or I'll moon you.dec but oh well.
You can already ruin people's day running blood moon and sideboard fulminator mage/stone rain...
There's no need for modern to add utility lands like you're proposing. Tectonic edge is already a strong answer to manlands/tron/greedy mana bases. At least it lets you have 3 lands in play.
No one wants to be on the draw keep 2 lands and have the opponent lead with mountain 1 drop into turn 2 (basically) waste you, turn 3 waste you all the while beating down with some dork.
Yawgmoth's Will would likely not even make it into storm. Past in flames is much better since there's no led/lotus petal and the deck doesn't have access to dark ritual or cabal ritual so the black splash would be very hard + the fact you exile cards instead of putting into the graveyard after you cast it is awkward given modern storm needs a higher count and can often end up looping past in flames 2 + times.
I would fully expect all GBx decks to run will to some extent simply to have huge late game potential. Top deck will with 10 lands out and suddenly bring back 2 rhino's hmm. No thanks
I guess that time warp deck that takes infinite turns drawing its deck with howling mine effects then winning with lab maniac would count as a combo decks of sorts all be it a slow as hell one
imo Blood Moon was vastly overrated all these years, honestly it's a bad card that happens to beat some good decks situationally
it is quite possible that the opponent will fetch/draw enough basics to play around it(people are playing more and more basics due to burn and other agro being so prevalent)
and it always damages it's caster too: he essentially plays at -1 card, must suffer a huge tempo loss by tapping out turn 3 and the effect hits him too(ofc to a lesser effect)
I can recall a lot of games vs affinity when my opponent stupidly casted a blood moon with 1-2 manlands on the board so he might color screw me yet ended up nuking 2 threats from his board that could equip Cranial Plating and swing for the win
the threat of blood moon is more important than blood moon itself, which is just a stupid magic card, randomly hosing players-sometimes the opponent sometimes it's caster, the true value is that only you know if you have it, the other guy has to guess and play around blindly
It's not as simple as playing around it. I've been messing around with an esper control deck on modo and last night I played like 4 or 5 blood moon decks over the space of the evening. I think twice I got surprised with it game one and the other times they landed it post board. It didn't matter that I was prepared for blood moon, when I was on the play and they landed a turn 3 moon there was nothing I could do. You can't mulligan good hands with just 1 fetch because you might get hit by a blood moon. Even when I was purposely fetching out basics it was playing hell with the mana requirements of my deck (fetching basic island when I have cards needing white/black not blue). Most 3 colour decks are not going to manage to get 3 basics of each colour unless the moon doesn't come down for 6+ turns and relying on drawing naturally is unrealistic. Other than your primary colour you're likely not running more than a single basic. Abzan for example runs a single forest/plains.
Yeah, Blood Moon is just one of the gazilion things you need to take into account when you make a deck (Lighning Bolt, counterspells, Path to Exile, Abrupt Decay, Tarmogoyf, Splinter Twin, etc... and Blood Moon). Funny you mention Bloom Titan, because that is an excellent example why Modern needs Blood Moon so hard as police card. Some greed just needs to be kept in check.
As we all know after the recent revelations the deck is no where near as good as it was assumed blood moon or not.
Blood Moon (and Magus of the Moon) is the reason I don't play modern. It is an auto-win card in many matchups and more importantly stops more new deck development than any other card in the format. You think you have a good idea for a Modern Slivers deck? Sorry Blood Moon. You want to try Temur Aggro? Sorry Blood Moon. You found a neat 3 card combo in 3 colors? Sorry, Blood Moon.
So should 5 color goodstuff decks be the norm? Blood Moon is the only defense 1-2 color decks have against the 3+color goodstuff decks. Without Blood Moon, you HAVE to be a 3 color goodstuff deck to survive in modern.
Should traditional control (esper/jeskai) also not be decks in modern? 'Durdling' around in modern is hard enough as it is without having cards like that, and choke.... and boil.
Where's the destroy all mountains/forests card for control to get back at the red/green decks
Blood Moon (and Magus of the Moon) is the reason I don't play modern. It is an auto-win card in many matchups and more importantly stops more new deck development than any other card in the format. You think you have a good idea for a Modern Slivers deck? Sorry Blood Moon. You want to try Temur Aggro? Sorry Blood Moon. You found a neat 3 card combo in 3 colors? Sorry, Blood Moon.
Magus is pretty bad. Dies to pretty much everything. Few decks have a maindeck answer for a resolved blood moon though. You either have to counter it, float mana and destroy it (if you're lucky enough to run abrupt decay) or you're screwed.
Blood moon is definitely one of the unfun cards of modern that are questionable in terms of being unbanned. Wizards wants people to enjoy modern but 1 of the very first questions you have to ask of any deck is if it is able to play around blood moon. You shouldn't have to design your entire deck over 1 card that not just punishes you but just colds you entirely. 3 mana 1 card win the game in some matchups if it was a combo deck that wouldn't be legal!
It's currently played by more than 1 in 4 decks on mtgo which makes for pretty depressing reading. It's surprising tron and amulet bloom see as much play as they do when in an average daily event they'll face a blood moon deck.
Anticipate lets you keep a lot of hands you'd otherwise have to mulligan. Real real good. It also saved my bacon against my friends UWR Geist deck in Round 4, after he cliqued away my Verdict, I shuffled with a fetch and then anticipated into it after I had all ready killed one geist with snapcaster block. It also lets you play a more diverse SB imho.
I am Aegraen's friend that was playing UWR Geist. As an opponent to a control deck utilizing Anticipae, the spell seemed very very good. Everytime the spell was cast I felt like he was able to begin sculpting a hand that ha everything he needed to win, which he ultimately did.
I have also been casting Anticiate in various builds of UWR Control and Esper Control and I am convinced the spell has a home as a 4 of in both builds. Both decks have had ways to gain card advantage, but they lacked efficient instant speed selection. There has been many times that I have anticipated into 2 lands and another Anticipate which I was then able to cast and go down an additional 3 cards. When digging for an answer, I'm very glad to be able to skip past the dead land draws and find what I need.
I haven't been around the format much lately, but I have used anticipate in standard quite a bit. From my experience it is a great card, but is kinda slow against faster matchups. It would be great against twin to find hate cards in games 2 and 3, but will take up valuable turns early against junk. For this reason I would max out at two in the main deck and maybe run 1 in the board if you have an open slot.
I always feel like I want to draw anticipate against junk. They'll only discard your business spells at the start anyway so being able to see the top 3 can make a big difference. I'd also be happy to see it against burn just to help dig for my life gain cards.
News about States : Robert Seder did it and took down is state! Finished 1st with this Four-Colour Control list (the Sukenik one that I'm running too!):
I'm still not sold on splashing black I just hate having to stretch the mana base that already has very specific requirements and only further hurting ourselves against land destruction and hosing type effects.
I really hate the blood moon in the board with the amount of cards it actually hurts from our side. I guess it's so unexpected from a 4 colour control deck that you could catch someone out though unless it just colds them we've sacrificed so much to cast it (lost colonnade, can't flashback souls, can't cast gideon, likely can't cast our cryptics and such too).
1 of sideboards with anticipate is defensible but when you're looking for early hate the single copy most of the time won't show up. I'm surprised that there's no stony silence or relic/GY hate because tron and graveyard decks are 2 of the worse matchups in my opinion.
Nothing is going to start at the current price and only go upwards... that is bad investment to buy into it now. The only thing you should buy into is modern staples in sets that are not getting into MM this year as they actually should just go up as more people enter modern but these cards don't.
Serum visions assuming it gets printed at common will plummet from the 8 bucks price it has now that's for sure.
So it seems like pure control has really taken a huge downturn at the moment. Mtggoldfish has just updated all the dailies from the last week or something and the stats make for very sad reading.
A true Jeskai control list doesn't make up even 1% of the meta. Even the most played version (the midrange one) is only at 2% but I consider it a completely different deck, the version running geist and thundermaw with no cryptic command, no sweepers, no rev and just 4 remands as counter magic is not at all a control deck.
I honestly thought anticipate was good enough that it would see modern play and do something to boost control % (looking at twin I see some decks that have been 4-0 have adopted anticipate as a 4 of).
@ Aegraen - even though you have more than just snapcaster you're fighting the good fight at least! Good job
I'm fed up of playing tap out on turn 3 and I'll kill you and play basics or I'll moon you.dec but oh well.
There's no need for modern to add utility lands like you're proposing. Tectonic edge is already a strong answer to manlands/tron/greedy mana bases. At least it lets you have 3 lands in play.
No one wants to be on the draw keep 2 lands and have the opponent lead with mountain 1 drop into turn 2 (basically) waste you, turn 3 waste you all the while beating down with some dork.
I would fully expect all GBx decks to run will to some extent simply to have huge late game potential. Top deck will with 10 lands out and suddenly bring back 2 rhino's hmm. No thanks
Can't seem to find an example decklist though
It's not as simple as playing around it. I've been messing around with an esper control deck on modo and last night I played like 4 or 5 blood moon decks over the space of the evening. I think twice I got surprised with it game one and the other times they landed it post board. It didn't matter that I was prepared for blood moon, when I was on the play and they landed a turn 3 moon there was nothing I could do. You can't mulligan good hands with just 1 fetch because you might get hit by a blood moon. Even when I was purposely fetching out basics it was playing hell with the mana requirements of my deck (fetching basic island when I have cards needing white/black not blue). Most 3 colour decks are not going to manage to get 3 basics of each colour unless the moon doesn't come down for 6+ turns and relying on drawing naturally is unrealistic. Other than your primary colour you're likely not running more than a single basic. Abzan for example runs a single forest/plains.
As we all know after the recent revelations the deck is no where near as good as it was assumed blood moon or not.
Should traditional control (esper/jeskai) also not be decks in modern? 'Durdling' around in modern is hard enough as it is without having cards like that, and choke.... and boil.
Where's the destroy all mountains/forests card for control to get back at the red/green decks
Magus is pretty bad. Dies to pretty much everything. Few decks have a maindeck answer for a resolved blood moon though. You either have to counter it, float mana and destroy it (if you're lucky enough to run abrupt decay) or you're screwed.
It's currently played by more than 1 in 4 decks on mtgo which makes for pretty depressing reading. It's surprising tron and amulet bloom see as much play as they do when in an average daily event they'll face a blood moon deck.
I always feel like I want to draw anticipate against junk. They'll only discard your business spells at the start anyway so being able to see the top 3 can make a big difference. I'd also be happy to see it against burn just to help dig for my life gain cards.
So a 1st place control list but without any anticipate. I wonder if splashing black stops you from having the free spots for cards like that.
I really hate the blood moon in the board with the amount of cards it actually hurts from our side. I guess it's so unexpected from a 4 colour control deck that you could catch someone out though unless it just colds them we've sacrificed so much to cast it (lost colonnade, can't flashback souls, can't cast gideon, likely can't cast our cryptics and such too).
1 of sideboards with anticipate is defensible but when you're looking for early hate the single copy most of the time won't show up. I'm surprised that there's no stony silence or relic/GY hate because tron and graveyard decks are 2 of the worse matchups in my opinion.
Serum visions assuming it gets printed at common will plummet from the 8 bucks price it has now that's for sure.
A true Jeskai control list doesn't make up even 1% of the meta. Even the most played version (the midrange one) is only at 2% but I consider it a completely different deck, the version running geist and thundermaw with no cryptic command, no sweepers, no rev and just 4 remands as counter magic is not at all a control deck.
I honestly thought anticipate was good enough that it would see modern play and do something to boost control % (looking at twin I see some decks that have been 4-0 have adopted anticipate as a 4 of).
@ Aegraen - even though you have more than just snapcaster you're fighting the good fight at least! Good job