Its not unheard of for people devote 7-8 slots just to beat Dredge consistently in Vintage. I play BUG Fish in that format and I have exactly 7 (plus maindeck Deathrite Shaman) to make that matchup not a complete joke post-board.
Legacy can definitely have some very weird sideboard cards in that format, I mean Moat is a card Miracles has been using for a while and its pretty common for non-blue green decks to be packing Choke in their sideboard.
The card selection being as powerful as it stands is what lets fair decks play magic against the unfair decks in eternal formats (Not advocating for them in modern, they'd be more busted in unfair decks here than anything fair).
The solution, in my eyes, is lots of cheap and modal cards that have relevant effects. I like how Blessed Alliance is lifegain + removal in a single card, and something like removal + grave hate in one could be done without going overboard and forcing everyone to rely on really narrow cards.
anger and path don't matter much against dredge because they just sac the dudes to gargadon. Celestial Purge is narrow, I don't think I've ever seen a competitive modern deck play Anguished Unmaking. Nahiri is worth noting, but the only one out of those cards.
Surgical Extraction is a bad card and the only time it does anything against a combo deck is if the combo player is not very good at their deck. You're spending a card to not impact the board with the hope that taking all copies of a specific card renders the opponent unable to play magic or have their deck function at all, which probably won't happen against a competent combo player. Graveyard decks have just too many moving parts for one surgical to do anything, and you'll die to their beatdown plan. Everytime I see a Surgical Extraction in someone's sideboard I imagine they're not very good at creating powerful sideboards.
Grafdigger's Cage is the ultimate trap card. It looks great on the surface, but it does nothing to further your own proactive game plan. I've seen company players easily beat a t1 cage by just casting dudes and beating face.
Ooze and kalitas are good, but because they can threaten to kill the other guy instead of sitting around and doing nothing like Cage or Relic will.
Well that really depends on what you think the problem is.
Dredge's speed or resilience? If its the former, then Neonate/other enables are the problem, but if its the latter then Faithless Looting/Bridge/Prized Amalgram/Bloodghast are the primary offenders.
Its not unheard of for people devote 7-8 slots just to beat Dredge consistently in Vintage. I play BUG Fish in that format and I have exactly 7 (plus maindeck Deathrite Shaman) to make that matchup not a complete joke post-board.
Legacy can definitely have some very weird sideboard cards in that format, I mean Moat is a card Miracles has been using for a while and its pretty common for non-blue green decks to be packing Choke in their sideboard.
The card selection being as powerful as it stands is what lets fair decks play magic against the unfair decks in eternal formats (Not advocating for them in modern, they'd be more busted in unfair decks here than anything fair).
The solution, in my eyes, is lots of cheap and modal cards that have relevant effects. I like how Blessed Alliance is lifegain + removal in a single card, and something like removal + grave hate in one could be done without going overboard and forcing everyone to rely on really narrow cards.
Its a high variance card. Sometimes you're on the play, turn 2 they crack a fetch and you shadow of doubt them, they never see another land until 5 turns later and you pretty much auto-win.
Other times its just a really bad cantrip. There are also spots you can get blown out by your own shadow of doubt if your opponent is holding up ghost quarters (they can basically strip mine you for free).
When its great it wins the game, but when its bad, you wished it was something better. Whether or not to play it depends on how okay you're with high variance cards. For what its worth, I tend to stay away from high variance cards in my maindeck when I'm playing fair in modern. I'll leave my high variance but high upside cards in my sideboard, where they belong for a fair attrition deck. On the other hand, if I'm playing unfair and I aim to have you dead by turn 2, I'm okay with some high variance cards that might not do anything in a specific matchup. Summary: If you're playing fair, I think you want consistency over upside but if you're unfair, that's when you want high variance cards.
Sphinx seems great on paper, but unless I'm reading your manabase wrong, you have only 20 lands. Getting to 7 mana on 20 lands is gonna be rough a lot of the time. You do have a lot of card draw, which mitigates that concern somewhat, but I would still be wary of that.
There's also little tricks Teferi can pull that Sphinx can't. Like for instance, it makes creature combat awkward because your opponent can't just end step a lot of stuff to try and choke your mana or be bolting your own dudes mid-combat.
If you're looking for good situational countermagic, I feel mainboard Negate is perfectly justifiable even though Logic Knot probably serves your purposes better.
If you're going to go with Batterskull, I'd like to see an academy ruins somewhere in the manabase. No, you won't always have it in your opener, but if you have enough card draw, you will consistently find it in a lot of grindy, drawn out matchups. And those are the kind of matchups where you want to be recurring Batterskull anyway.
Another line you could go for is adding a Crucible of Worlds somewhere in there and replace edges with Ghost Quarter and establish a lock. I would only have Crucible in the sb though, its kind of dead in any aggro matchup, but gives you some kind of out in matchups that require you to have land hate.
On the subject of cheap interaction, you're already running a lot of spell snares and that card hits a lot of relevant things in modern (sniping Bob on the draw feels pretty good!) along with pierce/vapor snag. I'd say you have more than enough cheap interaction.
Oona's Grace, Think Twice, Whispers of the Muse - All three of these occupy a similar card draw slot that I'm not sure if the deck needs - instant speed repeatable card draw. Whispers seems SWEET and it was used to great effect in early draw go decks, but 6 mana is REALLY hefty for one card. Still, it's literally unlimited cards and you don't HAVE to use it if you need mana for other things. I've seen Esper decks use Think Twice but I've never personally used it - anyone have any insight here?
Think Twice is a card that shines in extremely grindy, attrition types of matchups. Like say, it really shines against something like Jund. It gives you some serious velocity, especially if you have other card draw spells to pair with it. It can really churn through your deck, give you a mana sink in the mid to late game. It also lets you get out from underneath Liliana of the Veil (Pitch TT to the +1, crack the flashback at EoT, you're up a card on your opponent since you're at parity and they pitched one). One of the best ways for a blue deck to beat a BGx deck is for the BGx player to piss away their hand with Liliana and then being able to punch through it with either a Cryptic Command bounce or hitting it with a manland.
Think Twice is also a lot worse in matchups against decks that are hyper linear, because you don't have the time to be spending that much mana, but it's really great in an attrition based matchup. It is nice that think twice very rarely gets countered by other blue decks, but if it does, that's also card advantage of its own (since any counterspell is only going to hit one half of it).
The Think Twice vs. Serum Visions debate hinges on how important the scry 2 is. Think Twice will always see 2 cards deep with no selection. Serum Visions will always draw you a card with no selection, then give you a shot at looking at the next 2. If you top/bottom, then essentially you've seen the same amount of cards either way, just Visions gave you slightly better selection than TT. If you bottom/bottom, then Visions saw more cards than TT would have. If you top/top, then Think Twice would have been superior. What this means is that Think Twice is going to function a lot better in decks that care about winning long attrition battles and have a lot of redundant cards that kind of all do the same thing (If your deck is a pile of spot removal/wraths and it doesn't matter what you draw, then you'd want TT because the selection becomes redundant). Serum Visions will be better in a deck that cares about finding very specific things.
I guess a good way to summarize it is that TT shines in fair matchups and Visions shines in unfair matchups.
I also feel that Visions shines a lot better in a proactive strategy. Its very mediocre in reactive decks, in my experience.
But then there's this too. Has modern slowed down enough for these kinds of decks to have breathing room or was it a case of players playing pet decks when they should just be playing better decks instead?
btw i've been testing AV all day long today (Jeskai vs CoCo), never lost a game in which i suspended T1-2, i need to see it more vs aggro though, this card is for real, it's the archetype it's played that's innately problematic
What kind of Jeskai list exactly? The counterburn Jeskai, the midrangey one with Angels + Thopter shop, etc.
Because to me, I think AV shines the brightest in a UBx midrange deck. Vision, Dark Confidant, Thoughtseize, Snapcaster Mage, Clique, Remand, Lilliana, Tasigur/Angler, etc. Could go green for Goyf/Abrupt Decay, White for Path + sideboard cards or Red for Bolt and reach.
A while back ago when Twin was a deck, some people tried Teferi in the sb for the blue mirror. If blue decks running AV are rampant, will this be the tech that beats them?
Notion Thief and Spirit of the Labyrinth also exist, but those are more in the realm of cute than actually practical.
As a Jund player I'm not overly fearing Ancestral Vision... Sword of the Meek is going to cause us more problems - although not directly, indirectly, through all decks running Graveyard hate against it. SotM is no more a threat to Jund than Twin is - inasmuch as we have a bunch of answers to it but we're in trouble if we don't have them at the time it wants to go off.
In regards to AV, AV is being massively over hyped, imo. Sure, AV is good but it needs to resolve twice to gain any true CA as drawing the first 3 cards essentially only mitigates having the other 3 copies of AV being terrible top decks in your deck later on.
I wonder if the decks that use it best are also going to have Goblin Dark Dwellers in them so they can cast it for free. I'm less worried about Jace, VP because of how easy he is for pretty much all decks to remove.
5 drops are still hard to cast in modern. Its a good 5 drop, but its still a 5 drop.
One thing that hasn't been brought up yet, but I think is important is remand. Remand's stock is going to skyrocket when people figure out that remanding other people's Vision's is one of the best things you can be doing.
This is my opinion too. I've read over the last few pages people saying Remand is now terrible and thinking "WHAT!" Remand seems sooo much stronger now than it has done for ages, imo.
Remand was bad, especially in the eldrazi metagame. That's no longer the case. I think blue decks should be packing some number of remands maindeck now.
As a Jund player I'm not overly fearing Ancestral Vision... Sword of the Meek is going to cause us more problems - although not directly, indirectly, through all decks running Graveyard hate against it. SotM is no more a threat to Jund than Twin is - inasmuch as we have a bunch of answers to it but we're in trouble if we don't have them at the time it wants to go off.
In regards to AV, AV is being massively over hyped, imo. Sure, AV is good but it needs to resolve twice to gain any true CA as drawing the first 3 cards essentially only mitigates having the other 3 copies of AV being terrible top decks in your deck later on.
I wonder if the decks that use it best are also going to have Goblin Dark Dwellers in them so they can cast it for free. I'm less worried about Jace, VP because of how easy he is for pretty much all decks to remove.
5 drops are still hard to cast in modern. Its a good 5 drop, but its still a 5 drop.
One thing that hasn't been brought up yet, but I think is important is remand. Remand's stock is going to skyrocket when people figure out that remanding other people's Vision's is one of the best things you can be doing.
anger and path don't matter much against dredge because they just sac the dudes to gargadon. Celestial Purge is narrow, I don't think I've ever seen a competitive modern deck play Anguished Unmaking. Nahiri is worth noting, but the only one out of those cards.
Surgical Extraction is a bad card and the only time it does anything against a combo deck is if the combo player is not very good at their deck. You're spending a card to not impact the board with the hope that taking all copies of a specific card renders the opponent unable to play magic or have their deck function at all, which probably won't happen against a competent combo player. Graveyard decks have just too many moving parts for one surgical to do anything, and you'll die to their beatdown plan. Everytime I see a Surgical Extraction in someone's sideboard I imagine they're not very good at creating powerful sideboards.
Grafdigger's Cage is the ultimate trap card. It looks great on the surface, but it does nothing to further your own proactive game plan. I've seen company players easily beat a t1 cage by just casting dudes and beating face.
Ooze and kalitas are good, but because they can threaten to kill the other guy instead of sitting around and doing nothing like Cage or Relic will.
Dredge's speed or resilience? If its the former, then Neonate/other enables are the problem, but if its the latter then Faithless Looting/Bridge/Prized Amalgram/Bloodghast are the primary offenders.
Legacy can definitely have some very weird sideboard cards in that format, I mean Moat is a card Miracles has been using for a while and its pretty common for non-blue green decks to be packing Choke in their sideboard.
The card selection being as powerful as it stands is what lets fair decks play magic against the unfair decks in eternal formats (Not advocating for them in modern, they'd be more busted in unfair decks here than anything fair).
The solution, in my eyes, is lots of cheap and modal cards that have relevant effects. I like how Blessed Alliance is lifegain + removal in a single card, and something like removal + grave hate in one could be done without going overboard and forcing everyone to rely on really narrow cards.
Does it count if I can tolerate the new borders?
Its a high variance card. Sometimes you're on the play, turn 2 they crack a fetch and you shadow of doubt them, they never see another land until 5 turns later and you pretty much auto-win.
Other times its just a really bad cantrip. There are also spots you can get blown out by your own shadow of doubt if your opponent is holding up ghost quarters (they can basically strip mine you for free).
When its great it wins the game, but when its bad, you wished it was something better. Whether or not to play it depends on how okay you're with high variance cards. For what its worth, I tend to stay away from high variance cards in my maindeck when I'm playing fair in modern. I'll leave my high variance but high upside cards in my sideboard, where they belong for a fair attrition deck. On the other hand, if I'm playing unfair and I aim to have you dead by turn 2, I'm okay with some high variance cards that might not do anything in a specific matchup. Summary: If you're playing fair, I think you want consistency over upside but if you're unfair, that's when you want high variance cards.
Sphinx seems great on paper, but unless I'm reading your manabase wrong, you have only 20 lands. Getting to 7 mana on 20 lands is gonna be rough a lot of the time. You do have a lot of card draw, which mitigates that concern somewhat, but I would still be wary of that.
There's also little tricks Teferi can pull that Sphinx can't. Like for instance, it makes creature combat awkward because your opponent can't just end step a lot of stuff to try and choke your mana or be bolting your own dudes mid-combat.
If you're looking for good situational countermagic, I feel mainboard Negate is perfectly justifiable even though Logic Knot probably serves your purposes better.
Another line you could go for is adding a Crucible of Worlds somewhere in there and replace edges with Ghost Quarter and establish a lock. I would only have Crucible in the sb though, its kind of dead in any aggro matchup, but gives you some kind of out in matchups that require you to have land hate.
On the subject of cheap interaction, you're already running a lot of spell snares and that card hits a lot of relevant things in modern (sniping Bob on the draw feels pretty good!) along with pierce/vapor snag. I'd say you have more than enough cheap interaction.
Think Twice is a card that shines in extremely grindy, attrition types of matchups. Like say, it really shines against something like Jund. It gives you some serious velocity, especially if you have other card draw spells to pair with it. It can really churn through your deck, give you a mana sink in the mid to late game. It also lets you get out from underneath Liliana of the Veil (Pitch TT to the +1, crack the flashback at EoT, you're up a card on your opponent since you're at parity and they pitched one). One of the best ways for a blue deck to beat a BGx deck is for the BGx player to piss away their hand with Liliana and then being able to punch through it with either a Cryptic Command bounce or hitting it with a manland.
Think Twice is also a lot worse in matchups against decks that are hyper linear, because you don't have the time to be spending that much mana, but it's really great in an attrition based matchup. It is nice that think twice very rarely gets countered by other blue decks, but if it does, that's also card advantage of its own (since any counterspell is only going to hit one half of it).
The Think Twice vs. Serum Visions debate hinges on how important the scry 2 is. Think Twice will always see 2 cards deep with no selection. Serum Visions will always draw you a card with no selection, then give you a shot at looking at the next 2. If you top/bottom, then essentially you've seen the same amount of cards either way, just Visions gave you slightly better selection than TT. If you bottom/bottom, then Visions saw more cards than TT would have. If you top/top, then Think Twice would have been superior. What this means is that Think Twice is going to function a lot better in decks that care about winning long attrition battles and have a lot of redundant cards that kind of all do the same thing (If your deck is a pile of spot removal/wraths and it doesn't matter what you draw, then you'd want TT because the selection becomes redundant). Serum Visions will be better in a deck that cares about finding very specific things.
I guess a good way to summarize it is that TT shines in fair matchups and Visions shines in unfair matchups.
I also feel that Visions shines a lot better in a proactive strategy. Its very mediocre in reactive decks, in my experience.
I assume this was a really bizarre metagame choice, because I have a hard time imagining Teachings actually working in an open metagame for modern.
http://sales.starcitygames.com//deckdatabase/displaydeck.php?DeckID=100983
But then there's this too. Has modern slowed down enough for these kinds of decks to have breathing room or was it a case of players playing pet decks when they should just be playing better decks instead?
What kind of Jeskai list exactly? The counterburn Jeskai, the midrangey one with Angels + Thopter shop, etc.
Because to me, I think AV shines the brightest in a UBx midrange deck. Vision, Dark Confidant, Thoughtseize, Snapcaster Mage, Clique, Remand, Lilliana, Tasigur/Angler, etc. Could go green for Goyf/Abrupt Decay, White for Path + sideboard cards or Red for Bolt and reach.
Rest in Peace is pretty well positioned as a sideboard card right now.
Notion Thief and Spirit of the Labyrinth also exist, but those are more in the realm of cute than actually practical.
Remand was bad, especially in the eldrazi metagame. That's no longer the case. I think blue decks should be packing some number of remands maindeck now.
5 drops are still hard to cast in modern. Its a good 5 drop, but its still a 5 drop.
One thing that hasn't been brought up yet, but I think is important is remand. Remand's stock is going to skyrocket when people figure out that remanding other people's Vision's is one of the best things you can be doing.