So on the chance that Death's Shadow does get hit in August, is the rest of the shell still viable?
By that I mean, is powering out a turn 2 Tasigur/ Gurmag Angler with Stubborn Denial backup still a good enough strategy? Do you just replace Death's Shadow with Delver or do you find something else to fit that slot instead (preferably another 4+ powered creature)?
I can't think of anything that's both a cheap 4/* creature that wouldn't conflict with Tasigur and Gurmag Angler, so the fatty + Stubborn Denial plan pretty much dies with DS. If DS were banned (and man I hope it doesn't) the likely outcome is that anyone who can't jump ship from a Grixis shell to some other shell would switch back to either Grixis Control or Grixis Delver. I can't say how well the former will do, but the latter is pretty much objectively worse than Grixis DS by a large margin
I heard some people talking the other day about the possibility of Chalice of the Void getting the ban. They also mentioned Blood Moon as a contender.
Personally the idea seemed kind of weird to me, as both are legal in Legacy where they hose way more decks than in Modern... Plus neither is particularly meta-dominating. Admittedly, both lead to some feel-bad games, and sometimes that's what Wizards cares about.
What do you all think?
Legacy impact doesn't affect whether or not cards get banned in Modern, and there are certainly a number of decks in Modern that get hosed by a T1 Chalice or a T2 Blood Moon.
That being said, the only T1 deck maindecking Chalice is Eldrazi Tron, which has a reasonably healthy meta share, and virtually none of the T1 decks even have Blood Moon in the 75. "This card leads to feel-bad games" on its own is not a good enough reason to ban a card, especially in eternal formats like Modern
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that DS decks actually had a bad match-up against traditional BGx Midrange decks due to the higher removal spell counts and Liliana of the Veil, but had bad match-ups against almost everything else in the meta, which led me to think that it was less about DS decks cannibalizing other midrange/tempo decks because it was objectively better and more about the rest of the meta simply being way too hostile towards more traditional builds
I am looking for some help with tuning the deck and have most of the standard pieces mentioned in both the Multi and 1v1 primers, however I am struggling to compete with token decks and combo decks.
I am wondering what the general opinion is for keeping those decks at bay?
I run board wipes and MLD and I still cannot seem to keep them at bay, even with taking them out first.
Any ideas?
In addition to Wrath sorceries, there's also Steel Hellkite and Balefire Dragon, both of which can help deal with decks when they've gone wide. Rakdos the Defiler can also help, but I'm not a huge fan of it since it's usually only good for 1, maybe 2 attacks after the first time you cheat its trigger. Magus of the Moat is also good for stopping a lot of decks from attacking while still letting almost all of your relevant attackers keep attacking.
I don't have much advise for dealing with Combo players, sadly. Hopefully someone else with more experience can help with that
Personally I think at this point it would both be feasible and reasonable to have a small team test for potential bans and unbans. If they're hiring new people and forming an entirely new team to help with designing Standard, you can devote a few resources to making a team for testing Modern banlist cards. Heck, you could just pull some people from the new team once or twice a year and temporarily have them discuss potential bannings and test potential unbannings. It just doesn't strike me as a resource-intensive endeavor, especially if you have the time and money to spend on an entirely new department consisting partially of experienced players outside of Wizards
talking about the new article, "metamorphosis 2.0" do you think that the comeback of this kind of "coreset" could bring back the modern pro tour? it seems like a pro tour with a core set as a focus could be boring, even more taking into account that, as maro said, this set would be more oriented to new players
Seems unlikely. Original they didn't want Modern to be a Pro Tour format because it tends to become "solved" much more quickly than Standard and because new sets tend not to have enough of an impact on Modern to showcase the sets. Considering that the core sets are going to be designed for newer players with only a few cards designed with Modern or Legacy in mind, the core sets likely aren't going to cause massive shifts in the Modern meta, which means that the biggest reasons why Modern isn't a PT format will still stand
State of M-O-D-E-R-N. Who cares legacy? Handdisruption, take selfdamage, a lot of pointremoval and cycling...big creatures. It is realy similar. some counter in grixis and snapcaster changes nothing in real life. Splinter twin was splinter twin was splinter twin and death shadow is death shadow is death shadow...
The differences are way deeper than that. Twin decks were basically just splashing a color either more efficient beaters and/or spells. UBx Shadow decks and GBx Shadow decks usually require completely different set-up plans to get to the same place. While UBx decks are using Serum Visions and Thoughtscours to sculpt their hands and pump their graveyards enough to cast Delve threats, the GBx variants are trying to pump multiple card types into the graveyard to set up fatter Tarms and get Traverse online. It's not just splashing U to cast Snaps and Denials, which some of the 4 color GBx decks have done in the past
By the way, you should use mtg top 8. There you see the numbers and results in the last big tournaments like kopenhagen...its not fake news
The reason people say MTGTop8 is bad for getting usage numbers is because they will often aggregate decks that have no business being combined in usage over multiple events. Past and present examples include combining RW Prison deck usage with Jeskai Nahiri and Grixis Control with Grixis Delver. This is why people specifically mentioned not using their metagame numbers and why most people use MTGGoldfish for metagame numbers. MTGTop8's fine if you want to see the top 16/32 results of tourneys, but a lot sites do that, including Goldfish.
The problem card in Shadow is Shadow. The ability to produce absurd ahead of curve pressure of of 4 Tarmogoyf cards (the real goyf, tasigur, fish, shadow) is what is consistently keeping these decks a thing. Shadow as the best of them makes the deck. Everything else without Shadow is merely okay, even mediocre.
A Grixis delver list with Daze would be much more fair than a Grixis Shadow list is now.
We should not be held hostage because of WotC's creature related design failures.
But is there any reason why Grixis Shadow wouldn't just run Daze though? For me, I didn't switch from Delver to Shadow just because TS/IoK is more effective than counter magic. Another huge reason was because Death's Shadow was in general more reliable than Delver since DS can go online while I proactively go after my opponent, whereas flipping early Delvers can be unreliable with only Serum Visions to manipulate the top of my deck. Maybe I'm missing something, but if Daze were reprinted for Modern, it just seems like Grixis Shadow would be getting a powerful new tool that they can easily add to the deck by dropping Stubborn Denial and 1-2 other spells while Delver decks would continued to overshadowed (heh) due to the lack of good cantrips
As for whether or not Daze would be fine in a format full of shocklands, I couldn't say for sure because a player could just fetch for a basic Island and bounce that, but I know that doing so could create awkward mana situations in 3-color decks, and from what I see from Legacy games, it's not the hardest card to play around if you plan for it. I have some Dazes coming in soon, so hopefully I'll find some free time to test Daze in decks with a Modern format manabase and see how it feels firsthand
I just don't know if they will unban it after only a year and a half of it being banned. Is that too soon?
GGT was unbanned Jan. 2015, then got re-banned two years later in Jan. 2017...
So if they were to emulate this, there's still half a year to go, and Twin would be unbanned this coming Jan. 2018.
They're not obligated to follow it to the letter, but that's the only precedent we have, I think?
I wouldn't call that a good example of a banning->unbanning precedent. Not only was that a time table for an unbanning followed by its re-banning, the deck didn't do anything until Amalgam and Cathartic Reunion were printed, so there's a whole lot of time where it really didn't matter that GGT was even unbanned.
A better example would be Wild Nacatl, which was banned after the initial banlist but unbanned after a while. That was banned in December 2011, but came back February 2014, so that was roughly 2 years before it came back. So, assuming there is such a schedule for looking at unbans (though I'm pretty sure there is no such thing) they likely wouldn't even consider it until sometime around June 2018
What is the middle line between Miscalculation - a relatively average, maybe even below average Counterspell by old standards and the garbage they print nowadays?
Anything weaker than Miscalculation is bound to be weaker than Mana Leak and Remand and those two are already lacking in Modern.
Stoddard logic:
Miscalculation = too strong for standard
T4 Ulamog = okay for standard
@HairlessThoctar Should Marvel have entered tapped or sacrificed or not cast? In hindsight, what would have changed?
There are a number of things. First off, I think we should try to limit the number of cards getting random creatures off the top after CoCo and Aetherworks Marvel. I think we could've fixed the problems with the current card by either adding a mana cost to the activation or we could've not cast the spell. Certainly if we'd known about the extra six months with Eldrazi, we would've weakened it a bit.
Apparently when Marvel was first designed, they didn't know that the Battle For Zendikar block was going to be in Standard for another 6 months and had expected the deck to die out naturally, and even now they're realizing that cards like CoCo and Marvel that can cheat in creatures at instant speed or continuously for 0 mana are not particularly good for Standard, so it's not that they're necessarily OK with it nor was it designed with the knowledge that Ulamog was going to be in Standard for a particularly long period of time.
As for Miscalculation, it is interesting that they deemed it too powerful and yet want to make something better than what's out there since I can't think of an effect that would be stronger than Censor for 2 mana but would be weaker than Miscalculation (aside from countering unless you pay 1.5 mana:)). What I'm hoping is that maybe they'll make more counterspells like Silumgar's Scorn that are powerful but require you to build around them. Granted there's nothing particular about the language he used that makes me think that they're looking into that, but it'd be nice
Weather it sustains or not isn't the only problem. Control should really be more of the top tier metagame share. Roughly 20%-25% of it in fact, and that shouldn't be in the form of a single control deck (a single deck with more than 10% metagame share over a sustained period is dangerous). The metagame in the top tier should be roughly 20% aggro, 20% 'aggro-control' (midrange and/or tempo), 20% combo, 20% control, and 20% other/flex if you want a healthy metagame, particularly one that can reign in on combo effectively if a combo deck starts getting problematic. The current environment is still pretty far from that.
What??? Why? Where did Wizards say this was a goal of theirs?
its not their goal, its just an example of balance in archetypes. one that would be healthy imo if they where all even, explained clearly above.
This doesn't necessarily equate to balance in strategies. If the 20% Aggro portion consists of 2 decks and the other 20% portions consist of 10 decks a piece, at a glance, my first impression is that the two aggro decks are actually significantly stronger than the rest of the meta, which wouldn't necessarily be a healthy meta. You could add an addendum stating that an ideal meta would also have roughly the same number of T1 decks while also maintaining these percentages, but to me that's unrealistic goal to strive for without a level of micromanagement that would turn most people off of Modern.
I believe a more reasonable goal to strive towards would be to simply make sure every strategy has at least 2 (preferably 3) reasonably distinct T1-level decks in the meta. I couldn't care less if there are 10 T1 aggro decks if I can choose from a couple of control deck and walk into the same open tourney as the aggro pilots and have roughly the same chance of winning (assuming I'm at the same skill level as the other pilots of course). This goal also as the benefit of not really carrying how much of a particular strategy is in the meta, whereas in the other model, if a strategy started hitting 27% of the meta due to 9 decks all being at 3%, by the other model, you'd have to nerf almost all of them or straight-up kill 2 of them to get back to being around 20%
We had a good couple of weeks without Twin talk. I'd assumed cfusionpm had gone on holiday or something.
But we're back to beating the old dead horse, trying to get blood from the same old stone.
My only point was that his argument meant nothing in the current metagame. If you like, it's Tabak's law in action.
I don't think anyone's saying that the new iteration of GWx CoCo is safe from bannings because it's an interactive creature-based combo deck. They're saying to the people calling for something to be banned from the one month old deck that it can be interacted with to a large enough degree that we should at least wait until it sees the same success Twin did or if it's a frequent T4 Rule violator before calling for the banhammer. I mentioned this before, but Twin shouldn't even be a factor in this conversation
Abzan Coco is pretty favourable against Jund Death's Shadow. That I can surely say.
In fact, about Abzan Coco, the deck has 50/50's everywhere(but not too many 60/40's or 70/30's to receive a banning), but in my books thats a great thing.
Even against Ad nauseam, Storm, or Tron you win with the Turn 3 kill with the new combo if you have it. It also crushes the fair decks with Eternal Witness, Chord Of Calling, Collected Company, Renegade Rallier, Sheenanigans. Too much value into one deck for the fair decks to handle and too much quickness into one deck for the unfair decks to handle. It has the whole package of 50-50's if you are into that.
BUT! Again, it's TOO EASILY disruptable and nearly everything has game against it. This is the reason why ABZAN COCO WILL NEVER RECEIVE A NERF. Please, people, stop it.
Also, it can be hated out. Leyline, Rest In Peace and all of the attrition spells.
Abzan Company is perfectly safe and OK. People need to realize that. Please, stop the banmania.
A resilient combo deck that is easily disrupted and can be hit by targeted hate with mostly 50/50 matchups and runs a solid value beatdown back up plan... Why does this sound so familiar? And why is this one OK?
I have nothing against Twin, but in addition to what Pokken said, the fact that the combo pieces are CMC 2 creatures with less than 3 toughness makes them way more vulnerable to removal than Twin, which wasn't vulnerable to Lightning Bolts unless you used it on Pestermite or Bounding Krasis (in Temur builds) and couldn't be popped by Fatal Push without Revolt. Not to mention the buffed version of the deck has only been around for about a month, whereas Twin had been around for quite some time. This isn't to say that Twin necessarily deserves to be banned (a ring I'd rather not throw my hat into), but it's definitely too early to say that this deck was as good as Twin at fighting against disruption, and it's too new to have put up the same track record in tournaments as Twin, so I don't see why this deck's existence should be tied in any way to Twin's
For what it's worth, Grixis Shadow definitely runs way too much discard to be a tempo deck, but it definitely falls under the Aggro-Control archetype just like Delver and other Tempo decks. Swapping counter magic for discard definitely means you're foregoing tempo for a different kind of disruption, but at its core, you're still running a small number of efficient beaters and aiming to use control elements to clear the way for them to clock your opponent. Of course, "Tempo" rolls off the tongue better than "Aggro-Control" and has been the poster child of Aggro-Control for so many years that I can see why people refer to Grixis Shadow as a tempo deck despite the large number of discard spells.
Wizards will eventually realize their mistake with removal, and start printing better answers again (Push not withstanding). At which point Twin will definitely be safe.
They banned Saheeli in Standard, Twin in Modern, Miracles in Legacy, and Mentor in Legacy. Wizards hates spells, hates control, hates blue cards, and hates combos. In their perfect world, we would have big dumb creatures smashing into each other turn after turn, just like Hearthstone.
It seriously seems disingenuous to make any correlation between the recent bans and Wizard's stance on Control. CopyCat was literally ruining Standard, which can be measured through its metagame numbers and tournament success, and Miracles has been eating up about 14-15% of the meta for over a year. If these were aggro decks eating crippling bans, can you say in good faith that you'd claim that these bans were unjustified based on metagame shares and tournament success?
People need to stop assuming that these recent bans have anything to do with some secret anti-Control agenda. Both decks were pulling meta shares that for their respective formats was simply too high. Getting rid of Copy Cat is the first step to making Standard playable, and if you want to play control in Legacy, both Sultai Control and 4 Color Control are very strong decks that are completely untouched by this ban. This isn't WotC secretly plotting control, this is Wizards improving diversity in one format and fixing a blatant mistake in another
That being said, the only T1 deck maindecking Chalice is Eldrazi Tron, which has a reasonably healthy meta share, and virtually none of the T1 decks even have Blood Moon in the 75. "This card leads to feel-bad games" on its own is not a good enough reason to ban a card, especially in eternal formats like Modern
I don't have much advise for dealing with Combo players, sadly. Hopefully someone else with more experience can help with that
The differences are way deeper than that. Twin decks were basically just splashing a color either more efficient beaters and/or spells. UBx Shadow decks and GBx Shadow decks usually require completely different set-up plans to get to the same place. While UBx decks are using Serum Visions and Thoughtscours to sculpt their hands and pump their graveyards enough to cast Delve threats, the GBx variants are trying to pump multiple card types into the graveyard to set up fatter Tarms and get Traverse online. It's not just splashing U to cast Snaps and Denials, which some of the 4 color GBx decks have done in the past
The reason people say MTGTop8 is bad for getting usage numbers is because they will often aggregate decks that have no business being combined in usage over multiple events. Past and present examples include combining RW Prison deck usage with Jeskai Nahiri and Grixis Control with Grixis Delver. This is why people specifically mentioned not using their metagame numbers and why most people use MTGGoldfish for metagame numbers. MTGTop8's fine if you want to see the top 16/32 results of tourneys, but a lot sites do that, including Goldfish.
As for whether or not Daze would be fine in a format full of shocklands, I couldn't say for sure because a player could just fetch for a basic Island and bounce that, but I know that doing so could create awkward mana situations in 3-color decks, and from what I see from Legacy games, it's not the hardest card to play around if you plan for it. I have some Dazes coming in soon, so hopefully I'll find some free time to test Daze in decks with a Modern format manabase and see how it feels firsthand
A better example would be Wild Nacatl, which was banned after the initial banlist but unbanned after a while. That was banned in December 2011, but came back February 2014, so that was roughly 2 years before it came back. So, assuming there is such a schedule for looking at unbans (though I'm pretty sure there is no such thing) they likely wouldn't even consider it until sometime around June 2018
Apparently when Marvel was first designed, they didn't know that the Battle For Zendikar block was going to be in Standard for another 6 months and had expected the deck to die out naturally, and even now they're realizing that cards like CoCo and Marvel that can cheat in creatures at instant speed or continuously for 0 mana are not particularly good for Standard, so it's not that they're necessarily OK with it nor was it designed with the knowledge that Ulamog was going to be in Standard for a particularly long period of time.
As for Miscalculation, it is interesting that they deemed it too powerful and yet want to make something better than what's out there since I can't think of an effect that would be stronger than Censor for 2 mana but would be weaker than Miscalculation (aside from countering unless you pay 1.5 mana:)). What I'm hoping is that maybe they'll make more counterspells like Silumgar's Scorn that are powerful but require you to build around them. Granted there's nothing particular about the language he used that makes me think that they're looking into that, but it'd be nice
I believe a more reasonable goal to strive towards would be to simply make sure every strategy has at least 2 (preferably 3) reasonably distinct T1-level decks in the meta. I couldn't care less if there are 10 T1 aggro decks if I can choose from a couple of control deck and walk into the same open tourney as the aggro pilots and have roughly the same chance of winning (assuming I'm at the same skill level as the other pilots of course). This goal also as the benefit of not really carrying how much of a particular strategy is in the meta, whereas in the other model, if a strategy started hitting 27% of the meta due to 9 decks all being at 3%, by the other model, you'd have to nerf almost all of them or straight-up kill 2 of them to get back to being around 20%
I don't think anyone's saying that the new iteration of GWx CoCo is safe from bannings because it's an interactive creature-based combo deck. They're saying to the people calling for something to be banned from the one month old deck that it can be interacted with to a large enough degree that we should at least wait until it sees the same success Twin did or if it's a frequent T4 Rule violator before calling for the banhammer. I mentioned this before, but Twin shouldn't even be a factor in this conversation
People need to stop assuming that these recent bans have anything to do with some secret anti-Control agenda. Both decks were pulling meta shares that for their respective formats was simply too high. Getting rid of Copy Cat is the first step to making Standard playable, and if you want to play control in Legacy, both Sultai Control and 4 Color Control are very strong decks that are completely untouched by this ban. This isn't WotC secretly plotting control, this is Wizards improving diversity in one format and fixing a blatant mistake in another