I know the Esper Charm thing came up for Cedric Phillips before and some people still think that it's scummy that he did it but it was a completely valid play. He even double checked with his opponent asking him "Target yourself?"
The awkward thing about Charm now in modern is that if you play against a player on Esper Goryo's them saying "Target me" might be them trying to angle shoot. There might be a situation where they have 2 Vengance's and Griselbrand in hand that they need to get online so saying "target me" is literally what they mean. Then again they might say "target me" waiting to see if you respond and if you don't they can go to draw cards because they changed their mind.
Because of this, I feel that if an opponent casts it and says "target me" that they have to discard, no questions asked. Before I respond I'll make sure to double check with a "target yourself?" for confirmation but if they say yes again then it means they want to discard.
That being said if this is like FNM or some other random weekend event then I don't really care and I know what they meant and just let them draw. It's casual, if they really want to scum me with something like that at FNM then they're only hurting themselves. FNM's are meant to be fun and it's best to try and not ruin the mood. I'd even say to an extent that GPT's and PPTQ's fall under this umbrella of being really casual.
Edit: Honestly the best thing to do is just to straight up ask them "Wait, which mode are you selecting?" to 100% clarify. If you are ever uncertain about something it's always best to get clarification from your opponent. Sometimes with all the shortcuts and fatigue we often assume too much which can lead to some awkward situations.
Another thing I forgot to add is the ban of Gitaxian Probe and infect falling off the map hurt Jund. Jund had a good matchup against infect, and infect preyed upon decks like Tron which is Jund's worst matchup.
The banning of Probe was only a slight nerf to infect. The deck would have been fine in that meta. The thing that really killed Infect was the printing of Push. You can ask pretty much any other infect player (I was one as well) and they will respond similarly.
Though it is interesting to think how the format would shape up if Push were not printed. I do think that the printing of Push was for the better though, as I already said more general answers is always better.
Honestly the thing this format needs more than bans/unbans is just more general answers. I've been a part of the more answers camp for years and hope that eventually Wizards gets their act together and prints better answers to both help standard (they sure as hell need it with how bad it's been within the last year) and maybe a few trickle into modern as well. I'm not saying we need drastic answers like Force of Will or anything but more cards in higher color varieties like Push and even Kommand that are either very efficient or are general enough to answer a multitude of threats will help out the format way more than unbanning (or certainly banning) any single card. Sure there are a few cards that Wizards finds questionable but can come off the ban list. Chances are with their pattern though it won't (just being realistic here).
I just wish Wizards added new cards to non-standard legal supplemental products like MM that they could also deem Modern legal. There are plenty of tame cards they could try adding like Prohibit and Opt and maybe they can even try throwing in some curveballs like Baleful Strix, Pyrokinesis and Contagion if they want. Though for more land hate they would have to create a whole new card that some people have suggested is a mix between Wasteland and Ghost Quarter. The whole issue of threats massively outweighing the answers has made the format so proactive so it wouldn't hurt to see some stuff come from the other direction.
Surgical isn't really that good in this deck, especially with everybody cutting LD from the 75. I've even cut it from my YP lists, and those are the lists that would tend to abuse it the most. The card is just too slow to deal with GY strategies, and isn't strong enough to capitalize on big mana decks when we go under and don't have LD to lock them. The card is also not very good in grindy matchups since it is inherent card disadvantage. If worried about combo, run more counters in addition to the denials and brutalities. If worried about GY strats, run more Spellbombs/Leylines/Cages. Or if you want a bit of a mix between aggro, combo and GY decks you could do what Jessup advocated and play a catchall instead of slightly more specific cards in TBR. Sometimes stealing games is just the best strategy if backed into a corner.
At ehat poont do you take the yp build and put back in delver
When Gitaxian Probe gets unbanned or a card very similar to it comes out (like a Wraith but a Sorcery). Or if they ever decide to unban preordain. Wizards pls just once.
The deck still has answers to Chalice in the 8 main deck disruption spells, and can potentially go up to more. 1 vs. 2 Kommands doesn't make a whole ton of a difference, especially when severely upping the count on cantrips in the maindeck. Ballista and All is Dust are a problem, but All is Dust was always a problem, you just had to race it or had to have timely disruption. Ballista is a little more annoying but at least they are forced to fire it off earlier than they would want to gun down YP and his buddies. I didn't actually know that ETron deck were putting back Wail in the main, IIRC they ran dismembers because it also dealt with delve creatures.
The card certainly isn't broken or anything, it's just another option you can take if your meta is hostile towards normal Grixis Shadow decks and you don't happen to have any other decks available. Feel free to tweak some numbers here and there if you want to test it out, I do think that some bolts or more dismembers could be in the main but I didn't want to have to eat into more Scours than I needed to. The side is still all over the place, Izzet Staticaster could probably be in place of a field wipe, there's a chance some Surgicals should be in there because of YP synergy and I think Painful Truths would be a great addition in a YP build of the deck.
Most of you are probably doing fine with the stock 19 land version so if it ain't broke no need to fix it.
It's the reason why I cut Kommand. Snap has a lot more utility than Kommand does and is not red. The goal is to limit the number of red spells in the deck at a given time and I have to hedge. The whole point of playing YP is to have yourself a hedge against chalice while having more threats and reducing the number of clunky/dead cards. In this regard I could see cutting a Snapcaster as well.
The whole point in playing a version like this deck is to hedge against certain things. Land destruction not being one of them. This version aims to minimalize against grave hate as much as possible and have an edge against chalice. More decks right now are running grave hate than land destruction because the threat of Dredge and Living End is very real. LD also isn't that great against Eldrazi Tron opposed to basic tron which has fallen out of favor.
I did want to fit some number of Lightning Bolts into the deck but ultimately I wasn't able to cut enough slots for them. I refuse to run bolt in this deck unless I have at least 2.
If you want to play YP you're going to want to capitalize on its potential as much as you can. I would definitely add some number of Sleight of Hands to the list. I originally had Claim in the deck but it was too slow so I just made it a Kommand instead. I'm really liking this leaner version of the deck.
The deck seems like it's on the right track but it still looks confused. 2 Claim//Fame and 2 Kommand main is a lot and I think they were testing Gifts as a hedge in the main. For this deck seems like more of a side card. Not sure the correct number between YP's and Delve dudes in the 75. Currently testing 3 YP/3 delve dudes rn, seems to be working solidly for now. Gifts with Claim and Kommand is sick nasty though, seems like a dope thing to try out.
Edit: Where is that decklist from? Was it from a daily on mtggoldfish or something?
For those who still want to play a twin style deck: since at this point in time it seems Kiki Jiki is the closest thing to a replacement you will get have you guys tested all the variants? I heard someone say Grixis is bad, so fair enough. A friend and I built a UR version right as soon as twin got banned, and he topped an event with it the weekend that Pro Tour Eldrazi happened, though at this point that deck probably isn't good enough anymore. What about USA/UWR/Jeskai Kiki Jiki flash though? It keeps all of the EOT flash elements you guys love, still has bolt snap bolt and can chip away at the opponent with all the fliers. What seems to be the issue with this deck, it seems to fit your wants better than Copycat combo will.
If you want you can also exchange the/a IOK with Denials to deal with some of the stuff postboard. Specifically the stuff with flashback. Being able to hit looting or conflagrate is nice and you don't run into awkward scenarios in the later game when their hand is all dredge cards so it's dead or you have to think about playing it into a hand of cards they want discarded. Denial is a little more narrow but guarunteed. Doesn't make the matchup significantly better or anything but could gain you a few percentage points in dealing with those pesky conflagrates or stopping loam for a turn to kill them.
Hi all, fairly new to the archetype and don't have much experience with UW decks because I've never owned Colonnades before.
I'm here to ask why this deck specifically has significantly shot up in popularity over the last few months over any other control deck. What makes this deck stand out from say, Grixis control that makes it a great meta choice? I'm curious as to why UW has been thriving recently but other Cryptic Command decks are dying out.
As of right now we are limited in the kinds of threats that we can run that diversify our threat suite while helping us mitigate damage from grave hate. The only other card I could see people running is Vendilion Clique but that's more of a sideboard card than anything. YP feels like a great value card that can also take over a game if left unanswered. These lists already run 25-26 noncreature spells which is more than enough to keep something like YP going. The difference between it and Delver is that you can just let YP sit on the battlefield and it will be a threat in itself. An unflipped Delver isn't a threat at all. The deck can play both a proactive and reactive game which gives YP a lot of flexibility in the deck. Think of it more as a value card than anything.
Because of that the deck will want to minimize the number of dead/clunky draws as possible and both Snap and Kommand fit that bill. They are 3 mana cards that are relevant enough if the game goes late, but feel downright awful if you draw several of them. For that reason I could see cutting some number of these (though I myself would want at least 3 Snaps and 1 Kommand main) to mitigate this issue and help yourself become less reliant on the graveyard. If your meta is literally all Shadow and Bgx decks with literally 0 grave hate then you obviously don't need to worry about this, but nowadays most unknown metas are packing serious grave hate that affects this deck and others like dredge.
Some folks are content with their 19 land builds and won't ever change. That's fine, as long as you're winning with it you do you friend. I'm just on the quest to find the best possible build of this deck because it has so much untapped potential. Will that result in me playing a lot of suboptimal builds? Yeah, probably. Chapin looked like a fool when he first tried to do it but he believed that there was something more. There might be something more to this deck with what we have, but it might also be with a card that hasn't come out yet.
I've been fiddling with some of the slots and have been doing some research on Modern/Legacy decks that ran YP in the past. It turns out that every Grixis variant I came across (with the exception of this: http://www.gamekeeper.ca/decklist-du-top-16-modern-8k-1er-juillet-2017/) but that's actually a new one not an old build had 2-3 YP in them. So I'm currently going to try 2 Young Pyromancer in the deck. I believe from my list I cut a Dismember and a Gurmag Angler to add them in. The list still has 2 Kommands and can go up to 3 hard removal spells post board so I'm content on cutting those. I cut the Angler to help the deck be slightly less graveyard reliant like what Spooly suggested. Hopefully we find the right balance that ends up working but this is version 1.
I doubt that Grixis is the best DS shell. Before the Probe (& Troll) ban, the 4 color aggro/combo build seemed like the best build. After the ban the world found out that the Jund and Jund + white builds were better all along. Then Michael Majors showed us that Grixis was even better than Jund. But how much experimentation has there really been since the format found out about the power of Shadow + Thoughtseize + Street Wraith + Fetches + Shocks? I don't mean by random players like you and me, I mean by the best players and deckbuilders in the world. Not that much! Modern isn't a PT format, and outside of a handful of GPs, e.g. GP Vegas, there hasn't been a ton of incentive for these players to put in the effort. Esper, in particular, is a color combination that I think has been fairly underexplored by those top players, but there's also been relatively little exploration of radically different shells other than the Goyf shell we see in Jund and Sultai and the Scour + delve shell we see in Grixis and Esper. The world only recently found out about the 4 Sleight of hand build in Grixis, and there's still no concensus about whether 0, 4, or some other number of Sleights is the way to go! And this is a question in the Esper shell too!
The core Shadow shell is a single color and doesn't take up too much deckbuilding space or put much of a constraint on deckbuilding. If anything, it eases constraints because the life loss associated with a fetch+shock manabasse is now a benefit. If you're trying to win a tournament tomorrow, by all means, sleeve up a tweaked and tuned version of Grixis Shadow teched out for all the hate. Or maybe Esper Shadow if you basically like Grixis but want Path and a different suite of SB cards or if you're feeling like taking a risk on something a little less proven. But there's still a ton of room to experiment with and explore this basic shell. The holy grail, if you can find it - if it exists - is a Shadow shell that doesn't rely on the graveyard so heavily while still providing strong threats to pair with Shadow. Then you get to dodge all of the graveyard hate and maybe even play some stronger hate yourself.
In that sense I kind of wish we still had probe back in the format that way we could try some builds with Young Pyromancer. Maybe it could work if they ever somehow manage to sneak in Cabal Therapy into modern for us. The deck is probably 1-2 good cards away from being able to play pyromancer. Just an idea, others are free to try out other threats in its place to help not get reamed by grave hate. A Pyromancer build could end up being bettered by more Sleight of Hands in its wake as well, which sounds sweet.
The awkward thing about Charm now in modern is that if you play against a player on Esper Goryo's them saying "Target me" might be them trying to angle shoot. There might be a situation where they have 2 Vengance's and Griselbrand in hand that they need to get online so saying "target me" is literally what they mean. Then again they might say "target me" waiting to see if you respond and if you don't they can go to draw cards because they changed their mind.
Because of this, I feel that if an opponent casts it and says "target me" that they have to discard, no questions asked. Before I respond I'll make sure to double check with a "target yourself?" for confirmation but if they say yes again then it means they want to discard.
That being said if this is like FNM or some other random weekend event then I don't really care and I know what they meant and just let them draw. It's casual, if they really want to scum me with something like that at FNM then they're only hurting themselves. FNM's are meant to be fun and it's best to try and not ruin the mood. I'd even say to an extent that GPT's and PPTQ's fall under this umbrella of being really casual.
Edit: Honestly the best thing to do is just to straight up ask them "Wait, which mode are you selecting?" to 100% clarify. If you are ever uncertain about something it's always best to get clarification from your opponent. Sometimes with all the shortcuts and fatigue we often assume too much which can lead to some awkward situations.
The banning of Probe was only a slight nerf to infect. The deck would have been fine in that meta. The thing that really killed Infect was the printing of Push. You can ask pretty much any other infect player (I was one as well) and they will respond similarly.
Though it is interesting to think how the format would shape up if Push were not printed. I do think that the printing of Push was for the better though, as I already said more general answers is always better.
I just wish Wizards added new cards to non-standard legal supplemental products like MM that they could also deem Modern legal. There are plenty of tame cards they could try adding like Prohibit and Opt and maybe they can even try throwing in some curveballs like Baleful Strix, Pyrokinesis and Contagion if they want. Though for more land hate they would have to create a whole new card that some people have suggested is a mix between Wasteland and Ghost Quarter. The whole issue of threats massively outweighing the answers has made the format so proactive so it wouldn't hurt to see some stuff come from the other direction.
Rob Long has 2 copies of KReturn in his side.
When Gitaxian Probe gets unbanned or a card very similar to it comes out (like a Wraith but a Sorcery). Or if they ever decide to unban preordain. Wizards pls just once.
The deck still has answers to Chalice in the 8 main deck disruption spells, and can potentially go up to more. 1 vs. 2 Kommands doesn't make a whole ton of a difference, especially when severely upping the count on cantrips in the maindeck. Ballista and All is Dust are a problem, but All is Dust was always a problem, you just had to race it or had to have timely disruption. Ballista is a little more annoying but at least they are forced to fire it off earlier than they would want to gun down YP and his buddies. I didn't actually know that ETron deck were putting back Wail in the main, IIRC they ran dismembers because it also dealt with delve creatures.
The card certainly isn't broken or anything, it's just another option you can take if your meta is hostile towards normal Grixis Shadow decks and you don't happen to have any other decks available. Feel free to tweak some numbers here and there if you want to test it out, I do think that some bolts or more dismembers could be in the main but I didn't want to have to eat into more Scours than I needed to. The side is still all over the place, Izzet Staticaster could probably be in place of a field wipe, there's a chance some Surgicals should be in there because of YP synergy and I think Painful Truths would be a great addition in a YP build of the deck.
Most of you are probably doing fine with the stock 19 land version so if it ain't broke no need to fix it.
The whole point in playing a version like this deck is to hedge against certain things. Land destruction not being one of them. This version aims to minimalize against grave hate as much as possible and have an edge against chalice. More decks right now are running grave hate than land destruction because the threat of Dredge and Living End is very real. LD also isn't that great against Eldrazi Tron opposed to basic tron which has fallen out of favor.
I did want to fit some number of Lightning Bolts into the deck but ultimately I wasn't able to cut enough slots for them. I refuse to run bolt in this deck unless I have at least 2.
Here's my list for reference:
1x Blood Crypt
3x Bloodstained Mire
1x Island
4x Polluted Delta
4x Scalding Tarn
1x Steam Vents
1x Swamp
2x Watery Grave
Sorcery (14)
2x Inquisition of Kozilek
4x Serum Visions
4x Sleight of Hand
4x Thoughtseize
4x Death's Shadow
1x Gurmag Angler
4x Snapcaster Mage
4x Street Wraith
2x Tasigur, the Golden Fang
3x Young Pyromancer
Instant (11)
1x Dismember
4x Fatal Push
1x Kolaghan's Command
2x Stubborn Denial
3x Thought Scour
3x Ceremonious Rejection
2x Collective Brutality
1x Dreadbore
1x Flaying Tendrils
1x Kolaghan's Command
1x Kozilek's Return
3x Nihil Spellbomb
1x Pyroclasm
2x Stubborn Denial
Edit: Where is that decklist from? Was it from a daily on mtggoldfish or something?
I'm here to ask why this deck specifically has significantly shot up in popularity over the last few months over any other control deck. What makes this deck stand out from say, Grixis control that makes it a great meta choice? I'm curious as to why UW has been thriving recently but other Cryptic Command decks are dying out.
Because of that the deck will want to minimize the number of dead/clunky draws as possible and both Snap and Kommand fit that bill. They are 3 mana cards that are relevant enough if the game goes late, but feel downright awful if you draw several of them. For that reason I could see cutting some number of these (though I myself would want at least 3 Snaps and 1 Kommand main) to mitigate this issue and help yourself become less reliant on the graveyard. If your meta is literally all Shadow and Bgx decks with literally 0 grave hate then you obviously don't need to worry about this, but nowadays most unknown metas are packing serious grave hate that affects this deck and others like dredge.
Some folks are content with their 19 land builds and won't ever change. That's fine, as long as you're winning with it you do you friend. I'm just on the quest to find the best possible build of this deck because it has so much untapped potential. Will that result in me playing a lot of suboptimal builds? Yeah, probably. Chapin looked like a fool when he first tried to do it but he believed that there was something more. There might be something more to this deck with what we have, but it might also be with a card that hasn't come out yet.
Let's keep innovating boys.
In that sense I kind of wish we still had probe back in the format that way we could try some builds with Young Pyromancer. Maybe it could work if they ever somehow manage to sneak in Cabal Therapy into modern for us. The deck is probably 1-2 good cards away from being able to play pyromancer. Just an idea, others are free to try out other threats in its place to help not get reamed by grave hate. A Pyromancer build could end up being bettered by more Sleight of Hands in its wake as well, which sounds sweet.