I doubt Twin is coming. I don't think we'll see any unbans until early next year, and I think it'll most likely be SFM.
I'm really hoping they don't change the banlist this announcement because it'd be incredibly obnoxious to do so given that the RPTQs start next weekend. Or if they do, they exempt the RPTQs from the announcement.
I don't think it would actually have that much of an effect in terms of forcing people to run fewer colors. 3-color decks functioned perfectly fine and were in fact the norm during Innistrad-RTR Standard with just the shocklands and checklands, and there's even more dual lands to choose from in Modern.
People sometimes claim it'd make Blood Moon overpowered, but I'm doubtful of that. Blood Moon would become a whole lot better, but it'd also become a whole lot worse. It'd become a lot better because decks would be more susceptible to it (you no longer have the option to fetch out a basic land to dodge it) but it'd become a lot worse because it'd be a lot harder to run Blood Moon yourself without the fetchlands, which would considerably reduce the number of decks that could actually play it. On balance Blood Moon would probably even out to be about the same strength as it is now.
I don't think the removal of fetchlands would really have that big an impact on decks in terms of the quality of their mana. Its biggest impacts would be felt in the non-land cards that rely on fetchland synergies, like Tarmogoyf, Fatal Push, Scapeshift, or Death's Shadow... though all of those cards have ironically been on a downswing as of late anyway. On the whole, I'm not sure there'd actually be that big a shift in the current metagame without the fetchlands. I suppose Dredge might take a hit because Bloodghast loses some strength without fetchlands.
yeah the wildcard (huehue) you arent considering is arena.
without arena i agree that fetchlands are in the 'someday maybe' territory, along with some other high value reprints. however viewed through the lens of arena, stuff like raising the cost of standard is less of a factor because in the game there isnt a difference between a $1 rare and a $100 rare.
like nobody though onslaught fetches were going to be reprinted in a standard set...until they were. as much as you say people grumbled about the cost of standard at the time, the period where khans was standard legal was successful/popular. in fact i dont think its unreasonable to claim that more people felt secure buying into the format at the time because of the fetches since they were getting in on the ground floor for cards that were almost guaranteed to hold long term value.
What do you mean no one thought Onslaught fetches would be reprinted in a Standard set? Lots of people were predicting that would happen, especially towards the end of Theros block when the fetchlands were due to rotate out.
Although I should point out, as I frequently have, that Standard prices were fine--or, more accurately, weren't any worse than they typically were--when the fetchlands were in Standard until they had the baffling idea to put the battlelands in the same Standard as them (without any actual hatred on the interaction, to boot). That caused their price to spike, and spike hard because all of a sudden you'd be running a whole lot more of them. Beforehand, you'd only bother with fetchlands that were in your decks' colors, but with the battlelands suddenly manabases were looking more like that of Modern's, where people are running more fetchlands because they have incentive to run fetchlands that aren't fully in their decks' colors. Even worse, there was no hate for this interaction, no Blood Moon, no Leonin Arbiter, not even a Burning Earth, so people went even more crazy and you had 4-color decks running around that of course were running even more fetchlands (the closest thing we had to a hate card was freaking Crumble to Dust).
also, one of the stated reasons for fetches not seeing standard printings is that dealing with non stop shuffling is a pain in the ass. but, again, arena means this matters less.
As noted, this wasn't an issue until they brought in the battlelands. When it was just the fetchlands, you'd maybe draw one or two a game and thus there wouldn't be much shuffling. But WOTC's bright idea to bring the fetchland+battleland combo into Standard suddenly made people run a lot more fetchlands which resulted in more shuffling.
If not for the fetchland+battleland interaction, there would've been few complaints about the fetchlands in Standard. Sadly, WOTC are sufficiently incompetent that it's likely they lesson they became convinced that all this meant fetchlands shouldn't return to Standard, rather than the correct lesson which would be "don't put fetchlands and fetchable dual lands into Standard simultaneously, and if you're going to, at least put some hate for the interaction".
In Legacy we have the original Dual lands paired with Fetch lands, having perfect access to mana without any downside.
I'm not sure where you get the idea there's no "downside." Even if we ignore the impact of hate cards like Wasteland, you're still paying life for those fetchlands. It's less of downside than the shocklands, but there is still a downside for that "perfect" mana.
My question is more of just a thought experiment, but besides being on the Reserved List, what is the point of punishing player 2 health to play a dual land?
Because the original dual lands were way too good. There should be an actual built-in drawback to playing a dual land rather than a basic land, and there really wasn't one for the original dual lands. Even before the Reserved List was created, Wizards of the Coast had realized that the original dual lands were too powerful and discontinued them in favor of dual lands with built-in drawbacks like the painlands. It's true the shocklands came much later, but they, just like all the later dual lands that had a built-in drawback (fetchlands, checklands, fastlands, etc.) were just following in the footsteps of the painlands.
Mana screw is never fun for either player, and I think one of the major attractions to eternal formats is that you are pretty flexible with the mana base when it comes to deckbuilding.
I agree mana screw isn't fun. There's a reason subsequent card games like Hearthstone have generally eliminated it or at least reduced it. Hearthstone eliminated it entirely by giving you a guaranteed mana each turn. The Pokemon TCG, while still having a system similar to Magic's that allows mana screw to occur, is set up in such a way that you're less likely to be hurt by mana screw (there's a lot of consistency cards--which don't require mana to play--to help ensure you draw them, plus the way the game plays out means you can actually go your first and possibly second turn without hitting any "land drops" and still be in a good position).
However, what you are talking about isn't mana screw (which is not drawing enough lands at all), but color screw (not drawing the right color of lands). Mana screw is a problem, color screw isn't, because color screw is 100% avoidable: Simply play a monocolored deck. Sure, that comes with some disadvantages, but that's the tradeoff: If you want to play more colors, you therefore accept the higher risk of color screw.
If they're going to ban or unban something, I at least hope they exempt the upcoming RPTQs (2-3 weeks afterwards) from the changes because it'd be incredibly annoying for your deck to suddenly become way worse just before such an important tournament.
transparent sure, but super dirty? i dont think anyone here is under the false pretense that wizards is operating out of the goodness of their hearts. however them making money coinciding with giving players what they want isnt necessarily wrong or bad.
What I mean by that is if that is the case, they could have unbanned her at literally ANY TIME in the last several years, and chose not to, so they could take advantage of a hype reprint.
Personally, I'd much rather Stoneforge Mystic (or anything else) be unbanned around the same time as a reprint, so its price wouldn't be too terrible. If they hadn't unbanned Jace shortly before a reprint, he would've spiked even worse than he did and would probably be at around $150 right now.
So after a good number of reasonably diverse SCG Opens, we had a not-so-diverse Grand Prix event, which leads of people people to dismiss the SCG Open results because they're at a lower level of play. So here's a question. Why should we care so much about Grand Prix results?
Because they feed directly into the most competitive environments for Magic. As such, it stands to reason people play what they think is best, instead of whatever brew they want.
And if they actually "trickle down" to venues like SCG, then perhaps that would be an issue. But in that case, the problem would be when it reaches the lower levels, not because it might do so.
Because we have EVERY reason to believe that those competitive environments (GP, Pro Tour) lead DIRECTLY to Ban's, while we have no reason that I am aware of to believe SCG events are looked at.
If you want to talk about how WOTC sees it that might be reasonable, but I was referring more to player feelings about the metagame. Though I know they mentioned SCG events in the Stoneforge/Jace bans.
I disagree that 'most of us dont see this level', as these, Tron, KCI, Dredge, etc, are EXACTLY what we see online.
I never said people don't see Tron/KCI/Dredge/whatever outside of Grand Prix. But from my experience, they're not overrepresented in the way they might have been in this particular Grand Prix.
So after a good number of reasonably diverse SCG Opens, we had a not-so-diverse Grand Prix event, which leads of people people to dismiss the SCG Open results because they're at a lower level of play. So here's a question. Why should we care so much about Grand Prix results?
99.99% of experiences playing Modern aren't going to be at a Grand Prix. I consider myself a much more competitive player than most, and it's been years since I was at a Modern Grand Prix (within the last year, the biggest Modern events I was at were an SCG Open and an RPTQ). There's not that many of them and they're so scattered around the world that your typical Modern player, even a more competitive one like me, isn't likely to go to even one per year. So why care so heavily about the results of a type of event that almost all Modern players don't actually play at?
If SCGs are just large FNMs, as I've seen multiple people assert, then they're actually a great benchmark for how people are actually experiencing the format, because that's the way most people experience the format! If they're closer to what most people will be experiencing in playing Modern, shouldn't that sort of be the metric by which the format is evaluating, not a type of event that only a very small minority of Modern players actually go to?
The Eldrazi infested Modern on all levels, to the point people who didn't play at larger events than FNMs were asking for bans so they wouldn't have to keep facing the deck so constantly. During the last PPTQ season (only a few months ago), I remember people complaining about Grand Prix results that were totally different than my experiences at the PPTQs, which were pretty diverse outside of perhaps Humans being slightly overrepresented sometimes. And sure, that's just my own personal experience. But it's odd for so many SCG Opens to indicate the format is fine and then suddenly decide a Grand Prix result should toss that information out despite the fact SCG Opens are "closer" to the metagame your typical Modern player will actually be playing in.
Re: banning "unfair/too powerful" cards
Again, these are subjective characterizations of cards. I only judge power level based on the performance of the decks that use the cards. For instance, Bridge, Moon, and Chalice are barely competitive if we judge by GP finishes. Even MTGO suggests these cards just aren't that good from results. Banning them for experiential reasons is biased and subjective with no evidentiary backing that it would improve the format. Again, this is just a subset of players that enjoy a certain type of Magic experience trying to argue that their type of Magic is "better." Thankfully, Wizards disagrees so we don't need to worry about this approach materializing.
Listen, I love the card Blood Moon, I have played Blood Moon decks many times in my Modern days, but even I admit that it doesn't make for good games of Magic. When Blood Moon works, one person doesn't get to play Magic anymore. How can you say it's subjective whether or not that is bad gameplay? One player being locked out of playing the game is bad gameplay, objectively.
It's clearly subjective in that I know a good number of people who actually really like formats where things like that are possible, even when playing against them.
And let's not forget: The whole reason Modern exists is because they realized Legacy was super popular but knew the Reserved List would eventually be its death knell, so Legacy wasn't really supportable in the long term. But Legacy was filled with cards and decks designed to lock out the opponent. The claim it makes for objectively bad gameplay seems to not work when you consider how many people were clearly satisfied enough with this "bad gameplay" to play in a format that was filled with it.
I'd also say that even if we accept it is "bad gameplay" it's still gameplay. Getting clobbered by an aggro deck like Burn is worse because it results in no gameplay because the game is over.
And there are a ton of cards in Modern that do things like that. Does that mean they should all get banned? No, not necessarily. But you can't honestly tell me that the format wouldn't be objectively more fun if you removed all these cards that lock people out of playing the game. It would be better. But I like playing Blood Moon, even though I know I'm a *****ty person for playing it, lol. So if I get to keep my Blood Moons, you can keep your Chalices or Ensnaring Bridges. That's what we sign up for when we play Modern.
I would find the format less fun if those cards were removed, and I rarely if ever play with them.
Nah, I'm talking like RIP vs Dredge, or Eidolon vs Storm as Burn, or the literal piles of Artifact hate vs Affinity.
All of which are, in fact, beatable by those decks.
Tron loses a land, shrugs, and tutors up another. Tron is extremely hate resilient.
I mean, if you play a hate card and then twiddle your thumbs for turn after turn after turn afterwards, then yeah, Tron can recover, but that's not particularly different from the above examples. If you cast your Storm hate and then just sit back, they'll get their answer with a Gifts Ungiven, remove it, and then go off anyway.
Dredge is just inherently broken although really a 6 point life swing that is uncounterable and all you have to do is self mill? Clearly no one was thinking about Modern when that was approved. Sheesh is essentially a better Warleader's Helix yeah Helix is 2 more points of swing and instant but the sorcery speed is irrelevant for Chill since you never actually cast it. They should have tacked a mana cost on in it
You know, I'm really confused as to why they didn't add a mana cost onto it; just one mana would have made it of more reasonable power. It's not like this card would see play in Standard, so it's really just for Modern and casual. Whatever silly casual decks would be made around it would still be made with a mana cost, but it wouldn't be as annoying in Modern.
Granted, maybe this is just another Eldrazi or Death's Shadow or Cheeri0s where everything goes back to normal soon enough, but the decision to print it as it is, considering WOTC's self-admitted dislike of Dredge as a deck, is very confusing.
For me, it would be sad to see Faithless Looting. It would essentially die for Creeping Chill pushing Dredge over. Faithless Looting (just like Ancient Stirrings I guess) enables a lot of Modern strategies or make them much better. Without the card, Modern is less diverse.
*On a personal note, I am starting to get bored of Modern. People around my area know me as the "Modern dude," but I seriously am considering playing a format where I can win over 60% of the time (like Standard or Limited, which actually don't look too bad anymore). Maybe if there are some unbannings in the future, I'll be back, but right now seeing stuff on the ban list when Modern has become boring for me (because in the end, that's all that matters) is really a slap in the face.
I have been noticing as standard keep getting better people look at modern with much more scrutiny. Its hard to get behind modern right now given what it is now compared to other formats
I don't know if Standard is actually that great. It's a whole lot better than it was before, but considering just how bad Standard was for the last 2+ years, that's not really saying much. I wonder if people are liking it as much as they are now by virtue of comparison more than it actually being that good on its own merits.
People sometimes claim it'd make Blood Moon overpowered, but I'm doubtful of that. Blood Moon would become a whole lot better, but it'd also become a whole lot worse. It'd become a lot better because decks would be more susceptible to it (you no longer have the option to fetch out a basic land to dodge it) but it'd become a lot worse because it'd be a lot harder to run Blood Moon yourself without the fetchlands, which would considerably reduce the number of decks that could actually play it. On balance Blood Moon would probably even out to be about the same strength as it is now.
I don't think the removal of fetchlands would really have that big an impact on decks in terms of the quality of their mana. Its biggest impacts would be felt in the non-land cards that rely on fetchland synergies, like Tarmogoyf, Fatal Push, Scapeshift, or Death's Shadow... though all of those cards have ironically been on a downswing as of late anyway. On the whole, I'm not sure there'd actually be that big a shift in the current metagame without the fetchlands. I suppose Dredge might take a hit because Bloodghast loses some strength without fetchlands.
Although I should point out, as I frequently have, that Standard prices were fine--or, more accurately, weren't any worse than they typically were--when the fetchlands were in Standard until they had the baffling idea to put the battlelands in the same Standard as them (without any actual hatred on the interaction, to boot). That caused their price to spike, and spike hard because all of a sudden you'd be running a whole lot more of them. Beforehand, you'd only bother with fetchlands that were in your decks' colors, but with the battlelands suddenly manabases were looking more like that of Modern's, where people are running more fetchlands because they have incentive to run fetchlands that aren't fully in their decks' colors. Even worse, there was no hate for this interaction, no Blood Moon, no Leonin Arbiter, not even a Burning Earth, so people went even more crazy and you had 4-color decks running around that of course were running even more fetchlands (the closest thing we had to a hate card was freaking Crumble to Dust).
As noted, this wasn't an issue until they brought in the battlelands. When it was just the fetchlands, you'd maybe draw one or two a game and thus there wouldn't be much shuffling. But WOTC's bright idea to bring the fetchland+battleland combo into Standard suddenly made people run a lot more fetchlands which resulted in more shuffling.
If not for the fetchland+battleland interaction, there would've been few complaints about the fetchlands in Standard. Sadly, WOTC are sufficiently incompetent that it's likely they lesson they became convinced that all this meant fetchlands shouldn't return to Standard, rather than the correct lesson which would be "don't put fetchlands and fetchable dual lands into Standard simultaneously, and if you're going to, at least put some hate for the interaction".
Because the original dual lands were way too good. There should be an actual built-in drawback to playing a dual land rather than a basic land, and there really wasn't one for the original dual lands. Even before the Reserved List was created, Wizards of the Coast had realized that the original dual lands were too powerful and discontinued them in favor of dual lands with built-in drawbacks like the painlands. It's true the shocklands came much later, but they, just like all the later dual lands that had a built-in drawback (fetchlands, checklands, fastlands, etc.) were just following in the footsteps of the painlands.
I agree mana screw isn't fun. There's a reason subsequent card games like Hearthstone have generally eliminated it or at least reduced it. Hearthstone eliminated it entirely by giving you a guaranteed mana each turn. The Pokemon TCG, while still having a system similar to Magic's that allows mana screw to occur, is set up in such a way that you're less likely to be hurt by mana screw (there's a lot of consistency cards--which don't require mana to play--to help ensure you draw them, plus the way the game plays out means you can actually go your first and possibly second turn without hitting any "land drops" and still be in a good position).
However, what you are talking about isn't mana screw (which is not drawing enough lands at all), but color screw (not drawing the right color of lands). Mana screw is a problem, color screw isn't, because color screw is 100% avoidable: Simply play a monocolored deck. Sure, that comes with some disadvantages, but that's the tradeoff: If you want to play more colors, you therefore accept the higher risk of color screw.
Personally, I'd much rather Stoneforge Mystic (or anything else) be unbanned around the same time as a reprint, so its price wouldn't be too terrible. If they hadn't unbanned Jace shortly before a reprint, he would've spiked even worse than he did and would probably be at around $150 right now.
If you want to talk about how WOTC sees it that might be reasonable, but I was referring more to player feelings about the metagame. Though I know they mentioned SCG events in the Stoneforge/Jace bans.
I never said people don't see Tron/KCI/Dredge/whatever outside of Grand Prix. But from my experience, they're not overrepresented in the way they might have been in this particular Grand Prix.
99.99% of experiences playing Modern aren't going to be at a Grand Prix. I consider myself a much more competitive player than most, and it's been years since I was at a Modern Grand Prix (within the last year, the biggest Modern events I was at were an SCG Open and an RPTQ). There's not that many of them and they're so scattered around the world that your typical Modern player, even a more competitive one like me, isn't likely to go to even one per year. So why care so heavily about the results of a type of event that almost all Modern players don't actually play at?
If SCGs are just large FNMs, as I've seen multiple people assert, then they're actually a great benchmark for how people are actually experiencing the format, because that's the way most people experience the format! If they're closer to what most people will be experiencing in playing Modern, shouldn't that sort of be the metric by which the format is evaluating, not a type of event that only a very small minority of Modern players actually go to?
The Eldrazi infested Modern on all levels, to the point people who didn't play at larger events than FNMs were asking for bans so they wouldn't have to keep facing the deck so constantly. During the last PPTQ season (only a few months ago), I remember people complaining about Grand Prix results that were totally different than my experiences at the PPTQs, which were pretty diverse outside of perhaps Humans being slightly overrepresented sometimes. And sure, that's just my own personal experience. But it's odd for so many SCG Opens to indicate the format is fine and then suddenly decide a Grand Prix result should toss that information out despite the fact SCG Opens are "closer" to the metagame your typical Modern player will actually be playing in.
And let's not forget: The whole reason Modern exists is because they realized Legacy was super popular but knew the Reserved List would eventually be its death knell, so Legacy wasn't really supportable in the long term. But Legacy was filled with cards and decks designed to lock out the opponent. The claim it makes for objectively bad gameplay seems to not work when you consider how many people were clearly satisfied enough with this "bad gameplay" to play in a format that was filled with it.
I'd also say that even if we accept it is "bad gameplay" it's still gameplay. Getting clobbered by an aggro deck like Burn is worse because it results in no gameplay because the game is over.
I would find the format less fun if those cards were removed, and I rarely if ever play with them.
I mean, if you play a hate card and then twiddle your thumbs for turn after turn after turn afterwards, then yeah, Tron can recover, but that's not particularly different from the above examples. If you cast your Storm hate and then just sit back, they'll get their answer with a Gifts Ungiven, remove it, and then go off anyway.
Granted, maybe this is just another Eldrazi or Death's Shadow or Cheeri0s where everything goes back to normal soon enough, but the decision to print it as it is, considering WOTC's self-admitted dislike of Dredge as a deck, is very confusing.