Obviously you destroy caverns if you're a counter-deck
It takes serious dedicated land hate to take E-Tron off their mana, like Ponza and DnT.
I actually fought through land-hate against Ponza, a merfolk deck with 7 seas, and at least made game 3 against Dnt. Glad I picked the deck up to understand it better, sideboard land hate for it is absolutely not the way to fight that deck.
I think Jund needs a lot of help. If BBE isn't even great, why is it even on the ban-list then? BBE>K-Command shenanigans is no more broken than anything grixis death shadow is doing right now, this is a joke, and the fact so many people have reseverations about it is mind-blowing. We aren't talking about Jace here, or even Shaman.
Either BBE pushes Jund into tier 2, or maybe even slips into tier 1, where it still has big mana as predators from ever making it oppressive.
The top 15 list, we have about about 4 decks that want to interact with you a lot---5 if you count Lantern control, where they want to interact but lock you out
Don't want that statement to turn into hurt feelings with people saying burn can bolt a bird, affinity can bolt the bird, or Tron board-wiping you.
The rest of the top decks are proactive, fairly linear decks that want to jam their own thing and just beat your face in
I wouldn't exactly be upset if Jund hit tier 1 with BBE, but I'm not even certain if BBE is THAT powerful enough
Jund sucks right now, guys, you can go on about data or how enough people aren't playing it
Like, even on a local level I see it performing poorly, and it's rarely on camera now or seen in the tournaments at the winners table
But why does Jund have to be good? Some decks are more viable now because Jund midrange isn't as viable. So it's not like a ban or unban that helps Jund simply makes the meta "current tier 1 meta + jund."
I have zero issue with WOTC undoing decisions. That's, in my opinion, how a person or organization should handle the decision making process: change something, see its effects, then reevaluate and decide whether to press onward or go back to the old way. A little instability will help with card prices at the very least. Increased risk will decrease price.
The problem with SFM is not that the card itself is broken. The problem is that it is only really good against other fair decks. Its inclusion would easily lead to a reduced diversity of fair decks, and the meta would descend to "SFM fair decks vs unfair decks vs "fair" decks."
Sure, Affinity, Storm and Dredge seem more degenerate than SFM decks, and I don't disagree. The problem is SFM pushes out more fair interactive decks than linear ones. FFS, did you all buy fifty copies and are pushing for a spike? What is the fascination with this one card being reintroduced into a format with a ton of diversity?
Maybe if they made the core tournament games not 1 v 1 then that would allow for more diversity.
Being forced to play the meta or lose just isn't fun.
The meta is like two dozen decks! Plus another dozen or two you can play on the fringe! It would take months to play modern events that were virtually identical to a previous one, as opposed to standard that tends to have 3-4 decks at the top and 2-3 fringe picks. What more do you want?
"Flavor of the month" to me seems to mean new decks emerging and replacing old ones. That's literally how a format avoids going stale - a cyclical meta. I bought into Kiln Fiend combo last year, and the probe ban killed it. I was mad for about two hours, then I just took the manabase and card draw over to Grixis Delver. Then I sold about half of it to put the deposit on my new home, just in time to see that I could have just bought wraith and shadow to have one of the top tier decks (trust me, that stung). Now I have storm. I know WOTC hates storm, and as soon as a meta shift allows it to be one of the top decks it will be banned. That is fine with me, because I took on that risk.
Let's be clear. No matter how much you spent on a deck, let alone foiling it out, WOTC has no obligation to ban/unban to keep that deck at the top of the meta. When you buy a modern deck, it comes with some risk that a ban, unban, reprint, new card or metagame shift will occur at some point down the line which will render your deck either less competitive or even irrelevant. We all have our preferences, but there is something to be said of saying BBE needs to be unbanned because you want to play Jund. No single deck has a right to exist, let alone at tier 1.
Why does FNM Promos have to MOstly be "Standard Legal"? All the new players / Kids i see in the store that are starting to play standard, would love to have (and im just spitballing) any number of modern or older cards. I understand the "i cant even play this fresh promo in my deck" thought process.. But it doesnt cost any more money to reprint in foil Renegade Rallier or Horizon Canopy.
If these were the Next 12 months of promos - no one would complain and your attendance would be skyrocketing
Oh, people would complain. They absolutely would. "Investors" who make singles sales their primary business and source of income would complain, and those are the same people who buy sealed product by the case. WOTC needs players, sure, but the sales come from the big stores. Those big stores also sell singles online, and too many high-end promos would crash the market. Personally, I think the market needs a crash, but it wouldn't be in WOTC's best interest to upset the people who buy the most sealed product.
Price memory is a pain. But obviously somebody must be paying that price. If nobody was buying AV vendors and individuals would start to drop the price for the sake of liquidity. The problem is a physical card takes up so little space that there isn't much opportunity cost to just keeping it tucked away unlike a larger physical good, let's say a pair of shoes, where if that shoebox stays on the shelf it reduces the effective inventory.
Okay, I am going to do my "hope to get super flamed" post once again. I have to do one of these every once in a while. I hope you understand.
Green Sun's Zenith. I have talked to some about this card being on the banned list. Most players I talk to are not even upset about the consistency that it gives decks. They are upset about Green Sun's Zenith into Dryad Arbor. My question is this. What is the main issue that causes Green Sun's Zenith to remain banned? Is it...
1. GSZ into Dryad Arbor - Who cares? Noble Hierarch does that better and we also have a lot of potential mana dorks in Modern. Gaea's Cradle is not a thing, so there really is no way to abuse this. Are we that scared of 1 into 3 mana when another deck has done 2 into 7 mana since 2012?
2. Consistency - I hate this argument. Why do we forcefully want Modern to have a certain amount of variance?
3. Nobody cares - I hate this argument even more. If nobody cares and it won't make a difference, why not unban a harmless card? Nobody cares if Shock is banned. Should it be then?
4. Some other reason - I cannot imagine there's something else. It's a $5 card with plenty of reprints. If there's something I'm missing, please bring it up.
I feel like bringing up a card like Green Sun's Zenith because some of the other cards already have a lot of agreement. (I don't see the point in arguing Stoneforge Mystic, Bloodbraid Elf, Jace, TMS, or Preordain too much right now.) What do you think? Is Green Sun's Zenith that mythological monster that will warp the meta? Or is it just a forgotten card that Wizard's employees have not even muttered a word about in the past 4 years?
I would be worried about Collected Company/Chord decks like Elves and Vizier-Druid getting very very good. Pure speculation on my part. I also think modern is in a great place right now. Unbans do bring a level of risk and there's something to be said of not wanting to mess up a good thing.
Um, you actually can't hone your skills on a kitchen table, or online, or any other way. Nothing can replace the mental pressure of having to perform well in a competitive environment with you know, actual groups of people in person. Also as I stated before, the incentive shouldn't be a friggin shiny promo card, the incentive should be to play the game and have fun doing that, regardless of the value of the reward. I truly wonder if some of you play this game at all, no trolling. When I go to a GP or low end tourney event, I expect nothing but a good time for playing. Much like gambling, I don't go play poker and expect someone to give me $20 just for showing up. The reward incentive in such a low level event such as FNM should be if you got better at your game, and then if you won a cool shiny card in the meantime then that is great as well.
What mental pressure? There's 0 pressure in an FNM or really most tournaments. You can easily hone your skills on a table or online if your play group is decent. Why spend money and time at a gaming store when I can spend that time with friends/other players outside the store in a more comfortable setting at 0 cost unless hosting? 3-5 hours spent at a buddy's house or apartment playing is much more enticing than being at a gaming store for that same time frame.
Agreed. Also, lolz at the idea that FNM has pressure. This isn't the damn Yugioh anime where our lives hang in the balance of the results of a card game.
I don't play standard. That should be okay, yet WOTC really wants me to play standard. I bought a lot of standard blue cards from Amonkhet...I dunno the format doesn't appeal to me.
I went 3-1 this past Friday, taking my total record over 3 events to 4-6 (trending upward woo!). I have more questions now.
1. Sideboarding - what do you bring out? I opt for Remand more often than not but it seems like the list is pretty tight regardless.
2. Grixis Shadow - is that just a punt? I've played three shadow decks so far and got my butt kicked each time.
No, xxhellfirexx3. There is no reason that BGx midrange has to exist. Let's look at the types of diversity WOTC has talked about:
1. Deck diversity
2. Strategy diversity
3. Color diversity
WOTC wants modern to have multiple viable decks. It has that. They want for, among those viable decks, there to be different strategies. It has that. They want all five colors to see play. Oh, that's accounted for, too! BGx midrange is far more specific. And honestly, you can still play the deck if you want! It has a couple of bad matchups, but it certainly isn't impossible.
This attitude of "I don't want deck A to be top tier, because I want MY deck to have that spot" is just wrong.
I don't see what Firebrand Archer offers that Thermo-Alchemist or Young Pyromancer don't. Keep in mind those two have already been Modern-legal.
Young Pyromancer has seen a very limited amount of play, back when Song got banned and people were still figuring out alternatives, but the recent loss of Probe is the nail in its coffin.
To me Archer is just a Grapeshot that you have to cast before comboing off, instead of after. That's not something that will work in its favor. You have all those mana thresholds to meet while you're still in the early stages of comboing, like 6 mana before Gifts or 4 mana before Past. Tacking on 2 mana makes it harder to keep up.
Well technically the Archer could be superior in that it does not target. Thus, it gets around Leyline of Sanctity. However, I would rather run something like a pair of reckless bushwhacker and go with a haste tokens win plan because, as you said, I can drop it at the end as opposed to having to do it earlier.
I repeat, and this is a response to cfusion. Every player that wants Twin back and is not satisfied from U/W Control's dynamic in this meta can not be taken seriously.
We get that you want to have a deck that is losing from nothing, but move on. While Shadow is legal, Twin is not coming back.
Moving towards August: NO CHANGES. Modern is great and interactive once again.
tell me. how many of the top 8 decks are very interactive? What percentage of modern is control right now?
Interactive and control are two different things. Maybe that's part of the problem here. Discard is interactive, so is combat math and removal. The stack is not the only form of interaction that exists, and your post is outright wrong to try to put the two together in this way. Grixis Shadow is highly interactive in that it uses several forms of disruption, discard, countermagic and creature removal. Yet it also plays unfair by getting cheap fatties into play.
On another note, perhaps this sentence from hellfire is indicative of another problem in MtG - we boil down tournaments with hundreds or even thousands of players to the top 8. That's the playoff cut, so it's easy to do, but honestly we all know that the difference between 8th and 12th is generally tiebreakers. Does it make more sense to alter our data collection for large events? Should we develop a new system where tournaments up to X players reveal top 8, up to Y players top 16 and Z up to 32? Hell I'm just throwing stuff out there.
Okay let's be really careful about throwing around the term "warping." Right now hellfire just said it in a way that basically describes any deck that is good in modern. Affinity forces people to run SB hate, it's warping. Dredge with gy hate is warping then, too. Etron is good, but by no means dominating. Right now people are using the same fuzzy logic that got Splinter Twin banned. Etron isn't warping just because it pushed two decks out of the format in Jund and Abzan classic midrange builds. It has flaws, it has bad matchups, and again, Jund doesn't have a right to exist. There is a variety in the top dozen decks in color, strategy, and card selections. That's good. Whenever you buy a modern deck, whether you spent $200 or $2K, you run the risk of something being banned or new cards making it less effective. These aren't CDs, they aren't safe uses of money, and there are no guarantees.
And that's coming from a dude who threw a paycheck into Kiln Fiend aggro only for Probe to get banned one month later. S%*! happens okay?
But why does Jund have to be good? Some decks are more viable now because Jund midrange isn't as viable. So it's not like a ban or unban that helps Jund simply makes the meta "current tier 1 meta + jund."
Sure, Affinity, Storm and Dredge seem more degenerate than SFM decks, and I don't disagree. The problem is SFM pushes out more fair interactive decks than linear ones. FFS, did you all buy fifty copies and are pushing for a spike? What is the fascination with this one card being reintroduced into a format with a ton of diversity?
The meta is like two dozen decks! Plus another dozen or two you can play on the fringe! It would take months to play modern events that were virtually identical to a previous one, as opposed to standard that tends to have 3-4 decks at the top and 2-3 fringe picks. What more do you want?
Let's be clear. No matter how much you spent on a deck, let alone foiling it out, WOTC has no obligation to ban/unban to keep that deck at the top of the meta. When you buy a modern deck, it comes with some risk that a ban, unban, reprint, new card or metagame shift will occur at some point down the line which will render your deck either less competitive or even irrelevant. We all have our preferences, but there is something to be said of saying BBE needs to be unbanned because you want to play Jund. No single deck has a right to exist, let alone at tier 1.
Oh, people would complain. They absolutely would. "Investors" who make singles sales their primary business and source of income would complain, and those are the same people who buy sealed product by the case. WOTC needs players, sure, but the sales come from the big stores. Those big stores also sell singles online, and too many high-end promos would crash the market. Personally, I think the market needs a crash, but it wouldn't be in WOTC's best interest to upset the people who buy the most sealed product.
I would be worried about Collected Company/Chord decks like Elves and Vizier-Druid getting very very good. Pure speculation on my part. I also think modern is in a great place right now. Unbans do bring a level of risk and there's something to be said of not wanting to mess up a good thing.
Agreed. Also, lolz at the idea that FNM has pressure. This isn't the damn Yugioh anime where our lives hang in the balance of the results of a card game.
I don't play standard. That should be okay, yet WOTC really wants me to play standard. I bought a lot of standard blue cards from Amonkhet...I dunno the format doesn't appeal to me.
1. Sideboarding - what do you bring out? I opt for Remand more often than not but it seems like the list is pretty tight regardless.
2. Grixis Shadow - is that just a punt? I've played three shadow decks so far and got my butt kicked each time.
1. Deck diversity
2. Strategy diversity
3. Color diversity
WOTC wants modern to have multiple viable decks. It has that. They want for, among those viable decks, there to be different strategies. It has that. They want all five colors to see play. Oh, that's accounted for, too! BGx midrange is far more specific. And honestly, you can still play the deck if you want! It has a couple of bad matchups, but it certainly isn't impossible.
This attitude of "I don't want deck A to be top tier, because I want MY deck to have that spot" is just wrong.
Well technically the Archer could be superior in that it does not target. Thus, it gets around Leyline of Sanctity. However, I would rather run something like a pair of reckless bushwhacker and go with a haste tokens win plan because, as you said, I can drop it at the end as opposed to having to do it earlier.
Interactive and control are two different things. Maybe that's part of the problem here. Discard is interactive, so is combat math and removal. The stack is not the only form of interaction that exists, and your post is outright wrong to try to put the two together in this way. Grixis Shadow is highly interactive in that it uses several forms of disruption, discard, countermagic and creature removal. Yet it also plays unfair by getting cheap fatties into play.
On another note, perhaps this sentence from hellfire is indicative of another problem in MtG - we boil down tournaments with hundreds or even thousands of players to the top 8. That's the playoff cut, so it's easy to do, but honestly we all know that the difference between 8th and 12th is generally tiebreakers. Does it make more sense to alter our data collection for large events? Should we develop a new system where tournaments up to X players reveal top 8, up to Y players top 16 and Z up to 32? Hell I'm just throwing stuff out there.
And that's coming from a dude who threw a paycheck into Kiln Fiend aggro only for Probe to get banned one month later. S%*! happens okay?