The ultimate answer is the same as it has ever been: Wizards offers existing owners of dual lands a trade-in for unique art dual-lands which will never be reprinted. They're going to have to be as good as the expeditions lands with a commitment from WotC to never print full-art dual lands. Then reprint the duals after a respectable period too allow people to take advantage of the offer. Maybe 6 months, at which point the full-art duals are forever gone and the option to trade in for them is also.
The expeditions duals would be at least as valuable as the dual lands are now, maybe moreso - although there are a lot of duals out there so they wouldn't be mythic rare in the MtG economy the way the current expedition lands are. The new duals would lower the overall price of buying into eternal since they could be reprinted as needed, like the fetch lands and WotC could both control the price and benefit from the reprints.
This is what I said when WoTC initially told us the Reserve List was set in stone after re-considering the proposition. It's still the best answer.
hi guys, im looking to pilot this deck in modern but im not entirely happy with where the deck is at right now, any suggestions from you as to what could make the deck viable in modern? i've decided on playing muddle the mixture and reshape over thirst for knowledge (which might end up as a 1 of). other than that i can't really see any way to improve short of unbannings and/or functional reprints of lands etc. any help from you guys would be awesome since you know how the deck works and it is a competitive deck in legacy.
Wrong thread for a Modern discussion of the archetype. I will say that the lockout version with Chalice of the Void is not good in Modern. There are too many lists that don't care if you lockout 0cc and 1cc spells and it is generally too slow without the Sol lands.
Go check out the Modern Tezzerator thread for ideas. Be prepared to see lists that are much more like Affinity then Legacy Tezzerator and that unfortunately are slower than the real Affinity in a meta that is prepared to face Affinity or auto-lose at least one round in a big tourney.
The interview is reminiscent of the public statements that WotC was making about CawBlade in 2010, although it's very compressed compared to that. WotC claimed for quite a long period of time that CawBlade wasn't broken and that there were answers to it if people just looked hard enough and then attendance at FNM's and ultimately larger events forced their hand and they went to DefCon 1 very quickly and banned several cards.
Well, to be fair, there being answers to it was true. Then they printed Batterskull.
It's surprising that they didn't learn enough from that series of events to pre-emptively emergency ban at least Eye of Ugin here.
That would be like "learning" after almost getting hit by a car to never cross any street unless there are no cars within eyesight. It's taking a valid idea and then going so far with it it ends up becoming a problem in and of itself. Emergency bans are a bad idea.
My problem in a nutshell is that WotC has created a classic dilemma here for the FNM crowd. We can get our brains beat in by Eldrazi Aggro for another month or we can buy into a list that is likely to see a few bans at the end of that month, with the necessary cards in high supply and at a high price at the moment due to price memory.
That's just a totally crappy situation to be in.
That's why WotC eventually did the bans in 2010. The price of CawBlade was high. The list was very hard to compete with except in the mirror. Nobody wanted to spend a lot of money on a list that was going to rotate out soon anyway. So attendance at FNM's plummeted like a stone. Attendance at major events went down. WotC broke the glass and did the emergency ban, knowing all along that they had created and sustained this unattractive dilemma for their most faithful customers, the people who actually cared enough about the game to play every Friday night.
It's the SAME THING HERE. Same dilemma for the invested fan. Same power dynamics in play.
And I refuse to believe that WotC had no idea that Eye of Ugin, Eldrazi Temple, Thought-knot Seer, Eldrazi Mimic and Reality Smasher were going to be totally broken crapola when they printed this set. If they really didn't catch that then they seriously need to get better software in to do by AI what R&D vets should have known by the eye test.
The interview is reminiscent of the public statements that WotC was making about CawBlade in 2010, although it's very compressed compared to that. WotC claimed for quite a long period of time that CawBlade wasn't broken and that there were answers to it if people just looked hard enough and then attendance at FNM's and ultimately larger events forced their hand and they went to DefCon 1 very quickly and banned several cards.
It's surprising that they didn't learn enough from that series of events to pre-emptively emergency ban at least Eye of Ugin here. My guess is that attendance has not declined at this point and Affinity looks pretty strong against Eldrazi and they're just going to weather the storm the way they did right up until Batterskull was printed last time around. They'll do the ban on whatever as the next set releases and just hope the meta isn't 50/50 UW Eldrazi before that. I'm thinking they've got 50/50 odds on that at this point.
Artifact count not high enough for Thirst for Knowledge? Seems like it would have more synergy overall than Anticipate. Is it the lack of mana rocks and acceleration that is the issue with a 3cc instant?
It's going to be playable with things like Bloodghast, Dakmor Salvage and a few other specific return to play from graveyard cards. It's also an alternate aggro plan as a discard outlet for Reanimator lists. I don't see how it's playable in this list with Raven's Crime being the only real synergy and turn 2 being the earliest it can land.
They're not going to unban BBE until they ban Liliana of the Veil at a minimum. She's kind of unconditionally good, unlike Maelstrom Pulse, which may have no target when BBE is cast and Fulminator Mage, which may just be a 2/2 chump blocker with benefits effectively by the time you have 4 mana to cast BBE.
The interesting thing is that Shardless Agent is not banned despite the fact that it theoretically lets you fine tune your potential pulls off of the cascade much better than BBE does. At a guess WotC has decided that there are no unconditionally good spells at 2cc or less that are not creatures and thus easily removed if necessary.
Not that it's anything but anecdotal but I played in a 12 man Modern last night at my LGS and we only had 1 UR Eldrazi player there. He didn't win the event and the consensus from my opponents on the night was that nobody is buying into Eldrazi at this point because a ban is so likely in April. It felt kind of like the gentleman's agreement that used to revolve around fast combo and Mystical Tutor in local events in Legacy: almost nobody was bringing the list to a friendly competition, we were all just playing Modern instead.
I faced Death and Taxes, CoCo Elves, BR Burn and Lantern Control on the night on the way to 2-2. I'd actually hoped to face Eldrazi in some form with my Tezzerator, not because I expected to win but because I wanted to see the body before I declared my list dead against the archetype.
I'm guessing the reason that Liliana is underperforming at the moment is that she kind of runs counter to what you are doing with the landkill. You don't really care if the opponent has to discard a card if they have a full hand and are locked out from casting anything. However she is probably the best card in the list against opponents that can run off of very low mana or combo out on you. Her permanent ability to edict away that small creature that will otherwise mess with you because you keep drawing land or landkill and that's not the issue is a real strength. Her ability to force the opponent to maintain a lower card count after the initial wave of landkill is probably very strong against combo.
It'll be interesting to see what your opinion of her is after you take the list to a big meta where you aren't seeing a relatively small selection of opponents. In most pox lists she's the all-star the opponent hates seeing land on the table opposite them.
I love the concept of your list btw. Landkill is under explored and in the right mix and the right meta can be very good. It has the problem of a lot of dead draws at times and it has to deal with the reality that some lists can run off of a low enough mana base that no lock is safe and there's no way to gain inevitability. This makes long drawn out sequences where you can't find a win-con for your life really frustrating at times.
I've played the archetype for twenty-plus years now and while I don't think it is possible to make it tier 1 at this point, due to random blank runs where you can't draw the thing you need, I think it is a lot of fun to play and it can absolutely shock some very high power lists in the process.
Explore works well with Ghost Quarter if you're going green. It helps break the asymmetry of sacrificing a land while the opponent stays even. It's also a cantrip of sorts and it accelerates in the right situation.
With Smallpox you want to focus heavily on breaking symmetry and creating a battlefield tilted heavily in your favor. That's because Smallpox itself is asymmetrical, costing you an extra card unless you're currently without a creature on the board or another card in hand. That argues for more artifacts, enchantments and planeswalkers in the list. I would go 4th Liliana of the Veil as the first step in that direction. 3rd Trinisphere would probably be step two. The 4cc and 5cc spells in the list are going to be a pipedream against many well-constructed lists. You're just never going to have the leeway to build up to that amount of mana given the constraints of the other things you must do to win. Not that Ajani Vengeant wouldn't be a house on the board but you're going to slaughter any list that would let you get to 4 land, again under the constraints of what you're trying to do, anyway.
I'm wondering if the lack of commentary coming out of WotC on Eldrazi is due to the fact that they're measuring Affinity for action also and trying to figure out if Modern and the PT can handle 4 list bans in a 3-6 month period.
They're in a weird position right now, having banned Splintertwin and Summer Bloom to prevent the pros from gravitating towards control and fast combo and instead finding the pros gravitating towards two other lists that are fast aggro-control and fast aggro-combo instead.
The problem with the Eldrazi menace is that it has too many ways to cheat cards into play and the cards it cheats in are too cost-effective, in terms of power and the 2-for-1's they create.
The Eye of Ugin and Eldrazi Temple are 2 mana lands on turn 1. There are no other 2 mana lands in the meta on turn 1. The effect by turn 3 can be ridiculous, with an Eye in play.
The creature that gets deployed on turn 1 is innocuous enough, a 2/1, which is something that is available in many other forms in the meta. However it is also a 3/2 or 4/4 often on turn 2 and only Wild Nacatl is as good as the former and nothing is as good as the latter in terms of attack power turn 2.
The creatures that land after the 2/1 are either cheated into play earlier than they should be or create a 2-for-1 when they land or leave the battlefield or both and then there's the hasty 5/5 that lands turn 3.
The synergy between the mana base and the creatures and between the creatures themselves borders on the absurd.
The choices that the opponent is forced to make are often unreasonable in the extreme, as in when a Thought-Knot Seer lands turn 2 and the opponent has to spend 4 life to remove it with a Dismember, while it's trigger is on the stack. The removal happens and the opponent draws a card and then the TKS player gets to also take the best card left in the opponent's hand counting the draw from TKS removal.
Matter Reshaper is pure card advantage and it matches up very well against the early aggro creatures in other archetypes as well as letting Eldrazi Mimic swing in for 3 on turn 2.
Reality Smasher costs an extra card to target and cannot be killed by a hellbent topdeck for that reason. This alongside the fact that it is a 5/5 Haste, Trample that can realistically land turn 3 and 4.
It's just an absurd amount of synergy and fast damage and disruption in a tight set of cards. Even without the very fast mana the synergy might be too much for the meta to handle without collapsing into just a few highly tuned opposing lists. Modern isn't supposed to be about finding the best list and forcing the meta to adapt to it. At least not in my understanding of the format.
So here's a question: if every card in a modern legal set were unbanned, would one deck be dominant? And which? Certainly it would be a degenerate format, but eternal formats are generally degenerate, simply because they eliminate all but the best 1% of cards.
Or alternatively, what if the ban list were turned into a restricted list? These are the questions that keep me up at night.
Restricted lists are bad, they create a shell of top tier cards that most lists play 1-of and shoehorn into what is effectively a bunch of 50 card lists.
In Modern that would likely be singletons of Ancestral Vision, Ponder, Preordain, Mental Misstep, Treasure Cruise, Dig through Time, Sensei's Divining Top, Chrome Mox with a secondary pool of Jace, the Mind Sculptor, Sword of the Meek, Umezawa's Jitte, Skullclamp and Stoneforge Mystic depending on what orientation of the blue shell was in play. Most lists would play 4 Serum Visions alongside the other singleton cantrips plus Treasure Cruise and Dig Through Time.
Mental Misstep would definitely go in flex slots or the sideboard of most lists. It's good against 1 cmc creatures, 1 cmc removal, 1 cmc discard and various high impact 1 cmc spells, like Relic of Progenitus, Pithing Needle, Ancient Stirrings, Expedition Map, etc.
It's a cheap hard counter in a format that does not have many of those and it is available to every list.
You're kidding yourself if you don't think it would become the most used counterspell in Modern if it became available.
The expeditions duals would be at least as valuable as the dual lands are now, maybe moreso - although there are a lot of duals out there so they wouldn't be mythic rare in the MtG economy the way the current expedition lands are. The new duals would lower the overall price of buying into eternal since they could be reprinted as needed, like the fetch lands and WotC could both control the price and benefit from the reprints.
This is what I said when WoTC initially told us the Reserve List was set in stone after re-considering the proposition. It's still the best answer.
Wrong thread for a Modern discussion of the archetype. I will say that the lockout version with Chalice of the Void is not good in Modern. There are too many lists that don't care if you lockout 0cc and 1cc spells and it is generally too slow without the Sol lands.
Go check out the Modern Tezzerator thread for ideas. Be prepared to see lists that are much more like Affinity then Legacy Tezzerator and that unfortunately are slower than the real Affinity in a meta that is prepared to face Affinity or auto-lose at least one round in a big tourney.
My problem in a nutshell is that WotC has created a classic dilemma here for the FNM crowd. We can get our brains beat in by Eldrazi Aggro for another month or we can buy into a list that is likely to see a few bans at the end of that month, with the necessary cards in high supply and at a high price at the moment due to price memory.
That's just a totally crappy situation to be in.
That's why WotC eventually did the bans in 2010. The price of CawBlade was high. The list was very hard to compete with except in the mirror. Nobody wanted to spend a lot of money on a list that was going to rotate out soon anyway. So attendance at FNM's plummeted like a stone. Attendance at major events went down. WotC broke the glass and did the emergency ban, knowing all along that they had created and sustained this unattractive dilemma for their most faithful customers, the people who actually cared enough about the game to play every Friday night.
It's the SAME THING HERE. Same dilemma for the invested fan. Same power dynamics in play.
And I refuse to believe that WotC had no idea that Eye of Ugin, Eldrazi Temple, Thought-knot Seer, Eldrazi Mimic and Reality Smasher were going to be totally broken crapola when they printed this set. If they really didn't catch that then they seriously need to get better software in to do by AI what R&D vets should have known by the eye test.
It's surprising that they didn't learn enough from that series of events to pre-emptively emergency ban at least Eye of Ugin here. My guess is that attendance has not declined at this point and Affinity looks pretty strong against Eldrazi and they're just going to weather the storm the way they did right up until Batterskull was printed last time around. They'll do the ban on whatever as the next set releases and just hope the meta isn't 50/50 UW Eldrazi before that. I'm thinking they've got 50/50 odds on that at this point.
Artifact count not high enough for Thirst for Knowledge? Seems like it would have more synergy overall than Anticipate. Is it the lack of mana rocks and acceleration that is the issue with a 3cc instant?
It's going to be playable with things like Bloodghast, Dakmor Salvage and a few other specific return to play from graveyard cards. It's also an alternate aggro plan as a discard outlet for Reanimator lists. I don't see how it's playable in this list with Raven's Crime being the only real synergy and turn 2 being the earliest it can land.
The interesting thing is that Shardless Agent is not banned despite the fact that it theoretically lets you fine tune your potential pulls off of the cascade much better than BBE does. At a guess WotC has decided that there are no unconditionally good spells at 2cc or less that are not creatures and thus easily removed if necessary.
I faced Death and Taxes, CoCo Elves, BR Burn and Lantern Control on the night on the way to 2-2. I'd actually hoped to face Eldrazi in some form with my Tezzerator, not because I expected to win but because I wanted to see the body before I declared my list dead against the archetype.
It'll be interesting to see what your opinion of her is after you take the list to a big meta where you aren't seeing a relatively small selection of opponents. In most pox lists she's the all-star the opponent hates seeing land on the table opposite them.
I love the concept of your list btw. Landkill is under explored and in the right mix and the right meta can be very good. It has the problem of a lot of dead draws at times and it has to deal with the reality that some lists can run off of a low enough mana base that no lock is safe and there's no way to gain inevitability. This makes long drawn out sequences where you can't find a win-con for your life really frustrating at times.
I've played the archetype for twenty-plus years now and while I don't think it is possible to make it tier 1 at this point, due to random blank runs where you can't draw the thing you need, I think it is a lot of fun to play and it can absolutely shock some very high power lists in the process.
They're in a weird position right now, having banned Splintertwin and Summer Bloom to prevent the pros from gravitating towards control and fast combo and instead finding the pros gravitating towards two other lists that are fast aggro-control and fast aggro-combo instead.
The Eye of Ugin and Eldrazi Temple are 2 mana lands on turn 1. There are no other 2 mana lands in the meta on turn 1. The effect by turn 3 can be ridiculous, with an Eye in play.
The creature that gets deployed on turn 1 is innocuous enough, a 2/1, which is something that is available in many other forms in the meta. However it is also a 3/2 or 4/4 often on turn 2 and only Wild Nacatl is as good as the former and nothing is as good as the latter in terms of attack power turn 2.
The creatures that land after the 2/1 are either cheated into play earlier than they should be or create a 2-for-1 when they land or leave the battlefield or both and then there's the hasty 5/5 that lands turn 3.
The synergy between the mana base and the creatures and between the creatures themselves borders on the absurd.
The choices that the opponent is forced to make are often unreasonable in the extreme, as in when a Thought-Knot Seer lands turn 2 and the opponent has to spend 4 life to remove it with a Dismember, while it's trigger is on the stack. The removal happens and the opponent draws a card and then the TKS player gets to also take the best card left in the opponent's hand counting the draw from TKS removal.
Matter Reshaper is pure card advantage and it matches up very well against the early aggro creatures in other archetypes as well as letting Eldrazi Mimic swing in for 3 on turn 2.
Reality Smasher costs an extra card to target and cannot be killed by a hellbent topdeck for that reason. This alongside the fact that it is a 5/5 Haste, Trample that can realistically land turn 3 and 4.
It's just an absurd amount of synergy and fast damage and disruption in a tight set of cards. Even without the very fast mana the synergy might be too much for the meta to handle without collapsing into just a few highly tuned opposing lists. Modern isn't supposed to be about finding the best list and forcing the meta to adapt to it. At least not in my understanding of the format.
Restricted lists are bad, they create a shell of top tier cards that most lists play 1-of and shoehorn into what is effectively a bunch of 50 card lists.
In Modern that would likely be singletons of Ancestral Vision, Ponder, Preordain, Mental Misstep, Treasure Cruise, Dig through Time, Sensei's Divining Top, Chrome Mox with a secondary pool of Jace, the Mind Sculptor, Sword of the Meek, Umezawa's Jitte, Skullclamp and Stoneforge Mystic depending on what orientation of the blue shell was in play. Most lists would play 4 Serum Visions alongside the other singleton cantrips plus Treasure Cruise and Dig Through Time.
It would create a Legacy lite in no time flat.
It's a cheap hard counter in a format that does not have many of those and it is available to every list.
You're kidding yourself if you don't think it would become the most used counterspell in Modern if it became available.