They really missed the point, and picked the wrong cards to achieve their aims.
In legacy brainstorm is the problem, and will be the problem until they eventually but the bullet and ban it. The top 8's with 32 brainstorms are the issue, not the 10-ish DTTs.
In Vintage, Lodestone is the real offender. It's true that you can use artifact mana to get out from under Lodestone or Sphere, so Chalice on zero is a huge play to back that up. But Lodestone providing both disruption and a 4 turn clock is the main issue. Workshops has top decking issues because of the lack of draw spells, and can flounder around with no way to close the game, that's what golem gives them by combining those things into one card.
Regarding the Goyf discussion, I have owned a set for years both in paper and online and rarely play them in Bant decks. Unless accompanied by black discard, I don't think it grows to an appropriate size as regularly in Bant, certainly not in Modern and and it's still iffy in Legacy though opposing Sorcery cantrips helps out there.
I agree with having a good solid beat down plan to accompany the combo elements, but Goyf may not fit the bill. I have had good finishes with Bant Conscription, which is similarly a midrange deck with a combo-ish kill, and tested Goyf there on mTGO and not been impressed except when Jund was all over the place.
I was maindecking the Thalias, but only played two decks all day that they were good against. It's probably still correct to maindeck them though.
The Explores were there to facilitate the most explosive Cobra starts. Basically you want to start with Forest + manadork, then Turn 2 Cobra plus landdrop for an additional 2 mana (3 with fetch). Explore busts those starts wide open, easily threatening Turn 3 Sovereigns, but unlike other options it cycles in the lategame. Maybe it should be Coiling Oracle instead, since I'm maindecking the Thalias now. At one point I had additional removal in those slots, but I took it out in favor of just advancing the linear strategy when I realized there wasn't much that I couldn't go over the top of. My very crude plan was to play all-in for the most explosive possible starts in Game 1's, then for Game 2 I would side out whichever threat package was weak depending on my opponent's deck and mull aggressively for hate cards.
I think the field was strange overall, and I hate to say this about a tournament I did well in, but I wouldn't read it as representative of what to expect. I'm not saying the players were weak, but they didn't come to Indy planning to play Modern with carefully tuned decks for the expected metagame. I asked everybody I played over the course of the day if they had played in the Legacy event the previous day, and 7/8 of them had done so (the Small Zoo player who made Top 8 was at a PTQ the previous day.) I would ask if they played a lot of Modern, and a couple guys said it was their main format, but a few others said they played it sporadically and viewed it as "Legacy Lite" -- I think a lot of people (and this basically includes me) chose to spend the day playing Modern because the alternative was Standard. We weren't really planning to play Modern, we all obviously hoped to make Day 2 of Legacy. Lots of good players didn't make Day 2, it was a cut from 580 to 100-ish, but this Modern tournament was probably not what everybody was practicing for all week.
Given the amount of aggro, I don't think more Junk lists would have really made a huge difference in the results. I think the relative absence of Tron and Scapeshift players is why things shook out this way. If I was going to play this deck again (and I have it pretty pimped out, so that answer is yes) I would probably have some plan for Pyro/Anger other than just a couple Mana Leaks.
Hey guys, I just got home from Indy. I was the guy in 11th with the Bant Conscription deck. In the last round some of the x-1's didn't want to ID, so one 6-2 made Top 8, but unfortunately my pretty good breakers were not quite good enough.
The field at large had a seemingly ENORMOUS amount of Affinity in it. I played against Affinity 4 times out of 8 rounds (3 in the early rounds including against one of the guys who Top 8'd with it, and once in the late rounds). A few other players I talked to remarked about the relative lack of Junk decks, I believe only two Junk decks were spotted near the top tables. Looking around at the top tables, I didn't see any Scapeshift players at all and only saw one Tron deck -- the lack of pyroclasms obviously was nice for me and for the guy who was tearing it up with Elves but came up just short.
The most interesting rogue deck I saw was in Round 8, a guy was playing a Soul Sisters deck with Return to the Ranks and had Viscera Seers and Blood Artists. He told me that Sam Black had written about it and he and his buddy had adjusted it from that list, iirc.
BTW, I was amazed at how many people had to read Sovereigns of Lost Alara. Like I think all day maybe only one guy didn't pick it up and stare at it. I had to fetch the English copy of Conscription all day instead of my foreign one just to avoid a million calls for oracle text. Both these cards were played in what was arguably the best deck in Standard only 4 years ago, so I have to surmise there are a lot of people playing Modern who didn't play in ALA/ZEN standard, which says something about the game's growth during that span.
Goyf is neither an engine card nor an archetype-defining card, I don't see any conceivable rationale by which they would have banned it. It's just big, and there's plenty of removal that can handle it in Modern. Getting rid of it neither creates new viable decks nor eliminates a top tier deck, so they gain nothing from banning it. I suspect most of the people who suggest that banning just want it banned because it's expensive and they don't own them, which is not a reason. The metagame that would have to exist for that ban to make sense is almost inconceivable, and in any case does not exist now.
Legacy has a precarious balance that keeps non-blue decks playable by having the blue decks fight off the combo decks. The way non-blue sneaks in there is that FoW is pretty bad against them for the most part. TC allowed the blue tempo decks to play effectively against combo while also being able to keep pace with the non-blue attrition decks, made Thoughtseize and Hymn worse, etc. In the past I would absolutely stomp UR Delver with Zoo because I had way more removal than they had threats and protection for them, but TC totally inverted that matchup -- not a common matchup these days, but it exemplifies the issue I'm talking about. So I can see why banning it might help the format restore its traditional balance.
Pod I was convinced would remain in Modern forever as a "format pillar" the way Shops and Bazaars are in Vintage -- everybody knows Shops and Bazaars probably *should* be restricted but they are allowed to remain as Tier One decks for format stability, and they tend to counteract each other pretty well. Those are decks you think of right away when you think of Vintage. Those decks have character, they play a certain identifiable style of game, they advertise the format (for better or worse, depending on your tastes.) Pod advertised the Modern format as well as any deck. It was a great engine card, but I thought they'd let it exist as one of the flagship decks of Modern, part of what defines the format. But really we've seen over the years that they don't want to manage Modern the way they would manage real eternal formats. I don't think they really know yet what Modern is "supposed to be", beyond talk about it being a Turn 3/4 format when it comes to combo, but Pod didn't run afoul of that. I didn't play Pod, but I knew it to be a deck that rewarded experience with the deck, that allowed you a ton of interesting lines of play, flexible deckbuilding, and basically all the things people like about Magic. I would have thought that 5/12 GP's wasn't enough for that to get the axe in light of the positives, but I guess they see it another way.
Yeah these abilities at rare are strangely out of place. This has gone beyond just a couple outliers and is looking like a trend. Now I wonder if a rare cycle got axed late in development and they had to bump up things like this and the Tusker.
I browsed the rares from Innistrad again just now and could only find Elder of Laurels as being anywhere near as un-rare-y as Avalanche Tusker. You'd have to go back to Indomitable Ancients to find a more boring rare, and that one was so out of place they printed at uncommon in MMA.
Cyclonic Rift and Mizzium Mortars can be rare because they affect the whole board potentially. Fireball+2, even if better, is an exceedingly simple card for its rarity. Fireball itself is far more complex than the new one. At least Devils Play had to be rare because it would have been too awesome in limited. Even the more complex Aurelia's Fury was designed as uncommon and only pushed to mythic bc of limited power level.
Maybe all the real rares come out next week. Or maybe there is in fact a deliberate attempt to reduce complexity and make the game be simpler, and Khans is the debut of that new philosophy.
These cards aren't issues of "this should cost one less or have haste or be uncounterable". You can't make these look rare/mythic just by pushing them for constructed, the Op was not making a generic power level complaint. Rather, it seems an unusual number of rares are cards that would be powerful uncommons for limited, but just don't look appropriate at rare. It's not about fiddling with the knobs, these are just completely out of place at rare, as if they were deliberately trying to keep rares as simple as commons.
Avalanche Tusker could be printed at common as a french vanilla Craw Wurm with provoke, that's a straight-up fact. Shaving a mana off would not make it any different, the complaint is not about power level.
Turlockmike's idea may be close. I took all my prize packs in RTR for over a year because it had all the goodies. When they spoiled fetches I assumed this would be a good set to buy with nice value distribution, but all these rares that are really uncommons bumped up are bringing this set down to earth. The RUG guy who is just a 6/4 with provoke, why in gods name is he rare? Had the exact same thought as the OP.
Well I appreciate you guys giving me the reasoning for it. I recognized Blood Moon as a potential problem worth answering. Still suspect a fetch/dual mana base is too much self-damage to be worth it for three sideboard cards, but I haven't had the chance to play any of these newer versions yet, all my experience is with older builds online a year back. I'm building it in paper right now and plan to stay 2-color with a painless manabase, even though I already own all relevant fetches and shocks. I feel like I lose a whole turn per game to aggro decks in this format when my own mana is doing their work for them. A two color manabase and copious amounts of mainlands is a big part if its appeal to me. I'd rather bring in Duress to deal with problem enchantments, which complements the Bridge plan better anyhow.
Moving to a three-color fetchland manabase seems bad if Burn is already a poor matchup. At least at the local level that's a popular budget choice. The UB version at least doesn't take any damage from its lands, though a couple points from Talismans may occur.
It just seems like throwing away one of the few strong points in a bad matchup to add removal spells that are terrible against the already-weak matchups.
If you're gonna play one for one removal like Path, you should probably just abandon Tezzeret and play Snapcasters for card advantage in a traditional UWR or Esper control build. That's not the type of control deck I care to play, but that's where you're headed eventually if you take the splash for removal to its logical conclusion.
And to the poster a few spots above me, no, fetchlands aren't good mana-fixing unless there are dual lands with basic land types. They had threshold the first time and landfall the second time. On top of landfall, we had JTMS brainstorm ability, Oracle of Mul Daya, etc etc, last time. They grabbed the basic mountain in UWR superfriends just fine, but that was the only time their mana-fixing ability was particularly decent, and taht deck had Jacestorming anyhow.
Tell me. How many top tier decks in Odyssey-Onslaught or Onslaught-Mirrodin utilized Threshold to a large extent? I remember that era quite fondly, actually. I was actually playing then, you see. U/G Madness was all the rage, Psychatog was the boogeyman that made you wet the bed, and Mono-Black control was there with their Withered Wretchs to keep things honest.
The answer is practically none. U/G Madness was amazing, and seemingly a perfect fit for Threshold. Aside from the Odd Werebear, or Grizzly Fate, which were by no means prolific, Threshold was almost non-existent in the single deck that could actually use it. Hell, I can't even find a dedicated Threshold deck at all from that era. The odd Threshold card doesn't mean Threshold was particularly relevant. Madness was just stronger, and Flashback was just so much more efficient. Both of these abilities were far stronger, and far more heavily played even alongside Fetchlands, which provided no obvious benefit to either. U/B Psychatog was the beast in the room as well. Threshold simply couldn't, and didn't, compete in that era of magic. And people still played fetchlands. The point is, Fetchlands were not used to enable Threshold by the simple virtue that Threshold wasn't at all important to the format. Most decks didn't use the ability, and any that had cards that did generally didn't actually *need* to. There were plenty of viable, and top-tier and top-placing versions of said decks that didn't run a single Threshold card.
Onslaught-Mirrodin Standard, while being dominated by Raffinity, still saw some other archetypes appear. AstralGlide played fetches, as did Goblins.
In the Zendikar era, there were tons of Allied pairings available, and yet people continuously played Wedge color and Enemy pairings. In those three color decks that *could* run multiple duals of a given pairing, often times fetchlands were played in eight or 10-ofs, with the non-fetch lands being a 2-3 of almost always (Even though they had a multitude of options). And not every deck that ran fetchlands actually ran Landfall cards too boot. Some did, some didn't.
What does this means? That Fetchlands are freaking good. They always have been, and they don't even need anything to interact with to be good.
Expect this to make Courser of Kruphix even better, as the only card in standard that actually synergizes with fetches. If I hear anybody complain about Courser's price after today, they should have known better as of this very moment.
Except, you know, Delve is in the format. And will probably be available to 3 colors. Which, for those paying attention, interacts wonderfully with Fetchlands. Or so I hear.
The late period ALA-ZEN metagame was: Jund, Cruel Control, Mythic Bant, UWR Superfriends. Jund and Cruel Control relied on tri-lands and vivid lands rather than fetches -- of the fetch-heavy decks, Bant had KotR and Lotus Cobra, and Superfriends had Jace. The shuffles were valuable in those decks even if they didn't play actual landfall. That's why I say Courser decks are in the best position, because only Courser cares about shuffles in current Standard.
The ZEN-SOM metagame was: Valakut Ramp, UB Control, Caw-Blade. Fetches were only really relevant to Valakut, and for Jacestorming in the blue decks. In none of those cases was the enemy color mana-fixing relevant. You can point to maybe the one weekend when everybody was splashing red in their Caw-Blade decks for Sparkmage and Bolt, but that's it.
Delve is not really a good mechanic, it's playable when it's on exactly one relevant card. You can cast Tombstalker once on the cheap... which you are only bothering with in the first place because it dodges Counterbalance and Abrupt Decay.
In legacy brainstorm is the problem, and will be the problem until they eventually but the bullet and ban it. The top 8's with 32 brainstorms are the issue, not the 10-ish DTTs.
In Vintage, Lodestone is the real offender. It's true that you can use artifact mana to get out from under Lodestone or Sphere, so Chalice on zero is a huge play to back that up. But Lodestone providing both disruption and a 4 turn clock is the main issue. Workshops has top decking issues because of the lack of draw spells, and can flounder around with no way to close the game, that's what golem gives them by combining those things into one card.
I agree with having a good solid beat down plan to accompany the combo elements, but Goyf may not fit the bill. I have had good finishes with Bant Conscription, which is similarly a midrange deck with a combo-ish kill, and tested Goyf there on mTGO and not been impressed except when Jund was all over the place.
The Explores were there to facilitate the most explosive Cobra starts. Basically you want to start with Forest + manadork, then Turn 2 Cobra plus landdrop for an additional 2 mana (3 with fetch). Explore busts those starts wide open, easily threatening Turn 3 Sovereigns, but unlike other options it cycles in the lategame. Maybe it should be Coiling Oracle instead, since I'm maindecking the Thalias now. At one point I had additional removal in those slots, but I took it out in favor of just advancing the linear strategy when I realized there wasn't much that I couldn't go over the top of. My very crude plan was to play all-in for the most explosive possible starts in Game 1's, then for Game 2 I would side out whichever threat package was weak depending on my opponent's deck and mull aggressively for hate cards.
I think the field was strange overall, and I hate to say this about a tournament I did well in, but I wouldn't read it as representative of what to expect. I'm not saying the players were weak, but they didn't come to Indy planning to play Modern with carefully tuned decks for the expected metagame. I asked everybody I played over the course of the day if they had played in the Legacy event the previous day, and 7/8 of them had done so (the Small Zoo player who made Top 8 was at a PTQ the previous day.) I would ask if they played a lot of Modern, and a couple guys said it was their main format, but a few others said they played it sporadically and viewed it as "Legacy Lite" -- I think a lot of people (and this basically includes me) chose to spend the day playing Modern because the alternative was Standard. We weren't really planning to play Modern, we all obviously hoped to make Day 2 of Legacy. Lots of good players didn't make Day 2, it was a cut from 580 to 100-ish, but this Modern tournament was probably not what everybody was practicing for all week.
Given the amount of aggro, I don't think more Junk lists would have really made a huge difference in the results. I think the relative absence of Tron and Scapeshift players is why things shook out this way. If I was going to play this deck again (and I have it pretty pimped out, so that answer is yes) I would probably have some plan for Pyro/Anger other than just a couple Mana Leaks.
The field at large had a seemingly ENORMOUS amount of Affinity in it. I played against Affinity 4 times out of 8 rounds (3 in the early rounds including against one of the guys who Top 8'd with it, and once in the late rounds). A few other players I talked to remarked about the relative lack of Junk decks, I believe only two Junk decks were spotted near the top tables. Looking around at the top tables, I didn't see any Scapeshift players at all and only saw one Tron deck -- the lack of pyroclasms obviously was nice for me and for the guy who was tearing it up with Elves but came up just short.
The most interesting rogue deck I saw was in Round 8, a guy was playing a Soul Sisters deck with Return to the Ranks and had Viscera Seers and Blood Artists. He told me that Sam Black had written about it and he and his buddy had adjusted it from that list, iirc.
BTW, I was amazed at how many people had to read Sovereigns of Lost Alara. Like I think all day maybe only one guy didn't pick it up and stare at it. I had to fetch the English copy of Conscription all day instead of my foreign one just to avoid a million calls for oracle text. Both these cards were played in what was arguably the best deck in Standard only 4 years ago, so I have to surmise there are a lot of people playing Modern who didn't play in ALA/ZEN standard, which says something about the game's growth during that span.
Pod I was convinced would remain in Modern forever as a "format pillar" the way Shops and Bazaars are in Vintage -- everybody knows Shops and Bazaars probably *should* be restricted but they are allowed to remain as Tier One decks for format stability, and they tend to counteract each other pretty well. Those are decks you think of right away when you think of Vintage. Those decks have character, they play a certain identifiable style of game, they advertise the format (for better or worse, depending on your tastes.) Pod advertised the Modern format as well as any deck. It was a great engine card, but I thought they'd let it exist as one of the flagship decks of Modern, part of what defines the format. But really we've seen over the years that they don't want to manage Modern the way they would manage real eternal formats. I don't think they really know yet what Modern is "supposed to be", beyond talk about it being a Turn 3/4 format when it comes to combo, but Pod didn't run afoul of that. I didn't play Pod, but I knew it to be a deck that rewarded experience with the deck, that allowed you a ton of interesting lines of play, flexible deckbuilding, and basically all the things people like about Magic. I would have thought that 5/12 GP's wasn't enough for that to get the axe in light of the positives, but I guess they see it another way.
Maybe all the real rares come out next week. Or maybe there is in fact a deliberate attempt to reduce complexity and make the game be simpler, and Khans is the debut of that new philosophy.
Avalanche Tusker could be printed at common as a french vanilla Craw Wurm with provoke, that's a straight-up fact. Shaving a mana off would not make it any different, the complaint is not about power level.
It just seems like throwing away one of the few strong points in a bad matchup to add removal spells that are terrible against the already-weak matchups.
If you're gonna play one for one removal like Path, you should probably just abandon Tezzeret and play Snapcasters for card advantage in a traditional UWR or Esper control build. That's not the type of control deck I care to play, but that's where you're headed eventually if you take the splash for removal to its logical conclusion.
The late period ALA-ZEN metagame was: Jund, Cruel Control, Mythic Bant, UWR Superfriends. Jund and Cruel Control relied on tri-lands and vivid lands rather than fetches -- of the fetch-heavy decks, Bant had KotR and Lotus Cobra, and Superfriends had Jace. The shuffles were valuable in those decks even if they didn't play actual landfall. That's why I say Courser decks are in the best position, because only Courser cares about shuffles in current Standard.
The ZEN-SOM metagame was: Valakut Ramp, UB Control, Caw-Blade. Fetches were only really relevant to Valakut, and for Jacestorming in the blue decks. In none of those cases was the enemy color mana-fixing relevant. You can point to maybe the one weekend when everybody was splashing red in their Caw-Blade decks for Sparkmage and Bolt, but that's it.
Delve is not really a good mechanic, it's playable when it's on exactly one relevant card. You can cast Tombstalker once on the cheap... which you are only bothering with in the first place because it dodges Counterbalance and Abrupt Decay.