MTG Salvation

It's really amazing how users can complain about having to read posts they don't like yet refuse to simply use the ignore function.

Quote from The Fluff »

yeah, on her first print into standard.. Baneslayer took a lot money from people years ago. Only on the printing of the 6 cmc titans did she start to calm down.

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On another thing. Checked today. Prismatic Vista still rather expensive at 25-27$.
Not many modern decks are using it, so I'm wondering why the price is still so high?

Legacy, the UW miracles and blade decks run vista as the fetch of choice after Flooded Strand. These are the main culprits as they tend to run 6-8 basics.

Claiming that something is fine in Modern because the same practice is fine in vintage.

In case you didn't know. Things don't needed to be tier 0 to be banned. They just need to be too good or if WOTC just feels like coming up with some arbitrary BS reason to remove it.

DRS Jund, Twin, Pod, TC Delver, GGT Dredge, Probe Infect, Titan with summer bloom where never Tier 0 decks.

Quote from BloodyRabbit_01 »

As predicted, metagame already started to shift again. People just understood that they had to run some Grave hate in the sideboard.

If an average of 6 pieces of GY hate per deck still lets a graveyard deck to take up half of a top 16 is considered reasonable adaptation, I'm super curious as to what you consider to be warping.

Or just play 4 of each to really stick it to them.

It's not about beating both GY and non-GY decks, it's about sending a message.

Quote from FoodChainGoblins »

If players are not willing to adjust like I've seen a million players here say again and again, then they DESERVE to lose. I'm sorry for being blunt. Players during Eldrazi Winter that played me usually were not willing to play the best deck. They usually lost. All they could say is that "it will get banned." Well, during that time in which I bought the Eldrazi pieces that I was missing (only the new ones), I netted $1,300 worth of cash and prizes. I'm okay with it getting banned. That was obvious. It didn't mean that I was going to force myself to lose before it does actually get banned.

Refusing to straight up buy a new deck = deserve to lose because not willing to adjust? Is this a joke?

There were 2, maybe 3 decks during that period that could hang with Eldrazi. In a format as expensive as this, you seriously expect people to buy a new deck in the name of adjustment just to be able compete in some events?

This isn't being blunt, it's being stupid.

In some metas yeah, but using Eldrazi Winter as an example of players deserving to lose because of lack of adaptation is dumb af.

Like it or not, this is the new reality of Modern. Modern players can accept it (and play 4+ pieces of GY hate in the 75) or futilely defy it, but we cannot deny the reality of it. There's no indication that the powers that govern the game see any issue with this.

Modern can still be fun but the novelty of the format wears out fast.

In the 5 years I've played in this format, game play has never been less engaging and shallow than it is right now.

1) Find X hate card
2) Find answer to X hate card

This is the strategic depth of most of the format currently.

Anyone remember those months and years gone by where people complained that Modern is a battle of the sideboards? Those times are a pleasant memory compared to what's going on currently.

Shrug, the only issue here is that to some people, having a bunch of different deck types are good. And that's the be-all-end-all.

Which is true, it is a good thing.

But on the other side of the fence, you realise that a majority of those decks generate very similar type of gameplay. Sit down vs tron/dredge/burn/affinity etc you know almost exactly what's going to happen and how the game and match is going to play out. For the most part, win or lose, there isn't anything thought-provoking about the match. Are there interesting gameplay decisions to be made? Occasionally maybe.

And that's not a knock against those decks or people who enjoy playing those decks. They're made to do their thing efficiently.

The decks do different things but the general blueprint of how the game progresses is the same.

The only "unfair" deck that's interesting to play against imo is UR Phoenix and that's only because of how flexible it is at switching roles and its multiple angles of attack.

A curated online metagame spreadsheet that shows healthy ratios and numbers might be an objective truth, but it could also mean absolutely nothing in the context of a local environment.

Telling someone that certain fair decks have a good metagame share on mtggoldfish or whatever mean jack ***** when they could actually be playing against tron/dredge/H1/Phoenix 3/4 of the time locally which causes the negative feelings towards the format.

Online stats do not magically invalidate someone's local experience of Modern.

Quote from Ym1r »

Quote from Aeonsz »

I understand that many of you will disagree, but I have yet to see a single main deck playable level card spoiled from MH1, excluding the slivers and the canopy land cycle.

You mean that cards like Archmage's Charm Ranger-Captain of Eos, Force of Negation, Giver of runes, Fact or Fiction, Prohibit, Scale Up, Lava Dart, Wrenn and Six, Fallen Shinobi, Eladamri's Call, Ice-Fang Coatl, and Mox Tantalite, and that's just from the top of my head, are not maindeckable?

Depends really on what your interpretation of maindeckable is.

If you mean they'll be played main deck as people experiment with new cards? For sure.

In the long term? Not really, half of that list of cards won't be able to carve a spot for themselves in Modern past the experimental period because they can't hack it in the Modern arms race.

Not to say they aren't good cards, but there could just be no home for them yet. Fallen Shinobi for example, is there a UB deck that's interested in proactively attacking to trigger ninjutsu? What about Ice-fang Coatl, is there a UG deck that wants to run enough snow permanents for that payoff?

Even something like Ranger-Captain that at 1st glance seems like a auto-include in 5C Humans but is actually just one of the many flex slot considerations. White Weenie or D&T could be more playable with it and Giver of Runes but they don't really address the main problems of those archetypes either.

We still have more spoilers coming up so fingers-crossed.

So if people are weary of Hogaak's ban potential as soon as two weeks from now, and refuse to buy it in paper to show it off dominating a large GP, then we're just in for yet another period of insufferable misery in Modern?

I remember when "battle of sideboards" was a ban criteria. Now 8 pieces of GY hate in your 75 is supposed to be "normal."

Why do I play this format again? /shrug

Pretty hilarious for people to lose it over 1 deck. If Modern was fine (in some opinions) before Horizons, it's not like its fundamentally changed now. You increase your GY hate and continue to do what you did before. What's changed beyond that?

Quote from ktkenshinx »

We can do better.

So can WOTC.

Remember when printed small Eldrazi, knowing about the manabase, because it would be cool and fun?
Remember when they said Ancestral Vision would help grindy slow blue decks?
Remember when they said Thopter Sword would help grindy slow blue decks?
Remember when they said Jace would help grindy slow blue decks?
Remember when they said Twin stifled blue diversity?
Remember when they bombarded blue with specifically UW cards (stifling diversity) and it still wasn't good enough for sustained competitive relevance?
Remember when they gave Dredge Cathartic Reunion and free 3/3s?
Remember when they printed a free, uninteractable Lightning Helix for Dredge?
Remember when they thought GGT was the problem with Dredge?
Remember when they thought BBE was the problem with Jund?
Remember when Jace and BBE came back and did nothing?
Remember when Tron kept getting new toys to become more obnoxious all the time?
Remember how they keep printing busted colorless cards for Tron/Prison?
Remember how they let Phoenix dominate GPs at disturbing levels for months?
Remember how green and red still have the best cantrips in Modern?
Remember how they think any blue cantrip has to be worse than Serum Visions?
Remember how they think Stoneforge Mystic is too good for Modern?
Remember how they think Counterspell is too good for Modern?
Remember when they printed that wacky new pump spell so Infect can T2 kill better?
Remember how they view diversity from a name standpoint and not archetype?
Remember how they hide and obfuscate information in order to create a false narrative of format health?
Remember when they printed Iconic Masters, and it lacked any sort of Iconic cards?
Remember when they printed a celebration of 25 years of Magic, and left out the most celebrated cards of Magic's history?
Remember when they printed a Modern-focused set, filled with maybe half a dozen playable cards, and a ton of Commander and Limited chaff?
Remember when they missed the mark entirely on what it takes to make a card playable in Modern?
And then there's recent Standard...
Remember when they printed ridiculous graveyard abuse cards with no way to fight it?
Remember when they printed Energy, and no way to interact with it?
Remember when no one in R&D noticed the Saheeli combo, spotted within 15 minutes of its spoiler?
Remember when they printed fetchlands and fetchable duals with a tri-color themed set?
Remember when they ignored all the other formats because they were too busy putting out the dumpster fire that was Standard?
Remember how they continued to ignore Modern almost entirely to focus on the "new! better!" Ravnica Standard?

There are likely many more instances, but these are just off the top of my head and I think you get the idea. You make the case that many of these things are isolated and specific events. This is true. But when taken on the whole, they indicate a pattern of incompetence, a lack of understanding of the format, and a specific desire to force their own narrative about what the format is by hiding data and telling us that our miserable experiences are just isolated small events.

Seems like the perfect day to unban and announce a reprint of Stoneforge. And give us 5 allied swords, too.

Quote from Mtgthewary »

And how often we do this? Yes you can say money is not important, but you can tell this after another ban guys like you and me loosing a lot of money.

It's an open question as to how many bans have actually resulted in devaluation of card prices over the long run. The banned card certainly loses value with few exceptions, but the overall deck might retain value or increase through natural factors unrelated to the ban. One could easily compare historical price data from the time of the ban to the deck's value today. For instance, here are some May 2015 deck prices:
http://modernnexus.com/modern-investment-deck-win-rate-to-cost-analysis/

Amulet Bloom was about $575 in May 2015. Wizards banned Bloom in early 2016. Today, MTGGoldfish lists it in the $790 +/- range. Obviously, other factors have increased card value such as format popularity, scarcity, EDH demand, etc., but overall the parcel of Amulet Bloom cards has increased 35%+ since 2015. I suspected this would also be true for URx Twin cards, notably Tarns and Snapcaster. In fact, a cursory glance does suggest this to be true: UR Twin went for about $1,000 in May 2015 and the same parcel of cards goes for about $1,300 +/- today; here's Sam Pardee's old GP Charlotte UR Twin and some other decks for comparison (https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/296690#paper).

It's definitely possible that if the cards had gone unbanned, the overall deck would have increased in value even more than it increased naturally. It's also possible that there was a short-term loss in value in the 1-2 year timeframe. But at least in the Twin and Bloom cases, banned decks don't appear to lose value over time in the Modern long run.

the win rate is just an average taken over players of varying skill levels. it isnt a literal representation of how much any given person can win with the deck. the more players piloting a deck means that range of skill levels likely widens, thus pulling win rates towards some expected value around 50/50. its why win rates for decks usually always float in that area given enough match data; yet we arent here claiming 10+ decks are '50/50'. this is also why decks like kci, amulet, or whir that have a smaller population have frequently shown top win rates; because the influence of any one highly skilled player is greater. couple that with barriers, perceived or otherwise, that keep less skilled players away and the difference is only more pronounced.

so the GP results are what they are; the reality we have to rationalize/explain. right now im seeing claims that a deck that presumably can win only half the time is coincidentally posting these level of results because the number of players.

according to tobi henke's GP analysis articles going back 4-5 months, where he tries to measure representation of the day 1 fields, UR phoenix started out near 5% in dec-jan, increased to around 8% in feb, and broke into 11-13% range in march making it the most played deck. in the case of GP calgary burn actually beat out phoenix as the most played. note the consistency of the GP placements during this period of ramping popularity.

the stellar day 2 representation that meets those day 1 numbers, and in cases exceeding them by a good amount, therefore is probably because of the decks day 2 conversion rate. which would in turn explain the abnormally high top8 conversions.

so consider a deck roughly 1 in 10 GP attendants are bringing to the event, with a 50% win-rate, placing multiple copies in the top 8 on average for 8 consecutive events (where the environment is increasingly hostile towards the strategy no less). i dont know about you but at face value that seems absurdly improbable. more likely there is something else going on.

granted i think there are plenty of justifications for UR phoenix's success that go beyond the decks power level, most of which deal with the decks qualities that tournament grinders find attractive and the timeline of the events themselves. that said, i believe anything along the lines of 'look at its 50% win rate, its just a lot of players' does little to nothing to explain what the deck has accomplished.

Phoenix is putting up competitive numbers Twin could only dream of.

Yes, this is how you choke out a format. If nobody can watch it, was it really played?

Carry on.