1/ Elves : lost 0-2
My Leylines were protecting me against Shaman of the Packs, but eventually the opponent always ended up with a very large board and tons of mana which allowed hip to pay very easily the Ghostly Prisons' tax and overrun with Ezuri once or twice at the same time. I think it is an awful matchup. Only Wrath of God could have gained me a bit of time, and even that's not super exciting. All their activated abilities were mana abilities, so Suppression Field didn't help. Post side they had Rec Sage and Fracturing Gusts to handle as well.
Nota Bene : add Rule of Law in the side to stand a chance next time.
2/ Affinity : win 2-0
Suppression Field and Solemnity prevented a lot of shenanigans game 1 until I managed to establish the lock with Phyrexian Unlife. Game 2 Stony Silence did it's job.
3/ Burn : win 2-0
There's no beating around the bush : I utterly rekted my opponent. He's on the play, but Turn 0 Leyline really hurt him. A Runed Halo on his Eidolon was pretty funny as well. Several Ghostly Prisons later, I fly over him easily for the win.
Game 2 I didn't have a Leyline right away, but I drew one later in the game. He drew 1 Revelry but he had to target it toward Greater Auramancy. I managed to cast a Nevermore naming Revelry and then Phyrexian Unlife won me enough time to establish the lock.
4/ Affinity : win 2-1
The opponent had the nuts game 1. Game 2 I locked him out using Suppression Fields and Stony Silence. Game 3 I played a Porphyry Node on the draw and picked apart its board bit by bit, starting with Signal Pests, until the Node went to the yard. I didn't draw a Stony Silence this game and at one point he could have won if he'd drawn a Cranial Plating (he had plenty of mana to equip and attack), but he didn't. The matchup feels favored, even if this one was closer.
I heard there was an UW control lurking around but I'm glad I avoided it \o/
The deck is so fun, I love it. Next step : try the Idyllic Tutors, I'm convinced they will be great.
1
Outside of the US why would you buy into a top deck that was not just a bunch of multi-use staples if you did not have the cards already?
Once a year pptqs that could easily be sanctioned as sealed by your local LGS? A Modern grand prix every now and then in Europe which would cost more than the deck just to get to? The mkm series? That one random WMCQ that was modern? Actually that last one I went to the semis with in my small country.... with a landkill deck that preyed on all the efficient decks of the day like Affinity and Infect. Which rather proves the point, all those decks got wrecked by what appeared to them to be random.dec, there was no advantage in playing those acknowledged top decks if half the room was content to turn up with fringe decks, some of which had great matches against specific top decks. There is no incentive to invest into top decks, there is no real grind circuit available in the format outside of the US. The same is true of Legacy, with fewer opportunities for competitive play, but once you buy your big RL cards they maintain and ultimately gain value over the long term. In other words I can make money by owning key cards in the format, which makes me at least more likely to invest in them.
There is not much point building for a meta of top decks if people are slinging Soul Sisters et al, and most LGS stores in Europe at least are full of such mini metas with decks from years ago still about. It is what makes the idea of data analysis of the meta totally laughable outside of the US. There is no meta data that will be relevant to your local LGS, which is about the only place modern is occuring on this side of the pond. Until wotc give a reason to play Modern or a pathway for the format, things will continue this way, and I doubt if they want to do so.
Oh, and in response to measuring interactivity, I don't think you can quantify it. Interactivity is very, very subjective. You can not measure it any more than you can measure fun. People either feel they had an interactive game or they don't, but people experiencing the same game will view it differently. Cards that are interactive can be used very uninteractively.
It is very difficult to pinpoint when they are interactive abd when they are not.
There are things you can measure and things you can't, the big fallacy of so much politics is that everything can be meaningfully measured, and to a high degree of precision. Measuring win rates is a lot easier than interactivity, for the reasons highlighted in the post above.
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In Standard, unless your store is very, very casual, the best decks will be represented. In Legacy, this is a given, even if Europe is less blue than the US or less Delver-y than Japan was. In Modern I can see very little evidence of the top decks being played in the numbers they should be, at least in Europe, even at larger events. The lack of competitive ladder for Modern, coupled with the price means that by and large people are happy to stick with their deck/s. This is true in Legacy, of course, but the power level of the format is so, so high that a "bad" legacy choice can still do well.
In Modern the old PPTQ system failed rapidly...I could play Modern once a year but only to qualify for an event that was not Modern. Or I can play FNM. Or travel to an event with Modern, but wait, oh, it has a Legacy event at the same time.
Without that ladder for higher tier play there was no incentive to change to the best decks. Now as it happens I don't like the "best decks" I like the best prison decks, no mean task in Modern, but the principle holds. Why bother to learn top decks and acquire cards that are spiking in price when there is nothing to do with them beyond FNM? Why drop 400-800 GBP on a deck when I can grab a couple of duals or RL cards for Legacy that hold their value? Thus Wizard's decisions, correctly based on top tier play, don't really impact the vast majority of Modern enthusiasts outside of the US that has a real Modern scene.
Modern is all sorts of linear flavours (or flavors, for the US readers) lined up against each other. Without a Wasteland and Force of will police this will always be the case while sideboards are just 15 cards and tutoring is awful. But when the format is always everyone's second or third choice format, and the competitive scene is so weak outside of the US, does it actually matter? I enjoy Modern, I don't enjoy 80/20 matches, but overall, when so little is on the line in the format, I can't bring myself to care too much. If Wizards improved the competitive ladder for Modern players then the format would get more scrutiny. As it is, it is a flawed but enjoyable format that gets very little compared to the vast number of players it has.
2
Modern players by and large have their decks. I don't know about you but whenever I see a Modern player with a well tuned and well played Death's Shadow as their primary deck I pretty much know when they started Modern, and it was not six months ago.
Ditto humans, Spirits, Hollow one. The thing is that bans aside they will likely be playing the same decks in a couple of years. They won't be changing any time soon. I know Storm players who will always be Storm players, most were Storm players five years ago. People swap, but for many Modern is the number two format, always second favorite behind something else, so they swap less often than you would think.
These Masters sets are often bought by richer casuals, often casuals who dabble in Modern but are not committed to it, and as such represent one of the fee ways WOTC can mine the casual Commander players. Including a few reprints in Standard sets to help sell them can boost sales to casuals, but the Master's set is a beautiful example of mining casuals, leading to buyer's remorse more often than not.
2
I have made a lot of money off mtg, I have not bought sealed product for a while and sat on it, and I am reserving judgement till I see the list because I suspect it won't be the gift that keeps on giving.
1
I broke even on drafts without them. Drafts gave me worthless fifty cent garbage plus a winning lucky lottery ticket for someone. I don't want cheap standard cards, I won't play standard regardless because I hate the design paradigm. I want the cheapest rares to be a dollar, most to be five dollars, good ones to be ten, and mythics to be three to thirty dollars. If it drols significantly below that threshold it simply is not worth drafting. Spread the value and you get lots of quite happy people. Put it into Masterpieces and you get one lucky sod with all the value and a bunch of people walking away from draft disappointed.
Masterpieces made standard cheap but still the standard numbers did not go up.
Bringing them back is only good for standard players looking to play cheaply, but it wrecks draft players who don't play standard doubling the cost of drafting minimum as the cost of drafting cannot be defrayed with cards pulled.
1
Firstly, you need minimum 8 accelerants, perhaps 9. 4 Tomb 4 Mox or 4 Tomb 3 Mox, 2 City etc.
The deck also needs Cavern of Souls, no question. It is not an Aether Vial deck and so 4 are essential.
On the other point, Preeminent needs an attack phase to implement. The deck would invariably cast Chalice or Sup field over Preeminent t1 on the play over preeminent, because Storm reanimator and combo all outpace ANY creature deck that does not disrupt. Legacy is not about dropping ten power t2, that is too late. Give me two power and disruption, followed by a bit more disruption and a bit more power. It is what the deck is about, it does not race, it joggs, but it ties the opponent's shoelaces together. You need disruption t1, t2 at the latest, but normally t1. I am happy to drop Chalice, Thalias etc. t1 as they dusrupt. Preeminent at best gets me a second dude t2, which is not enough. If it cost 1 then it would be better, but normally it hits t2 which is too late to disrupt, and without disruption you are not winning.
1
4
Amen to that.
I think Modern is a fun format from some perspectives- so many off beat strategies bring a smile to my face - but creatures rather than the stack is where most games are decided. At the very highest tables there are basically Humans, Tron, random graveyard abusing explosive deck d or (hollow one, bridgevine, whatever you call them- the same inconsistent but explosive critter decks), KCI, and UW control and its ilk.
Now over a five round event you can pilot a lesser deck to the top by hitting the right matches, but over a bigger event those decks will rise.
Feel free to skip the next bit where I talk about what I run and what it loses to. The TL:DR is always the same- I can have a deck with a fantastic record against one or two of those decks, nigh on unbeatable, and will have a nigh on unwinnable match in another two, but the bottom line is to get a deck into the top echelons needs cards capable of turning round 10/90 matches. We got stuck at a point in time where any new power comes basically from new critters and even when new answers/hosers are printed they don't exist in the power level required to say sod off like Gloom and Chill used to, or Blood Moon does, which is probably a good thing but means that they won't be hateful enough to make a difference in those 10/90 % matches, and the format lacks filtering to the extent that even if they did we could not draw the answers consistently early enough- No E tutor, no Brainstorm/fecth synergy, no answer when I need it.
Here is the next bit I referred to to illustrate. You can change the name of random janky deck, the principle remains. In Modern over the past couple of years I have run decks like Martyr proc and Wx Devotion Enchantment pillow forts or Enduring Ideal. Unsurprisingly the latter Enchantment decks keep beating Humans because main deck Leylines stop freebooter, and sphere of Safety/Ghostly prison make attacking very unlikely when the whole of the deck is defensive enchantments. T4 pay 8 to attack is one thing, turn 8 pay 15 or more is another. The Martyr decks have a nasty habit of early gaining life, recurring chump blockers via S. Hawks can recursively Forecast Kami of Fogness. Like any good control imitating deck nowadays they use different sweepers. At the same time beating Tron, for example, is only vaguely possible in both cases with a skewed sideboard.
So in order to bridge the gap they need to print a lot more than Alpine Moon or Damping Sphere, and some tutoring to get it early.
Modern is stuck forever with its pool,despite new cards being added. The static nature is due to philosophy, it won't get better tutoring, for example. Legacy has such great selection that a meaningful hate piece gets play as it has selection/tutoring. Printing that for Modern would be lethal as there is no FOW to keep combo in check. Without better tutoring it will not matter what new hate card get printed. By and large all new pushed cards have been critters since the days of Snappy, they won't take the game back to the stack and most importantly they won't print cards that keep people out of the game by taxing them. They certainly won't tax planeswalker abilities, blowing up lands is a no-no, even on symmetrical Smokestack type cards. No, all we get is an endless stream of Buglers and a few hate cards that prick rather than slice their prey. Net result is we discover "new" decks but really they are all they same - some random explosive deck that sometimes has 8 or 10 power t2, and sometimes whiffs. Some tribal build based on Vial, Cavern and tribe du jour. Some deck based on Tron. Some control deck in UWx. Some good stuff deck like Jund or Mardu that is always not quite there, bubbling under the top tables with Burn. Plenty more will have some measure of success, but not over the longer events consistently. Rogue corner is always full, but the leaderboard normally has a predicable top 32/64 in the GPs. Some broken combo deck that gets banned and comes back but not as good. Basically the phrase we use in cricket- you can change the bowler, but not the bowling.
1
1
Financially, an area I like to think I have done well in this past decade like many older players, Std has been a treadmill and money pit for almost everyone. Older players long since abandoned it.
The biggest lies are the ones we tell ourself, and so many Standard players lie to themselves--that the format is not a money pit, that they can grind away to a pro life, that they could end up being known as a designer of decks when in reality any innovation they come up with will be ascribed to whichever pro picks up the deck and writes about it first. The first two are big ones that help perpetuate the format sales even when the format is poor.
The big, almost insurmountable issue is the desire to placate newbies, at the expense of multiple fronts on which to fight. Newbies hate landkill, handkill, taxes, and counters. So they are weak, whilst PWs and combat are all and voilà, one solved format.
Answers been too weak for the best part of a decade, muppets like Stoddard have presented utterly broken stuff such as Emrakul with a an article proclaiming how great the card is, happily fiddling away like Nero as the format explodes. What would have made Emrakul or whatever broken stuff they are banning is always the same. Answers. Killing someone's land 3 turns in a row or casting 3 successive discard spells really hurts their chances of landing a broken artifact, as does a Null Rod effect. Neither were available for that Std. Energy showed why Maro is not right for the game it would have been fine if Solemnity had cost 1 mana or it could be removed, but the same mistake from Scars block limited was made--a resource you can't interact with.
Bottom line Mtg is a paper game. It will go on being so, but Standard will never be as prominent as before, whilst the whole idea of answers being stronger will only go so far. If newbies and casuals hate something they won't push it, despite the fact that casuals in particular will never jump on the tournament scene when shops have so much EDH.