MTG Salvation

Interest Level in the Modern Format: High

Agreeableness with the banning method of the format thus far: 4

Question 1: WoTC has said that Modern is a turn 4 format, meaning that in general decks should not be able to win before turn 4. There are some decks that can win prior to turn 4, but with relatively low consistency (and with a failure to win implying almost certain loss). With what consistency does a deck have to win before turn 4 in order to be deserving banning? (75%? 50%? 5%? etc.)

Question 2: Are the cards banned and recently banned banned for good in your eyes? Or are the bannings being done in order to fit the format to your goals, at which point cards can be cautiously unbanned if deemed necessary? Meaning, when you add arguably format warping but not clear design mistakes to the banned list (more like Wild Nacatl than skullclamp), is there any reasonable chance they will be taken off if the format changes?

Maybe add Azusa, Lost but Seeking? It's 67% of a summer bloom (at 1 more mana) if your opponent can kill it immediately, and keeps giving benefit as long as it survives.

Also: Vernal Bloom? Not sure how mana hungry the deck is (as opposed to card hungry), but if it likes to empty it's hand a lot, this will help.

I feel like the deck wants for draw power, but the best I found (that's related to the idea, anyway) is Seer's Sundial, which works, though it's a bit meh.

Oooo... Treasure Hunt? Getting a land or 2 plus summer bloom, then playing the bloom and slapping down the lands seems pretty sweet. Plus you're already in blue.

Quote from Tom

Mshnik's DeckMagic OnlineOCTGN2ApprenticeBuy These Cards
4 Geralf's Messenger 4 Flickerwisp 4 Blade Splicer 2 Stonecloaker 4 Dark Confidant 3 Thalia, Guardian of Thraben 2 Restoration Angel 4 Path to Exile 4 AEther Vial 2 Tidehollow Sculler 4 Student of Warfare 4 Fetid Heath 1 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth 4 Caves of Koilos 6 Plains 4 Godless Shrine 3 Swamp 1 Isolated Chapel

Now that you're not running arbiter, why no marsh flats? It'll help with the mana a lot, I think.

Also, a quick note (in testing), it kinda sucks to have 4 finks and 4 messengers (between the mainboard and the sideboard) in conjunction with 3 rest in peace. Yes I'd usually to take out the messengers when I put in the RIP, but it's still kinda awkward.

Kirblar and I are about to play.

If you're having mana problems, what about Mirran Spy? In conjunction with Paradise Mantle, you'll get egregious amounts of mana. It works mid-combo too, as if you can play him (with whatever mana you have), then resume playing cheerios, you can keep untapping Paladin with mantle on it. (It also lets you re-use springleaf drum, but that doesn't actually produce mana). Sadly, without paradise mantle, it doesn't do anything. Maybe it's too cute, but it's an idea.

The question is, at what point are you running out of mana? If it's at the beginning, this probably won't help. But if it's at the end (when you've drawn your deck), it probably will.

It's exactly what you need when you need it and subpar anytime else. Which sounds like a sideboard card to me.

I actually experienced this first hand. I'm working on an America Superfriends deck in Modern. I started out (of course) with 4x path to exile. With the advent of lingering souls EVERYWHERE, I started playing 2x electrolyze, and took out 1 path and 1 something else to make room. Electrolyze was so good that I added two more. Every time I drew path, I just wished it was some other removal. Obviously there are exceptions, (Wurmcoil is the big one), but not much else. So soon, Path was gone entirely.

I think if you need one card (four slots) to do all your removal needs for you, then you won't find anything better than path. But, if it's one of many, there are very few creature(s) that can't be gotten rid of by a combination of downside-less targeted removal and board wipes. I found that when you have access to red and white, you don't need path. IMO, anyway.

I won 2-1 against Lantern. Great match!

I have to agree with The Dead Weatherman here. When I first looked at the art, I thought it was a really fat guy with eyes in the slit in the blue, like a ninja in a blue ski jacket with a beer belly. Then the thing's actual eyes came in to focus, and it all made sense!

In the discussion of playability, I like him. If simic's curve is this good (and gets better), it could spawn serious agro archetypes, especially with the things you can do in this format with +1/+1 counters besides just beat face.

Plus you'd have the coolest art and creature types in the format. Vorthos-wise, you're OP.

Your argument can be applied to any amount of broken decks. It's totally irrelevant when it comes to format health and the way that Jund is perceived to either make the format healthier or is it an oppressive deck the way that Zoo was apparently an oppressive deck. It doesn't matter if you like playing your deck or not, it matters whether or not Jund is oppressive.

Given the evidence Jund is straddling that line in ways that the DCI has punished before (GSZ and Nacatl). But, if we go by your logic there should just be waves of unbannings because there are no oppressive decks, just decks that are not good enough.

I guess our difference is that I don't think Jund is oppressive. It isn't putting up oppressive results, and when I build a deck, Jund is one of the many decks I have to beat in mind. It is not the one. So what makes Jund oppressive? I just see Jund as a deck people are having trouble tuning their decks to beat, and thus want de-powered.

I can confirm MartinMcfly's result. A fun match to watch!

To all those calling for any ban out of Jund right now: Do you, right at this moment, enjoy playing Modern? Do you have some deck you like to play (or would like to play if money was not involved) that you think has a reasonable/good chance to do well? Is that deck Jund? If not, then you just gave the best reasoning for why Jund isn't overpowered: You didn't choose to play it. From what we have seen in the past, a deck has a stranglehold on the format when literally 5-6 of the top 8 in most major tournaments are that deck. Jund has nothing close to that. It is often beat.

About my previous comment on beating Jund, I don't think it's quite as simple as: Beating Jund is hard --> Beating any given deck shouldn't be hard --> Ban jund. If you're in school and a class is hard, do you drop it with the justification "getting a good grade in any class shouldn't be hard, so I'm not going to take this?" When I go out to build a new deck, there are many (emphasis mine) decks I am building to beat. After a bit of testing, I step back to evaluate the results. What decks and archetypes did the deck perform well against? What decks and archetypes did it not? Let's say I find that my deck is underperforming against (grave based) combo. That's easy enough to fix with the sideboard, just throw in SB: 3/4 RiP and you're good to go. How about aggro? Some early sweepers (Pyroclasm) or some stall and life gain (Timely Reinforcements) ought to do the trick. Now how about Jund? Easy, I'll just........ um......

You need to build a good deck to beat Jund. That does not say you need to build to beat Jund to beat Jund. What I mean is, I can slap any pile of Junk -- not the actual GBW deck -- together that will hate out combo decks. It's easy. Make it W/x with maindeck rule of law, stony silence, rest in peace, ghostly prison, path to exile, etc etc. Maybe some win condition like elspeth. That deck will have a good 65%+ against most combo. But it will have almost 0% against anything else. So while I would never play it, I know exactly how to build a deck to beat combo. Most other decks have some deck that could be built to beat them and only them if they made up the entire meta. Jund does not. If you said to me "build a deck to beat Jund", I don't know what direction I'd go in. Maybe attack the mana base first? That would lead to spreading seas and blood moon. Alternatively, play more efficient beats that win combat. So Junk? Or play some combo that can avoid the disruption Jund can throw at you, which mostly comes in the form of hand hate. Eggs? There is no clear answer, which makes deckbuilding difficult, and that's all right! This says that there is no linear "beat-jund-and-nothing-else" deck. If you want to beat Jund, you actually have to build a good deck. Which as I previously said, is hard.

Every deck in the format, with the exception of some combo decks, is a combination of powerful cards. That's how Modern is and always will be. Jund doesn't "fold" to a card the same way that many other decks do. All this is saying is that you need to build your deck to beat combinations of powerful cards, some combinations of which fold to Sowing Salt and some that don't.

Ok, that rounds out that. Thank you all for coming today. Let's all say the bad guy oath together now:

Jund is good, and that's good, Jund will always be good and that's not bad, there's no deck I'd rather play than mine.

I don't think Jund needs anything banned from it.

I don't think Jund is too powerful. A bit greedy with it's mana, maybe, but that's neither here nor there. Unless Modern gets some kind of playable land hate, many color good-stuff decks will exist and do well. I don't know what that land hate should be (Wasteland is certainly too strong), but we'll see what happens.

I think a large part of Jund's dominance has to do with the format's age. The metagame is changing on a moment's notice, partially due to wizards poorly reporting how many people played what. More than anything else, Jund is a safe deck to play. If it turns out that everyone else shows up with infect and storm sleeved up, sure you're going to have to mulligan to hit your targeted discard, but you have some conceivable path to victory. By contrast, if you chose to play Tron that day, you may as well go home, because you're not going to get through that many combo decks. Unlike many other decks, Jund has the asset of being wide. It doesn't fall absolutely flat against any deck. Some matchups are better than others, but Bloodbraid elf is still good at putting on pressure and generating card advantage, thoughtseize still takes any card, and liliana still wrecks hands and demands an answer (from your dwindling hand) before it wrecks your board.

If it turns out that Jund is oppressive, it will be played in greater and greater numbers. When that happens, anti-jund decks (Tron, U/R control maindecking Blood Mood) will rise. The thing with jund is that there is no one-and-done sideboard solution that kills the deck on the spot like there is with other decks. Eggs? I'll play rest in peace. Got that bounce? No? on to game 3 then. Other decks aren't hit quite as hard as combo, but Sowing Salt still does a number on tron, as does Stony Silence to Robots. This makes playing to beat jund frustrating. You have to build a good deck to beat jund. And building good decks is hard.

Looking at the PTQ Dragon's Maze information that Blippy has compiled, Jund is putting up great but not "stranglehold-on-the-format" good results. Many tournaments have been won by non-jund decks, like Zoo, UW Control, and UR Storm.

Jund, as a 3 (or 4 or 5) color combination of the most efficient and powerful cards available, will never cease to exist in Modern. And I don't think it should. It is a buffer against durdle decks, that may be able to hate out other decks while doing nothing, but can't handle the myriad threats of Jund. And that's good. I don't want a meta full of extreme anti-meta decks, do you?

I think we, as a community, like to have a deck to hate. If another deck gets banned, that's one less deck for our pet deck to play against, right? Obviously, we should try to get past this somewhat primal urge, (as there's no telling what any (un)banning will do with regard to one particular deck's matchups), but also because if we are going to have an intelligent ban-list discussion, we need to think like the people actually in charge of this whole messy business, who, at least professionally, won't have a pet deck in mind. I know how it feels. I watched Cifka play a few months back while holding my eggs deck and felt like I had the winning lottery ticket. Immediately afterwards everyone starts discussing what needs banning from sunrise, because at the time it was clearly overpowered. Thankfully that has subsided, but I think the sentiment has shifted to jund.

So, after all that, what do I think? I don't think anything should be banned. I don't think enough time has been given to see the impact of new cards introduced, mainly Abrupt Decay and DRS. For unbannings, I could see Ancestral Vision (Which I missread as Aether vial when I first saw the banned list), as it won't do anything except help blue based control which needs it pretty bad. Also, I wouldn't mind Bitterblossom, as with abrupt decay legal a potential faries deck has a huge new enemy to deal with.

Most importantly, despite what anyone says, I have found no reason at all to dislike modern. The meta is fantastic! People complaining about Jund are sitting on their sofas looking out the window, and, upon seeing the large oak immediately outside, state that there are only oak trees in the world. "It's a very big oak tree" they reason, "It's so big, it must overshadow the whole world!" If only they would step outside, they would find a forest full of big trees, small trees, many different breeds of trees beyond counting, a number that grows every day.

Can someone explain how mox opal interacts with retract? I mean in regards to timing and the legend rule. Can you play one, tap it for mana, play another, tap that for mana, and save them with retract? Or does the timing of the legend rule kill them before you can play retract? Because unless you can do that I'm not seeing how you can gain mana during the combo to play your grapeshot. Or extra paladins.

hmmmm.... by Karn tron you mean RG tron? (I think both RG and UW play Karn)

Strictly better, no. Better, yes. They are different things. RG tries to get tron online ASAP (expedition map, sylvan scrying, eggs, ancient stirrings) and win from there, whereas UW is more of a control deck that uses tron to play expensive control cards at reasonable land numbers and win with tron pieces.

Hiya!

I'm currently running America Superfriends in Modern (light, I guess. No black). Here are some thoughts on your list:

Planeswalkers:

Your total (8) is about right, but you really need to have Jace, Architect of Thought in there. He does everything the deck wants to do, and at an affordable price. Gideon Jura is probably my MVP, so don't take him out.

Instants/Sorceries:

Lightning Helix >>> Lightning Bolt for a control deck like this. It turns your agro/burn matchup around.

Izzet Charm is almost always more useful than Mana Leak. There aren't all that many creatures with toughness >2 that need to be dealt with this turn that can't just be wrathed away/kept tapped forever. You also get dig functionality. While there have been a few occasions when making the opponent pay 1 more with leak would have done the trick, many more times I have dug at end of turn for the wrath/planeswalker I needed to hit to stay alive.

I don't think you really need sun titan. You've got enough of an endgame with all your planeswalkers as it is. You could better use those slots ensuring you get there.

The other differences in our lists I'm not sure about. Your picks may be better. I chose Spreading Seas over Wall of Omens, but both do essentially the same thing. A 2 mana cantriping card that slows the opponent down a bit. The question is, which slows the average deck down more: a 0/4, or making one land into blue only, and maybe shutting off a man-land? I think it depends more on the meta than anything else.
Also, I have thirst for knowledge instead of Jace's Ingenuity. Without artifacts, Thirst mainly improves card quality, not quantity. My first impression is that Jace's Ingenuity costs too much (as with 5 mana you want to be playing a planeswalker, not leaving it up), but I could be wrong.

Post how it goes if you do testing! I'm interested to hear.