Yes. No.
It can be good in the midrange match ups, as well as against decks like miracles in the early game, decks like DnT in the early/late game and also allow you to deal with problem lands such as maze of ith, glacial chasm, tabernacle, etc. once you have used your wastelands already. On a land light hand it can even be good against combo.
When it is bad is against tempo decks that run daze. Obviously daze isn't really something you want to cast a sinkhole into. It is also not ideal against combo as they tend to run off very few lands and some times artifact/creature mana (storm/elves).
I ran pox for a long time, never went below 3 copies because it was never really an irrelevant card. I had a friend who ran them in BuG control as well since they were still a very nice tempo move that doesn't set us back a land drop as well, like when activating a wasteland.
Sinkhole has been used successfully in two different deck types, Delver tempo and Pox resource denial.
BUG tempo doesn't usually run the card anymore due to Deathrite Shaman, Aether Vial, and the card's natural weakness against combo. Mostly because of Deathrite Shaman, I think. Hymn to Tourach remains a more potent 2-mana disruption spell in the circumstances that deck gets into.
As for Pox, it kind of needs to run Sinkhole as part of its all-out assault on resources... in most metagames it still doesn't seem to make a dent.
Sinkhole is the third best mana denial card in the format (behind Wasteland at #1 and Stifle at #2, and ahead of Rishadan Port at #4 and Vindicate at #5)
It's just not very synergistic with Wasteland (due to the mana requirements), requires too many sacrifices to fit into Delver.dec, and is also a very bad card in tempo mirrors.
I have toyed with the idea of building an Esper Delver list on MTGO (with Mentor as a secondary threat and Sinkhole, Stifle and Vindicate plus the traditional blue core), but I don't own a good number of the cards, particularly the Sinkholes, Vindicates and (most importantly) the Stifles.
If you could figure out how to play large with your threats and locks then Sinkhole might still have some real value even against lists with Daze and 1cc threats. The problem is that playing large is really hard to do in Legacy today.
Having a Sinkhole Dazed wouldn't be so bad if that was your opponent playing into your game plan of having 4 or 5 lands to their 1 or 2.
It's ok. Good against some combo (Omnitell tends to take a bit of mana to get there and doesn't expect to lose lands. IME anyway.)
The main issue is it's a dead draw and you can't foretell which matches it'll be a dead draw in. It's akin to Discard. It's better with Liliana (since if it's dead, it's ok to discard.) The main issue that with a BB cost, you can do better.
There's nothing more frustrating than seeing an opponent's bad draw become a win. You know, the one where they draw land after land and would normally be grimacing and complaining but instead they're just smiling and dropping land after land instead.
The point about playing large with threats and locks was that you just don't care if they keep dropping land after land because their threats are low cc and designed to beat mostly low cc opponents.
The problem is that playing large means no Wasteland, because you need to be able to play your large threats and locks. It's just a basic consistency issue at that point.
The notion of playing 4 Sinkhole, 4 Vindicate and 4 Rancid Earth alongside Chalice of the Void is probably the landkill theme most likely to live large and prosper. Figuring out how to make that all work is a lot harder than it seems at first glance. Leonin Arbiters and Dark Confidants and Thalia are just going to stare unhappily at the Delver or Goyf that resolves. The creatures that would stand up to those guys don't have anything like the same utility in the theme. Once you go to 12 landkill in the list it's hard to put other consistency pieces in. You need the oomph to win once you've got the opponent suppressed. At that point you don't really care if the 2 mana he can cobble together produces the normal 1cc and 2cc spells if your assets are all 4cc and there are enough of them at that point to just keep putting them out there until you've exhausted their limited removal options.
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and so I was looking at some old old decklists and remembered this black nightmare
Sinkhole
Is it a good card in the modern day?
It can be good in the midrange match ups, as well as against decks like miracles in the early game, decks like DnT in the early/late game and also allow you to deal with problem lands such as maze of ith, glacial chasm, tabernacle, etc. once you have used your wastelands already. On a land light hand it can even be good against combo.
When it is bad is against tempo decks that run daze. Obviously daze isn't really something you want to cast a sinkhole into. It is also not ideal against combo as they tend to run off very few lands and some times artifact/creature mana (storm/elves).
I ran pox for a long time, never went below 3 copies because it was never really an irrelevant card. I had a friend who ran them in BuG control as well since they were still a very nice tempo move that doesn't set us back a land drop as well, like when activating a wasteland.
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BUG tempo doesn't usually run the card anymore due to Deathrite Shaman, Aether Vial, and the card's natural weakness against combo. Mostly because of Deathrite Shaman, I think. Hymn to Tourach remains a more potent 2-mana disruption spell in the circumstances that deck gets into.
As for Pox, it kind of needs to run Sinkhole as part of its all-out assault on resources... in most metagames it still doesn't seem to make a dent.
Overall record: 139-98-15
Total number of matches: 252
Win percentage ignoring draws: 58.649789
Win percentage including draws: 55.158730
It's just not very synergistic with Wasteland (due to the mana requirements), requires too many sacrifices to fit into Delver.dec, and is also a very bad card in tempo mirrors.
I have toyed with the idea of building an Esper Delver list on MTGO (with Mentor as a secondary threat and Sinkhole, Stifle and Vindicate plus the traditional blue core), but I don't own a good number of the cards, particularly the Sinkholes, Vindicates and (most importantly) the Stifles.
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Having a Sinkhole Dazed wouldn't be so bad if that was your opponent playing into your game plan of having 4 or 5 lands to their 1 or 2.
The main issue is it's a dead draw and you can't foretell which matches it'll be a dead draw in. It's akin to Discard. It's better with Liliana (since if it's dead, it's ok to discard.) The main issue that with a BB cost, you can do better.
Look, Fetch, Draw, Look
Draw
Fetch
Look
The point about playing large with threats and locks was that you just don't care if they keep dropping land after land because their threats are low cc and designed to beat mostly low cc opponents.
The problem is that playing large means no Wasteland, because you need to be able to play your large threats and locks. It's just a basic consistency issue at that point.
The notion of playing 4 Sinkhole, 4 Vindicate and 4 Rancid Earth alongside Chalice of the Void is probably the landkill theme most likely to live large and prosper. Figuring out how to make that all work is a lot harder than it seems at first glance. Leonin Arbiters and Dark Confidants and Thalia are just going to stare unhappily at the Delver or Goyf that resolves. The creatures that would stand up to those guys don't have anything like the same utility in the theme. Once you go to 12 landkill in the list it's hard to put other consistency pieces in. You need the oomph to win once you've got the opponent suppressed. At that point you don't really care if the 2 mana he can cobble together produces the normal 1cc and 2cc spells if your assets are all 4cc and there are enough of them at that point to just keep putting them out there until you've exhausted their limited removal options.