Disrupting Shoal.So basically no deck in the format uses this. Could this card have a place in a currently non-existent control deck? It could easily be part of a counter-suite that pitches a spell snare first turn to stop that first turn Griselbrand godhand or even just baiting your opponent into a misplay when you're tapped out. This card looks like Modern's FoW, why has it gotten 0 play?
Some Merfolk decks use it. But generally it's card disadvantage. Note that comparing it to FoW doesn't work out very well since FoW lets you pitch any blue card to counter any spell.
This needs you to pitch a blue card with the same CMC as the spell you want to counter. Not as easy as you'd hope for.
Noob here weighing in, but I think Shoal is incredibly situational, and is reliant on having the exact CC blue card in hand to make it work effectively. Admittedly, most of the cards played in the format are 1-2, maybe 3cc, but I'm sure people have done some extensive testing, and realized it is simply too difficult to use.
Some Merfolk decks use it. But generally it's card disadvantage. Note that comparing it to FoW doesn't work out very well since FoW lets you pitch any blue card to counter any spell.
This needs you to pitch a blue card with the same CMC as the spell you want to counter. Not as easy as you'd hope for.
Most of the scary spells in the format are 1-4 cmc it doesn't seem like that big of a stretch to build your deck with that in mind.
D-Shoal's not really good IMO, you're hedging too much on having the proper cmc for pitch-fodder.
If it were X or less, it'd be better. Heck if it were a soft-counter value (counter unless you pay X), it'd also probably work. But to need to set X to the right value makes it a special breed of risky play, gambling on having the right blue card at the right time.
Compare/contrast with Counterbalance. Similar design demands, but topdeck rigging is something I think is easier to pull off than having the right pitch-fodder in hand.
Honestly, if we wanted to talk Modern FoWs, I'd rather see FoW reprinted (and combo decks re-enabled to meet in kind) for Modern legality, but there's probably a more relevant thread to relate my attitude on the subject (stuff about Force being not as back-breakingly broken as people may think at first sight and how it's really just a stopgap against combo and adding it to Modern only makes sense if Storm is at its prime and/or Griselcannon gets a hardcore boost).
People do notice the part where you can cast it for UUx? Which can be useful as well.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
In case I didn't tell you, I don't care about your opinion I just want your facts. And not the facts that make you seem smart. I want the ones that are actual facts.
Most of the scary spells in the format are 1-4 cmc it doesn't seem like that big of a stretch to build your deck with that in mind.
1-4 cmc is a huge range of casting costs. Admittedly, you could probably cover them all, but not reliably. If you ran both Spell Snare and Spell Pierce as 4 ofs, you would have 8 spells at 1 CMC to pitch to the Shoal, so whenever your opponent cast a spell at 1 mana on turn 1, you would have roughly a 30% chance of having the Shoal in response. That goes up by about 5% per turn. If you ran a 3/3 split on the 1 cmc counters, your chance drops to 25% on the first turn, still rising by about 5% per turn.
For 2 CMC spells, you would have the Shoals themselves, Mana Leak, Snapcaster Mage, and perhaps Think Twice. Assuming you had 4 Shoals and a 3/3/2 split of the others, that's about a 41% chance on turn 2, going up by about 5% per turn.
3 CMC spells would be trickier because you only run Sphinx's Revelation and Electrolyze, so the chance of having the Shoal online on turn 3 is only around 31%.
4 CMC spells are slightly better, with Cryptic Command and Supreme Verdict both pitchable. By turn 2 (the turn you need to counter Pod), you would have a 30% chance of having some permutation of that combo. By turn 4, that's up to 40%.
This is clearly just a rudimentary analysis of the probabilities, but it is still something to think about. Again, this all assumes that Shoal is being slotted into a UWR shell and not an entirely new deck, another point worth considering in evaluating Shoal.
One problem with this card is having access to enough cards that fit the appropriate CMC. The reason why Merfolk used it is because the format is congested with 2-drops, which also happens to be the same cmc the lords are. They play Aether Vial which can be good to pitch late game, as well as Cursecatcher and Snag in the 1-drop spot, and then Marrow Reejery in the 3-drop spot. Even though that's a solid curve for this format and that card.
The biggest problem with this card is that it's card disadvantage to do so. So is FoW but when you pitch any blue card for it, you don't have to specifically design a deck around it. Yeah I'm sure you can easily build around it but do you want to use card disadvantage in a deck without good draw spells? Decks using FoW in Legacy are often running Ponder, Preordain, and Brainstorm, so they easily draw more cards. This format has Serum Visions, and people dislike that enough not to run it in blue control decks, so we mostly have Remand, which isn't the same.
If I wanted to fit it in, say USA Midrange, I can run:
Now you've got a curve of 6, 8, 6-12, 3-6 which would be really good in this format. You'll obviously need to cut something from that shell to make room for this and your 24 lands, as well as the other things like Bolt, Helix, and Path, but regardless, you can make it work without too much effort. Most of the decks are playing a decent range of cards to make it worth playing, it's just about finding something that you're comfortable playing and finding the appropriate amount of each drop.
One of the biggest issues perhaps is Birthing Pod. Not only can you not Shoal the cards it fetches, but it's hard to Shoal the Birthing Pod on turn 3 because you have so few 4-drops (just Cryptic in my proposed list). I mean, you can run Supreme Verdict but not in midrange, so you'd have to go more controlling. It's just not viable enough, Jace would obviously fix that but he's way too powerful for the format right now.
You can always just cast it for the X cost, so it sometimes isn't card disadvantage. You'd rather not though because you want to efficiently use your mana.
I've tried playing it in a Faeries deck with mixed impressions. The card disadvantage is a real problem, especially in a deck that has no actual card draw, fewer cantrips and doesn't apply enough pressure for the disadvantage not to matter.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
In my dream, the world had suffered a terrible disaster. A black haze shut out the sun, and the darkness was alive with the moans and screams of wounded people. Suddenly, a small light glowed. A candle flickered into life, symbol of hope for millions. A single tiny candle, shining in the ugly dark. I laughed and blew it out.
Many thanks to HotP Studios. Special thanks to DNC for this great sig.
In this format, I could see it as a sideboard card in a blue deck control deck.
The thing is, this format doesn't have enough spells that absolutely need to be countered in this very desperate way. In legacy, turn 1 combo exists. Therefore FoW is necessary.
Putting all the narrow-ness aside: In modern, the only deck that can win on turn 2 is glass cannon-griselbrand, and you have mana in play at that point to do something about it if they get the nut draw and go off on turn 2. Other than that, most of the combo decks are slow enough to the point where just leaving mana open to counter a spell is easy enough. The decks in modern are just a lot more fair, meaning disrupting shoal just isn't as necessary.
The problem is that most fast combo has been banned out of the format. I think that in an environment closer to legacy's, you probably could make it work as a pseudo-FoW, but you would need some powerful enablers to do so. The problem with it is that it requires you to have blue cards at all costs along your curve, and you need to be able to reliably find them in order to counter a spell, which hugely limits deckbuilding. In addition, modern doesn't have brainstorm, so you would constantly be relying on what's in your hand, and what you can draw into.
I could see it being right for a really tuned metagame deck, but personally I have found uses for Sickening Shoal and Shining Shoal more easily than their blue cousin.
I tested it extensively in a 19 land Delver type deck optimized for it (almost all of the cards could be pitched and basically only the Bolts weren't blue cards), and, while it won me some games allowing me to protect my threat tapped out, it is ultimately too incosistent most of the time, and the card disadvantage is a HUGE problem.
It's not bad, but not great now either. Has potential if Ponder/Preordain ever get unbanned.
I think people grossly overestimate how strong FoW is in a midrange heavy, combo-lite format, and how useful it would be in Modern in general.
There are a huge number of Legacy matchups where FoW is simply not that strong. A beautiful example of this is Jund, a modern and legacy powerhouse against which FoW is unimpressive at best and often sided out. The card disadvantage is a serious cost. I play my turn 1 thoughtseize and you 2-for-1 yourself to stop it? Thanks! I drop a huntmaster hoping to eke out a marginal 2-for-1 with a free bear, you FoW and do the work for me? You bet!
This assumes you are not doing something tremendously broken yourself very shortly afterward, of course. But in Modern, thanks to more sensible card design and some bannings, you are not. In fair vs fair matches, FoW is weak.
A narrower, weaker version is unlikely to see any serious play unless the format narrows it's CMC dramatically and especially vulnerable combo decks emerge. I actually think Commandeer might have better odds, as at least taking the spell offsets a bit of the card disadvantage. Even then, it is a narrow card at best, requiring a very specific metagame.
Any deck that could pitch its unused 1 cmc counters to stop something could probably just use those same counters to stop that same spell. Or add more lightning bolts etc. to answer it in a different way without the card disadvantage.
I play it as a 1-of in a deck that draws its entire library off a Boseiju'd Ad Nauseam. It backs up my Lightning Storm with the ability to exile Sleight of Hand, Peer Through Depths, a singleton Forbidden Alchemy, or Mystical Teachings to counter any disruption between 1-4 mana.
I also play Snapback, which is sadly much more relevant given the situation.
The card's problem isn't that it's too weak itself, it's that Blue has access to such mediocre card draw in Modern that blue decks just can't support it.
This card doesn't work quite as well as Force of Will, because the spells that you want to counter in combo decks are around 4CMC. For example, Birthing Pod, Splinter Twin, Scapeshift. In order to counter these spells for free with Shoal, it means packing your deck with a bunch of 4-drops and screwing your curve.
Spirit Stompy with Tallowisp and Geist could absolutely support it.
Tallowisp could fetch enough variation in cmc to make Disrupting Shoal a completely viable hard counter, and Shoal itself is fine countering a Deathrite for 3 anyway.
I could see the shoal in a UU 'folk build that had cryptic in it--you'd never have to worry about being tapped out in combo matches, and you can pitch it to another DS if you draw two against a lot of what your opponents are casting in games.
The problem with shoal is that it's a conditional/bad force of will. Force is not a very good card but is necessarily to keep fast combo in check for legacy. Modern doesn't have decks which necessitate a force type card with the bannings towards making the format end on t4 on the earliest (yes, there are exceptions, but as a whole it's t4). If it did, shoal would be played at least occasionally to mise a win off of someone going all in t1 but that's just about it. The situational nature of the card combined with card disadvantage kill it.
Bathickey: The best card in a Merfolk deck against combo is actually aether vial. Allows you to drop creatures while holding up counters. Shoal would end up just putting you down a card when whatever was pitched could have either added to the clock or countered something else.
Bathickey: The best card in a Merfolk deck against combo is actually aether vial. Allows you to drop creatures while holding up counters. Shoal would end up just putting you down a card when whatever was pitched could have either added to the clock or countered something else.
Oh I agree totally, but say you facing down the newish Todd Anderson brew w/ Goryo's Vengeance--What a fun thing to cast DS on his turn 2 w/o holding up mana.
I've been playing merfolk since when I started playing merfolk because of countertop being a thing. The problem I see with the port into modern is that a lot of merfolk decks don't play counters until G2--which I think is super dumb. I don't understand why merfolk is on the cusp of 30+ threats.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
This needs you to pitch a blue card with the same CMC as the spell you want to counter. Not as easy as you'd hope for.
Thoughts?
Most of the scary spells in the format are 1-4 cmc it doesn't seem like that big of a stretch to build your deck with that in mind.
If it were X or less, it'd be better. Heck if it were a soft-counter value (counter unless you pay X), it'd also probably work. But to need to set X to the right value makes it a special breed of risky play, gambling on having the right blue card at the right time.
Compare/contrast with Counterbalance. Similar design demands, but topdeck rigging is something I think is easier to pull off than having the right pitch-fodder in hand.
Honestly, if we wanted to talk Modern FoWs, I'd rather see FoW reprinted (and combo decks re-enabled to meet in kind) for Modern legality, but there's probably a more relevant thread to relate my attitude on the subject (stuff about Force being not as back-breakingly broken as people may think at first sight and how it's really just a stopgap against combo and adding it to Modern only makes sense if Storm is at its prime and/or Griselcannon gets a hardcore boost).
Cockatrice username: Blackcat77
1-4 cmc is a huge range of casting costs. Admittedly, you could probably cover them all, but not reliably. If you ran both Spell Snare and Spell Pierce as 4 ofs, you would have 8 spells at 1 CMC to pitch to the Shoal, so whenever your opponent cast a spell at 1 mana on turn 1, you would have roughly a 30% chance of having the Shoal in response. That goes up by about 5% per turn. If you ran a 3/3 split on the 1 cmc counters, your chance drops to 25% on the first turn, still rising by about 5% per turn.
For 2 CMC spells, you would have the Shoals themselves, Mana Leak, Snapcaster Mage, and perhaps Think Twice. Assuming you had 4 Shoals and a 3/3/2 split of the others, that's about a 41% chance on turn 2, going up by about 5% per turn.
3 CMC spells would be trickier because you only run Sphinx's Revelation and Electrolyze, so the chance of having the Shoal online on turn 3 is only around 31%.
4 CMC spells are slightly better, with Cryptic Command and Supreme Verdict both pitchable. By turn 2 (the turn you need to counter Pod), you would have a 30% chance of having some permutation of that combo. By turn 4, that's up to 40%.
This is clearly just a rudimentary analysis of the probabilities, but it is still something to think about. Again, this all assumes that Shoal is being slotted into a UWR shell and not an entirely new deck, another point worth considering in evaluating Shoal.
The biggest problem with this card is that it's card disadvantage to do so. So is FoW but when you pitch any blue card for it, you don't have to specifically design a deck around it. Yeah I'm sure you can easily build around it but do you want to use card disadvantage in a deck without good draw spells? Decks using FoW in Legacy are often running Ponder, Preordain, and Brainstorm, so they easily draw more cards. This format has Serum Visions, and people dislike that enough not to run it in blue control decks, so we mostly have Remand, which isn't the same.
If I wanted to fit it in, say USA Midrange, I can run:
1-drops: 2x Spell Snare, 4 Serum Visions
2-drops: 4x Snapcaster, 4x Remand,
3-drops: 2-4x Geist, 2-4x Clique, 2-4x Electrolyze
4-drops: 2-4x Cryptic, 1-2x Lightning Angel
Now you've got a curve of 6, 8, 6-12, 3-6 which would be really good in this format. You'll obviously need to cut something from that shell to make room for this and your 24 lands, as well as the other things like Bolt, Helix, and Path, but regardless, you can make it work without too much effort. Most of the decks are playing a decent range of cards to make it worth playing, it's just about finding something that you're comfortable playing and finding the appropriate amount of each drop.
One of the biggest issues perhaps is Birthing Pod. Not only can you not Shoal the cards it fetches, but it's hard to Shoal the Birthing Pod on turn 3 because you have so few 4-drops (just Cryptic in my proposed list). I mean, you can run Supreme Verdict but not in midrange, so you'd have to go more controlling. It's just not viable enough, Jace would obviously fix that but he's way too powerful for the format right now.
You can always just cast it for the X cost, so it sometimes isn't card disadvantage. You'd rather not though because you want to efficiently use your mana.
Grixis Death's Shadow, Jund, UW Tron, Jeskai Control, Storm, Counters Company, Eldrazi Tron, Affinity, Living End, Infect, Merfolk, Dredge, Ad Nauseam, Amulet, Bogles, Eldrazi Tron, Mono U Tron, Lantern, Mardu Pyromancer
Many thanks to HotP Studios. Special thanks to DNC for this great sig.
The thing is, this format doesn't have enough spells that absolutely need to be countered in this very desperate way. In legacy, turn 1 combo exists. Therefore FoW is necessary.
Putting all the narrow-ness aside: In modern, the only deck that can win on turn 2 is glass cannon-griselbrand, and you have mana in play at that point to do something about it if they get the nut draw and go off on turn 2. Other than that, most of the combo decks are slow enough to the point where just leaving mana open to counter a spell is easy enough. The decks in modern are just a lot more fair, meaning disrupting shoal just isn't as necessary.
Modern Junk Primer
Legacy ANT Primer
L1 Judge
FTFY
Grixis Death's Shadow, Jund, UW Tron, Jeskai Control, Storm, Counters Company, Eldrazi Tron, Affinity, Living End, Infect, Merfolk, Dredge, Ad Nauseam, Amulet, Bogles, Eldrazi Tron, Mono U Tron, Lantern, Mardu Pyromancer
Reprint Opt for Modern!!
FREE DIG THOROUGH TIME!
PLAY MORE ROUGE DECKS!
It's not bad, but not great now either. Has potential if Ponder/Preordain ever get unbanned.
There are a huge number of Legacy matchups where FoW is simply not that strong. A beautiful example of this is Jund, a modern and legacy powerhouse against which FoW is unimpressive at best and often sided out. The card disadvantage is a serious cost. I play my turn 1 thoughtseize and you 2-for-1 yourself to stop it? Thanks! I drop a huntmaster hoping to eke out a marginal 2-for-1 with a free bear, you FoW and do the work for me? You bet!
This assumes you are not doing something tremendously broken yourself very shortly afterward, of course. But in Modern, thanks to more sensible card design and some bannings, you are not. In fair vs fair matches, FoW is weak.
A narrower, weaker version is unlikely to see any serious play unless the format narrows it's CMC dramatically and especially vulnerable combo decks emerge. I actually think Commandeer might have better odds, as at least taking the spell offsets a bit of the card disadvantage. Even then, it is a narrow card at best, requiring a very specific metagame.
Any deck that could pitch its unused 1 cmc counters to stop something could probably just use those same counters to stop that same spell. Or add more lightning bolts etc. to answer it in a different way without the card disadvantage.
I also play Snapback, which is sadly much more relevant given the situation.
A wacky UW tallowisp deck could be cool though.
| Ad Nauseam
| Infect
Big Johnny.
Tallowisp could fetch enough variation in cmc to make Disrupting Shoal a completely viable hard counter, and Shoal itself is fine countering a Deathrite for 3 anyway.
Probably best as an SB card against combo.
Bathickey: The best card in a Merfolk deck against combo is actually aether vial. Allows you to drop creatures while holding up counters. Shoal would end up just putting you down a card when whatever was pitched could have either added to the clock or countered something else.
Oh I agree totally, but say you facing down the newish Todd Anderson brew w/ Goryo's Vengeance--What a fun thing to cast DS on his turn 2 w/o holding up mana.
I've been playing merfolk since when I started playing merfolk because of countertop being a thing. The problem I see with the port into modern is that a lot of merfolk decks don't play counters until G2--which I think is super dumb. I don't understand why merfolk is on the cusp of 30+ threats.