Do you think modern will be like legacy in some month/years?
I mean in competive legacy there are "only" Delver decks, stoneblade decks, miracle and combo decks all in 10 variants but not rly different decks. "normal" creature based deck like zoo are not rly playable competive. People say "yeah legacy you have a 1000000 card pool it is so much diverse" but in reality you see only the same 100 cards again and again.
Will we have in modern only bgx, twin and combo decks?
If you wanna generalize. You have junk, jund, junk company and little kid junk and sultai, 4 variants of twin, 2-4 delver variants and the rest are mostly combo decks.
No, and I hope that will never happen.
The diversity problem you are talking about happens if you let cards in the format that are clearly above the rest. In Legacy it's clearly all the Blue cards and that's why the format is warped around them.
Modern may have a few cards that are certainly very good but the difference is that they are all not in the same color unlike in Legacy. In Modern you have stuff like Thoughtseize in Black, Remand in Blue, Lightning Bolt in Red, Tarmogoyf in Green, etc.
All colors in Modern besides probably White have some extremely powerful cards that enable decks in those colors to compete but not a single color stands above the rest. That's why Modern has such much color diversity.
We also had Esper Midrange, Abzan Company, Grixis Delver, Sultai Control, Elves and Abzan Liege as decks that made a name for themselves but were on nobody's radar before. Modern is far from stagnant.
You said in another thread that you would be OK with 3 BGx decks being tier 1 in Modern, yet you complain about blue in Legacy. I know that the dominance wouldn't be on the same level, but that still seems a bit contradictory to me. (not to mention that the difference between decks like Storm and Miracles is a lot higher than the one between something like Jund and Junk)
Do you think modern will be like legacy in some month/years?
I mean in competive legacy there are "only" Delver decks, stoneblade decks, miracle and combo decks all in 10 variants but not rly different decks. "normal" creature based deck like zoo are not rly playable competive. People say "yeah legacy you have a 1000000 card pool it is so much diverse" but in reality you see only the same 100 cards again and again.
Will we have in modern only bgx, twin and combo decks?
If you wanna generalize. You have junk, jund, junk company and little kid junk and sultai, 4 variants of twin, 2-4 delver variants and the rest are mostly combo decks.
No, and I hope that will never happen.
The diversity problem you are talking about happens if you let cards in the format that are clearly above the rest. In Legacy it's clearly all the Blue cards and that's why the format is warped around them.
Modern may have a few cards that are certainly very good but the difference is that they are all not in the same color unlike in Legacy. In Modern you have stuff like Thoughtseize in Black, Remand in Blue, Lightning Bolt in Red, Tarmogoyf in Green, etc.
All colors in Modern besides probably White have some extremely powerful cards that enable decks in those colors to compete but not a single color stands above the rest. That's why Modern has such much color diversity.
We also had Esper Midrange, Abzan Company, Grixis Delver, Sultai Control, Elves and Abzan Liege as decks that made a name for themselves but were on nobody's radar before. Modern is far from stagnant.
You said in another thread that you would be OK with 3 BGx decks being tier 1 in Modern, yet you complain about blue in Legacy. I know that the dominance wouldn't be on the same level, but that still seems a bit contradictory to me. (not to mention that the difference between decks like Storm and Miracles is a lot higher than the one between something like Jund and Junk)
I said that 3 BG/x decks being Tier would mean that more decks would be interactive.
And yes there is quite the difference between Abzan and Jund. ktkenshinx wrote an excellent article about it on his site.
And let's not even get into Abzan Company which has almost nothing in common with anything else.
And lastly Im not complaining about anything when it comes to Legacy. Why should I complain about something that I have no interest in exactly?
I wouldn't even bring it up if other people wouldn't do it all the time. I was making a comparison. One that is quite clearly valid. Data doesn't lie.
Is Bloom Titan also considered non-interactive? What about blue and black pacts? Is loom Titan interactive if it brings Swan Songs or Pyroclasms or Seals of Primordium from the sideboard? Like, it's not that removal spells are dead against the deck, they seem to do something, althought it's true that they don't do anything meaningful? I'm a bit confused by the terminology you guys are using.
Well I know you are an expert Amulet player. I have seen your name a lot MTGO.
But yes I would classify Amulet Bloom as an non-interactive deck. Why do I think this way? That's simple.
Just answer me this question. If you could pull off a turn 2 Hive Mind kill every single game and you knew that your opponent has no way to stop you then would you do that? I think the answer to that would be yes.
You don't care about what the opponent is playing or doing. You only care about what you are capable of doing. That is what makes the deck so non-interactive.
Now the the thing about the pacts and the sideboard cards is this. If you could guarantee a turn 2 kill every single game then you wouldn't play of all that stuff. Because you don't want to interact with the opponent. You are forced to interact with your opponent. That's a significant difference.
Storm decks are seen playing Lightning Bolt. That doesn't mean they play that card because they want to bolt your Wild Nacatl. They do because things don't always go as planned and they are forced to bolt your Nacatl. Same with decks like Burn.
That is what separates such decks from decks like Jund. They play Lightning Bolt because they want to kill your Wild Nacatl. They want to blow up your stuff and discard it. They want to interact with you constantly. They actively care about what the opponent is doing since the entire deck is built to stop the opponent from doing what he wants to do.
Now of course Jund is an extreme example. You don't have to care that much about the opponent to be considered an interactive deck but I hope I got my point across.
Everybody may have his own opinion when it comes to this but that's how I see it.
I am currently annoyed at the lack of wotc design team. you are telling me they design and play test sets 6 years in advance and they don't see how cards like TC were going to be a problem?
I lmao everytime they come out and say x card was a mistake, did they ever say goyf was a mistake, I can not recall.
I am currently annoyed at the lack of wotc design team. you are telling me they design and play test sets 6 years in advance and they don't see how cards like TC were going to be a problem?
Well ***** happens. They are not infallible but they do a pretty decent job overall.
I lmao everytime they come out and say x card was a mistake, did they ever say goyf was a mistake, I can not recall.
I don't think they did.
Mark Rosenwater did write an article though where he explained how Tarmogoyf came into being and that his original design was different so it's kinda like an admission that the card was a mistake.
I am currently annoyed at the lack of wotc design team. you are telling me they design and play test sets 6 years in advance and they don't see how cards like TC were going to be a problem?
Uh... six years in advance? Where in the world did you get that? If you're talking about that 6-year plan Mark Rosewater sometimes goes on about, the "6-year plan" is extremely general. It's mostly something like "hey, we should do a multicolor block here." Not exactly designing and playtesting.
In fact, the only real playtesting occurs during development, which from what I remember lasts about a year or so. So... I have no idea where you got the idea that they do this 6 years in advance.
Also, pretty much all of the playtesting is for Standard and Limited. Where, what do you know, Treasure Cruise is a good but perfectly reasonable card.
I lmao everytime they come out and say x card was a mistake, did they ever say goyf was a mistake, I can not recall.
I don't think they did.
Mark Rosenwater did write an article though where he explained how Tarmogoyf came into being and that his original design was different so it's kinda like an admission that the card was a mistake.
In what way? Cards often change considerably from design to development. Heck, compared to a lot of cards, Tarmogoyf is actually pretty similar to its original iteration, just lowering of the mana cost and +1 added to toughness. I don't really see that as any admission that it was a mistake. At most it's an admission that "hey, the reason the card is good is because of these changes."
The description of Tarmogoyf's development can be found here, by the way.
In what way? Cards often change considerably from design to development. Heck, compared to a lot of cards, Tarmogoyf is actually pretty similar to its original iteration, just lowering of the mana cost and +1 added to toughness. I don't really see that as any admission that it was a mistake. At most it's an admission that "hey, the reason the card is good is because of these changes."
The description of Tarmogoyf's development can be found here, by the way.
Well there is this part:
"Mike Turian, Future Sight's lead developer, recreated the card from memory and just assumed it had */*+1 because it was copying Lhurgoyf. Mike also dropped the card from 2G to 1G because he felt as it was "just a beater without evasion" it didn't need to cost three mana. The rest, as they say, is history."
That says pretty clearly that Mike Turian was solo on this and that he remembered the card incorrectly. He also shaved a mana off because he felt like it and not because actual playtesting showed the card to be fine at 2 mana.
In what way? Cards often change considerably from design to development. Heck, compared to a lot of cards, Tarmogoyf is actually pretty similar to its original iteration, just lowering of the mana cost and +1 added to toughness. I don't really see that as any admission that it was a mistake. At most it's an admission that "hey, the reason the card is good is because of these changes."
The description of Tarmogoyf's development can be found here, by the way.
Well there is this part:
"Mike Turian, Future Sight's lead developer, recreated the card from memory and just assumed it had */*+1 because it was copying Lhurgoyf. Mike also dropped the card from 2G to 1G because he felt as it was "just a beater without evasion" it didn't need to cost three mana. The rest, as they say, is history."
That says pretty clearly that Mike Turian was solo on this and that he remembered the card incorrectly.
The point is, saying "it got changed in development" doesn't really mean anything in regards to mistakes because of how frequently cards are changed. Compared to some of the changes I've read about, this was relatively minor.
He also shaved a mana off because he felt like it and not because actual playtesting showed the card to be fine at 2 mana.
That's just an assumption on your part. It never said he never playtested it (and at the time, it probably did seem unimpressive even at 1G), it merely gave the rationale for the change.
And again, no indication he regarded it as a mistake, just an explanation as to why the card ended up being good, whereas the original iteration would've basically been unplayable.
A better indication that it was regarded, to some extent at least, as a mistake is that they don't want to put it back into Standard due to fear of its power (though admittedly, that may simply be because putting it back into Standard constraints them a lot; there's a whole lot of cards you really don't want to be in any Standard environment with Tarmogoyf).
Goyf at 1GG or even GG would see very little play. As splashable as it is, it's everywhere. They didn't make Green stronger, they made everyone else stronger and sure, Green decks would play it too. Anytime they are trying to focus on making a particular color stronger, they should make it on a card that is less splashable. Otherwise you see thinsg like now w/Goyf where everyone splashes it in as one of their only green non-board cards.
I think the development team need to re evaluate how they do things.
We went years and years of sets then suddenly 1 u card is so good its a mistake.
Why not make the other cards better to make that card weaker?
Wotc, the company afraid of what the formats will look like so they ban it make some changes and we are back to prenewset.
The format is stewing in its own excrement cause wotc is scared to make the format change. We lost pod, got a pricy/betterish card but now it runs goyf where it never did before. Many decks have been the same for a year or 2 now. No new cards to shake up the format.
What does that tell you about current set/deck development?
Yeah I know limited then type 2, but for the rest of us.
I think the development team need to re evaluate how they do things.
We went years and years of sets then suddenly 1 u card is so good its a mistake.
What does this even mean? If the argument is supposed to be that it was only recently we had a ban, Deathrite Shaman was banned exactly one year before Treasure Cruise (arguably, it should have been banned a year before that). How is it "years and years of sets" until suddenly there was a ban necessary?
Why not make the other cards better to make that card weaker?
Because it takes them a while to get cards into sets, and sometimes cards are so powerful it isn't really possible to outclass them without breaking things even further?
Wotc, the company afraid of what the formats will look like so they ban it make some changes and we are back to prenewset.
This is the kind of argument you could use against any card being banned. "Wizards of the Coast is afraid of what the format would look like, so they banned Skullclamp and now we're back to where we were before that!"
The format is stewing in its own excrement cause wotc is scared to make the format change. We lost pod, got a pricy/betterish card but now it runs goyf where it never did before. Many decks have been the same for a year or 2 now. No new cards to shake up the format.
What does that tell you about current set/deck development?
It doesn't tell us anything about current set/deck development. It does, however, tell us that Modern is a nonrotating format with a large card pool. The decks staying fairly similar is what's expected.
The problem I see in the current modern is that cheap decks tend to be the non interactive kind, therefore we tend to see more non interactive decks running around, can't blame people when playset of goyf, lilly, cryptic, snap, etc cost a ton to get. Till the day when staples of interactive decks are low enough for ppl to buy in, we got to live with non interactive decks.
So much this.
Not even going into Goyf, but Liliana is $80 (required for BGx/8Rack), Cryptic Command is $50, Vendilion clique is still 40.... Going into the BGx shell, Abrupt Decay is $10....
And then you get into Desperate Ritual ($1), Manamorphose ($3), Gitaxian Probe ($3)..... It's really not hard to see why people gravitate to the less interactive decks.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Oath of the Gatewatch; the set that caused the competitive community to freak out over Basic Lands.
The problem I see in the current modern is that cheap decks tend to be the non interactive kind, therefore we tend to see more non interactive decks running around, can't blame people when playset of goyf, lilly, cryptic, snap, etc cost a ton to get. Till the day when staples of interactive decks are low enough for ppl to buy in, we got to live with non interactive decks.
So much this.
Not even going into Goyf, but Liliana is $80 (required for BGx/8Rack), Cryptic Command is $50, Vendilion clique is still 40.... Going into the BGx shell, Abrupt Decay is $10....
And then you get into Desperate Ritual ($1), Manamorphose ($3), Gitaxian Probe ($3)..... It's really not hard to see why people gravitate to the less interactive decks.
The first reason I run Burn is that I love linear decks with an established strategy that is almost unvariable : the budget aspect is also to consider and I agree that some of the uninteractive decks cost less than most of the other tier 1-2 decks.
As a matter of fact, the most uninteractive deck I find is Ad Nauseam, but it is the deck that I love the most. I'd play it if I could afford to build it.
But, I don't think Modern is heading towards uninteractive decks. It's not happening.
The problem I see in the current modern is that cheap decks tend to be the non interactive kind, therefore we tend to see more non interactive decks running around, can't blame people when playset of goyf, lilly, cryptic, snap, etc cost a ton to get. Till the day when staples of interactive decks are low enough for ppl to buy in, we got to live with non interactive decks.
So much this.
Not even going into Goyf, but Liliana is $80 (required for BGx/8Rack), Cryptic Command is $50, Vendilion clique is still 40.... Going into the BGx shell, Abrupt Decay is $10....
And then you get into Desperate Ritual ($1), Manamorphose ($3), Gitaxian Probe ($3)..... It's really not hard to see why people gravitate to the less interactive decks.
The first reason I run Burn is that I love linear decks with an established strategy that is almost unvariable : the budget aspect is also to consider and I agree that some of the uninteractive decks cost less than most of the other tier 1-2 decks.
As a matter of fact, the most uninteractive deck I find is Ad Nauseam, but it is the deck that I love the most. I'd play it if I could afford to build it.
But, I don't think Modern is heading towards uninteractive decks. It's not happening.
I play both UR Storm and Jund. I was sitting at a full Storm deck within a month, and I still don't hsve a tourney legal Jund deck.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Oath of the Gatewatch; the set that caused the competitive community to freak out over Basic Lands.
I have most of Affinity covered so far, but the rest of the deck will run me $275. Most of that is 2 Spellskites, 4 Opals and 3 Ravagers. Burn was just over $100 and that was when Guides were about $10. Tron was pretty easy to put together w/o Karn and I snagged those from a friend eventually. Storm is super cheap, when I built it I picked up the cards to be able to run mono red, U/R and TWoo's Goblin Storm whenever I wanted. Living End will run me $200, but half of that cost is a set of Fulminator Mages. Snapcasters and Goyfs are ridiculous, I picked up a set of LotV last year for $225 and she s $90+ per card now.
When you can make Storm or Infect for $100 and Jund runs you $1500 or so? Yeah, not even close to a question of which is easier to jump into the format with. I want to put together an Obliterator Rock deck, but I'm building it Goyf-less b/c I'm not dropping that kind of money. Like any format of Magic, once you have enough of the building blocks, it can be easy to switch around a bit, but if you like jumping around in colors and types of decks, often there isn't a ton of overlap. I'm just glad Fulminator's will get played in other decks besides Living End, unlike Minotaur and Carabid.
All that said, while the less interactive decks are cheaper to put together (sometimes), it doesn't mean Magic is going that way. The secondary market just isn't that kind to those who want to jump in. Currently I'm making due w/Khans fetches until BFZ drops and hopefully has all the Zendikar fetches in it. Then I can save a ton of money on my Modern mana base. When I picked up the game again last May after 11 years of not playing, Misty and Tarn were $100 each. $50 now is still huge and it's hard to justify. Especially if I could pick up a case of BFZ for less than what a set of the fetches would currently run me and have most of the new set to boot.
I am not sure why people have a problem with cheap decks. Decks should not be piles of the most expensive cards, it makes for terrible magic. Also burn is extremely hard to play well. A single miss timed attack or spell and you lost the game. There is zero margin for error with the deck, and you need be good at reading tells. While the deck might be easy to play, it is very hard to play well. Also, people focus on interactive like the only way to do that is with creatures and spells being thrown at creatures. Something as simple as determine spell sequencing based on their mana left open is extremely important. People are far too narrow on the interactive definition. Not every game needs to be 25 turns to be interactive.
Well the issue is, with rare exception (decks of mostly common/uncommon printings, especially recent ones), cards are expensive because they're good, not the other way around. Being good means lots of people want them, and demand goes up. As Magic has grown logarithmically, supply for older good cards is often fractions of what's needed to satiate everyone's demand. High demand and low supply leads to tier 1 decks being primarily composed of cards worth dozens or even hundreds individually, because they go in lots of different decks. As such, each of those decks turns out in the hundreds of dollars range.
The few decks which don't share a pool of high-quality cards with a bunch of other decks usually, but not always, turn out much cheaper. Affinity benefits from both this and being made of a great number of commons/uncommons, but is still very expensive because it's currently one of the biggest metagame players at the moment. This also benefits Burn and Zoo (except for Goyf kek).
I am not sure why people have a problem with cheap decks. Decks should not be piles of the most expensive cards, it makes for terrible magic. Also burn is extremely hard to play well. A single miss timed attack or spell and you lost the game. There is zero margin for error with the deck, and you need be good at reading tells. While the deck might be easy to play, it is very hard to play well. Also, people focus on interactive like the only way to do that is with creatures and spells being thrown at creatures. Something as simple as determine spell sequencing based on their mana left open is extremely important. People are far too narrow on the interactive definition. Not every game needs to be 25 turns to be interactive.
Well the issue is, with rare exception (decks of mostly common/uncommon printings, especially recent ones), cards are expensive because they're good, not the other way around. Being good means lots of people want them, and demand goes up. As Magic has grown logarithmically, supply for older good cards is often fractions of what's needed to satiate everyone's demand. High demand and low supply leads to tier 1 decks being primarily composed of cards worth dozens or even hundreds individually, because they go in lots of different decks. As such, each of those decks turns out in the hundreds of dollars range.
The few decks which don't share a pool of high-quality cards with a bunch of other decks usually, but not always, turn out much cheaper. Affinity benefits from both this and being made of a great number of commons/uncommons, but is still very expensive because it's currently one of the biggest metagame players at the moment. This also benefits Burn and Zoo (except for Goyf kek).
You have to look at expensive in relation to the format. Affinity, burn, merfolk, and bloom are much cheaper than some decks people can play. A splinter twin deck is 1,300 dollars from scratch. Affinity can be built for 650 and that is the most expensive of the four I named. Also, what you showed is way magic is a good thing. More powerful cards are not always better. This a deck like abzan can't beat burn for the life of it. Even when it is packed with so many "good" cards. Synergy and redundancy is just as important. Also in modern there are lots of "cheap" decks that you can win with.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
You said in another thread that you would be OK with 3 BGx decks being tier 1 in Modern, yet you complain about blue in Legacy. I know that the dominance wouldn't be on the same level, but that still seems a bit contradictory to me. (not to mention that the difference between decks like Storm and Miracles is a lot higher than the one between something like Jund and Junk)
I said that 3 BG/x decks being Tier would mean that more decks would be interactive.
And yes there is quite the difference between Abzan and Jund. ktkenshinx wrote an excellent article about it on his site.
And let's not even get into Abzan Company which has almost nothing in common with anything else.
And lastly Im not complaining about anything when it comes to Legacy. Why should I complain about something that I have no interest in exactly?
I wouldn't even bring it up if other people wouldn't do it all the time. I was making a comparison. One that is quite clearly valid. Data doesn't lie.
Well I know you are an expert Amulet player. I have seen your name a lot MTGO.
But yes I would classify Amulet Bloom as an non-interactive deck. Why do I think this way? That's simple.
Just answer me this question. If you could pull off a turn 2 Hive Mind kill every single game and you knew that your opponent has no way to stop you then would you do that? I think the answer to that would be yes.
You don't care about what the opponent is playing or doing. You only care about what you are capable of doing. That is what makes the deck so non-interactive.
Now the the thing about the pacts and the sideboard cards is this. If you could guarantee a turn 2 kill every single game then you wouldn't play of all that stuff. Because you don't want to interact with the opponent. You are forced to interact with your opponent. That's a significant difference.
Storm decks are seen playing Lightning Bolt. That doesn't mean they play that card because they want to bolt your Wild Nacatl. They do because things don't always go as planned and they are forced to bolt your Nacatl. Same with decks like Burn.
That is what separates such decks from decks like Jund. They play Lightning Bolt because they want to kill your Wild Nacatl. They want to blow up your stuff and discard it. They want to interact with you constantly. They actively care about what the opponent is doing since the entire deck is built to stop the opponent from doing what he wants to do.
Now of course Jund is an extreme example. You don't have to care that much about the opponent to be considered an interactive deck but I hope I got my point across.
Everybody may have his own opinion when it comes to this but that's how I see it.
I lmao everytime they come out and say x card was a mistake, did they ever say goyf was a mistake, I can not recall.
Well ***** happens. They are not infallible but they do a pretty decent job overall.
I don't think they did.
Mark Rosenwater did write an article though where he explained how Tarmogoyf came into being and that his original design was different so it's kinda like an admission that the card was a mistake.
In fact, the only real playtesting occurs during development, which from what I remember lasts about a year or so. So... I have no idea where you got the idea that they do this 6 years in advance.
Also, pretty much all of the playtesting is for Standard and Limited. Where, what do you know, Treasure Cruise is a good but perfectly reasonable card.
In what way? Cards often change considerably from design to development. Heck, compared to a lot of cards, Tarmogoyf is actually pretty similar to its original iteration, just lowering of the mana cost and +1 added to toughness. I don't really see that as any admission that it was a mistake. At most it's an admission that "hey, the reason the card is good is because of these changes."
The description of Tarmogoyf's development can be found here, by the way.
Well there is this part:
"Mike Turian, Future Sight's lead developer, recreated the card from memory and just assumed it had */*+1 because it was copying Lhurgoyf. Mike also dropped the card from 2G to 1G because he felt as it was "just a beater without evasion" it didn't need to cost three mana. The rest, as they say, is history."
That says pretty clearly that Mike Turian was solo on this and that he remembered the card incorrectly. He also shaved a mana off because he felt like it and not because actual playtesting showed the card to be fine at 2 mana.
That's just an assumption on your part. It never said he never playtested it (and at the time, it probably did seem unimpressive even at 1G), it merely gave the rationale for the change.
And again, no indication he regarded it as a mistake, just an explanation as to why the card ended up being good, whereas the original iteration would've basically been unplayable.
A better indication that it was regarded, to some extent at least, as a mistake is that they don't want to put it back into Standard due to fear of its power (though admittedly, that may simply be because putting it back into Standard constraints them a lot; there's a whole lot of cards you really don't want to be in any Standard environment with Tarmogoyf).
He also throws Mike Turian under the bus again here: http://archive.wizards.com/Magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/mm/138
Goyf at 1GG or even GG would see very little play. As splashable as it is, it's everywhere. They didn't make Green stronger, they made everyone else stronger and sure, Green decks would play it too. Anytime they are trying to focus on making a particular color stronger, they should make it on a card that is less splashable. Otherwise you see thinsg like now w/Goyf where everyone splashes it in as one of their only green non-board cards.
We went years and years of sets then suddenly 1 u card is so good its a mistake.
Why not make the other cards better to make that card weaker?
Wotc, the company afraid of what the formats will look like so they ban it make some changes and we are back to prenewset.
The format is stewing in its own excrement cause wotc is scared to make the format change. We lost pod, got a pricy/betterish card but now it runs goyf where it never did before. Many decks have been the same for a year or 2 now. No new cards to shake up the format.
What does that tell you about current set/deck development?
Yeah I know limited then type 2, but for the rest of us.
Because it takes them a while to get cards into sets, and sometimes cards are so powerful it isn't really possible to outclass them without breaking things even further?
This is the kind of argument you could use against any card being banned. "Wizards of the Coast is afraid of what the format would look like, so they banned Skullclamp and now we're back to where we were before that!"
It doesn't tell us anything about current set/deck development. It does, however, tell us that Modern is a nonrotating format with a large card pool. The decks staying fairly similar is what's expected.
So much this.
Not even going into Goyf, but Liliana is $80 (required for BGx/8Rack), Cryptic Command is $50, Vendilion clique is still 40.... Going into the BGx shell, Abrupt Decay is $10....
And then you get into Desperate Ritual ($1), Manamorphose ($3), Gitaxian Probe ($3)..... It's really not hard to see why people gravitate to the less interactive decks.
The first reason I run Burn is that I love linear decks with an established strategy that is almost unvariable : the budget aspect is also to consider and I agree that some of the uninteractive decks cost less than most of the other tier 1-2 decks.
As a matter of fact, the most uninteractive deck I find is Ad Nauseam, but it is the deck that I love the most. I'd play it if I could afford to build it.
But, I don't think Modern is heading towards uninteractive decks. It's not happening.
Aggro: Naya Burn RWG
Combo: Scapeshift RG
Control: Jeskai Control UWR
Legacy
Control: Miracles UW
Aggro: Burn R
I play both UR Storm and Jund. I was sitting at a full Storm deck within a month, and I still don't hsve a tourney legal Jund deck.
Cryptic is $30 dude. That's a huge difference.
URW Control
WBG Abzan
GRW Burn
EDH
GR Rosheen Meanderer
http://shop.tcgplayer.com/magic/product/show?ProductName=Cryptic Command&newSearch=false
Only the new one($35), and that's subject to change.
I admit the mistake, but the point still stands; $35 vs $3.
When you can make Storm or Infect for $100 and Jund runs you $1500 or so? Yeah, not even close to a question of which is easier to jump into the format with. I want to put together an Obliterator Rock deck, but I'm building it Goyf-less b/c I'm not dropping that kind of money. Like any format of Magic, once you have enough of the building blocks, it can be easy to switch around a bit, but if you like jumping around in colors and types of decks, often there isn't a ton of overlap. I'm just glad Fulminator's will get played in other decks besides Living End, unlike Minotaur and Carabid.
All that said, while the less interactive decks are cheaper to put together (sometimes), it doesn't mean Magic is going that way. The secondary market just isn't that kind to those who want to jump in. Currently I'm making due w/Khans fetches until BFZ drops and hopefully has all the Zendikar fetches in it. Then I can save a ton of money on my Modern mana base. When I picked up the game again last May after 11 years of not playing, Misty and Tarn were $100 each. $50 now is still huge and it's hard to justify. Especially if I could pick up a case of BFZ for less than what a set of the fetches would currently run me and have most of the new set to boot.
Well the issue is, with rare exception (decks of mostly common/uncommon printings, especially recent ones), cards are expensive because they're good, not the other way around. Being good means lots of people want them, and demand goes up. As Magic has grown logarithmically, supply for older good cards is often fractions of what's needed to satiate everyone's demand. High demand and low supply leads to tier 1 decks being primarily composed of cards worth dozens or even hundreds individually, because they go in lots of different decks. As such, each of those decks turns out in the hundreds of dollars range.
The few decks which don't share a pool of high-quality cards with a bunch of other decks usually, but not always, turn out much cheaper. Affinity benefits from both this and being made of a great number of commons/uncommons, but is still very expensive because it's currently one of the biggest metagame players at the moment. This also benefits Burn and Zoo (except for Goyf kek).
You have to look at expensive in relation to the format. Affinity, burn, merfolk, and bloom are much cheaper than some decks people can play. A splinter twin deck is 1,300 dollars from scratch. Affinity can be built for 650 and that is the most expensive of the four I named. Also, what you showed is way magic is a good thing. More powerful cards are not always better. This a deck like abzan can't beat burn for the life of it. Even when it is packed with so many "good" cards. Synergy and redundancy is just as important. Also in modern there are lots of "cheap" decks that you can win with.