I think any card that is part of a time-consuming combo is firmly entrenched in the banlist. Specifically SDT, sunrise, and the rituals. Even if decks like eggs are faster now than their previous iterations, I think that does more to hurt their enabler's chances coming off the banlist than it helps.
I think any card that is part of a time-consuming combo is firmly entrenched in the banlist. Specifically SDT, sunrise, and the rituals. Even if decks like eggs are faster now than their previous iterations, I think that does more to hurt their enabler's chances coming off the banlist than it helps.
I agree that it needs to stay banned because it would make the deck too consistent but the deck isn't even remotely as slow as it used to be. Codex Shredder has really fixed a lot of those issues because once you have 8W every sac cycle you are infinite. Second sunrise would require 6WW but that's still very easy to get to. Once at infinite mana they can just shortcut to a lethal Walking Ballista. Still it deserves to stay banned because that deck struggles with lack of redundancy right now. Second Sunrise would vastly change that.
Had an idea regarding the state of the modern meta:
I think it would do us all some good if we could get a better picture of what the meta looks like to the majority of Modern players. The people posting here obviously don't represent the majority across the country, but I think if we cooperated we could get a glimpse at what the local metas around the country look like. Obviously we wouldn't have hard numbers, but I think it would benefit further discussions if we had some idea of what players at the local level are playing and playing against week to week. To that end, I was thinking we could just post the area of the country that we played at during the week, and what decks we played/played against.
It's crazy to me to try and gauge the health of a format without discussing how a large portion of it is being played. Sure we look at big tournaments and the Pro Tour, which are factors certainly, but I hardly see any discussion on what's happening on the local level.
Had an idea regarding the state of the modern meta:
I think it would do us all some good if we could get a better picture of what the meta looks like to the majority of Modern players. The people posting here obviously don't represent the majority across the country, but I think if we cooperated we could get a glimpse at what the local metas around the country look like. Obviously we wouldn't have hard numbers, but I think it would benefit further discussions if we had some idea of what players at the local level are playing and playing against week to week. To that end, I was thinking we could just post the area of the country that we played at during the week, and what decks we played/played against.
It's crazy to me to try and gauge the health of a format without discussing how a large portion of it is being played. Sure we look at big tournaments and the Pro Tour, which are factors certainly, but I hardly see any discussion on what's happening on the local level.
The big tournaments is always what these discussions are about. I also think that is a bad thing because how many of us play in those big tournaments. Not many if you ask me. Most people just play at their local FNM or their local tournament but those metas are mostly not the same as your local scene.
Like you said start oof telling what you played against and where and go from there if you are looking to discuss the so called `meta`.
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Legacy - Reanimator
Modern - Burn
EDH - Neheb the Eternal
The big tournaments are talked about because they're the biggest sample sizes and give the best picture of the meta as a whole. My small group of friends has a Dredge player, Infect player, and GDS player, but that's not representative of the meta as a whole. My LGS has a bunch of Elves, but that's also not representative. You can't really get an idea of the health of the format or if a deck is too dominant just from a local LGS. It might be that the LGS has an inbred meta that's skewing the picture.
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Modern UBR Grixis Shadow UBR UR Izzet Phoenix UR UW UW Control UW GB GB Rock GB
Commander BG Meren of Clan Nel Toth BG BGUW Atraxa, Praetor's Voice BGUW
The big tournaments are talked about because they're the biggest sample sizes and give the best picture of the meta as a whole. My small group of friends has a Dredge player, Infect player, and GDS player, but that's not representative of the meta as a whole. My LGS has a bunch of Elves, but that's also not representative. You can't really get an idea of the health of the format or if a deck is too dominant just from a local LGS. It might be that the LGS has an inbred meta that's skewing the picture.
Which is why I was putting out there that we could start comparing the local metas from the posters here and get a bigger assortment of what the local metas are like across the country.
Here in Nashville at my LGS, we've got mostly Spikes, so there are a lot of tier decks: Storm, GDS, Robots, Titanshift, and Gx Tron. Used to have some ETron, but they've started shifting back to Gx. I'm pretty much the only Johnny that regularly attends, and sometimes when I throw a curveball at an event the next time I'll see a ton of decks tweaked to destroy whatever I brewed up before.
I'm gonna see if the LGS owner is willing to let me get copies of the numbers from our last few events, cause lately Modern has been overflowing in attendance, and I'm sure there are decks I've missed just because I didn't play against them.
The big tournaments are talked about because they're the biggest sample sizes and give the best picture of the meta as a whole. My small group of friends has a Dredge player, Infect player, and GDS player, but that's not representative of the meta as a whole. My LGS has a bunch of Elves, but that's also not representative. You can't really get an idea of the health of the format or if a deck is too dominant just from a local LGS. It might be that the LGS has an inbred meta that's skewing the picture.
...and get a bigger assortment of what the local metas are like across the world
Fixed that for you. It's easy to get wrapped up in your bubble and not realise that the people on these forums come from all over. Greetings from across the pond!
I like your idea. It wouldn't be too much of a stretch (although it would require a lot of stores to get behind the idea initially) to amalgamate all the fnm decks played on a given Friday into a spreadsheet.
That way you could look back and be like "right on the 4th November we had X affinity decks being played at FNM, X company decks etc"
This doesn't account for brewing or really rogue decks but that's fine. It could track more well known lists.
I reckon you'd have to have at least 100 stores with people giving their deck-names at the start of an event. No faffing around with decklists, just the names.
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Modern: G Tron, Vannifar, Jund, Druid/Vizier combo, Humans, Eldrazi Stompy (Serum Powder), Amulet, Grishoalbrand, Breach Titan, Turns, Eternal Command, As Foretold Living End, Elves, Cheerios, RUG Scapeshift
Sorry about that, my bad! ^^; In fact, knowing what is being played worldwide just lends more credence to the idea, so thank you for kicking me out of my bubble, lol.
If we could really get this going I think it'd be a great way to gauge the meta at a local level, and maybe the results at big tournaments won't be so surprising, i.e. Humans.dec. I'd bet money that deck was tested in smaller venues before being brought to bigger venues.
Sorry about that, my bad! ^^; In fact, knowing what is being played worldwide just lends more credence to the idea, so thank you for kicking me out of my bubble, lol.
If we could really get this going I think it'd be a great way to gauge the meta at a local level, and maybe the results at big tournaments won't be so surprising, i.e. Humans.dec. I'd bet money that deck was tested in smaller venues before being brought to bigger venues.
Yeah it's a great plan.
Logistics;
- someone/anyone contacting stores and getting them to submit deck-names into a central database, in a way which didn't make a load of work for the event hosts. Perhaps it requires an app to be effective.
- Someone compiling/checking everything (you'd expect there to be errors)
Issues:
- Convincing people to take part and that giving a list of deck names (via email or whatever) wouldn't take longer than a minute or so.
- Convincing someone to manage the data.
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Modern: G Tron, Vannifar, Jund, Druid/Vizier combo, Humans, Eldrazi Stompy (Serum Powder), Amulet, Grishoalbrand, Breach Titan, Turns, Eternal Command, As Foretold Living End, Elves, Cheerios, RUG Scapeshift
I like the idea of evaluating and comparing individual metas regionally like that. I'd say the hardest part is getting LGS's help in identifying decks. I play at a large shop in Philadelphia where one of the event organizers tried to make a weekly meta "snapshot" of decks and how they did, then posted the data on their site. Getting people to (correctly) submit what deck they were playing each week was hard enough, but then compiling and posting the data ended up just being too much work and the project petered out after a few weeks.
If it's just finding out what decks are being played it might be simple enough to get the project rolling again. I'll definitely ask about it next time I'm around.
Re: Data project
This isn't a bad idea but I guarantee you that anyone who is involved will probably not want to participate after a few months. How many definitive/comprehensive metagame analyses have we seen in the last few years? I kept Modern Nexus updates going for a while when I was actually working there, but after I stopped, the project basically died. That is true of at least 1-2 other similar projects on MTGS and true of at least 2-3 other similar projects we saw on Reddit. I don't think any of those projects except the Nexus updates lasted longer than 6 months, and I was only able to keep the Nexus one up because I treated it as a job and not a hobby. So if you end up pursuing this, you need a really disciplined approach to data entry and analysis or it will just fade away after all the contributors realize what a time sink it is.
I think if it comes down to banning storm due to a lack of interactive gameplay on the part of blue's inability to metagame effectively, wizards will have failed and ruined its best format through lack of needed answers passed through standard. I dont think this is the future we will come to however
What would your thoughts be on a reprint of, say, Daze?
I think if it comes down to banning storm due to a lack of interactive gameplay on the part of blue's inability to metagame effectively, wizards will have failed and ruined its best format through lack of needed answers passed through standard. I dont think this is the future we will come to however
What would your thoughts be on a reprint of, say, Daze?
At first glance, I'd love Daze. Then I pause and think...Daze would mostly boost blue-based aggro and tempo decks like Merfolk, Delver variants, and the current beast that is Grixis Shadow. I think those are fair, blue based decks, interacting on the stack. Personally, no issue to be found there. However, honestly I think some people want Twin or bust. Just a personal feeling, because they complain about answers and interaction while we just got Fatal freakin Push.
I know a free counter may get a rise out of some people, but with existing duals either regularly coming into play tapped on early turns or costing 2 life to do otherwise...well it feels more balanced.
Re: Data project
This isn't a bad idea but I guarantee you that anyone who is involved will probably not want to participate after a few months. How many definitive/comprehensive metagame analyses have we seen in the last few years? I kept Modern Nexus updates going for a while when I was actually working there, but after I stopped, the project basically died. That is true of at least 1-2 other similar projects on MTGS and true of at least 2-3 other similar projects we saw on Reddit. I don't think any of those projects except the Nexus updates lasted longer than 6 months, and I was only able to keep the Nexus one up because I treated it as a job and not a hobby. So if you end up pursuing this, you need a really disciplined approach to data entry and analysis or it will just fade away after all the contributors realize what a time sink it is.
I actually think there's a way to do this. You may or may not remember an idea I floated by you a year or two ago. The gist of the idea was that I wanted to create a system to evaluate cards against each other. Rank them as a 1 if they were effective or 0 if they weren't. Then, using that relationship matrix, I wanted to use social network analysis to identify clusters of cards that would likely be played together. Effectively packages rather than decks. From there, we could build a secondary matrix of effectiveness percents (one package rates highly against another package) and put in arbitrary meta percentages to try and predict the metagame.
The issue with such a system was that it was too big a project for me at the time, and I have less time these days while the card pool has grown. The other issue was that this process is exponentially more work. A 100 card format pool requires 100*100 pieces of data or 10,000 individual inputs. Doubling that to 200 cards is 40,000 individual inputs. 4x the work for twice as many cards.
That forced me to give up this idea. I believe the theory is sound, but that the manpower required is prohibitive.
Over the past 2 years though, I've been playing with an AI I built to play Magic. It can take a pool of cards, and iterate over and over to build optimal decks. I'm still figuring out the concept, but I think my AI has the basis for the first idea, and the card evaluation could be automated.
Basically, I think we might be able to program a format pool, and automatically rate each card against each other card using a series of criteria. In my AI I do evaluations based on a clock speed heuristic to evaluate plays, but we could change that to be something more appropriate for card vs card. It should be possible to write a series of zero sum rules that rank each card, and then perform an analysis.
Such a system would still carry an n^2 runtime, but it would only have to run once every 3 months with a set update and would still run relatively quickly. More importantly though, the time sink remains linear as it would still be a fixed number of cards being added to the dataset every few months, which solves the issue of my original idea that contains exponentially increasing labor costs.
Thing is, we do know what the best decks in the three major competitive formats are, even if they're hiding the data. Temur Energy in Standard, Storm (or possibly E-Tron) in Modern, and Grixis Delver in Legacy.
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Well, I can saw a woman in two, but you won't wanna look in the box when I'm through.
Thing is, we do know what the best decks in the three major competitive formats are, even if they're hiding the data. Temur Energy in Standard, Storm (or possibly E-Tron) in Modern, and Grixis Delver in Legacy.
Thing is, we do know what the best decks in the three major competitive formats are, even if they're hiding the data. Temur Energy in Standard, Storm (or possibly E-Tron) in Modern, and Grixis Delver in Legacy.
the card itself really isn't worth the card board its printed on...does it serve a purpose? Sure its a blue 1 drop that might not be a 1/1. I would not put it in a list and expect to win a PTQ or GP though.
Re: Data project
This isn't a bad idea but I guarantee you that anyone who is involved will probably not want to participate after a few months. How many definitive/comprehensive metagame analyses have we seen in the last few years? I kept Modern Nexus updates going for a while when I was actually working there, but after I stopped, the project basically died. That is true of at least 1-2 other similar projects on MTGS and true of at least 2-3 other similar projects we saw on Reddit. I don't think any of those projects except the Nexus updates lasted longer than 6 months, and I was only able to keep the Nexus one up because I treated it as a job and not a hobby. So if you end up pursuing this, you need a really disciplined approach to data entry and analysis or it will just fade away after all the contributors realize what a time sink it is.
...Maybe WOTC blames you for solved metas!
No, seriously though, you had the best articles on modern bar-none when you were running the site. Channelfireball, MTGmint and TCG don't really write modern articles, except a ton of fluff like, "deck of the day!" "jank brew of the day!"
I still enjoy modernnexus, but a lot of it is just Trevor writing about a blue deck, someone talking about merfolk, etc. I did enjoy someone playing Humans on a league, along with Jordan writing some articles once in a while.
I kinda think E-Tron is on its way to sliding down the 1.5-2.0 tier, to be honest. It's had decent results in the past two classic side events though.
There is definitely a meta shift occurring, one where go wide strategies are taking place.
The more I watch and hear about Storm, the more it's just busted, man
If Storm gets 1 single top 8 in the pro-tour, I think it's getting banned.
I don't understand how other UR decks in the past are banned because it can win turn 4 but this deck can be allowed to continue to exist. Storm easily does that, ritual end of turn 3, gifts. Win on turn 4. It's doing similar things in that if you aren't playing the GY hate then you need to be a black deck with creature removal and discard.
Winning on the draw against Storm is nightmarish, especially as a linear deck. I actually haven't felt very confidant against Storm as a GBx/Shadow deck on the draw, since I also have to fade Blood Moon while keeping a reasonable hand to handle a quick combo.
It really is head and shoulders above the rest of the combo decks, I believe. The goblins backup plan is also a really resilient plan.
I truly think if trends continue:
Storm is banned
BBE is unbanned (as a litmus test).
Sheridan's thoughts on the risk of the old UR deck in the private threads kinda convinced me it's incredibly unlikely currently, it's too much of an unknown factor, they wouldn't do it unless the meta was stale and in risk of losing too many players.
I think white's results may not make a compelling case for SFM
A lot of pros and the articles written on BBE seem to agree it's a joke that the card is on the ban list, I think they're going to start there. It's unlikely Jund ravages this format. The deck is tier 3 and they'll unban something with the lowest risk factor first.
Still not very convinced Jace is coming off in the next three years.
Re: Data project
This isn't a bad idea but I guarantee you that anyone who is involved will probably not want to participate after a few months. How many definitive/comprehensive metagame analyses have we seen in the last few years? I kept Modern Nexus updates going for a while when I was actually working there, but after I stopped, the project basically died. That is true of at least 1-2 other similar projects on MTGS and true of at least 2-3 other similar projects we saw on Reddit. I don't think any of those projects except the Nexus updates lasted longer than 6 months, and I was only able to keep the Nexus one up because I treated it as a job and not a hobby. So if you end up pursuing this, you need a really disciplined approach to data entry and analysis or it will just fade away after all the contributors realize what a time sink it is.
There are probably plenty of people doing good meta analyses, but they are not publishing them. I know of one.
Storm ... if you aren't playing the GY hate then you need to be a black deck with creature removal and discard.
There, I've cut out the non-essentials from your post. I'll add that you can also play ethersworn canonist effects, counters, spell tax effects or leyline of sanctity... (Beware of globlins!) It's not like there are no answers or a single angle of attack.
People moan that decks are non-interactive but can't be bothered to sideboard into answer cards.
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Affinity
Death & Taxes
Mardu Nahiri
Forcing people to merge with twitch is stupid
I agree that it needs to stay banned because it would make the deck too consistent but the deck isn't even remotely as slow as it used to be. Codex Shredder has really fixed a lot of those issues because once you have 8W every sac cycle you are infinite. Second sunrise would require 6WW but that's still very easy to get to. Once at infinite mana they can just shortcut to a lethal Walking Ballista. Still it deserves to stay banned because that deck struggles with lack of redundancy right now. Second Sunrise would vastly change that.
I think it would do us all some good if we could get a better picture of what the meta looks like to the majority of Modern players. The people posting here obviously don't represent the majority across the country, but I think if we cooperated we could get a glimpse at what the local metas around the country look like. Obviously we wouldn't have hard numbers, but I think it would benefit further discussions if we had some idea of what players at the local level are playing and playing against week to week. To that end, I was thinking we could just post the area of the country that we played at during the week, and what decks we played/played against.
It's crazy to me to try and gauge the health of a format without discussing how a large portion of it is being played. Sure we look at big tournaments and the Pro Tour, which are factors certainly, but I hardly see any discussion on what's happening on the local level.
The big tournaments is always what these discussions are about. I also think that is a bad thing because how many of us play in those big tournaments. Not many if you ask me. Most people just play at their local FNM or their local tournament but those metas are mostly not the same as your local scene.
Like you said start oof telling what you played against and where and go from there if you are looking to discuss the so called `meta`.
Modern - Burn
EDH - Neheb the Eternal
UBR Grixis Shadow UBR
UR Izzet Phoenix UR
UW UW Control UW
GB GB Rock GB
Commander
BG Meren of Clan Nel Toth BG
BGUW Atraxa, Praetor's Voice BGUW
Which is why I was putting out there that we could start comparing the local metas from the posters here and get a bigger assortment of what the local metas are like across the country.
Here in Nashville at my LGS, we've got mostly Spikes, so there are a lot of tier decks: Storm, GDS, Robots, Titanshift, and Gx Tron. Used to have some ETron, but they've started shifting back to Gx. I'm pretty much the only Johnny that regularly attends, and sometimes when I throw a curveball at an event the next time I'll see a ton of decks tweaked to destroy whatever I brewed up before.
I'm gonna see if the LGS owner is willing to let me get copies of the numbers from our last few events, cause lately Modern has been overflowing in attendance, and I'm sure there are decks I've missed just because I didn't play against them.
Fixed that for you. It's easy to get wrapped up in your bubble and not realise that the people on these forums come from all over. Greetings from across the pond!
I like your idea. It wouldn't be too much of a stretch (although it would require a lot of stores to get behind the idea initially) to amalgamate all the fnm decks played on a given Friday into a spreadsheet.
That way you could look back and be like "right on the 4th November we had X affinity decks being played at FNM, X company decks etc"
This doesn't account for brewing or really rogue decks but that's fine. It could track more well known lists.
I reckon you'd have to have at least 100 stores with people giving their deck-names at the start of an event. No faffing around with decklists, just the names.
If we could really get this going I think it'd be a great way to gauge the meta at a local level, and maybe the results at big tournaments won't be so surprising, i.e. Humans.dec. I'd bet money that deck was tested in smaller venues before being brought to bigger venues.
Yeah it's a great plan.
Logistics;
- someone/anyone contacting stores and getting them to submit deck-names into a central database, in a way which didn't make a load of work for the event hosts. Perhaps it requires an app to be effective.
- Someone compiling/checking everything (you'd expect there to be errors)
Issues:
- Convincing people to take part and that giving a list of deck names (via email or whatever) wouldn't take longer than a minute or so.
- Convincing someone to manage the data.
If it's just finding out what decks are being played it might be simple enough to get the project rolling again. I'll definitely ask about it next time I'm around.
Affinity
Death & Taxes
Mardu Nahiri
Forcing people to merge with twitch is stupid
This isn't a bad idea but I guarantee you that anyone who is involved will probably not want to participate after a few months. How many definitive/comprehensive metagame analyses have we seen in the last few years? I kept Modern Nexus updates going for a while when I was actually working there, but after I stopped, the project basically died. That is true of at least 1-2 other similar projects on MTGS and true of at least 2-3 other similar projects we saw on Reddit. I don't think any of those projects except the Nexus updates lasted longer than 6 months, and I was only able to keep the Nexus one up because I treated it as a job and not a hobby. So if you end up pursuing this, you need a really disciplined approach to data entry and analysis or it will just fade away after all the contributors realize what a time sink it is.
What would your thoughts be on a reprint of, say, Daze?
At first glance, I'd love Daze. Then I pause and think...Daze would mostly boost blue-based aggro and tempo decks like Merfolk, Delver variants, and the current beast that is Grixis Shadow. I think those are fair, blue based decks, interacting on the stack. Personally, no issue to be found there. However, honestly I think some people want Twin or bust. Just a personal feeling, because they complain about answers and interaction while we just got Fatal freakin Push.
I know a free counter may get a rise out of some people, but with existing duals either regularly coming into play tapped on early turns or costing 2 life to do otherwise...well it feels more balanced.
I actually think there's a way to do this. You may or may not remember an idea I floated by you a year or two ago. The gist of the idea was that I wanted to create a system to evaluate cards against each other. Rank them as a 1 if they were effective or 0 if they weren't. Then, using that relationship matrix, I wanted to use social network analysis to identify clusters of cards that would likely be played together. Effectively packages rather than decks. From there, we could build a secondary matrix of effectiveness percents (one package rates highly against another package) and put in arbitrary meta percentages to try and predict the metagame.
The issue with such a system was that it was too big a project for me at the time, and I have less time these days while the card pool has grown. The other issue was that this process is exponentially more work. A 100 card format pool requires 100*100 pieces of data or 10,000 individual inputs. Doubling that to 200 cards is 40,000 individual inputs. 4x the work for twice as many cards.
That forced me to give up this idea. I believe the theory is sound, but that the manpower required is prohibitive.
Over the past 2 years though, I've been playing with an AI I built to play Magic. It can take a pool of cards, and iterate over and over to build optimal decks. I'm still figuring out the concept, but I think my AI has the basis for the first idea, and the card evaluation could be automated.
Basically, I think we might be able to program a format pool, and automatically rate each card against each other card using a series of criteria. In my AI I do evaluations based on a clock speed heuristic to evaluate plays, but we could change that to be something more appropriate for card vs card. It should be possible to write a series of zero sum rules that rank each card, and then perform an analysis.
Such a system would still carry an n^2 runtime, but it would only have to run once every 3 months with a set update and would still run relatively quickly. More importantly though, the time sink remains linear as it would still be a fixed number of cards being added to the dataset every few months, which solves the issue of my original idea that contains exponentially increasing labor costs.
The last couple months Eldrazi Tron is very big but we also have a couple of very good and consistent Elves players running around.
Modern - Burn
EDH - Neheb the Eternal
Seems like it's working to me. If no one can know a deck is dominating then formats don't seem as bad.
How do you know those are the best decks?
Counter-Cat
Colorless Eldrazi Stompy
...Maybe WOTC blames you for solved metas!
No, seriously though, you had the best articles on modern bar-none when you were running the site. Channelfireball, MTGmint and TCG don't really write modern articles, except a ton of fluff like, "deck of the day!" "jank brew of the day!"
I still enjoy modernnexus, but a lot of it is just Trevor writing about a blue deck, someone talking about merfolk, etc. I did enjoy someone playing Humans on a league, along with Jordan writing some articles once in a while.
There is definitely a meta shift occurring, one where go wide strategies are taking place.
The more I watch and hear about Storm, the more it's just busted, man
If Storm gets 1 single top 8 in the pro-tour, I think it's getting banned.
I don't understand how other UR decks in the past are banned because it can win turn 4 but this deck can be allowed to continue to exist. Storm easily does that, ritual end of turn 3, gifts. Win on turn 4. It's doing similar things in that if you aren't playing the GY hate then you need to be a black deck with creature removal and discard.
Winning on the draw against Storm is nightmarish, especially as a linear deck. I actually haven't felt very confidant against Storm as a GBx/Shadow deck on the draw, since I also have to fade Blood Moon while keeping a reasonable hand to handle a quick combo.
It really is head and shoulders above the rest of the combo decks, I believe. The goblins backup plan is also a really resilient plan.
I truly think if trends continue:
Storm is banned
BBE is unbanned (as a litmus test).
Sheridan's thoughts on the risk of the old UR deck in the private threads kinda convinced me it's incredibly unlikely currently, it's too much of an unknown factor, they wouldn't do it unless the meta was stale and in risk of losing too many players.
I think white's results may not make a compelling case for SFM
A lot of pros and the articles written on BBE seem to agree it's a joke that the card is on the ban list, I think they're going to start there. It's unlikely Jund ravages this format. The deck is tier 3 and they'll unban something with the lowest risk factor first.
Still not very convinced Jace is coming off in the next three years.
So, right now I think it's like
75% of BBE
25% of SFM
0% of any other major unban for Feb
There are probably plenty of people doing good meta analyses, but they are not publishing them. I know of one.
There, I've cut out the non-essentials from your post. I'll add that you can also play ethersworn canonist effects, counters, spell tax effects or leyline of sanctity... (Beware of globlins!) It's not like there are no answers or a single angle of attack.
People moan that decks are non-interactive but can't be bothered to sideboard into answer cards.