MTG Salvation

Yeah Surgical is nice when it works in those spots but when you have no target it feels real bad. Especially when we're already bringing in Nature's Claims that sometimes do nothing as well. It's tempting for Field in particular - that's the real problem card. But still I don't think it's worth it. I'm pretty set on having a Crucible in the side for that reason. Spyglass is an option that I tried a little bit. It's good against UW, the mirror, and Scales. Could be worth a slot.

For those who struggle with the UWx Control MU, I can just repeat my older postings:
Give the Red Splash another try. Running fewer Basic Lands may seem wrong, but here is my list:


These Main 60 worked splendid against UW with Field Of Ruin, Celestial Colonnade, Search for Azcanta and many Fetchlands. It also works well against Affinity, because Pyroclasm and Blood Sun shuts it down almost completely. Titan Shift, U(W)R Through the Breach, and many more Decks (all of those relying on Fetchlands to fix their Mana) are hosed really hard, whilst any LD-land is turned off.
The lack of Sanctum of Ugin did nothing horrible, and you can also play it (my 60 above are just an example).
And the Red Splash offers more, like Ancient Grudge and Boil for the Sideboard.
Try it out if you have those Groves. I am convinced of Blood Sun in the Maindeck.

Greetings

Edit: Exiling Lands with Karn and World Breaker turns out really mean if you also disabled fetching. You can bring'em the vengeance for all that Mana denial.

Blood Sun and Pyroclasm are interesting cards but I think they have issues against the field. Both of them are really high variance in this meta. Sometimes they'll do a lot, sometimes they look really silly. For this reason, I think if I were to try an RG build, most if not all of my red cards would be in the sideboard. I admit Blood Sun would be an awesome option against Titan Shift, my record against which is an incredible 2-14 over the last 2 months, but I'm not really convinced adding red really upgrades much else, considering the hit the manabase takes. Grudge is a nice option but not necessary, and Boil is way too cute/narrow.

Regarding the UW matchup, lets not forget that it's still 50/50 at worst. It was such a good matchup for so long that now that it's even, it feels terrible. I'm all for using a slot here and there to hedge against it because its so popular (and I personally hate losing to it), but it's not as if it's an awful matchup and needs tons of help.

The Mana Base takes no hit at all. Running 3 Basics is enough to find one for each Field of Ruin before you start casting BIG guys or landing Blood Sun. Plus you get an additional advantage over all those creature-heavy Decks like Affinity, Elves, Humans and so on via Pyroclasm. You can even put those in the Sideboard to have space for more threats main (like Walking Ballista).

Have you updated the sideboarding guide to fit the new sideboard config? There a lot of PpTqs in my area that I am going to grind for the next month.

The guide is still pretty close to what I'm on now. I don't wanna be too aggressive about changing it too much, because slots change fairly frequently as the meta does. Though I am periodically updating specific matchups. The only difference in the main is +1 Ballista, -1 Dismember, and the SB slots are always being juggled a bit. The only important difference in the SB is that now I think 3 Claim is required as the meta has shifted, and I'd probably cut a Contortion or Tusk for it from that list. I'll probably give it some tweaks if I get a bit of time though.

Currently my SB looks like this:

1 Crucible
3 Claim
1 Spyglass
2 Contortion
2 Surgical
3 Thought-Knot
2 Thragtusk
1 Wail

Spyglass has felt solid but that's my flex slot. Could also be a 4th Claim, 4th TKS, or another GY hate, depending on what I feel like hedging against.

Just finishing my August stats wrap-up and I thought I'd share the metagame stats here. MP is matches played.

Humans: 8.07% (13 MP)
UW Control: 8.07% (13 MP)
Bridgevine: 6.21% (10 MP)
Gx Tron: 5.59% (9 MP)
Storm: 5.59% (9 MP)
Burn: 4.97% (8 MP)
Titan Shift: 4.97% (8 MP)
Hardened Scales: 4.35% (7 MP)
Spirits: 4.35% (7 MP)
Jund: 4.35% (7 MP)
Grixis Shadow: 3.73% (6 MP)
Hollow One: 3.11% (5 MP)
Blue Moon: 2.48% (4 MP)
Infect: 2.48% (4 MP)
Affinity: 1.86% (3 MP)
Boggles: 1.86% (3 MP)
Counters Company: 1.86% (3 MP)
Jeskai Control: 1.24% (2 MP)
Ponza: 1.24% (2 MP)
Mardu Pyro: 1.24% (2 MP)
Hatebears: 1.24% (2 MP)

UW Control tied for #1 in metagame share, up to 8% from 6% in July. Bridgevine 2nd in representation. Storm with 5.5% is high. Titan Shift at almost 5% is very significant, almost double what I saw in July. Burn very popular, 5th most played deck along with TS. Mardu Pyro down to just 1.24%, from 4% in July and 7.3% in June. Pretty spectacular downfall.

I managed to finish the month with a 5-0 and scrape together a 58.4% overall winrate in 161 matches played which I'm not exactly happy with but given the relatively hostile meta I can't be too upset.

Some winrate notes: 9-4 against UW Control. Yep, still feel favored here. Using a sideboard slot or two helps a lot. 11-2 against Humans, pretty silly. The 3rd Ballista obviously helps a lot. Have not missed Dismember. I think couple of those wins were when I only had 2 Spatials in the 75 as spot removal while I was making room for the Crucible/Tec package. Bridgevine 5-5. Very winnable matchup, but it tends to depend if they have an insane draw or not. Very similar to Hollow One in that way but this one is trickier to navigate. The Gargadon versions are particularly bad cause it's an impossible to interact with sac outlet. Unless you have a trusty Spyglass of course Add in the July numbers and my total record is 8-12. Squarely unfavorable, but definitely winnable. Hardened Scales 2-5. This is just variance, I kept getting terrible hands/they had busted ones. Overall record is 9-9. Spirits 5-2, overall record is 16-6. The 3rd Ballista is amazing again here. The way you lose is if they stick one of their hate cards.

This is the spreadsheet for August: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JLgrSdeFUIzxkqIJB7Tbg_EEz3jUaHPwK8z-sR1lTug/edit?usp=sharing

Enjoy!

Finished the night playing 2 Competitive Leagues with Tron. First league was 3-2, second was 4-1. SO many UW control decks, I had to adjust my SB'ing plans to account for their 4x Field of Ruin and Ghost Quarter effects. I started bringing in my own Surgical's to counter theirs. I never went down on relics and machine gunned away their gy for maximum hate.

First league I beat 2 Burn decks and Abzan. Lost to 1 Burn deck and 1 control deck.
Second League I beat 2 UW control decks, 1 Humans (so easy), and Mardu Pyromancer. Lost to 1 UW control deck.

The UW match up does feel very close, I think adding the Crucible of Worlds is probably correct now.

Awesome write up Sicsmoo! Muchas gracias for your hard work.

Quote from Missinganeye »

I play Tron from something like 10 yrs, I was there from the very beginning and played G RG-still my fav- WG BG... And now I'm brewing a few new/old cards. Since the ban of Eye I was thinking on how tutor our fatties, and now that we are mono-G again M19 happened with Goreclaw and something beeped in my head.
Wurmcoil for 4?
Thraghtusk for 3?
Sundering Titan for 6?

But most of all
Ulamog for 8?
Emmy1 again for 13?

And what about find out lovely LEGENDARY eldrazis with Time of need?

What about play Ulamog turn 4 with Tron and a forest?

I dunno if there are really any possibility but I think this package should worth trying a little work

I think Conduit of Ruin is a good bit better than Goreclaw, but I don't think either's very playable.

However, the bigger problem with the Eye ban isn't that we lost "a tutor;" we effectively lost 9 tutors (1 Eye, 4 Map, 4 Scrying). Eye's draw wasn't that it was a single tutor; it was that it allowed us to convert all our land tutors into tutors for our end-game threats. The best Eye replacement is 1 Sanctum for turning 1 threat into 2 and then 1 Urza's Factory, Horizon Canopy, Scavenger Grounds if you absolutely flood out. I like Factory the best personally, but all 3 have merit.

Went 7-3 in the MTGO PTQ today, though I scooped to my opponent as I was about to win in the last round because my tiebreakers werent good enough for prizes so technically 6-4.

Played the same sideboard I have listed a few posts up, and it felt good. Would run it back.

R1 Ironworks (2-1) W

My opponent showed up 7 minutes late and he ran out of time in game 3.

R2 UR Prison (1-2) L

Played against this deck last night as well. Seems like a pretty bad matchup - they have 3 Chalice, Damping Sphere, Tec Edge and Crucible, and 3 Spyglass all maindeck. I've only played against it 4 times lifetime but my record is 1-3 now. This one in particular was extremely close. He milled me out in game 3 with 16 seconds left on his clock, when I had 15 minutes.

R3 Affinity (2-1) W

Went as Affinity usually does. Opponent got under me one of the games but with 3 Ballista and 4 O-Stone it usually feels pretty easy.

R4 Hardened Scales (0-2) L

G1 I pinged off his summoning sick Overseer with Scales in play, but he just slammed Ravager and killed me with Inkmoth on turn 3. Couldn't even have played around it if I wanted to because he had an Arcbound Worker to dump on to Nexus in response to potential ping.

G2 I had O-Stone and Claim, but he had Damping Sphere, Welding Jar, Scales and Overseer. Once I blew his board he reloaded with another Damping Sphere, Ravager and 2 successive Ballistas. He had pretty nutty draws both games, not much I could have done.

R5 Bant Company (2-0) W

I suspect he was playing Todd Stevens' recent list - Noble, Knight of the Reliquary, Tireless Tracker, Vendilion Clique and Stirring Wildwood all made appearances. There's not much room for land destruction when you add blue so he didn't really do anything to disrupt me.

R6 Soul Sisters (1-2) L

This matchup used to feel really easy but now most lists are playing a full 7 land destruction in the main, which is pretty gross. He had at least 2 in every game and backed it up with fast 6/6 flyers in games 1 and 3. Not a whole lot I could do, though Spyglass did help against Field in G2.

R7 Bant Spirits (2-0) W

G1 I got fast Tron and snuck O-Stone into play, getting under any potential Queller. I had Ugin, Ballista and tutored for Ulamog so it didn't matter anyway. G2 was a little closer, I had to fight through a Damping Sphere and got fairly low on life, but again cracked O-Stone followed by World Breaker, lights out.

R8 Humans (1-0) W

Game 1 he didn't have a fast enough clock and I O-Stoned him. He scooped the match afterwards.

R9 Boggles (2-1) W

This was a nailbiter, as Boggles often is. Stabilized at 5 life in G1. G2 he kept a hand with 2 hate cards (Stony and Sphere), but his only threat was fetching for Dryad Arbor. He put 2 Umbras on it and was attacking for 3 while I couldn't activate my Map, Star or O-Stone. I have 13 life, 4 lands in play, 2 Wurmcoil, Karn, Ugin in hand and cast Ancient Stirrings. I see 3 lands which I desperately need, a Sylvan Scrying, and a Spatial Contortion. He has 2 cards in hand. Spatial will kill the Arbor, because the Umbras wont save a creature who's toughness is reduced to 0. But then I'm stuck with 4 cards I can't cast in my hand, and just put 3 lands and the only tutor I can cast on the bottom, a huge hit to my probability of drawing future lands. I decide to take the land. The next turn he casts Coronet on the Arbor and kills me before I can get anywhere. Close decision either way, but didn't work out.

G3 I had Map for T3 Tron, Karn and Ugin. He plays Teeg. I draw Contortion and kill it EOT, play Ugin next turn. Good times

R10 UR Tempo (2-0) W

He had an early Delver in both games but wasn't able to flip them in the couple turns they were out. World Breaker ended both games, a fantastic card in this matchup. G2 he couldn't find his red source to cast Alpine Moon when he needed it.

Didn't run into any UW or Vengevine which is mildly surprising. That's Modern for ya though. I'm just happy to have not run into Titan Shift. Felt like I played pretty well and ran pretty well, my opponents just had my number in the ones I lost.

Awesome job! I tried the modern challenge and screwed up with Surgical Extraction in R5, I misclicked and it cost me the match. Would've have been 3-2, but I also drew like poo! While I know we mull a lot, I did mull every opening hand to 6 or 5. So i do chalk some of those losses to variance. I still think the deck is in a decent spot.

UW is everywhere in the competitive leagues. I rented UW control to pilot it and have a better understanding of how the deck operates. I'm still on tron and will be this entire season, PPTQ coming up next weekend.

Vengevine seems to be on the decline, having tested that deck a lot, it does lose to itself and doesn't really beat Mantis Rider or any decks that play to the board.

I'm on the Tron prep train for SCG Dallas at the end of Oct. Sicsmoo you used the same list? W Tectonic Edge + Crucible back plan?

Yeah there was 6 UW and 1 Jeskai in the top 32 of the PTQ, I just managed to dodge them all.

I played this sideboard:

1 Crucible
3 Claim
1 Spyglass
2 Contortion
2 Surgical
3 Thought-Knot
2 Thragtusk
1 Wail

I liked it a lot. The 2 Crucible/Tec edge plan is sick but it's not really worth the slots I think. If I wanted to fit in a Tec Edge I'd probably be cutting Spyglass which is good in a lot of the same situations and more overall I think, so I don't think its worth it.

The only Tron deck that made top 32 (31st) is interesting. 0 Relic/2 Dismember main, and playing 2 Gut Shot and 1 Gaea's Revenge in the side, and 0 Surgicals or any other graveyard hate. Really hedging against creature matchups and just being OK losing to graveyard/combo decks. Not the approach I really like taking as I've said in the past, because Modern is so diverse. Gaea's Revenge is pretty hilarious against UW though. As far as I can tell they have no answer to that, except Terminus which they should be boarding out.

The other interesting thing is he added an Ugin and subtracted a Wurmcoil. Playing 3 Ugins has been a reasonable choice for a while now but it was almost always done at the expense of one of the 4 O-Stones, which never felt worth it to me. I think O-Stone is the best card in the deck the way the meta stands now. At the same time, Wurmcoil has felt worse recently. It's not very good or medium against a lot of the top decks. I very frequently shave down to 2 even against creature decks because they often have efficient removal for it (Path, Reflector Mage), or can ignore it in a variety of ways (racing in the air with Spirits, sac outlets out of Hardened Scales and Bridgevine, combo killing out of Counters Company). Conversely, Ugin is great in a lot of these scenarios (neither are really good against Scales), particularly being much much better against the top dog, UW.

The 3rd Wurmcoil would be missed in the fairer midrange matchups like Grixis Shadow, Jund and Mardu, but not a lot, we're still favored and these types of decks are not a large part of the meta right now. Also Hollow One, where Coil and O-Stone are the best plays, but that deck has lost half its meta share to Bridgevine.

I think overall the 3rd Ugin is better than the 3rd Coil right now, and I'm gonna give it a spin. The only issue I see is that it makes the deck slightly clunkier, as Ugin is a turn 4 play as opposed to Coil on turn 3. But if our opponents are largely ignoring the turn 3 Coil anyway I don't think it matters much.

After seeing the list with Gaia's Revenge I thought well, why not test out Carnage Tyrant? Sure it's a stretch, but if we are looking for a way to shore up the UW match up, it seems like a decent threat. I tried 2 of them last night in a league where I went 4-1 and drew 0. SO, I'm sure it's just cute but hey, UW control doesn't really answer the card and since they are already blowing up our lands, double GG isn't hard.

I suppose Tyrant is pretty similar to Revenge, does the same thing against UW for 1 less mana, losing the haste and having slightly different P/T. I tried a Revenge in a league yesterday and smashed a Jeskai player with it. It was very fun. Overall though, they're both pretty narrow cards. Even given that UW is the top deck online right now, its still well below 10% of the meta. Add in Blue Moon and you get a couple more percent. Still pretty narrow given how many different threats we have to fight against in this meta. Especially considering again that UW is already a fine matchup. Cards like Crucible, Spyglass and Emrakul are good against UW but have wider applications.

rough 2 leagues with Tron tonight. Tons of hate and that is due to Hardened Scales affinity, KCI and Us. First time in a while I felt like I need to playing something a little different this week. Not sure if variance, but everyone has stony's sphere's and surgiscals lately. UW is harder now but depending on their build beatable.

4 Claims is a must and if I could run more I would.

4 Claims is a must and if I could run more I would.

Seal of Primordium is your friend. Or Naturalize, Natural State...

I also do not feel like UW is such a hard matchup. Yes, they have disruption but they are durdeling like crazy. Walking Ballista is a nice clock against them and must be handled or it scales out of control.

Pithing Needle is also great agains Field of Ruin, GQ, Teferi, Ravager, Steel Overseer, Hangarback Walker, you name it.

I feel like this whole "tron is in such a bad spot right now" can be dealt with by playing 4 Claim, 2-3 Needle in the SB and a full set of Ballistas MD.

I have been running 4 Ballista for quite some time now and not once did it feel bad drawing them. Even without tron online they are reasonable blockers/attackers and with it they close a game in 2 turns.

Quote from racerxen »

rough 2 leagues tonight with tron. Tons of hate that is due to Hardene Scales affinity, KCI and Us. First time in a while I felt like I need to playing something a little different this week. Not sure if variance, but everyone has stony's sphere's and surgiscals lately. UW is harder now but depending on their build beatable.

4 Claims is a must and if I could run more I would.

Yep, this is what I meant by people "respecting" the deck a whole lot more since the great finishes it had in June. I had fantastic success with the deck in April, May and June with only 2 Nature's Claims because Stony Silence was not a widely played card at the time and Sphere was beatable with small hedging and other tactics. Now the 2 of them are ubiquitous and it's made it a lot more difficult. Even if you have 4 Claims available, it's not as if that just evens the playing field. If you have the Claim for their well-placed hate card, you just get to keep playing. If you don't have it, you often just lose. And of course sometimes you draw multiple Claims, your opponent doesn't draw your hate, and you lose anyway because you have 2 dead cards in your hand. So while we do have an answer to these hate cards, the fact that they are seeing play in higher numbers is absolutely a net negative for us. For Stony in particular as well, we are getting splash damage from Scales being the hot new deck. And yes, Surgical as well is now seeing play as a 1 or 2 of in these control decks with Field. Another wrench.

The other thing is that people are metagaming to beat UW and Hardened Scales, the 2 most popular decks right now. What beats these 2 decks? Storm, Ad Naus and Titan Shift, which are terrible matchups for us. These have seen a large uptick in play. Burn, same boat. It's much more popular now. Then you have Bridgevine and Infect. So it's not a matter of just playing a bunch of Claims and Pithing Needles. There's not enough sideboard space to hedge against everything, and this is why Tron is bad right now.

And the real kicker is that the community at large still thinks Tron one of the most well-positioned decks, so people are still designing their decks with more land destruction and hate cards. In Modern, a deck is only really well-positioned when the majority of people don't realize it is. The cat has been out of the bag for Tron for a bit too long at this point. This format works in cycles, and our deck is in the downtrend of a cycle right now.

Quote from sicsmoo »

Quote from racerxen »

rough 2 leagues tonight with tron. Tons of hate that is due to Hardene Scales affinity, KCI and Us. First time in a while I felt like I need to playing something a little different this week. Not sure if variance, but everyone has stony's sphere's and surgiscals lately. UW is harder now but depending on their build beatable.

4 Claims is a must and if I could run more I would.

Yep, this is what I meant by people "respecting" the deck a whole lot more since the great finishes it had in June. I had fantastic success with the deck in April, May and June with only 2 Nature's Claims because Stony Silence was not a widely played card at the time and Sphere was beatable with small hedging and other tactics. Now the 2 of them are ubiquitous and it's made it a lot more difficult. Even if you have 4 Claims available, it's not as if that just evens the playing field. If you have the Claim for their well-placed hate card, you just get to keep playing. If you don't have it, you often just lose. And of course sometimes you draw multiple Claims, your opponent doesn't draw your hate, and you lose anyway because you have 2 dead cards in your hand.

This is my biggest issue with the "4 Claims" strategy when the only cards it hits are hate cards. Yes, losing to Stony sucks. But I've also experienced and seen players lose to Snapcaster beats with double Claim in hand. Obviously 4 Claims are great vs Scales where they're a proactive hate card as well as a reactive anti-hate card. But I don't think I'd ever bring in more than 2-3 vs UW even if I know they're bringing in 2-3 Stony Silence, because I realize that the chances of just losing to my own double Claim + lands hand are a lot higher than losing to a low-chance T2 Stony Silence. Sometimes you just have to accept some level of variance because you can't SB in 4 otherwise dead cards on the off-chance you're going to hit your opponents' hate pieces.

I don't even bring in Claims vs Humans most of the time (even though I know that they're on Vials and generally Spheres) because I'd rather just use Contortions to slow their aggression until I can clean up with an O-Stone. It's miserable either way, but I want to give myself the highest % to win as well as not lose. A lot of times SBing in a lot of Claims in addition to our other SB cards means we're running dangerously low on threats for Sanctums and other topdecking situations. We need to win through our opponents' hate cards, but we're also not in a good enough situation that we can just act as if we can win by reactively destroying our opponent's hate cards. Our opponents' proactive plans are too strong for that.

Agreed, 4 Claims against UW is a trap. I like 3. Scales is the only widely played deck I'd actually want 4 against, and given that, it's hard to justify the slot. I don't worry about KCI. I've only played against it twice in my last 200+ matches.

When I said 4 Claims, I meant just having access to 4 in SB. Against UW I bring in 3 now. Decks like Elves, Even Naya Ponza brew brought in stony's, sphere's, against Tron. GB decks, are running 4 Field's, GQ, on top of Fulimantor's out of the SB + Surgical. I've beaten a lot of these decks and hate cards, but when they go Stony into sphere and both are on board it's like. MM K, got it, I will F6 until I find a green source.

Locally players are doing well with Tron because access new cards isn't always an option. You play what you have is true, on mtgo (I have a manatraders account) so I pivot daily. No amount of pivoting helped me those 2 leagues SO

When decks like Merfolk, Elves, Ponza, Spirits (UW and Bant), even Boogles! Bring in the hate cards and see them, that's when I see my mtgo pts poof and I don't know about you guys, but I don't like paying for leagues I haven't in 3 months.

What can we do ? What's the fix best way to go about adjusting?