What do you think is the most powerful deck in modern at the moment? I know that the format is still really young, but some are emerging to prove very strong.
Zoo. It has Caw-Blade syndrome:
Hate-Proof (what're you gonna do, SB in 12 sweeps?)
EVERY SINGLE CARD can win the game, with the exception of L-Bolt and L-Helix.
It's fast enough to race combo, efficient enough to race aggro, and BOTH make it stomp most midrange.
It's a deck that plays itself. While that may sound bad, consider Valakut in pre-MBS standard, Survival of the Fittest, Affinity in Standard, so on.
I am uncertain if the best deck has been discovered yet. Give it some more time. For now, 12 post and zoo.
Completely agreed here, we haven't even had a decent sized tournament for Modern and people are still jumping to conclusions about the "best" deck. Tbh, Zoo seems quite a bit overrated to me, and 12 Post doesn't seem all that good either considering all of the enormous amounts of hate you can play for it, including the very good Blood Mountain card that wrecks a whole lot of the metagame currently. Honestly, I think Jund is better than both 12 Post and Zoo right now.
Mono Green 12 Post seems really well positioned from all the daily event data that we've seen, and it operates the best under blood moon as it has access to beast within et al
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Green 12post seems to be cleaning up right now. I suspect it will be pretty dominant, as it's fairly resilient and can survive more efficiently than other colors.
The best deck will always be either as powerful variant of Zoo that will have some kind of interesting brewed in tech, or a BU control deck once the meta narrows down to the point the control deck can run the correct cards to handle it.
At the moment, 12 post is powerrful, yes, but it's a one trick pony that is so easily taken down I don't know why people don't run it.
Turn 1, Ghost Quarter, destroy the first cloudpost the moment it comes into play and surgically extract it from their deck. Good game.
Zoo is a solid deck with heavy threat, but it's not hard to deal with. Once again Surgically extracting Tarmagoyf out of their deck makes it go from a Tier 1 threat to a deck running some mildly tough creatures that aren't that hard to deal with.
Red Deck wins flails helplessly if you run any kind of life gain, the deck can generally put out about 23~25 damage reliably. You run enough life gain to bump you over that and they peter out turn 5 and you stabilize.
In other words, Kitchen Finks + Timely reinforcements.
Affinity is strong, but creeping corrosion just ends the game and that's that. One trick pony again, not that hard to deal with. And if they run wurmcoil engine you deserve to get punished for not running exile.
Meleria is tough, but once again Meleria herself is a lynchpin of the deck. Take her out of the equation and the deck falls apart.
Archmage ascension and zoo are the only true contenders at the moment for true Tier 1 level. Sure the other decks are fast, but they're glass cannons that can backfire and be smashed apart with proper sideboarding very very easily.
Archmage is much tougher to deal with just due to its raw speed, outpacing every other deck in the format, sometimes even red. It's the hardest to deal with, however once again Surgical Extracting archmage ascension can seriously hurt the deck, however that one is not as reliable to pull off fast. The only real way to do it is running Archive traps (yeah no joke, this spell wrecks archmage, you wait for them to combo off, then respond to them drawing their last spell and prepping by hitting them with archive trap and then force them to draw a card in one of several means. They generally deck out at least 2/3~3/4 of their deck comboing off and die before you do.)
But that's a cheesy way to deal with it, as a G/W player I side in leyline and mull into it. For some obscure reason no archmage decks run enchantment removal, so they basically can't do anything at all unless they run cryptic command.
I've yet to find a competent raw jund deck by its definition, I've seen some jund variants of zoo but to be honest Zoo itself is more reliable overall.
As for the silly little combo decks that do their shenanigans, 95% of the time gaddock teeg, leyline of sanctity, and well timed counterspells just kind of hold them off. Cheese decks are really good at winning game one, but once you know what they're doing games 2 and 3 are nigh impossible to pull off outside of nut draws.
So what's going to be the best modern deck in standard? Some kind of mix of B/U/W control, maybe running green. My bet is either B/U or U/W, maybe Esper but it seems flimsy atm with all the land hate.
Turn 1, Ghost Quarter, destroy the first cloudpost the moment it comes into play and surgically extract it from their deck. Good game.
The chance of actually having both of these cards in your opening hand is under 20%, even if you run 4 copies. Also, surgical extraction is a seriously terrible maindeck card.
Yes, you can build a deck with the sole intention of beating 12-post. The real trick is to build such a deck that isn't absolutely terrible against the rest of the field.
Using surgical extraction on tarmogoyf against zoo is seriously awful unless you know ahead of time that they have a copy in their hand. This card is not maindeck material, and is bad in most matchups.
The chance of actually having both of these cards in your opening hand is under 20%, even if you run 4 copies. Also, surgical extraction is a seriously terrible maindeck card.
Yes, you can build a deck with the sole intention of beating 12-post. The real trick is to build such a deck that isn't absolutely terrible against the rest of the field.
Using surgical extraction on tarmogoyf against zoo is seriously awful unless you know ahead of time that they have a copy in their hand. This card is not maindeck material, and is bad in most matchups.
Not running surgical extraction in your deck in a format that will be for the next few months chock full of wonky combo decks playing off a very specific card is silly. So many decks fall apart when you surgically extract out their lynchpin turn one, whether its punishing fire, cloudpost, archmage, meleria, etc etc etc.
You scroll down this page and look at the decks being brewed and I bet the vast majority of them, I could point out the lynchpin in their deck and say "If I countered that card of yours and then surgically extracted it out of your deck, it would be the end of the match, wouldn't it?"
Most of them the answer would be yes. A few of them following up with miraculous top decking might get back in the game, but basically the format is a bunch of glass cannons right now and zoo.
Powerful, powerful decks when they go off, but you break their key piece and the whole deck shatters. And surgical extraction is one of the best cards to do that. However I will say obviously if you're running black their are slightly better versions as we know. But if you aren't running black you can obviously use it.
Yeah, I haven't see any Zoo lists yet that are blowing others away. On the other hand, as per a thread in these very forums, 12post seems very dominant. With no Mental Misstep and no Force of Will, the stage is pretty set for Modern to be rife with combo decks.
Hate-Proof (what're you gonna do, SB in 12 sweeps?)
EVERY SINGLE CARD can win the game, with the exception of L-Bolt and L-Helix.
It's fast enough to race combo, efficient enough to race aggro, and BOTH make it stomp most midrange.
It's a deck that plays itself. While that may sound bad, consider Valakut in pre-MBS standard, Survival of the Fittest, Affinity in Standard, so on.
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Completely agreed here, we haven't even had a decent sized tournament for Modern and people are still jumping to conclusions about the "best" deck. Tbh, Zoo seems quite a bit overrated to me, and 12 Post doesn't seem all that good either considering all of the enormous amounts of hate you can play for it, including the very good Blood Mountain card that wrecks a whole lot of the metagame currently. Honestly, I think Jund is better than both 12 Post and Zoo right now.
Zoo and 12post seem quite strong as well.
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Haha, God I hope so. Love tribal decks.
No GreenPost in the poll? Is this deck REALLY still under the radar?
The best deck will always be either as powerful variant of Zoo that will have some kind of interesting brewed in tech, or a BU control deck once the meta narrows down to the point the control deck can run the correct cards to handle it.
At the moment, 12 post is powerrful, yes, but it's a one trick pony that is so easily taken down I don't know why people don't run it.
Turn 1, Ghost Quarter, destroy the first cloudpost the moment it comes into play and surgically extract it from their deck. Good game.
Zoo is a solid deck with heavy threat, but it's not hard to deal with. Once again Surgically extracting Tarmagoyf out of their deck makes it go from a Tier 1 threat to a deck running some mildly tough creatures that aren't that hard to deal with.
Red Deck wins flails helplessly if you run any kind of life gain, the deck can generally put out about 23~25 damage reliably. You run enough life gain to bump you over that and they peter out turn 5 and you stabilize.
In other words, Kitchen Finks + Timely reinforcements.
Affinity is strong, but creeping corrosion just ends the game and that's that. One trick pony again, not that hard to deal with. And if they run wurmcoil engine you deserve to get punished for not running exile.
Meleria is tough, but once again Meleria herself is a lynchpin of the deck. Take her out of the equation and the deck falls apart.
Archmage ascension and zoo are the only true contenders at the moment for true Tier 1 level. Sure the other decks are fast, but they're glass cannons that can backfire and be smashed apart with proper sideboarding very very easily.
Archmage is much tougher to deal with just due to its raw speed, outpacing every other deck in the format, sometimes even red. It's the hardest to deal with, however once again Surgical Extracting archmage ascension can seriously hurt the deck, however that one is not as reliable to pull off fast. The only real way to do it is running Archive traps (yeah no joke, this spell wrecks archmage, you wait for them to combo off, then respond to them drawing their last spell and prepping by hitting them with archive trap and then force them to draw a card in one of several means. They generally deck out at least 2/3~3/4 of their deck comboing off and die before you do.)
But that's a cheesy way to deal with it, as a G/W player I side in leyline and mull into it. For some obscure reason no archmage decks run enchantment removal, so they basically can't do anything at all unless they run cryptic command.
I've yet to find a competent raw jund deck by its definition, I've seen some jund variants of zoo but to be honest Zoo itself is more reliable overall.
As for the silly little combo decks that do their shenanigans, 95% of the time gaddock teeg, leyline of sanctity, and well timed counterspells just kind of hold them off. Cheese decks are really good at winning game one, but once you know what they're doing games 2 and 3 are nigh impossible to pull off outside of nut draws.
So what's going to be the best modern deck in standard? Some kind of mix of B/U/W control, maybe running green. My bet is either B/U or U/W, maybe Esper but it seems flimsy atm with all the land hate.
The chance of actually having both of these cards in your opening hand is under 20%, even if you run 4 copies. Also, surgical extraction is a seriously terrible maindeck card.
Yes, you can build a deck with the sole intention of beating 12-post. The real trick is to build such a deck that isn't absolutely terrible against the rest of the field.
Using surgical extraction on tarmogoyf against zoo is seriously awful unless you know ahead of time that they have a copy in their hand. This card is not maindeck material, and is bad in most matchups.
Not running surgical extraction in your deck in a format that will be for the next few months chock full of wonky combo decks playing off a very specific card is silly. So many decks fall apart when you surgically extract out their lynchpin turn one, whether its punishing fire, cloudpost, archmage, meleria, etc etc etc.
You scroll down this page and look at the decks being brewed and I bet the vast majority of them, I could point out the lynchpin in their deck and say "If I countered that card of yours and then surgically extracted it out of your deck, it would be the end of the match, wouldn't it?"
Most of them the answer would be yes. A few of them following up with miraculous top decking might get back in the game, but basically the format is a bunch of glass cannons right now and zoo.
Powerful, powerful decks when they go off, but you break their key piece and the whole deck shatters. And surgical extraction is one of the best cards to do that. However I will say obviously if you're running black their are slightly better versions as we know. But if you aren't running black you can obviously use it.
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I'm kind of curious as to this as well. Is her misnaming related to the deck she's in or something?