I'm just gonna point out that the only thing that kept Infect in check was the completely massive amount of removal that Jund played. If Jund falls out of flavor, expect Infect to come rampaging back...and we all love Infect!
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Also, consider that Liliana counts as occasional mana denial, and it starts to become a significant portion of our strategy.
http://magic.freizeitspieler.de/wahrscheinlichkeiten.php (it is in german tough i think it is easily understandable)
Look at the probabilites.
I think we can agree that EpEx is dead now for the deck, so we need the PiF kill.
In order to do that we need 6 mana.
In most games we will see 2 Rituals, so we need 4 lands to do that.
Now after the PiF we have 5 mana to work with, two of which we need to cast Grapeshot.
In this scenario we have drawen 4 lands, which also means we have increase our land count, meaning that we dilute our deck, makeing the average comboturn even worse ...
This of course does not take Goblin Electromancer into account, but relying on a 2/2 that dies as soon as somebody mentions its name, is not a smart move.
storm does not need 4 lands to go off.
first- manamorphose allows you to draw more cards for past in flames, and after you cast past in flames
second-rituals build into one another
now the lack of seething song may hurt it quite a bit, but perhaps electromancer will be more survivable now, after all, with BBE banned, maybe jund switches to junk, and runs PtE instead of Bolt, which nets us a land unless they want to die.
perhaps we could use increasing vengeance as a ritual.
all theory though, i know that seething song is an extremely significant blow ><. just trying to be optimistic ><
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Modern UWUW ControlUW UGWSpiritsUGW GHardened ScalesG WGRUKiki PodWGRU [RIP]
There would Zoo dominance. If just Bitterblossum was unbanned, Faeries would rule Modern.
No, there wouldn't be. Zoo was dominant because of Green Sun's Zenith. Without it, the deck wouldn't be nearly as consistent as before. And Fae would still lose to Jund and Zoo and Pod and Tron, perhaps Doran, but win against the combo decks. Remember that there is no Riptide Laboratory to push it over the top. Fae was never legal, we actually don't know how it would be played.
Assuming that BBE and SS were still legal, there would be a truly rock-paper-scizors type of Magic, with Aggro (Zoo, B/W Tokens, "Jund", Delver, Affinity, Burn), Combo ( Pod, Twin, Tron, Storm) and Control (UWR, Fae, UW)
Seems a better metagame than the one right now.
Also, the reason behind banning Seething Song is very bad. Storm almost never won on turn 3. If that is enough reason to ban a card, next update we will see Karn, Urzatron, Second Sunrise, Lotus Bloom, Glistener Elf, Blighted Angent, Daybreak Coronet and Slippery Bogle bans, because they all "can" make a turn 3 win possible.
I just want to say, banning a 4-drop is not going to nerf Jund. I think it will still be the top deck for a long time, it just may become slightly slower.
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Some facts of magic:
-Terror is an emotion which, when experienced, results in death.
-The pox was a disease notorious for having killed one-third, rounded up, of Europe’s population. Smallpox, on the other hand, killed only a single person.
-A person riding a horse cannot be stopped by foot soldiers, large animals, walls, archers, or even catapults.
Jund's dominance had a lot to do with the ability to play the greediest possible mana-base and almost never get punished for it. Banning the fetchlands would have gone a much longer way towards changing the nature of Modern's metagame than this will. There will be another 4-color goodstuff deck, just watch.
BTW, sell your Daybreak Coronets now, that idiotic Bogle deck was only "good" because of the Jund matchup. Without Jund and its huge number of spot removal spells dominating the field, Bogle is just a bad version of the infect deck.
I literally just bought the cards for jund before gp toronto (well, the goyfs and dark confidants anyways, I had most of the other stuff) and don't feel cheated by this ban at all.
We barely lose a penny on the deck. It's not like they went crazy and banned thoughtseize and cut it's price in half, all of our money cards will retain their value. The whole appeal of the deck is that every single card in the list is A+ all on it's own.
And as to the deathrite shaman argument, while I cede that it might be just as crazy a card, and may need a ban in the future, it just got printed and it seems sooooo fun! lol. We've barely scratched the surface on it, so I'm glad we get to see how it performs outside of jund before giving it the hammer. I probably would feel cheated if he was the one to go.
Thirdly, it just seems deserved and forseeable. The deck is, according to the results pretty easily the best in the format and I`m ok with killing it to allow for some diversity. I think the people are right who are saying this kills it too. You can maybe still play BGR midrange to some success, but I don't think it will be as good, and there will probably be better options.
Bloodbraid elf- The lottery elf probably needed to go. Jund needed something hit because there is no reason for jund to be ~25% of the meta in an format as large as modern. After watching so many games from different GPs so many times jund was losing then double lottery elf for the win. Jund will still be the best deck in the format as far as powerlevel goes. This should kill its popularity as some people will deem it bad now. Banning BBE essentially weakens every other card in the deck because you see less cards. I am glad to see this one and can't wait to see what modern looks like now. I might just start brewing again.
Seething Song- Many of the pros have been calling for storms head since the inception of the format. The issue with storm(and eggs) is the fact that you can't really react to them unless your running counterspells. Combine that with a less than 4 turn(barely) win average and any deck not packing 10 counters or discard spells has almost not chance game 1. Then game 2 is always a crapshoot because you have to see that 3 of narrow hate card from board or just lose.(or lose after seeing it still)
a 3rd turn win in storm vs a turn 3 win in infect or certain pod decks.
Many of the complaints have been but this combo deck can win on turn 3 at close to the same rate as storm. The thing is they don't because they can be interacted with via removal. Magic is played between 2 or more players and not a game where you can see how fast you could win each game. If I was sitting behind a zoo deck for example I would rather see pod or infect as opposed to storm 100% of the time. My path to exiles, and different bolts are live and can buy enough time to feasibly win.
OVERALL
While I would have loved to see some blue cards come off of the ban list(calling chrome mox and BB blue cards ) these bannings are honestly a step in the right direction and the first thing wotc has actually done right with modern. Nixing storm and weakening jund opens quite a bit of space for brewing and for fringe decks to function.
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In life all we can do is try to make things better. Sitting lost in old ways and fearing change only makes us outdated and ignorant.
Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding.
Albert Einstein
Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity.
Seething Song I don't see as necessary. Storm has so many ways to auto-scoop between various thoughtseize type cards, counterspells, rule of law.
BBE is another matter entirely. The main issue of this is that in a deck like jund where every card is just such a threat, this cascades another threat out for free and attacks with haste. It gets out that deathrite shaman or giant goyf or liliana to destroy a target permanent in addition to exisiting. Which is what sped jund up so much.
What I think it comes down to is Wizards doesn't want cards played for free in this format. If you look at the bans, that's what consistently goes away. Seething Song does that in a sense because it's 3 mana into 5, so it pays for itself and then some. BBE I already discussed.
I really wanted them to unban bitterblossom, but keeping with their consistency, BB is a bunch of free creatures, so of course they wouldn't do that either. That's the power level of modern. Legacy is all about exploiting free stuff (FoW, Shardless Agent) and that's where it becomes a different game. Makes sense, but I don't like it.
Bloodbraid elf- The lottery elf probably needed to go. Jund needed something hit because there is no reason for jund to be ~25% of the meta in an format as large as modern. After watching so many games from different GPs so many times jund was losing then double lottery elf for the win. Jund will still be the best deck in the format as far as powerlevel goes. This should kill its popularity as some people will deem it bad now. Banning BBE essentially weakens every other card in the deck because you see less cards. I am glad to see this one and can't wait to see what modern looks like now. I might just start brewing again.
Seething Song- Many of the pros have been calling for storms head since the inception of the format. The issue with storm(and eggs) is the fact that you can't really react to them unless your running counterspells. Combine that with a less than 4 turn(barely) win average and any deck not packing 10 counters or discard spells has almost not chance game 1. Then game 2 is always a crapshoot because you have to see that 3 of narrow hate card from board or just lose.(or lose after seeing it still)
a 3rd turn win in storm vs a turn 3 win in infect or certain pod decks.
Many of the complaints have been but this combo deck can win on turn 3 at close to the same rate as storm. The thing is they don't because they can be interacted with via removal. Magic is played between 2 or more players and not a game where you can see how fast you could win each game. If I was sitting behind a zoo deck for example I would rather see pod or infect as opposed to storm 100% of the time. My path to exiles, and different bolts are live and can buy enough time to feasibly win.
OVERALL
While I would have loved to see some blue cards come off of the ban list(calling chrome mox and BB blue cards ) these bannings are honestly a step in the right direction and the first thing wotc has actually done right with modern. Nixing storm and weakening jund opens quite a bit of space for brewing and for fringe decks to function.
I think this is a great explanation of what I was thinking. You put it better than I could've.
I can only add a little emphasis of my own - that for the hit that Storm and Jund took today (and Jund is frankly still pretty strong even without BBE) - I think that there will be a number of other decks that will now be viable that weren't viable before.
I think this is a great explanation of what I was thinking. You put it better than I could've.
I can only add a little emphasis of my own - that for the hit that Storm and Jund took today (and Jund is frankly still pretty strong even without BBE) - I think that there will be a number of other decks that will now be viable that weren't viable before.
People keep saying that jund will be alright but what is red offering the deck anymore? The other colors seem to offer better cards then bbe-less red
I am happy BBE is gone, even as someone who plays Jund fairly often. I think the reports of Jund's demise are premature. I think it may lose some market share to BUG and BGW but I think it will still very much exist.
I think the loss of bloodbraid will give a little more variety to Jund decks themselves, as they no longer have to worry about not playing too many things that are bad cascades.
Seething Song was a bit of a surprise, but I support it. I am very excited and appreciative that they were able to look beyond the "clear and present danger" of Jund and also take the opportunity to sculpt the environment to their liking with another card. I would have dealt with Storm in a different way, but I can see the logic in the path they chose.
I think Emrakul is a more distorting presence on the format than Storm was, but I can understand that they couldn't even begin to make the argument that it was having too much success like they were able to with Storm. They may just be biding their time until the effect of emrakul is more clear.
I am very satisfied with the ban announcement. I think we still have a rocky road ahead, and expect more bannings in 6 months or another year. But I am convinced that they have resolved themselves to a path towards a Modern format that will eventually be very healthy.
IDK maybe they are promoting/protecting legacy by doing this. Seems odd considering the obvious push for modern as of late.
WotC has not put forth Modern as a Legacy replacement, despite what many players seem to think. They have always put it forward as a replacement for old Extended.
They want Legacy to continue to exist, and they want Modern to have a distinct identity from Legacy.
Nobody expected 2 banned cards and nobody wanted it, so no clue what you're getting at.
I wanted at least 2 cards. I want a lot more in fact.
I have been saying for awhile that WotC is trying to determine what path they would take. This update was their chance to abandon their quest to sculpt a format, or commit down that path.
The thing that really aggravates me about banning Seething Song is that it seems like a complete change in philosophy surrounding what the ban list is there for. Instead of protecting the format from decks that are dominating the meta and creating a stale environment, they're using it to make a format that looks the way they want it to.
I've been saying this is what they have been doing for awhile. For modern they have re-evaluated what the ban list is there for. This isn't a surprise that sprung up today, there has been growing evidence of this since Modern's beginnings.
The success of Commander I think really opened their eyes to the fact that sculpting a format can result in something very popular. Commander does it largely through changing rules, but I think they believe they can do something similar through careful use of the banned list.
I think WotC very much has a end vision in mind, but just doesn't know how to get there without upsetting the playerbase. This latest ban list update I think just cements that they are going to try to mitigate the player anger by doing the transformation slowly. They'll ban a couple cards each year, after people have had plenty of time to see why those specific cards were a problem. Not everyone will agree, but the majority of the playerbase will at least say "I may not agree, but I can see where they are coming from, so I am not going to get worked up over it".
I get the feeling they want the format to be wide open to convince standard players that it is safe to play in Modern. Sitting down at your first Modern event and getting shut down by Jund and a non-interactive Storm are definitely bad ways to get introduced to the format.
I think you are right. As I mention above, I think WotC has a clear vision of what they want for modern, and I think one element of that is that players should be able to transition into the format easily from Standard.
If you have been playing standard and have a deck that you love that is about to rotate, if you could adjust half the deck and be a tier 2 Modern deck, that would be a huge win for WotC.
Its purely anecdotal on my part, but far and away the thing that has made people I know quit magic has been having a standard season come along that they were not interested in. I quit part way through lorwyn because I just couldn't bring myself to stomach the tribal nature. The older formats seemed so far separated from the magic that I knew and liked that I quit rather than playing one of them.
I finally came back during Zendikar, but I would have like Alara, and they missed out on some money from me on that because I had just left the game of magic entirely.
Instead, imagine a lower powered Modern where I could keep playing my Ravnica/Time Spiral deck to some reasonable effect. That would have kept me in the game, and when I looked at the Alara spoilers to see what could go in my Modern deck, I might get excited for standard again.
I really think these bannings will be good down the road.
So the long term effects of this will be very beneficial. It will make newer players happy about the format.
Now I don't think they(Jace, Mystic, etc) will ever come off, but it suddenly doesn't bother me. The format will be much more interactive now. It will be weird to see what happens this weekend.
I have been on the "ban moar" bandwagon for awhile, but I never really had a problem with the "unban plan". I thought the ban plan was better, not that the unban plan was bad.
I agree that this does seem to cement that its unlikely they will reverse direction and unban the uber-power cards.
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I support WotC's goal of shaping Modern in favor of diversity.
I ran a thought experiment on my blog Modern in a Nuclear Wasteland
of an extreme case of banning 20 more cards to make sure they get everything, then scaling back where appropriate. WotC seems to be on a slowly build up approach. Both ways probably reach similar end points.
The post Gatecrash metagame is proving to be closer to the endpoint than I estimated, so its very possible that few (if any) more cards need to be banned.
I hate that the banning of seething song hurts a lot of potential tier 1.5 strategies like AIR and Big Red variants. Yes, turn 3 demigod is good, but is seething song really so good in storm that it had to be banned and move other potential strategies lower on the totem pole?
Epic Experiment should have been on the list instead of seething song. You think Wizards would have learned its lesson about playing multiple spells without paying mana costs from the Mind's Desire printing.
Jund losing BBE isn't really going to change anything. Jund players will probably replace it with Huntmaster (which also gets triggers despite Torpor Orb), Finks and more Lingering Souls. Really you are just replacing CA with more CA, so it doesn't make much sense and probably won't put a dent in the power level of the deck.
I can understand why they put a ban on Seething Song, but I felt that it was the wrong way to go about "fixing" a deck that was easy enough to hate out to begin with. Between Ethersworn Cannonist, Thalia, Rule of Law, Thorn of Amethyst and Leyline of Sanctity, not to mention Lifegain making it harder to put an opponent in range, there was not a single problem hating that deck. True, it can win on turn 3, but it doesn't happen very often. Electromancer is really the card that enables storm to hit those turn 3 kills more consistently. There was certainly nothing wrong with the deck before that was printed, and I really didn't feel there was a problem afterwards either.
This makes me think that the people in the DCI who make these decisions are just looking over tons of tournament lists and don't actually play in the meta. I really don't like the idea of people who are essentially "net deckers" making these decisions in a format that many of us really enjoy. They need to have a core group of people who play the meta help them make these decisions. After Ponder and Preordain, I wonder what the next "wtf" banning is gonna be.
Wizards likes to keep all of the colors competitive. Jace TMS was made specifically because blue had been weakened because of Faeries and it needed a good card to bring its power level up. Well, we all know how that turned out.
I think Jace gets an unfair amount of the blame. It's true he was a really really good card, but he wasn't by himself the reason Caw-Blade took over the format. Without cards like Stoneforge Mystic, grossly undercosted equipment, and Squadron Hawk, the deck would've been a lot worse.
It was really a combination of cards that made Caw-Blade so unbeatable, and Jace was only one of them.
It's kind of like how, despite being the dominant deck last Standard season, Delver decks are pretty much nowhere to be seen anymore despite Delver of Secrets still being in the format. The reason is that the cards that helped Delver of Secrets be so strong rotated out, so the card pretty much dropped out of Standard.
I said this earlier in the thread, but I'll say it again. The real problem with fast mana stems from fast mana used to fuel instants and sorceries. It seems like every time in Magic's history that fast mana has been an issue (whether it be from artifact mana or from a ritual), it has come from decks loaded with tons of instants and sorceries in it. However, fast mana isn't always broken because it depends on what you do with the fast mana. Look at "musket" decks such as All-in-Red; they have tons of fast mana, but they're not using the fast mana to combo off. They're just casting super-early big red threats instead.
I would love to see a "fixed" Seething Song like this printed in the future:
Song of Ire2R
Instant (C)
Add RRRRR to your mana pool. Spend this mana only to cast permanent cards.
Using Seething Song to power out a turn 3 Arc-Slogger is powerful, but fair. Seething Song to power out a turn 3 or even turn 2 Deus of Calamity is also powerful, but still fair. Using Seething Song to chain into more rituals and instants/sorceries is where we get problems.
I said this earlier in the thread, but I'll say it again. The real problem with fast mana stems from fast mana used to fuel instants and sorceries. It seems like every time in Magic's history that fast mana has been an issue (whether it be from artifact mana or from a ritual), it has come from decks loaded with tons of instants and sorceries in it. However, fast mana isn't always broken because it depends on what you do with the fast mana. Look at "musket" decks such as All-in-Red; they have tons of fast mana, but they're not using the fast mana to combo off. They're just casting super-early big red threats instead.
I would love to see a "fixed" Seething Song like this printed in the future:
Song of Ire2R
Instant (C)
Add RRRRR to your mana pool. Spend this mana only to cast permanent cards.
Using Seething Song to power out a turn 3 Arc-Slogger is powerful, but fair. Seething Song to power out a turn 3 or even turn 2 Deus of Calamity is also powerful, but still fair. Using Seething Song to chain into more rituals and instants/sorceries is where we get problems.
It seems I wasn't the only one wanting AIR modern viable :D.
To all those upset they cant play FOW, Wasteland, or any other Legacy staple in Modern, go play Legacy and leave the Modern people alone.
I played both Modern and Gavin Verhey's "Over-extended" before the official August 2011 launch of Modern as a format. I certainly wanted it to succeed, and the value of my collection has benefitted tremendously from having bought in before the rush. But there were always going to be two flaws this format had to overcome: the mana's too easy, and the combo decks don't have to worry about FoW. The latter problem is being addressed by banning the cantrips and rituals that would enable combo, but the easy mana issue has been left unchecked.
The combination of good mana-fixing and weak land-hate is something the Modern format will be dealing with forever. Somebody brought up on MaRo's blog last week about Jund being able to play all the best attrition cards across all the colors, and MaRo responded that he considers it R&D's job to make sure people can't just play all colors like that. But neither design nor development seem willing to actually print or re-print any mana-hoser that could deal with this problem. Banning BBE doesn't solve the ultimate problem of the Modern format, something will have to fundamentally change about the mana-fixing situation.
It wouldn't have to be Wasteland. Price of Progress would likely keep these decks honest on mana quite well, but that would certainly not get reprinted until at least RTR block left, if ever. And as long as the fetch-dual mana base remains intact with very little to discourage it, the Jund style deck will just keep coming back in different configurations over and over.
I said this earlier in the thread, but I'll say it again. The real problem with fast mana stems from fast mana used to fuel instants and sorceries. It seems like every time in Magic's history that fast mana has been an issue (whether it be from artifact mana or from a ritual), it has come from decks loaded with tons of instants and sorceries in it. However, fast mana isn't always broken because it depends on what you do with the fast mana. Look at "musket" decks such as All-in-Red; they have tons of fast mana, but they're not using the fast mana to combo off. They're just casting super-early big red threats instead.
I would love to see a "fixed" Seething Song like this printed in the future:
Song of Ire2R
Instant (C)
Add RRRRR to your mana pool. Spend this mana only to cast permanent cards.
Using Seething Song to power out a turn 3 Arc-Slogger is powerful, but fair. Seething Song to power out a turn 3 or even turn 2 Deus of Calamity is also powerful, but still fair. Using Seething Song to chain into more rituals and instants/sorceries is where we get problems.
It's called Geosurge and it's quite a horrendous card. I'd hardly call a T4 combo deck a "problem". If you cant beat a T4 combo deck then you either suck or your deck is horrible. Not calling you out personally, but just using "you" in a general sense.
alright here's my best attempt at a real justification for the bannings.
if you refer to official statements made by members of the design staff you'll know that they feel that the ideal state of the game is like this:
aggro<midrange<ramp/combo<control<aggro
that's not my opinion. that is wizards' opinion.
now look at the decks that work in modern and you'll see that the format is extremely biased toward one midrange deck in particular, that being jund. jund is naturally good at suppressing aggro, is such a dominant midrange deck that no other midrange decks are on the same level as it, and can even perform reasonably well against ramp/combo which is supposed to be it's bad matchup. jund's dominance has lead to a proliferation of ramp/combo decks including recent innovations such as bogle.dec. the massive number of combo decks makes it difficult for control to get a handle on them and since control decks generally match up neutral against midrange anyways and have a negative matchup against aggro you can see why control is struggling. control would get better if there were less combo decks because they could then dominate that matchup broadly instead of having to plan against more decks than they can ever fit in their sideboard.
so wotc took action against storm because of the way storm works. this ought to allow control decks to refine their lists to make themselves more effective against the remaining combo decks and they should be able to feast on the ones that haven't been nerfed.
that won't happen right away. at first combo/ramp decks will still be popular because they're over-represented in the format anyways. people are used to having to play this archetype in order to have good matchups against jund. i think that combo will run rampant until control realizes that they can take charge of the scene now that jund isn't always looming. then control will pick up significantly and some of the combo decks will fall by the wayside.
once control recovers a bit it'll give aggro a new opening.
Yeah, but if you actually knew something about this format you'd know that Storm is in no way the second most powerful deck in Modern. It was tier 1/tier 1.5, sure, but it didn't have better results than, say, Pod or affinity. The reason the deck was played so much is because it was one of the cheaper decks to build.
I agree. Do you know (and I've tested the crap out of this matchup because it always fascinated me) that Storm vs Affinity (two decks that basically just race each other) is a 50/50 toss up? I've played enough of these to know.
So why hasn't affinity been touched? Oh, I forgot. It was with the banning of all the artifact lands. Well, THAT was TRULY busted to hell and almost destroyed Magic during Mirrodin. But Storm isn't even close. And even without the artifact lands, affinity can play Storm 50/50.
So why wasn't Cranial banned? Certainly that card is the over the top card for Affinity? But it's still here. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that Cranial is more important to Affinity than BBE was to Jund.
Again, there is so much inconsistency with these bannings. I really have to question how much the DCI has thought through this process because I could make a case for so many other cards getting the ban hammer.
Would this cause Affinity to start dominating the format again without Storm and BBE? or will Abrupt Decay keep the deck in check
Dominate? No.
Warp? Yes.
The bans don't affect affinity, which is an established deck of the format. That means we all know to bring the affinity hate. The hate against affinity is what kept it down. It's almost as good as the graveyard hate.
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What's the big deal? You could have played multiple Righteous Avengers for years now.
Well, I was looking at taking a break from Standard so I decided why not. I sold off all of my Standard stuff, but kept a few decks around for Modern. Now that they ban these, I wonder to myself why even bother. I am really disappointed with these bans. They seem so lazy and lack creativity. If they are just going to ban every card that starts to pull wins, then eventually they are going to ban every card. There will always be one card that dominates almost every other card. That is the nature of card games. As far as I am concerned, Modern is going downhill. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted. I will downright quit this format if they hit anything in eggs. That is my main Modern deck, but I have no doubt that its time will come too.
Well, I was looking at taking a break from Standard so I decided why not. I sold off all of my Standard stuff, but kept a few decks around for Modern. Now that they ban these, I wonder to myself why even bother. I am really disappointed with these bans. They seem so lazy and lack creativity. If they are just going to ban every card that starts to pull wins, then eventually they are going to ban every card. There will always be one card that dominates almost every other card. That is the nature of card games. As far as I am concerned, Modern is going downhill. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted. I will downright quit this format if they hit anything in eggs. That is my main Modern deck, but I have no doubt that its time will come too.
Honestly I am surprised they didn't hit eggs. It seems to be the "worst" of the combo decks. At least a storm player's turn takes 2 minutes. Eggs can take the better part of the round just comboing off. I find eggs to be a much more hated match because of the non-interactive nature of the deck. And going down the road of "new player friendly" then it seems this would be public enemy number one. Maybe Eggs should start showing up more to tournaments and then WotC will ban it. End rant.
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Currently Playing
Legacy: WUBRG Manaless Dredge GRBUW
Modern: BRG Jund GRB
EDH/Commander: WUG Rafiq of the Many GUW
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-MTG Salvation.
storm does not need 4 lands to go off.
first- manamorphose allows you to draw more cards for past in flames, and after you cast past in flames
second-rituals build into one another
now the lack of seething song may hurt it quite a bit, but perhaps electromancer will be more survivable now, after all, with BBE banned, maybe jund switches to junk, and runs PtE instead of Bolt, which nets us a land unless they want to die.
perhaps we could use increasing vengeance as a ritual.
all theory though, i know that seething song is an extremely significant blow ><. just trying to be optimistic ><
UWUW ControlUW
UGWSpiritsUGW
GHardened ScalesG
WGRUKiki PodWGRU [RIP]
No, there wouldn't be. Zoo was dominant because of Green Sun's Zenith. Without it, the deck wouldn't be nearly as consistent as before. And Fae would still lose to Jund and Zoo and Pod and Tron, perhaps Doran, but win against the combo decks. Remember that there is no Riptide Laboratory to push it over the top. Fae was never legal, we actually don't know how it would be played.
Assuming that BBE and SS were still legal, there would be a truly rock-paper-scizors type of Magic, with Aggro (Zoo, B/W Tokens, "Jund", Delver, Affinity, Burn), Combo ( Pod, Twin, Tron, Storm) and Control (UWR, Fae, UW)
Seems a better metagame than the one right now.
Also, the reason behind banning Seething Song is very bad. Storm almost never won on turn 3. If that is enough reason to ban a card, next update we will see Karn, Urzatron, Second Sunrise, Lotus Bloom, Glistener Elf, Blighted Angent, Daybreak Coronet and Slippery Bogle bans, because they all "can" make a turn 3 win possible.
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-The pox was a disease notorious for having killed one-third, rounded up, of Europe’s population. Smallpox, on the other hand, killed only a single person.
-A person riding a horse cannot be stopped by foot soldiers, large animals, walls, archers, or even catapults.
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BTW, sell your Daybreak Coronets now, that idiotic Bogle deck was only "good" because of the Jund matchup. Without Jund and its huge number of spot removal spells dominating the field, Bogle is just a bad version of the infect deck.
We barely lose a penny on the deck. It's not like they went crazy and banned thoughtseize and cut it's price in half, all of our money cards will retain their value. The whole appeal of the deck is that every single card in the list is A+ all on it's own.
And as to the deathrite shaman argument, while I cede that it might be just as crazy a card, and may need a ban in the future, it just got printed and it seems sooooo fun! lol. We've barely scratched the surface on it, so I'm glad we get to see how it performs outside of jund before giving it the hammer. I probably would feel cheated if he was the one to go.
Thirdly, it just seems deserved and forseeable. The deck is, according to the results pretty easily the best in the format and I`m ok with killing it to allow for some diversity. I think the people are right who are saying this kills it too. You can maybe still play BGR midrange to some success, but I don't think it will be as good, and there will probably be better options.
Bloodbraid elf- The lottery elf probably needed to go. Jund needed something hit because there is no reason for jund to be ~25% of the meta in an format as large as modern. After watching so many games from different GPs so many times jund was losing then double lottery elf for the win. Jund will still be the best deck in the format as far as powerlevel goes. This should kill its popularity as some people will deem it bad now. Banning BBE essentially weakens every other card in the deck because you see less cards. I am glad to see this one and can't wait to see what modern looks like now. I might just start brewing again.
Seething Song- Many of the pros have been calling for storms head since the inception of the format. The issue with storm(and eggs) is the fact that you can't really react to them unless your running counterspells. Combine that with a less than 4 turn(barely) win average and any deck not packing 10 counters or discard spells has almost not chance game 1. Then game 2 is always a crapshoot because you have to see that 3 of narrow hate card from board or just lose.(or lose after seeing it still)
a 3rd turn win in storm vs a turn 3 win in infect or certain pod decks.
Many of the complaints have been but this combo deck can win on turn 3 at close to the same rate as storm. The thing is they don't because they can be interacted with via removal. Magic is played between 2 or more players and not a game where you can see how fast you could win each game. If I was sitting behind a zoo deck for example I would rather see pod or infect as opposed to storm 100% of the time. My path to exiles, and different bolts are live and can buy enough time to feasibly win.
OVERALL
While I would have loved to see some blue cards come off of the ban list(calling chrome mox and BB blue cards ) these bannings are honestly a step in the right direction and the first thing wotc has actually done right with modern. Nixing storm and weakening jund opens quite a bit of space for brewing and for fringe decks to function.
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Seething Song I don't see as necessary. Storm has so many ways to auto-scoop between various thoughtseize type cards, counterspells, rule of law.
BBE is another matter entirely. The main issue of this is that in a deck like jund where every card is just such a threat, this cascades another threat out for free and attacks with haste. It gets out that deathrite shaman or giant goyf or liliana to destroy a target permanent in addition to exisiting. Which is what sped jund up so much.
What I think it comes down to is Wizards doesn't want cards played for free in this format. If you look at the bans, that's what consistently goes away. Seething Song does that in a sense because it's 3 mana into 5, so it pays for itself and then some. BBE I already discussed.
I really wanted them to unban bitterblossom, but keeping with their consistency, BB is a bunch of free creatures, so of course they wouldn't do that either. That's the power level of modern. Legacy is all about exploiting free stuff (FoW, Shardless Agent) and that's where it becomes a different game. Makes sense, but I don't like it.
Currently Playing:
Standard: Jund Midrange
Modern: Mono-U Faeries, Soul Sisters, Scapeshift
Legacy: Goblins, Dredge, BUG Agent
EDH: Zur, Azusa, Gisela, Hanna
Looking at the Storm section, they've already figured out how to work around the lack of Seething Song.
I think this is a great explanation of what I was thinking. You put it better than I could've.
I can only add a little emphasis of my own - that for the hit that Storm and Jund took today (and Jund is frankly still pretty strong even without BBE) - I think that there will be a number of other decks that will now be viable that weren't viable before.
People keep saying that jund will be alright but what is red offering the deck anymore? The other colors seem to offer better cards then bbe-less red
I think the loss of bloodbraid will give a little more variety to Jund decks themselves, as they no longer have to worry about not playing too many things that are bad cascades.
Seething Song was a bit of a surprise, but I support it. I am very excited and appreciative that they were able to look beyond the "clear and present danger" of Jund and also take the opportunity to sculpt the environment to their liking with another card. I would have dealt with Storm in a different way, but I can see the logic in the path they chose.
I think Emrakul is a more distorting presence on the format than Storm was, but I can understand that they couldn't even begin to make the argument that it was having too much success like they were able to with Storm. They may just be biding their time until the effect of emrakul is more clear.
I am very satisfied with the ban announcement. I think we still have a rocky road ahead, and expect more bannings in 6 months or another year. But I am convinced that they have resolved themselves to a path towards a Modern format that will eventually be very healthy.
WotC has not put forth Modern as a Legacy replacement, despite what many players seem to think. They have always put it forward as a replacement for old Extended.
They want Legacy to continue to exist, and they want Modern to have a distinct identity from Legacy.
I wanted at least 2 cards. I want a lot more in fact.
I have been saying for awhile that WotC is trying to determine what path they would take. This update was their chance to abandon their quest to sculpt a format, or commit down that path.
I've been saying this is what they have been doing for awhile. For modern they have re-evaluated what the ban list is there for. This isn't a surprise that sprung up today, there has been growing evidence of this since Modern's beginnings.
The success of Commander I think really opened their eyes to the fact that sculpting a format can result in something very popular. Commander does it largely through changing rules, but I think they believe they can do something similar through careful use of the banned list.
I think WotC very much has a end vision in mind, but just doesn't know how to get there without upsetting the playerbase. This latest ban list update I think just cements that they are going to try to mitigate the player anger by doing the transformation slowly. They'll ban a couple cards each year, after people have had plenty of time to see why those specific cards were a problem. Not everyone will agree, but the majority of the playerbase will at least say "I may not agree, but I can see where they are coming from, so I am not going to get worked up over it".
Agreed.
I think you are right. As I mention above, I think WotC has a clear vision of what they want for modern, and I think one element of that is that players should be able to transition into the format easily from Standard.
If you have been playing standard and have a deck that you love that is about to rotate, if you could adjust half the deck and be a tier 2 Modern deck, that would be a huge win for WotC.
Its purely anecdotal on my part, but far and away the thing that has made people I know quit magic has been having a standard season come along that they were not interested in. I quit part way through lorwyn because I just couldn't bring myself to stomach the tribal nature. The older formats seemed so far separated from the magic that I knew and liked that I quit rather than playing one of them.
I finally came back during Zendikar, but I would have like Alara, and they missed out on some money from me on that because I had just left the game of magic entirely.
Instead, imagine a lower powered Modern where I could keep playing my Ravnica/Time Spiral deck to some reasonable effect. That would have kept me in the game, and when I looked at the Alara spoilers to see what could go in my Modern deck, I might get excited for standard again.
I have been on the "ban moar" bandwagon for awhile, but I never really had a problem with the "unban plan". I thought the ban plan was better, not that the unban plan was bad.
I agree that this does seem to cement that its unlikely they will reverse direction and unban the uber-power cards.
I ran a thought experiment on my blog
Modern in a Nuclear Wasteland
of an extreme case of banning 20 more cards to make sure they get everything, then scaling back where appropriate. WotC seems to be on a slowly build up approach. Both ways probably reach similar end points.
The post Gatecrash metagame is proving to be closer to the endpoint than I estimated, so its very possible that few (if any) more cards need to be banned.
Epic Experiment should have been on the list instead of seething song. You think Wizards would have learned its lesson about playing multiple spells without paying mana costs from the Mind's Desire printing.
I can understand why they put a ban on Seething Song, but I felt that it was the wrong way to go about "fixing" a deck that was easy enough to hate out to begin with. Between Ethersworn Cannonist, Thalia, Rule of Law, Thorn of Amethyst and Leyline of Sanctity, not to mention Lifegain making it harder to put an opponent in range, there was not a single problem hating that deck. True, it can win on turn 3, but it doesn't happen very often. Electromancer is really the card that enables storm to hit those turn 3 kills more consistently. There was certainly nothing wrong with the deck before that was printed, and I really didn't feel there was a problem afterwards either.
This makes me think that the people in the DCI who make these decisions are just looking over tons of tournament lists and don't actually play in the meta. I really don't like the idea of people who are essentially "net deckers" making these decisions in a format that many of us really enjoy. They need to have a core group of people who play the meta help them make these decisions. After Ponder and Preordain, I wonder what the next "wtf" banning is gonna be.
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It was really a combination of cards that made Caw-Blade so unbeatable, and Jace was only one of them.
It's kind of like how, despite being the dominant deck last Standard season, Delver decks are pretty much nowhere to be seen anymore despite Delver of Secrets still being in the format. The reason is that the cards that helped Delver of Secrets be so strong rotated out, so the card pretty much dropped out of Standard.
I would love to see a "fixed" Seething Song like this printed in the future:
Song of Ire 2R
Instant (C)
Add RRRRR to your mana pool. Spend this mana only to cast permanent cards.
Using Seething Song to power out a turn 3 Arc-Slogger is powerful, but fair. Seething Song to power out a turn 3 or even turn 2 Deus of Calamity is also powerful, but still fair. Using Seething Song to chain into more rituals and instants/sorceries is where we get problems.
It seems I wasn't the only one wanting AIR modern viable :D.
I played both Modern and Gavin Verhey's "Over-extended" before the official August 2011 launch of Modern as a format. I certainly wanted it to succeed, and the value of my collection has benefitted tremendously from having bought in before the rush. But there were always going to be two flaws this format had to overcome: the mana's too easy, and the combo decks don't have to worry about FoW. The latter problem is being addressed by banning the cantrips and rituals that would enable combo, but the easy mana issue has been left unchecked.
The combination of good mana-fixing and weak land-hate is something the Modern format will be dealing with forever. Somebody brought up on MaRo's blog last week about Jund being able to play all the best attrition cards across all the colors, and MaRo responded that he considers it R&D's job to make sure people can't just play all colors like that. But neither design nor development seem willing to actually print or re-print any mana-hoser that could deal with this problem. Banning BBE doesn't solve the ultimate problem of the Modern format, something will have to fundamentally change about the mana-fixing situation.
It wouldn't have to be Wasteland. Price of Progress would likely keep these decks honest on mana quite well, but that would certainly not get reprinted until at least RTR block left, if ever. And as long as the fetch-dual mana base remains intact with very little to discourage it, the Jund style deck will just keep coming back in different configurations over and over.
It's called Geosurge and it's quite a horrendous card. I'd hardly call a T4 combo deck a "problem". If you cant beat a T4 combo deck then you either suck or your deck is horrible. Not calling you out personally, but just using "you" in a general sense.
if you refer to official statements made by members of the design staff you'll know that they feel that the ideal state of the game is like this:
aggro<midrange<ramp/combo<control<aggro
that's not my opinion. that is wizards' opinion.
now look at the decks that work in modern and you'll see that the format is extremely biased toward one midrange deck in particular, that being jund. jund is naturally good at suppressing aggro, is such a dominant midrange deck that no other midrange decks are on the same level as it, and can even perform reasonably well against ramp/combo which is supposed to be it's bad matchup. jund's dominance has lead to a proliferation of ramp/combo decks including recent innovations such as bogle.dec. the massive number of combo decks makes it difficult for control to get a handle on them and since control decks generally match up neutral against midrange anyways and have a negative matchup against aggro you can see why control is struggling. control would get better if there were less combo decks because they could then dominate that matchup broadly instead of having to plan against more decks than they can ever fit in their sideboard.
so wotc took action against storm because of the way storm works. this ought to allow control decks to refine their lists to make themselves more effective against the remaining combo decks and they should be able to feast on the ones that haven't been nerfed.
that won't happen right away. at first combo/ramp decks will still be popular because they're over-represented in the format anyways. people are used to having to play this archetype in order to have good matchups against jund. i think that combo will run rampant until control realizes that they can take charge of the scene now that jund isn't always looming. then control will pick up significantly and some of the combo decks will fall by the wayside.
once control recovers a bit it'll give aggro a new opening.
I agree. Do you know (and I've tested the crap out of this matchup because it always fascinated me) that Storm vs Affinity (two decks that basically just race each other) is a 50/50 toss up? I've played enough of these to know.
So why hasn't affinity been touched? Oh, I forgot. It was with the banning of all the artifact lands. Well, THAT was TRULY busted to hell and almost destroyed Magic during Mirrodin. But Storm isn't even close. And even without the artifact lands, affinity can play Storm 50/50.
So why wasn't Cranial banned? Certainly that card is the over the top card for Affinity? But it's still here. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that Cranial is more important to Affinity than BBE was to Jund.
Again, there is so much inconsistency with these bannings. I really have to question how much the DCI has thought through this process because I could make a case for so many other cards getting the ban hammer.
Paper: WUR Waffle Control, RG and U Tron
MTGO: U Tron, BRG Living End, B Infect
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Hermit Druid Combo:
Dominate? No.
Warp? Yes.
The bans don't affect affinity, which is an established deck of the format. That means we all know to bring the affinity hate. The hate against affinity is what kept it down. It's almost as good as the graveyard hate.
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GYisan Toolbox Combo/ControlG
Honestly I am surprised they didn't hit eggs. It seems to be the "worst" of the combo decks. At least a storm player's turn takes 2 minutes. Eggs can take the better part of the round just comboing off. I find eggs to be a much more hated match because of the non-interactive nature of the deck. And going down the road of "new player friendly" then it seems this would be public enemy number one. Maybe Eggs should start showing up more to tournaments and then WotC will ban it. End rant.
Legacy:
WUBRG Manaless Dredge GRBUW
Modern:
BRG Jund GRB
EDH/Commander:
WUG Rafiq of the Many GUW