I figure with the incoming likely ban, I'd ask this question. Which is more broken? Further, does the current meta give us any insight into the nature of what it means to be broken as a card?
To the Mods, I'm trying to skirt ban list talk here. Its not intended to be about what should or should not be banned but rather what the scale of the anxt is with "eldrazi winter" compared to the most recent WotC mistake.
Full disclosure, I feel that Eldrazi is worse by a large margin.
Modern GB Rock U Flooding Merfolk RUG Delver Midrange WU Monks UW Tempo Geist GW Bogle GW Liege UR Tron B Vampires
Affinity Legacy
Fish
Goblins
Burn
Reanimator
Dredge
Affinity EDH W Akroma GBW Ghave BRU Thrax GR Ruric I advocate for the elimination of the combo archetype in Modern. I believe it is degenerate and unfun by its very nature and will always limit design space and cause unnecessary bans.
Bizarrely, I don't recall the meta being as infested with Cruise Delver as it got infested with Eldrazi. Maybe Pod being the second most popular deck during Cruise Time (as opposed to a less clear runner-up, if any, during Eldrazi Winter) contributed to that.
Oddly enough, as I check MTGO and www.tcdecks.net, the Eldrazi population seems to have been going down for the last few weeks, possibly below peak Cruise Delver levels and maybe to Heyday Jund levels.
I'm actually on the side of the treasure Cruise metagame being worse from a grass-roots FNM perspective.
I saw far more treasure Cruise powering specific decks up than I've ever seen eldrazi.
Part of the reasoning is that the Eldraz are kind of a whole deck. Cruise was just one card (and not even a rare) which everyone had access to.
My experiences (and the experiences of many of my friends and associates across the UK) have seen barely any Eldrazi at the FNM level, although its presence can surely be felt online and at big events.
For the 95% every-day-joes of the modern scene, treasure Cruise was more impactful and ruined more games.
With Eldrazi, Despite being talked about constantly and being the current modern scapegoat (with good reason), you'd be hard pressed to say there's a consistent problem across the large swathes of local shops around the UK and probably the world. There'll be exceptions of course, but that's always true. This may be due to people fearing a ban and not buying into the deck, but regardless of the cause, the effect is that treasure Cruise was the true FNM bruiser.
Modern GB Rock U Flooding Merfolk RUG Delver Midrange WU Monks UW Tempo Geist GW Bogle GW Liege UR Tron B Vampires
Affinity Legacy
Fish
Goblins
Burn
Reanimator
Dredge
Affinity EDH W Akroma GBW Ghave BRU Thrax GR Ruric I advocate for the elimination of the combo archetype in Modern. I believe it is degenerate and unfun by its very nature and will always limit design space and cause unnecessary bans.
Eldrazi is worse, no question. TC powered decks were still slow enough to be interacted with, and the Delver decks had a natural foil in Pod. I could still play midrange or control vs TC powered decks. Eldrazi has no peers, with even the anti drazi decks struggling to put up numbers. If you aren't faster than Eldrazi you don't have a real chance, and it's hard to be faster than the deck.
The thing is, with TC, sure, it gave you so much absurd card advantage, but it didn't just win the game. I would argue that fast mana is far more dangerous than card advantage, especially in a format where we don't have any tools at all to deal with fast mana. TC could draw you 3 cards on t3, eye makes 6 mana by turn 2, and you get to cast really pushed boltproof beaters off of it. On the other hand, no one at my shop actually has built eldrazi, everyone is very skittish of losing more money, after 30% of the players got burned on either twin or pod, both in a few cases. It's this really weird situation, where only the people with deep pocketbooks want to invest in something tier 1, and everyone else has decided to play high tier 2 decks.
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To echo what basically everyone else in this thread has said: Eldrazi is by far worse than TC Delver ever was. Eldrazi has soul-crushing metagame numbers, and next to no decks that can scrape together even 55-45 advantage against it.
To illustrate the brutal effects Eldrazi have h on the format, consider that Modern has always been the lightning bolt format. It was played in 38% of decks in the format. That number is now 24%, and every staple in Eldrazi decks are more played than it.
I don't think that's happened in the history of Modern.
It really depends on what you were/are playing and where. If you are talking high level events, Eldrazi numbers crush TC era numbers. But on the local level I would say the TC era was worse. The reason was you couldnt play a deck that had good match ups with both Pod and Delver, or you played one of the 2. Now its fairly easy to build to beat the Eldrazi if they are the majority in your meta. If there isnt Eldrazi, you are playing the race game for the most part against fast decks. I personally have done better in the Eldrazi era in my meta.
Quote from herfs »
Eldrazi meta dominance is partialy due to a splinter twin banning
Twin has been tested against different Eldrazi decks and Twin wouldnt have even been a speed bump for the Eldrazi. Twin being gone has nothing to do with the rise of the Eldrazi.
Eldrazi was worse for everyone except 8Rack players who actually had a good game against Eldrazi without changing a single card. TC was like the polar opposite for us.
Cruise/Dig meta was fun for me since every blue deck got a piece of those cards and they were very affordable (it was also funny to see liliana/thoughtseize become terrible cards). Eldrazi is one deck wreaking everyone else and it's a no-skill luck based deck on top of it all.
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On mtgsalvation people don't want to discuss ideas, so I give people something else to discuss: my controversial opinions.
Think about it this way:
We only saw the tip of the iceberg of eldrazi representation. Think of all the people who were not buying into the deck because they didn't want to take the risk.
This limited representation was enough to be one of the worst in history.
To ask which was more broken is a poor question. Trying to evaluate which did more harm to the format is not much better, as people can be expected to evaluate "harm to the format" in different ways.
From a pure numbers perspective, Eldrazi is apparently the most damning thing to happen to the format in forever. My attitude is that it didn't introduce a single deck, it brought an entire microcosm of Magic into the format, and the real crime here is that Modern in its current state is unable to handle the totality of Eldrazi strategies.
See, I think it's good for the format when new decks come into being. Eldrazi in an ideal world should have contributed towards the format's diversity, but it's so overwhelmingly good that it instead functions as a format singularity. Format singularities are the sort of phenomenon I consider to be harmful to the format, strategies so good that they undermine Modern's nature as a non-rotating format by setting bars for card playability so high that you could reduce the total cardpool of 8th Edition to now into a Cube's worth of cards and call that the Modern metagame. When you hit that point where fewer and fewer cards are seeing play, where every new card printed is held to extreme expectations even before accounting for WotC's design policies, where everything is "does this answer the format boogeyman or does it see play in said boogeyman," that's where I think something went wrong.
When Cruise was around there was an insanely broken combo deck, which was balanced by twin, a combo control deck, which was also balanced by delver, a tempo deck, which was balanced by pod, a midrange strat.
It wasnt healthy since the meta was warped around pod and dig spells, but at least it wasnt "play these cards and add a color."
I think when the ban is announced this will be the ONLY time people in modern will ever have a "Thank you ban list" moment.
Treasure Cruise was a more glaring oversight on the part of Wizards, as it was just one card broken in and of itself.
The biggest difference is that Eldrazi is one deck (with pretty minor variation.) Treasure Cruise was a broken engine that served various strategies, and could have served other purposes in other metas. Eldrazi only serves Eldrazi. It was indeed a glaring error on the part of Wizards not to realize that you could just put all the best tribal Eldrazi cards together.
Like all broken things, Eldrazi will fade into memory. It will find its rightful place as a reasonable Legacy deck.
I'm left wondering which Eldrazi cards will continue to make meaningful appearances in modern after the banning. Cards like Thought-Knot Seer have enough raw power to remain within consideration for some decks, even without broken lands. That's the biggest difference: without Treasure Cruise, there's just no Treasure Cruise. Without the Eldrazi deck, there are still stray pieces.
It's a little funny how people fixate on Treasure Cruise when that wasn't even the best card in that metagame; Birthing Pod was.
Incidentally, that metagame was a lot better. Sure, there were two dominant decks, but you had two dominant decks rather than just one. Furthermore, for whatever issues it suffered from in regards to deck dominance, that was actually one of the most interactive metagames Modern has seen.
The numbers speak for themselves - Eldrazi Winter is/was worse and by a large margin. At no other point in the history of the format has Tier 0 existed.
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Modern - Cheeri0s (building), Belcher (building), Lantern (building), UW Control (building)
RIP Magic Duels. Wizards will regret what they did to you.
Now its fairly easy to build to beat the Eldrazi if they are the majority in your meta.
Ha! Haha! Hahahaha! If only we told that to all those thousands of people who got destroyed in every major event since February!
Its because the player base is upset with Wotc actions and refuse to adapt. The player base allowed the format to be the way it was the last 3 months. Look at the players that actually care about the format and didnt play Eldrazi and how good they did during that same time frame. Eldrazi did not win every event. There was a small contingency actually adapting and trying to beat the Eldrazi. Then there was those pissed they had to actually think and adapt to a new deck and said screw it, this format sucks, and kept pounding their old deck against a wall complaining about the Eldrazi.
It was the Magic version of taking the ball and going home and not caring.
Eldrazi is worse, but it's closer than people think.
1. Treasure Cruise Delver and Rhino Pod were the 2 best decks at the time, but Affinity, Bloom Titan, and RG Breach also were good at the time. Even Burn could do okay if you caught enough people playing UR Delver, although Pod and Bloom would be tough for it, as well as Affinity having a slightly positive matchup vs. Burn as well.
2. In the Eldrazi meta, Affinity, Living End, Abzan Company, and Lantern Control all do decently. I feel like this type of meta is more annoying to most people. Not to mention, the meta is much quicker than Cruise days.
But the reason why I say it's close is that I noticed an attendance drop during Cruise and Pod. My LGS went from 36 players to 20 players at one point. As for the Eldrazi month or 2, despite all the rumblings and only 3 people playing it, we've had 33-46 players each FNM. I honestly am not sure exactly why attendance stayed up, but maybe players are getting more "resilient" to odd changes in the meta. Just last night, a Jund player did Terminate on my Reality Smasher into Big Game Hunter on my Eldrazi Mimic. That was the first Big Game Hunter I have seen since Planar Chaos Limited. Sadly, I shrugged that off by casting a Drowner of Hope the next turn.
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Legacy - Sneak Show, BR Reanimator, Miracles, UW Stoneblade
Premodern - Trix, RecSur, Enchantress, Reanimator, Elves https://www.facebook.com/groups/PremodernUSA/ Modern - Neobrand, Hogaak Vine, Elves
Standard - Mono Red (6-2 and 5-3 in 2 McQ)
Draft - (I wish I had more time for limited...)
Commander - Norin the Wary, Grimgrin, Adun Oakenshield (taking forever to build) (dead format for me)
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To the Mods, I'm trying to skirt ban list talk here. Its not intended to be about what should or should not be banned but rather what the scale of the anxt is with "eldrazi winter" compared to the most recent WotC mistake.
Full disclosure, I feel that Eldrazi is worse by a large margin.
GB Rock
U Flooding Merfolk
RUG Delver Midrange
WU Monks
UW Tempo Geist
GW Bogle
GW Liege
UR Tron
B Vampires
Affinity
Legacy
Fish
Goblins
Burn
Reanimator
Dredge
Affinity
EDH
W Akroma
GBW Ghave
BRU Thrax
GR Ruric
I advocate for the elimination of the combo archetype in Modern. I believe it is degenerate and unfun by its very nature and will always limit design space and cause unnecessary bans.
Oddly enough, as I check MTGO and www.tcdecks.net, the Eldrazi population seems to have been going down for the last few weeks, possibly below peak Cruise Delver levels and maybe to Heyday Jund levels.
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RGTron
UGInfect
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WUBRAd Nauseam
BRGrishoalbrand
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I saw far more treasure Cruise powering specific decks up than I've ever seen eldrazi.
Part of the reasoning is that the Eldraz are kind of a whole deck. Cruise was just one card (and not even a rare) which everyone had access to.
My experiences (and the experiences of many of my friends and associates across the UK) have seen barely any Eldrazi at the FNM level, although its presence can surely be felt online and at big events.
For the 95% every-day-joes of the modern scene, treasure Cruise was more impactful and ruined more games.
With Eldrazi, Despite being talked about constantly and being the current modern scapegoat (with good reason), you'd be hard pressed to say there's a consistent problem across the large swathes of local shops around the UK and probably the world. There'll be exceptions of course, but that's always true. This may be due to people fearing a ban and not buying into the deck, but regardless of the cause, the effect is that treasure Cruise was the true FNM bruiser.
GB Rock
U Flooding Merfolk
RUG Delver Midrange
WU Monks
UW Tempo Geist
GW Bogle
GW Liege
UR Tron
B Vampires
Affinity
Legacy
Fish
Goblins
Burn
Reanimator
Dredge
Affinity
EDH
W Akroma
GBW Ghave
BRU Thrax
GR Ruric
I advocate for the elimination of the combo archetype in Modern. I believe it is degenerate and unfun by its very nature and will always limit design space and cause unnecessary bans.
It's a terrible meta, and is extremely boring.
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Pauper
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Modern
Pod (RIP)
Bloom(RIP)
Merfolk
To illustrate the brutal effects Eldrazi have h on the format, consider that Modern has always been the lightning bolt format. It was played in 38% of decks in the format. That number is now 24%, and every staple in Eldrazi decks are more played than it.
I don't think that's happened in the history of Modern.
Modern -
Both are bad.
CBW midrange deck
CBW eldrazi processor deck
CBW bw eldrazi shadow midrange
Twin has been tested against different Eldrazi decks and Twin wouldnt have even been a speed bump for the Eldrazi. Twin being gone has nothing to do with the rise of the Eldrazi.
Yes, but it would of taken longer for the eldrazi meta to catch on. When there is no meta, it doesn't take long for a degenerate deck to dominate.
Dig was becoming oppressive with pod and twin around, two of the most dominate modern decks ever. That is impressive.
CBW midrange deck
CBW eldrazi processor deck
CBW bw eldrazi shadow midrange
Decks I'm playing in Modern right now:
URB Grixis Reveler (http://www.mtgvault.com/supast4r7/decks/modern-grixis-reveler/)
UB Faeries (http://www.mtgvault.com/supast4r7/decks/ub-fae-2/)
UW Azorious Control (http://www.mtgvault.com/supast4r7/decks/modern-ojutai-control-2/)
Think about it this way:
We only saw the tip of the iceberg of eldrazi representation. Think of all the people who were not buying into the deck because they didn't want to take the risk.
This limited representation was enough to be one of the worst in history.
From a pure numbers perspective, Eldrazi is apparently the most damning thing to happen to the format in forever. My attitude is that it didn't introduce a single deck, it brought an entire microcosm of Magic into the format, and the real crime here is that Modern in its current state is unable to handle the totality of Eldrazi strategies.
See, I think it's good for the format when new decks come into being. Eldrazi in an ideal world should have contributed towards the format's diversity, but it's so overwhelmingly good that it instead functions as a format singularity. Format singularities are the sort of phenomenon I consider to be harmful to the format, strategies so good that they undermine Modern's nature as a non-rotating format by setting bars for card playability so high that you could reduce the total cardpool of 8th Edition to now into a Cube's worth of cards and call that the Modern metagame. When you hit that point where fewer and fewer cards are seeing play, where every new card printed is held to extreme expectations even before accounting for WotC's design policies, where everything is "does this answer the format boogeyman or does it see play in said boogeyman," that's where I think something went wrong.
It wasnt healthy since the meta was warped around pod and dig spells, but at least it wasnt "play these cards and add a color."
I think when the ban is announced this will be the ONLY time people in modern will ever have a "Thank you ban list" moment.
The biggest difference is that Eldrazi is one deck (with pretty minor variation.) Treasure Cruise was a broken engine that served various strategies, and could have served other purposes in other metas. Eldrazi only serves Eldrazi. It was indeed a glaring error on the part of Wizards not to realize that you could just put all the best tribal Eldrazi cards together.
Like all broken things, Eldrazi will fade into memory. It will find its rightful place as a reasonable Legacy deck.
I'm left wondering which Eldrazi cards will continue to make meaningful appearances in modern after the banning. Cards like Thought-Knot Seer have enough raw power to remain within consideration for some decks, even without broken lands. That's the biggest difference: without Treasure Cruise, there's just no Treasure Cruise. Without the Eldrazi deck, there are still stray pieces.
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Incidentally, that metagame was a lot better. Sure, there were two dominant decks, but you had two dominant decks rather than just one. Furthermore, for whatever issues it suffered from in regards to deck dominance, that was actually one of the most interactive metagames Modern has seen.
Ha! Haha! Hahahaha! If only we told that to all those thousands of people who got destroyed in every major event since February!
UR ....... WUBR ........... WB ............. RGW ........ UBR ....... WUB .... BGU
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Modern - Cheeri0s (building), Belcher (building), Lantern (building), UW Control (building)
RIP Magic Duels. Wizards will regret what they did to you.
Its because the player base is upset with Wotc actions and refuse to adapt. The player base allowed the format to be the way it was the last 3 months. Look at the players that actually care about the format and didnt play Eldrazi and how good they did during that same time frame. Eldrazi did not win every event. There was a small contingency actually adapting and trying to beat the Eldrazi. Then there was those pissed they had to actually think and adapt to a new deck and said screw it, this format sucks, and kept pounding their old deck against a wall complaining about the Eldrazi.
It was the Magic version of taking the ball and going home and not caring.
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1. Treasure Cruise Delver and Rhino Pod were the 2 best decks at the time, but Affinity, Bloom Titan, and RG Breach also were good at the time. Even Burn could do okay if you caught enough people playing UR Delver, although Pod and Bloom would be tough for it, as well as Affinity having a slightly positive matchup vs. Burn as well.
2. In the Eldrazi meta, Affinity, Living End, Abzan Company, and Lantern Control all do decently. I feel like this type of meta is more annoying to most people. Not to mention, the meta is much quicker than Cruise days.
But the reason why I say it's close is that I noticed an attendance drop during Cruise and Pod. My LGS went from 36 players to 20 players at one point. As for the Eldrazi month or 2, despite all the rumblings and only 3 people playing it, we've had 33-46 players each FNM. I honestly am not sure exactly why attendance stayed up, but maybe players are getting more "resilient" to odd changes in the meta. Just last night, a Jund player did Terminate on my Reality Smasher into Big Game Hunter on my Eldrazi Mimic. That was the first Big Game Hunter I have seen since Planar Chaos Limited. Sadly, I shrugged that off by casting a Drowner of Hope the next turn.
Premodern - Trix, RecSur, Enchantress, Reanimator, Elves https://www.facebook.com/groups/PremodernUSA/
Modern - Neobrand, Hogaak Vine, Elves
Standard - Mono Red (6-2 and 5-3 in 2 McQ)
Draft - (I wish I had more time for limited...)
Commander -
Norin the Wary, Grimgrin, Adun Oakenshield (taking forever to build)(dead format for me)