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Ulka
But at the same time, wizards is printing more an more powerful creatures, so the consistency that blue had in the past now is on BG, just by brute force, so i dont see the point of limiting blue cantrips, when you have things like traverse (and setting delirium is not that hard) or just by filling your deck with redundancy, like thoughtseize and inquisition on black, or chord of calling and collected company on green, or "40 bolts" decks in red
Remove storm cards from the format and you can have all the cantrips you want...
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
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.
Remove storm cards from the format and you can have all the cantrips you want...
I wish they had the balls to do this. They don't seem to have any problem killing one deck for the "greater good," might as well be the one that is actually holding back our ability to draw cards or protect things. I can only hope that better blue cards are on the horizon, even things as simple as an Opt reprint or a playable, universal-but-relatively-meaningless-downside 1cmc counterspell.
Remove storm cards from the format and you can have all the cantrips you want...
I wish they had the balls to do this. They don't seem to have any problem killing one deck for the "greater good," might as well be the one that is actually holding back our ability to draw cards or protect things. I can only hope that better blue cards are on the horizon, even things as simple as an Opt reprint or a playable, universal-but-relatively-meaningless-downside 1cmc counterspell.
I agree, if storm is such a problem that they need to ban fair cards wouldn't it make sense to remove the problem, Storm. Most of the storm cards are cheap so I don't think there would be an outcry.
Remove storm cards from the format and you can have all the cantrips you want...
Sam Stoddart: "I've heard arguments that cards like Preordain are needed to make control work in Modern, but realistically, they would be much more powerful in combo decks than the control decks. This is one of the risks of having cheap card filtering, and one of the reasons we moved away from doing it in Standard. We print cards like Anticipate, but I don't think we will make another one-mana cantrip with card selection attached to it any time soon. It just doesn't incentivize the kinds of games we want to see play out.
Part of the reason that Ponder and Preordain are banned and Sleight of Hand and Serum Visions aren't, is that the latter two are just weaker and don't do as good of a job of letting people set up their draws quickly. The problem with putting too much card filtering in a format is that it drives too many of the games to play out exactly the same. There is some novelty in this, but I think it is less fun for a format that we want to be highly re-playable.
That's not to say we don't like consistency, it's one of the reasons we put so many dual lands in our sets, but there should be a reasonable tradeoff for consistency. Mana Confluence would be the best land in Standard if it didn't just have that pesky 'lose 1 life' clause on it. If you want a deck that never has color problems, then you can play mono-red. If you want to play a three-color aggressive deck, then you get to play way more powerful spells, at the cost of your life and your lands entering the battlefield tapped and messing up your curve."
For yet another time.....
Then FFS they should at least give us Opt. They clearly don't give a crap about printing creatures that break the format, so it's sickening to hear over and over about how these card draw or permission spells would ruin Modern or something.
So Opt is too good. Mana Leak is too good. Fact or Fiction is too good. How exactly do people propose U get new tools in the format if all the cards that have the baseline power to see play are considered too good to see print let alone anything better? So, in essence, by 2020 Ux control decks will be <1% of the meta while OP creatures and green consistency tools will continue to get better and better. Then people scoff at any of the Ux cards coming off the banlist because "new prints" should be the answer. I know it's not the same cross-section of people, but Houston, we have a problem.
The way I see it, there are more or less two variations of combo that are viable in modern: Storm based and non storm based. The ones that are not storm based at least have to make an attempt at interaction and playing a fair game. Twin was an example of this as was pod and is Company decks. The mechanic of storm removes a lot of the necessary interaction in a deck. It does its thing and wins or loses based on what the opponent is able to do (if they can interact, they can counteract the combo a likely have a win if they cannot, they lose.) I'm not a combo fan but I have always viewed storm as a problematic mechanic if for no other reason than it has a tendency to break good blue spells. Storm is a legacy mechanic that needs cards like FoW and Daze to keep it in check. Modern doesn't have those kinds of cards and likely never will.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
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.
Honestly, no. But we're at a point where literally everything that could possibly be playable in blue is either banned or "wayy to broken for Standard" or some other BS reason. Maybe this is the appropriate level of suck to actually sneak its way into Modern.
The way I see it, there are more or less two variations of combo that are viable in modern: Storm based and non storm based. The ones that are not storm based at least have to make an attempt at interaction and playing a fair game. Twin was an example of this as was pod and is Company decks. The mechanic of storm removes a lot of the necessary interaction in a deck. It does its thing and wins or loses based on what the opponent is able to do (if they can interact, they can counteract the combo a likely have a win if they cannot, they lose.) I'm not a combo fan but I have always viewed storm as a problematic mechanic if for no other reason than it has a tendency to break good blue spells. Storm is a legacy mechanic that needs cards like FoW and Daze to keep it in check. Modern doesn't have those kinds of cards and likely never will.
How fair is Dredge? Affinity? Ad Nauseum? Elves? KCI? These are non-storm mechanic combo decks that feature about as much interaction as Storm does.
I am really happy where Modern is right now, where the most dominant deck is <9% of the meta, and it feels like any type of deck can do well, if piloted right.
Honestly, no. But we're at a point where literally everything that could possibly be playable in blue is either banned or "wayy to broken for Standard" or some other BS reason. Maybe this is the appropriate level of suck to actually sneak its way into Modern.
Opt not coming to Modern pretty obviously has nothing to do with its power level. Wizards just hasn't been especially motivated to reprint it for Standard. They have pretty clear ideas of what they want to do in each set and how they shape their limited environments, and their emphasis is clearly on designing new cards. But now that scry is evergreen, I definitely wouldn't rule out the possibility of an Opt reprint in the eventual future. It's probably just a matter of timing for them.
the card itself really isn't worth the card board its printed on...does it serve a purpose? Sure its a blue 1 drop that might not be a 1/1. I would not put it in a list and expect to win a PTQ or GP though.
So Opt is too good. Mana Leak is too good. Fact or Fiction is too good. How exactly do people propose U get new tools in the format if all the cards that have the baseline power to see play are considered too good to see print let alone anything better? So, in essence, by 2020 Ux control decks will be <1% of the meta while OP creatures and green consistency tools will continue to get better and better. Then people scoff at any of the Ux cards coming off the banlist because "new prints" should be the answer. I know it's not the same cross-section of people, but Houston, we have a problem.
We just had revolt and escalate (essentially kicker) as well as cycling and delirium. All of these could have worked to give us something good, but we either received nothing or in the case of Censor absolute garbage (because apparently, Miscalculation is too powerful lmao). So, yeah, theoretically you can design a card that isn't obnoxiously warping (I'm using this as an assumption of argument, not as a statement of fact, because frankly, counterspell is NOT too powerful for standard), but WoTC will never print anything like that in Magic: the Hearthstoning. It's unfortunate really, because they actually made a useful card draw spell with delirium in Scour the Laboratory, but punted with all the above mechanics on a counterspell.
So, theoretical arguments are ***** to me, because it doesn't take into account current realities at Wizards, as well as many of the folks arguments here. Like I said before, if people believe Opt! is too powerful for standard then U is never going to get anything in that design space for use in Modern, so might as well unban Preordain. The same with card draw vis a vis Fact or Fiction (and we couldn't even get an asymmetric Accumulated Knowledge...they had to give Take Inventory sorcery speed, like everything else now-a-days), so give us DTT. Unfortunately, there isn't a good counterspell on the banned list, so the biggest thing control needs to do well we'll never get. Which leads me to the painfully obvious - they keep printing stupid broken creatures in BGx and consistency / tutor effects in Green. It's obnoxious really.
One more thing: they always say that counterspell is hard to balance standard around. I call bs, next time there's a tribal set, print cavern of souls and counterspell in the same set. Or decent discard magic. Or any one of the horde of green fatties that read "cannot be countered". Decent countermagic is seriously not difficult to have regulated in a metagame, it has plenty of well known and carefully studied weaknesses.
Just to piggy-back on that, and I've said it here before, but we practically had Counterspell in Standard just a little over a year ago. Silumgar's Scorn was actual Counterspell in the dragons decks most of the time, and it was completely fine.
Brainstorm
Force of Will
Daze
DTT
Treasure Cruise
Ponder
These are some overpowered or broken piece of cardboard, and it's absolutely right to have them carved in the banlist or to have them never seen the light of the day in modern.
I don't think Daze would be broken in Modern. I'm not even sure it would be all that good.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Modern UBR Grixis Shadow UBR UR Izzet Phoenix UR UW UW Control UW GB GB Rock GB
Commander BG Meren of Clan Nel Toth BG BGUW Atraxa, Praetor's Voice BGUW
Remove storm cards from the format and you can have all the cantrips you want...
Sam Stoddart: "I've heard arguments that cards like Preordain are needed to make control work in Modern, but realistically, they would be much more powerful in combo decks than the control decks. This is one of the risks of having cheap card filtering, and one of the reasons we moved away from doing it in Standard. We print cards like Anticipate, but I don't think we will make another one-mana cantrip with card selection attached to it any time soon. It just doesn't incentivize the kinds of games we want to see play out.
Part of the reason that Ponder and Preordain are banned and Sleight of Hand and Serum Visions aren't, is that the latter two are just weaker and don't do as good of a job of letting people set up their draws quickly. The problem with putting too much card filtering in a format is that it drives too many of the games to play out exactly the same. There is some novelty in this, but I think it is less fun for a format that we want to be highly re-playable.
That's not to say we don't like consistency, it's one of the reasons we put so many dual lands in our sets, but there should be a reasonable tradeoff for consistency. Mana Confluence would be the best land in Standard if it didn't just have that pesky 'lose 1 life' clause on it. If you want a deck that never has color problems, then you can play mono-red. If you want to play a three-color aggressive deck, then you get to play way more powerful spells, at the cost of your life and your lands entering the battlefield tapped and messing up your curve."
For yet another time.....
Sam Stoddard needs to be fired. How is consistency novel? So chess is novel? Really? I think he is only thinking about draft since it's so boring you need variation. But any eternal format has a huge depth of cards that create these fun experiences without randomness.
Cantrips are played for higher consistency. That's it. If cantrips made storm too powerful it's because the answers were too weak. Just look at legacy. You could argue there are too many cantrips. But you can't argue that there isn't a diversity in decks that run these cantrips. Before the miracles ban, Storm was in a terrible place even though it has the best cantrips available to it. Cantrips seem to homogenize formats towards blue. But as long as answers are powerful enough cantrips can be run in answer decks to keep threat decks in check.
Anyways, opt seems silly. Give us FoF, counterspell, or preordain please.
I would love counterspell or FoF but your totally correct unless they bring back the core set in the style of 8th edition(none of that M10 lets print all new cards in the core set too stuff) those cards are never seeing standard play again.
Honestly, I think the best thing they could do for Modern is allow supplemental sets to be legal. Let it run free for at least one ban cycle, then ban things accordingly if anything was breaking the turn 4 rule or held an oppressive meta share. It solves so many problems that otherwise will never be properly dealt with because cards have to go through Standard.
Core sets seem to be coming back in some shape or form so it may not be all that unlikely.
Yeah I had seen that "what should we call it" thing, I'll believe it when its official. I've been advocating the return of the core set for a long time. Notice how standard has spiraled out of control more frequently since they have abandoned it. If I remember correct the "what should we call it" was floating a 2019 date which is far off if it does come.
Honestly, I think the best thing they could do for Modern is allow supplemental sets to be legal. Let it run free for at least one ban cycle, then ban things accordingly if anything was breaking the turn 4 rule or held an oppressive meta share. It solves so many problems that otherwise will never be properly dealt with because cards have to go through Standard.
Supplementary Sets will make a lot of bannings happen in Modern, I am sure of it. It's a good idea ONLY if they are to design them speicifically for modern. They can't just unleash True-Name Nemesis, Shardless Agents, Leovold, Emissary of Trests and that stuff into Modern. That said, a supplementary set NOT designed specifically for Modern is pretty dangerous. Difference with Legacy, Commander and Vintage is that those kind of formats have the tools to withstand such broken prints.
That's what they are afraid of and rightly so. That's what you say as well. Release a set and ban 5 cards out of it, if need be. Modern is a serious format in their eyes and they can ban 5 cards if it's needed after having banned 4 cards in Standard, 2 in Vintage, so many cards in Online Commander, 1 card in Legacy and 1 in Pauper earlier and probably on the road to banning a 5th one(Aetherworks Marvel).
So we can't have powerful cards because we don't have the tools to deal with them, but we won't ever GET the tools to deal with them because cards needs to come from Standard, and everything that would be remotely playable as a tool or answer in Modern would totally break Standard. So what exactly is our solution then? Continue down the road we've been on? Ban every best deck every time until all that's left are a bunch of high variance aggro/midrange decks and 80/20 decks that lose to themselves? Because that's basically where we're at.
Core sets seem to be coming back in some shape or form so it may not be all that unlikely.
Yeah I had seen that "what should we call it" thing, I'll believe it when its official. I've been advocating the return of the core set for a long time. Notice how standard has spiraled out of control more frequently since they have abandoned it. If I remember correct the "what should we call it" was floating a 2019 date which is far off if it does come.
the card itself really isn't worth the card board its printed on...does it serve a purpose? Sure its a blue 1 drop that might not be a 1/1. I would not put it in a list and expect to win a PTQ or GP though.
Honestly, I think the best thing they could do for Modern is allow supplemental sets to be legal. Let it run free for at least one ban cycle, then ban things accordingly if anything was breaking the turn 4 rule or held an oppressive meta share. It solves so many problems that otherwise will never be properly dealt with because cards have to go through Standard.
Supplementary Sets will make a lot of bannings happen in Modern, I am sure of it. It's a good idea ONLY if they are to design them speicifically for modern. They can't just unleash True-Name Nemesis, Shardless Agents, Leovold, Emissary of Trests and that stuff into Modern. That said, a supplementary set NOT designed specifically for Modern is pretty dangerous. Difference with Legacy, Commander and Vintage is that those kind of formats have the tools to withstand such broken prints.
That's what they are afraid of and rightly so. That's what you say as well. Release a set and ban 5 cards out of it, if need be. Modern is a serious format in their eyes and they can ban 5 cards if it's needed after having banned 4 cards in Standard, 2 in Vintage, so many cards in Online Commander, 1 card in Legacy and 1 in Pauper earlier and probably on the road to banning a 5th one(Aetherworks Marvel).
So we can't have powerful cards because we don't have the tools to deal with them, but we won't ever GET the tools to deal with them because cards needs to come from Standard, and everything that would be remotely playable as a tool or answer in Modern would totally break Standard. So what exactly is our solution then? Continue down the road we've been on? Ban every best deck every time until all that's left are a bunch of high variance aggro/midrange decks and 80/20 decks that lose to themselves? Because that's basically where we're at.
I only expect them to design one card per set for Modern, maybe even zero. So, maybe something slips through them(hopefully an answer this time)
That's a pretty piss-poor track record then. Looking at MTG Top 8 over all of 2017 so far (1/1/2017-5/17/2017, all Modern events, Professional, Major, Competitive, Regular), this is how many decks are running those cards, respectively:
So... Fatal Push is amazing, Harbinger sees play in Merfolk, Narnam in a few random Zoo decks, and literally nothing of value from anything else. Wizards is terrible at designing cards for eternal formats and cards only become staples if they were accidents or mistakes.
So I guess that answers my question, we continue down the same path until they make some more accidents and mistakes that finagle their way into Modern.
People have ridiculous demands. Wizards said that Modern will only be getting new cards via Standard. Fact Or Fiction, (maybe) Opt, Counterspell without disadvantage are some examples that you need to get away from.
Hang on. Opt is not too strong for Standard (in general). It was in Magic Origins for a while, but it was too good in their FFL-testing that had a Jeskai-tokens deck as being one of the best (Jeskai Ascendancy, Monastery Mentor, etc.), so they concluded that "[then] was not the time for it". I doubt things have changed that much since then.
People have ridiculous demands. Wizards said that Modern will only be getting new cards via Standard. Fact Or Fiction, (maybe) Opt, Counterspell without disadvantage are some examples that you need to get away from.
Hang on. Opt is not too strong for Standard (in general). It was in Magic Origins for a while, but it was too good in their FFL-testing that had a Jeskai-tokens deck as being one of the best (Jeskai Ascendancy, Monastery Mentor, etc.), so they concluded that "[then] was not the time for it". I doubt things have changed that much since then.
This just highlights how awful and useless the FFL "testing" is. Jeskai Tokens became completely unplayable after Dromoka's Command was printed in DTK. I played that deck exclusively through THS/KTK Standard before switching to Esper Dragons (which, itself became unplayable after Abzan started main-decking Crackling Doom), and the deck struggled against even basic green creature decks, never mind Abzan powerhouses with or without Command. Considering Origins came out after DTK, they should have known that Siege Rhino.dec would be packing the most powerful Standard-legal modal card in quite a long time and that Jeskai Tokens decks fell to pieces without Jeskai Ascendancy in play. Their fear of spells and spell-based decks has absolutely no basis in reality, but perfectly explains why most spells are either horrendously over-costed, underpowered, downgraded to Sorcery, or modal to make up for being over-costed and individually underpowered. We will not be getting playable cheap blue spells for years.
Focus on the card not the people.
Please be respectful and stay on topic.
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Please review the original post if you need a refresher of the thread rules
Ulka
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.
I wish they had the balls to do this. They don't seem to have any problem killing one deck for the "greater good," might as well be the one that is actually holding back our ability to draw cards or protect things. I can only hope that better blue cards are on the horizon, even things as simple as an Opt reprint or a playable, universal-but-relatively-meaningless-downside 1cmc counterspell.
UR ....... WUBR ........... WB ............. RGW ........ UBR ....... WUB .... BGU
Spells / Blink & Combo / Token Grind / Dino Tribal / Draw Cards / Zombies / Reanimate
Then FFS they should at least give us Opt. They clearly don't give a crap about printing creatures that break the format, so it's sickening to hear over and over about how these card draw or permission spells would ruin Modern or something.
UR ....... WUBR ........... WB ............. RGW ........ UBR ....... WUB .... BGU
Spells / Blink & Combo / Token Grind / Dino Tribal / Draw Cards / Zombies / Reanimate
RGTron
UGInfect
URStorm
WUBRAd Nauseam
BRGrishoalbrand
URGScapeshift
WBGAbzan Company
WUBRGAmulet Titan
BRGLiving End
WGBogles
Edit: Consolidating my sarcasm
Let's not forget how broken Ad Nauseam would be with the ability to worse sleight of hand at instant speed.
UW Ephara Hatebears [Primer], GB Gitrog Lands, BRU Inalla Combo-Control, URG Maelstrom Wanderer Landfall
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.
Honestly, no. But we're at a point where literally everything that could possibly be playable in blue is either banned or "wayy to broken for Standard" or some other BS reason. Maybe this is the appropriate level of suck to actually sneak its way into Modern.
UR ....... WUBR ........... WB ............. RGW ........ UBR ....... WUB .... BGU
Spells / Blink & Combo / Token Grind / Dino Tribal / Draw Cards / Zombies / Reanimate
How fair is Dredge? Affinity? Ad Nauseum? Elves? KCI? These are non-storm mechanic combo decks that feature about as much interaction as Storm does.
I am really happy where Modern is right now, where the most dominant deck is <9% of the meta, and it feels like any type of deck can do well, if piloted right.
My H/W list
P.S. Opt sucks; Serum Visions is 10000x better
Counter-Cat
Colorless Eldrazi Stompy
We just had revolt and escalate (essentially kicker) as well as cycling and delirium. All of these could have worked to give us something good, but we either received nothing or in the case of Censor absolute garbage (because apparently, Miscalculation is too powerful lmao). So, yeah, theoretically you can design a card that isn't obnoxiously warping (I'm using this as an assumption of argument, not as a statement of fact, because frankly, counterspell is NOT too powerful for standard), but WoTC will never print anything like that in Magic: the Hearthstoning. It's unfortunate really, because they actually made a useful card draw spell with delirium in Scour the Laboratory, but punted with all the above mechanics on a counterspell.
So, theoretical arguments are ***** to me, because it doesn't take into account current realities at Wizards, as well as many of the folks arguments here. Like I said before, if people believe Opt! is too powerful for standard then U is never going to get anything in that design space for use in Modern, so might as well unban Preordain. The same with card draw vis a vis Fact or Fiction (and we couldn't even get an asymmetric Accumulated Knowledge...they had to give Take Inventory sorcery speed, like everything else now-a-days), so give us DTT. Unfortunately, there isn't a good counterspell on the banned list, so the biggest thing control needs to do well we'll never get. Which leads me to the painfully obvious - they keep printing stupid broken creatures in BGx and consistency / tutor effects in Green. It's obnoxious really.
I don't think Daze would be broken in Modern. I'm not even sure it would be all that good.
UBR Grixis Shadow UBR
UR Izzet Phoenix UR
UW UW Control UW
GB GB Rock GB
Commander
BG Meren of Clan Nel Toth BG
BGUW Atraxa, Praetor's Voice BGUW
Before Eldrazi we usually had Jund, Abzan, Twin and sometimes Grixis control as interactive tier 1 decks.
So what's so great about the current meta? At least in terms of interactive decks I'm just not seeing it.
Sam Stoddard needs to be fired. How is consistency novel? So chess is novel? Really? I think he is only thinking about draft since it's so boring you need variation. But any eternal format has a huge depth of cards that create these fun experiences without randomness.
Cantrips are played for higher consistency. That's it. If cantrips made storm too powerful it's because the answers were too weak. Just look at legacy. You could argue there are too many cantrips. But you can't argue that there isn't a diversity in decks that run these cantrips. Before the miracles ban, Storm was in a terrible place even though it has the best cantrips available to it. Cantrips seem to homogenize formats towards blue. But as long as answers are powerful enough cantrips can be run in answer decks to keep threat decks in check.
Anyways, opt seems silly. Give us FoF, counterspell, or preordain please.
I would love counterspell or FoF but your totally correct unless they bring back the core set in the style of 8th edition(none of that M10 lets print all new cards in the core set too stuff) those cards are never seeing standard play again.
UR ....... WUBR ........... WB ............. RGW ........ UBR ....... WUB .... BGU
Spells / Blink & Combo / Token Grind / Dino Tribal / Draw Cards / Zombies / Reanimate
Yeah I had seen that "what should we call it" thing, I'll believe it when its official. I've been advocating the return of the core set for a long time. Notice how standard has spiraled out of control more frequently since they have abandoned it. If I remember correct the "what should we call it" was floating a 2019 date which is far off if it does come.
So we can't have powerful cards because we don't have the tools to deal with them, but we won't ever GET the tools to deal with them because cards needs to come from Standard, and everything that would be remotely playable as a tool or answer in Modern would totally break Standard. So what exactly is our solution then? Continue down the road we've been on? Ban every best deck every time until all that's left are a bunch of high variance aggro/midrange decks and 80/20 decks that lose to themselves? Because that's basically where we're at.
UR ....... WUBR ........... WB ............. RGW ........ UBR ....... WUB .... BGU
Spells / Blink & Combo / Token Grind / Dino Tribal / Draw Cards / Zombies / Reanimate
Counter-Cat
Colorless Eldrazi Stompy
That's a pretty piss-poor track record then. Looking at MTG Top 8 over all of 2017 so far (1/1/2017-5/17/2017, all Modern events, Professional, Major, Competitive, Regular), this is how many decks are running those cards, respectively:
Goblin Piledriver - 1
Harbinger Of The Tides - 49
Rending Volley - 0
Fatal Push - 489
Narnam Renegade - 23
Greenwheel Liberator - 4
Scrap Trawler - 5
Whir Of Invention - 1
So... Fatal Push is amazing, Harbinger sees play in Merfolk, Narnam in a few random Zoo decks, and literally nothing of value from anything else. Wizards is terrible at designing cards for eternal formats and cards only become staples if they were accidents or mistakes.
So I guess that answers my question, we continue down the same path until they make some more accidents and mistakes that finagle their way into Modern.
UR ....... WUBR ........... WB ............. RGW ........ UBR ....... WUB .... BGU
Spells / Blink & Combo / Token Grind / Dino Tribal / Draw Cards / Zombies / Reanimate
Hang on. Opt is not too strong for Standard (in general). It was in Magic Origins for a while, but it was too good in their FFL-testing that had a Jeskai-tokens deck as being one of the best (Jeskai Ascendancy, Monastery Mentor, etc.), so they concluded that "[then] was not the time for it". I doubt things have changed that much since then.
Cubetutor Peasant'ish-Funbox
Project: Khans of Tarkir Cube (cubetutor)
This just highlights how awful and useless the FFL "testing" is. Jeskai Tokens became completely unplayable after Dromoka's Command was printed in DTK. I played that deck exclusively through THS/KTK Standard before switching to Esper Dragons (which, itself became unplayable after Abzan started main-decking Crackling Doom), and the deck struggled against even basic green creature decks, never mind Abzan powerhouses with or without Command. Considering Origins came out after DTK, they should have known that Siege Rhino.dec would be packing the most powerful Standard-legal modal card in quite a long time and that Jeskai Tokens decks fell to pieces without Jeskai Ascendancy in play. Their fear of spells and spell-based decks has absolutely no basis in reality, but perfectly explains why most spells are either horrendously over-costed, underpowered, downgraded to Sorcery, or modal to make up for being over-costed and individually underpowered. We will not be getting playable cheap blue spells for years.
UR ....... WUBR ........... WB ............. RGW ........ UBR ....... WUB .... BGU
Spells / Blink & Combo / Token Grind / Dino Tribal / Draw Cards / Zombies / Reanimate