Go ask on the ET forum if ET is prey to GDS. Seriously.
why would i ask 20 biased people when i can instead rely on actual data?
I don't have data from >100 games, but I can easily tell you that I would rather play Grixis Shadow than any control or midrange deck when I am up against Eldra Tron. (matchup seems about even to me, though and if they go turn 1 relic of progenitus life is very hard)
Edit: you are both kind of right.
Eldra Tron pushes people away from playing Control or Midrange decks and into playing Shadow, because it's better vs it than playing any other control or midrange deck. That's the reason why Eldrazi Temple should be hit, since it warps the format that way.
But the matchup still is about even.
I have no doubt in my mind that temple should be banned, but if its hit without death shadow wouldn't death shadow dominate even more?
I almost feel like they would both have to go.
Grixis Shadow is a prey to all of the fair decks. It gives you a reason to play Control and Midrange fair decks. If Shadow gets hit, people will have even less reason to run those decks(tbh, it's nearly pointless to play fair in Modern atm if you want to win)
Also, the deck is not putting that much numbers, according to the latest Modern Challengs and honestly, it is not as good as people claim it is.
It has the old Splinter Twin effect without being a combo. It's a check and a great deck to have.
its not so much death shadows effect on "healthiness" wizards would look at unfortunately though. I think they more or less look at its 15.7% metashare.
The meta is very diverse, even if there are other problems there.
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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)
its not so much death shadows effect on "healthiness" wizards would look at unfortunately though. I think they more or less look at its 15.7% metashare.
GDS is about 1/3 of that. No deck right now takes up more than 7% of the meta. Meta is currently unreasonably balanced.
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More realism!
Time Walk 1U: Win target game.
Demonic Tutor 1B: Add a time walk to your hand.
its not so much death shadows effect on "healthiness" wizards would look at unfortunately though. I think they more or less look at its 15.7% metashare.
GDS is about 1/3 of that. No deck right now takes up more than 7% of the meta. Meta is currently unreasonably balanced.
The meta is very diverse, even if there are other problems there.
I don't know where that comes from, but I'd advice against using mtggoldfish. It's unreliable, at best. Besides that, we should be looking at the GP Top8 numbers anyway. Last time I checked, Shadow wasn't close to bannable numbers.
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Modern:WU WU Control | WBG Abzan Company Frontier:UBR Grixis Control | BRG Jund Delirium
To reiterate, the fact that the Pro Tour is only partially Modern or of a small size don't matter whatsoever. What matters is that people will want to play what the pros play, which has an enormous ripple effect on the format.
I don't know about that. Except for Pro Tour Eldrazi, Modern Pro Tours have actually not been particularly good predictors of the overall metagame that followed them--and in the cases where they were, they were just as "predictive" of the metagame that preceded them, i.e. the Pro Tour metagame followed the already existing metagame rather than establishing it.
Or to put it in another way: Decks that did well at Modern Pro Tours were either already big decks (one can't really blame the Pro Tour for making people run decks they were already running) or were just blips on the screen that basically fell off after the Pro Tour. I can't really think of any time the Modern Pro Tours suddenly catapulted a previously unknown or disregarded into prominence except for Eldrazi... and let's be honest, that deck was so bonkers that it would've overtaken the metagame even if not for the Pro Tour (might have taken a little longer for people to put it together and refine it, but it would've happened).
Grixis can easy put away 1-2 push and take tec edge instead, why they dont use it? Because it seems titanshift and eldratron dont warp enough like twin and eldrazi in our eldrazi winter. By the way guys, diamember is great against eldrazi....dont be so greedy for push and path, use them now and stop crying.
That's an interesting idea, but is running two Tec Edge actually good against Eldrazi Tron? It doesn't turn on until the Eldrazi player hits their fourth land drop, which they don't really need to start going big. If they have Tron online on turn 3, or just play a couple of Eldrazi Temples and any third land, they are probably happy.
I'm assuming you are talking about Grixis Shadow (not Control), which actually doesn't have that much use for colourless mana, making the mana producing part of Tec Edge kind of bad. I do like the idea of cutting a spell for Tec Edge though, given that it won't do much as a land.
I can see Tec Edge being somewhat good against Titanshift though. It basically counters a ramp spell, and can theoretically blow up a Valakut.
In general, I think if you want to cut some removal for land destruction, it would be a better idea to run something like Stone Rain, or even Spreading Seas. I have no idea if that is what Shadow players should be doing though, given that I don't know much about those matchups, and Shadow could always try racing instead of running interaction with lands.
Edit: I do love Dismember against Eldrazi though. Definitely agree that it's good against them.
Grixis can easy put away 1-2 push and take tec edge instead, why they dont use it? Because it seems titanshift and eldratron dont warp enough like twin and eldrazi in our eldrazi winter. By the way guys, diamember is great against eldrazi....dont be so greedy for push and path, use them now and stop crying.
Is this satire? It seems like you're missing a lot here. GDS has almost no use for colorless mana, turn 4 is too slow to really affect Titanshift/Etron, it's not GDS pilots complaining about ramp, etc. It's a fairly even match-up where GDS' best chance is to disrupt with discard then race.
We know that Wizards looks both. And we may have lost half of the 5-0 competitive leagues, but we gained Modern Challenges full top-40 data instead. So, that's not a net negative. From those Modern Challenges, we can deduce Grixis Shadow is not even a big player.
It's almost certainly is a net negative. Modern Challenges are a less representative data source -- they're limited to players who are available to play X matches in a row starting at a given time. That's a narrower sample than most people realize. A daily randomly chosen 10 is more valuable than a weekly chosen 40 that comes with more limitations on availability.
That said, I agree with your conclusion. GDS has been falling in popularity (at least on MTGO) for the last month plus. People seem to have moved away from it once the metagame adjusted to its spike in popularity.
Why satire? Because eldrazi is not the bogeyman maybe? Because titanshift is not worth using tec edge? Why the hell people cry of this matchups, when they say: "no use for colorless mana"? By the way, it is very good against uw too. Come on guys, take your tec edge main and side, or put your spreading seas and all other sort of landdestruction in your deck if you really think you cannot beat them. I have in each deck in my 75 cards 4 tec edge...never need to cry. Now go on and watch sideboards all of this people crying....what will you see? They dont use this cards even they hate big mana decks! They know about titanshift, uw and eldrazi...but they say: "is this satire? Why should i play them?" 2 tec edge main, 2 side..and winning increase. If you put 2 dismember too, 10%. Try it! But stop talking bannings temple, if you think:" i dont need it". P.S mnesci i like tec edge, because inquisition and counter and thought knot seer. They cannot remove it. Better for my playstyle then other landdestruction
My favorite part of this is that you edited it and it's still incomprehensible. Tectonic Edge is awful versus Titanshift/Tron variants.
Yep. Grixis Shadow is at about 5.28% of the meta, also is nowhere to be seen at those Modern Challenges. Deck is completely fine, not only because of the numbers, but also because it has many bad matchups.
It really comes down to which data Wizard has, and which data they take in consideration. If they look mostly at mtgo presence we really don't have reliable data, so we can't guess. If they consider gp's/open top8/16, gds and eldrazi tron are head and shoulder above the rest of the meta.
And if i'm not mistaken one of the reason splinter twin was banned, was its numbers in the gps/pt tops.
We know that Wizards looks both. And we may have lost half of the 5-0 competitive leagues, but we gained Modern Challenges full top-40 data instead. So, that's not a net negative. From those Modern Challenges, we can deduce Grixis Shadow is not even a big player.
Those are only a set of various sets of datas: we have gps, opens, modern challenge and leagues . We mostly don't have datas from the leagues, and we don't know which performance wizard weight the most: the online results or the paper ones.
I agree on the Felidar subject. MODO data was the nail in the coffin, but the card wouldn't have been banned at that time without them, so it shows Wizards cares A LOT about those numbers.
I highly, highly, disagree with this assessment. It reeks of a corporate decision to *not* ban something after salting the earth at the previous ban announcement, and then backpedaling from the MASSIVE backlash from players, pros, writers, etc.
On the surface, they could SAY that 2 days of MODO data was the reason. But either that's true, and is terrifying how big decisions are made on essentially no meaningful data, or is false, and a cover story for yet another blunder on the part of their executive decision team.
What I disagree with is using this example as proof of significance of MTGO data, when it was likely a surface level explanation. 2 days of data is laughably meaningless, especially when given the untuned lists everyone was playing with and overall lack of availability of new cards. If they ACTUALLY DID rely on 2 days of data, then that is terrifying. The decision was likely made to ban it due to the last several months of data, but was vetoed by some high-up exec who didn't want more bad ban press. Instead, there was a massive backlash over NOT banning it, so they made up some silly reason to justify only the second emergency ban ever.
Announcing a ban after 2 days of MTGO data is wildly irresponsible and a terrifying prospect. To make such an important information with data that is almost entirely irrelevant (due to lack of card ability, crafting and tuning of lists to fight it, seeing how the metagame adjusts with new cards, etc) is dangerous and chaotic. It's yet another ban decision in a long list of ban decisions that look like darts thrown at a board. Ham-fisted, haphazard, and sloppy decision making, based on sketchy, vague, or lazy reasoning.
I agree, MTGO data is important and Wizards values it very much. But if you wan an example of this, perhaps the complete redaction of any meaningful MTGO data to the public would be a better example (they think the info is SO impotant, that only THEY can have it). The Felidar Guardian ban may appear to show this on the surface, but critically thinking about their decision leads to nothing but terrible reasoning, no matter what their intentions were.
Wizards takes mtgo results into account and that's the main reason they banned seathing song in the first place.
Now storm is comboing again turn3 too often. The "funny" part is that even if you kill their bear the same turn they play it, they still combo off since all their spells are instant so they combo with your removal on the stack.
Past in flames is probably getting banned next month (hope that's enough to nerf the deck). That, or the storm cards themselves.
I've been comboed instant speed several times. Of course they can't pif instant speed, they do that after the removal resolves, but by then they already got lots of free mana thanks to the bear.
Man, I'm talking about dropping the bear and THEN comboing, on the same turn.
Of course everyone is going to kill the bear the same turn it drops if they have removal to do so. But ever since they got the redundant bear, they can access the bears too easily.
If the storm player plays a Baral turn 3, then plays a Pyretic Ritual, and with that on the stack you kill the baral, they can't win unless they manamorphose into double blue, play a second baral, ritual twice, cast past in flames from the hand, then have a gifts to play off of the flashed back rituals....and I think that's the only way out. If you are running into that repeatedly, your opponent is stacking the deck.
Storm is tier 1 right now almost as much because it's so damn cheap as anything else. A lot of people, myself included, wanted a pretty good deck that only costs like $300 to build and storm fits that mold. It's vulnerable to removal, vulnerable to graveyard hate, plus storm specific hosers like Eidolon of Rhetoric. I'm telling you, if it cost $900 to build it wouldn't have so large a playerbase, and that large sample size increases the odds of particular players doing well in any large event.
It's yet another ban decision in a long list of ban decisions that look like darts thrown at a board. Ham-fisted, haphazard, and sloppy decision making, based on sketchy, vague, or lazy reasoning.
Nothing about what I wrote has anything to do with perceived "success" or lack of success. It has everything to do with the choices, reasoning, and justifications. If someone does something stupid, for stupid reasons, that make little sense, but it happens to sort of work out (which is still not universally agreed upon), then that's dumb luck, not something to be praised. We've also talked at length about Probe multiple times, and it's not worth bringing up the specifics again.
I agree that banning Felidar Guardian was the correct call. I also believe it was probably one of the worst handled situations in contemporary times for the game, and likely shows the impact Hasbro executives are having on trying to manage Wizards from a corporate perspective (in addition to the constant pumping out of Masters sets).
It's worth bringing up Probe specifics if you're going to make an argument that is directly contradicted by those specifics...
You can reference the multiple posts already made about Probe by a number of individuals over several pages of discussion several pages ago. I no longer have the time nor energy to continually repeat myself over and over like some other posters still do.
Reading between the lines, it sounds like either street wraith or eldrazi temple gets a ban. My gut says temple gets a pass though and the wraith goes. Just my guess. Storm is annoying but oddly I started to miss it after the seething song ban. We need good combo decks in the format anyways.
Reading between the lines, it sounds like either street wraith or eldrazi temple gets a ban. My gut says temple gets a pass though and the wraith goes. Just my guess. Storm is annoying but oddly I started to miss it after the seething song ban. We need good combo decks in the format anyways.
Except a wraith ban makes no sense because the deck in question is entirely fair. It's not even dominant anymore. Grixis Shadow is just another good deck. At least Temple I understand because E-tron kills off a lot of other decks. Part of the Grixis Shadow hysteria is this idea of color combination diversity, which is the only way I can describe it from reading this thread. Some individuals seem to be under the impression that every guild/shard/clan color combo should be viable in modern, and by viable I mean tier 1 or 2. This is an absolute pipe dream. Even with a card pool as large as modern's, inevitably optimal combinations will be found. Hell Shadow midrange itself started as jund until people realized grixis was just fundamentally better.
I almost only want to see a BBE unban now to see if the junders finally stop complaining as I sit there across a table waiting to die on turn 14 having discarded my entire hand and had whatever I put into play blown up. Oh gee, that's fun.
Well people were saying grixis shadow was seeing heavy play in large paper tournaments so I thought maybe it's a problem or something. On second thought, eldrazi temple is pretty odd in a format where chrome mox and artifact lands are banned.
Well people were saying grixis shadow was seeing heavy play in large paper tournaments so I thought maybe it's a problem or something. On second thought, eldrazi temple is pretty odd in a format where chrome mox and artifact lands are banned.
For a little while it was way up, but the meta adjusted. The deck is very good, but by no means dominant now. In fact, it's arguably the top deck policing combo like Storm and Devoted Druid.
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decks playing:
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https://www.mtggoldfish.com/metagame/modern#paper
The meta is very diverse, even if there are other problems there.
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)GDS is about 1/3 of that. No deck right now takes up more than 7% of the meta. Meta is currently unreasonably balanced.
Time Walk 1U: Win target game.
Demonic Tutor 1B: Add a time walk to your hand.
how do you know? where do you get your stats
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Frontier: UBR Grixis Control | BRG Jund Delirium
Or to put it in another way: Decks that did well at Modern Pro Tours were either already big decks (one can't really blame the Pro Tour for making people run decks they were already running) or were just blips on the screen that basically fell off after the Pro Tour. I can't really think of any time the Modern Pro Tours suddenly catapulted a previously unknown or disregarded into prominence except for Eldrazi... and let's be honest, that deck was so bonkers that it would've overtaken the metagame even if not for the Pro Tour (might have taken a little longer for people to put it together and refine it, but it would've happened).
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That's an interesting idea, but is running two Tec Edge actually good against Eldrazi Tron? It doesn't turn on until the Eldrazi player hits their fourth land drop, which they don't really need to start going big. If they have Tron online on turn 3, or just play a couple of Eldrazi Temples and any third land, they are probably happy.
I'm assuming you are talking about Grixis Shadow (not Control), which actually doesn't have that much use for colourless mana, making the mana producing part of Tec Edge kind of bad. I do like the idea of cutting a spell for Tec Edge though, given that it won't do much as a land.
I can see Tec Edge being somewhat good against Titanshift though. It basically counters a ramp spell, and can theoretically blow up a Valakut.
In general, I think if you want to cut some removal for land destruction, it would be a better idea to run something like Stone Rain, or even Spreading Seas. I have no idea if that is what Shadow players should be doing though, given that I don't know much about those matchups, and Shadow could always try racing instead of running interaction with lands.
Edit: I do love Dismember against Eldrazi though. Definitely agree that it's good against them.
Interested in RUG (Temur) Delver in Modern? Find gameplay with live commentary at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8UcKe8jVh1e2N4CHbd3fhg
Is this satire? It seems like you're missing a lot here. GDS has almost no use for colorless mana, turn 4 is too slow to really affect Titanshift/Etron, it's not GDS pilots complaining about ramp, etc. It's a fairly even match-up where GDS' best chance is to disrupt with discard then race.
It's almost certainly is a net negative. Modern Challenges are a less representative data source -- they're limited to players who are available to play X matches in a row starting at a given time. That's a narrower sample than most people realize. A daily randomly chosen 10 is more valuable than a weekly chosen 40 that comes with more limitations on availability.
That said, I agree with your conclusion. GDS has been falling in popularity (at least on MTGO) for the last month plus. People seem to have moved away from it once the metagame adjusted to its spike in popularity.
My favorite part of this is that you edited it and it's still incomprehensible. Tectonic Edge is awful versus Titanshift/Tron variants.
I highly, highly, disagree with this assessment. It reeks of a corporate decision to *not* ban something after salting the earth at the previous ban announcement, and then backpedaling from the MASSIVE backlash from players, pros, writers, etc.
On the surface, they could SAY that 2 days of MODO data was the reason. But either that's true, and is terrifying how big decisions are made on essentially no meaningful data, or is false, and a cover story for yet another blunder on the part of their executive decision team.
A lot of this is covered in an excellent Goldfish article here: https://www.mtggoldfish.com/articles/the-good-and-bad-of-b-r-week
I'm sure Wizards cares deeply about MTGO data, but to use Felidar Guardian as an example feels like it removes all credibility from the argument.
UR ....... WUBR ........... WB ............. RGW ........ UBR ....... WUB .... BGU
Spells / Blink & Combo / Token Grind / Dino Tribal / Draw Cards / Zombies / Reanimate
UR ....... WUBR ........... WB ............. RGW ........ UBR ....... WUB .... BGU
Spells / Blink & Combo / Token Grind / Dino Tribal / Draw Cards / Zombies / Reanimate
I agree, MTGO data is important and Wizards values it very much. But if you wan an example of this, perhaps the complete redaction of any meaningful MTGO data to the public would be a better example (they think the info is SO impotant, that only THEY can have it). The Felidar Guardian ban may appear to show this on the surface, but critically thinking about their decision leads to nothing but terrible reasoning, no matter what their intentions were.
UR ....... WUBR ........... WB ............. RGW ........ UBR ....... WUB .... BGU
Spells / Blink & Combo / Token Grind / Dino Tribal / Draw Cards / Zombies / Reanimate
Now storm is comboing again turn3 too often. The "funny" part is that even if you kill their bear the same turn they play it, they still combo off since all their spells are instant so they combo with your removal on the stack.
Past in flames is probably getting banned next month (hope that's enough to nerf the deck). That, or the storm cards themselves.
Of course everyone is going to kill the bear the same turn it drops if they have removal to do so. But ever since they got the redundant bear, they can access the bears too easily.
Storm is tier 1 right now almost as much because it's so damn cheap as anything else. A lot of people, myself included, wanted a pretty good deck that only costs like $300 to build and storm fits that mold. It's vulnerable to removal, vulnerable to graveyard hate, plus storm specific hosers like Eidolon of Rhetoric. I'm telling you, if it cost $900 to build it wouldn't have so large a playerbase, and that large sample size increases the odds of particular players doing well in any large event.
Nothing about what I wrote has anything to do with perceived "success" or lack of success. It has everything to do with the choices, reasoning, and justifications. If someone does something stupid, for stupid reasons, that make little sense, but it happens to sort of work out (which is still not universally agreed upon), then that's dumb luck, not something to be praised. We've also talked at length about Probe multiple times, and it's not worth bringing up the specifics again.
I agree that banning Felidar Guardian was the correct call. I also believe it was probably one of the worst handled situations in contemporary times for the game, and likely shows the impact Hasbro executives are having on trying to manage Wizards from a corporate perspective (in addition to the constant pumping out of Masters sets).
UR ....... WUBR ........... WB ............. RGW ........ UBR ....... WUB .... BGU
Spells / Blink & Combo / Token Grind / Dino Tribal / Draw Cards / Zombies / Reanimate
You can reference the multiple posts already made about Probe by a number of individuals over several pages of discussion several pages ago. I no longer have the time nor energy to continually repeat myself over and over like some other posters still do.
UR ....... WUBR ........... WB ............. RGW ........ UBR ....... WUB .... BGU
Spells / Blink & Combo / Token Grind / Dino Tribal / Draw Cards / Zombies / Reanimate
Except a wraith ban makes no sense because the deck in question is entirely fair. It's not even dominant anymore. Grixis Shadow is just another good deck. At least Temple I understand because E-tron kills off a lot of other decks. Part of the Grixis Shadow hysteria is this idea of color combination diversity, which is the only way I can describe it from reading this thread. Some individuals seem to be under the impression that every guild/shard/clan color combo should be viable in modern, and by viable I mean tier 1 or 2. This is an absolute pipe dream. Even with a card pool as large as modern's, inevitably optimal combinations will be found. Hell Shadow midrange itself started as jund until people realized grixis was just fundamentally better.
I almost only want to see a BBE unban now to see if the junders finally stop complaining as I sit there across a table waiting to die on turn 14 having discarded my entire hand and had whatever I put into play blown up. Oh gee, that's fun.
For a little while it was way up, but the meta adjusted. The deck is very good, but by no means dominant now. In fact, it's arguably the top deck policing combo like Storm and Devoted Druid.