Ross's list from the open is looking real slick. Currently I'm on Jeskai control, but I've noticed a lot of people at my LGS running close to the same list. Do you all think a list like Ross's is well positioned against the meta, and not just against other control decks, because I'm considering switching up to it for a bit, or would it be best to stick to Jeskai?
While I’m very pleased to see fair decks like Mardu Pyro, Jeskai, and Jund putting up strong results, I have an unusual complaint: it seems like it’s hard to play a strong, fair deck these days that isn’t red!
Biased? Absolutely. Red is far and away my least favorite color, and I also recognize that there isn’t necessarily anything inherently good or desirable about achieving parity of color representation in a format. Still, it’s starting to seem like there are fewer and fewer reasons not to play red.
Faithless Looting’s full power is starting to be realized, and IMO it’s starting to form something of an unholy trinity with Lightning Bolt and Blood Moon. In Looting, you have a card that people are calling “Modern’s Brainstorm”, equal parts card selection and combo/advantage enabler. In Moon, you have Modern’s most widely applicable “I win” button, and the opportunity cost of running it has never been lower with card selection so strong in red decks. Finally, there’s Bolt, which quite simply has the immense power of being a top-tier removal spell that’s never dead.
Let me be absolutely clear that none of this is a problem. What’s missing, I would contend, is a compelling reason not to be doing some or all of those things in a control or midrange deck. Enter Stoneforge Mystic.
Which decks does SFM benefit most? Two-colored (or mono-colored in the case of D&T), non-red, fair decks. It lines up well against the hyperaggro decks that rule the roost without coming anywhere near to invalidating them. Again, I freely admit to bias here. I play UW control and also have been working on brewing and testing the best shell for Orzhov Stoneblade in Modern, in order to be ready when her (hopefully inevitable) unban takes place.
Anyway, apologies for preaching to the choir; I haven’t seen anyone here suggest that SFM should remain on the ban list. It’s just that the case for her release seems to grow stronger and stronger with each passing day.
Ross's list from the open is looking real slick. Currently I'm on Jeskai control, but I've noticed a lot of people at my LGS running close to the same list. Do you all think a list like Ross's is well positioned against the meta, and not just against other control decks, because I'm considering switching up to it for a bit, or would it be best to stick to Jeskai?
how good blue moon is at any point in time is largely contingent on whether blood moon is well positioned. both against other decks, and a better mana base so you are less soft to land disruption. you give some ground against aggressive decks, sideboard depth, and access to better planeswalkers. humans and affinity are still good matchups, hollow one less so. spell based combo should be around the same, heavy 3 color midrange and control goes up, and big mana is clearly better.
Well how good was Jeskai before THOD? Before JTMS?
Might be a short term spike will see if Teferi can sustain this charge for Jeskai but he seems to have done more for the deck then Jace has over a shorter period of time I should note.
both jeskai control and tempo were actually doing better prior to the jace unban. what probably happened is people over prepared for control. on top of this early lists playing jace were playing 2-3 copies and cutting cryptics, or doing other weird stuff like playing disrupting shoal or cutting lightning bolt. add in ponza and other land hate as people prepared for our jund overlords and the deck fell off more than it should have.
im drinking the teferi koolaid at this point. its a nice addition to the deck, but it isnt a coincidence that the jeskai lists we are seeing now are closer to what they were before and the meta is closer to what it would have been had the unbans not happened at all.
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Modern: UWGSnow-Bant Control BURGrixis Death's Shadow GWBCoCo Elves WCDeath and Taxes (sold)
The problem is not that Jeskai was good, but not great. That's true.
The problem is several people claiming Jeskai was outright bad, or garbage and this is an anomaly or outlier we shouldn't be caring about.
It's mostly a matter of semantics. If your goal is to win a tournament, playing a good deck is the same as playing a bad deck (in that it reduces your chances to win; though playing Skred will hurt you more than playing Jeskai Control, it's a matter of degrees), when there are great decks available.
On one hand I split up "good decks" (Humans, hollow one, lantern, mardu p, maybe a couple others) and "bad decks" (most of the rest of the format).
On the other hand we can split up great (humans, hollow one), good (jeskai, jund), and bad (Skred, death and taxes, martyr proc, mono blue tron).
We can further subdivide bad into decent (death and taxes) and actively bad (martyr proc).
But fundamentally if your goal is to win tournaments you should be playing a great deck. So non-great decks are bad in that sense.
Not true! Kci is Bad...but won....jeskai is blue = Bad? But again double top 8 and so on. This is modern and you cant say bad. It is a matter of context, luck and skil
I fully believe this was simply a meta call working out as some of us expected. I've been saying for some time that UWR Control (not this Queller nonsense) if Humans/Affinity/Hollow One/Elves showed up in force, would be successful, and due to Tron being absent for some reason, UWR had massive day 2 numbers, that translated to 2 Top 8 slots.
This is not 'blue is fine' 'blue is fixed' or 'Teferi is our Messiah' (though I think he is) its a meta that was soft to UWR, like Affinity/Infect were soft to Twin.
Preordain should still come off, and so should SFM.
Not true! Kci is Bad...but won....jeskai is blue = Bad? But again double top 8 and so on. This is modern and you cant say bad. It is a matter of context, luck and skil
Skred won a GP too!
Pointing at one result largely means nothing except that it proves that there's a lot of luck (matchup luck, card luck, meta luck) involved in winning at magic.
But there are decks that consistently place better and win more games. Those decks are great. We don't have a perfect picture of which decks are great, but historical results (back to the twin-jund era) shows that for the most part some decks are consistently better than others.
And we know that win rate is almost surely the best predictor of overall performance over the long term. So if you want to win you should play decks with higher win rates.
Which decks does SFM benefit most? Two-colored (or mono-colored in the case of D&T), non-red, fair decks. It lines up well against the hyperaggro decks that rule the roost without coming anywhere near to invalidating them. Again, I freely admit to bias here. I play UW control and also have been working on brewing and testing the best shell for Orzhov Stoneblade in Modern, in order to be ready when her (hopefully inevitable) unban takes place.
Anyway, apologies for preaching to the choir; I haven’t seen anyone here suggest that SFM should remain on the ban list. It’s just that the case for her release seems to grow stronger and stronger with each passing day.
I don't think there is any real argument left for SFM to stay on the ban list from a gameplay perspective. IMO the reason Wizards won't release her in the next couple ban/unban dates is that they want to grab some money off of it by printing it in a future set like they did with Jace. So no SFM for 2018 I think, although I would love to brew some Orzhov or Esper list, too!
Exactly what I've been telling people. Stoneforge Mystic, along with something else hype-inducing, could easily sell a Modern Masters set. I even told people previous to the Jace, the Mind Sculptor unban that he could easily sell MM2019, but then Wizards went ahead and did it early in Masters 25, which I could not have foreseen.
When does the new Modern Masters set come out, BTW? I guess it's in 2019, so yeah, we are not seeing that Kor Artificer until 2019. Sorry guys. I'm as upset about it as the next guy. Everyone here knows I support Stoneforge Mystic, Preordain, and Green Sun's Zenith. The way things are going for Aggro right now, I'm nearly on the Punishing Fire and Seething Song trains as well, although I have to admit what Pokken said about the potential for Tron with Punishing Fire is nausea inducing.
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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)
Not true! Kci is Bad...but won....jeskai is blue = Bad? But again double top 8 and so on. This is modern and you cant say bad. It is a matter of context, luck and skil
Skred won a GP too!
Pointing at one result largely means nothing except that it proves that there's a lot of luck (matchup luck, card luck, meta luck) involved in winning at magic.
But there are decks that consistently place better and win more games. Those decks are great. We don't have a perfect picture of which decks are great, but historical results (back to the twin-jund era) shows that for the most part some decks are consistently better than others.
And we know that win rate is almost surely the best predictor of overall performance over the long term. So if you want to win you should play decks with higher win rates.
this is wrong wrong and wrong again....modern is diverse and this means DIVERSE because you can choose a lot of decks.
this is wrong wrong and wrong again....modern is diverse and this means DIVERSE because you can choose a lot of decks.
Nobody's arguing that Modern is not diverse. But if you honestly think that every deck has an equal chance of winning in a Competitive environment, that in fact is wrong.
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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)
well the diversity that modern is built upon is based on the assumption that you can play a deck that is less represented, and thus deemed less powerful, by leveraging aspects such as card choices, format knowledge, and skill/experience to close the gap. if the meta cycles to a point where your cards or strategy are well positioned then the gap closes even further.
this falls apart in these types of discussions because we are talking about the format in the abstract where everyone has equal skill and deck power is described objectively rather than subjectively.
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Modern: UWGSnow-Bant Control BURGrixis Death's Shadow GWBCoCo Elves WCDeath and Taxes (sold)
The diversity thing is mostly a myth at large enough events. If you are playing a strategy that is bad against Humans, Affinity, and Burn for example, odds are good you got mauled this weekend.
this is wrong wrong and wrong again....modern is diverse and this means DIVERSE because you can choose a lot of decks.
Nobody's arguing that Modern is not diverse. But if you honestly think that every deck has an equal chance of winning in a Competitive environment, that in fact is wrong.
Every deck does not have an equal chance of winning a wide-open 15 round event, or even a wide-open 8-9 round event. But there is a large array of decks that are about equally competitive in that environment. Right now, you could reasonable win an event with at least a dozen decks. Burn, Affinity, Humans, H1, UW/Jeskai Control/Blue Moon, Jund, Mardu, Storm, GDS, Gx Tron, D&T, Titan Shift, KCI (this deck is bonkers), Amulet Titan, Elves, and Bogles all come to mind. Even if we argued about a few decks on that list, we'd still be left with a list of at least a dozen contenders that are all more or less equally viable at any major event.
The next tier down is even larger and consists of decks that are still mostly viable but may require more practice and metagame conditions. Examples include, but are not limited to, Living End, Dredge, Lantern, E-Tron, Merfolk, Infect, Ponza, Ad Naus, Abzan/BG Rock, any Ux deck you don't think is in the first category (I know this is a polarizing topic), Company variants, Kiki Chord, different Traverse/Shadow variants, etc. We can also argue about exchanging some of those positions depending on skill, preference, and environment. This is why Modern is so open.
The diversity thing is mostly a myth at large enough events. If you are playing a strategy that is bad against Humans, Affinity, and Burn for example, odds are good you got mauled this weekend.
Those three decks collectively make up, in the absolutely most generous estimation, <30% of any given weekend. Assume you started SCG Open Louisville's Day 2 (154 players) and had a ***** matchup to Affinity, Humans, AND Jeskai, comprising 26% of the metagame. Assume independent probabilities (e.g. losing one game doesn't make you more/less likely to face another matchup in a subsequent round). Given that, you have a 12% chance to run into ZERO of those decks for the next 7 rounds. You have a 41% chance to run into 0 or 1 of those decks over 7 rounds. You have an insane 74% chance to just hit 0, 1, or 2 of those matchups for the next 7 rounds. And that assumes you have a bad matchup against all three of those most-played decks! This is why the fear of bad matchups doesn't matter as much in Modern and why you shouldn't worry too much about them.
That said, if it's a smaller/local field with a more known distribution of decks, then it does make sense to hedge bets more. This is just not the case in open events.
Well those numbers certainly would say 'play what you want' and when I look at the Day 2 Meta, vs the Top 32, I dont know, to me it looks like the conversion rates where pretty good for those decks that had many copies, vs the singletons. Have you looked at that?
Not that I'm asking you to, I'll be looking at it later after I take my dog out.
Well those numbers certainly would say 'play what you want' and when I look at the Day 2 Meta, vs the Top 32, I dont know, to me it looks like the conversion rates where pretty good for those decks that had many copies, vs the singletons. Have you looked at that?
Not that I'm asking you to, I'll be looking at it later after I take my dog out.
Every event has outlier 1-2 shot decks making it to the top tables. I think it was the Milwaukee Open in April where the only Living End player got 9th and the only BtL Scapeshift player got 7th. SCG Dallas in March had 1 of 2 Infect pilots hit T8 and the only UW Control player hit 6th. This happens in literally every event (but it's harder to detect at the GP level because Wizards throttles Day 2 data). Decks with lots of players make T8s, decks with fewer players make T8s. Conversion rates only tell part of the story because breakout decks, or viable decks, often have tiny Ns for a very long time. See Mardu for years, Amulet Bloom pre-2015, Lantern Control, Hollow One for late 2017, etc.
the probabilities arent entirely independent. the pool of decks you could potentially face from round to round changes as it shrinks and depending on the record brackets. there is an expectation for the 'meta' at large tournaments to condense at the top tables, though the reality is sometimes different. for instance going into day 2 with a 7-1 record could mean the chance of facing a set of decks is substantially higher than someone at 6-2. its also why byes are so influential for pros. starting at 2-0 just makes it less likely you will face some rogue pile that your deck cant beat for whatever reason.
another example would be unintentional draws. if you assume that its true that certain decks are more prone to getting unintentional draws, then being in the draw bracket increases your likelihood of facing that set of decks.
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the probabilities arent entirely independent. the pool of decks you could potentially face from round to round changes as it shrinks and depending on the record brackets. there is an expectation for the 'meta' at large tournaments to condense at the top tables, though the reality is sometimes different. for instance going into day 2 with a 7-1 record could mean the chance of facing a set of decks is substantially higher than someone at 6-2. its also why byes are so influential for pros. starting at 2-0 just makes it less likely you will face some rogue pile that your deck cant beat for whatever reason.
another example would be unintentional draws. if you assume that its true that certain decks are more prone to getting unintentional draws, then being in the draw bracket increases your likelihood of facing that set of decks.
I think that overcomplicates things to an extent where we can't do anything with the numbers. I also think it's the classic case of overcomplicating the problem and still arriving at the same conclusion. For instance, in this event, it probably wouldn't have mattered. Humans had 3 showings in the T32 (9.3%), Jeskai had 6 (18.75%), and Affinity had 0. So their net share in Round 9 was 26% and their net share in the T32 was 28.51%. These are the sorts of tiny differences that probably don't matter in the end calculation and ultimately don't undermine the point. That point is simple: you are unlikely to face any given matchup in a tournament and it takes a huge set of bad matchups to invalidate a deck choice. This is obviously untrue in unhealthy/warped/insular metagames, but is definitely true in wide ones that most of us probably are thinking of when we consider big events.
yeah i agree that there are too many variables in what i described, and i think your initial point has merit. just wanted to point out that there are other factors at play. modern, or any format in general, wouldnt be very good if it was impossible to metagame. for instance the winner of the event on mardu had a very clear plan based on his main and side, had the skill to execute said plan, and was rewarded for it. which is the most that any of us could hope for in a competitive setting. for that to be true you have to be able to expect to play against a reasonably small set of decks more than others and have it actually be the case.
on another note looks like someone on reddit aggregated data on the mtgo challenges for the past year. some of it isnt very surprising, but i found some bits interesting.
yeah i agree that there are too many variables in what i described, and i think your initial point has merit. just wanted to point out that there are other factors at play. modern, or any format in general, wouldnt be very good if it was impossible to metagame. for instance the winner of the event on mardu had a very clear plan based on his main and side, had the skill to execute said plan, and was rewarded for it. which is the most that any of us could hope for in a competitive setting. for that to be true you have to be able to expect to play against a reasonably small set of decks more than others and have it actually be the case.
Marshall Arthurs stated in his post win interview that he teched specifically for a Humans, Elf, and Affinity meta, and played only 1 elf deck and none of the others all weekend.
The way things are going for Aggro right now, I'm nearly on the Punishing Fire and Seething Song trains as well, although I have to admit what Pokken said about the potential for Tron with Punishing Fire is nausea inducing.
Why do you guys fear Punishing Fire from Tron? For Fire to be put to good use, additional red sources are needed besides Grove of the Burnwillows, at least 1 more to regrow and cast it in the same turn and more in order to juggle several Fires and start punishing bigger or more creatures. With the colorless lands, I doubt Tron would be able to do much better than having a single Grove out and then limiting itself to cast Fire every second turn, which is clearly underwhelming.
On another topic, the presence of 2 Jund decks in the top8 is even weirder than the absence of Hollow One what kind of decks they ran through? No self respecting deck should be losing to Jund now that has been confirmed bad...
On another topic, the presence of 2 Jund decks in the top8 is even weirder than the absence of Hollow One what kind of decks they ran through? No self respecting deck should be losing to Jund now that has been confirmed bad...
The bigger thing to look at will be Vegas in a few weeks. Opens rarely ever have the same makeup as GPs, and we'll know if there are legs if Jund (and Jeskai) show up for GP Vegas.
On another topic, the presence of 2 Jund decks in the top8 is even weirder than the absence of Hollow One what kind of decks they ran through? No self respecting deck should be losing to Jund now that has been confirmed bad...
The bigger thing to look at will be Vegas in a few weeks. Opens rarely ever have the same makeup as GPs, and we'll know if there are legs if Jund (and Jeskai) show up for GP Vegas.
Thing is, I just dont see it. I see this as a 'perfect storm' scenario. All the data was pointing to it, as was my gut feel based on what I was seeing out of MTGO.
Jund and UWR at half of the Top 8? No Tron to be found in the top 16?
There is correlation there.
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Biased? Absolutely. Red is far and away my least favorite color, and I also recognize that there isn’t necessarily anything inherently good or desirable about achieving parity of color representation in a format. Still, it’s starting to seem like there are fewer and fewer reasons not to play red.
Faithless Looting’s full power is starting to be realized, and IMO it’s starting to form something of an unholy trinity with Lightning Bolt and Blood Moon. In Looting, you have a card that people are calling “Modern’s Brainstorm”, equal parts card selection and combo/advantage enabler. In Moon, you have Modern’s most widely applicable “I win” button, and the opportunity cost of running it has never been lower with card selection so strong in red decks. Finally, there’s Bolt, which quite simply has the immense power of being a top-tier removal spell that’s never dead.
Let me be absolutely clear that none of this is a problem. What’s missing, I would contend, is a compelling reason not to be doing some or all of those things in a control or midrange deck. Enter Stoneforge Mystic.
Which decks does SFM benefit most? Two-colored (or mono-colored in the case of D&T), non-red, fair decks. It lines up well against the hyperaggro decks that rule the roost without coming anywhere near to invalidating them. Again, I freely admit to bias here. I play UW control and also have been working on brewing and testing the best shell for Orzhov Stoneblade in Modern, in order to be ready when her (hopefully inevitable) unban takes place.
Anyway, apologies for preaching to the choir; I haven’t seen anyone here suggest that SFM should remain on the ban list. It’s just that the case for her release seems to grow stronger and stronger with each passing day.
how good blue moon is at any point in time is largely contingent on whether blood moon is well positioned. both against other decks, and a better mana base so you are less soft to land disruption. you give some ground against aggressive decks, sideboard depth, and access to better planeswalkers. humans and affinity are still good matchups, hollow one less so. spell based combo should be around the same, heavy 3 color midrange and control goes up, and big mana is clearly better.
both jeskai control and tempo were actually doing better prior to the jace unban. what probably happened is people over prepared for control. on top of this early lists playing jace were playing 2-3 copies and cutting cryptics, or doing other weird stuff like playing disrupting shoal or cutting lightning bolt. add in ponza and other land hate as people prepared for our jund overlords and the deck fell off more than it should have.
im drinking the teferi koolaid at this point. its a nice addition to the deck, but it isnt a coincidence that the jeskai lists we are seeing now are closer to what they were before and the meta is closer to what it would have been had the unbans not happened at all.
UWGSnow-Bant Control
BURGrixis Death's Shadow
GWBCoCo Elves
WCDeath and Taxes(sold)It's mostly a matter of semantics. If your goal is to win a tournament, playing a good deck is the same as playing a bad deck (in that it reduces your chances to win; though playing Skred will hurt you more than playing Jeskai Control, it's a matter of degrees), when there are great decks available.
On one hand I split up "good decks" (Humans, hollow one, lantern, mardu p, maybe a couple others) and "bad decks" (most of the rest of the format).
On the other hand we can split up great (humans, hollow one), good (jeskai, jund), and bad (Skred, death and taxes, martyr proc, mono blue tron).
We can further subdivide bad into decent (death and taxes) and actively bad (martyr proc).
But fundamentally if your goal is to win tournaments you should be playing a great deck. So non-great decks are bad in that sense.
UW Ephara Hatebears [Primer], GB Gitrog Lands, BRU Inalla Combo-Control, URG Maelstrom Wanderer Landfall
This is not 'blue is fine' 'blue is fixed' or 'Teferi is our Messiah' (though I think he is) its a meta that was soft to UWR, like Affinity/Infect were soft to Twin.
Preordain should still come off, and so should SFM.
Spirits
Skred won a GP too!
Pointing at one result largely means nothing except that it proves that there's a lot of luck (matchup luck, card luck, meta luck) involved in winning at magic.
But there are decks that consistently place better and win more games. Those decks are great. We don't have a perfect picture of which decks are great, but historical results (back to the twin-jund era) shows that for the most part some decks are consistently better than others.
And we know that win rate is almost surely the best predictor of overall performance over the long term. So if you want to win you should play decks with higher win rates.
UW Ephara Hatebears [Primer], GB Gitrog Lands, BRU Inalla Combo-Control, URG Maelstrom Wanderer Landfall
I don't think there is any real argument left for SFM to stay on the ban list from a gameplay perspective. IMO the reason Wizards won't release her in the next couple ban/unban dates is that they want to grab some money off of it by printing it in a future set like they did with Jace. So no SFM for 2018 I think, although I would love to brew some Orzhov or Esper list, too!
When does the new Modern Masters set come out, BTW? I guess it's in 2019, so yeah, we are not seeing that Kor Artificer until 2019. Sorry guys. I'm as upset about it as the next guy. Everyone here knows I support Stoneforge Mystic, Preordain, and Green Sun's Zenith. The way things are going for Aggro right now, I'm nearly on the Punishing Fire and Seething Song trains as well, although I have to admit what Pokken said about the potential for Tron with Punishing Fire is nausea inducing.
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)Nobody's arguing that Modern is not diverse. But if you honestly think that every deck has an equal chance of winning in a Competitive environment, that in fact is wrong.
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)this falls apart in these types of discussions because we are talking about the format in the abstract where everyone has equal skill and deck power is described objectively rather than subjectively.
UWGSnow-Bant Control
BURGrixis Death's Shadow
GWBCoCo Elves
WCDeath and Taxes(sold)Spirits
I think they said that Masters sets would focus on themes not formats going forward.
Cubetutor Peasant'ish-Funbox
Project: Khans of Tarkir Cube (cubetutor)
Every deck does not have an equal chance of winning a wide-open 15 round event, or even a wide-open 8-9 round event. But there is a large array of decks that are about equally competitive in that environment. Right now, you could reasonable win an event with at least a dozen decks. Burn, Affinity, Humans, H1, UW/Jeskai Control/Blue Moon, Jund, Mardu, Storm, GDS, Gx Tron, D&T, Titan Shift, KCI (this deck is bonkers), Amulet Titan, Elves, and Bogles all come to mind. Even if we argued about a few decks on that list, we'd still be left with a list of at least a dozen contenders that are all more or less equally viable at any major event.
The next tier down is even larger and consists of decks that are still mostly viable but may require more practice and metagame conditions. Examples include, but are not limited to, Living End, Dredge, Lantern, E-Tron, Merfolk, Infect, Ponza, Ad Naus, Abzan/BG Rock, any Ux deck you don't think is in the first category (I know this is a polarizing topic), Company variants, Kiki Chord, different Traverse/Shadow variants, etc. We can also argue about exchanging some of those positions depending on skill, preference, and environment. This is why Modern is so open.
Those three decks collectively make up, in the absolutely most generous estimation, <30% of any given weekend. Assume you started SCG Open Louisville's Day 2 (154 players) and had a ***** matchup to Affinity, Humans, AND Jeskai, comprising 26% of the metagame. Assume independent probabilities (e.g. losing one game doesn't make you more/less likely to face another matchup in a subsequent round). Given that, you have a 12% chance to run into ZERO of those decks for the next 7 rounds. You have a 41% chance to run into 0 or 1 of those decks over 7 rounds. You have an insane 74% chance to just hit 0, 1, or 2 of those matchups for the next 7 rounds. And that assumes you have a bad matchup against all three of those most-played decks! This is why the fear of bad matchups doesn't matter as much in Modern and why you shouldn't worry too much about them.
That said, if it's a smaller/local field with a more known distribution of decks, then it does make sense to hedge bets more. This is just not the case in open events.
Not that I'm asking you to, I'll be looking at it later after I take my dog out.
Spirits
Every event has outlier 1-2 shot decks making it to the top tables. I think it was the Milwaukee Open in April where the only Living End player got 9th and the only BtL Scapeshift player got 7th. SCG Dallas in March had 1 of 2 Infect pilots hit T8 and the only UW Control player hit 6th. This happens in literally every event (but it's harder to detect at the GP level because Wizards throttles Day 2 data). Decks with lots of players make T8s, decks with fewer players make T8s. Conversion rates only tell part of the story because breakout decks, or viable decks, often have tiny Ns for a very long time. See Mardu for years, Amulet Bloom pre-2015, Lantern Control, Hollow One for late 2017, etc.
another example would be unintentional draws. if you assume that its true that certain decks are more prone to getting unintentional draws, then being in the draw bracket increases your likelihood of facing that set of decks.
UWGSnow-Bant Control
BURGrixis Death's Shadow
GWBCoCo Elves
WCDeath and Taxes(sold)I think that overcomplicates things to an extent where we can't do anything with the numbers. I also think it's the classic case of overcomplicating the problem and still arriving at the same conclusion. For instance, in this event, it probably wouldn't have mattered. Humans had 3 showings in the T32 (9.3%), Jeskai had 6 (18.75%), and Affinity had 0. So their net share in Round 9 was 26% and their net share in the T32 was 28.51%. These are the sorts of tiny differences that probably don't matter in the end calculation and ultimately don't undermine the point. That point is simple: you are unlikely to face any given matchup in a tournament and it takes a huge set of bad matchups to invalidate a deck choice. This is obviously untrue in unhealthy/warped/insular metagames, but is definitely true in wide ones that most of us probably are thinking of when we consider big events.
on another note looks like someone on reddit aggregated data on the mtgo challenges for the past year. some of it isnt very surprising, but i found some bits interesting.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ModernMagic/comments/8l1rtp/modern_challenge_data_52017_to_52018/
link to the spreadsheet is there, and includes a separate breakdown of the post unbanning challenges.
UWGSnow-Bant Control
BURGrixis Death's Shadow
GWBCoCo Elves
WCDeath and Taxes(sold)Marshall Arthurs stated in his post win interview that he teched specifically for a Humans, Elf, and Affinity meta, and played only 1 elf deck and none of the others all weekend.
Take that how you will
Why do you guys fear Punishing Fire from Tron? For Fire to be put to good use, additional red sources are needed besides Grove of the Burnwillows, at least 1 more to regrow and cast it in the same turn and more in order to juggle several Fires and start punishing bigger or more creatures. With the colorless lands, I doubt Tron would be able to do much better than having a single Grove out and then limiting itself to cast Fire every second turn, which is clearly underwhelming.
On another topic, the presence of 2 Jund decks in the top8 is even weirder than the absence of Hollow One what kind of decks they ran through? No self respecting deck should be losing to Jund now that has been confirmed bad...
The bigger thing to look at will be Vegas in a few weeks. Opens rarely ever have the same makeup as GPs, and we'll know if there are legs if Jund (and Jeskai) show up for GP Vegas.
UR ....... WUBR ........... WB ............. RGW ........ UBR ....... WUB .... BGU
Spells / Blink & Combo / Token Grind / Dino Tribal / Draw Cards / Zombies / Reanimate
Thing is, I just dont see it. I see this as a 'perfect storm' scenario. All the data was pointing to it, as was my gut feel based on what I was seeing out of MTGO.
Jund and UWR at half of the Top 8? No Tron to be found in the top 16?
There is correlation there.
Spirits