First you claim that it's aggro or but. Then when you post the actual numbers, Tron and scapeshift are actually #2 and 3 and not by a big margin. The following decks are all bunched up with difference that are not statistically significant. Then when we look at actual results, we see for example a single GP with 4 trons, so tron high number were pushed quite a bit by that single week-end. There's also the problem of deck division: each variant of tron, eldrazi of death shadow is given a different slot.
What I'm saying is that it looks to me that it's once again a case that people will see what they want to see. That, yes, long-lived tier-1 decks will have more good results.
What I see is diversity. I did a rough count, I think there is something like 140 individual slot, so affinity represent less than 10% of top 8? And that means I-must-play-affinity? Meh.
I do remember the "What About Affinity?" question being answered in the months following the Twin ban. IIRC, a Modern WotC higher-up (don't recall who, unfortunately) said that the format can regulate Affinity. The hate works, and when a meta adapts for Affinity, Affinity loses. That made bans unnecessary in their view.
The same thing was, in their opinion, not true about Twin. Even when WotC printed hate in Standard to reign it in, the meta couldn't adapt to a place when Twin wouldn't be the best deck.
Love it or hate it, that was their line at the time. Personally, I don't really have a problem with it, and that's as someone who got his Twins in the mail literally the week of the banning.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Playing UX Mana Denial until Modern gets the answers it needs.
WUBRG Humans BRW Mardu Pyromancer UW UW "Control" UR Blue Moon
First you claim that it's aggro or but. Then when you post the actual numbers, Tron and scapeshift are actually #2 and 3 and not by a big margin. The following decks are all bunched up with difference that are not statistically significant. Then when we look at actual results, we see for example a single GP with 4 trons, so tron high number were pushed quite a bit by that single week-end. There's also the problem of deck division: each variant of tron, eldrazi of death shadow is given a different slot.
What I'm saying is that it looks to me that it's once again a case that people will see what they want to see. That, yes, long-lived tier-1 decks will have more good results.
What I see is diversity. I did a rough count, I think there is something like 140 individual slot, so affinity represent less than 10% of top 8? And that means I-must-play-affinity? Meh.
No, but is 20 different shades of Aggro, not still Aggro?
If you wanted to have a deck that would allow you the best chance to win, over time, do you pick Affinity, or UWR Control?
EDIT: I'll run the pre-ban numbers to balance the perception this afternoon. Maybe Twin alone is 50% of the top 8's, I mean it must be to warrant being banned.
So in legacy, Death and Taxes is classed as a control deck despite being awfully close to what we consider aggro in Humans.
In my opinion, we should consider refining the classifications in modern. The distinction between midrange and control is very blurry in particular -- how many restoration angels do you have to play before your UW control deck is a midrange deck, for example?
We should also probably be thinking about aggro-control decks like Humans/Merfolk as quite different than true aggro decks, and also probably think about which ones have combo elements (e.g. Hollow One has some substantial comboish turns).
In particular, Hollow One functions more like a combo deck than an aggro deck in many ways (in that it beats aggro decks and is faster than them).
TL;DR I think a lot of what the perceived problems in modern are is based on a classification problem. People with an agenda are aggressively classifying everything as aggro.
Lol, yeah I agree it's been round and round. But I think it's been done pretty poorly in modern. Calling Bogles, Burn, Affinity, Elves, Merfolk, Humans, and Hollow one aggro is doing the format a pretty serious injustice.
Here's a quick exercise:
If we remove (the classic midrange/control decks) UWx, URx, and Jund from the format, how would we classify the rest? Like, say there was no GBx midrange? Who's the control deck now?
If your format was made up of:
Hollow One
Humans
G Tron
Eldrazi Tron
Lantern
Storm
Elves
Affinity
Burn
GR Valakut
Who's aggro, who's big mana, who's control, who's combo in there? (Feel free to add some to the list, of course, that's just what I recall of other popular decks).
So in legacy, Death and Taxes is classed as a control deck despite being awfully close to what we consider aggro in Humans.
In my opinion, we should consider refining the classifications in modern. The distinction between midrange and control is very blurry in particular -- how many restoration angels do you have to play before your UW control deck is a midrange deck, for example?
We should also probably be thinking about aggro-control decks like Humans/Merfolk as quite different than true aggro decks, and also probably think about which ones have combo elements (e.g. Hollow One has some substantial comboish turns).
In particular, Hollow One functions more like a combo deck than an aggro deck in many ways (in that it beats aggro decks and is faster than them).
TL;DR I think a lot of what the perceived problems in modern are is based on a classification problem. People with an agenda are aggressively classifying everything as aggro.
I HATE the "big mana" lump. Titanshift and Amulet are combo decks, Tron has its many variants, E-Tron is very different than the other Tron variants, and Tooth & Nail is very different than them!
If we take Patrick Chapin's book, Next Level Deckbuilding, he categorizes each deck into 4 Major archetypes:
• Control
• Aggro
• Combo
• Midrange
and 16 minor archetypes that fall beneath a major archetypes:
Aggro
• Red Aggro
• Linear Aggro
• Swarm
• Fish/Suicide Black
Control
• Tap-Out
• Draw-Go
• Lock
• Combo-Control
I do remember the "What About Affinity?" question being answered in the months following the Twin ban. IIRC, a Modern WotC higher-up (don't recall who, unfortunately) said that the format can regulate Affinity. The hate works, and when a meta adapts for Affinity, Affinity loses. That made bans unnecessary in their view.
The same thing was, in their opinion, not true about Twin. Even when WotC printed hate in Standard to reign it in, the meta couldn't adapt to a place when Twin wouldn't be the best deck.
Love it or hate it, that was their line at the time. Personally, I don't really have a problem with it, and that's as someone who got his Twins in the mail literally the week of the banning.
Ouch. I know that (a similar) feel. A similar thing happened to me with Copy Cat and Marvel in Standard.
I was one of those that brought up Affinity before. It's not that I wanted it banned. I just wanted other cards NOT to be banned and I thought showing the success of Affinity through all Modern metas would be a reason to not ban something else. I was wrong. I will admit it. It just seemed very odd to me that Affinity always remained one of the top 5 decks in the meta, through DRS Jund, Pod and Treasure Delver, Eye of Ugin, Bloom/Twin, Probe/Troll, and any other time (sorry, I can't vouch for before DRS Jund because that's when I stopped playing Standard regularly to play Modern).
If they ban something else for "being the best deck," then Affinity has been that or very close to that many times before. I often wish I learned to play Affinity at the beginning of Modern. Yes, I would have survived several ban scares. But I would know how to successfully play one of the hardest and rewarding decks of Modern.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
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)
Understanding ramp decks is a big gap in the traditional archetypes; I've seen them referred to as midrange, combo, control and even aggro.
In modern we lump them together because they generally stomp midrange and control by playing unanswerable threats with an overwhelming mana advantage; they break the various pyramids/circles, by beating control and midrange but losing to aggro and combo (whereas control beats combo, and midrange beats aggro, generally). If you start calling some of them combo decks it's confusing because they're invariably slower than other combo decks, and also way more resilient and better against midrange. The relationship to midrange that big mana "combo" decks have is very peculiar as well.
Chapin seems to classify most of these decks as some degree of "Big Spell Combo" though E-tron kinda reaches over to the midrange area quite a bit. It's tough.
My inclination would be to use Chapin's definitions I guess, but you'll find some disagreements there too.
Understanding ramp decks is a big gap in the traditional archetypes; I've seen them referred to as midrange, combo, control and even aggro.
In modern we lump them together because they generally stomp midrange and control by playing unanswerable threats with an overwhelming mana advantage; they break the various pyramids/circles, by beating control and midrange but losing to aggro and combo (whereas control beats combo, and midrange beats aggro, generally). If you start calling some of them combo decks it's confusing because they're invariably slower than other combo decks, and also way more resilient and better against midrange. The relationship to midrange that big mana "combo" decks have is very peculiar as well.
Chapin seems to classify most of these decks as some degree of "Big Spell Combo" though E-tron kinda reaches over to the midrange area quite a bit. It's tough.
My inclination would be to use Chapin's definitions I guess, but you'll find some disagreements there too.
We need to then define the reasons/purpose or goals of such a classification.
I found this Strawpoll while going through my old bookmarks. It's pretty weak even for a random internet poll, but the results confirm my biases so I don't care.
I think the main thing is that there's a lot of rumbling about format health out there that neglects to look at the large number of different strategies fairly. There's a tendency to say "Bogles, hollow one, humans, burn, affinity...aggro-the-gathering amiright?"
But most of those decks are different subarchetypes at the very least (though you could argue for humans being aggro-control instead of fish)
Humans is Fish or Aggro-Control (I lean Aggro-Control, since the Freebooter/Thalia/Mage gameplan is maybe closer to AC, but it can be argued) (Midrange or aggro)
Hollow One is I have no idea, maybe Linear Aggro? with combo elements?(Aggro)
Burn is Lava Spike (Combo)
Affinity is Linear Aggro (aggro)
Bogles is..whatever, I don't even know, maybe Linear Aggro with a Storm Combo relationship (Aggro)
I'd be interested to see how Chapin would categorize the top 20 decks in Modern. My guess is it's got a slight aggro tilt, but probably not as bad as people think, especially if you consider Fish decks as very close to the midrange spectrum.
---------------------------------------
And additionally to all that 'standard classification' I think that there is an element of relativity that's probably missing. I'm not sure how to factor that in or if it even should.
He goes into all 16 and gives examples of them in the book
Aggro-Control and Fish are in fact often mistaken for one
another — and in the context of a particular format, the decks will often share many individual cards. In addition, especially when comparing Fish or Aggro-Control to traditional control decks, they both tend to play the beatdown, run out a threat (whether it is a Bitterblossom or a Master of the Pearl Trident), and then use their permission to hold a lead they already have.
The distinction between them is that Fish / Suicide Black plays out its threats and then plays out its Time Walks, whereas Aggro- Control generally plays out its Time Walks before getting in with its threats.
If someone can generate a list of "credible decks" in the modern format I'll do my best to categorize them against the archetype definitions as a starting point. Sure Pistallion can keep me honest.
I'm not sure what the cutoff for "credible" is these days; I'm tempted to say "has 5-0'd a league in the last year" or something like that.
Maybe that reddit guy's tiers or whatever would be reasonable?
First, please please do not ban twin discussion. You do not build real consciences by just silencing voices. It is a contentious ban and talking about it can help heal those wounded or fasicilate change, neither of which is possible in a mandated silence.
Second, someone mentioned the new one drop bird breaking cheerios. HAHA! I laughed real hard when I read that. I love combo decks, I have that deck, I hope that does make it a better deck but I'm betting it sees zero copies in the main deck. I think cheerios is just to fragile to hand disruption and creature removal to be a really serious competitive contender. It's lots of fun to play though.
Third, I think the format look healthy enough right now. I would love more unbans and maybe we'll keep getting them. I also hope we keep getting good broad side board options like dampening sphere to be able to self regulate the format naturally in the future.
If someone can generate a list of "credible decks" in the modern format I'll do my best to categorize them against the archetype definitions as a starting point. Sure Pistallion can keep me honest.
I'm not sure what the cutoff for "credible" is these days; I'm tempted to say "has 5-0'd a league in the last year" or something like that.
Maybe that reddit guy's tiers or whatever would be reasonable?
Its gotta be more than a 5-0, or the list is going to be LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG.
GP Top 32 or SCG Open Top 32 would be where I would start, but even then your looking at dozens of decks.
Hey Pistallion. Having issues envisaging what Chapin means by burn being combo. Without copy pasting text any chance of a quick why burn is combo rather than aggro?
(because to most people including myself burn is the archetypal aggro deck)
I've seen it argued that just as a combo involves a set number of spells, Burn is Combo because you Bolt, Bolt, Bolt, Lava Spike, Bolt, Helix, Skullcrack.
Or, in the Naya Burn days, Swiftspear, Swiftspear/Guide, Bolt/Atarka's Command.
It depends on casting a sequence of spells, to actually get to lethal.
Hey Pistallion. Having issues envisaging what Chapin means by burn being combo. Without copy pasting text any chance of a quick why burn is combo rather than aggro?
(because to most people including myself burn is the archetypal aggro deck)
It's on the spectrum of combo that lines up next to Red aggro (so it's just out of aggro and just into combo).
(This image is on the cover, so feel like it's pretty fair game to share:))
Disagree on that combo definition in the sense that, if everything is a combo piece, the word "disruption" doesn't work anymore. A Relentless Rats deck would be combo. Would you run Thoughtseize to "disrupt" Burn or Rats? Does permission help? There's not really card interaction among the cards other than everyone doing the same goal.
But enough Twin discussion, those people can always go to no ban modern if the urge to tapping for infinite creatures is too much to resist.
Someone asked why GDS started to suck. After watching or playing some matches it becomes obvious: the deck appears to be doing stuff but it's merely durdling and doing nothing on the board. GDS turns can go Serum Visions, Opt, Thought scour, cycle Street Wraith and only then dropping a Gurmag Angler. To sum it up, it spent three mana across several turns and some life just to cast a vanilla 5 / 5. Not impressive, Hollow One at least drops some 4 / 4s and 2 / 1s in the process. Even if GDS does drop a Zombie Fish and a Death's Shadow, too often they have to sit in defense with no clear plan to turn the tables given that they best option is to spent another bunch of mana and turns to durdle and get another Tasigur. People may be tempted to think that casting one mana cards that replace themselves is harmless, but it's not; maybe if they were digging for a sweeper but then being a low land count deck was one of the points of GDS.
Spirits
What I'm saying is that it looks to me that it's once again a case that people will see what they want to see. That, yes, long-lived tier-1 decks will have more good results.
What I see is diversity. I did a rough count, I think there is something like 140 individual slot, so affinity represent less than 10% of top 8? And that means I-must-play-affinity? Meh.
The same thing was, in their opinion, not true about Twin. Even when WotC printed hate in Standard to reign it in, the meta couldn't adapt to a place when Twin wouldn't be the best deck.
Love it or hate it, that was their line at the time. Personally, I don't really have a problem with it, and that's as someone who got his Twins in the mail literally the week of the banning.
WUBRG Humans
BRW Mardu Pyromancer
UW UW "Control"
UR Blue Moon
No, but is 20 different shades of Aggro, not still Aggro?
If you wanted to have a deck that would allow you the best chance to win, over time, do you pick Affinity, or UWR Control?
EDIT: I'll run the pre-ban numbers to balance the perception this afternoon. Maybe Twin alone is 50% of the top 8's, I mean it must be to warrant being banned.
Spirits
In my opinion, we should consider refining the classifications in modern. The distinction between midrange and control is very blurry in particular -- how many restoration angels do you have to play before your UW control deck is a midrange deck, for example?
We should also probably be thinking about aggro-control decks like Humans/Merfolk as quite different than true aggro decks, and also probably think about which ones have combo elements (e.g. Hollow One has some substantial comboish turns).
In particular, Hollow One functions more like a combo deck than an aggro deck in many ways (in that it beats aggro decks and is faster than them).
TL;DR I think a lot of what the perceived problems in modern are is based on a classification problem. People with an agenda are aggressively classifying everything as aggro.
UW Ephara Hatebears [Primer], GB Gitrog Lands, BRU Inalla Combo-Control, URG Maelstrom Wanderer Landfall
Spirits
Here's a quick exercise:
If we remove (the classic midrange/control decks) UWx, URx, and Jund from the format, how would we classify the rest? Like, say there was no GBx midrange? Who's the control deck now?
If your format was made up of:
Hollow One
Humans
G Tron
Eldrazi Tron
Lantern
Storm
Elves
Affinity
Burn
GR Valakut
Who's aggro, who's big mana, who's control, who's combo in there? (Feel free to add some to the list, of course, that's just what I recall of other popular decks).
UW Ephara Hatebears [Primer], GB Gitrog Lands, BRU Inalla Combo-Control, URG Maelstrom Wanderer Landfall
I HATE the "big mana" lump. Titanshift and Amulet are combo decks, Tron has its many variants, E-Tron is very different than the other Tron variants, and Tooth & Nail is very different than them!
If we take Patrick Chapin's book, Next Level Deckbuilding, he categorizes each deck into 4 Major archetypes:
• Control
• Aggro
• Combo
• Midrange
and 16 minor archetypes that fall beneath a major archetypes:
Aggro
• Red Aggro
• Linear Aggro
• Swarm
• Fish/Suicide Black
Control
• Tap-Out
• Draw-Go
• Lock
• Combo-Control
Midrange
• Rock/Junk
• True Midrange
• Non-Blue Control
• Aggro-Control
Combo
• Big Spell
• Traditional Combo
• Storm
• Lava Spike (Burn)
If we use this as a baseline, I think its the best way to go about categorizing them
URStormRU
GRTitanshift[mana]RG/mana]
Ouch. I know that (a similar) feel. A similar thing happened to me with Copy Cat and Marvel in Standard.
I was one of those that brought up Affinity before. It's not that I wanted it banned. I just wanted other cards NOT to be banned and I thought showing the success of Affinity through all Modern metas would be a reason to not ban something else. I was wrong. I will admit it. It just seemed very odd to me that Affinity always remained one of the top 5 decks in the meta, through DRS Jund, Pod and Treasure Delver, Eye of Ugin, Bloom/Twin, Probe/Troll, and any other time (sorry, I can't vouch for before DRS Jund because that's when I stopped playing Standard regularly to play Modern).
If they ban something else for "being the best deck," then Affinity has been that or very close to that many times before. I often wish I learned to play Affinity at the beginning of Modern. Yes, I would have survived several ban scares. But I would know how to successfully play one of the hardest and rewarding decks of Modern.
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)In modern we lump them together because they generally stomp midrange and control by playing unanswerable threats with an overwhelming mana advantage; they break the various pyramids/circles, by beating control and midrange but losing to aggro and combo (whereas control beats combo, and midrange beats aggro, generally). If you start calling some of them combo decks it's confusing because they're invariably slower than other combo decks, and also way more resilient and better against midrange. The relationship to midrange that big mana "combo" decks have is very peculiar as well.
Chapin seems to classify most of these decks as some degree of "Big Spell Combo" though E-tron kinda reaches over to the midrange area quite a bit. It's tough.
My inclination would be to use Chapin's definitions I guess, but you'll find some disagreements there too.
UW Ephara Hatebears [Primer], GB Gitrog Lands, BRU Inalla Combo-Control, URG Maelstrom Wanderer Landfall
We need to then define the reasons/purpose or goals of such a classification.
URStormRU
GRTitanshift[mana]RG/mana]
WUBRG Humans
BRW Mardu Pyromancer
UW UW "Control"
UR Blue Moon
But most of those decks are different subarchetypes at the very least (though you could argue for humans being aggro-control instead of fish)
Humans is Fish or Aggro-Control (I lean Aggro-Control, since the Freebooter/Thalia/Mage gameplan is maybe closer to AC, but it can be argued) (Midrange or aggro)
Hollow One is I have no idea, maybe Linear Aggro? with combo elements?(Aggro)
Burn is Lava Spike (Combo)
Affinity is Linear Aggro (aggro)
Bogles is..whatever, I don't even know, maybe Linear Aggro with a Storm Combo relationship (Aggro)
I'd be interested to see how Chapin would categorize the top 20 decks in Modern. My guess is it's got a slight aggro tilt, but probably not as bad as people think, especially if you consider Fish decks as very close to the midrange spectrum.
---------------------------------------
And additionally to all that 'standard classification' I think that there is an element of relativity that's probably missing. I'm not sure how to factor that in or if it even should.
UW Ephara Hatebears [Primer], GB Gitrog Lands, BRU Inalla Combo-Control, URG Maelstrom Wanderer Landfall
Spirits
URStormRU
GRTitanshift[mana]RG/mana]
Spirits
URStormRU
GRTitanshift[mana]RG/mana]
I'm not sure what the cutoff for "credible" is these days; I'm tempted to say "has 5-0'd a league in the last year" or something like that.
Maybe that reddit guy's tiers or whatever would be reasonable?
UW Ephara Hatebears [Primer], GB Gitrog Lands, BRU Inalla Combo-Control, URG Maelstrom Wanderer Landfall
Second, someone mentioned the new one drop bird breaking cheerios. HAHA! I laughed real hard when I read that. I love combo decks, I have that deck, I hope that does make it a better deck but I'm betting it sees zero copies in the main deck. I think cheerios is just to fragile to hand disruption and creature removal to be a really serious competitive contender. It's lots of fun to play though.
Third, I think the format look healthy enough right now. I would love more unbans and maybe we'll keep getting them. I also hope we keep getting good broad side board options like dampening sphere to be able to self regulate the format naturally in the future.
Its gotta be more than a 5-0, or the list is going to be LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG.
GP Top 32 or SCG Open Top 32 would be where I would start, but even then your looking at dozens of decks.
Spirits
(because to most people including myself burn is the archetypal aggro deck)
Legacy - LED Dredge, ANT & WDnT
Or, in the Naya Burn days, Swiftspear, Swiftspear/Guide, Bolt/Atarka's Command.
It depends on casting a sequence of spells, to actually get to lethal.
Spirits
It's on the spectrum of combo that lines up next to Red aggro (so it's just out of aggro and just into combo).
(This image is on the cover, so feel like it's pretty fair game to share:))
UW Ephara Hatebears [Primer], GB Gitrog Lands, BRU Inalla Combo-Control, URG Maelstrom Wanderer Landfall
But enough Twin discussion, those people can always go to no ban modern if the urge to tapping for infinite creatures is too much to resist.
Someone asked why GDS started to suck. After watching or playing some matches it becomes obvious: the deck appears to be doing stuff but it's merely durdling and doing nothing on the board. GDS turns can go Serum Visions, Opt, Thought scour, cycle Street Wraith and only then dropping a Gurmag Angler. To sum it up, it spent three mana across several turns and some life just to cast a vanilla 5 / 5. Not impressive, Hollow One at least drops some 4 / 4s and 2 / 1s in the process. Even if GDS does drop a Zombie Fish and a Death's Shadow, too often they have to sit in defense with no clear plan to turn the tables given that they best option is to spent another bunch of mana and turns to durdle and get another Tasigur. People may be tempted to think that casting one mana cards that replace themselves is harmless, but it's not; maybe if they were digging for a sweeper but then being a low land count deck was one of the points of GDS.
Spirits