With the recent display of our community's ability to comprehend statistics I'm going to really miss Ktkenshinx.
EDIT(to actually add something to the discussion):Anyway, curious myself to see the new criteria. I am in the camp that more exclusive tiers are better at actually representing the tiers. An 11% deck should not be classified similarly to a 2% deck. It doesn't do either of them or their players any favors.
Death's Shadow decks are tempo decks. I know it's weird to think of a deck without blue and with tempo-negative plays like Thoughtseize and IoK as a tempo deck, but it is. Cheap aggressive threats + cheap disruption = tempo.
anyone have Gerard fabiano's list from GP San Antonio?
Any list and any results from this GP should be taken with GIGANTIC grains of salt. Team Unified forces players to artificially diversify their decks and places arbitrary restrictions on deck choices and construction. Players are playing sub-optimal lists and making sub-optimal deck choices because no cards can repeat. Do you really think that people would be playing Grixis Control by choice? Or just because that's what's leftover after someone builds a BGx shell and a some colorless shell (Eldrazi/Tron/Affinity)?
I mean, Reid Duke is playing Death's Shadow Abzan instead of Death's Shadow Jund so that Owen could play Grixis Control. It seems like they do think the deck had merit. Otherwise they would have used that slot on Merfolk, or Burn or something.
I strongly disagree. I don't think Jace would be a problem even if Blue was good. I mean, Black would be super powerful even without Liliana, but almost no one has ever suggested banning her.
You know, it's funny people are so terrified of Jace when the only formats he's ever been shown to be overpowered in are small ones, namely Standard and 4-year Extended, which had substantially smaller card pools and a lower power level.
The Problem is that Jace is a very powerful card that CAN be busted (even if it is just a small chance) and does concentrate a lot of end-game power in one card...it is just not worth the risk. Imagine the feedback if they had to ban him in a year or so...imagine people looking at their 300-400$ playset that they can't use now. It is a very high risk - medium reward scenario, and since modern does well there is no need to take this risk!
The thing is, people made the same argument against Valakut, Sword of the Meek, Ancestral Vision, Wild Nacatl, and Bitterblossom.
So what though? Yeah, people are wrong about those cards. But that doesn't mean they are wrong about Jace. You also conveniently left out Golgari Grave Troll because it didn't fit your argument, lol.
I don't think it's really fair to compare, given that Jace sees Legacy/Vintage play while none of the above cards really do. It's clearly a more powerful card than any of the group you mentioned.
I could take the exact argument you just used, and apply it to Skullclamp or Dark Depths. Those cards have never been in the format so how do we know they're busted? Right?
That being said, I argue that Jace is not only safe, he's so weak in the current meta, he will do nothing to help blue and set back another year of "can't give blue more tools." Functionally, he's no different than Nahiri, and she is only an alternate win condition for Moon/Chalice/Bridge prison lock decks that don't want to solely rely on Koth. She's been terrible in blue shells since about a month or two after her breakout weekend because tapping out for a 4 mana walker that still takes multiple turns to win just isn't good enough when opponents have Thoughtseizing 4/4s and 1 mana 10/10s. Jace is not what Modern needs, regardless of whether he is "safe" or not.
This is a great point, actually, and one I agree with fully. Even if Jace is "safe" in the current meta, it's only because blue is otherwise very weak right now.
Unbanning a busted card to help a struggling archetype is not a good move.
The problem is that with Jace in the format, as soon as blue does get the tools everyone has been hoping for (be it counterspell, or some other good answer or whatever), blue decks with Jace become oppressive and Jace has to be re-banned, which would be a complete disaster.
I strongly disagree. I don't think Jace would be a problem even if Blue was good. I mean, Black would be super powerful even without Liliana, but almost no one has ever suggested banning her.
You know, it's funny people are so terrified of Jace when the only formats he's ever been shown to be overpowered in are small ones, namely Standard and 4-year Extended, which had substantially smaller card pools and a lower power level.
I didn't play Standard with Jace or 4-year Extended with Jace so that has nothing to do with my opinion. My opinion comes solely from having lots of experience playing decks with Jace in Legacy, which is of course a much higher power level format than Modern and yet Jace is still extremely powerful there.
That being said, I argue that Jace is not only safe, he's so weak in the current meta, he will do nothing to help blue and set back another year of "can't give blue more tools." Functionally, he's no different than Nahiri, and she is only an alternate win condition for Moon/Chalice/Bridge prison lock decks that don't want to solely rely on Koth. She's been terrible in blue shells since about a month or two after her breakout weekend because tapping out for a 4 mana walker that still takes multiple turns to win just isn't good enough when opponents have Thoughtseizing 4/4s and 1 mana 10/10s. Jace is not what Modern needs, regardless of whether he is "safe" or not.
This is a great point, actually, and one I agree with fully. Even if Jace is "safe" in the current meta, it's only because blue is otherwise very weak right now.
Unbanning a busted card to help a struggling archetype is not a good move.
The problem is that with Jace in the format, as soon as blue does get the tools everyone has been hoping for (be it counterspell, or some other good answer or whatever), blue decks with Jace become oppressive and Jace has to be re-banned, which would be a complete disaster.
First two Fact or Fictions of GP SA w/LSV and Marshall:
1)Should DS be banned in Modern? Fact. DS just takes diversity away since 3-color control type of decks like Jund,Abzan,Grixis,etc are taking up DS and just improving their decks.
2)Should Jace be unbanned? Sort of Fiction since we all want to play him but if your job depended on that(Imagine you worked at R&D basically), it would be a little too risky.
You should probably make it clear that those are your opinions, not Chapin's lol.
For the record, a summary of Chapin's responses:
1) Fiction, no way DS should be banned. If the deck becomes oppressive, look at Bauble or Street Wraith as ban targets.
2) Absolute fiction, Jace is way too overpowered. Yes a lot of decks win on turn 3, but decks with Jace will be able to pack enough cheap interaction to handle those decks. Jace would push out midrange decks from the format.
I think it's ridiculous that people are labeling Death's Shadow as oppressive or reducing diversity.
Tarmogoyf, Snapcaster, and even Thought-Knot Seer are currently played in a larger percentage of decks than DS is. I mean really what gives?
The card is basically the perfect solution to Modern's problem of fair decks being inherently disadvantaged because of their manabases. Great card to have in the format.
Based on what we do know, I'd say the Twin ban had three goals:
1. Remove Twin from the format
2. Improve decks supplanted by Twin ("They can also reduce diversity by supplanting similar decks.")
3. Improve decks that had bad Twin matchups ("Decks that are this strong can hurt diversity by pushing the decks that it defeats out of competition.")
(4. Shakeup the PT (not explicitly stated but evidence strongly points to this being one of a few motives))
I'm pretty sure that while 1-3 were the stated goals, #4 was the one Wizards really cared about. I strongly doubt that right now people at Wizards are lamenting the Twin ban or are displeased with the state of blue decks in Modern. It wasn't mentioned at all in the last banlist update, in which they basically said Modern was in an excellent state.
I don't think Wizards believes having a blue deck in Tier 1 is necessary. It sucks for Twin players that had their deck banned, but I think it's finally time to move on. The format is otherwise healthy.
The meta looks fairly healthy. According to the data blue isn't nearly as bad as people seem to think. 4 ramp decks in Tier 1 is a bit concerning though I must say. Maybe we'll see Infect make a comeback to combat them.
If a piece of the Death's Shadow deck gets banned, I am probably done with Modern to be honest. If the deck really ends up being too dominant, which I find unlikely given that there are plenty of natural counters to the deck, this would be the exact type of situation where an unban would be more appropriate than a ban.
What would you even ban anyway? Death's Shadow? Goyf? That would be silly. There isn't a single card in the deck that's even close to being overpowered. If it ends up dominating the format, that's just a sign that they've powered other decks down too much with bans.
This deck is strong but very beatable, and it's a nice police deck to have in the format.
Seriously though, this is the perfect deck to have as Modern's "top deck". It punishes uninteractive decks, and it's very beatable if you're on something fair like Abzan or Grixis.
Maybe the "unban Jace" crowd will cool it a bit with 2 Grixis decks in the top 8.
Based on Sheridan's latest article it seems like Cheeri0s wins way too many games on turn 2/3 and thus is likely going to meet the hammer sometime soon, unless we see a pretty extreme shift toward interactive decks in the meta.
I'd have to assume that the ban target would be either Puresteel, Sram, or Retract. Of these I doesn't seem to matter much which one gets hit, but I think Retract makes the most sense because we're least likely to see another effect like it in the future.
I don't think JTMS is a likely target. While JTMS wouldn't be overpowered in the sense that Jace decks will start dominating the meta, he's too good against fair decks and thus would have the effect of pushing the meta towards "play a Jace deck, or play a fast linear deck, or play Tron".
I just don't think Wizards does this kind of deep testing. They throw stuff together on MTGO, run a few lists, and make sure the decks receiving unbanned cards won't be busted. It's a lot of intuition and gut feel. The thing is, blue-based reactive decks are pretty horrendous right now on MTGO and still struggling in paper. so JTMS seems pretty solid in theory. If that metagame pattern persists through the GP, there will be a very strong argument to look to unbannings to fix blue's issues, and JTMS may jump out.
I also challenge this argument because people said the exact same thing about AV. A year later, AV has not panned out and BGx barely cared. Almost all the unban alarmism was unwarranted. Even GGT, which got rebanned, wasn't a problem until Wizards printed three major upgrades for Dredge in a row.
It seems to me like blue based control isn't doing worse than in the past few months, if anything it has gotten slightly better with Push and the Dredge ban.
Someone recently tallied up the last 90 decks that went 5-0 in MTGO leagues. U based control (Grixis, Esper, and UW) had 12 5-0's which is only 1 less than BGx did. On MTGGOldfish the collective share of Grixis Control and Grixis Delver is around 4.5%, which is around the same as Burn's.
This is of course a subjective prediction, but I wouldn't be suprised to see Grixis pop in and out of Tier 1 a few times in the upcoming months. To me the deck feels the best positioned it's been in since summer 2015.
Did I just read Cabal Therapy should be printed into modern? Does this person want GBx decks to get banned?
The format is DEFINITELY slower with the ban of probe, I'm really shocked how effective the banning was. Infect looks really dead to me now though, I think for the first time in a long time it's going to drop into tier 3. It's nearly dead on mtgo, it's down in paper shares, and people who said they played it in regionals were out so quick it wasn't even funny.
The new death shadow aggro is powerful and fast without feelings oppressively so, it's fast and grindy. I don't own that deck, but for like 100 dollars I could buy the pieces I don't own. I think I'm only like 20ish away on mtgo.
Rallier is the real ******* deal in company decks, I think Rallier may actually be the allstar from the new set, not Fatal Push (oddly enough).
Blue still sucks. Wasn't there 1 Jeskai deck that hit like 2nd place in the regionals though?
I didn't mean to say ponder earlier yesterday, I meant preordain.
Also, Sheridan, even though MTGO's shares say Junk is higher than Jund's, it's notably been shrinking and underperformed in the regionals, everyone was playing Jund and most people agree Jund is better, I'm not sure Abzan is being very pushed right now, I don't think SFM is an unreasonable ban. You said it yourself, white is absolute crap in modern, and blue's not far behind. SFM is literally the definition of blue and white packaged into one card.
I no longer feel the talk of unbanning Splinger Twin is unreasonable anymore, and I can't defend that ban now, WOTC's goal of empowering blue has been an absolute failure
Either take the chance and unban a very huge blue card or just bring Twin again.
Now, if blue gains preordain, maybe Jace, doesn't it seem dangerous to unban Twin then? Just a question for the more seasoned blue players
I'm not sure I get the part about SFM being "blue and white rolled into one". There's nothing about SFM that makes it pair well with blue specifically. People play it with blue in Legacy because blue is just generally the best color. Not because there's synergy between SFM and Blue cards.
In Modern, I think SFM is much more likely to see play in Junk and in Wx Hatebears types of decks. Think about it, would you rather have SFM and Inquisition in your opener, or SFM and Mana Leak? SFM is not great in Modern's blue decks, which don't really want to tap out on turn 2.
Also, Sheridan, even though MTGO's shares say Junk is higher than Jund's, it's notably been shrinking and underperformed in the regionals, everyone was playing Jund and most people agree Jund is better, I'm not sure Abzan is being very pushed right now, I don't think SFM is an unreasonable ban. You said it yourself, white is absolute crap in modern, and blue's not far behind. SFM is literally the definition of blue and white packaged into one card.
Abzan sees more MTGO play for very specific reasons. Based on the current metagame and my own experience, MTGO has more Death's Shadow Midrange, Eldrazi Tron, and weird ramp stuff like Amulet Titan than paper. It's a 3%-5% or even higher difference for those decks. Against such strategies, Jund really isn't that great; Bolts suck and K-Command sucks. Path/Push is much better in those kinds of matchups. Paper also has more stuff like Abzan Company and Elves, where Jund is much better than Abzan. These metagame differences are, in my experience, the main difference we see Abzan in MTGO and Jund in paper, although there are definitely other factors at play.
Because of that, I don't really see SFM as a likely unban target. JTMS is much likelier. So is Preordain, although I think JTMS is the likelier option given how Wizards tests cards for unbanning and given how much they dislike blue-based combo decks. GP numbers are needed to confirm these suspicions though.
I don't think JTMS is a likely target. While JTMS wouldn't be overpowered in the sense that Jace decks will start dominating the meta, he's too good against fair decks and thus would have the effect of pushing the meta towards "play a Jace deck, or play a fast linear deck, or play Tron".
I know people will mention unbanning BBE to compensate, but even then you're only giving Jund specifically a chance to compete against the Jace decks.
Ktkenshinx is leaving?
I mean, Reid Duke is playing Death's Shadow Abzan instead of Death's Shadow Jund so that Owen could play Grixis Control. It seems like they do think the deck had merit. Otherwise they would have used that slot on Merfolk, or Burn or something.
So what though? Yeah, people are wrong about those cards. But that doesn't mean they are wrong about Jace. You also conveniently left out Golgari Grave Troll because it didn't fit your argument, lol.
I don't think it's really fair to compare, given that Jace sees Legacy/Vintage play while none of the above cards really do. It's clearly a more powerful card than any of the group you mentioned.
I could take the exact argument you just used, and apply it to Skullclamp or Dark Depths. Those cards have never been in the format so how do we know they're busted? Right?
I didn't play Standard with Jace or 4-year Extended with Jace so that has nothing to do with my opinion. My opinion comes solely from having lots of experience playing decks with Jace in Legacy, which is of course a much higher power level format than Modern and yet Jace is still extremely powerful there.
This is a great point, actually, and one I agree with fully. Even if Jace is "safe" in the current meta, it's only because blue is otherwise very weak right now.
Unbanning a busted card to help a struggling archetype is not a good move.
The problem is that with Jace in the format, as soon as blue does get the tools everyone has been hoping for (be it counterspell, or some other good answer or whatever), blue decks with Jace become oppressive and Jace has to be re-banned, which would be a complete disaster.
You should probably make it clear that those are your opinions, not Chapin's lol.
For the record, a summary of Chapin's responses:
1) Fiction, no way DS should be banned. If the deck becomes oppressive, look at Bauble or Street Wraith as ban targets.
2) Absolute fiction, Jace is way too overpowered. Yes a lot of decks win on turn 3, but decks with Jace will be able to pack enough cheap interaction to handle those decks. Jace would push out midrange decks from the format.
Tarmogoyf, Snapcaster, and even Thought-Knot Seer are currently played in a larger percentage of decks than DS is. I mean really what gives?
The card is basically the perfect solution to Modern's problem of fair decks being inherently disadvantaged because of their manabases. Great card to have in the format.
I'm pretty sure that while 1-3 were the stated goals, #4 was the one Wizards really cared about. I strongly doubt that right now people at Wizards are lamenting the Twin ban or are displeased with the state of blue decks in Modern. It wasn't mentioned at all in the last banlist update, in which they basically said Modern was in an excellent state.
I don't think Wizards believes having a blue deck in Tier 1 is necessary. It sucks for Twin players that had their deck banned, but I think it's finally time to move on. The format is otherwise healthy.
The meta looks fairly healthy. According to the data blue isn't nearly as bad as people seem to think. 4 ramp decks in Tier 1 is a bit concerning though I must say. Maybe we'll see Infect make a comeback to combat them.
What would you even ban anyway? Death's Shadow? Goyf? That would be silly. There isn't a single card in the deck that's even close to being overpowered. If it ends up dominating the format, that's just a sign that they've powered other decks down too much with bans.
This deck is strong but very beatable, and it's a nice police deck to have in the format.
Seriously though, this is the perfect deck to have as Modern's "top deck". It punishes uninteractive decks, and it's very beatable if you're on something fair like Abzan or Grixis.
Maybe the "unban Jace" crowd will cool it a bit with 2 Grixis decks in the top 8.
I'd have to assume that the ban target would be either Puresteel, Sram, or Retract. Of these I doesn't seem to matter much which one gets hit, but I think Retract makes the most sense because we're least likely to see another effect like it in the future.
It seems to me like blue based control isn't doing worse than in the past few months, if anything it has gotten slightly better with Push and the Dredge ban.
Someone recently tallied up the last 90 decks that went 5-0 in MTGO leagues. U based control (Grixis, Esper, and UW) had 12 5-0's which is only 1 less than BGx did. On MTGGOldfish the collective share of Grixis Control and Grixis Delver is around 4.5%, which is around the same as Burn's.
This is of course a subjective prediction, but I wouldn't be suprised to see Grixis pop in and out of Tier 1 a few times in the upcoming months. To me the deck feels the best positioned it's been in since summer 2015.
Btw, when can we expect the next metagame update?
I'm not sure I get the part about SFM being "blue and white rolled into one". There's nothing about SFM that makes it pair well with blue specifically. People play it with blue in Legacy because blue is just generally the best color. Not because there's synergy between SFM and Blue cards.
In Modern, I think SFM is much more likely to see play in Junk and in Wx Hatebears types of decks. Think about it, would you rather have SFM and Inquisition in your opener, or SFM and Mana Leak? SFM is not great in Modern's blue decks, which don't really want to tap out on turn 2.
I don't think JTMS is a likely target. While JTMS wouldn't be overpowered in the sense that Jace decks will start dominating the meta, he's too good against fair decks and thus would have the effect of pushing the meta towards "play a Jace deck, or play a fast linear deck, or play Tron".
I know people will mention unbanning BBE to compensate, but even then you're only giving Jund specifically a chance to compete against the Jace decks.