New list moves the alternate win con to main. Now can go off through mindbreak trap etc, and not just dead to angel's grace. Also realised that a priest of urabrask would obviously be better as a 4th spirit guide.
Trying to figure out a way to get one or two priest of urabrask in there since if you hit one and a spirit guide while going off you can start cycling your manamorphoses again. It is possible to fizzle before you find a second retriever if you tap out and start trying to go off immediately (which you should!). Although it means you'll just go off next turn with a hand full of cantrips and combo pieces instead and didn't cause a problem the one time it happened to me, it's obviously a weakness that would be nice to cover.
I honestly didn't even think of grim haruspex, fecundity and beck/call were just the first two that occurred to me. Well, aside from glimpse of nature The tokens from myr sire and hangarback are pretty key though yeah, I don't think the deck would function if you couldn't draw off them.
One thing that I learned quickly during goldfishing that might seem obvious to those who are a bit brighter, is to never cast summoning unless you're confident you can resolve beck or fecundity on the same or following turn. A lot of your cards are literal blanks if all you have is summoning. Also, multiple summonings in play mean you'll draw more cards from hangarbacks, so they're not totally dead after the first.
I've been playing a couple of games with this, and it's surprisingly consistent. I did lose to a g/b opponent when all of my heartless summonings were in the bottom 18 cards of my deck, but that's magic. I've killed on turn 2 with it, and that's magic too I guess. The sideboard is pretty random, the manabase is utter guesswork because I'm lazy, and obviously the list is bound to be pretty loose at this point, but Hangarback Walker seems to have really improved this kind of heartless summoning deck. It's obviously a lot more reliable vs an opponent who needs to interact with your ground creatures in order to kill you, but it's still pretty consistent against the goldfish. The 3rd spirit guide is there so you can still start the combo with fecundity when stuck on 2 land without ruining your kill. It's effectively land number 18, 19 and 20, since drawing any of the 3 has the same effect.
For the turn 2 kill I was on the draw with gemstone cavern and heartless summoning, a gitaxian probe and a couple manamorphoses drew me into a beck/call.
Guys I've been testing out Cathartic Reunion, and I think it's actually pretty good. It requires a bit more maneuvering to get it to resolve, but it feels similar to Treasure Cruise when it does resolve. Where Cruise depleted our graveyard, Reunion depletes the hand, but the draw 3 feels excellent along with getting rid of extraneous cards in your hand. And it feels like the literal best card in your deck with an ascension up. I've had success against control with it, you just have to bait out counters and wait for the opportune moment to cast it.
Been playing around with this too. 2 mana for 3 cantrips is already nice, 1 mana for 3 cantrips with electromancer is very nice, turning dead draws into free cantrips is even better, and you win if you resolve it with an active ascension. The downsides are obvious, you lose if it's countered, but I'm liking it a lot.
Seems like I'm alone in this but I don't find the drawback terribly significant in standard. Very few decks are aiming to hit 5+ mana on curve, and even for those that are, the odds of having 3 or 4 lands already and drawing exactly a fastland on turn 4 or 5 are low enough that it doesn't seem like a huge issue (less than 0.16% chance of your 4th land coming in tapped on turn 4 if you're playing 8 of these for example). If you can run evolving wilds and manlands you can run these.
@AeveKai: Maybe you could make a "current state of Green" thread? Talk about how powerful/prevalent the color is and how it's affecting the game? Talk about the color pie, how green is getting such a wide space, how that hurts all the colors and the game?
I would like to but there's a couple of issues I think. Firstly I'd want to analyze things to a much finer grain, plus get some more samples, and I just don't have enough time on my hands in the next little while. I haven't even checked if the extra data that would be required is readily available. Secondly, despite my expressed cynicism, I think that people at wizards are probably aware of the issue and working to resolve it in some way. People, including myself, are passionate about the game, and particularly passionate about the aspects of the game that they enjoy most, which is great, but when those aspects are less than competitive, we can be quite vocal about it, which is good for venting but perhaps not particularly useful in other ways.
Of course, 17 years ago forest was one of the worst cards you could be playing and they said that they wanted to do something about that. Personally I think they've taken it way too far, and when it's being played in 86% of the decks that posted a winning record at a PT, the data seems to back that up. This could totally be an abnormal event though and someone may brew up a w/b/r deck that destroys the format somehow in the coming weeks. Someone with a better understanding of statistics would have a better idea of how likely it is that this PT was a bit of a blip.
The other thing that would be useful would be a bit of info from some of the folks who took bant company as to the reasoning behind their decision, because a lot of people did, and that skewed the results. It could have been a lack of preparation or it could have been that it put up more consistent results against their gauntlet than any of the other decks they brewed up, so they were happy to try to dodge the inevitable hate they would face. Maybe their testing showed that the decks they developed to beat it just weren't doing it consistently enough, or were terrible against the wider field. Maybe they just felt it's better to play a deck you know inside and out than to pick up something new just because it has a 55% winrate against the deck you know well. More likely it's a mixture of some number of the above, or something else that I haven't thought of. Whatever each persons reasons, the fact that so many people brought it did skew the results towards green and that may not continue in coming events. Maybe we see a lot more ur spells and wb control coming up, or maybe we see something else that trounces green emrakul decks. The UR spells still seems very unlikely to me but anythings possible.
With all that said however, I do think that it is a problem when they consistently skew the power towards the style of play that apparently the majority of people consider fun without paying very much attention to how effective each color is at that style of play. I also think it's a problem when things like the grapple/churn, gather/contingency stuff happens. There are certain things that I guess some of us have grown accustomed to expecting particular colors to be better at, but those things do occasionally get given to green if the card also has the word creature in the text somewhere. If impulse is too strong so you print anticipate (and telling time and whatever other neutered impulse) how is gather the pack ok in a format with so much emphasis on creatures and the graveyard? People would still be running gather the pack to filter and draw if impulse had been printed in EMN. Possibly could have affected modern negatively though.
I've been thinking recently and first of all, I hate that it exiles itself. It would open up a really cool deck of it didn't. Imagine saccing a Matter Reshaper to grab a Goblin Dark-Dwellers, flashing back the Evolution, sac Dark-Dwellers to grab a 7-drop.
Alas, this is not the case.
As such, I think one of the best plays is Thalia's Lancers, go grab a legendary, Evolution, saccing lancers, go grab Bruna, Brunas CITP brings back Lancers, allowing you to go grab another Legendary. Off that single play, you can have something like a 4/4 first strike, a 5/7 Flying Vigilance, and I dunno, Kalitas and Thalia in hand?
I somehow skipped the exile text when I first read it and thought of going t1 manadork into t2 ee for witness returning ee into t3 ee for darkdwellers flashback ee for protean hulk or something in modern.
Like the 9-1 u/r deck. 3 people played it, one posted a top finish, the others went worse than 6-4.
So - 33.33~%. Since you seem to have the numbers from somewhere, how many people played Bant vs those that finished in the win? Number of players - not percent of players, please. And what percentage of players of the whole are in the win (not sure where your cut-off is) if there were 200 players and we're talking top 32 - that's 16%, of which 33.33~% is a significant margin.
It more than likely still posted a winning record due to the huge effect outliers have on very small sample sizes, and may even merit further investigation
True.
but the only red decks that consistently showed up at the winners tables were the emerge decks leveraging kozileks return.
Only because of draft, otherwise the Izzet 9-1 deck would have made it there too.
you're still playing just another base green deck, all of which are enabled by having such a concentration of powerful and versatile cards in green.
The green in Temur Emerge is mostly mana ramping, from the looks of it. Most of the creatures and win conditions require blue mana (even though are technically colourless) I recognize that Emerge creatures don't technically 'need' any colour - but they do for the actual emerge feature which is part of their ramp curve.
Sorry that was poor word choice from me. I'm talking about only the standard portion, decks that posted winning records, 6-4 or better, ignoring draft, rather than actual winners tables. The ur deck which put one player on a 9-1 record did not consistently put players on winning records, although as I mentioned, the sample is too small for that to be a particularly strong indicator.
The green in all the emerge decks looks to be mainly draw manipulation to me. Gather, grapple, vessel, traverse, nissa enabling people to dig for what they need and dump the rest in the yard for later use in one way or another. There's a few pilgrimages and druids for ramping to emrakul (which sounds like it was pretty relevant in the emrakul vs emrakul matches), and a few ishkanahs to get on defense. I'll check out the conversion rate for bant company later but it's definitely low. It was as represented as the two next decks combined overall but it's frequency at the 6-4 or better tables was much lower. I'm just pulling these numbers from the wizards coverage btw.
I know this line of conversation is drifting a bit offtopic for this thread, but it's impossible to overstate how green the format is. 70% of people turned up with forests and that's only because the rest didn't understand how good that card is in this standard. Those who left their forests at home largely did not have a good weekend. It has me looking back to recent standards and wanting to do some analysis on those too, because I suspect forest has quietly been the best card in standard for many years now, and I also suspect that it hasn't even been close.
Oh, also, you raise a really good point about the blue in the emerge decks! I think it really highlights what I said before about anything working if you pair it with green. Blue underperformed in terms of putting people on winning standard records, yet did very well in emerge decks running the green card selection. Whatever color was paired with green did well (with the interesting although potentially obvious exception of white), but only did well when paired with green (with another obvious exception in w/b). In other words, it's pretty irrelevant what you pair with the green card selection engine, just so long as you're running it. Since you raised it after my initial post I am talking about 'doing well' relative to the field btw, not just high overall representation converting more easily into a high representation of winning decks.
Card selection may be too narrow a way to define it though, as it doesn't explain whites problem. The key would appear to be that it's also self mill, and EMN made self mill pretty relevant. GY matters cards (of which white has only a few weak options*), alongside grapple and gather. Whether you were running a grapple with the past and/or gather the pack deck was more significant than which grapple with the past/gather the pack deck you were running.
*Although since taking a closer look at some of these numbers it did occur to me to try to figure out a naya deck with the green self mill and nahiri trying to dump eldritch evolution and gisela into the yard so I could cast a dark dwellers that hit the board as brisela after triggers... but brunas 'cast' wording wouldn't let me. Point being that there is a gy matters white card or two and they might show up alongside grapple/gather at some point.
Speaking of the wording on bruna, I do find it interesting that even if counterspell had been reprinted in this block most of these combo style decks would regard it as more of a speedbump than a roadblock, since etb triggers are becoming 'when cast' triggers. Kozileks return in the yard and emerging mindbender or casting emrakul is going to do the nasty part of what it does whether or not the opponent has a counterspell. In their efforts to avoid combos, they've made them stronger by weakening our ability to interact with them. Yes, we have 2uu clear the stack, but 4cmc has always been way too much for a counterspell to see competitive play unless it draws a card, is particularly versatile, or both. Answers that narrow are not even good in the board.
I think blue actually came quite close to being the bogeyman of the weekend though. If contingency plan was a real card and pieces of the puzzle was a bit more like gather the pack and a bit less like crap, we would have seen those two making up the graveyard/card selection engines of at least some versions of these emrakul and delirium decks. I'm sure that wouldn't have flown under the radar quite so much as greens 70% representation appears to have done. Once again I think this highlights just how absurd green is right now. Nobody even bats an eyelid when people are playing green instead of black and blue to fill their graveyard and filter their draws. It's become a very large slice of pie indeed. It's always had some capacity to do these things, but this is the first time I can think of off the top of my head where it's been unquestionably the best at it. Compare contingency plan and gather the pack, or grapple with the past and corpse churn. The green versions are straight upgrades, and that would never have made it through the design stage if they were at all serious about the color pie. Take a moment to think about the process that occurred here. It's something of an indicator that they really regard the color pie as something they can use to rationalize design choices that lead to unbalanced formats when they get called on them.
It's funny that it took a close look at the PT to realise just how strong the grapple/gather engine is, since it's been in literally every brew but one that I've toyed with since spoilers finished, from a terrible spells matter rug bedlam reveler thing, through ug emerge, bug delirium, a quite strong bg delirium, a pretty bad bug version of zombies, and back to a truly awful r/g omnath+splendid reclamation thing. Can be easy to overlook the roleplayers that are the only thing holding your feverish concoctions together I guess.
Anyway, more on topic, it's safe to say that not a single red card would have seen any serious amount of play if kozileks return didn't exist. Banhammer inc?
I just posted before you that 70% of people took green to the PT, but 86% of the decks with winning records played green. People underestimated it's power, not overestimated. However, your point is true in reference to red, at least this past weekend. 27% of people took red to the PT, but 40% of the winning decks played red. Red also overperformed relative to the pros expectations, almost entirely on the back of the kozileks emergence decks.
I believe it was you that I was referring to when I made that comment (I didn't make a direct quote because I saw the comment and filed it away). Edit: I see you edited your post while I was typing. That's exactly what I mean - sure only 40% of the winning decks were red, but only 27% of all total decks were red so that's huge. If more people had taken the chance to play red there'd be more red in the winning decks.
Well yeah, if they were all on the kozileks+emerge train. Everything else that played red underperformed. Like the 9-1 u/r deck. 3 people played it, one posted a top finish, the others went worse than 6-4. It more than likely still posted a winning record due to the huge effect outliers have on very small sample sizes, and may even merit further investigation, but the only red decks that consistently showed up at the winners tables were the emerge decks leveraging kozileks return. That combo being strong enough that it showed up in decks that weren't even able to cast kozileks of course. I guess the obvious analysis here is that while kozileks return is a strong enough combo with emerge guys that it can be worth playing some other red cards too, you're still playing just another base green deck, all of which are enabled by having such a concentration of powerful and versatile cards in green. I would say the single most common card type at the winners tables after 'land' and 'green creature' was 'green library manipulation'. It was certainly much more common than 'red removal', and 'red creature' was a long, looong way back. Edited my prior post too btw, more info in there now. Bad habit sorry!
And for the people quoting based on # of decks making the top <whatever> - that doesn't factor in the number of people playing them. Since so few people are actually playing red - I'd say that there is a larger % of decks with mountains hitting the top <whatever> than the ones with forests because more people are playing forests and therefore more of them get shut out due to odds and mirror-matching. In the Alberta Regionals I only know of 2 people playing red aggro/burn and we both made the top 16. Thus it logically stands that if more people were playing it more red would make the top <whatever> (and, of course, the odds of getting shut out to the luck-of-the-draw mirror increase - one of my losses was to the other red player)
I just posted before you that 70% of people took green to the PT, but 86% of the decks with winning records played green. People underestimated it's power, not overestimated. However, your point is true in reference to red, at least this past weekend. 27% of people took red to the PT, but 40% of the winning decks played red. Red also overperformed relative to the pros expectations.
And yes, that relative margin is larger. The pros undervalued forest, but they undervalued mountain by more. In fact, red had the highest win rate of any color, almost entirely on the back of the kozileks emergence decks, i.e, fiery impulse, tormenting voice, collective defiance, and kozileks return. Of course the key card here isn't red, and was ideally not cast with red mana, particularly not against the other winning decks, most of which would simply shrug off a hardcast kozileks. It probably did get cast for 3 quite a bit in the early rounds though, and the ability to do so would have been critical to those matches, so after thinking about it for a bit I reckon it definitely is still a red card in these decks.
52% played islands, 47% of winning decks played islands. 48% and 40% for plains. 50% and 55% for swamps. Note that the winning decks played more colors on average, about 2.7 compared to 2.6. I haven't counted out win rates for all decks but it's easy to infer an approximate win rate ranking by color from the abstraction provided by these percentages. It won't be very accurate because we're just comparing what showed up to what did well, rather than fine detail about what did particularly well and what did especially poorly, but it might still be useful.
1 red
2 green
3 black
4 blue
5 white
I guess the lesson is don't underestimate red, because kozileks return is really good with emerge and... no, that's it.
By the way, a burn deck did indeed go undefeated at the pro tour but lost in the draft. It was red/blue with Fevered Visions. Also, Kozileks Return is all over the Pro Tour.
If you're honestly striving to analyze the meta, learn about "Socratic discussion" and "The Scientific Method" and you might end up more successful.
Yeah do a proper analysis guys, Kahmos here has this one data point which is a pretty strong indicator that what we are looking at here is a healthy and diverse meta. Oh wait no, that deck doesn't exist. There was a u/r deck that went 9-1 though, and I'm gonna assume he meant that one and just made a mistake, not that he would engage in unscientific hyperbole or exaggeration in order to push his view. I know he just wants to critically analyze the meta, he practically said as much.
I agree with him, the only fair analysis here is that 3/82 decks that went 6-4 or better didn't play forests or plains, therefore you're all a pack of whiners. And besides, you can play forests and plains too. 2 slices is enough color pie for everyone.
Jokes aside, ~70% of the decks at the PT played forests, and they overperformed. ~86% of 6-4 or better decks had forests, compared to 40% that played mountains, 40% that played plains, 47% that played islands, and 55% that played swamps.
The initial pass through the decklists that posted winning records is interesting. Basically anything works if you pair it with green. Black and white also work if paired with each other, but are more commonly paired with green. There are a small handful of 1 and 2 of outliers, W/r, u/b, u/r, W/B/u. Some of these are established decks that have been pushed out by greens dominance, others are new brews, including a blue splash into an existing w/b archetype and the u/b deck designed to fight a bant/gw tokens/'fair' emerge meta, plus the rogue u/r deck that appears easily hated but that no one seriously expects to face. At this point though if you're not playing green you've pretty much gone rogue, so singling that deck out for the label seems unfair except for the fact that it is so narrow.
It does get me thinking, by ramping up the power of creatures to such astronomical levels, wizards seems to have pushed out those narrow strategies very effectively. A few years back, a metagame with such weak disruption would potentially have been dominated by such strategies, now they simply can't keep up.
The only red or blue instant that saw any serious amount of play was fiery impulse. The next closest at the winning tables was about half a dozen total copies of ojutais command. Kozileks return was everywhere obviously but it's a bit hard to evaluate because it's not red and no one was actually paying any red mana for it. Still counts I think, but it could have been purple or had a nonexistent manacost and it wouldn't matter.
The only red or blue sorceries that saw any serious amount of play were tormenting voice and collective defiance. So we have 4 instants and sorceries in the spells matter guild that are good enough and have enough support around them to see a decent amount of play on the PT. They are all red interestingly, and there was no more than a handful of copies of any counterspell among all the winning decks combined.
There was a fair amount of black discard played, which is nice to see, given how weak it is compared to many previous standard formats, especially in a meta where close to 90% of your opponents are purely trying to get a tempo advantage or dump cards in the graveyard themselves. There is still a way to interact beyond playing and removing dudes.
Once again, printing a decent counterspell now and then isn't 'bringing back draw go'. Nor is allowing players to interact on the stack so that you can play decks that don't contain 20% or more etb trigger dudes without being crippled. Nor would draw go be anywhere near as oppressive as MaRos fevered imaginings in an environment where 5 or 6 times more 2/1s (or 3/3s) for 1, 5 or 6 times more flash guys, and 20-30 times more etb triggers exist. We all know creatures are tremendously more powerful than they were back then.
It's kind of beside the point though. They could develop another concept for blue aside from terrible draw effects and an endless stream of 1 for 0 tap and bounce effects. Why does gather the pack at least cycle, and often net you a card, while contingency plan leaves you a card down? Why is coco an instant and pieces of the puzzle a sorcery? Why is coco even green? Why is flash more simic than blue? Hell, it's almost as white as it is blue. If blue can't have anything to do with putting guys into play, can't have destroy or exile effects, and can't have playable counterspells, what exactly can it do? If you want to have a spells matter guild in izzet, why not print some spells in both of those colors that actually matter?
It's actually amusing that a bounce effect that would have been considered powerful at one point is almost entirely unplayable today because it requires you to play a lot of islands.
Draw-go or not, I don't enjoy playing creatures. I used to enjoy magic conceptually, while I have never enjoyed the concept of pokemon battles. These days I'm not sure what the difference is between the two concepts. Mechanically different of course, conceptually, not so much. This is the current state of blue btw:
I don't think two copies of Deathmist Raptor will reliably get you value, I'd either run a minimum of three Raptors and two Den Protector or not run the package at all. That engine is also a bit slow to be in the main deck, I think it's more of a sideboard plan unless the metagame shifts considerably. If you've decided Tireless Tracker is too slow you're probably better off replacing those with additional removal.
I'm going on vacation soon so I'm not doing any testing yet, but I plan to stay in Sultai colors while shifting to a delirium pseudo-ramp approach with Emrakul at the top. I don't like ramp spells or manadorks typically, but I do like the idea of ramping by filling the graveyard and using Kiora, Master of Depths alongside Jace, Vryn's Prodigy and Hangarback Walker. Grim Flayer would be pretty nutty card selection in a control deck, and delirium-enabled Pick the Brain is evil when you have multiple ways to recast it.
I've been trying something similar in straight g/b. It's more of a proof of concept right now, focused on making the engines work rather than winning games, but it's a lot of fun. I didn't really think emrakul was playable but 6 mana win the game is actually not bad, and against the decks where she doesn't just win the game, the dark past combo does. Oh yeah, if you're filling the yard fast enough, splendid reclamation is pretty silly too.
4 Hangarback Walker
4 Myr Retriever
4 Myr Sire
4 Perilous Myr
4 Simian Spirit Guide
1 Reckless Fireweaver
Enchantment:
4 Fecundity
4 Heartless Summoning
Instant:
4 Manamorphose
Sorcery:
4 Gitaxian Probe
3 Serum Visions
3 Beck//Call
1 Grapeshot
2 Verdant Catacombs
2 Misty Rainforest
2 Polluted Delta
2 Breeding Pool
2 Overgrown Tomb
2 Watery Grave
1 Forest
1 Swamp
1 Island
1 Gemstone Caverns
4 Grafdigger's Cage
4 Abrupt Decay
4 Hurkyl's Recall
3 Gemstone Caverns
I honestly didn't even think of grim haruspex, fecundity and beck/call were just the first two that occurred to me. Well, aside from glimpse of nature
One thing that I learned quickly during goldfishing that might seem obvious to those who are a bit brighter, is to never cast summoning unless you're confident you can resolve beck or fecundity on the same or following turn. A lot of your cards are literal blanks if all you have is summoning. Also, multiple summonings in play mean you'll draw more cards from hangarbacks, so they're not totally dead after the first.
4 Perilous Myr
4 Hangarback Walker
4 Myr Sire
4 Myr Retriever
3 Simian Spirit Guide
Enchantment:
4 Fecundity
4 Heartless Summoning
Instant:
4 Manamorphose
Sorcery:
4 Gitaxian Probe
4 Serum Visions
3 Beck//Call
1 Grapeshot
3 Verdant Catacombs
2 Misty Rainforest
2 Polluted Delta
2 Breeding Pool
2 Overgrown Tomb
2 Watery Grave
1 Forest
1 Swamp
1 Island
1 Gemstone Caverns
1 Reckless Fireweaver
3 Abrupt Decay
1 Beck//Call
3 Grafdiggers Cage
3 Shadow of Doubt
4 Ancestral Vision
For the turn 2 kill I was on the draw with gemstone cavern and heartless summoning, a gitaxian probe and a couple manamorphoses drew me into a beck/call.
Been playing around with this too. 2 mana for 3 cantrips is already nice, 1 mana for 3 cantrips with electromancer is very nice, turning dead draws into free cantrips is even better, and you win if you resolve it with an active ascension. The downsides are obvious, you lose if it's countered, but I'm liking it a lot.
I would like to but there's a couple of issues I think. Firstly I'd want to analyze things to a much finer grain, plus get some more samples, and I just don't have enough time on my hands in the next little while. I haven't even checked if the extra data that would be required is readily available. Secondly, despite my expressed cynicism, I think that people at wizards are probably aware of the issue and working to resolve it in some way. People, including myself, are passionate about the game, and particularly passionate about the aspects of the game that they enjoy most, which is great, but when those aspects are less than competitive, we can be quite vocal about it, which is good for venting but perhaps not particularly useful in other ways.
Of course, 17 years ago forest was one of the worst cards you could be playing and they said that they wanted to do something about that. Personally I think they've taken it way too far, and when it's being played in 86% of the decks that posted a winning record at a PT, the data seems to back that up. This could totally be an abnormal event though and someone may brew up a w/b/r deck that destroys the format somehow in the coming weeks. Someone with a better understanding of statistics would have a better idea of how likely it is that this PT was a bit of a blip.
The other thing that would be useful would be a bit of info from some of the folks who took bant company as to the reasoning behind their decision, because a lot of people did, and that skewed the results. It could have been a lack of preparation or it could have been that it put up more consistent results against their gauntlet than any of the other decks they brewed up, so they were happy to try to dodge the inevitable hate they would face. Maybe their testing showed that the decks they developed to beat it just weren't doing it consistently enough, or were terrible against the wider field. Maybe they just felt it's better to play a deck you know inside and out than to pick up something new just because it has a 55% winrate against the deck you know well. More likely it's a mixture of some number of the above, or something else that I haven't thought of. Whatever each persons reasons, the fact that so many people brought it did skew the results towards green and that may not continue in coming events. Maybe we see a lot more ur spells and wb control coming up, or maybe we see something else that trounces green emrakul decks. The UR spells still seems very unlikely to me but anythings possible.
With all that said however, I do think that it is a problem when they consistently skew the power towards the style of play that apparently the majority of people consider fun without paying very much attention to how effective each color is at that style of play. I also think it's a problem when things like the grapple/churn, gather/contingency stuff happens. There are certain things that I guess some of us have grown accustomed to expecting particular colors to be better at, but those things do occasionally get given to green if the card also has the word creature in the text somewhere. If impulse is too strong so you print anticipate (and telling time and whatever other neutered impulse) how is gather the pack ok in a format with so much emphasis on creatures and the graveyard? People would still be running gather the pack to filter and draw if impulse had been printed in EMN. Possibly could have affected modern negatively though.
I somehow skipped the exile text when I first read it and thought of going t1 manadork into t2 ee for witness returning ee into t3 ee for darkdwellers flashback ee for protean hulk or something in modern.
Sorry that was poor word choice from me. I'm talking about only the standard portion, decks that posted winning records, 6-4 or better, ignoring draft, rather than actual winners tables. The ur deck which put one player on a 9-1 record did not consistently put players on winning records, although as I mentioned, the sample is too small for that to be a particularly strong indicator.
The green in all the emerge decks looks to be mainly draw manipulation to me. Gather, grapple, vessel, traverse, nissa enabling people to dig for what they need and dump the rest in the yard for later use in one way or another. There's a few pilgrimages and druids for ramping to emrakul (which sounds like it was pretty relevant in the emrakul vs emrakul matches), and a few ishkanahs to get on defense. I'll check out the conversion rate for bant company later but it's definitely low. It was as represented as the two next decks combined overall but it's frequency at the 6-4 or better tables was much lower. I'm just pulling these numbers from the wizards coverage btw.
I know this line of conversation is drifting a bit offtopic for this thread, but it's impossible to overstate how green the format is. 70% of people turned up with forests and that's only because the rest didn't understand how good that card is in this standard. Those who left their forests at home largely did not have a good weekend. It has me looking back to recent standards and wanting to do some analysis on those too, because I suspect forest has quietly been the best card in standard for many years now, and I also suspect that it hasn't even been close.
Oh, also, you raise a really good point about the blue in the emerge decks! I think it really highlights what I said before about anything working if you pair it with green. Blue underperformed in terms of putting people on winning standard records, yet did very well in emerge decks running the green card selection. Whatever color was paired with green did well (with the interesting although potentially obvious exception of white), but only did well when paired with green (with another obvious exception in w/b). In other words, it's pretty irrelevant what you pair with the green card selection engine, just so long as you're running it. Since you raised it after my initial post I am talking about 'doing well' relative to the field btw, not just high overall representation converting more easily into a high representation of winning decks.
Card selection may be too narrow a way to define it though, as it doesn't explain whites problem. The key would appear to be that it's also self mill, and EMN made self mill pretty relevant. GY matters cards (of which white has only a few weak options*), alongside grapple and gather. Whether you were running a grapple with the past and/or gather the pack deck was more significant than which grapple with the past/gather the pack deck you were running.
*Although since taking a closer look at some of these numbers it did occur to me to try to figure out a naya deck with the green self mill and nahiri trying to dump eldritch evolution and gisela into the yard so I could cast a dark dwellers that hit the board as brisela after triggers... but brunas 'cast' wording wouldn't let me. Point being that there is a gy matters white card or two and they might show up alongside grapple/gather at some point.
Speaking of the wording on bruna, I do find it interesting that even if counterspell had been reprinted in this block most of these combo style decks would regard it as more of a speedbump than a roadblock, since etb triggers are becoming 'when cast' triggers. Kozileks return in the yard and emerging mindbender or casting emrakul is going to do the nasty part of what it does whether or not the opponent has a counterspell. In their efforts to avoid combos, they've made them stronger by weakening our ability to interact with them. Yes, we have 2uu clear the stack, but 4cmc has always been way too much for a counterspell to see competitive play unless it draws a card, is particularly versatile, or both. Answers that narrow are not even good in the board.
I think blue actually came quite close to being the bogeyman of the weekend though. If contingency plan was a real card and pieces of the puzzle was a bit more like gather the pack and a bit less like crap, we would have seen those two making up the graveyard/card selection engines of at least some versions of these emrakul and delirium decks. I'm sure that wouldn't have flown under the radar quite so much as greens 70% representation appears to have done. Once again I think this highlights just how absurd green is right now. Nobody even bats an eyelid when people are playing green instead of black and blue to fill their graveyard and filter their draws. It's become a very large slice of pie indeed. It's always had some capacity to do these things, but this is the first time I can think of off the top of my head where it's been unquestionably the best at it. Compare contingency plan and gather the pack, or grapple with the past and corpse churn. The green versions are straight upgrades, and that would never have made it through the design stage if they were at all serious about the color pie. Take a moment to think about the process that occurred here. It's something of an indicator that they really regard the color pie as something they can use to rationalize design choices that lead to unbalanced formats when they get called on them.
It's funny that it took a close look at the PT to realise just how strong the grapple/gather engine is, since it's been in literally every brew but one that I've toyed with since spoilers finished, from a terrible spells matter rug bedlam reveler thing, through ug emerge, bug delirium, a quite strong bg delirium, a pretty bad bug version of zombies, and back to a truly awful r/g omnath+splendid reclamation thing. Can be easy to overlook the roleplayers that are the only thing holding your feverish concoctions together I guess.
Anyway, more on topic, it's safe to say that not a single red card would have seen any serious amount of play if kozileks return didn't exist. Banhammer inc?
Well yeah, if they were all on the kozileks+emerge train. Everything else that played red underperformed. Like the 9-1 u/r deck. 3 people played it, one posted a top finish, the others went worse than 6-4. It more than likely still posted a winning record due to the huge effect outliers have on very small sample sizes, and may even merit further investigation, but the only red decks that consistently showed up at the winners tables were the emerge decks leveraging kozileks return. That combo being strong enough that it showed up in decks that weren't even able to cast kozileks of course. I guess the obvious analysis here is that while kozileks return is a strong enough combo with emerge guys that it can be worth playing some other red cards too, you're still playing just another base green deck, all of which are enabled by having such a concentration of powerful and versatile cards in green. I would say the single most common card type at the winners tables after 'land' and 'green creature' was 'green library manipulation'. It was certainly much more common than 'red removal', and 'red creature' was a long, looong way back. Edited my prior post too btw, more info in there now. Bad habit sorry!
I just posted before you that 70% of people took green to the PT, but 86% of the decks with winning records played green. People underestimated it's power, not overestimated. However, your point is true in reference to red, at least this past weekend. 27% of people took red to the PT, but 40% of the winning decks played red. Red also overperformed relative to the pros expectations.
And yes, that relative margin is larger. The pros undervalued forest, but they undervalued mountain by more. In fact, red had the highest win rate of any color, almost entirely on the back of the kozileks emergence decks, i.e, fiery impulse, tormenting voice, collective defiance, and kozileks return. Of course the key card here isn't red, and was ideally not cast with red mana, particularly not against the other winning decks, most of which would simply shrug off a hardcast kozileks. It probably did get cast for 3 quite a bit in the early rounds though, and the ability to do so would have been critical to those matches, so after thinking about it for a bit I reckon it definitely is still a red card in these decks.
52% played islands, 47% of winning decks played islands. 48% and 40% for plains. 50% and 55% for swamps. Note that the winning decks played more colors on average, about 2.7 compared to 2.6. I haven't counted out win rates for all decks but it's easy to infer an approximate win rate ranking by color from the abstraction provided by these percentages. It won't be very accurate because we're just comparing what showed up to what did well, rather than fine detail about what did particularly well and what did especially poorly, but it might still be useful.
1 red
2 green
3 black
4 blue
5 white
I guess the lesson is don't underestimate red, because kozileks return is really good with emerge and... no, that's it.
Yeah do a proper analysis guys, Kahmos here has this one data point which is a pretty strong indicator that what we are looking at here is a healthy and diverse meta. Oh wait no, that deck doesn't exist. There was a u/r deck that went 9-1 though, and I'm gonna assume he meant that one and just made a mistake, not that he would engage in unscientific hyperbole or exaggeration in order to push his view. I know he just wants to critically analyze the meta, he practically said as much.
I agree with him, the only fair analysis here is that 3/82 decks that went 6-4 or better didn't play forests or plains, therefore you're all a pack of whiners. And besides, you can play forests and plains too. 2 slices is enough color pie for everyone.
Jokes aside, ~70% of the decks at the PT played forests, and they overperformed. ~86% of 6-4 or better decks had forests, compared to 40% that played mountains, 40% that played plains, 47% that played islands, and 55% that played swamps.
The initial pass through the decklists that posted winning records is interesting. Basically anything works if you pair it with green. Black and white also work if paired with each other, but are more commonly paired with green. There are a small handful of 1 and 2 of outliers, W/r, u/b, u/r, W/B/u. Some of these are established decks that have been pushed out by greens dominance, others are new brews, including a blue splash into an existing w/b archetype and the u/b deck designed to fight a bant/gw tokens/'fair' emerge meta, plus the rogue u/r deck that appears easily hated but that no one seriously expects to face. At this point though if you're not playing green you've pretty much gone rogue, so singling that deck out for the label seems unfair except for the fact that it is so narrow.
It does get me thinking, by ramping up the power of creatures to such astronomical levels, wizards seems to have pushed out those narrow strategies very effectively. A few years back, a metagame with such weak disruption would potentially have been dominated by such strategies, now they simply can't keep up.
The only red or blue instant that saw any serious amount of play was fiery impulse. The next closest at the winning tables was about half a dozen total copies of ojutais command. Kozileks return was everywhere obviously but it's a bit hard to evaluate because it's not red and no one was actually paying any red mana for it. Still counts I think, but it could have been purple or had a nonexistent manacost and it wouldn't matter.
The only red or blue sorceries that saw any serious amount of play were tormenting voice and collective defiance. So we have 4 instants and sorceries in the spells matter guild that are good enough and have enough support around them to see a decent amount of play on the PT. They are all red interestingly, and there was no more than a handful of copies of any counterspell among all the winning decks combined.
There was a fair amount of black discard played, which is nice to see, given how weak it is compared to many previous standard formats, especially in a meta where close to 90% of your opponents are purely trying to get a tempo advantage or dump cards in the graveyard themselves. There is still a way to interact beyond playing and removing dudes.
It's kind of beside the point though. They could develop another concept for blue aside from terrible draw effects and an endless stream of 1 for 0 tap and bounce effects. Why does gather the pack at least cycle, and often net you a card, while contingency plan leaves you a card down? Why is coco an instant and pieces of the puzzle a sorcery? Why is coco even green? Why is flash more simic than blue? Hell, it's almost as white as it is blue. If blue can't have anything to do with putting guys into play, can't have destroy or exile effects, and can't have playable counterspells, what exactly can it do? If you want to have a spells matter guild in izzet, why not print some spells in both of those colors that actually matter?
It's actually amusing that a bounce effect that would have been considered powerful at one point is almost entirely unplayable today because it requires you to play a lot of islands.
Gather the Pack
Contingency Plan
I've been trying something similar in straight g/b. It's more of a proof of concept right now, focused on making the engines work rather than winning games, but it's a lot of fun. I didn't really think emrakul was playable but 6 mana win the game is actually not bad, and against the decks where she doesn't just win the game, the dark past combo does. Oh yeah, if you're filling the yard fast enough, splendid reclamation is pretty silly too.