AS a lover of the original Modern, I have lost most of that love with the bannings of the past 2 years. Why they choose to ban what they do is insane. Based on power and such DRS should be gone. How in the world is Ponder worse than that dude?
I know around 30 players who feel just like me. We all wanted something to do with our cards from the 2000's. Now all we have is a bunch of midrange dude go smash decks. It will remain stale as long as you only have 1 type of deck that can see play. I know people hate combo but it is a healthy part of the format. Don't even get me started on the Dredge pieces being banned, that might be the most moronic thing in a format with Scooze and DRS all over the damn place.
I still brew and play on Trice, but I won't ever buy back into the format IRL. As many have stated the cost to play for the entertainment return just isn't there. Heck Legacy decks are only $200 more and at least I am assured that the money I am investing won't just drop out.
^EXACTLY!!!
Its not just vocal people on message boards, it people at my local games store that voice this issue. The ban list feels so amazingly arbitrary. Its like the EDH ban list all over again where somehow Yawgmoth's Bargain is banned but for some reason Necropotence and Hermit Druid is perfectly fine.
Is a format's ban list always going to have debatable cards due to the somewhat fuzzy nature of "what justifies a ban"? Yes, of course. But when a format has Nacatl, Ponder, and GGT banned but not DRS then ban list will rightfully look like a joke, and that will drive them away from the format.
And then they will tell their friends about what a joke they think the format is, and their friends are less likely to play.
And regardless of whether or not they are right it will effect the growth of the format.
So many misconceptions to correct and so little time.
Where to start?
I guess the banned list is the biggest thing Magic players don't understand. I can see why, I suppose. It's easy to feel slighted when someone takes your toys away from you. Anyone who's ever been eight years old can empathize. But I would suggest that people put their eight-year-old selves away for the moment and look at the banned list from a perspective that lets you see it for what it is.
There are two states of format balance: when all of the decks are too good and when none of them are. Legacy and Vintage are poster children for the former: every deck in each format is ridiculous. Their spells are ridiculous, their mana is ridiculous, everything about them is ridiculous; Modern and Standard are the latter: the spells are low-power and the mana is bad, so all of the decks are pretty much terrible. High-power formats can be difficult to penetrate. Or, rather, they appear to be. Brainstorm is a complex spell that requires a little more thinking than most, but it's not that hard if you give it time and practice. Nevertheless, high-power formats are still harder to get into than low-power formats.
Low-power formats are easy to jump right into. The spells are pretty straight-forward and all you need to know really is match-up specifics.
WotC wants Modern to be a low-power format. It Legacy and Vintage have high-power formats covered for now so it wants Modern to be an eternal format (I'm not calling it "non-rotating" - stop that ****) for everyone. But players - ever the selfless, thoughtful bunch - want Modern to be high-power. I'm not sure why it has to be, but that's what they want. I guess players aren't happy if their eternal format isn't dense as a neutron star.
That's not what WotC wants. And this is where the banned list comes in. We either get all of the power cards or none of them. Bloodbraid Elf pushed Jund to the top because it's a broken card. In theory, it could be balanced by, say, Ancestral Vision. But there was no Ancestral Vision to balance it, and unbanning Ancestral Vision could lead to another unbalance because Bloodbraid Elf might not balance it back. Ancestral Vision probably needs something like Wild Nacatl to make three cards drawn on turn four to be way too late. And so on, and so forth.
So in interest of keeping the format low-power and easier to play, Bloodbraid Elf had to go.
If this honestly puts you off - fine. Go play Legacy if you must play "high-powered Magic" but there's nothing inherently wrong with having a low-power format. Modern has some problems but they have nothing to do with it being low-power.
Also, Modern will become high-power eventually. But starting high-power would make it difficult to attract a playerbase. Dense formats don't typically attract new players. The steep learning curve can be very frustrating.
So, yeah, stop with the banned list griping.
This is about what drive the unpopularity of the format, and the ban list is a huge reason for that.
There have been multiple times that bans came out of nowhere. usually with other formats you can tell a ban is coming in advanced, but who the hell saw Nacatl or SS coming? They didn't cause they were completely unjustified bans (storm was perfectly fine before GE) no matter how you slice it.
When bans just feel arbitrary people have no confidence in their investments into the format. This isn't childishness, its completely rational economic calculus.
Stop personally bashing people who have a beef with the format. You are engaging in personal association with a format and its clear that any attack on the format is what you see as an attack against you personally by association. Let go of it.
(yes, this is about the ban list, yes it is on topic cause im claiming that the ban list is the reason the format is hurting in terms of popularity)
People don't have infinite funds and magic is an expensive hobby. You can throw out "they shoulds" all you want about how people should "just accept the possibility". But we don't live in the world of "should" we live in the world of "what is". And here is the reality: People don't like having their decks disappear due to seemingly random bans.
You can say that in a perfect world they would just accept it, but in this imperfect world they don't' (whether justified or not) and that leads to fewer people playing the format.
modern is a deck builder's paradise, but a pilot's nightmare. Everyone I have met who hates modern does so because they are good pilots who are not good at building but very good at learning a five match meta. Any deck is possible in the modern format and so few top events means metas are very diverse. I have been on forums where people say that the crazy amount of decks make it luck based and impossible to test for. Such people are generally tossers in my view, but it is the most popular view I have encountered amongst the more serious players who hate modern. I have never found a person who quit because their deck was banned. Not one. Perhaps it is a us uk thing. Maybe people take bannings to heart more in other places. But even though I would love to play in a format where hive mind is possible I just accept they took my rituals away and get on with it. When you can play so many decks why get upset when one is banned, especially if it is cheap? There are forty more you could play, which is more than standard.
Why get upset when a deck gets banned and you can no longer play it? Um... how about cause you wanted to *play that specific deck*. How difficult is that to understand?
No one is "taking it to heart" like some type of overly-emotional wreck. They build X deck wanting it to be good. Now most people are reasonable when a piece gets banned from their deck if its a fair ban (see: Punishing Fire). But when you take a deck that isn't even a blip on the teir1 charts (Hive Mind), mince it to hell and back (ban SS), then is it really that difficult to see how pissed off (justifiably so) people will be?
They said they wanted to reduce the ability of Storm to go off turn three with the SS ban, but everyone and their mother new Goblin Electromancer was the problem (hint: it was roughly just as easy to go off on turn 3 with one Des-Rit and PiF and GE as it was if you replaced Des-Rit with SS).
I play ALL kinds of decks in modern. I have Pod, Affinity, and UWR control built fully. I can easily switch between them so its no skin off my nose directly. But when I see people build the only modern deck they can afford at the moment (storm, UR Tron, Naya Zoo) only to have it stripped to even lower tier status by bans, I rarely ever see them come back into the format. Or in some cases its done by printings overnight (look at what happened to tempo after the RTR printing).
But hey, I don't even know why I bother. If you don't understand why excessive and unwarranted bans drive people away with out me having to point it out to you explicitly, then you are far too gone to understand even when I do explain it.
Wow so much BS being spewed by legacy players and modern players alike.
First to dispel some myths...
1) Sorry legacy players, but legacy is MUCH more expensive by miles if you don't want to be stuck bored while playing burn of the famous "$8 Cycling Deck". Seriously... Legacy duals are 50-120 dollars each with the modern equivalent being only 10-20 (shocklands).
This isn't even a debate, anyone who tells you that modern is just as expensive as legacy is some you best avoid listening to, disregard every opinion they have regarding magic. Let's not even get started on Wasteland, Will and friends.
2) Sorry my fellow modern players, but its pretty indisputable that the ban list has driven MANY players away. Specifically the Seething Song ban. You can harp about the violation of the turn 3 rule all you want, but in that ban they killed off *multiple* decks that didn't deserve it (UR Tron, Hivemind, Breach). People can often only afford 1 deck, sometimes 2and when you kill off one of their few decks then they are not going to feel very warm and fuzzy towards the format that just sunk the money they spent on a deck they liked.
I've seen modern attendance in my area go from 30-40 a week to at best 15 a week. And I might also leave due to how stale the format has gotten and the feeling that my Pod deck might get banned.
I love the format but have become disillusioned with it due to the handling of the ban list and the way new printings have pushed whole archetypes out of the format (hey! where did teir1 tempo go after Abrupt Decay and DRS?).
Sorry but no kind of UB control would use this card for it's discard clause no matter how you put it. Discarding 2 cards for a thoughtseize (3 with the enchantment, even if it's recurrable or not) is not at all worth it ever.
I really don't see tokens using it either. Tokens plays tokens because they need them to swarm, not because they can just sac them to lose a 1x2, else they just have no threats.
The land clause isn't useful either unless in a combo deck or some very late game loam deck, and even then, 2 lands for a wasteland is just still not worth it, because even with crucible of worlds you don't catch up, and that's already a 2 card sinergy.
It's not that it's not broken, from my initial analisis it's straight unplayable as of now. Btw, not that there are UB or "act of agression" (?) decks out there, and tokens isn't tier either.
As for it being a madness enabler, I think we could come up with a better more specialized one. Lets not try to make 1 card solve every problem of the meta.
Thought of something:
B
Sorcery
Choose one - Destroy target creature with power 1 or less; or exile all cards from target player's graveyard; or target player discards a card at random.
(And now I'm hypocritical in how I'm trying to hate on jund with only 1 card).
Slow down there buddy. I'm not claiming the card would solve all of modern's problems. Just that it's a fun card that would enable more interesting grave strategies, and a type of graveyard based deck that would also be able to sometimes hate on all of the non-basic craziness going on.
You also list all the decks it would be bad in but are not considering some of the decks it might be really cool in.
Imagine a deck that uses Loam and Bloodghast and similar cards (like that 3 mana artifact that lets you play lands from the grave you get the idea). And Im not going to even talk about magical Christmas land scenarios. Imagine this:
*that might not seem like much but imagine that being repeated since you will probably have lands to play.*
2- float mana, Sac lands, target a man land to destory land, play Loam.
3- Sac Pyro tokens, Play a reccuring spell (ravens crime for instance).
Im not even saying it would be teir1 or even 2. But I would like to see interesting synergy based cards being printed for modern and ones that are not so super artificially designed to fit into pre-existing decks. Once enough of those get critical mass we would have more interesting decks available.
Anyways I just care more about interesting synergy based cards then pure power or "lets help X deck" cards.
Discard 2 cards: Target player reveals their hand. You choose a non-land card. They discard that card.
----
Why its a good idea for modern: We need land hate, but not the kind that can be abused too easily. This card also works well with the recurring creature theme of black, possibly helping to enable an interesting graveyard based deck that doesn't just focus on big reanimation effects. It could also create a really fun side effect with token cards like Young Pyromancer.
Why its not broken: Its not white so it won't easily slot into hatebears/D+T (the two decks that would be able to too easily abuse this effect). It also does not fit into the current cascade based combo decks due to its mana cost.
I'm not sure that Turn to Air would work, I thin that you'd have to specify that the blue mana is reduced. It is also at least a counterspell against everything that isn't in Tron or Affinity and is often a 1 mana counterspell. It seems a little too pushed.
I reworded to fix some of the problems, but the intent behind "reduce the man cost" including U color should be clear though. Its just an informal forum post not real life submission.
I would like to introduce a whole new mechanic to modern for the purpose of deflating some of these crazy mana bases without completely killing them off...
Hatred for the Impure
For example...
Pure Hearted Soldier WW
Vigilance
Hatred for the Impure - X is the number of different colors of mana that could be produced by all lands controlled by target opponent. Put X +1/+1 counters on this creature when it comes into play.
2/2
Turn to Air UUU
Counter target spell
Hatred for the Impure - X is the number of different colored mana symbols among all spells on the stack controlled by your opponents. If X is greater than, or equal to, 2 then reduce the cost of this spell by X.
(**** YOU DRS!!!)
Just some non-busted examples for all you out there who seem to enjoy suggesting ridiculously pushed cards... These cards, while good, are only good in VERY specific archetypes or as sideboard.
You could come up with an answer for each scenario you present yourself. You'll find the answers quite bland and will hopefully start focusing your brain on something more interesting.
q: What if they had to watch that movie forever?
a: They would grow bored of it and memorize most of the lines.
Move on. You're asking yourself a question that isn't scary, it's just too observant for your own good. Start answering your baseless questions with logical answers and I'd be surprised if it didn't lose its appeal quite quickly.
good advice.
But why do these thoughts bother you? There is nothing unussual about them. Indeed I would think there is somethign unussual if you hadn't thought them. Everyone's life is filled with certian repeating and monotonous elements. Its only natural that question concerning monotomy are asked.
You stated opinions, like veryone else stated opinions. I guess Tetris is the base of many games and because of that is sort of eternal, yet, it lacks a emotinal factor to really connect with people. Now, it's all good, they'ra all opinions... what i can't understand is why you have a fighting game i never even heard about and you compare it to marvelVScapcom like it was the game to beat. I consider myself a lover of fighting games and played alot. I always considered the playability of the King of Fighters better than that of the Streefighters. Even so the Street fighter series have to be respected on their importance. So, in the end i could understand answers like: Tekken (3 probably), King of fighters (insert year/number), Street Fighter (2 probably), Virtua fighter (or whatever ..that last one from sega that was considered great and that has worldwide tournaments), Soul Edge (or calibur or whatever) and Super Smash Bros (melee or brawl ...for those nintendo fans). I can't understand your answer :O!
I am talking about it in terms of fun, smoothness, how much skill/strategy it takes, and how fairly balenced most of the characters are. As for streetfighter, yeah it was great for its place in fighting game history, but I don't give out points for that. Ironicaly StreetFighter2 is still alot better than the vast majority of fighting games out new and old. I play lots of fighting games too... Everything from Soul Caliber to Street Fighter to MVC2 and I am surprised that you are the one that hasn't heard of BlazBlue yet.
It is a fairly new game. It was released last year, but that doesn't mean it isn't the best.
That's why I never watch dubs. I guess it's a cultural thing. For example, the Latin American dubs for animated series are almost always myriad times better than their American counterparts (for anime and even American cartoons sometimes). Japan and Latin America are known for having "dramatic" cultures that emphasize self-expression and passionate art (I guess the same applies to other countries like Italy and France, sometimes). And it also has to do with the niche: how much of the audience is used to it and how demanding the targeted public is. Americans are known for a "hell yeah, just blow crap up" attitude, while other cultures expect to see more depth in characters and whatnot. And there's also the language. Common English is filled with slang, and speaking in a "standard" (or "dictionary") way would seem both awkward and unappealing, paradoxically causing the opposite to be annoying and easily becoming trite. This isn't the same with other languages, where more attention is paid in different fields, thus causing a better outcome in voice acting.
This is one of the reasons while people like Matt Groening go out of their way to make sure the voice acting is as best as it can be in their work. It's so easy to end up with a mediocre voice-acting animation, that some exhausting steps should be followed before allowing people to voice-act.
What? are you seriose? Expect to see more depth in thier anime characters? Please.
Anyways. I know lots of people complain about the english voice acting, but unless you speak japanese how do you know if the japanese voice acting is any better?
And of course you'll also think voice acting is bad if you're already biased against it; there's no stopping that.
and thats true too. Most people here their friends say "ENGLISH VOICE ACTING SUCKS" and will just agree and maintain tha same bias.
Has anyone heard ERGO PROXIE'S voice acting?
Really though. Am I the only that notices how pretentiose most dub complaints are? Anyone else find it funny that lots of the people who cimplain about US entertainment companies being too concerned about "the mainstream" yet watch the dumbest most mainstream anime out there?
I love anime, but sometimes anime fans make me rage hardcore.
Yeah I know, but I face palmed simply over the fact that they watch naruto. Its one of the worst animes ever produced. Why does the worst anime always become so popular?
^EXACTLY!!!
Its not just vocal people on message boards, it people at my local games store that voice this issue. The ban list feels so amazingly arbitrary. Its like the EDH ban list all over again where somehow Yawgmoth's Bargain is banned but for some reason Necropotence and Hermit Druid is perfectly fine.
Is a format's ban list always going to have debatable cards due to the somewhat fuzzy nature of "what justifies a ban"? Yes, of course. But when a format has Nacatl, Ponder, and GGT banned but not DRS then ban list will rightfully look like a joke, and that will drive them away from the format.
And then they will tell their friends about what a joke they think the format is, and their friends are less likely to play.
And regardless of whether or not they are right it will effect the growth of the format.
There have been multiple times that bans came out of nowhere. usually with other formats you can tell a ban is coming in advanced, but who the hell saw Nacatl or SS coming? They didn't cause they were completely unjustified bans (storm was perfectly fine before GE) no matter how you slice it.
When bans just feel arbitrary people have no confidence in their investments into the format. This isn't childishness, its completely rational economic calculus.
Stop personally bashing people who have a beef with the format. You are engaging in personal association with a format and its clear that any attack on the format is what you see as an attack against you personally by association. Let go of it.
(yes, this is about the ban list, yes it is on topic cause im claiming that the ban list is the reason the format is hurting in terms of popularity)
People don't have infinite funds and magic is an expensive hobby. You can throw out "they shoulds" all you want about how people should "just accept the possibility". But we don't live in the world of "should" we live in the world of "what is". And here is the reality: People don't like having their decks disappear due to seemingly random bans.
You can say that in a perfect world they would just accept it, but in this imperfect world they don't' (whether justified or not) and that leads to fewer people playing the format.
Why get upset when a deck gets banned and you can no longer play it? Um... how about cause you wanted to *play that specific deck*. How difficult is that to understand?
No one is "taking it to heart" like some type of overly-emotional wreck. They build X deck wanting it to be good. Now most people are reasonable when a piece gets banned from their deck if its a fair ban (see: Punishing Fire). But when you take a deck that isn't even a blip on the teir1 charts (Hive Mind), mince it to hell and back (ban SS), then is it really that difficult to see how pissed off (justifiably so) people will be?
They said they wanted to reduce the ability of Storm to go off turn three with the SS ban, but everyone and their mother new Goblin Electromancer was the problem (hint: it was roughly just as easy to go off on turn 3 with one Des-Rit and PiF and GE as it was if you replaced Des-Rit with SS).
I play ALL kinds of decks in modern. I have Pod, Affinity, and UWR control built fully. I can easily switch between them so its no skin off my nose directly. But when I see people build the only modern deck they can afford at the moment (storm, UR Tron, Naya Zoo) only to have it stripped to even lower tier status by bans, I rarely ever see them come back into the format. Or in some cases its done by printings overnight (look at what happened to tempo after the RTR printing).
But hey, I don't even know why I bother. If you don't understand why excessive and unwarranted bans drive people away with out me having to point it out to you explicitly, then you are far too gone to understand even when I do explain it.
First to dispel some myths...
1) Sorry legacy players, but legacy is MUCH more expensive by miles if you don't want to be stuck bored while playing burn of the famous "$8 Cycling Deck". Seriously... Legacy duals are 50-120 dollars each with the modern equivalent being only 10-20 (shocklands).
This isn't even a debate, anyone who tells you that modern is just as expensive as legacy is some you best avoid listening to, disregard every opinion they have regarding magic. Let's not even get started on Wasteland, Will and friends.
2) Sorry my fellow modern players, but its pretty indisputable that the ban list has driven MANY players away. Specifically the Seething Song ban. You can harp about the violation of the turn 3 rule all you want, but in that ban they killed off *multiple* decks that didn't deserve it (UR Tron, Hivemind, Breach). People can often only afford 1 deck, sometimes 2and when you kill off one of their few decks then they are not going to feel very warm and fuzzy towards the format that just sunk the money they spent on a deck they liked.
I've seen modern attendance in my area go from 30-40 a week to at best 15 a week. And I might also leave due to how stale the format has gotten and the feeling that my Pod deck might get banned.
I love the format but have become disillusioned with it due to the handling of the ban list and the way new printings have pushed whole archetypes out of the format (hey! where did teir1 tempo go after Abrupt Decay and DRS?).
Slow down there buddy. I'm not claiming the card would solve all of modern's problems. Just that it's a fun card that would enable more interesting grave strategies, and a type of graveyard based deck that would also be able to sometimes hate on all of the non-basic craziness going on.
You also list all the decks it would be bad in but are not considering some of the decks it might be really cool in.
Imagine a deck that uses Loam and Bloodghast and similar cards (like that 3 mana artifact that lets you play lands from the grave you get the idea). And Im not going to even talk about magical Christmas land scenarios. Imagine this:
1 - sac ghast, play land, sac again, destroy target creature.
*that might not seem like much but imagine that being repeated since you will probably have lands to play.*
2- float mana, Sac lands, target a man land to destory land, play Loam.
3- Sac Pyro tokens, Play a reccuring spell (ravens crime for instance).
Im not even saying it would be teir1 or even 2. But I would like to see interesting synergy based cards being printed for modern and ones that are not so super artificially designed to fit into pre-existing decks. Once enough of those get critical mass we would have more interesting decks available.
Anyways I just care more about interesting synergy based cards then pure power or "lets help X deck" cards.
Hateful Presence
Enchantment
Sacrifice 2 lands: Destroy target land.
Sacrifice 2 creatures: Destroy target creature.
Discard 2 cards: Target player reveals their hand. You choose a non-land card. They discard that card.
----
Why its a good idea for modern: We need land hate, but not the kind that can be abused too easily. This card also works well with the recurring creature theme of black, possibly helping to enable an interesting graveyard based deck that doesn't just focus on big reanimation effects. It could also create a really fun side effect with token cards like Young Pyromancer.
Why its not broken: Its not white so it won't easily slot into hatebears/D+T (the two decks that would be able to too easily abuse this effect). It also does not fit into the current cascade based combo decks due to its mana cost.
I reworded to fix some of the problems, but the intent behind "reduce the man cost" including U color should be clear though. Its just an informal forum post not real life submission.
Hatred for the Impure
For example...
Pure Hearted Soldier
WW
Vigilance
Hatred for the Impure - X is the number of different colors of mana that could be produced by all lands controlled by target opponent. Put X +1/+1 counters on this creature when it comes into play.
2/2
Turn to Air
UUU
Counter target spell
Hatred for the Impure - X is the number of different colored mana symbols among all spells on the stack controlled by your opponents. If X is greater than, or equal to, 2 then reduce the cost of this spell by X.
(**** YOU DRS!!!)
Just some non-busted examples for all you out there who seem to enjoy suggesting ridiculously pushed cards... These cards, while good, are only good in VERY specific archetypes or as sideboard.
We now have a big card that we didn't have earlier: Voice of Resurgence
3 Birds of Paradise
4 Voice of Resurgence
2 Gaddock Teeg
3 Qausali Pridemage
3 Geist of Saint Traft
3 Rhox Warmonk
2 Vendilion Clique
3 Kitchen Finks
4 Path to Exile
3 Bant Charm
Just add lands
But why do these thoughts bother you? There is nothing unussual about them. Indeed I would think there is somethign unussual if you hadn't thought them. Everyone's life is filled with certian repeating and monotonous elements. Its only natural that question concerning monotomy are asked.
It is a fairly new game. It was released last year, but that doesn't mean it isn't the best.
Whoops that was melee,
Anyways. I know lots of people complain about the english voice acting, but unless you speak japanese how do you know if the japanese voice acting is any better?
and thats true too. Most people here their friends say "ENGLISH VOICE ACTING SUCKS" and will just agree and maintain tha same bias.
Has anyone heard ERGO PROXIE'S voice acting?
Really though. Am I the only that notices how pretentiose most dub complaints are? Anyone else find it funny that lots of the people who cimplain about US entertainment companies being too concerned about "the mainstream" yet watch the dumbest most mainstream anime out there?
I love anime, but sometimes anime fans make me rage hardcore.