Someone asked why GDS started to suck. After watching or playing some matches it becomes obvious: the deck appears to be doing stuff but it's merely durdling and doing nothing on the board. GDS turns can go Serum Visions, Opt, Thought scour, cycle Street Wraith and only then dropping a Gurmag Angler. To sum it up, it spent three mana across several turns and some life just to cast a vanilla 5 / 5.
DS variants get an edge in mana efficiency. the example you provided show a player making multiple game actions. in a typical game they are just making more decisions in the first few turns than the opponent. lowering the opponents hand quality, improving their own, or building resources for a future play (ie lowering their life total or stocking their GY for delve/delirium). each of these adds up to some value, and therefore an advantage.
also disregarding how they can leverage street wraith and bauble, free effects that replace themselves essentially means they are playing a 52 card deck; therefore they are more likely to see their high impact cards.
death shadow fell off for a bunch of reasons, but i dont believe what you described is one of them.
also @pokken if you start talking some nonsense like humans being a control deck again i swear to god im gonna punch a baby.
Humans is very arguably an aggro-control deck (given that much of the time it plays that gameplan of wanting to drop Kitesail, Thalia or MM to disrupt prior to sticking threats like mantis rider/image that close the game). It's either right at the edge of Aggro in Fish or it's floating into midrange with aggro-control. 16 disruptive elements is a lot even if they are all on creatures (reflector, thalia, kitesail, meddling mage).
I've actually played the deck quite a bit and I think classifying it in the same pool as Bogles or Hollow One is the nonsense.
Humans is very arguably an aggro-control deck (given that much of the time it plays that gameplan of wanting to drop Kitesail, Thalia or MM to disrupt prior to sticking threats like mantis rider/image that close the game). It's either right at the edge of Aggro in Fish or it's floating into midrange with aggro-control. 16 disruptive elements is a lot even if they are all on creatures (reflector, thalia, kitesail, meddling mage).
I've actually played the deck quite a bit and I think classifying it in the same pool as Bogles or Hollow One is the nonsense.
Its not midrange, when it can legit aggro you out on Turn 3. I'm fine with your analysis that its more Fish, than RDW or Linear Aggro, but its still 'Aggro'.
Bogles would be Linear, and Hollow One is...probably what 'Red' in the sense that its approaching the Combo approach?
*Assuming Chapin's guide is what we are following.
Re: Twin talk
As I've said before, if the Twin defenders actually made an evidence-driven argument for Twin's unbanning that addressed the reasons it was banned in the first place, I am sure more people would be open to considering the card. This also includes acknowledging opposing sides of the argument even if it is not to one's benefit. For instance, we already know that Twin had 50/50+ matchups against the best decks in Modern (https://www.channelfireball.com/articles/magic-math-the-new-modern-by-the-numbers/), so denying this feels disingenuous and/or uninformed.
You're moving the goalposts here. The claim was not that Twin had no bad matchups against the most popular decks. It was that Twin had little to no bad matchups at all.
And let's not forget the data mentioned earlier in that article regarding overall win rate. According to that, Twin's overall win rate was below that of Grixis Delver, Affinity, Junk, GR Tron, Amulet Bloom, Infect, Merfolk, Temur Moon, and Soul Sisters(!).
This isn't moving the goalposts at all. When someone talks about decks having 50/50+ matchups, they don't care if the deck has a 40/60 matchup against an untiered deck that no one plays. Or a deck that is dedicated to beating that deck. See Eldrazi having a bad matchup against Living End. We care about major decks and major decks only.
Sorry, but not the claim made. Let's go back and look at it again:
@Mods: Please ban all Twin talk from this thread, and dont just come down on those who RESPOND to the incorrect statements.
I just said the truth. Splinter Twin had little to none bad matchups, and it was winning too much, more than Affinity, except that you could hate on Affinity harder if you wanted.
There is nothing wrong here. Just a bunch of people wanting to play an archetype that has no bad matchups again.
Sorry, can't have that. In the real world, your deck must be dog to some matchups!
Do you see anything there specifying we're just talking about the top decks? No, it doesn't specify that at all and makes grand, sweeping claims that your data does not support. This post was the one I (and others) responded to, and you're just arguing something differently than was said then. If you want to make a more specific claim that's fine, particularly as you didn't make the original post, but it's not backing up what was originally posted that was being responded to.
In fact, your reference to Living End vs. Eldrazi only supports my point. Eldrazi was the most dominant deck in the history of the format, and it still had bad matchups. So the claim that Twin, which in its wildest dreams couldn't get to that level, somehow had little to no bad matchups is clearly a false statement.
Additionally, considering the non-major decks is rather important. While the data is quite a bit out of date, if we tally up the combined field percentage of the top 10 decks (note the source you keep appealing to doesn't go that far, only doing what it judges as the top 6) according to Modern Nexus, we end up with 47.3%. More than half of your games will be against decks that don't fall into those categories. So how you do against all those other decks is more than a little relevant because that's going to be half or more of your games. And when using the data from Channel Fireball you apparently hold in high regard, when that other half of the format is calculated in, Twin's win rate is lower than other top decks.
[quote]"The first, most obvious thing to look for is whether or not any deck has a positive matchup against every other major deck in the field. When your worst matchup is the mirror, chances are you are going to get banned." (emphasis added)
The Stoddard definition and article has always been the source for this idea that 50/50+ matchup decks are problems. Other decks having more positive matchups likely didn't matter because those decks weren't themselves top-tier and/or didn't have consistently positive matchup against major decks.
The problem is, Twin does not fit that definition. Again, let's look back at the posted data at the end of that article. According to this, Twin had an even Burn matchup, a slightly disadvantaged Delver matchup, a very advantaged Affinity matchup, a slightly positive Junk matchup, a slightly negative Jund matchup, and a mildly positive Tron matchup. So it had a positive matchup against half of those decks (assuming the data is accurate, of course). Even if someone wants to claim that because the disadvantaged matchups are only slightly disfavored, they should be rounded up to 50/50 (by which logic the slightly positive ones should be rounded down, but let's ignore that), we don't end up with positive matchups, only even ones. This falls well short of Stoddard's statement that it must have a positive matchup against EVERY major deck.
Humans is very arguably an aggro-control deck (given that much of the time it plays that gameplan of wanting to drop Kitesail, Thalia or MM to disrupt prior to sticking threats like mantis rider/image that close the game). It's either right at the edge of Aggro in Fish or it's floating into midrange with aggro-control. 16 disruptive elements is a lot even if they are all on creatures (reflector, thalia, kitesail, meddling mage).
I've actually played the deck quite a bit and I think classifying it in the same pool as Bogles or Hollow One is the nonsense.
Its not midrange, when it can legit aggro you out on Turn 3. I'm fine with your analysis that its more Fish, than RDW or Linear Aggro, but its still 'Aggro'.
Bogles would be Linear, and Hollow One is...probably what 'Red' in the sense that its approaching the Combo approach?
*Assuming Chapin's guide is what we are following.
On Monday, I realized that my talk about not having a viable Tempo deck in Modern was not 100% correct. Humans is the new style of Tempo. Delver type decks, Fish, and Faeries Tempo decks are a thing of the past. I just have to accept that there is never going to be a Tempo deck like Legacy Grixis Delver that will be viable in Modern.
Humans can play a lot of roles in matchups, but I think what makes them so strong is that they can just goldfish you out of the game if you're slightly slow to develop. Aggro Control is an acceptable name to me. But I think this is also why it's so hard to put decks in certain archetypes.
I mean, people are saying Burn is Combo? For ****'s sake. I play Combo. There are some I don't enjoy much like Ad Nauseam or Twin. But I would never play Burn, unless it was a Tier 0 deck and there was no reason not to. Also, I play Bogles. It is Aggro. Yes, it is an odd sort of Aggro and has Combo elements, which I enjoy, but it is Aggro. Drop a creature and kill you with that creature as soon as possible...
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Legacy - Sneak Show, BR Reanimator, Miracles, UW Stoneblade
Premodern - Trix, RecSur, Enchantress, Reanimator, Elves https://www.facebook.com/groups/PremodernUSA/ Modern - Neobrand, Hogaak Vine, Elves
Standard - Mono Red (6-2 and 5-3 in 2 McQ)
Draft - (I wish I had more time for limited...)
Commander - Norin the Wary, Grimgrin, Adun Oakenshield (taking forever to build) (dead format for me)
Its not midrange, when it can legit aggro you out on Turn 3. I'm fine with your analysis that its more Fish, than RDW or Linear Aggro, but its still 'Aggro'.
Bogles would be Linear, and Hollow One is...probably what 'Red' in the sense that its approaching the Combo approach?
*Assuming Chapin's guide is what we are following.
See, a Fish deck is all about attacking, then playing a “Time Walk”
or two to neutralize the opponent’s turn (and that pseudo-Walk
can arrive in the form of a counterspell, bounce, a removal spell,
or some other method). An Aggro-Control deck uses its Time
Walks to gain a tempo advantage, then closes the game out with
an attack or two.
Humans actually does both the fish gameplan and the Aggro-control gameplan depending on opponents. Most of the time it's trying to prevent the opponent from killing them with Thalias, Meddling Mages, etc., and then closing out the game with reflector maging a blocker and crashing with a couple fliers, or similar.
The general draws you want to have are where you drop 2 champions, make them huge, and then protect them with a freebooter or something, but in my experience the deck spends a lot more time eking out wins with a mantis rider+phantasmal image after disrupting.
A lot of that could just be the meta, but I think it is arguable that Humans has more in common with Faeries (the old aggro versions with lots of critters) than Merfolk in the way it approaches games.
I might actually ping Chapin and ask what he thinks
On Monday, I realized that my talk about not having a viable Tempo deck in Modern was not 100% correct. Humans is the new style of Tempo. Delver type decks, Fish, and Faeries Tempo decks are a thing of the past. I just have to accept that there is never going to be a Tempo deck like Legacy Grixis Delver that will be viable in Modern.
Humans can play a lot of roles in matchups, but I think what makes them so strong is that they can just goldfish you out of the game if you're slightly slow to develop. Aggro Control is an acceptable name to me. But I think this is also why it's so hard to put decks in certain archetypes.
I think "Disruptive Aggro" is commonly accepted and works well. Plus it has less baggage than using the word Control to (in part) describe Humans.
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Playing UX Mana Denial until Modern gets the answers it needs.
WUBRG Humans BRW Mardu Pyromancer UW UW "Control" UR Blue Moon
Humans is very arguably an aggro-control deck (given that much of the time it plays that gameplan of wanting to drop Kitesail, Thalia or MM to disrupt prior to sticking threats like mantis rider/image that close the game). It's either right at the edge of Aggro in Fish or it's floating into midrange with aggro-control. 16 disruptive elements is a lot even if they are all on creatures (reflector, thalia, kitesail, meddling mage).
I've actually played the deck quite a bit and I think classifying it in the same pool as Bogles or Hollow One is the nonsense.
ding ding ding! you have identified the crux of the classification system. it is the play patterns that matter.
why is diversity important for format health? id chalk it up to two reasons:
-increase the replayability of the format
-allow players to express themselves with various playstyles (being competitive is a given)
diversity ties into the larger more obvious goal of: get more people to play and enjoy the format for as long as possible.
so we are in a situation where we are currently lumping a bunch of decks together that may have similar goals but go about it completely differently. for instance lantern and jeskai are both categorized as control. however they arent remotely the same in their play style. likewise neither are hollow one and humans.
id implore people to not lose sight of this. it isnt about some checklist or meeting some quota that makes the format interesting.
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Modern: UWGSnow-Bant Control BURGrixis Death's Shadow GWBCoCo Elves WCDeath and Taxes (sold)
The complaints about aggro are more linked to an over all goal of trying to just ignore what the other person is doing at the table and win as fast as possible. Since modern is basically players competing for prizes, players tend to go with the fastest and most consistent path to victory while also spending the least amount of money. The idea is that the player wins more than they spent to get those winnings, so if someone can win most of their match ups on a 400-500 dollar modern deck vs something like Jund, they are going to take it.
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1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
I think people are very casual with the "just trying to ignore what the opponent is doing" stuff.
There are very few decks in modern that are like this. Most decks have more decisions and more interaction than people claim.
Every time I pick up a new deck I'm amazed by how much is involved.
This is something I think improved categorization can help. I think it hurts more than it helps to lump every deck that wants to turn dudes sideways in with aggro...
Just as it hurts more than helps to make unsupported assumptions such as "if x percentage of the meta is z then the format is unhealthy."
why is diversity important for format health? id chalk it up to two reasons:
-increase the replayability of the format
-allow players to express themselves with various playstyles (being competitive is a given)
I'd add one reason to rule them all: WotC wants said format diversity. And they want Blue Control to have a spot at the table to the point of making extraordinarily controversial bans and unbans to realize that goal, which is still eluding them.
I don't mind one way or another what people think on the matter, personally. But contrary to the insistence of some posters, making Blue a bit better isn't something that Legacy diehards are trying to force onto Modern; it's explicitly WotC's agenda.
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Playing UX Mana Denial until Modern gets the answers it needs.
WUBRG Humans BRW Mardu Pyromancer UW UW "Control" UR Blue Moon
[
Do you see anything there specifying we're just talking about the top decks? No, it doesn't specify that at all and makes grand, sweeping claims that your data does not support. This post was the one I (and others) responded to, and you're just arguing something differently than was said then. If you want to make a more specific claim that's fine, particularly as you didn't make the original post, but it's not backing up what was originally posted that was being responded to.
I have no idea what GK was arguing. I'm specifically arguing the claim in the Stoddard argument and just assumed everyone else knew we were talking about major decks and not nitpicking with lower-tier decks that see less play. I'd wager that there has never been a deck in the history of Modern that has zero negative matchups of all kinds, because there's always been at least one lower-tier deck that is positive against that deck. If it was unclear that my 50/50+ matchup theory derived from Stoddard's article then that's maybe me being unclear but it doesn't change my own argument. To avoid that in the future, let it be known that when I talk about "50/50+ decks" I am only referring to the matchup spectrum against top decks, not barely-played corner cases.
In fact, your reference to Living End vs. Eldrazi only supports my point. Eldrazi was the most dominant deck in the history of the format, and it still had bad matchups. So the claim that Twin, which in its wildest dreams couldn't get to that level, somehow had little to no bad matchups is clearly a false statement.
Eldrazi wasn't banned because of its matchups. It was banned because it was ridiculously dominant. Incidentally, as I literally said in a post in the last few days, Twin also was not banned because of its matchups. The 50/50+ matchup argument is not an argument that got Twin banned. It's an argument against unbanning Twin because the worry is that Wizards will not risk a 50/50+ deck in Modern. If the pro-Twin camp can prove that Twin does indeed have top decks that are unfavorable matchups, that's a great argument in favor of unbanning Twin.
Additionally, considering the non-major decks is rather important. While the data is quite a bit out of date, if we tally up the combined field percentage of the top 10 decks (note the source you keep appealing to doesn't go that far, only doing what it judges as the top 6) according to Modern Nexus, we end up with 47.3%. More than half of your games will be against decks that don't fall into those categories. So how you do against all those other decks is more than a little relevant because that's going to be half or more of your games. And when using the data from Channel Fireball you apparently hold in high regard, when that other half of the format is calculated in, Twin's win rate is lower than other top decks.
Again, I don't care about all this because my definition of the 50/50+ matchup derives solely from Stoddard's article about decks with positive matchups against MAJOR decks. I don't even care about this definition at all personally. I just acknowledge that Wizards and R&D seem to care about it.
The problem is, Twin does not fit that definition. Again, let's look back at the posted data at the end of that article. According to this, Twin had an even Burn matchup, a slightly disadvantaged Delver matchup, a very advantaged Affinity matchup, a slightly positive Junk matchup, a slightly negative Jund matchup, and a mildly positive Tron matchup. So it had a positive matchup against half of those decks (assuming the data is accurate, of course). Even if someone wants to claim that because the disadvantaged matchups are only slightly disfavored, they should be rounded up to 50/50 (by which logic the slightly positive ones should be rounded down, but let's ignore that), we don't end up with positive matchups, only even ones. This falls well short of Stoddard's statement that it must have a positive matchup against EVERY major deck.
We don't know what the actual numbers are for Twin's matchups. We know most of them were right around 50/50 and the rest were statistically favorable. But the confidence interval around that 50/50 spectrum shows the matchups could fall as low as 45% and as high as 55%. I will happily concede that they could in fact be lower than 50/50 and we just don't know from the data. But in doing so, the Twin camp must also concede that they could be higher and all of them could be 51/49+ (i.e. positive). This is why the pro-Twin camp would do well to address this objection; it builds the credibility of their case because one of the major anti-Twin objections is "this deck will be positive against major decks in the field." If the Twin camp can show this is not the case, that's a great addition to their argument.
I think people are very casual with the "just trying to ignore what the opponent is doing" stuff.
There are very few decks in modern that are like this. Most decks have more decisions and more interaction than people claim.
Every time I pick up a new deck I'm amazed by how much is involved.
This is something I think improved categorization can help. I think it hurts more than it helps to lump every deck that wants to turn dudes sideways in with aggro...
Just as it hurts more than helps to make unsupported assumptions such as "if x percentage of the meta is z then the format is unhealthy."
Things aren't that simple.
It's the nature of how competitive play at it's core operates. Competitiveness can be summed up as having possession of a strong desire to be more successful than others. The barometer by which many people playing the game competitively determine this is by win percentage and the volume of victories, as well as what prizes they win. If a deck can go under a lot of other strategies and provide a fairly good win percentage, that offers a path of least resistance since it allows for less sideboarding. That and if the deck is fairly low cost then it makes it even more attractive even if the win percentage is slightly worse than maybe the best deck for the meta, especially if the best deck were to cost somewhere 2-3x as much.
That's why aggro is always a problem. Cheap decks, fairly decent win percentages for the price, and losses / wins can be determined pretty quickly. Also since a lot of aggro decks are trying to go under most strategies they don't generally get concerned too much with interaction.
There's basically two ways to deal with fast linear decks. One is to have a deck that can win as fast as they can through a combo that demands interaction, such as the old splinter twin deck, and the other is to create some kind of strategy that makes it impossible for a low to the ground deck to win. Lifegain + card advantage while walling an opponent out is one way to do it, while another might be to just throw as many board wipes at the aggro player as possible and hope the constant destruction eventually causes them to run out of gas.
1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
I'm always hesitant to bring custom card creation into this thread, but I've been testing a lot lately and I honestly feel like giving Control some teeth is as simple as stapling a Bolt-A-Creature mode onto Negate. (Like this.)
Probably wouldn't put anything to Perma-Tier-1-Format-Pillar status, but it would make fair UR decks a lot less *****ty.
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Playing UX Mana Denial until Modern gets the answers it needs.
WUBRG Humans BRW Mardu Pyromancer UW UW "Control" UR Blue Moon
This is why the pro-Twin camp would do well to address this objection; it builds the credibility of their case because one of the major anti-Twin objections is "this deck will be positive against major decks in the field." If the Twin camp can show this is not the case, that's a great addition to their argument.
Well it's not us who continually bring up 50/50 matchups, it's you. And I'd love to be able to prove it. Got 50k worth of MTGO matches to parse through? Because there is no way to show otherwise without hundreds of ultimately completely meaningless test matches that nobody will put any credence in.
The reason we don't mention it is because it wasn't part of the ban announcement. And any attachment of that justification to Twin is done through implied and inferred connections. And like most justifications people make for the Twin ban, it was made after the fact; because the reasons they wrote in the announcement were either horrifically and blissfully ignorant or purposely constructed to avoid directly talking about shaking up the PT. Either way, we were ALL left scratching our heads trying to figure out why the hell was Twin actually banned.
It was for the Pro Tour. We know it, they know it.
The alternative is 'competitive diversity' without them even knowing what bans will or will not do other than 'we dont want to Nuke Eldrazi from Orbit, it has some interesting play patterns'
They were worried about Thopter Sword.
They were worried about Nacatl.
They were worried about Jace.
Heres the thing. You cannot put the onus on the PLAYERS.
Wizards has the data. They are either INTENTIONALLY or IGNORANTLY wrong about Modern ALL.THE.TIME.
Well they have the data. Come on out and say it to my face. 'Twin was the best deck and had favorable matches across the board, despite that not being TRUE as we showed several pages ago.
Ban Twin from this thread, because nobody will be convinced of anything here. Its quite literally pointless.
It was banned for competitive diversity (that never came about) and the Pro Tour.
It was for the Pro Tour. We know it, they know it.
The alternative is 'competitive diversity' without them even knowing what bans will or will not do other than 'we dont want to Nuke Eldrazi from Orbit, it has some interesting play patterns'
They were worried about Thopter Sword.
They were worried about Nacatl.
They were worried about Jace.
Heres the thing. You cannot put the onus on the PLAYERS.
Wizards has the data. They are either INTENTIONALLY or IGNORANTLY wrong about Modern ALL.THE.TIME.
Well they have the data. Come on out and say it to my face. 'Twin was the best deck and had favorable matches across the board, despite that not being TRUE as we showed several pages ago.
Ban Twin from this thread, because nobody will be convinced of anything here. Its quite literally pointless.
It was banned for competitive diversity (that never came about) and the Pro Tour.
Literally, the end.
Well, the part no one likes is the obscuring of data and that has been a complaint since they started doing that with MTG Goldfish. The trouble is the company has a lot of things all piled into the same pool of concerns with giving players too accurate of a data source. They want to avoid having the format get figured out too quickly so that demand doesn't get all focused onto the same cards and the meta turns stagnant.
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1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
I never played Twin. I play Tron, so I hated it like the plague, but I could beat it without THAT much trouble. it wasn't toxic, it didn't need to go entirely. I don't know if it was unhealthy or whatever, I didn't see that. but I hate how it was done. I understand the Pod ban. I disagree with it being banned, I don't think it was too strong, but I understood the logic, and that was the card that probably would have needed banning at some point. I think Twin was banned EXCLUSIVELY for PT reasons, but that's whatever. I just think they banned the wrong card. Exarch should have been the card to die if anything. Storm gets to keep the payoff cards, Eldrazi committed FAR, FAR worse sins and still gets to exist (and they banned the wrong land). The Twin deck may have needed a ban with Opt, I don't know, but banning Splinter Twin itself, stopping the deck from existing, it wasn't in keeping with previous bans, it was stupid and dare I say vindictive. They didn't ban Delver, they didn't ban Glistener Elf, they printed a replacement for Pod that kept the bulk of the deck very relevant, there was no justification even if a ban was needed, to leave the people who bought into that deck with a pile of cards that no longer had a home in tournaments.
my stake in this is that a good friend quit the game entirely when he lost that deck that he had scrimped and saved for a year to buy.
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Project Booster Fun makes it less fun to open a booster.
This is why the pro-Twin camp would do well to address this objection; it builds the credibility of their case because one of the major anti-Twin objections is "this deck will be positive against major decks in the field." If the Twin camp can show this is not the case, that's a great addition to their argument.
Well it's not us who continually bring up 50/50 matchups, it's you. And I'd love to be able to prove it. Got 50k worth of MTGO matches to parse through? Because there is no way to show otherwise without hundreds of ultimately completely meaningless test matches that nobody will put any credence in.
The reason we don't mention it is because it wasn't part of the ban announcement. And any attachment of that justification to Twin is done through implied and inferred connections. And like most justifications people make for the Twin ban, it was made after the fact; because the reasons they wrote in the announcement were either horrifically and blissfully ignorant or purposely constructed to avoid directly talking about shaking up the PT. Either way, we were ALL left scratching our heads trying to figure out why the hell was Twin actually banned.
I might not be explaining myself clearly so I'll try again. As I said in a number of previous posts, I 100% agree that the 50/50+ matchup argument was not mentioned in the banning of Twin. The Twin ban was for three stated reasons and one unstated reason:
1. Twin "held a large enough percentage of the competitive field to reduce the diversity of the format."
2. Twin "hurt diversity by pushing the decks that it defeats out of competition."
3. Twin "reduce[d] diversity by supplanting similar decks"
(4. Wizards wanted to shakeup the PT metagame for a more exciting/interesting/diverse/engaging/_____ event)
This is why I have continually stated that some of the best ways to argue for a Twin unbanning are:
1. Show that an unbanned Twin would not reduce overall format diversity.
2. Show that an unbanned Twin would not push decks that it defeats out of competition.
3. Show that an unbanned Twin would not supplant similar decks.
4. Show that similar decks did not suddenly get better after Twin was banned.
5. Show that overall format diversity did not improve after Twin was banned.
All of these are critical arguments that the pro-Twin camp needs to make, or at least seriously explore, to justify an unban. Instead, this camp is frequently mired in semantical and rhetorical arguments about the card and its detractors. For example, I don't know why we are focusing on the 50/50+ matchup issue which is merely an unbanning-risk concern and not an actual reason for Twin being banned (which I have said before multiple times). It's merely something that should be addressed to further show the unban is not risky. Necessary? No. Helpful? Definitely. For my part, I am willing to table that issue for the time being because I think it's confusing people and users are interpreting the 50/50+ matchup posts to mean that this is a necessary, sticking issue with Twin. It's not. The necessary, sticking issues are the ones I'm posting about above. But if it's being read as so important and that's because I oversold it, that's my bad for being unclear. So I'm just going to backtrack on that and not bring it up at all. Instead, I am going to encourage us to focus on the three reasons I mentioned above and the five example counter-claims that could be made to dispute them.
I have an old screenshot of the goldfish modern metagame from 2015. Splinter Twin and Jund had meta shares of 10% in 2015. Affinity, R/G Tron, Grixis Delver, and Burn followed at 7%. Bloom titan was 5.5% and Junk was 4.25%. Pretty diverse meta but the numbers were slightly higher.
okay, so turns out it's from an old goldfish article discussing finance. its still out there. it mentioned jund being on the rise at the time.
but anyway, twin was definitely top dog. and the meta has opened up a little bit since. but it was never warping like treasure cruise delver was. i even remember pod hitting higher meta game shares. so i guess you can look at it however you want.
Does anyone have screenshots from when pod was legal? I just think these old screenshots are cool.
I'm always hesitant to bring custom card creation into this thread, but I've been testing a lot lately and I honestly feel like giving Control some teeth is as simple as stapling a Bolt-A-Creature mode onto Negate. (Like this.)
Probably wouldn't put anything to Perma-Tier-1-Format-Pillar status, but it would make fair UR decks a lot less *****ty.
That sort of card with an entwine cost would be outstanding and possibly more the kind of thing modern needs. Flexible maindeckable cards! Nice idea
Still can't get on board with burn being combo.
The way I like to think about the difference is would I rather have selection or card draw and burn is definitely card draw. Obviously I'm not going to go pick a fight with Chapin though
1. Twin allegedly reduced overall diversity. For Twin to be unbanned, it must be shown that Twin's unban will not reduce overall diversity.
First of all, I disagree heavily with unbanning of Twin needing any burden of proof.
This attitude may be the single biggest reason I want twin to stay banned. Most pro-twin posters here carry this same "I don't need to prove anything" argument. It is already banned, so if you want it back, give some rational statements with evidence to back them up. You then gave an argument with conjecture, personal anecdotes, and appeals to authority in the form of pro players which aren't proper evidence.
Like I care what Reid Duke thinks.
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DS variants get an edge in mana efficiency. the example you provided show a player making multiple game actions. in a typical game they are just making more decisions in the first few turns than the opponent. lowering the opponents hand quality, improving their own, or building resources for a future play (ie lowering their life total or stocking their GY for delve/delirium). each of these adds up to some value, and therefore an advantage.
also disregarding how they can leverage street wraith and bauble, free effects that replace themselves essentially means they are playing a 52 card deck; therefore they are more likely to see their high impact cards.
death shadow fell off for a bunch of reasons, but i dont believe what you described is one of them.
also @pokken if you start talking some nonsense like humans being a control deck again i swear to god im gonna punch a baby.
UWGSnow-Bant Control
BURGrixis Death's Shadow
GWBCoCo Elves
WCDeath and Taxes(sold)I've actually played the deck quite a bit and I think classifying it in the same pool as Bogles or Hollow One is the nonsense.
UW Ephara Hatebears [Primer], GB Gitrog Lands, BRU Inalla Combo-Control, URG Maelstrom Wanderer Landfall
Its not midrange, when it can legit aggro you out on Turn 3. I'm fine with your analysis that its more Fish, than RDW or Linear Aggro, but its still 'Aggro'.
Bogles would be Linear, and Hollow One is...probably what 'Red' in the sense that its approaching the Combo approach?
*Assuming Chapin's guide is what we are following.
Spirits
Do you see anything there specifying we're just talking about the top decks? No, it doesn't specify that at all and makes grand, sweeping claims that your data does not support. This post was the one I (and others) responded to, and you're just arguing something differently than was said then. If you want to make a more specific claim that's fine, particularly as you didn't make the original post, but it's not backing up what was originally posted that was being responded to.
In fact, your reference to Living End vs. Eldrazi only supports my point. Eldrazi was the most dominant deck in the history of the format, and it still had bad matchups. So the claim that Twin, which in its wildest dreams couldn't get to that level, somehow had little to no bad matchups is clearly a false statement.
Additionally, considering the non-major decks is rather important. While the data is quite a bit out of date, if we tally up the combined field percentage of the top 10 decks (note the source you keep appealing to doesn't go that far, only doing what it judges as the top 6) according to Modern Nexus, we end up with 47.3%. More than half of your games will be against decks that don't fall into those categories. So how you do against all those other decks is more than a little relevant because that's going to be half or more of your games. And when using the data from Channel Fireball you apparently hold in high regard, when that other half of the format is calculated in, Twin's win rate is lower than other top decks.
The problem is, Twin does not fit that definition. Again, let's look back at the posted data at the end of that article. According to this, Twin had an even Burn matchup, a slightly disadvantaged Delver matchup, a very advantaged Affinity matchup, a slightly positive Junk matchup, a slightly negative Jund matchup, and a mildly positive Tron matchup. So it had a positive matchup against half of those decks (assuming the data is accurate, of course). Even if someone wants to claim that because the disadvantaged matchups are only slightly disfavored, they should be rounded up to 50/50 (by which logic the slightly positive ones should be rounded down, but let's ignore that), we don't end up with positive matchups, only even ones. This falls well short of Stoddard's statement that it must have a positive matchup against EVERY major deck.
On Monday, I realized that my talk about not having a viable Tempo deck in Modern was not 100% correct. Humans is the new style of Tempo. Delver type decks, Fish, and Faeries Tempo decks are a thing of the past. I just have to accept that there is never going to be a Tempo deck like Legacy Grixis Delver that will be viable in Modern.
Humans can play a lot of roles in matchups, but I think what makes them so strong is that they can just goldfish you out of the game if you're slightly slow to develop. Aggro Control is an acceptable name to me. But I think this is also why it's so hard to put decks in certain archetypes.
I mean, people are saying Burn is Combo? For ****'s sake. I play Combo. There are some I don't enjoy much like Ad Nauseam or Twin. But I would never play Burn, unless it was a Tier 0 deck and there was no reason not to. Also, I play Bogles. It is Aggro. Yes, it is an odd sort of Aggro and has Combo elements, which I enjoy, but it is Aggro. Drop a creature and kill you with that creature as soon as possible...
Premodern - Trix, RecSur, Enchantress, Reanimator, Elves https://www.facebook.com/groups/PremodernUSA/
Modern - Neobrand, Hogaak Vine, Elves
Standard - Mono Red (6-2 and 5-3 in 2 McQ)
Draft - (I wish I had more time for limited...)
Commander -
Norin the Wary, Grimgrin, Adun Oakenshield (taking forever to build)(dead format for me)Humans actually does both the fish gameplan and the Aggro-control gameplan depending on opponents. Most of the time it's trying to prevent the opponent from killing them with Thalias, Meddling Mages, etc., and then closing out the game with reflector maging a blocker and crashing with a couple fliers, or similar.
The general draws you want to have are where you drop 2 champions, make them huge, and then protect them with a freebooter or something, but in my experience the deck spends a lot more time eking out wins with a mantis rider+phantasmal image after disrupting.
A lot of that could just be the meta, but I think it is arguable that Humans has more in common with Faeries (the old aggro versions with lots of critters) than Merfolk in the way it approaches games.
I might actually ping Chapin and ask what he thinks
UW Ephara Hatebears [Primer], GB Gitrog Lands, BRU Inalla Combo-Control, URG Maelstrom Wanderer Landfall
Spirits
I think "Disruptive Aggro" is commonly accepted and works well. Plus it has less baggage than using the word Control to (in part) describe Humans.
WUBRG Humans
BRW Mardu Pyromancer
UW UW "Control"
UR Blue Moon
ding ding ding! you have identified the crux of the classification system. it is the play patterns that matter.
why is diversity important for format health? id chalk it up to two reasons:
-increase the replayability of the format
-allow players to express themselves with various playstyles (being competitive is a given)
diversity ties into the larger more obvious goal of: get more people to play and enjoy the format for as long as possible.
so we are in a situation where we are currently lumping a bunch of decks together that may have similar goals but go about it completely differently. for instance lantern and jeskai are both categorized as control. however they arent remotely the same in their play style. likewise neither are hollow one and humans.
id implore people to not lose sight of this. it isnt about some checklist or meeting some quota that makes the format interesting.
UWGSnow-Bant Control
BURGrixis Death's Shadow
GWBCoCo Elves
WCDeath and Taxes(sold)1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
There are very few decks in modern that are like this. Most decks have more decisions and more interaction than people claim.
Every time I pick up a new deck I'm amazed by how much is involved.
This is something I think improved categorization can help. I think it hurts more than it helps to lump every deck that wants to turn dudes sideways in with aggro...
Just as it hurts more than helps to make unsupported assumptions such as "if x percentage of the meta is z then the format is unhealthy."
Things aren't that simple.
UW Ephara Hatebears [Primer], GB Gitrog Lands, BRU Inalla Combo-Control, URG Maelstrom Wanderer Landfall
I'd add one reason to rule them all: WotC wants said format diversity. And they want Blue Control to have a spot at the table to the point of making extraordinarily controversial bans and unbans to realize that goal, which is still eluding them.
I don't mind one way or another what people think on the matter, personally. But contrary to the insistence of some posters, making Blue a bit better isn't something that Legacy diehards are trying to force onto Modern; it's explicitly WotC's agenda.
WUBRG Humans
BRW Mardu Pyromancer
UW UW "Control"
UR Blue Moon
I have no idea what GK was arguing. I'm specifically arguing the claim in the Stoddard argument and just assumed everyone else knew we were talking about major decks and not nitpicking with lower-tier decks that see less play. I'd wager that there has never been a deck in the history of Modern that has zero negative matchups of all kinds, because there's always been at least one lower-tier deck that is positive against that deck. If it was unclear that my 50/50+ matchup theory derived from Stoddard's article then that's maybe me being unclear but it doesn't change my own argument. To avoid that in the future, let it be known that when I talk about "50/50+ decks" I am only referring to the matchup spectrum against top decks, not barely-played corner cases.
Eldrazi wasn't banned because of its matchups. It was banned because it was ridiculously dominant. Incidentally, as I literally said in a post in the last few days, Twin also was not banned because of its matchups. The 50/50+ matchup argument is not an argument that got Twin banned. It's an argument against unbanning Twin because the worry is that Wizards will not risk a 50/50+ deck in Modern. If the pro-Twin camp can prove that Twin does indeed have top decks that are unfavorable matchups, that's a great argument in favor of unbanning Twin.
Again, I don't care about all this because my definition of the 50/50+ matchup derives solely from Stoddard's article about decks with positive matchups against MAJOR decks. I don't even care about this definition at all personally. I just acknowledge that Wizards and R&D seem to care about it.
We don't know what the actual numbers are for Twin's matchups. We know most of them were right around 50/50 and the rest were statistically favorable. But the confidence interval around that 50/50 spectrum shows the matchups could fall as low as 45% and as high as 55%. I will happily concede that they could in fact be lower than 50/50 and we just don't know from the data. But in doing so, the Twin camp must also concede that they could be higher and all of them could be 51/49+ (i.e. positive). This is why the pro-Twin camp would do well to address this objection; it builds the credibility of their case because one of the major anti-Twin objections is "this deck will be positive against major decks in the field." If the Twin camp can show this is not the case, that's a great addition to their argument.
It's the nature of how competitive play at it's core operates. Competitiveness can be summed up as having possession of a strong desire to be more successful than others. The barometer by which many people playing the game competitively determine this is by win percentage and the volume of victories, as well as what prizes they win. If a deck can go under a lot of other strategies and provide a fairly good win percentage, that offers a path of least resistance since it allows for less sideboarding. That and if the deck is fairly low cost then it makes it even more attractive even if the win percentage is slightly worse than maybe the best deck for the meta, especially if the best deck were to cost somewhere 2-3x as much.
That's why aggro is always a problem. Cheap decks, fairly decent win percentages for the price, and losses / wins can be determined pretty quickly. Also since a lot of aggro decks are trying to go under most strategies they don't generally get concerned too much with interaction.
There's basically two ways to deal with fast linear decks. One is to have a deck that can win as fast as they can through a combo that demands interaction, such as the old splinter twin deck, and the other is to create some kind of strategy that makes it impossible for a low to the ground deck to win. Lifegain + card advantage while walling an opponent out is one way to do it, while another might be to just throw as many board wipes at the aggro player as possible and hope the constant destruction eventually causes them to run out of gas.
1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
Probably wouldn't put anything to Perma-Tier-1-Format-Pillar status, but it would make fair UR decks a lot less *****ty.
WUBRG Humans
BRW Mardu Pyromancer
UW UW "Control"
UR Blue Moon
Well it's not us who continually bring up 50/50 matchups, it's you. And I'd love to be able to prove it. Got 50k worth of MTGO matches to parse through? Because there is no way to show otherwise without hundreds of ultimately completely meaningless test matches that nobody will put any credence in.
The reason we don't mention it is because it wasn't part of the ban announcement. And any attachment of that justification to Twin is done through implied and inferred connections. And like most justifications people make for the Twin ban, it was made after the fact; because the reasons they wrote in the announcement were either horrifically and blissfully ignorant or purposely constructed to avoid directly talking about shaking up the PT. Either way, we were ALL left scratching our heads trying to figure out why the hell was Twin actually banned.
UR ....... WUBR ........... WB ............. RGW ........ UBR ....... WUB .... BGU
Spells / Blink & Combo / Token Grind / Dino Tribal / Draw Cards / Zombies / Reanimate
The alternative is 'competitive diversity' without them even knowing what bans will or will not do other than 'we dont want to Nuke Eldrazi from Orbit, it has some interesting play patterns'
They were worried about Thopter Sword.
They were worried about Nacatl.
They were worried about Jace.
Heres the thing. You cannot put the onus on the PLAYERS.
Wizards has the data. They are either INTENTIONALLY or IGNORANTLY wrong about Modern ALL.THE.TIME.
Well they have the data. Come on out and say it to my face. 'Twin was the best deck and had favorable matches across the board, despite that not being TRUE as we showed several pages ago.
Ban Twin from this thread, because nobody will be convinced of anything here. Its quite literally pointless.
It was banned for competitive diversity (that never came about) and the Pro Tour.
Literally, the end.
Spirits
Well, the part no one likes is the obscuring of data and that has been a complaint since they started doing that with MTG Goldfish. The trouble is the company has a lot of things all piled into the same pool of concerns with giving players too accurate of a data source. They want to avoid having the format get figured out too quickly so that demand doesn't get all focused onto the same cards and the meta turns stagnant.
1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
my stake in this is that a good friend quit the game entirely when he lost that deck that he had scrimped and saved for a year to buy.
I might not be explaining myself clearly so I'll try again. As I said in a number of previous posts, I 100% agree that the 50/50+ matchup argument was not mentioned in the banning of Twin. The Twin ban was for three stated reasons and one unstated reason:
1. Twin "held a large enough percentage of the competitive field to reduce the diversity of the format."
2. Twin "hurt diversity by pushing the decks that it defeats out of competition."
3. Twin "reduce[d] diversity by supplanting similar decks"
(4. Wizards wanted to shakeup the PT metagame for a more exciting/interesting/diverse/engaging/_____ event)
This is why I have continually stated that some of the best ways to argue for a Twin unbanning are:
1. Show that an unbanned Twin would not reduce overall format diversity.
2. Show that an unbanned Twin would not push decks that it defeats out of competition.
3. Show that an unbanned Twin would not supplant similar decks.
4. Show that similar decks did not suddenly get better after Twin was banned.
5. Show that overall format diversity did not improve after Twin was banned.
All of these are critical arguments that the pro-Twin camp needs to make, or at least seriously explore, to justify an unban. Instead, this camp is frequently mired in semantical and rhetorical arguments about the card and its detractors. For example, I don't know why we are focusing on the 50/50+ matchup issue which is merely an unbanning-risk concern and not an actual reason for Twin being banned (which I have said before multiple times). It's merely something that should be addressed to further show the unban is not risky. Necessary? No. Helpful? Definitely. For my part, I am willing to table that issue for the time being because I think it's confusing people and users are interpreting the 50/50+ matchup posts to mean that this is a necessary, sticking issue with Twin. It's not. The necessary, sticking issues are the ones I'm posting about above. But if it's being read as so important and that's because I oversold it, that's my bad for being unclear. So I'm just going to backtrack on that and not bring it up at all. Instead, I am going to encourage us to focus on the three reasons I mentioned above and the five example counter-claims that could be made to dispute them.
See: Jace cannot be banned he will ruin Modern. Source: Any number of Pro's.
4 and 5, I think can be done, at least at a Top 8 level...
Spirits
okay, so turns out it's from an old goldfish article discussing finance. its still out there. it mentioned jund being on the rise at the time.
but anyway, twin was definitely top dog. and the meta has opened up a little bit since. but it was never warping like treasure cruise delver was. i even remember pod hitting higher meta game shares. so i guess you can look at it however you want.
Does anyone have screenshots from when pod was legal? I just think these old screenshots are cool.
https://imgur.com/
Spirits
That sort of card with an entwine cost would be outstanding and possibly more the kind of thing modern needs. Flexible maindeckable cards! Nice idea
Still can't get on board with burn being combo.
The way I like to think about the difference is would I rather have selection or card draw and burn is definitely card draw. Obviously I'm not going to go pick a fight with Chapin though
Legacy - LED Dredge, ANT & WDnT
This attitude may be the single biggest reason I want twin to stay banned. Most pro-twin posters here carry this same "I don't need to prove anything" argument. It is already banned, so if you want it back, give some rational statements with evidence to back them up. You then gave an argument with conjecture, personal anecdotes, and appeals to authority in the form of pro players which aren't proper evidence.
Like I care what Reid Duke thinks.