comparing blazing shoal to glistener elf is kind of foolish....
yes, glistener elf+ 4 other pumps in a magical christmas land scenario gets you a turn 2 kill. If you could rely on "i drew two mutagenic growths and two grondswells" happening often, infect would be a much better deck
This is incomparable with the consistency that blazing shoal and any other infect creature destroys opponents turn 2 and 3, because
A- blazing shoal is one card
B- you can devote a lot of slots to search cards that are unplayable in normal infect
A: Two cards. No one is hardcasting Blazing Shoal for 10.
B- And a lot of decks already devote slots to creature removal, which works better against the Shoal plan than the Elf+pump plan.
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What's the big deal? You could have played multiple Righteous Avengers for years now.
B- And a lot of decks already devote slots to creature removal, which works better against the Shoal plan than the Elf+pump plan.
Removal works better against Shoal in a vacuum, because as you suggest, Shoal doesn't buff toughness.
But in practice, the Shoal pump package was so streamlined that the decks that ran it could play at least 8+ (often more: 10+) counterspells to handle removal. Spell Pierce, Pact of Negation, Muddle the Mixture, and Disrupting Shoal all fit into the deck because Shoal just required 4 slots for itself and 5+ slots for pitch spells.
In actual games, Pump Infect creatures are far more vulnerable to removal than were Shoal ones. Pump Infect dedicates too many slots to Rancors, Groundswells, Mights, Growths, and Vines. Shoal allowed players to fit a ton of protection into the deck, an advantage of old Mono U Infect that current versions just don't have.
To leave open mana for counter magic, they can't win turn two.
So they'll go off turn three, and that would require four cards, two of which cannot be interchanged, one of which is a counterspell and they fold if you have kill spells. (most of which only cost one mana) so they can win if they have five specific cards? (excluding not-manlands) Sounds like the current infect.
To tutor, they can't even win on turn three.
So they can win on turn four. I believe this is allowed by the format.
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What's the big deal? You could have played multiple Righteous Avengers for years now.
To leave open mana for counter magic, they can't win turn two.
So they'll go off turn three, and that would require four cards, two of which cannot be interchanged, one of which is a counterspell and they fold if you have kill spells. (most of which only cost one mana) so they can win if they have five specific cards? (excluding not-manlands) Sounds like the current infect.
To tutor, they can't even win on turn three.
So they can win on turn four. I believe this is allowed by the format.
Actually, they can.
Which was the point of the entire discussion. Please read prior posts for comprehension and examine the cards being discussed before commenting.
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Which was the point of the entire discussion. Please read prior posts for comprehension and examine the cards being discussed before commenting.
Sam Black Couldn't
To win on turn two requires him to use one land to animate his Inkmoth Nexus and his second land has to be inkmoth nexus, which has to tap to attack.
Therefore, he cannot leave mana for countermagic.
To tutor required three mana using transmute. Therefore, he cannot also animate his inkmoth nexus, since it will be tapped. His blighted Agent is a 1/1 with no evasion from removal, and he had to tap out to play it the turn before. Otherwise he could not win on turn three, giving you a opportunity to kill it with him tapped out, on his turn two. And a second one on turn three when he casts the shoal. The alternative is he waits till turn four, which is allowed by the format.
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What's the big deal? You could have played multiple Righteous Avengers for years now.
Sam Black Couldn't
To win on turn two requires him to use one land to animate his Inkmoth Nexus and his second land has to be inkmoth nexus, which has to tap to attack.
Therefore, he cannot leave mana for countermagic.
To tutor required three mana using transmute. Therefore, he cannot also animate his inkmoth nexus, since it will be tapped. His blighted Agent is a 1/1 with no evasion from removal, and he had to tap out to play it the turn before. Otherwise he could not win on turn three, giving you a opportunity to kill it with him tapped out, on his turn two. And a second one on turn three when he casts the shoal. The alternative is he waits till turn four, which is allowed by the format.
If you watch the top 4 match, Sam could have gone off turn 2 both games he lost, but played overly cautious and it cost him the match.
And had he gone off turn two, he would have had no mana up for countermagic, and been blown out by a removal spell. Exactly why he played cautious.
Being over cautious cost him the match. Granted we knew both sides and what each player had. If he would have taken a chance he would have been in the finals.
Being over cautious cost him the match. Granted we knew both sides and what each player had. If he would have taken a chance he would have been in the finals.
We agree on that.
But where as I see this as proof of the deck's high vulnerability to disruption, you see it as a boogieman.
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What's the big deal? You could have played multiple Righteous Avengers for years now.
The deck has access to and often runs multiple free counters, as well as several that are cheap enough to cast t3 (Which is also too fast for Modern). Sam Black was running both Disrupting Shoal and Pact of Negation, and a more all-in build could have easily run more copies of both.
I have no idea how this is hard to understand.
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The deck has access to and often runs multiple free counters, as well as several that are cheap enough to cast t3 (Which is also too fast for Modern). Sam Black was running both Disrupting Shoal and Pact of Negation, and a more all-in build could have easily run more copies of both.
I have no idea how this is hard to understand.
That he was, and no where did I say he couldn't. I'm talking about having mana available for the not free counter spells. He ran one copy of Pact, and Blue shoal requires an exact match. You're starting to require your opponet to have a six card combo on turn two. That's a safe place to be in.
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What's the big deal? You could have played multiple Righteous Avengers for years now.
That he was, and no where did I say he couldn't. I'm talking about having mana available for the not free counter spells. He ran one copy of Pact, and Blue shoal requires an exact match. You're starting to require your opponet to have a six card combo on turn two. That's a safe place to be in.
A "six card combo" that can easily be made exceedingly redundant and run cheap/free enablers.
Half of the deck is comprised of CMC 1 or CMC 2 blue spells, which are the only CMCs worth considering on turn two. There's also not that much of a reason for the deck to not run more copies of Pact of Negation, since the game is probably over after the counter war (whether Shoal wins it or not) anyways.
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That he was, and no where did I say he couldn't. I'm talking about having mana available for the not free counter spells. He ran one copy of Pact, and Blue shoal requires an exact match. You're starting to require your opponet to have a six card combo on turn two. That's a safe place to be in.
I can't tell if you are just arguing for the sake of arguing, playing devil's advocate, or if you seriously believe that Blazing Shoal was more broken than Glistener Elf. Or are you suggesting that Shoal should be unbanned and replaced with Elf? Not trying to insult you or anything, but I am just confused as to what you are arguing.
Shoal is the exact sort of card that Modern does not need without a FoW replacement. You can't reliably stop the early wins.
The real problem with Shoal was not just turn 2 glass cannon win, even if it was scary. After all, at GP Philly, the Infect builds that went more all-in on the turn 2 win (those running Glistener Elf), tended to do much worse than those running the much more resilient Mono U Agent/Inkmoth/Countermagic package.
It was this Mono U version that presented the real problem: The turn 3 win. If you waited until turn 3, you could have the unblockable Blighted Agent and countermagic backup from Spell Pierce/Disrupting Shoal/Pact of Negation/Muddle the Mixture. This layer of protection was only made possible because Shoal was totally free, and that is what gave the deck the turn 3 consistency it needed to dominate games.
As to the argument about Shoal requiring the exact CMC of the countered spell, that really wasn't an issue. At the CMC 1 slot, Infect was running 4 Ponder, 4 Preordain, 2+ Probe, and 4 Pierce. At the CMC 2 slot, it was running 3-4 Disrupting Shoal, 4 Peer Through Depths, 4 Muddle, and 4 Blighted Agent. That's more than enough redundancy to reliably pitch to Shoal, especially if your main worries are Path to Exile, Spell Snare, Mana Leak, and Lightning Bolt.
A "six card combo" that can easily be made exceedingly redundant and run cheap/free enablers.
And you can't use any of those enablers. To win on turn two you have to drop the nexus turn one which can't cast any of your cantrips.
At turn three you can have one blue mana to either hold onto a spell pierce or use a sorcery speed cantrip to guess at what is going to be the correct CMC of the answer the opponet is going to use against you, and it all fails if they have two cheap answers.
The earlier the deck goes off is directly proportional to how weak it was to hate. Volcanic Fallout, Boseiju, or gutshot anyone?
Even Gaddok Teeg.
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What's the big deal? You could have played multiple Righteous Avengers for years now.
And you can't use any of those enablers. To win on turn two you have to drop the nexus turn one which can't cast any of your cantrips.
At turn three you can have one blue mana to either hold onto a spell pierce or use a sorcery speed cantrip to guess at what is going to be the correct CMC of the answer the opponet is going to use against you, and it all fails if they have two cheap answers.
The earlier the deck goes off is directly proportional to how weak it was to hate. Volcanic Fallout, Boseiju, or gutshot anyone?
Even Gaddok Teeg.
Which is why I said "Free". The cheap ones are also good for enabling t3 wins, which are problematic in their own right, but it's the sheer quantity of free spells the deck can run that make a t2 win possible often enough to be a problem. The deck you linked earlier was running Gitaxian Probe and Summoning Pact, both of which are free enablers that can greatly improve the deck's consistency.
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Shoal Infect certainly did. The current iterations of Infect do not.
I dont have the data form thousands of games to say for sure. Some say infect wins turn 2 more then storm did. Only Wotc knows for sure. If the numbers are anywhere near what storm was, I expect the current incarnation of infect to get hit.
I dont see it as the boogyman, I see the deck falling outside the guidelines of the format. Big difference.
So then you're not ok with Zoo, current infect, or glass cannon? All these decks can break the the turn four rule (Zoo, not so much, granted.) but wizards is ok with them.
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What's the big deal? You could have played multiple Righteous Avengers for years now.
[...]All these decks can break the the turn four rule (Zoo, not so much, granted) but wizards is ok with them.
I have no problem with the fundamental concept of the Turn 4 Rule. But I am not happy with how vague it actually is in application. The playerbase knows the rule is there and assumes there's a method to the madness, but how its actually measured by WotC remains a mystery. A little bit of transparency would go quite a long way towards satisfying the gripes of the playerbase.
The example of Pump-infect vs. Past in Flames Storm (with Seething Song) is one of the best lenses we've seen so far for the Turn 4 Rule. WotC's party line of 'trust us, Storm is too fast/consistent, and Seething Song is to blame' is hard to stomach when the level of data actually presented is low. I'm sure they did the analysis as they claimed, but it means very little if they don't publish it.
Questions remain. Is it only non-creature-based combos that are subject to the turn 4 rule? Exactly what frequency qualifies as 'consistent'? Is a Turn 2 win worse than a turn 3 win, or are they equal in that they're both just 'before turn 4'? Is it just game 1's that are measured? What source is the data drawn from? Is variance calculated, and what is its acceptable range? These are just some of the questions that the Turn 4 Rule has left behind...The bottom line is that its difficult to discuss how Card X fits into the Turn 4 Rule when the rule itself isn't very clear.
Honestly that vagueness is important to give them room to make calls. If their policy was completely out in the open they'd have to post change logs constantly and justify to the public every micro decision. This would be a logistical nightmare and would only restrict their choices.
They would be unable to make decisions without lots of information about future sets being divineable which would interfere with marketing. Pushing in this direction is rule by consensus, which is just not a good idea.
More directly to the topic, I think it is fairly clear that goldfish speed isn't what they're using as a standard, which is the only way you can reasonably call Infect similar to combo.
Honestly that vagueness is important to give them room to make calls. If their policy was completely out in the open they'd have to post change logs constantly and justify to the public every micro decision. This would be a logistical nightmare and would only restrict their choices.
A rule is fundamentally an all or nothing proposition...anything less isn't a rule anymore. That's why its important for rules to be well defined.
It might not need to be all the things I suggested, but a simple "Over N observed games on MTGO, Deck Y wins XX% before turn 4. WotC finds this unacceptable" would suffice.
Then they go on to fill in the blanks for the card in question as justification. It isn't burdensome if they're already doing the statistical analysis and it doesn't undermine any of WotC's ability to make decisions as long as they're not arbitrary. The only thing it does is foster transparency. WotC has everything to gain in terms of player support and nothing to lose by communicating more effectively.
So then you're not ok with Zoo, current infect, or glass cannon? All these decks can break the the turn four rule (Zoo, not so much, granted.) but wizards is ok with them.
I am not happy with any build that can win before turn 4.
To say Wotc is 'ok' with anything is a stretch, we dont know what they are happy with. What is fine one period, an be bad the next.
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A: Two cards. No one is hardcasting Blazing Shoal for 10.
B- And a lot of decks already devote slots to creature removal, which works better against the Shoal plan than the Elf+pump plan.
Removal works better against Shoal in a vacuum, because as you suggest, Shoal doesn't buff toughness.
But in practice, the Shoal pump package was so streamlined that the decks that ran it could play at least 8+ (often more: 10+) counterspells to handle removal. Spell Pierce, Pact of Negation, Muddle the Mixture, and Disrupting Shoal all fit into the deck because Shoal just required 4 slots for itself and 5+ slots for pitch spells.
In actual games, Pump Infect creatures are far more vulnerable to removal than were Shoal ones. Pump Infect dedicates too many slots to Rancors, Groundswells, Mights, Growths, and Vines. Shoal allowed players to fit a ton of protection into the deck, an advantage of old Mono U Infect that current versions just don't have.
So they'll go off turn three, and that would require four cards, two of which cannot be interchanged, one of which is a counterspell and they fold if you have kill spells. (most of which only cost one mana) so they can win if they have five specific cards? (excluding not-manlands) Sounds like the current infect.
To tutor, they can't even win on turn three.
So they can win on turn four. I believe this is allowed by the format.
Actually, they can.
Which was the point of the entire discussion. Please read prior posts for comprehension and examine the cards being discussed before commenting.
Sam Black Couldn't
To win on turn two requires him to use one land to animate his Inkmoth Nexus and his second land has to be inkmoth nexus, which has to tap to attack.
Therefore, he cannot leave mana for countermagic.
To tutor required three mana using transmute. Therefore, he cannot also animate his inkmoth nexus, since it will be tapped. His blighted Agent is a 1/1 with no evasion from removal, and he had to tap out to play it the turn before. Otherwise he could not win on turn three, giving you a opportunity to kill it with him tapped out, on his turn two. And a second one on turn three when he casts the shoal. The alternative is he waits till turn four, which is allowed by the format.
If you watch the top 4 match, Sam could have gone off turn 2 both games he lost, but played overly cautious and it cost him the match.
And had he gone off turn two, he would have had no mana up for countermagic, and been blown out by a removal spell. Exactly why he played cautious.
Being over cautious cost him the match. Granted we knew both sides and what each player had. If he would have taken a chance he would have been in the finals.
We agree on that.
But where as I see this as proof of the deck's high vulnerability to disruption, you see it as a boogieman.
I have no idea how this is hard to understand.
That he was, and no where did I say he couldn't. I'm talking about having mana available for the not free counter spells. He ran one copy of Pact, and Blue shoal requires an exact match. You're starting to require your opponet to have a six card combo on turn two. That's a safe place to be in.
A "six card combo" that can easily be made exceedingly redundant and run cheap/free enablers.
Half of the deck is comprised of CMC 1 or CMC 2 blue spells, which are the only CMCs worth considering on turn two. There's also not that much of a reason for the deck to not run more copies of Pact of Negation, since the game is probably over after the counter war (whether Shoal wins it or not) anyways.
I can't tell if you are just arguing for the sake of arguing, playing devil's advocate, or if you seriously believe that Blazing Shoal was more broken than Glistener Elf. Or are you suggesting that Shoal should be unbanned and replaced with Elf? Not trying to insult you or anything, but I am just confused as to what you are arguing.
Shoal is the exact sort of card that Modern does not need without a FoW replacement. You can't reliably stop the early wins.
The real problem with Shoal was not just turn 2 glass cannon win, even if it was scary. After all, at GP Philly, the Infect builds that went more all-in on the turn 2 win (those running Glistener Elf), tended to do much worse than those running the much more resilient Mono U Agent/Inkmoth/Countermagic package.
It was this Mono U version that presented the real problem: The turn 3 win. If you waited until turn 3, you could have the unblockable Blighted Agent and countermagic backup from Spell Pierce/Disrupting Shoal/Pact of Negation/Muddle the Mixture. This layer of protection was only made possible because Shoal was totally free, and that is what gave the deck the turn 3 consistency it needed to dominate games.
As to the argument about Shoal requiring the exact CMC of the countered spell, that really wasn't an issue. At the CMC 1 slot, Infect was running 4 Ponder, 4 Preordain, 2+ Probe, and 4 Pierce. At the CMC 2 slot, it was running 3-4 Disrupting Shoal, 4 Peer Through Depths, 4 Muddle, and 4 Blighted Agent. That's more than enough redundancy to reliably pitch to Shoal, especially if your main worries are Path to Exile, Spell Snare, Mana Leak, and Lightning Bolt.
And you can't use any of those enablers. To win on turn two you have to drop the nexus turn one which can't cast any of your cantrips.
At turn three you can have one blue mana to either hold onto a spell pierce or use a sorcery speed cantrip to guess at what is going to be the correct CMC of the answer the opponet is going to use against you, and it all fails if they have two cheap answers.
The earlier the deck goes off is directly proportional to how weak it was to hate. Volcanic Fallout, Boseiju, or gutshot anyone?
Even Gaddok Teeg.
Which is why I said "Free". The cheap ones are also good for enabling t3 wins, which are problematic in their own right, but it's the sheer quantity of free spells the deck can run that make a t2 win possible often enough to be a problem. The deck you linked earlier was running Gitaxian Probe and Summoning Pact, both of which are free enablers that can greatly improve the deck's consistency.
I dont see it as the boogyman, I see the deck falling outside the guidelines of the format. Big difference.
Shoal Infect certainly did. The current iterations of Infect do not.
It's your job win every game of Magic where you're not.
I dont have the data form thousands of games to say for sure. Some say infect wins turn 2 more then storm did. Only Wotc knows for sure. If the numbers are anywhere near what storm was, I expect the current incarnation of infect to get hit.
So then you're not ok with Zoo, current infect, or glass cannon? All these decks can break the the turn four rule (Zoo, not so much, granted.) but wizards is ok with them.
I have no problem with the fundamental concept of the Turn 4 Rule. But I am not happy with how vague it actually is in application. The playerbase knows the rule is there and assumes there's a method to the madness, but how its actually measured by WotC remains a mystery. A little bit of transparency would go quite a long way towards satisfying the gripes of the playerbase.
The example of Pump-infect vs. Past in Flames Storm (with Seething Song) is one of the best lenses we've seen so far for the Turn 4 Rule. WotC's party line of 'trust us, Storm is too fast/consistent, and Seething Song is to blame' is hard to stomach when the level of data actually presented is low. I'm sure they did the analysis as they claimed, but it means very little if they don't publish it.
Questions remain. Is it only non-creature-based combos that are subject to the turn 4 rule? Exactly what frequency qualifies as 'consistent'? Is a Turn 2 win worse than a turn 3 win, or are they equal in that they're both just 'before turn 4'? Is it just game 1's that are measured? What source is the data drawn from? Is variance calculated, and what is its acceptable range? These are just some of the questions that the Turn 4 Rule has left behind...The bottom line is that its difficult to discuss how Card X fits into the Turn 4 Rule when the rule itself isn't very clear.
Speculate less. Test more.
They would be unable to make decisions without lots of information about future sets being divineable which would interfere with marketing. Pushing in this direction is rule by consensus, which is just not a good idea.
More directly to the topic, I think it is fairly clear that goldfish speed isn't what they're using as a standard, which is the only way you can reasonably call Infect similar to combo.
A rule is fundamentally an all or nothing proposition...anything less isn't a rule anymore. That's why its important for rules to be well defined.
It might not need to be all the things I suggested, but a simple "Over N observed games on MTGO, Deck Y wins XX% before turn 4. WotC finds this unacceptable" would suffice.
Then they go on to fill in the blanks for the card in question as justification. It isn't burdensome if they're already doing the statistical analysis and it doesn't undermine any of WotC's ability to make decisions as long as they're not arbitrary. The only thing it does is foster transparency. WotC has everything to gain in terms of player support and nothing to lose by communicating more effectively.
Speculate less. Test more.
From what I can tell, it has to involve an attacking creature. Storm was dependent on Goblin Electromancer and that didn't spare it.
| Ad Nauseam
| Infect
Big Johnny.
I am not happy with any build that can win before turn 4.
To say Wotc is 'ok' with anything is a stretch, we dont know what they are happy with. What is fine one period, an be bad the next.