How would they be able to tell though? Every deck is packing 4 right now, so it will be really hard to disentangle the data.
That's why it has to be done on MTGO. I assume they have the software structured to see where certain cards show up in certain games. They could run a number of analyses to determine if Temple or Eye showed up more in winning games, checking that against the turn of the win, the boardstate, the matchup, the turn of the land-drop etc. I'd certainly do this analysis if I had the data, and you could make a really smart ban decision this way. No idea if Wizards bans like this, but Stoddard's recent article at least suggests they use MTGO data to some extent, and I would hope they take this decision seriously.
I get what you're saying. However, I'm pretty sure that the data will show hands with Eye and Temple before turn 3 win (Stupid)% of the time, hands with only one win (Slight less Stupid)&, and hands without either are the loser hands. The biggest impact of a ban will be increasing the percentage of no-sol land hands, and dramatically decreasing the effectiveness of mulliganing for one, and that will dwarf the difference between one land and the other.
More fun stats: 13 decks were x-1 after day one of SCGLOU. 8 Eldrazi, 3 affinity, 2 Other.
We all know Wizards is going to wait for the next announcement to hit the deck, but I really wish they'd just get it over with.
I hope they wait and conduct a proper analysis of MTGO data (N will be larger by waiting) to determine if Eye, Temple, or both need to be banned. Banning the wrong card would be a disaster. Can you even imagine what would happen if they banned, say, Eye and said Eldrazi was defeated, and then it came back at 20% of the June GPs? The format would burn even worse than it's already burning.
How would they be able to tell though? Every deck is packing 4 right now, so it will be really hard to disentangle the data.
They are going to wait until the next announcement, the GPs will be as bad or worse than this SCG tournament was, and then they'll end up banning out both cards. If they emergency ban Temple tomorrow, we get a chance to see if Eye would be safe.
I doubt Wizards would actually unban everything (do we reallllllyyyy need to determine that Skullclamp is broken), but let's look at the list of all cards that are legacy legal and banned under the power level rule (not turn 4/tournament logistics):
Splinter Twin
The Artifact Lands
Jitte
Stoneforge
Ponder
Preordian
Punishing Fire
Jace
Green Sun's Zenith
Glimpse
Cloudpost
Deathrite
Bloodbraid
Pod
Ancstral Visions
Sword of the Meek
I'm not sure a format with all those legal wouldn't be better than Modern will be after the eldrazi ban. Take off the best five (Ponder/Deathrite/Stoneforge/Jitte/Post?) and I'd feel even better about unbanning the rest.
So, we get Latest Developments on the Mothership today, talking about bans. Which is odd: today is Thursday! Normally that article comes on Friday.
I highly suggest reading the whole thing, but one relevant section here:
"Fortunately for us, we do get a ton of very useful data from Magic Online. Between Leagues, on-demand queues, and premier events, we know a lot about the decks that are winning. Beyond just seeing what won, we also get very accurate matchup percentages as well as percentages of decks in the metagame. By analyzing all of this data, we get a pretty clear idea of just how healthy a metagame is.
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. Even if, in the real world, the deck hasn't won a lot of tournaments, this is a clear sign that it is poised to take over at some point, and we should probably act sooner rather than later."
I wonder why they posted that today instead of tomorrow. Maybe because they've got something else scheduled for Friday?
For people in the more data range, what's your opinion on MTGO data? At least in my opinion, sufficiently ridiculous MTGO results should count as additional data, and the MTGO information is almost as bad as the Pro Tour.
In the First PTQ Sunday, Eldrazi was 4/6 of the undefeated decks, 6/14 of the 5-1 decks, and 0/12 in the 4-2 decks (There's one deck listed as Eldrazi, but it's the outdated list without Mimic). So the players who bought into Eldrazi all did great, none doing as "poorly" as 4-2.
In the published results, Eldrazi has consistently been 40-50% of the winners metagame.
There's someone out there tracking MTGO match results and matchups. I won't link them so WOTC doesn't shut them down like they did MTGGoldfish, but over the past week the two variations of Eldrazi have 67% and 66% MWP against the field. For comparison, Burn is 64% against Tron, and Affinity is 64% against Merfolk. So Eldrazi is better against the field than two of the most lopsided matchups in Modern, and that's a field that's probably over 30% mirrors! The non-mirror MWP is probably over 70%.
Those numbers are both unprecedented and ridiculously stupid, and why I'm not worried about "adaptation". You can't just tweak some slots and sideboard cards to fix a 30-70 matchup, so the adaptation is going to look like most of the current meta being unplayable, which will lead to a ban anyway. I don't think Wizards will emergency ban now, but after this and Cruise I think they'll want a better way to deal with eternal "oopsies", like moving the B&R announcement to ~1 month after the set release.
I do understand worrying about ban fatigue, but I think there's also brokenness fatigue as well. Lots of the current modern playerbase just played through the Cruise meta not that long ago: we've seen how this goes, and are just going to skip out of the format until the storm blows over (and the bans happen).
As for worrying about banning the wrong card: I believe the Dig Through Time ban was correct. However, it was never actually proven that the card was broken: Wizards just wasn't willing to risk another three months after the Cruise season. If they emergency ban Cruise, maybe Dig gets tested and ends up not actually being broken? Same thing could happen again: maybe Eldrazi is OK but not broken with only one of Eye/Temple, but they might blow up both lands during the ban announcement if current trends hold.
I don't want to link the site because it will get them a WOTC cease-and-desist for scraping MTGO results, but there is someone out there monitoring MTGO match results. Not only is Eldrazi 50% of the winners metagame, but both versions have MWP of around 65%. No other deck is over 54%. For reference, Affinity has a MWP around 64% against Merfolk, and Burn is 64% against Tron. So Eldrazi is a little better against the field than Affinity is against Merfolk or Burn is against Tron. WOTC has all this data, and I'm sure they are paying attention to it.
That's why I'm not worried about waiting for the metagame to "react": when the matchups are that fundamentally bad, you can't fix them by tweaking your deck. So the "adapted" meta is going to be warped enough that they'll ban the lands anyway. So why make us wait for months? Just rip that band-aid off so we can move forward.
This feels like more of a case of "the blob" as I've heard MaRo put it on his podcast. In that there is more than one card here that is warping the format and they might have to ban multiple cards, or reprint a fixed Back to Basics.
No more bans. Wizards has tried the "ban the broken card" policy since 2013 and every time it leads to, guess what, more bans! Let's try something we've never tried before: unbanning good cards that might have a legitimate impact. If it doesn't work, we can always go back to even more bans. It's not like format confidence or confidence in Wizards can get much lower with regard to Modern, so why not try something new instead of the same old policy failures.
I don't think this is really true. The trick is to save your bans for the actually broken cards, like DRS and Cruise. Those bans actually opened up the metagame reasonably well. But you only get so many bans a year, you can't just waste them on random T1 decks for no good reason.
I just goldfished 50 amulet games during my lunch break with a pretty stock list (MTGO solitaire feature and not going through the motions after casting the prime time makes it pretty fast). Counting a kill only if opponent would go to zero life or not be able to pay for a pact, I got:
1 Turn Two Kills
15 Turn Three Kills
20 Turn Four Kills
15 Didn't kill by Turn Four (In ~2/3 of these games, I had a titan in play by the end of Turn Four)
Remember, this counts attacking with one hasty titan and leaving a second one back on turn 3 a "Turn 4 Kill".
This is consistent with my experience playing the deck in real games, although it slightly underestimates turn 2 kill potential (I didn't get any of the double-amulet/bloom/titan nut draws). Assuming Tom Martell is counting a turn two hasty titan as a "Turn two win", it's consistent with his statements.
I don't think letting "T2" decks that win on turn 3 exist is compatible with having a turn 4 format. There's two problems: first, unlike in standard, the gap in power level isn't that big. There just isn't that much difference in power level between Burn/Merfolk/Jund/Infect/Amulet/Tron, to pick 3 decks with T1 meta percentage right now and 3 decks at T2. Second, the nature of the turn 3 decks is that they are very hateable, so they tend not to stay T1, but they can and will strike back at any time if the hate goes away.
At this exact moment on MTGO I think Amulet is the best deck to play in Modern. So I'm playing it, and in the daily event today I played 9 games, with four turn 3 wins, one turn 3 loss, and four games where turn 4 happened. I don't think Wizards should try to ban every random combo deck with a glass cannon kill, but the T2 decks that are a regular part of the metagame should have to follow the turn four rule IMO.
1) How much have you played with the format, roughly?
I've done ~3 drafts and ~30 sealed events. So the rest of these are going to be answered in the context of sealed.
2) Which common was better than you expected?
Temur Battle Rage. I thought it would be similar in power to Kindled Fury, a fine but unexciting combat trick. I underestimated how much extra damage the trample/double strike could routinely do.
3) Which common was worse than you expected?
Ethereal Ambush. Not that it was bad, but I thought it was powerful enough to be worth splashing, which it definitely wasn't. Manifests were basically vanilla bears too often for the card to be great instead of good.
4) What's the most underappreciated card?
Return to the Earth. It looks narrow, but it hits a huge percentage of cards you really want to have removal for. Don't look at what percentage of cards in the set it hits, look at what percentage of cards you actually spend premium removal on that it hits, and then look at the bonus for blowing up sieges.
5) What's the worst common that people still play?
Ainok Guide as the worlds worst Borderland Ranger. If you actually want a two power two drop the card is fine, and it can be better than fine with outlast lords, but if you consistently use it to tutor up lands you should just play more lands in your deck.
6) What was your favorite archetype?
Citadel Siege.
7) Which archetype wasn't as good as you'd expected?
Four-Five Color Big Morph. Losing three packs of reward cards (Abomination/Guide/Snowhorn/etc) hurts, but I underestimated how much work just being able to play grey ogres did to smooth your mana. Losing three packs of morphs makes missing a color for the first couple turns way more punishing.
8) Which colors were the best and worst?
Whichever color you opened rares in.
The worst color was Red, but the other colors were relatively even, certainly not enough to overcome the rares.
9) Thoughts on the format as a whole?
This is the worst sealed format I've played since AVR. I've seen Turtenwald and Brad Nelson agree with me so I don't think I'm that crazy here. Just look at the commons: http://magiccards.info/query?q=r:common e:frf/en&s=cname&v=card&p=1. How many have 3 or more power and are playable? Two, maybe three? How are you supposed to actually win the game with these cards? KTK was great because it had powerful commons that could strongly affect the game, even if they were expensive. Fate Reforged has none of that, and substitutes in a crapload of bombs. So instead of a complex game where all your cards matter, you play cards that don't really matter so you can get to the stage of the game where the only cards that actually matter (the rares) decide who wins or loses. Hope you drew yours and your opponent didn't draw theirs! One bomb is manageable, but three packs of FRF means you can get three bombs, pair them with your one KTK bomb, and rely totally on those to win the game and just play a bunch of get-there cards to fill out your forty.
Manifest is probably the worst mechanic in years. It adds a HUGE amount of rules complexity for cards that 80% of the time are just vanilla creatures. Before I played the set, I thought you'd hit ~40 % of the time given the number of creatures in a typical deck, but it's worse because your average 2/3 drop doesn't do much and cards with ETB abilities are useless. "Hitting" on a Sandsteppe Outcast doesn't really count. So they wasted all the complexity budget on crappy vanilla creatures, then threw in a pile of crappy vanilla creatures on top to balance it out. Here's a run down of the FRF commons (Note that I'm counting Arashin Cleric as a "playable", being generous here, unplayable is crap like Ambush Krotiq:
By comparison, M15 (the last core set) had 8 effectively vanilla common creatures, instead of 10, and more were on curve. They accomplished that despite having 56 common creatures, while FRF had 60 non land commons total. That's because they spent their complexity budget on relatively simple mechanics that actually affect the game, instead of wasting it all on a dumb mechanic that doesn't do anything 80% of the time. Adding below curve vanilla creatures and more unplayable crap on top of that meant there wasn't any room for good cards that affect the game (where good is, again, at least Arashin Cleric, so VERY loosely defined). The power level of commons also dramatically drops off the higher up the curve you go, which is OK in draft but makes sealed a goddamn nightmare: when a vanilla 2/2 for 2 is bad instead of solid, you end up with very few playable FRF commons at all.
Excellent points. It would be fascinating to have some sort of system where you could guess your opponent's rating after the match and compare that to reality. I feel like I can peg the bad players and the experts most of the time (with the area in between being a lot murkier) but who knows.
Go to http://www.mtgontario.com/calculator.php and type in your before rating and your guess, and see if the after is close to what actually happened. Whenever I bother checking I'm accurate, but I only check like 20% of the time.
I play mostly sealed so it bothers me a lot. It's important to remember that sealed is 50/50 KTK/FRF, so it's materially different that way too. Three packs of FRF == many many bombs.
Let's make it a little more concrete: I just simmed random 6 KTK and random 3 KTK/FRF. Looking at the KTK rares, we have Narset/Empty the Pits/Vizier/Sage of the Inward Eye/Sultai Ascendancy/Grim Haruspex. There's quite a few good cards here, but none are particularly unbeatable and most require heavy color commitments. I'd expect to play two to three in my sealed deck, and I could expect to win without drawing them or lose even if I cast them and they aren't removed.
Now, for our FRF/KTK rares: Avalanche Tusker, Vizier, Sultai Ascendancy, Wildcall, Dromoka, Archfiend. If I'm G/B splash u/w I can play four to five rares, two of which are deal-with-me-now or win bombs. If my opponent kills one, I can just slam another. I've played a few too many opponent casts Dromoka -> I kill Dromoka -> Opponent casts Archfiend/Ojutai/Silumgar/Second Dromoka games. None of those are hypothetical, all have happened to me. Four bomb decks in sealed are fundamentally different than one bomb decks, and there's way too many four bomb decks in FRF-KTK.
I feel like the rare issue is way worse in Sealed than draft. There's just SO MANY bomb rares that almost every deck has multiple bombs, and the bombs are so much better than the commons that they are all that matters. It's just not very fun.
If you had a deck that could drop that turn 1 for one on the play, I would scoop and sign and walk away.
Those talking life gain, you have to gain life early and often. Turn 3 is usually too late, mainly because the red decks are main boarding skullcrack. They can play through your life gain with ease.
I get what you're saying. However, I'm pretty sure that the data will show hands with Eye and Temple before turn 3 win (Stupid)% of the time, hands with only one win (Slight less Stupid)&, and hands without either are the loser hands. The biggest impact of a ban will be increasing the percentage of no-sol land hands, and dramatically decreasing the effectiveness of mulliganing for one, and that will dwarf the difference between one land and the other.
How would they be able to tell though? Every deck is packing 4 right now, so it will be really hard to disentangle the data.
They are going to wait until the next announcement, the GPs will be as bad or worse than this SCG tournament was, and then they'll end up banning out both cards. If they emergency ban Temple tomorrow, we get a chance to see if Eye would be safe.
Splinter Twin
The Artifact Lands
Jitte
Stoneforge
Ponder
Preordian
Punishing Fire
Jace
Green Sun's Zenith
Glimpse
Cloudpost
Deathrite
Bloodbraid
Pod
Ancstral Visions
Sword of the Meek
I'm not sure a format with all those legal wouldn't be better than Modern will be after the eldrazi ban. Take off the best five (Ponder/Deathrite/Stoneforge/Jitte/Post?) and I'd feel even better about unbanning the rest.
We all know Wizards is going to wait for the next announcement to hit the deck, but I really wish they'd just get it over with.
I highly suggest reading the whole thing, but one relevant section here:
"Fortunately for us, we do get a ton of very useful data from Magic Online. Between Leagues, on-demand queues, and premier events, we know a lot about the decks that are winning. Beyond just seeing what won, we also get very accurate matchup percentages as well as percentages of decks in the metagame. By analyzing all of this data, we get a pretty clear idea of just how healthy a metagame is.
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. Even if, in the real world, the deck hasn't won a lot of tournaments, this is a clear sign that it is poised to take over at some point, and we should probably act sooner rather than later."
I wonder why they posted that today instead of tomorrow. Maybe because they've got something else scheduled for Friday?
In the First PTQ Sunday, Eldrazi was 4/6 of the undefeated decks, 6/14 of the 5-1 decks, and 0/12 in the 4-2 decks (There's one deck listed as Eldrazi, but it's the outdated list without Mimic). So the players who bought into Eldrazi all did great, none doing as "poorly" as 4-2.
In the published results, Eldrazi has consistently been 40-50% of the winners metagame.
There's someone out there tracking MTGO match results and matchups. I won't link them so WOTC doesn't shut them down like they did MTGGoldfish, but over the past week the two variations of Eldrazi have 67% and 66% MWP against the field. For comparison, Burn is 64% against Tron, and Affinity is 64% against Merfolk. So Eldrazi is better against the field than two of the most lopsided matchups in Modern, and that's a field that's probably over 30% mirrors! The non-mirror MWP is probably over 70%.
Those numbers are both unprecedented and ridiculously stupid, and why I'm not worried about "adaptation". You can't just tweak some slots and sideboard cards to fix a 30-70 matchup, so the adaptation is going to look like most of the current meta being unplayable, which will lead to a ban anyway. I don't think Wizards will emergency ban now, but after this and Cruise I think they'll want a better way to deal with eternal "oopsies", like moving the B&R announcement to ~1 month after the set release.
As for worrying about banning the wrong card: I believe the Dig Through Time ban was correct. However, it was never actually proven that the card was broken: Wizards just wasn't willing to risk another three months after the Cruise season. If they emergency ban Cruise, maybe Dig gets tested and ends up not actually being broken? Same thing could happen again: maybe Eldrazi is OK but not broken with only one of Eye/Temple, but they might blow up both lands during the ban announcement if current trends hold.
I don't want to link the site because it will get them a WOTC cease-and-desist for scraping MTGO results, but there is someone out there monitoring MTGO match results. Not only is Eldrazi 50% of the winners metagame, but both versions have MWP of around 65%. No other deck is over 54%. For reference, Affinity has a MWP around 64% against Merfolk, and Burn is 64% against Tron. So Eldrazi is a little better against the field than Affinity is against Merfolk or Burn is against Tron. WOTC has all this data, and I'm sure they are paying attention to it.
That's why I'm not worried about waiting for the metagame to "react": when the matchups are that fundamentally bad, you can't fix them by tweaking your deck. So the "adapted" meta is going to be warped enough that they'll ban the lands anyway. So why make us wait for months? Just rip that band-aid off so we can move forward.
I don't think this is really true. The trick is to save your bans for the actually broken cards, like DRS and Cruise. Those bans actually opened up the metagame reasonably well. But you only get so many bans a year, you can't just waste them on random T1 decks for no good reason.
I just goldfished 50 amulet games during my lunch break with a pretty stock list (MTGO solitaire feature and not going through the motions after casting the prime time makes it pretty fast). Counting a kill only if opponent would go to zero life or not be able to pay for a pact, I got:
1 Turn Two Kills
15 Turn Three Kills
20 Turn Four Kills
15 Didn't kill by Turn Four (In ~2/3 of these games, I had a titan in play by the end of Turn Four)
Remember, this counts attacking with one hasty titan and leaving a second one back on turn 3 a "Turn 4 Kill".
This is consistent with my experience playing the deck in real games, although it slightly underestimates turn 2 kill potential (I didn't get any of the double-amulet/bloom/titan nut draws). Assuming Tom Martell is counting a turn two hasty titan as a "Turn two win", it's consistent with his statements.
At this exact moment on MTGO I think Amulet is the best deck to play in Modern. So I'm playing it, and in the daily event today I played 9 games, with four turn 3 wins, one turn 3 loss, and four games where turn 4 happened. I don't think Wizards should try to ban every random combo deck with a glass cannon kill, but the T2 decks that are a regular part of the metagame should have to follow the turn four rule IMO.
I've done ~3 drafts and ~30 sealed events. So the rest of these are going to be answered in the context of sealed.
2) Which common was better than you expected?
Temur Battle Rage. I thought it would be similar in power to Kindled Fury, a fine but unexciting combat trick. I underestimated how much extra damage the trample/double strike could routinely do.
3) Which common was worse than you expected?
Ethereal Ambush. Not that it was bad, but I thought it was powerful enough to be worth splashing, which it definitely wasn't. Manifests were basically vanilla bears too often for the card to be great instead of good.
4) What's the most underappreciated card?
Return to the Earth. It looks narrow, but it hits a huge percentage of cards you really want to have removal for. Don't look at what percentage of cards in the set it hits, look at what percentage of cards you actually spend premium removal on that it hits, and then look at the bonus for blowing up sieges.
5) What's the worst common that people still play?
Ainok Guide as the worlds worst Borderland Ranger. If you actually want a two power two drop the card is fine, and it can be better than fine with outlast lords, but if you consistently use it to tutor up lands you should just play more lands in your deck.
6) What was your favorite archetype?
Citadel Siege.
7) Which archetype wasn't as good as you'd expected?
Four-Five Color Big Morph. Losing three packs of reward cards (Abomination/Guide/Snowhorn/etc) hurts, but I underestimated how much work just being able to play grey ogres did to smooth your mana. Losing three packs of morphs makes missing a color for the first couple turns way more punishing.
8) Which colors were the best and worst?
Whichever color you opened rares in.
The worst color was Red, but the other colors were relatively even, certainly not enough to overcome the rares.
9) Thoughts on the format as a whole?
This is the worst sealed format I've played since AVR. I've seen Turtenwald and Brad Nelson agree with me so I don't think I'm that crazy here. Just look at the commons: http://magiccards.info/query?q=r:common e:frf/en&s=cname&v=card&p=1. How many have 3 or more power and are playable? Two, maybe three? How are you supposed to actually win the game with these cards? KTK was great because it had powerful commons that could strongly affect the game, even if they were expensive. Fate Reforged has none of that, and substitutes in a crapload of bombs. So instead of a complex game where all your cards matter, you play cards that don't really matter so you can get to the stage of the game where the only cards that actually matter (the rares) decide who wins or loses. Hope you drew yours and your opponent didn't draw theirs! One bomb is manageable, but three packs of FRF means you can get three bombs, pair them with your one KTK bomb, and rely totally on those to win the game and just play a bunch of get-there cards to fill out your forty.
Manifest is probably the worst mechanic in years. It adds a HUGE amount of rules complexity for cards that 80% of the time are just vanilla creatures. Before I played the set, I thought you'd hit ~40 % of the time given the number of creatures in a typical deck, but it's worse because your average 2/3 drop doesn't do much and cards with ETB abilities are useless. "Hitting" on a Sandsteppe Outcast doesn't really count. So they wasted all the complexity budget on crappy vanilla creatures, then threw in a pile of crappy vanilla creatures on top to balance it out. Here's a run down of the FRF commons (Note that I'm counting Arashin Cleric as a "playable", being generous here, unplayable is crap like Ambush Krotiq:
6 Below Curve Vanilla
4 Fine Vanilla
1 Playable Auras
3 Playable Tricks
11 Playable Removal
17 Actually Playable non-removal/vanilla cards
17 Laughably Unplayable (Great Horn Krushok counts as Playable under low curve vanilla).
By comparison, M15 (the last core set) had 8 effectively vanilla common creatures, instead of 10, and more were on curve. They accomplished that despite having 56 common creatures, while FRF had 60 non land commons total. That's because they spent their complexity budget on relatively simple mechanics that actually affect the game, instead of wasting it all on a dumb mechanic that doesn't do anything 80% of the time. Adding below curve vanilla creatures and more unplayable crap on top of that meant there wasn't any room for good cards that affect the game (where good is, again, at least Arashin Cleric, so VERY loosely defined). The power level of commons also dramatically drops off the higher up the curve you go, which is OK in draft but makes sealed a goddamn nightmare: when a vanilla 2/2 for 2 is bad instead of solid, you end up with very few playable FRF commons at all.
So, yeah, I didn't like FRF sealed very much.
Go to http://www.mtgontario.com/calculator.php and type in your before rating and your guess, and see if the after is close to what actually happened. Whenever I bother checking I'm accurate, but I only check like 20% of the time.
Let's make it a little more concrete: I just simmed random 6 KTK and random 3 KTK/FRF. Looking at the KTK rares, we have Narset/Empty the Pits/Vizier/Sage of the Inward Eye/Sultai Ascendancy/Grim Haruspex. There's quite a few good cards here, but none are particularly unbeatable and most require heavy color commitments. I'd expect to play two to three in my sealed deck, and I could expect to win without drawing them or lose even if I cast them and they aren't removed.
Now, for our FRF/KTK rares: Avalanche Tusker, Vizier, Sultai Ascendancy, Wildcall, Dromoka, Archfiend. If I'm G/B splash u/w I can play four to five rares, two of which are deal-with-me-now or win bombs. If my opponent kills one, I can just slam another. I've played a few too many opponent casts Dromoka -> I kill Dromoka -> Opponent casts Archfiend/Ojutai/Silumgar/Second Dromoka games. None of those are hypothetical, all have happened to me. Four bomb decks in sealed are fundamentally different than one bomb decks, and there's way too many four bomb decks in FRF-KTK.
Hilariously I actually won that match. Smash to Smithereens out of the board is fantastic against Chalice.