And so Copycat's and Gideon's reign of oppression and terror will continue for another six weeks at a minimum.
Additionally, i now have to find a different modern deck AND legacy deck. I'm glad my LGS is drafting for the next two weeks, as I'm currently up a creek as far as constructed goes.
Pure U/W just doesn't have the early game answers to keep up with Mardu, and still just loses outright to scrounger. Nay, grixis is more then likely the best option to tackle the new meta. Commit to Memory is just as good an answer to resolved Gideon as cast out is, and the gearhulk synergy is well and truly busted.
Simple design that manages to fight through a lot. Vehicles didn't really lose their potency, neither did copycat, so barring a B&R announcement we should continue to opperate at instant speed as much as possible, and try to be fairly cheap as far as removal goes. One of the reasons I like archfiend so much is because he sort of acts as an instant speed sweeper. I don't know if Hyroglyphic Illumination is better then Glimmer, but having early game and late game use for a draw spell seems really nice, and I needed more cylcers that didn't suck.
Thoughts? Red is their for the good early game removal, mostly.
I think in a control deck that actually cares about the cycle synergies, this will replace glimmer outright, and decks that care about energy will still play glimmer. Outside of that, It'll probably be a split.
I get the feeling that Wizards is wanting to redefine blue control decks in a manner that's a semblance of its former self but one that new players feel is more "fun"; however that term may be applied. I say that because it feels like the different blue stuff we've been seeing is coming out in a hunt-and-peck style that is searching for an answer that is unknown.
"Maybe this will work? ... Nope"
"How about this? ... Not quite. Tweak it a bit."
"Tweaked. ... Ah, that made it worse."
I have no concrete reason for saying that. It's just how I feel about control these days: They don't like how it used to be, and they are working on building a new variant of it.
This seems accurate. They really want 2 mana to be "situational", forcing Blue to have the right solution to the right threat, while 3 mana is a hard "nope". They're having trouble finding the balance, however - Silumgar's Scorn proved pretty good because it could be hard counter, while Revolutionary Rebuff is nigh-unplayable. At 3, Dissolve and Void Shatter aren't enough of a boost over Cancel to be playable, but Disallow seems like it is in the right place. Lots of experimentation.
I actually liked Dissolve a lot more then Disallow. Scry 1 was actually really nice, and outside of randomly tagging an ultimate, Disallow is cancel 99 times out of a 100.
Finally a blue card with some TEETH to it. This is the late game inevitability control decks needed, and the discard synergizes with just about everything in the last few sets. Words cannot begin to describe how nice it is to have a draw spell stronger then glimmer of genius.
It's because standard sucks that lowering the power level is awkward right now. The threat to answer dicotemy still favors the threats to an absurd degree, and since the number of good removal spells and counterspells can still be counted on both hands, people are going to complain. Censor is the best example, as it's the biggest slap in face I've ever received. I would have preferreda an overreaction with good answers as opposed to this trickle effect. Let us have broken answers to deal with the broken threats, then scale it down. The broken threats would still probably win.
I'm not spending one penny on Amonkhet sealed product. I'm getting what I need from the secondary market and telling wizards to go screw themselves in the interim. #makecounterspellsandremovalgreatagain.
I love that the last line of text is "We believe that these changes will improve the player experience when playing with split cards, old and new." despite the fact that this new rule means split cards are pointless eyesores that may as well be charms/entwine/flashback cards, depending on which arbitrary rules modification they make to it each time they release it. This rules change doesn't actually add anything to the game, it just takes it away.
Expertise decks are soft banned.
Split cards can no longer be played in tiny leader decks
Split cards can no longer be imprinted on scepter
Split cards can no longer be taken with inquisition
Split cards can't be cascaded into
+ a bunch of other interactions that I haven't thought of yet.
What's more, the new rules don't make things any simpler. If for whatever reason someone plays a split card at a tournament, you'll still probably get judged called for ruling clarification. Because to most people, CMC is how much you pay to cast the spell, not the two different numbers added together. The previous rulings, although weird, were more logical then what they're feeding us now.
It would have been better if they just ruled that split cards are treated as two seperate cards, and if you can free cast them with limitations, like expertises, you're limited to just casting that that part of the card. It'd still be arbitrary and unneeded, but it'd make more sense then what they're trying to do.
it has nothing to do with "casuals" it has to do with logical, streamlined rules. The ENTIRE point of CMC is to give every card a singular numerical value that can be referenced by other cards. The old rule gave split cards 3 unique cmc's, the new rule gives them one. This is a completely logical rule change and fits with the goal of What CMC is supposed to be.
I sympathize with those who like jamming emrakul into play on turned 3 and modern, and I'm sorry it ruins your combo. But for the love of God don't be so disingenuous to say that this change was to appease the "casuals" because they're "too dumb."
Except they still have three different CMCs. They have one CMC off of the stack, but when you cast it, the card has the cmc of whatever mode you're casting. You can still spell snare a beck, you just can't inquisition it out of someone's hand, despite the fact that Beck's cmc is 2, it's treated as cmc 8 because it's part of a split card.
The ENTIRE point of a split card is that they function as different cards. They're designed to LOOK like two different cards in one. If you show a split card to someone who's never seen a split card and ask them what's the CMC of beck//call, they'll almost always throw two different numbers at you, 2 and 6. If they wanted to simplify the rules that's what they'd change the rule to. That the CMC is always treated as a 2 drop or a 6 drop (except when fused). They could have even changed the ruling so that if a card specifies a cmc requirement, you're locked into that part of the split card. That would have made more sense and I would have begrudingly accepted it. Instead, they changed the ruling on split cards in the least intuitive, awkward way possible and called us all idiots while they did it.
So in trying to make things simpler, they made it more complicated and ruined everyone's fun.
This is like the most arbitrary ruling change announcement ever, and should not be a thing. Yes I am slightly salty that I just finished building bird brain, but this goes beyond that. This is a big middle finger to johnnys everywhere. The logic is literally yes you found something interesting and cool, but we're going to take it away from you because it's confusing to people with the IQ of a goldfish. We're also going to make the new rules even more confusing and arbitrary.
Can WOTC just come off the "Too confusing for casual magic" BS. It's insulting more than anything. Casual players don't give a flying phelldagrif how things are ruled. They do whatever they want because they're casual players. It also feels like every time they say this, they affirm that they think casuals HAVE the collective IQ of a goldfish. They changed it because they didn't see the interaction, so they changed the ruling, functionally ERRATAing the cards, to cover their ass in case something broken happened, slapped the "Too confusing for casual magic" logo on it, and called it a day.
Standard's problems aren't something that can be solved with bans. The threat to answer pendulum has swung too far in the threats favor, and we're suffering the consequences. At least they've acknowledged the problem, the only thing we really CAN do is wait for it to correct. We're kind of stuck until that happens. I mean, you can't just ban all the broken problematic cards, the list is too long. I mean, what do you ban out of mardu to make it tolerable? All their threats are equally terrifying. Same for G/B.
I actually like the current modern meta game. I wouldn't mind seeing the return of bloodbraid and jace, but I don't hate modern at the moment.
What exactly does horribly awry do that removal spells don't. I mean, the only thing i can really think of is scrounger, but that only works on the play. On the draw, you're still forced to deal with his stupid recursion until you land gearhulk or exile it in some way shape or form. The big problem with cards like horribly awry is that they're only decent in match-ups where counter magic isn't great. I think jamming more fatal pushes, grasps, and removal in general is a better solution then trying to play at being ahead against decks that you'll always be behind with essence scatter clones.
I've never run into the issue of aether hub being a bad land drop. I even ran into the double aether hub as my only lands and was still fine. Since the report, I've probably played 50-60 games, and I think I'd run into more issues with more tap lands then I would with aether hub. As to the land count issue, I have felt that in some games I should up the count to 25 by cutting an anticipate.
Weird, off the wall card that I tested and was really, really impressed with was Leave in the Dust. I've swapped the 2 horribly awry for 2 leave in the dust and have been very impressed with how well it performed. It helped out as an instant speed out to resolved planeswalkers, a nice tempo play against creatures, and a really disgusting way to recur advantage with torrential gearhulk.
New to the deck, but very familiar with control strategies. Decided to take the above list to both of my game days and went 4-0 and 3-1 respectively. I probably need to play some number of Kalitas to help protect against Colossus and Scrounger. Lost against B/U colossus in the finals of my second game day. I was lucky to dodge the match up day 1.
Beat Jeskai Copycat 2-0 Match-up seemed good simply because I never tap-out and have WAY more interaction then they do. Only issue I can see is an early resolved saheeli.
Beat B/R Aggro 2-1 Scrounger is a pain in the ass, even with Awry, Shatter, and Disregard. Outside of that I had enough removal for the random crap they tried to throw at me. Disregard on scrounger was a big help and I was eventually able to just stick a Gearhulk and not care about the recursive piece of crap.
Beat R/W vehicles Twice 2-0 both times. Went against this guy both days. Was actually really straightforward. No scrounger meant I could just kill everything. I always just left up counter magic to make sure a chandra or gideon didn't resolve.
Beat G/B Delirium Twice 2-1 and 2-1. Big balistas were slightly worrying and a turn 3 lili on the play was a big problem. Bringing in Gifted Aetherborn as an aggressive and defensive threat helped keep my life high enough and pressure lili, and generally all of my answers lined up very well, so a win wasn't terribly hard.
Lost to Colossus 1-2 I managed to steal a game by chaining multiple gearhulks and keeping him off of a bunch of early artifacts, but the recursive 10/10 is just very hard to deal with and if the decks draw doesn't line up to what he's doing in that game, I just get rekt. Outside of kalitas, I don't know what to add to the board to improve this match-up.
Beat Panharmonica Combo 2-1 Deck was trying to set up double felidar guardian with panharmonica to set up infinite mana, then trigger any ETB to search for ballista and kill the opponent. Deck was actually kind of challenging because EVERYTHING replaced itself when it entered (Cloudblazer, refiner, glint-nest crane, prophetic prism and felidar) and it backed it up with countermagic. Good news is that most of the creatures are tiny, so I just had to make sure things didn't snowball.
Overall, I feel like the deck performed pretty well with some slight issues dealing with recurring threats, but was prone to somewhat polarizing draws. Maxing anticipate actually helped this a bit, and it was a bit easier to play catch up thanks to having a good 1 mana answer to cheap threats. Horribly awry felt kind of subpar, and could probably be replaced with something a bit more effective (May be moved to board). I also felt like I needed a better late game card draw effect, but I don't think one currently exists. Era of Innovation might be worth a shot, since I don't really use energy outside of early aether hubs.
More testing is probably required though. I need more games for a larger sample size.
Jace, Vryn's Prodigy went from ten dollars to thirty-five when frontier started gaining ground as a format. That's without it being an official format. It also has the support of CFB and Star City pros. Chance are, even if it isn't recognized, people will play it, and that will make the cards have value, even if they're banned in standard.
Additionally, i now have to find a different modern deck AND legacy deck. I'm glad my LGS is drafting for the next two weeks, as I'm currently up a creek as far as constructed goes.
This is the decklist I've been toying with.
4x Archfiend of Ifnir
4x Torrential Gearhulk
Instants
4x Commit // Memory
2x Disallow
4x Negate
4x Hieroglyphic Illumination
2x Pull from Tomorrow
3x Magma Spray
2x Fatal Push
3x Harnessed Lightning
2x Unlicensed Disintegration
2x Liliana, Death's Majesty
Lands
4x Choked Estuary
4x Island
4x Spirebluff Canal
4x Aether Hub
4x Fetid Pools
4x Canyon Slough
Simple design that manages to fight through a lot. Vehicles didn't really lose their potency, neither did copycat, so barring a B&R announcement we should continue to opperate at instant speed as much as possible, and try to be fairly cheap as far as removal goes. One of the reasons I like archfiend so much is because he sort of acts as an instant speed sweeper. I don't know if Hyroglyphic Illumination is better then Glimmer, but having early game and late game use for a draw spell seems really nice, and I needed more cylcers that didn't suck.
Thoughts? Red is their for the good early game removal, mostly.
I actually liked Dissolve a lot more then Disallow. Scry 1 was actually really nice, and outside of randomly tagging an ultimate, Disallow is cancel 99 times out of a 100.
I'm not spending one penny on Amonkhet sealed product. I'm getting what I need from the secondary market and telling wizards to go screw themselves in the interim. #makecounterspellsandremovalgreatagain.
Expertise decks are soft banned.
Split cards can no longer be played in tiny leader decks
Split cards can no longer be imprinted on scepter
Split cards can no longer be taken with inquisition
Split cards can't be cascaded into
+ a bunch of other interactions that I haven't thought of yet.
What's more, the new rules don't make things any simpler. If for whatever reason someone plays a split card at a tournament, you'll still probably get judged called for ruling clarification. Because to most people, CMC is how much you pay to cast the spell, not the two different numbers added together. The previous rulings, although weird, were more logical then what they're feeding us now.
It would have been better if they just ruled that split cards are treated as two seperate cards, and if you can free cast them with limitations, like expertises, you're limited to just casting that that part of the card. It'd still be arbitrary and unneeded, but it'd make more sense then what they're trying to do.
Except they still have three different CMCs. They have one CMC off of the stack, but when you cast it, the card has the cmc of whatever mode you're casting. You can still spell snare a beck, you just can't inquisition it out of someone's hand, despite the fact that Beck's cmc is 2, it's treated as cmc 8 because it's part of a split card.
The ENTIRE point of a split card is that they function as different cards. They're designed to LOOK like two different cards in one. If you show a split card to someone who's never seen a split card and ask them what's the CMC of beck//call, they'll almost always throw two different numbers at you, 2 and 6. If they wanted to simplify the rules that's what they'd change the rule to. That the CMC is always treated as a 2 drop or a 6 drop (except when fused). They could have even changed the ruling so that if a card specifies a cmc requirement, you're locked into that part of the split card. That would have made more sense and I would have begrudingly accepted it. Instead, they changed the ruling on split cards in the least intuitive, awkward way possible and called us all idiots while they did it.
This is like the most arbitrary ruling change announcement ever, and should not be a thing. Yes I am slightly salty that I just finished building bird brain, but this goes beyond that. This is a big middle finger to johnnys everywhere. The logic is literally yes you found something interesting and cool, but we're going to take it away from you because it's confusing to people with the IQ of a goldfish. We're also going to make the new rules even more confusing and arbitrary.
Can WOTC just come off the "Too confusing for casual magic" BS. It's insulting more than anything. Casual players don't give a flying phelldagrif how things are ruled. They do whatever they want because they're casual players. It also feels like every time they say this, they affirm that they think casuals HAVE the collective IQ of a goldfish. They changed it because they didn't see the interaction, so they changed the ruling, functionally ERRATAing the cards, to cover their ass in case something broken happened, slapped the "Too confusing for casual magic" logo on it, and called it a day.
I actually like the current modern meta game. I wouldn't mind seeing the return of bloodbraid and jace, but I don't hate modern at the moment.
Weird, off the wall card that I tested and was really, really impressed with was Leave in the Dust. I've swapped the 2 horribly awry for 2 leave in the dust and have been very impressed with how well it performed. It helped out as an instant speed out to resolved planeswalkers, a nice tempo play against creatures, and a really disgusting way to recur advantage with torrential gearhulk.
4x Fatal Push
4x Anticipate
4x Negate
2x Horribly Awry
4x Grasp of Darkness
2x Void Shatter
2x Disallow
2x Complete Disregard
2x Murder
4x Glimmer of Genius
2x Confirm Suspicion
4x Choked Estuary
4x Aether Hub
6x Island
6x Swamp
3x Ceremonious Rejection
4x Gifted Aetherborn
2x Dispel
2x Essence Extraction
4x Transgress the Mind
New to the deck, but very familiar with control strategies. Decided to take the above list to both of my game days and went 4-0 and 3-1 respectively. I probably need to play some number of Kalitas to help protect against Colossus and Scrounger. Lost against B/U colossus in the finals of my second game day. I was lucky to dodge the match up day 1.
Beat Jeskai Copycat 2-0 Match-up seemed good simply because I never tap-out and have WAY more interaction then they do. Only issue I can see is an early resolved saheeli.
Beat B/R Aggro 2-1 Scrounger is a pain in the ass, even with Awry, Shatter, and Disregard. Outside of that I had enough removal for the random crap they tried to throw at me. Disregard on scrounger was a big help and I was eventually able to just stick a Gearhulk and not care about the recursive piece of crap.
Beat R/W vehicles Twice 2-0 both times. Went against this guy both days. Was actually really straightforward. No scrounger meant I could just kill everything. I always just left up counter magic to make sure a chandra or gideon didn't resolve.
Beat G/B Delirium Twice 2-1 and 2-1. Big balistas were slightly worrying and a turn 3 lili on the play was a big problem. Bringing in Gifted Aetherborn as an aggressive and defensive threat helped keep my life high enough and pressure lili, and generally all of my answers lined up very well, so a win wasn't terribly hard.
Lost to Colossus 1-2 I managed to steal a game by chaining multiple gearhulks and keeping him off of a bunch of early artifacts, but the recursive 10/10 is just very hard to deal with and if the decks draw doesn't line up to what he's doing in that game, I just get rekt. Outside of kalitas, I don't know what to add to the board to improve this match-up.
Beat Panharmonica Combo 2-1 Deck was trying to set up double felidar guardian with panharmonica to set up infinite mana, then trigger any ETB to search for ballista and kill the opponent. Deck was actually kind of challenging because EVERYTHING replaced itself when it entered (Cloudblazer, refiner, glint-nest crane, prophetic prism and felidar) and it backed it up with countermagic. Good news is that most of the creatures are tiny, so I just had to make sure things didn't snowball.
Overall, I feel like the deck performed pretty well with some slight issues dealing with recurring threats, but was prone to somewhat polarizing draws. Maxing anticipate actually helped this a bit, and it was a bit easier to play catch up thanks to having a good 1 mana answer to cheap threats. Horribly awry felt kind of subpar, and could probably be replaced with something a bit more effective (May be moved to board). I also felt like I needed a better late game card draw effect, but I don't think one currently exists. Era of Innovation might be worth a shot, since I don't really use energy outside of early aether hubs.
More testing is probably required though. I need more games for a larger sample size.