Cursecatcher didn't get reprinted. Well it go up due to the support printed for merfolk this set? In the Masters of Modern preview podcast for the Merfolk Lord, they predicted Cursecatcher would go close to $30 if not reprinted. I'm thinking about building the deck, should I buy them now?
I want to really ask. Many of us want Preordain. But is Wizards willing to unban it, in your opinion?
Preordain would be much more powerful in combo decks than the control decks. This is one of the risks of having cheap card filtering, it just doesn't incentivize the kinds of games we want to see play out. Part of the reason that Ponder and Preordain are banned is that too much card filtering in a format drives too many of the games to play out exactly the same. That's not to say we don't like consistency, but there should be a reasonable tradeoff for consistency.
Some people in here have said it is just an outdated article, but do we have any indications that they dismiss such claims now?
I don't think there's been any change in the quoted stance from WotC, but no change is necessary for WotC to want to unban Preordain.
First, that article is not a banlist explainer article. It's a developement risks article. For example, there's a section on hate cards in which none of the pictured cards are banned and that talks about eighth edition, which is also not banned. If this article were directly indicative of any sort of policy stance from wizards, the "ban eighth/ninth" people would have just as much credence as the "see, no more Preordain" people.
Second, Wizards DOES print 1 mana filtering cantrips in standard these days, just of a different kind; see Oath of Nissa. And Wizards DOES have 1 mana selection cantrips more powerful than Preordain in Modern right now; see Ancient Stirrings. So Wizard's doesn't have a problem with selection cantrips per se. The difference is (aside from color) that those find specific, different things and they can't chain into additional cantrips. So you can't have a deck that loads on them like you can with the blue ones.
It follows from this that WotC wouldn't want to unban Preordain as long as there is some deck, especially combo deck, that is already running 8+ blue cantrips and is top tier, playing out all the games similarly or is too consistent at assembling it's best cards. However, WotC does like to unban cards that might slot into decks/colors/strategic archetypes that are not well represented if the risks are low. Unfortunately, we haven't had a metagame update on ModernNexus in so long that it's hard to accurately answer this question. A couple things I do know is that the traditional combo boogeymen that run them all suck right now (Griselbrand, Ad Nauseum, Storm, etc.) and that several other blue decks (Nahiri Jeskai, Grixis Control, Blue Moon, RUG Scapeshift, etc.) have been dwindling. Grixis delver might be doing ok, IDK. "Suicide Blue" might be doing ok, IDK. MTGTOP8 puts the latter at 5%. If that's accurate, it's in line with other tier one decks and I would not expect a Preordain unban. Most people who want a Preordain unban, myself included, are not really looking to just play a UR version of infect. However, if that 5% is not accurate or UR prowess is just a temporary flash in the pan, they very well might unban Preordain.
TL;DR: That article isn't banlist gospel. Can't answer w/o accurate metagame numbers, but I think the likelihood of a Preordain unban coming within the next 6 months will largely depend on how that new UR aggro deck is doing.
This post has been a long time coming, but I wanted to wait until post-Eldrazi metagame settled out a bit and other stuff got in the way.
When WotC banned Twin, two of the reasons they gave were:
Decks that are this strong can hurt diversity by pushing the decks that it defeats out of competition. They can also reduce diversity by supplanting similar decks.
As someone who's a bit of a Sirlinite, I found this reasoning to be rather irksome when applied to something that was only 10-12% or so of the metagame. When you think about it, EVERYTHING that is currently seeing play in the metagame is pushing out something else. Even tier 3 decks push out the next-best-but-not-quite-good-enough T3.5 decks. There's always going to be some versions of decks that are better than others. There's also always going to be some deck that's the best deck. So when using this reasoning, it's important to make sure of 2 things:
1: That deck IS actually responsible for pushing and supplanting those things out.
2: Other decks don't have effective ways to fight it.
Taking the first thing, Twin beats 40 Grizzly Bears, 20 Forests probably 100% of the time. But so what? There's a gazillion other decks that also beat that deck, so Twin isn't responsible for keeping that deck down. In the real modern metagame, I wanted to look at whether Twin was responsible for doing the pushing and supplanting that WotC says it did, or whether there were other prominent factors and Twin only was one part.
To be clear, I'm not going to get into a flame war over whether Twin deserved a ban or not, or whether Twin should stay banned or get unbanned, or whether Twin was "winning too much," or any number of other considerations. I am solely evaluating this one claim about Twin's effect on the metagame. So more of an analysis on the reasoning behind the decision than of the decision itself. Additionally, I should note that a lot of my digging led to a time before ModernNexus.com was a website [[shudders]] so some of the data sucks. I haven't seen anything else written about this so if anyone knows of a better article they can point to, please let me know. Lastly, this post is getting way too long so I'm only going to write about supplanted decks, not the "getting pushed out" decks.
What decks were similar to Twin that weren't seeing play because of Twin's existence? This means decks that are currently part of the T1 or T2 metagame but weren't before this year, and those decks didn't get any new cards to add that significantly boosted their performance after Twin was banned, and have a lot of Blue or are hybrid-combo decks with a lot of interaction. Well, WotC mentions Jeskai control and Temur tempo in the ban announcement. On top of that, I wanted to look at Scapeshift, Grixis, Blue Moon, and Kiki-Chord. All of those decks are similar to URx Twin in at least 1 major way. Here's what I found:
Jeskai Control: nope. The recent uptick in Jeskai has had more to do with the printing of Nahiri than the loss of Twin. Furthermore, Jeskai saw A TON of play in 2013 and 2014. According to the "decks to beat" archive section on MTGTOP8.com, it was tier 1, right along side Twin, so Twin can't have possibly been keeping Jeskai out of the metagame. If you can believe it, the "most played cards" section of MTGTOP8.com says that Celestial Colonnade was played in 12.6% of decks in 2013 while Twin was only 7.9%. In 2014, they have the cards at 8.8% and 10.3%, respectively. So Twin couldn't have supplanted it from the metagame. This made me wonder what killed Jeskai such that it took Nahiri to revive it. I went back to the "decks to beat" archive section and looked at every single month from Jan 2013 to Dec 2015. Jeskai is on the list for EVERY MONTH from The beginning until Nov 2014, then it doesn't show up at all. It seems much more likely that Khans of Tarkir killed Jeskai. The set came out at the very end of September and included Become immense, which propelled Infect, Monastery Swiftspear, which propelled Burn, Siege Rhino, which propelled Pod, Treasure Cruise, which killed the format, and many other cards. Further metagame developments from the rest of Khans block included Tasigur, K Command, Atarka's Command, and Collected Company. Jeskai likely couldn't keep up with so many different decks pressuring from so many different angles. IDK why WotC blamed Twin for this.
Temur Tempo: tentative nope. I'm going to preface this by clarifying that I don't remember a Temur Tempo deck ever being good in modern, so I'm not exactly sure what WotC was referring to here, so my analysis was incomplete. I looked for a lot of possibilities, like RUG delver, Monkey Grow, and generic Goyf-Bolt-Snap goodstuff beats. IDK. But I know there's been no Temur Tempo deck that arose since Twin's banning. Additionally, WotC says that not just Twin in general, but specifically Temur Twin was responsible here. I took that to mean Tarmo-Twin. But Tarmo-Twin was never that prominent. It made "decks to beat" a couple times and then faded. In the last metagame breakdown on ModernNexus before Twin was banned, RUG Twin doesn't even make the list, so it was tier 3 at best. It seems HIGHLY unlikely to me that some otherwise competitively playable deck is being shoved aside by something in tier 3.
Scapeshift: Nope. a very similar boat to Jeskai control. Was tier 1 most of the time along side Twin for the better part of 2 years. After Khans block, it sputtered to on-again off-again appearances. After Twin's ban, Scapeshift shot up to $50 so clearly the market thought it was likely that Twin was suppressing Scapeshift's meta share,and it did see a little more play for a little while, but in the most recent metagame breakdown, Scapeshift is sitting at 2.4%. It was 3.1% in the breakdown I linked earlier from right before Twin got the boot.
Grixis: Nope. It pains me to say this, but Grixis doesn't have what it takes regardless of whether Twin is around or not. Ironically, the best grixis deck there ever was was Grixis Twin. After Twin was banned, Ancestral Vision was unbanned and the new Goblin Dark Dwellers synergized with it and Kalitas joined the party shortly thereafter... and it's all been for naught. Grixis is lower metagame % now than last year when Twin was still around. I was better off when Twin was "supplanting" my favorite deck. Every other version has failed to break low T2 on it's own terms even without Twin around. #BalefulStrixInKaladesh #Grixis4Life #WizardsPlease
Blue Moon: Nope. Like Grixis, but worse. So it's not Twin's fault that this deck doesn't cut it.
Kiki-Chord: ... possibly ... Here's a deck that didn't see much of any play before Twin got banned. After Twin's departure, it had some success and fanfare with Jeff Hoogland and others playing it. So my initial reaction was "ok, twin supplanted this deck." But then it started going down again. Most recently, it's 1.4% in paper and 0.3% online. So then I thought, "didn't stand the test of time, so Twin probably wasn't (solely/mostly) responsible for keeping it down." But then, maybe it's going down because Dredge and Zooicide have risen, not because it doesn't have what it takes independent of those recent shifts, which would mean that while Twin was legal, Twin was keeping Kiki-Chord down. But then, Zooicide and Dredge are precisely the kind of decks that Twin would push out, which would put Kiki-Chord in a catch-22. I honestly don't know. Probably. At this point, it's getting into 2nd and 3rd order metagame effects that are pretty much unpredictable when making a ban decision of a single card.
The lesson I take from this is that Twin was not supplanting other similar decks to any appreciable degree. I'm not sure why Wizard's mentioned this in their ban announcement, especially considering that they, through the cards they printed in Khans set/block, were responsible for killing Jeskai, not Twin. There were other decent reasons for banning Twin but not this. Before I end the post, I want to mention that I would love to read something that goes more in depth on whether/if Twin supplanted other similar decks with better data than a cursory glance at MTGTOP8, or decks that Twin pushed out b/c it was beating them, or a look at how much other blue decks / interactive decks have gained or lost without Twin around, etc. If anyone knows of something, please reply to this so we can all read it.
Yeah but that land does the same thing for grixis and mardu when they play it. And jund would become much worse without Tarmogoyf for example so I can say that about another card in the deck.
Cliffs isn't the glue that holds jund together. Goyf is. Goyf synergizes with the discard spells; they buff him up and he provides a clock that's fast enough to make the discard spells more effective by killing the opponent before they can draw out of the disruption. That quick clock at such a low mana cost allows you to leverage the resources from Bob into a dead opponent before Bob kills you. That huge body perfectly compliments the simplified-game-state attrition plan that let's jund play a bunch of removal / liliana's by ensuring that you have the highest quality board state after resources are spent. The 2 mana bolt-proof body ensures that your opponent doesn't (usually) get a tempo advantage when trying to deal with it while you are able to deal with higher CMC threats at a mana advantage with goyf pressure on board.
Hypothetically, if jund stays on top and grows to around 20% or more of the metagame again, I think jund would be worse off by banning goyf, even if they unbanned BBE and DRS to compensate, than from banning Blackcleave Cliffs.
Moon is not even mildly necessary to punish greedy mana bases in Modern. Aggro decks and burn decks punish them more than moon. Both because modern mana bases pay so much life and because any stumble on colors against fast aggro can lead to death.
Banning infect would not cause an increase in linear decks. Infect is the most prevalent linear deck.
And yes, the vast majority of players like casting their spells. This is why WotC no longer prints strong land destruction nor cards that lock people out of a game like blood moon in standard. Heck, newbies don't even like counters or discard.
its not overly prevalent because this format has alot of combo and aggro and moon sucks vs them for the most part. this is what is keeping some foolish and unfun cards in this format unfortunately.
So you're basically saying Moon card sucks vs. a large subset of the format, happens to beat up the decks you like to play, causes you to not have fun, and thus should be banned? That's like me arguing as an Ad Nauseam player that Lily should be banned. It clearly represents an older design for planeswalkers that we're never going to see again, it locks me out of the game and is hard to overcome, and causes me to have less fun playing. Lily also hurts other control decks, so those players are probably in the same boat I am in and thus should also argue for her banning.
Except all these arguments are patently ridiculous and the very reason Wizards uses more objective ban criteria. If ban criteria were based on a subjective notion of player fun like your argument for Moon's banning is, then we'd get dozens of arbitrary bans annually.
This is a pretty harsh caricature of his argument. Especially when there's obviously something to the argument given that Wizards no longer makes cards like this. Some cards are unfun for the large majority of players, nearly always lead to a net decrease of fun, skill, and interaction in games, and never should have been made in the first place. It's not that unreasonable to suggest they ought to be banned; I try not to put cards like that in my cube. There were a lot of cards that have been on the ban list and some that still are on the ban list just because they were unfun and would have brought back bad memories of some standard or extended season long ago. Cards like BB, Valakut, and SotM. I am glad that Wizards doesn't put cards like Blood Moon on the ban list because it would easily triple the size of the list but someone more Machiavellian might say 'whatever it takes' when crafting a banlist.
@rwcraspy yes. Twin was considered as the "untouchable no.1 police deck of the format". That was, because it could win all linear decks namely Affinity, Infect, Elves Company, All-In Zoo plus some other linear strategies like Tron etc.
Ok, now this is revisionist history. Untouchable? Its worst matchup was the other police deck, BGx. That deck was the #1 police deck.
We all used to believe that there is something like a "police deck". We used to see police decks in the likes of Jund and mostly in Splinter Twin.
At last, you should all realize that this term is wrong, at least concerning Wizards. They did not hesitate to kill the best police deck (to linear decks) of the format.
So, deal with it. There are no police decks argument that stands still. Learn from your mistakes, as some of us did.
I've heard of Jund as a police deck for a long time, and understand why. But I don't recall ever hearing Twin referred to as a "police deck" before its banning. After that it was used as an excuse to think that Tron was going to explode in dominance because Twin had a positive Tron matchup, and then that excuse fell to the wayside and Twin was just generically referred to as a police deck. I think referring to Twin as a "police deck" is some revisionist history, whether intentional or not.
I like me some Baleful Strix too, but the last time Wizards did multicolored artifacts in Standard was in Alara block w/ Esper. Even if the power level were in line with what Wizards will reprint in Standard, which is unlikely, it's incredibly rare for a set to come out that would house this card. Kaladesh is the most likely place in years and it's still pretty unlikely, even ignoring the power level.
But if it got through that hurdle, I'd be stoked to retry me some Tezz.
I was once on board with an SSG ban, because it literally never contributes to any deck unless it is trying to put massive pressure on during the early game. It is probably a net negative effect on the format. But then, it's really not all that different from any other ritual. Those cards are all also only used in the kind of decks that try and break turn 4.
We could rack up a really long list if we banned everything that is more negative than positive, even if it's not seeing top tier play, even if it's not necessary. Like, there's the typical suggestions of Blood Moon and Ensnaring Bridge and SSG but what about Choke? Flash Fire? Temur Battle-Rage? The other rituals? There are a TON of cards that could contribute to unfun or degenerate games but if we start banning them simply b/c they exist and not because they are prominent, then WotC will be playing perpetual whack-a-mole.
SSG seems like a solid ban until you look at your reasons for banning it and take those reasons to their logical end. It doesn't lead to a good place for Modern. Wait for Grishoalbrand to get to high tier two and then SSG will be on the table.
I don't think there's been any change in the quoted stance from WotC, but no change is necessary for WotC to want to unban Preordain.
First, that article is not a banlist explainer article. It's a developement risks article. For example, there's a section on hate cards in which none of the pictured cards are banned and that talks about eighth edition, which is also not banned. If this article were directly indicative of any sort of policy stance from wizards, the "ban eighth/ninth" people would have just as much credence as the "see, no more Preordain" people.
Second, Wizards DOES print 1 mana filtering cantrips in standard these days, just of a different kind; see Oath of Nissa. And Wizards DOES have 1 mana selection cantrips more powerful than Preordain in Modern right now; see Ancient Stirrings. So Wizard's doesn't have a problem with selection cantrips per se. The difference is (aside from color) that those find specific, different things and they can't chain into additional cantrips. So you can't have a deck that loads on them like you can with the blue ones.
It follows from this that WotC wouldn't want to unban Preordain as long as there is some deck, especially combo deck, that is already running 8+ blue cantrips and is top tier, playing out all the games similarly or is too consistent at assembling it's best cards. However, WotC does like to unban cards that might slot into decks/colors/strategic archetypes that are not well represented if the risks are low. Unfortunately, we haven't had a metagame update on ModernNexus in so long that it's hard to accurately answer this question. A couple things I do know is that the traditional combo boogeymen that run them all suck right now (Griselbrand, Ad Nauseum, Storm, etc.) and that several other blue decks (Nahiri Jeskai, Grixis Control, Blue Moon, RUG Scapeshift, etc.) have been dwindling. Grixis delver might be doing ok, IDK. "Suicide Blue" might be doing ok, IDK. MTGTOP8 puts the latter at 5%. If that's accurate, it's in line with other tier one decks and I would not expect a Preordain unban. Most people who want a Preordain unban, myself included, are not really looking to just play a UR version of infect. However, if that 5% is not accurate or UR prowess is just a temporary flash in the pan, they very well might unban Preordain.
TL;DR: That article isn't banlist gospel. Can't answer w/o accurate metagame numbers, but I think the likelihood of a Preordain unban coming within the next 6 months will largely depend on how that new UR aggro deck is doing.
When WotC banned Twin, two of the reasons they gave were:
As someone who's a bit of a Sirlinite, I found this reasoning to be rather irksome when applied to something that was only 10-12% or so of the metagame. When you think about it, EVERYTHING that is currently seeing play in the metagame is pushing out something else. Even tier 3 decks push out the next-best-but-not-quite-good-enough T3.5 decks. There's always going to be some versions of decks that are better than others. There's also always going to be some deck that's the best deck. So when using this reasoning, it's important to make sure of 2 things:
1: That deck IS actually responsible for pushing and supplanting those things out.
2: Other decks don't have effective ways to fight it.
Taking the first thing, Twin beats 40 Grizzly Bears, 20 Forests probably 100% of the time. But so what? There's a gazillion other decks that also beat that deck, so Twin isn't responsible for keeping that deck down. In the real modern metagame, I wanted to look at whether Twin was responsible for doing the pushing and supplanting that WotC says it did, or whether there were other prominent factors and Twin only was one part.
To be clear, I'm not going to get into a flame war over whether Twin deserved a ban or not, or whether Twin should stay banned or get unbanned, or whether Twin was "winning too much," or any number of other considerations. I am solely evaluating this one claim about Twin's effect on the metagame. So more of an analysis on the reasoning behind the decision than of the decision itself. Additionally, I should note that a lot of my digging led to a time before ModernNexus.com was a website [[shudders]] so some of the data sucks. I haven't seen anything else written about this so if anyone knows of a better article they can point to, please let me know. Lastly, this post is getting way too long so I'm only going to write about supplanted decks, not the "getting pushed out" decks.
What decks were similar to Twin that weren't seeing play because of Twin's existence? This means decks that are currently part of the T1 or T2 metagame but weren't before this year, and those decks didn't get any new cards to add that significantly boosted their performance after Twin was banned, and have a lot of Blue or are hybrid-combo decks with a lot of interaction. Well, WotC mentions Jeskai control and Temur tempo in the ban announcement. On top of that, I wanted to look at Scapeshift, Grixis, Blue Moon, and Kiki-Chord. All of those decks are similar to URx Twin in at least 1 major way. Here's what I found:
Jeskai Control: nope. The recent uptick in Jeskai has had more to do with the printing of Nahiri than the loss of Twin. Furthermore, Jeskai saw A TON of play in 2013 and 2014. According to the "decks to beat" archive section on MTGTOP8.com, it was tier 1, right along side Twin, so Twin can't have possibly been keeping Jeskai out of the metagame. If you can believe it, the "most played cards" section of MTGTOP8.com says that Celestial Colonnade was played in 12.6% of decks in 2013 while Twin was only 7.9%. In 2014, they have the cards at 8.8% and 10.3%, respectively. So Twin couldn't have supplanted it from the metagame. This made me wonder what killed Jeskai such that it took Nahiri to revive it. I went back to the "decks to beat" archive section and looked at every single month from Jan 2013 to Dec 2015. Jeskai is on the list for EVERY MONTH from The beginning until Nov 2014, then it doesn't show up at all. It seems much more likely that Khans of Tarkir killed Jeskai. The set came out at the very end of September and included Become immense, which propelled Infect, Monastery Swiftspear, which propelled Burn, Siege Rhino, which propelled Pod, Treasure Cruise, which killed the format, and many other cards. Further metagame developments from the rest of Khans block included Tasigur, K Command, Atarka's Command, and Collected Company. Jeskai likely couldn't keep up with so many different decks pressuring from so many different angles. IDK why WotC blamed Twin for this.
Temur Tempo: tentative nope. I'm going to preface this by clarifying that I don't remember a Temur Tempo deck ever being good in modern, so I'm not exactly sure what WotC was referring to here, so my analysis was incomplete. I looked for a lot of possibilities, like RUG delver, Monkey Grow, and generic Goyf-Bolt-Snap goodstuff beats. IDK. But I know there's been no Temur Tempo deck that arose since Twin's banning. Additionally, WotC says that not just Twin in general, but specifically Temur Twin was responsible here. I took that to mean Tarmo-Twin. But Tarmo-Twin was never that prominent. It made "decks to beat" a couple times and then faded. In the last metagame breakdown on ModernNexus before Twin was banned, RUG Twin doesn't even make the list, so it was tier 3 at best. It seems HIGHLY unlikely to me that some otherwise competitively playable deck is being shoved aside by something in tier 3.
Scapeshift: Nope. a very similar boat to Jeskai control. Was tier 1 most of the time along side Twin for the better part of 2 years. After Khans block, it sputtered to on-again off-again appearances. After Twin's ban, Scapeshift shot up to $50 so clearly the market thought it was likely that Twin was suppressing Scapeshift's meta share,and it did see a little more play for a little while, but in the most recent metagame breakdown, Scapeshift is sitting at 2.4%. It was 3.1% in the breakdown I linked earlier from right before Twin got the boot.
Grixis: Nope. It pains me to say this, but Grixis doesn't have what it takes regardless of whether Twin is around or not. Ironically, the best grixis deck there ever was was Grixis Twin. After Twin was banned, Ancestral Vision was unbanned and the new Goblin Dark Dwellers synergized with it and Kalitas joined the party shortly thereafter... and it's all been for naught. Grixis is lower metagame % now than last year when Twin was still around. I was better off when Twin was "supplanting" my favorite deck. Every other version has failed to break low T2 on it's own terms even without Twin around. #BalefulStrixInKaladesh #Grixis4Life #WizardsPlease
Blue Moon: Nope. Like Grixis, but worse. So it's not Twin's fault that this deck doesn't cut it.
Kiki-Chord: ... possibly ... Here's a deck that didn't see much of any play before Twin got banned. After Twin's departure, it had some success and fanfare with Jeff Hoogland and others playing it. So my initial reaction was "ok, twin supplanted this deck." But then it started going down again. Most recently, it's 1.4% in paper and 0.3% online. So then I thought, "didn't stand the test of time, so Twin probably wasn't (solely/mostly) responsible for keeping it down." But then, maybe it's going down because Dredge and Zooicide have risen, not because it doesn't have what it takes independent of those recent shifts, which would mean that while Twin was legal, Twin was keeping Kiki-Chord down. But then, Zooicide and Dredge are precisely the kind of decks that Twin would push out, which would put Kiki-Chord in a catch-22. I honestly don't know. Probably. At this point, it's getting into 2nd and 3rd order metagame effects that are pretty much unpredictable when making a ban decision of a single card.
The lesson I take from this is that Twin was not supplanting other similar decks to any appreciable degree. I'm not sure why Wizard's mentioned this in their ban announcement, especially considering that they, through the cards they printed in Khans set/block, were responsible for killing Jeskai, not Twin. There were other decent reasons for banning Twin but not this. Before I end the post, I want to mention that I would love to read something that goes more in depth on whether/if Twin supplanted other similar decks with better data than a cursory glance at MTGTOP8, or decks that Twin pushed out b/c it was beating them, or a look at how much other blue decks / interactive decks have gained or lost without Twin around, etc. If anyone knows of something, please reply to this so we can all read it.
Cliffs isn't the glue that holds jund together. Goyf is. Goyf synergizes with the discard spells; they buff him up and he provides a clock that's fast enough to make the discard spells more effective by killing the opponent before they can draw out of the disruption. That quick clock at such a low mana cost allows you to leverage the resources from Bob into a dead opponent before Bob kills you. That huge body perfectly compliments the simplified-game-state attrition plan that let's jund play a bunch of removal / liliana's by ensuring that you have the highest quality board state after resources are spent. The 2 mana bolt-proof body ensures that your opponent doesn't (usually) get a tempo advantage when trying to deal with it while you are able to deal with higher CMC threats at a mana advantage with goyf pressure on board.
Hypothetically, if jund stays on top and grows to around 20% or more of the metagame again, I think jund would be worse off by banning goyf, even if they unbanned BBE and DRS to compensate, than from banning Blackcleave Cliffs.
Banning infect would not cause an increase in linear decks. Infect is the most prevalent linear deck.
And yes, the vast majority of players like casting their spells. This is why WotC no longer prints strong land destruction nor cards that lock people out of a game like blood moon in standard. Heck, newbies don't even like counters or discard.
This is a pretty harsh caricature of his argument. Especially when there's obviously something to the argument given that Wizards no longer makes cards like this. Some cards are unfun for the large majority of players, nearly always lead to a net decrease of fun, skill, and interaction in games, and never should have been made in the first place. It's not that unreasonable to suggest they ought to be banned; I try not to put cards like that in my cube. There were a lot of cards that have been on the ban list and some that still are on the ban list just because they were unfun and would have brought back bad memories of some standard or extended season long ago. Cards like BB, Valakut, and SotM. I am glad that Wizards doesn't put cards like Blood Moon on the ban list because it would easily triple the size of the list but someone more Machiavellian might say 'whatever it takes' when crafting a banlist.
Ok, now this is revisionist history. Untouchable? Its worst matchup was the other police deck, BGx. That deck was the #1 police deck.
http://modernnexus.com/twins-and-trends-at-gp-pittsburgh/
Skip to "Twin and BGx: Modern’s Buddy Cops" section, especially from the paragraph right before the IoK pic to the paragraph right after the Bolt pic.
But if it got through that hurdle, I'd be stoked to retry me some Tezz.
We could rack up a really long list if we banned everything that is more negative than positive, even if it's not seeing top tier play, even if it's not necessary. Like, there's the typical suggestions of Blood Moon and Ensnaring Bridge and SSG but what about Choke? Flash Fire? Temur Battle-Rage? The other rituals? There are a TON of cards that could contribute to unfun or degenerate games but if we start banning them simply b/c they exist and not because they are prominent, then WotC will be playing perpetual whack-a-mole.
SSG seems like a solid ban until you look at your reasons for banning it and take those reasons to their logical end. It doesn't lead to a good place for Modern. Wait for Grishoalbrand to get to high tier two and then SSG will be on the table.