The only reason I was talking about the results from this GP is because several high profile players decided to take control decks to it, which points at them realizing they are well situated in the metagame, right or not.
How you interpret data from individual events is up to you. My point is that the choices people made at this event have nothing to do with choices they would or should make in a normal, individual event. It is perfectly possible that the statements (a) "blue control is the best archetype in Team Unified Modern" and (b) "blue control decks are completely unplayable in Modern" can both be true simultaneously.
The point is that there were a good number of options for that 3rd deck, you named a few.
Well Owen Turtenwald picked Grixis Control when he could have picked any of those.
What made people pick UW Control in high numbers is not some random artificial rules of the tournament, it's that UW Control is exceptionally good right now, no matter what some people believe. And part of the reason for that is because it's good vs DS. The other part is that months ago, when DS didn't exist, the UW Control lists that existed were terrible. But some changes have been made, and they are no longer terrible for the most part.
In an individual metagame, you have only around an 18% chance at most of playing against Death's Shadow any given round. In this metagame, you have almost twice as great a chance. If UW is good against Death's Shadow, this makes that a good pick.
Even if Grixis is bad against Death's Shadow, you can build it so that it's good against Affinity, UW control, and maybe Tron, among others, taking advantage of the knowledge that a lot more people will be on UW control than they normally would be. This also applies to those other decks you could have chosen: is Storm a better choice than a control deck given the high probability that over half your matchups will be against a deck playing tons of discard or a deck playing counterspells? How does Merfolk do in a metagame where you have like a 1/5 chance of playing against Supreme Verdicts every round? And so on. This tournament structure changes everything about metagaming decisions in a way that favors control decks, and that is why Owen picked a control deck over the other possibilities for that slot.
Plus, these are choices made under the artificial constraint of trying to put together three completely disjoint decks. You're not choosing to play UW Control over Death's Shadow, Burn, Dredge, Lantern, Abzan/Jund, Tron, Affinity, Through the Breach, and so on; you're mostly choosing to play it over things like Merfolk and UR Storm. When you're free to choose whatever deck you want, the reasoning is once again completely different.
Basically, you can't apply any of the results from this tournament to an individual event because they don't work the same way at all. The restrictions on your decks are different and the metagame subgame is also different, which means you will make different choices. Maybe UW control is secretly the best deck in the format, but if you want to consider if that's true for individual events, you can only resort to data from individual events.
You know nothing, yet you are convinced you do. Commentators are talking right now about the large amount of control decks they've seen. Do you think people brought them because of the rules? There are a bazillion competitive options they could choose instead. There are a lot of competitive decks that don't share any card with any other top deck.
They picked control because it's good. Specifically, there was a high number of UW Control decks. Why? Well, because of what I've been saying for weeks.
No, the rules actually make deck selection for team unified events completely different from deck selection for individual events. The most important difference is the matchups you can expect.
The top decks in the format are Death's Shadow, Burn, Bant Eldrazi, Affinity, Tron, Jund/Abzan (including Chord/Evolution lists), and Through the Breach decks. Dredge, blue control, Scapeshift, Merfolk, Ad Nauseam, and Storm are the next best.
You can assume that any team that knows what they're doing will have exactly one Death's Shadow or Jund/Abzan deck. This will include you. However, the lands played by these decks mostly disqualify you from playing Burn and Dredge and make it harder to play Through the Breach decks. Hence, you can assume you won't see very many of those.
You can further assume at least one of the other two decks will be Affinity or Tron, since those are the next best decks that don't share any important cards with anything else. Other Mox Opal decks are also possible here. You could also run into teams that choose two of these decks for the third deck as well.
Alternatively, for the last deck, the best decks remaining all have Islands in them. If you chose to play Affinity instead of Tron, you can play Bant Eldrazi here and that will be the best choice. If you chose to play Tron instead, then you'll play Scapeshift, Merfolk, Ad Nauseam, Storm, or a blue control deck here.
Thus, you can project the following as the two most likely setups:
A. Death's Shadow/Jund/Abzan, Affinity, Bant Eldrazi/Eldrazi Tron
B. Death's Shadow/Jund/Abzan, Tron, [random deck with blue cards in it]
One of the reasons control decks are so mediocre in Modern in individual events is that there are no good catch-all answers in the format that can handle any matchup and Modern is too wide open to plan for every eventuality. But now you have a pretty fixed metagame. Every round your control deck will have a ~33% chance to play against Death's Shadow and you can assume there will be another 33% chance to get matched up against Tron or Affinity, with most of the remaining percentages involving a matchup against Bant Eldrazi or another blue deck.
With this knowledge, a blue control deck looks a lot more appealing: the archetype is naturally good against most other blue decks, you can pre-sideboard against Death's Shadow a bit, and you can choose sideboard cards that are good against Affinity and Tron (or pre-sideboard against those as well). You don't have to worry much about potential bad matchups like Burn and Dredge because there will be a much smaller chance of facing those. In fact, since this information is known to everyone who thinks about it, you can actually predict that the third deck most teams will play will be a control deck and also build your own control deck to be good in the mirror.
Finally, even if you end up in a bad seat playing against a random deck you've never seen before and lose with your deck, you can still win the match if your teammates playing Tier 1 lists pick up the slack.
At an individual event, none of this is true. You only have one deck you can pick, the metagame is a lot more diverse and includes more matchups you're bad against unless you play specific sideboard hate, your matchups are a lot more random and can't be planned for nearly as well, and you don't get any free match wins courtesy of your teammates; you have to win all your matches yourself. These are conditions under which control decks are bad, so very few people decide to play any.
The problem with phyreixan mana in my eyes is the same as the eldrazi, in that they are not designed with the next 2 blocks in mind. When Eye of Ugin was made, most every eldrazi that could benefit from it was not really that big a deal. The most degenerate thing you could likely do with it was a turn 1 mana elf into a turn 2 eye - Kozilek's Predator, and then if everything went amazingly turn 3 you could play a land and windmill broodwardern. Big whoop. The card and the cards that benefited from it were designed to do specifically in a manner that was controlled and tested. Eldrazi that mattered cost so much mana that if you didn't cheat them into play then it didn't matter.
The drones were all colored, so you couldn't actually do any of this. If you could, that would be 11 power on the board on turn 3 after playing two threats (not counting the Elf), which is far from trivial. There are several draws of drones and Broodwarden that would be lethal by turn 4, and many of those also generate enough mana to play an Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre by turn 4. This would have made both Caw-blade and Jund look tame by comparison.
The lowest casting cost that Eye could affect in ROE was 7 mana (several noncreature cards, notably All is Dust) and the lowest casting cost on a creature with annihilate was 8 (Ulamog's Crusher).
i know it's kind of moot, but I feel it's worth pointing out the fact that if the community decided to turn up to an event with 50% of players playing more or less the same deck in a weird herd-mentality move, you can expect the results to be skewed.
the deck's good but not *that* good. when a deck faces a million mirror matches and other decks get pushed out through sheer numbers, a deck looks better than it really is.
i'm not saying there isn't a problem, but we should recognise what's causing it, at least.
We have no idea what percentage of the Day 1 field at the Open was Eldrazi, so we only have the Day 2 conversion rates to go by, and as others have pointed out, Eldrazi overperformed significantly in the Top 32 and Top 16 relative to their Day 2 numbers. We have similar evidence of significant overperformance from the PT. The number of people playing the deck is not a factor in the paper metagame.
Is it really being argued that these Eldrazi decks are unique entities? That they aren't using the same engine to generate advantage? If that is the case, then no one needs to defend a banning of the lands, since those are just coincidentally a feature of every single Eldrazi deck out there, but not, as some people mistakenly believe, a strategy defining pillar of the decks' individual and incomparable success.
Back in reality, finding large overlap between archetypes of a color pairing isn't a defense for Eldrazi. Ask yourself what a Blue Moon, Twin, and Delver deck want to be doing on Turn 3. One wants to tap out for a 3-mama enchantment. One wants to play a 1/4 combo piece at EoT. One wants to be hitting you with a 3/2 flier for the second time. Every Eldrazi deck in the world wants to be swinging for 14 with a Mimic, TKS, and Reality Smasher.
Some versions of the deck don't play Mimic. But yes, this is pretty much what I said. At its core, the deck is the same, but you can tune it to be better in some situations/matchups than others, just like how there were several different variants of Caw-blade. In fact, just like Caw-blade, the most successful Eldrazi decks have been the ones that are tuned for the mirror.
Find me other decks in the history of Modern that share 20-24 cards, only 8 of which are lands, and can't be grouped together. The only decks that can get grouped this way were grouped this way for both the purposes of format health and the purposes of bans: BGx Midrange, BGx Pod, URx Delver, and URx Twin. The Jund and Living End example is probably the most misleading counterargument you've made so far, and still doesn't fit the Eldrazi instance because Jund and Eldrazi share between zero and maybe 3-4 non-land staples between the decks. The Eldrazi decks share 20-24, only 8 of which are lands leaving the other 12-16 to be non-land, core deck staples.
The relevant distinction is the degree to which the decks share threats/win conditions/gameplans, as well as proportions of cards that served different purposes (e.g. threats vs. utility), and there are categorical and gradient differences between decks. After all, the utility cards available in a format might all be the same; the real differences between decks in that case show up in the kind and number of threats.
Twin, for example, shared an enormous package of blue/red utility cards with every other blue/red deck in the format, but it was fundamentally different from the decks that didn't include the Twin package. There was, in fact, a three-way distinction between decks that played the Twin package, Delver/Young Pyromancer, and maindeck Blood Moon, even though they all had the same ~17-card core of Snapcaster, Remand, Bolt, Serum Visions, and Electrolyze and could become even more homogeneous after sideboard. The red/blue decks all had the backup plan of flexible threats backed by cheap disruption. For Plan A, though, the Twin deck had a 10-card combo package while the Delver deck had a high proportion of cheap threats to answers and Blue Moon had a low proportion of slow threats to answers. It made sense to separate these into different archetypes.
The similarities the Eldrazi decks have are all in their threats; they differ only in their utility cards and answers. The core of the deck is Thought-Knot, Reality Smasher, Endless One, Eldrazi Mimic and/or Matter Reshaper, and the 8 Sol lands, and each incarnation of the deck wants to win by playing midrange threats several turns before they should be able to play those threats. The other cards in the decks are all there to supplement this plan in different ways. You can go heavier on removal, you can play more expensive threats (which includes Displacer) to go over the top (along with possibly some extra ramp), or you can play manlands and more drones to try to win faster. Whatever choices you make all go toward furthering the same general gameplan. These are all functionally the same deck.
C can do whatever they want it to do, really. Since the five colors have entirely parceled out the color pie amongst themselves, there's going to be overlap between the color pie of C and the color pie of the existing colors, but that's not unprecedented: many mechanics are shared between the colors, like card drawing in blue and green and lifelink/lifegain matters in white and black. The only restriction is that the benefits of C should be balanced against its costs.
That's a development nightmare, though. Since colorless is so restrictive on your mana, you're only going to be able to pair it with one or two colors (and if it's two colors, you're probably giving up on double-colored spells to do so). The development team was given one set to make it worth that cost or it would be a total flop. For Standard, that's relatively easy to balance, since you have full control over how big a cost that actually is by adjusting the power level of the colorless-producing lands. For older formats, that's tough. Older colorless lands tend to have large upsides to make up for the drawback of colorless mana - often, by producing more than one mana at a time. Now you've turned those drawbacks into benefits, so the cards you print with C in their cost need to be good enough for Standard but not good enough to make forgoing a lot of colored lands to play 12-post or Urzatron manabases a lot less of a cost. I wish I could say this card was the result of extensive testing that led the development team to conclude that what Modern really needed was for GR Tron to have an answer to Splinter Twin decks and Crumble to Dust, but I really doubt that was the case.
I have a Standard deck I haven't changed since FRF released. 20% of its lands can produce colorless mana, which is in splashing range. No change from when it was just a two-color deck, and I could reasonably slot Warping Wail right into that deck. Utility lands are common in eternal formats - not in every or even most decks, but enough that there are prominent decks where this card requires no change to the land base.
I'm not saying this card is going to undermine the color pie - that's why I say "bleed" instead of "break" - but there are decks for which this might as well have a cost of 2 instead of 1C, and that's out of the ordinary for a counterspell.
Would you splash, say, Jace, Vryn's Prodigy, probably the best 1M card at the moment, in a deck where only 20% of the manabase (~5 lands) can generate the appropriate colored mana (U)? What about something similar to this, like Dispel or Silkwrap? The answer should be no, because you'll only be able to cast those cards if you draw them by turn 4 around 63% of the time (based on a simulation where you're playing 4 copies of the splash card in a 60-card deck, with no mulligans or anything fancy). That's almost certainly worse than an on-color option that you'll be able to cast 90% of the time or more.
The same is true for this. Let's set aside how wise it is to splash a reactive card in the first place. To actually be able to cast a two-mana splashed card within a reasonable timeframe, you're looking at 10 sources of the appropriate color. That's not free by any stretch of the imagination. Colorless is further hampered by a lack of duals. Not too many lands generate both colorless and colored mana, and the ones that do typically have a drawback to the colored mana generation - after all, the colorless option wasn't a bonus until now, it was supposed to be an outlet to let you still use the land when you didn't want to pay the cost for colored mana. These get worse in multiples, which is why you rarely see a deck in eternal formats play more than a 4 filters or painlands, which also makes them a questionable foundation for a manabase. The other colorless lands are mono-colored and none of them are fetchable. Hence, the tradeoff: either you play a lot of really bad duals, degrading your manabase, or you play extra lands to fit what is functionally basic lands in your splash color.
The white weenie manabase posted above is a good example of the costs of these colorless/colored manabases: you have eight painlands and two colorless lands in your 22-land aggro deck. What happens if you only draw painlands? Are you willing to tack on "As an additional cost to cast this spell, pay 1-2 life" to all of your cards some percentage of games? You also can't keep a hand of just a Blighted Steppe, and even if you draw both a Steppe and a white source, you've basically Sphere of Resistance'd your own WW spells. All that, and you still run around a 10-15% chance of drawing this card and being unable to cast it in the most opportune window. In comparison, splashing blue with eight fetches and two Prairie Streams has far fewer problems, and that's still not "free" because it gives up the consistency of the mostly-basics manabase - hence why not all white weenie decks are inclined to do it.
The only decks for which these cards are free are those that are taking advantage of colorless lands as the foundation of their manabase already: Tron, Affinity, 12-Post, and Workshops or maybe Legacy Metalworker or Painter decks. For the other decks, it's just like splashing a color, if the only duals available to you were horrible.
The biggest problem is needing the sources of <> so early. For this to kill a 1-drop on defense, you're gonna need to hit your colorless mana on the 2nd turn, which means like 7 sources of colorless lands. All the other ones I'm considering can function off of far fewer sources (and non-land sources!), which is an important factor to consider with these kinds of cards. I think 3<> is about the cheapest spell I'll reliably be able to play before the mana becomes unstable.
I'm not sure if this analysis is correct. If you're running this card in your 40-card deck, there's a 20% chance you'll draw it in your opening 8 cards. If you run 3 colorless sources in your deck, there's a 50% chance you'll draw at least one in your opening 8 cards. My understanding then, in that scenario, there's only a 10% chance of drawing this card and NOT drawing a colorless source in your first 8 cards. Therefore, 3 colorless sources seems like plenty in order to support this card in your deck.
Edit: Obviously this analysis is incomplete, and only focuses on your point about turn 2. With 3 colorless sources in your deck, you're going to draw this card before you draw a way to play it in 25% of games. I don't know how acceptable that is. Perhaps 4 colorless sources is what I would want to play this card. The point is that 7 would be excessive.
I'm not sure it's as simple as the conditional probability, but I'm also not confident in my ability to work out the math, so I ran a very simple simulation instead. Based on that very rough estimate, with 3 colorless sources in a 40-card deck, assuming no mulligans or anything fancy, about 45% of the times you have this card in your hand, you won't have a colorless source by the time you've seen 10 cards (around turn 3) and you still won't have a colorless source about 28% of the time after you seen 14 cards (around turn 7). By bumping that up to 4 colorless sources, you improve to ~33% and ~18% fail rates, respectively. Once you hit 7 sources, you have a ~13% fail rate after seeing 10 cards and a ~5% fail rate after seeing 14.
This card suffers a great deal from being uncastable because all of its modes are only effective within very narrow windows: the exile mode typically targets utility creatures that accrue value the longer they're on the table, the counter mode only works when your opponent is actively casting one of a limited number of sorceries, and the ramp/token mode gets worse with every turn. I wouldn't be inclined to play such a reactive card when there's even a 30% chance it'll be a stone blank during the critical window, let alone 45%. This is only good in heavy colorless-mana decks, which are probably not possible except in the most dedicated cubes.
Well, for one, you wouldn't play this if you don't want to play ~10 colorless lands minimum to support a reactive 1C spell.
Dont forget that the pain lands produce colorless!
I haven't. Suppose you play 8 painlands. You're still a few lands short of making this a reliable turn 2-3 play. Also, you have 8 painlands in your deck.
My bigger issue with it, as much as I like the card mechanically, is that the Eldrazi are literally chaos incarnate, so I don't understand how one of them can embody the aspects of White. I think this just has to be accepted as a case of mechanics before flavor and we have to move on
They're not internally chaotic. Each Eldrazi of a given brood has an assigned function as part of a single organism with an overarching goal: to purify the multiverse. The motivations behind this goal, their strategy, and the function of some of the individual Eldrazi are unknown/unknowable, so they may appear chaotic at a small scale, but it's pretty clear what they're trying to accomplish in the big picture.
All of these are white traits. The Eldrazi as a species are just as white as they are any other color and are arguably more white than they are black or red.
Cards that interact with a creature's color or colors will generally not interact with colorless. You cannot cast Ultimate Price on Kozilek, the Great Distortion, because colorless is not a color. You cannot choose colorless with Iona, Shield of Emeria, because colorless is not a color. Emrakul, the Aeons Torn and Etched Champion do not have protection from Spatial Contortion, because colorless is not a color. Transguild Courier is not white, blue, black, red, green, and colorless, because colorless is not a color. Birds of Paradise cannot add colorless to your mana pool, because colorless is not a color. Coalition Victory does not require an Endbringer to win you the game, because colorless is not a color. A card can be red and black, but a card cannot be red and colorless, because colorless is not a color. Your commander does not require colorless as part of their mana identity in order to run Walker of the Wastes, because colorless is not a color.
A card's color doesn't do anything on its own. It's just a trait that the card has (which most cards inherit from their mana cost) with no inherent game function, like creature type. If the cards you reference weren't printed, there would be no reason to care about color except in terms of mana costs; cards like Birds of Paradise could have been printed with the ability to add C as well had colored mana not been strictly better than colorless mana until now.
The main game function of color is in mana costs. It is technically true that colorless is not a new color, and that's seen in how it interacts with cards that care about color or colored mana. Functionally, though, it's another color now with its own color pie and its own lands. Things don't have to be identical in every respect to be the same in the ways that matter.
Mana costs are only one function that colors provide to Magic, and colors are not even the only tool that has historically been used to define mana costs. Snow appeared in costs, and had its own mana symbol, yet was not a color. The Phyrexian mana symbol appeared in costs, but was not a color. Mana symbols can define things other than colors.
Snow never appeared in casting costs, only activation costs. This is quite a bit different: you can play all of the snow mana cards in decks without any way to generate snow mana, although they wouldn't be very compelling. Had snow been included in mana costs, it would also have functioned as a new color. Snow-covered basics would basically be Duals in that case, except instead of the second type being a basic land subtype, it would be the Snow supertype (and they'd be basics). As it is, Snow is more of a pseudo-color. On the other hand, phyrexian mana was an alternate way to pay casting costs that was written into the casting cost rather than into the card (which allowed Rage Extractor to refer to them as a card would refer to a color). It doesn't function as a new color because it doesn't impose any restrictions on your manabase beyond those imposed by the five colors.
It is simply not correct to describe the new colorless symbol as a new color. It only fills a small portion of that much vaster role.
Vast in what sense? The mechanic of paying mana to cast spells is used several orders of magnitude more frequently than any other mechanic that involves color, especially as you have to use it before you can access any of those other mechanics (by paying 1B for your Ultimate Price, or by building your manabase to support 1B, for example).
So, is this a new color? Yes and no. They are more manipulating kind of a gray area of magic which lots of people considered to be a dull space which was the colorless (aka the stuff that usually generalizes all colors) and make it something that breaks from traditional magic into its own thing potentially. It might be a new way of adding a new color but its hard to really say until and unless we see them maintain this strategy moving forward and explore it more. If this turns out to be a one set thing it wont go anywhere really but if they continue to explore and expand it it has a TON of possibilities.
According to Maro, it'll be less frequent than hybrid, and since it's tied flavorwise to Kozilek and the Eldrazi, it probably won't show up very frequently at all. Even in the Eldrazi block, it only appeared in one set. Making colorless costs a prominent part of the game is a development nightmare because making a land only produce colorless mana is a balancing tool; making that into a useful property rather than a drawback restricts how good/diverse the payoff cards can be as well as how good lands can be in general.
Its more of a situation where they gave an existing area a better and more interesting niche though if you ask me.
It's more like they used existing tools to create a new space. Colorless mana sources now have a fundamentally different use than before: you need to play them in order to play cards like Spatial Contortion, whereas before they were only good if their other abilities or the amount of mana they generated made up for that mana being unable to cast colored spells without help from other mana sources.
Even if Grixis is bad against Death's Shadow, you can build it so that it's good against Affinity, UW control, and maybe Tron, among others, taking advantage of the knowledge that a lot more people will be on UW control than they normally would be. This also applies to those other decks you could have chosen: is Storm a better choice than a control deck given the high probability that over half your matchups will be against a deck playing tons of discard or a deck playing counterspells? How does Merfolk do in a metagame where you have like a 1/5 chance of playing against Supreme Verdicts every round? And so on. This tournament structure changes everything about metagaming decisions in a way that favors control decks, and that is why Owen picked a control deck over the other possibilities for that slot.
Plus, these are choices made under the artificial constraint of trying to put together three completely disjoint decks. You're not choosing to play UW Control over Death's Shadow, Burn, Dredge, Lantern, Abzan/Jund, Tron, Affinity, Through the Breach, and so on; you're mostly choosing to play it over things like Merfolk and UR Storm. When you're free to choose whatever deck you want, the reasoning is once again completely different.
Basically, you can't apply any of the results from this tournament to an individual event because they don't work the same way at all. The restrictions on your decks are different and the metagame subgame is also different, which means you will make different choices. Maybe UW control is secretly the best deck in the format, but if you want to consider if that's true for individual events, you can only resort to data from individual events.
The top decks in the format are Death's Shadow, Burn, Bant Eldrazi, Affinity, Tron, Jund/Abzan (including Chord/Evolution lists), and Through the Breach decks. Dredge, blue control, Scapeshift, Merfolk, Ad Nauseam, and Storm are the next best.
You can assume that any team that knows what they're doing will have exactly one Death's Shadow or Jund/Abzan deck. This will include you. However, the lands played by these decks mostly disqualify you from playing Burn and Dredge and make it harder to play Through the Breach decks. Hence, you can assume you won't see very many of those.
You can further assume at least one of the other two decks will be Affinity or Tron, since those are the next best decks that don't share any important cards with anything else. Other Mox Opal decks are also possible here. You could also run into teams that choose two of these decks for the third deck as well.
Alternatively, for the last deck, the best decks remaining all have Islands in them. If you chose to play Affinity instead of Tron, you can play Bant Eldrazi here and that will be the best choice. If you chose to play Tron instead, then you'll play Scapeshift, Merfolk, Ad Nauseam, Storm, or a blue control deck here.
Thus, you can project the following as the two most likely setups:
A. Death's Shadow/Jund/Abzan, Affinity, Bant Eldrazi/Eldrazi Tron
B. Death's Shadow/Jund/Abzan, Tron, [random deck with blue cards in it]
One of the reasons control decks are so mediocre in Modern in individual events is that there are no good catch-all answers in the format that can handle any matchup and Modern is too wide open to plan for every eventuality. But now you have a pretty fixed metagame. Every round your control deck will have a ~33% chance to play against Death's Shadow and you can assume there will be another 33% chance to get matched up against Tron or Affinity, with most of the remaining percentages involving a matchup against Bant Eldrazi or another blue deck.
With this knowledge, a blue control deck looks a lot more appealing: the archetype is naturally good against most other blue decks, you can pre-sideboard against Death's Shadow a bit, and you can choose sideboard cards that are good against Affinity and Tron (or pre-sideboard against those as well). You don't have to worry much about potential bad matchups like Burn and Dredge because there will be a much smaller chance of facing those. In fact, since this information is known to everyone who thinks about it, you can actually predict that the third deck most teams will play will be a control deck and also build your own control deck to be good in the mirror.
Finally, even if you end up in a bad seat playing against a random deck you've never seen before and lose with your deck, you can still win the match if your teammates playing Tier 1 lists pick up the slack.
At an individual event, none of this is true. You only have one deck you can pick, the metagame is a lot more diverse and includes more matchups you're bad against unless you play specific sideboard hate, your matchups are a lot more random and can't be planned for nearly as well, and you don't get any free match wins courtesy of your teammates; you have to win all your matches yourself. These are conditions under which control decks are bad, so very few people decide to play any.
The lowest casting cost that Eye could affect in ROE was 7 mana (several noncreature cards, notably All is Dust) and the lowest casting cost on a creature with annihilate was 8 (Ulamog's Crusher).
Twin, for example, shared an enormous package of blue/red utility cards with every other blue/red deck in the format, but it was fundamentally different from the decks that didn't include the Twin package. There was, in fact, a three-way distinction between decks that played the Twin package, Delver/Young Pyromancer, and maindeck Blood Moon, even though they all had the same ~17-card core of Snapcaster, Remand, Bolt, Serum Visions, and Electrolyze and could become even more homogeneous after sideboard. The red/blue decks all had the backup plan of flexible threats backed by cheap disruption. For Plan A, though, the Twin deck had a 10-card combo package while the Delver deck had a high proportion of cheap threats to answers and Blue Moon had a low proportion of slow threats to answers. It made sense to separate these into different archetypes.
The similarities the Eldrazi decks have are all in their threats; they differ only in their utility cards and answers. The core of the deck is Thought-Knot, Reality Smasher, Endless One, Eldrazi Mimic and/or Matter Reshaper, and the 8 Sol lands, and each incarnation of the deck wants to win by playing midrange threats several turns before they should be able to play those threats. The other cards in the decks are all there to supplement this plan in different ways. You can go heavier on removal, you can play more expensive threats (which includes Displacer) to go over the top (along with possibly some extra ramp), or you can play manlands and more drones to try to win faster. Whatever choices you make all go toward furthering the same general gameplan. These are all functionally the same deck.
That's a development nightmare, though. Since colorless is so restrictive on your mana, you're only going to be able to pair it with one or two colors (and if it's two colors, you're probably giving up on double-colored spells to do so). The development team was given one set to make it worth that cost or it would be a total flop. For Standard, that's relatively easy to balance, since you have full control over how big a cost that actually is by adjusting the power level of the colorless-producing lands. For older formats, that's tough. Older colorless lands tend to have large upsides to make up for the drawback of colorless mana - often, by producing more than one mana at a time. Now you've turned those drawbacks into benefits, so the cards you print with C in their cost need to be good enough for Standard but not good enough to make forgoing a lot of colored lands to play 12-post or Urzatron manabases a lot less of a cost. I wish I could say this card was the result of extensive testing that led the development team to conclude that what Modern really needed was for GR Tron to have an answer to Splinter Twin decks and Crumble to Dust, but I really doubt that was the case.
The same is true for this. Let's set aside how wise it is to splash a reactive card in the first place. To actually be able to cast a two-mana splashed card within a reasonable timeframe, you're looking at 10 sources of the appropriate color. That's not free by any stretch of the imagination. Colorless is further hampered by a lack of duals. Not too many lands generate both colorless and colored mana, and the ones that do typically have a drawback to the colored mana generation - after all, the colorless option wasn't a bonus until now, it was supposed to be an outlet to let you still use the land when you didn't want to pay the cost for colored mana. These get worse in multiples, which is why you rarely see a deck in eternal formats play more than a 4 filters or painlands, which also makes them a questionable foundation for a manabase. The other colorless lands are mono-colored and none of them are fetchable. Hence, the tradeoff: either you play a lot of really bad duals, degrading your manabase, or you play extra lands to fit what is functionally basic lands in your splash color.
The white weenie manabase posted above is a good example of the costs of these colorless/colored manabases: you have eight painlands and two colorless lands in your 22-land aggro deck. What happens if you only draw painlands? Are you willing to tack on "As an additional cost to cast this spell, pay 1-2 life" to all of your cards some percentage of games? You also can't keep a hand of just a Blighted Steppe, and even if you draw both a Steppe and a white source, you've basically Sphere of Resistance'd your own WW spells. All that, and you still run around a 10-15% chance of drawing this card and being unable to cast it in the most opportune window. In comparison, splashing blue with eight fetches and two Prairie Streams has far fewer problems, and that's still not "free" because it gives up the consistency of the mostly-basics manabase - hence why not all white weenie decks are inclined to do it.
The only decks for which these cards are free are those that are taking advantage of colorless lands as the foundation of their manabase already: Tron, Affinity, 12-Post, and Workshops or maybe Legacy Metalworker or Painter decks. For the other decks, it's just like splashing a color, if the only duals available to you were horrible.
This card suffers a great deal from being uncastable because all of its modes are only effective within very narrow windows: the exile mode typically targets utility creatures that accrue value the longer they're on the table, the counter mode only works when your opponent is actively casting one of a limited number of sorceries, and the ramp/token mode gets worse with every turn. I wouldn't be inclined to play such a reactive card when there's even a 30% chance it'll be a stone blank during the critical window, let alone 45%. This is only good in heavy colorless-mana decks, which are probably not possible except in the most dedicated cubes.
All of these are white traits. The Eldrazi as a species are just as white as they are any other color and are arguably more white than they are black or red.
The main game function of color is in mana costs. It is technically true that colorless is not a new color, and that's seen in how it interacts with cards that care about color or colored mana. Functionally, though, it's another color now with its own color pie and its own lands. Things don't have to be identical in every respect to be the same in the ways that matter.
Snow never appeared in casting costs, only activation costs. This is quite a bit different: you can play all of the snow mana cards in decks without any way to generate snow mana, although they wouldn't be very compelling. Had snow been included in mana costs, it would also have functioned as a new color. Snow-covered basics would basically be Duals in that case, except instead of the second type being a basic land subtype, it would be the Snow supertype (and they'd be basics). As it is, Snow is more of a pseudo-color. On the other hand, phyrexian mana was an alternate way to pay casting costs that was written into the casting cost rather than into the card (which allowed Rage Extractor to refer to them as a card would refer to a color). It doesn't function as a new color because it doesn't impose any restrictions on your manabase beyond those imposed by the five colors.
Vast in what sense? The mechanic of paying mana to cast spells is used several orders of magnitude more frequently than any other mechanic that involves color, especially as you have to use it before you can access any of those other mechanics (by paying 1B for your Ultimate Price, or by building your manabase to support 1B, for example).