This is the fourth year in a row I've had my deck hit in January. 3/4 of those years I do not believe I was playing the best deck in the format (exception being when Cruise/Dig were legal since obviously those cards were good.) On Monday I was literally having a conversation with a friend where I said there was no way Wizards was going to ban anything out of our deck, if they wanted to hit Infect they'd just ban Become Immense, they learned their lesson a long time ago... And boom, Probe's gone.
I don't think Gitaxian Probe is just a fine Magic card with no issues, obviously. But once you've got your basic lands in your deck you stop looking at fine Magic cards with no issues when determining what cards to play in Modern. I don't want to play Grizzly Bears and Lightning Strike, I want to play Tarmogoyf and Lightning Bolt. That's what the format is.
The most puzzling part of this ban is that Become Immense was the obvious target, since it hurts both Infect and Death's Shadow Zoo without killing either. Banning Probe leaves Infect only minimally different from before, while killing Death's Shadow and Bloo, neither of which was a top tier deck. Infect, meanwhile, is the most powerful and prevalent of those and has been for years. I just do not understand the priorities involved in punishing the less powerful decks disproportionately through the choice of ban targets. It's definitely not motivated by spite, but it feels spiteful.
WOTC has made a lot of promises about Modern and, while they absolutely have a difficult task in managing the format, they seem to break all of them. They said they'd take a lighter touch on the format after the Twin ban, then they make a marginal-case banning like Gitaxian Probe that's clearly upset people, blindsided a lot of folks, and is divisive. Nobody is complaining about the Grave-Troll ban, and I can't really imagine an outcry over a ban to Become Immense. I often feel like WOTC is full of people who are so used to being the smartest person in the room (and absolutely thinking they're the smartest person in the room) that they can't resist messing with things on the assumption that they know better than everyone else, and a ban like Probe feels more clever than a ban on Become Immense, so it's enticing to them. I could be totally off-base with that, but I do not agree with the people arguing that WOTC just knows better than everyone else what's healthy for a format or what the right thing is to do. Look at the past several years worth of Standard as evidence for the ability of the multitudes to figure things out more effectively than the designers.
Filling people with fear, anger, and frustration every time you release a banlist update just does not seem like the way to run things. We've asked for clarity and transparency over and over against as a community and they make a token effort at best. I wish they didn't do this to us.
I've generally found that, against Tron, you only win when you're able to disrupt their mana in a serious, serious way, or when their deck fails on them. Part of that also involves playing aggressively and clocking them as efficiently as possible, but that's only effective as part of the plan to keep them from drawing out of their stumble- on its own, your aggression is just not close to fast enough to race them, even with the more aggressive builds (e.g. Chapin's Delve-heavy list of yesteryear).
By serious mana disruption, I mean multiple Fulminators early on, or potentially Crumble to Dust (typically backed with a Remand or Mana Leak to stop their first threat on turn 3, or else curving t2 Fulminator into t3 Crumble). I would never rely on a single Fulminator to be enough barring some kind of insane draw with fast delve creature into multiple effective counters, and those draws just don't happen all that often. I have found that Crumbling correlates pretty strongly with winning as it buys way more turns than a Fulminator does. I've found that even tempoish draws that look promising are not reliable at all in closing the game fast enough even against pretty poor Tron draws, and that draws like t2 Tasigur + Mana Leak or Remand but without land destruction are actually traps. Even a Tron opponent on 4 or 5 cards has a pretty good shot of beating those hands, so you can't rely on them getting there (though, in game 1, they are probably your best shot even though it's not a good one).
As far as Junk/Abzan goes, I think Slaughter Games is totally the wrong way to approach the Lingering Souls problem since you'll rarely trade your Slaughter Games for a card, so even though it seems appealing, it is likely to play into their grindy game and actually put you behind. They are not reliant on killing you with souls, so just extracting those isn't enough to skew the matchup. I do think you need to respond to the card if you have tools available to do so, but I would look to something that answers them on the board, like Anger of the Gods, Pyroclasm, or Izzet Staticaster. Ideally, you can play a card which you have outs to use against cards other than just the Lingering Souls, since GBx thrives off of opponents playing too many situational spells when they can prevent the required situation from coming up so they can give you dead cards.
In general, I've found that both the midrange (Majors-style with discard and Kalitas) and control (Burkhart-style with Cryptics) decks have their strong points, but to be honest I can't really recommend either right now since they're a step slower than I'd like and they are too vulnerable to the increasingly fast, linear metagame. They each have the tools to win almost any matchup, but I don't know that there's a 75 that is reliable enough against the field. I like the control deck better than the delver deck in terms of personal preference, but I believe that Delver has a better win expectation at this point because it's more proactive and it can deploy its interaction much more quickly, so it doesn't fall behind as easily nor does it give the opponent as many chances to draw out of situations. It's possible that some delve-heavy variant of Chapin's old list (from Charlotte 2015) can behave similarly, and maybe even leverage some number of maindeck Ancestral Visions profitably. I'd certainly be happy to hear if anyone has done any work in that direction, or wants to toss ideas back and forth.
Ancestral Vision is frequently either a one-card knockout or totally dead. I'm split on how many to play. I like that it's virtually a win condition on its own sometimes and also helps ensure that you're actually getting ahead by taking the game long, but you can just as easily flood on them or play a series of matchups where they're dead. I'm trying 3 as a hedge, but I don't know how many I ultimately want.
I haven't played with Crumble yet, and it seems much worse than Fulminator against anything but Tron. I've generally found the Scapeshift matchup virtually unwinnable for this build, so if I can Crumble a Tron opponent into oblivion I feel like that's a good tradeoff- Tron is beatable, but only if you can really lock them out of assembling their set of lands. Crumble to Dust actually ensures this happens, so long as you get to cast it. Against the Breach Titan decks I feel like Fulminator vs. Crumble is sort of a 50/50 anyway.
Last time I played it in an event, I had a lot of trouble with Jund/Junk, losing to both of those decks to derail my tournament. I also drew against a Mardu Nahiri deck that locked me out game 2 with Rest in Peace, and got steamrolled in the last round by a UWR Nahiri deck. I feel like this deck should be good in those matchups, but that just didn't pan out. Does anyone have any advice for those midrange/control style matchups, or any suggestions for how I could tweak the deck?
Ask any regular human being what "pro" means and the answer you will get is professional, not promotional. It drives me nuts that WOTC debt the need to redefine what words mean so they could get people on board with their evolved intentions for the events. The pro tour was created as an outlet for the highest level competition and deliberately tried to model after the professional level tournaments for smaller sports, more or less.
Let's also not get caught up in the false dichotomy that WOTC has invented, that we either needed to have shakeup bans (ie ones that are not motivated intrinsically by threats to format health) or we needed to drop the Modern Pro Tour. There are other ways that things could have been managed, had the interest been there. WOTC devotes little thought to Modern in design, but they've also given it little thought in terms of how it could be managed. That's find, Modern isn't their biggest concern, but I don't think we should just accept this fairly counterintuitive claim that they've made without being critical.
My starting build is actually not counter-heavy. Two Leak and two Remand is all I have right now.
What cards did you use to trade with them- was it just removal for their creatures? Or are you playing some Dispels or the like?
Shamble Back needing a creature concerns me a little, but I suppose they're basically never winning fast without playing one... It's a thought, at least.
I played a fairly Chapin-sequel Grixis list last year from about April to early November. I eventually moved off of it because I found once the metagame adjusted to Grixis, it felt like about a 45% deck against the field. I loved the gameplay and am interested in coming back to it with Ancestral Vision.
I playtested about 15 games with it yesterday against Burn, Infect, and Jund. My list was loosely based on the one PV proposed in his article a few weeks back, so fairly generic, no appreciable thought invested into the specifics.
My record against Infect was hugely favourable, and I think I ran fairly well but I was pleased with it. My games against Jund also felt pretty good, though I also had a lot of turn 1 suspended Vision which surely skews it way in Grixis' favour. My games against Burn, meanwhile, felt awful- way worse than they were with the old Thought Scour + delve heavy lists.
Based on this small sample, I tentatively feel like 4 Vision is the number I'd want because, despite the awkwardness in drawing multiples, turn 1 suspend is such a powerful play with a decent hand that it's worth maximizing it. I was also very pleasantly surprised by GDD, which I'd initially expected to be too clunky or too cute. It's a very natural play pattern to suspend a turn1 Ancestral, cast it on turn 5, and then slam Dark-Dwellers to establish a board presence and draw another 3 or rebuy a Kolaghan's Command or even just Terminate a guy and the door is essentially closed on your opponent.
Again, I've only got a few games in here, so I'm definitely not firm in these conclusions yet.
I would like to find some way to gain life to crawl back into games that stabilize at low life totals. Are Kalitas and Tribute to Hunger the best maindeckable options? Is Vampiric Link the best we have postboard?
I've been playing Grishoalbrand since the middle of January. I love the power in the deck and the outs it has to kill any opponent before they get to play Msgic. I hate the inconsistency and ability to lose to itself, and the number of draws that are complete blanks outside of comboing off. I've played a variety of Serum Visions decks throughout my time in Modern, and Grishoalbrand certainly has given me the largest proportion of losing records, though it of course has the unbeatable draws on the other side of things.
How many of you have experience playing the Griselbrand/Emrakul UBR list along the lines of what some of the Japanese players ran at the Pro Tour? Here's a quick list of my observations compared to the Shoal list:
- there are fewer strictly conditional cards (e.g. Shoal), so you have fewer games where awkward draws lead to your deck doing absolutely nothing
- the deck gets to play more intrinsically powerful cards, like Jace, Vryn's Prodigy, Lightning Bolt, discard spells; the interactive package helps especially improve matchups like Infect that are quite difficult for Shoal
- Goryo's Vengeance has twice as many targets with Emrakul, so there's a greater range of card combinations that lead to a fatty in play
- reanimating a creature does not always end the game on the spot, and Griselbrand in particular can actually be relatively weak because it does not lead to a combo kill
- need to attack to win- no combo kill and no ability to win at instant speed
- overall seems less swingy in both directions than Shoal; matchups across the board seem pretty reasonable, but there are fewer free wins
I'd love to compare notes with someone who's given the build some work. Anyone out there?
I considered something like this briefly. There's a serious concern that it's too slow, as I think that's the big reason Glittering Wish has seen minimal play in Modern, but there could be a build out there.
If there really is enough compensation that you can run Bant Thopters, you do also gain access to Wargate as a possible tutor for Sword as well (or for Foundry, of course), either out of the side as a Wish target to very slowly assemble the combo or as a maindeck option. You really could end up with a lot of different tutors in this type of deck if you wanted- question is, can they be used effectively, or are they too slow and clunky?
It was hard for me to look at the Twin ban and not see it as an attempt to aggravate the players and give the Modern PT a bad taste in players' mouths. I know that's a little bit tinfoil hat, but that was how I felt. I didn't need to read this announcement to know what was coming.
I'm sure WOTC thinks this change is totally unproblematic, since they advertise the new set, and pros like EFro who hate playing Modern and have special influence on policy due to personal connections with the guys in R&D (not to pick on him in particular, he's just been open about this privilege) get to have their way and play Standard instead.
What they'll likely never acknowledge is that this is a failure on their part to figure out how to properly manage Modern, and rather than giving an honest attempt at doing so, they've bailed. I can't say I'm unhappy to have the threat of arbitrary bans alleviated, but I hope this comes with an increase in Grand Prix visibility and that they showcase the format at a high level by some other means. I do not want to see Modern become a neglected format like Legacy, or a de facto casual format.
This "ban everything" mentality drives me nuts. You interact with Splinter Twin by playing creature removal! Its matchup against Junk tends to be very miserable and all Junk has to do to achieve this is run some kill spells and threats that can close a game- i.e., by playing a very conventionally fair game. Twin excels when people are not playing fair, since it's in many ways an anti-combo combo deck. I think people who are calling wildly for the deck to take a ban would be surprised at how much less fair the format would be without having Twin to police the stuff they enjoy playing against even less (Amulet, Storm, Infect, assorted other minimally interactive linear decks). Take a moment to step back from whatever perceptions you have of Twin specifically and think about how the deck functions in the abstract - "largely interactive deck with access to a turn 4 kill, but which is incapable of winning before turn 4, and is primarily interacted with via any combination of counterspells, discard, and creature removal" - and I'm not sure I see something here that sounds problematic.
I have not yet had a chance to watch the coverage of the GP myself, but I can't help but wonder whether it was done in an awkward way that helps encourage this kind of attitude. They have a habit of featuring the same deck over and over again during a tournament rather than making an attempt to feature different matchups, which skews perceptions. They also have a tendency to completely fail to understand what is going on in a game and deliver commentary that plays down how interesting the gameplay actually is. I don't want to rip on the coverage team because I understand how difficult their job is, but they have almost nobody who plays Modern more than once in a blue moon and it really hurts the quality of the product and, subsequently, is damaging to the average person's sense of what the format is like.
Id gladly see twin meet the ax. It's not fun to play against or watch. If a sacrifice must be made.
With apologies for picking out this post in particular, Twin is a deck that makes a lot of decisions and which is pretty interactive (Bolt, Remand, Cryptic Command, Snapcaster, etc. are all cards intended to let you just play Magic against the other player). I love getting the opportunity to watch people play Twin because outside of the occasional games where the opponent taps out and the Twin player gets to cast Deceiver into Twin early, it involves a lot of options and rewards people for getting it right. I don't see how any serious Modern player would consider it anything but a treat to see someone like Patrick Dickmann play the deck on camera. I had the opportunity to play against it quite a lot at the GP and I was excited to do so, since I felt like I could use my skill in Modern to get an advantage over my opponents. I understand that it feels bad when they just "have it" and you've got nothing, but it doesn't feel any worse to me than Thoughtseize into Tarmogoyf free wins or turn 1 Cranial Plating free wins or getting Infected out turn 3.
Twin spends the majority of its game playing skill-intensive interactive Magic. I can't argue that your opinion is invalid, but I seriously would like to know what kind of decks you do like to watch or play against if Twin doesn't manage to meet your approval on either count.
Helene Bergot's statement implies that Modern is somehow not a format that rewards skill or deckbuilding. This is totally disconnected from reality.
Standard has been much more static than Modern over the course of the past ~10 months, so I don't understand this at all. Modern is the fastest-growing format and has been responsible for some of the largest GPs in Magic history. Why would they opt against supporting it at the Pro Tour level?
I'm sure its a thing though, don't get me wrong. Just its not a bad thing. In our current meta, lets start with zoo's worst matchup, pod. Cool, so pod is the best deck? Wrong, dies to hatebears hard. Well hatebears is the best deck then, also wrong, hatebear loses pretty hard to twin, so twin is the best deck? Also wrong, Even nutured jund beat it. Well jund. Nope, Delver beats it, they also main deck blood moons now. Ok, so delver! Nope, loses to control. So control? Notta. Loses to Tron. Then Tron? Loses to Zoo.
My friends... I think we have started the healthy meta era, and the decks that top 8 in the protour are the ones that miss these links in the chain/good players. I honestly think the new meta were going into is a very very healthy one. And thats good for us. So long as there is a good control, and tempo deck for us to prey on, were a good deck.
The problem with the rock-paper-scissors reasoning, of course, is that it's a weighted game of rock-paper-scissors. Sure, GW hate bears beats Pod. Hope you're planning to play against all Pod players in a tournament, because your deck isn't very good. Unless Pod has a bad matchup against something that is independently powerful, it's the presumed best deck and will in fact rise to the top.
That said, the top in Modern is no more than like 30% of decks, generally, so that's not the end of the world. Also, Zoo can always nut draw people and kill about as fast as the combo decks in the format, depending on the build, so it's hard to see it not being a good choice anyway. Unlike some of the examples you cite in your rock-paper-scissors analogy, Zoo is an independently powerful deck so you shouldn't be overly fearful when playing it unless the metagame becomes extremely hostile. (E.g., if I knew the meta would be 25% Pod, 20% UWR, and 10% Bogles I would go looking somewhere else... but that's not especially likely.)
EDIT: figuring out how to use these newfangled forums
This hate card doesn't need to be answered; it isn't that good. It doesn't stop fetch lands. It doesn't stop you from putting basics into play. It doesn't stop mana dorks. It doesn't stop artifacts that generate mana. It doesn't stop Chromatic Lantern. All it really affects are the three+ color decks, which NEED some decent hate. And most of those decks are either running thoughtseize or mana leak.
If it's not even good, why print it?
I am glad all those Chromatic Lantern decks in Modern are immune too...
Decks playing more than one or two colors are not inherently problematic. They pay in terms of consistency and life/speed as well as opportunity cost (there are good colorless lands in the format). I know those things are hard for people to see, or don't satisfy them, or seem irrelevant because they're used to Wasteland in Legacy, but they are real things that affect deckbuilding choices and outcomes of games.
Hey, I get it, I would love to be able to play UU, counter target spell, scry 3. But at a certain point what you want and what would be a good idea/healthy for the game do not necessarily line up. Good designers can separate their own likes and dislikes from what is needed or not needed and make cards accordingly. (This is part of the reason I don't like Ken Nagle much as a designer- you can pretty easily spot which sets he's worked on based on how much they support the things he likes. He loves BG, and no other guild got as many gifts in RTR. He loves the fatties, and Theros is all about huge idiots crashing around.)
That's all I'll say on the subject, no point in going any further down this rabbit hole.
Part of the reason I designed this is because of a game I played today. I was using a lot of utility lands, and then he landed blood moon...a card which completely hosed me. So I destroyed it, effortlessly. Enchantments are not hard to remove at all. I've also played Blood Moon in my decks and always end up taking it out. Sorry, but Blood Moon is crap. The fact it can be targeted makes it far too easy to be removed.
There seems to be this notion among players that all hate cards should be exceptionally easy to get rid of. This one isn't too hard to deal with, thanks to Engineered Explosives, several global enchantment removal cards, hand disruption, counter spells, and the simple fact that it doesn't do very much.
The only thing harder to get rid of in Magic than global enchantments are emblems.
They don't tend to print hate cards that can't be answered because then... you drop the hate card and the game is over. That doesn't really make for enthralling gameplay.
I don't think Gitaxian Probe is just a fine Magic card with no issues, obviously. But once you've got your basic lands in your deck you stop looking at fine Magic cards with no issues when determining what cards to play in Modern. I don't want to play Grizzly Bears and Lightning Strike, I want to play Tarmogoyf and Lightning Bolt. That's what the format is.
The most puzzling part of this ban is that Become Immense was the obvious target, since it hurts both Infect and Death's Shadow Zoo without killing either. Banning Probe leaves Infect only minimally different from before, while killing Death's Shadow and Bloo, neither of which was a top tier deck. Infect, meanwhile, is the most powerful and prevalent of those and has been for years. I just do not understand the priorities involved in punishing the less powerful decks disproportionately through the choice of ban targets. It's definitely not motivated by spite, but it feels spiteful.
WOTC has made a lot of promises about Modern and, while they absolutely have a difficult task in managing the format, they seem to break all of them. They said they'd take a lighter touch on the format after the Twin ban, then they make a marginal-case banning like Gitaxian Probe that's clearly upset people, blindsided a lot of folks, and is divisive. Nobody is complaining about the Grave-Troll ban, and I can't really imagine an outcry over a ban to Become Immense. I often feel like WOTC is full of people who are so used to being the smartest person in the room (and absolutely thinking they're the smartest person in the room) that they can't resist messing with things on the assumption that they know better than everyone else, and a ban like Probe feels more clever than a ban on Become Immense, so it's enticing to them. I could be totally off-base with that, but I do not agree with the people arguing that WOTC just knows better than everyone else what's healthy for a format or what the right thing is to do. Look at the past several years worth of Standard as evidence for the ability of the multitudes to figure things out more effectively than the designers.
Filling people with fear, anger, and frustration every time you release a banlist update just does not seem like the way to run things. We've asked for clarity and transparency over and over against as a community and they make a token effort at best. I wish they didn't do this to us.
By serious mana disruption, I mean multiple Fulminators early on, or potentially Crumble to Dust (typically backed with a Remand or Mana Leak to stop their first threat on turn 3, or else curving t2 Fulminator into t3 Crumble). I would never rely on a single Fulminator to be enough barring some kind of insane draw with fast delve creature into multiple effective counters, and those draws just don't happen all that often. I have found that Crumbling correlates pretty strongly with winning as it buys way more turns than a Fulminator does. I've found that even tempoish draws that look promising are not reliable at all in closing the game fast enough even against pretty poor Tron draws, and that draws like t2 Tasigur + Mana Leak or Remand but without land destruction are actually traps. Even a Tron opponent on 4 or 5 cards has a pretty good shot of beating those hands, so you can't rely on them getting there (though, in game 1, they are probably your best shot even though it's not a good one).
As far as Junk/Abzan goes, I think Slaughter Games is totally the wrong way to approach the Lingering Souls problem since you'll rarely trade your Slaughter Games for a card, so even though it seems appealing, it is likely to play into their grindy game and actually put you behind. They are not reliant on killing you with souls, so just extracting those isn't enough to skew the matchup. I do think you need to respond to the card if you have tools available to do so, but I would look to something that answers them on the board, like Anger of the Gods, Pyroclasm, or Izzet Staticaster. Ideally, you can play a card which you have outs to use against cards other than just the Lingering Souls, since GBx thrives off of opponents playing too many situational spells when they can prevent the required situation from coming up so they can give you dead cards.
In general, I've found that both the midrange (Majors-style with discard and Kalitas) and control (Burkhart-style with Cryptics) decks have their strong points, but to be honest I can't really recommend either right now since they're a step slower than I'd like and they are too vulnerable to the increasingly fast, linear metagame. They each have the tools to win almost any matchup, but I don't know that there's a 75 that is reliable enough against the field. I like the control deck better than the delver deck in terms of personal preference, but I believe that Delver has a better win expectation at this point because it's more proactive and it can deploy its interaction much more quickly, so it doesn't fall behind as easily nor does it give the opponent as many chances to draw out of situations. It's possible that some delve-heavy variant of Chapin's old list (from Charlotte 2015) can behave similarly, and maybe even leverage some number of maindeck Ancestral Visions profitably. I'd certainly be happy to hear if anyone has done any work in that direction, or wants to toss ideas back and forth.
3 Tasigur, the Golden Fang
4 Serum Visions
3 Thought Scour
3 Ancestral Vision
4 Lightning Bolt
2 Spell Snare
1 Mana Leak
1 Remand
1 Negate
3 Terminate
1 Dreadbore
1 Go for the Throat
4 Cryptic Command
4 Scalding Tarn
4 Polluted Delta
2 Steam Vents
1 Watery Grave
1 Blood Crypt
3 Island
1 Swamp
1 Mountain
1 Darkslick Shores
2 Sulfur Falls
2 Creeping Tar Pit
2 Dispel
2 Countersquall
2 Anger of the Gods
1 Engineered Explosives
1 Sun Droplet
1 Spellskite
3 Fulminator Mage
1 Izzet Staticaster
1 Crypt Incursion
1 Slaughter Games
This is, of course, a variation of Burkhart's top 8 list, only a few cards off.
I am considering:
-1 Cryptic Command; -1 Terminate?
+1-2: Ancestral Vision, Mana Leak, Pia and Kiran Nalaar
(I hate Dreadbore and love Terminate, but after getting mashed planeswalkers 4 rounds in a row I feel like I've been sent a message.)
SB:
-1 Fulminator Mage
+1 Crumble to Dust
I haven't played with Crumble yet, and it seems much worse than Fulminator against anything but Tron. I've generally found the Scapeshift matchup virtually unwinnable for this build, so if I can Crumble a Tron opponent into oblivion I feel like that's a good tradeoff- Tron is beatable, but only if you can really lock them out of assembling their set of lands. Crumble to Dust actually ensures this happens, so long as you get to cast it. Against the Breach Titan decks I feel like Fulminator vs. Crumble is sort of a 50/50 anyway.
Last time I played it in an event, I had a lot of trouble with Jund/Junk, losing to both of those decks to derail my tournament. I also drew against a Mardu Nahiri deck that locked me out game 2 with Rest in Peace, and got steamrolled in the last round by a UWR Nahiri deck. I feel like this deck should be good in those matchups, but that just didn't pan out. Does anyone have any advice for those midrange/control style matchups, or any suggestions for how I could tweak the deck?
Let's also not get caught up in the false dichotomy that WOTC has invented, that we either needed to have shakeup bans (ie ones that are not motivated intrinsically by threats to format health) or we needed to drop the Modern Pro Tour. There are other ways that things could have been managed, had the interest been there. WOTC devotes little thought to Modern in design, but they've also given it little thought in terms of how it could be managed. That's find, Modern isn't their biggest concern, but I don't think we should just accept this fairly counterintuitive claim that they've made without being critical.
What cards did you use to trade with them- was it just removal for their creatures? Or are you playing some Dispels or the like?
Shamble Back needing a creature concerns me a little, but I suppose they're basically never winning fast without playing one... It's a thought, at least.
I playtested about 15 games with it yesterday against Burn, Infect, and Jund. My list was loosely based on the one PV proposed in his article a few weeks back, so fairly generic, no appreciable thought invested into the specifics.
My record against Infect was hugely favourable, and I think I ran fairly well but I was pleased with it. My games against Jund also felt pretty good, though I also had a lot of turn 1 suspended Vision which surely skews it way in Grixis' favour. My games against Burn, meanwhile, felt awful- way worse than they were with the old Thought Scour + delve heavy lists.
Based on this small sample, I tentatively feel like 4 Vision is the number I'd want because, despite the awkwardness in drawing multiples, turn 1 suspend is such a powerful play with a decent hand that it's worth maximizing it. I was also very pleasantly surprised by GDD, which I'd initially expected to be too clunky or too cute. It's a very natural play pattern to suspend a turn1 Ancestral, cast it on turn 5, and then slam Dark-Dwellers to establish a board presence and draw another 3 or rebuy a Kolaghan's Command or even just Terminate a guy and the door is essentially closed on your opponent.
Again, I've only got a few games in here, so I'm definitely not firm in these conclusions yet.
I would like to find some way to gain life to crawl back into games that stabilize at low life totals. Are Kalitas and Tribute to Hunger the best maindeckable options? Is Vampiric Link the best we have postboard?
How many of you have experience playing the Griselbrand/Emrakul UBR list along the lines of what some of the Japanese players ran at the Pro Tour? Here's a quick list of my observations compared to the Shoal list:
- there are fewer strictly conditional cards (e.g. Shoal), so you have fewer games where awkward draws lead to your deck doing absolutely nothing
- the deck gets to play more intrinsically powerful cards, like Jace, Vryn's Prodigy, Lightning Bolt, discard spells; the interactive package helps especially improve matchups like Infect that are quite difficult for Shoal
- Goryo's Vengeance has twice as many targets with Emrakul, so there's a greater range of card combinations that lead to a fatty in play
- reanimating a creature does not always end the game on the spot, and Griselbrand in particular can actually be relatively weak because it does not lead to a combo kill
- need to attack to win- no combo kill and no ability to win at instant speed
- overall seems less swingy in both directions than Shoal; matchups across the board seem pretty reasonable, but there are fewer free wins
I'd love to compare notes with someone who's given the build some work. Anyone out there?
If there really is enough compensation that you can run Bant Thopters, you do also gain access to Wargate as a possible tutor for Sword as well (or for Foundry, of course), either out of the side as a Wish target to very slowly assemble the combo or as a maindeck option. You really could end up with a lot of different tutors in this type of deck if you wanted- question is, can they be used effectively, or are they too slow and clunky?
I'm sure WOTC thinks this change is totally unproblematic, since they advertise the new set, and pros like EFro who hate playing Modern and have special influence on policy due to personal connections with the guys in R&D (not to pick on him in particular, he's just been open about this privilege) get to have their way and play Standard instead.
What they'll likely never acknowledge is that this is a failure on their part to figure out how to properly manage Modern, and rather than giving an honest attempt at doing so, they've bailed. I can't say I'm unhappy to have the threat of arbitrary bans alleviated, but I hope this comes with an increase in Grand Prix visibility and that they showcase the format at a high level by some other means. I do not want to see Modern become a neglected format like Legacy, or a de facto casual format.
I have not yet had a chance to watch the coverage of the GP myself, but I can't help but wonder whether it was done in an awkward way that helps encourage this kind of attitude. They have a habit of featuring the same deck over and over again during a tournament rather than making an attempt to feature different matchups, which skews perceptions. They also have a tendency to completely fail to understand what is going on in a game and deliver commentary that plays down how interesting the gameplay actually is. I don't want to rip on the coverage team because I understand how difficult their job is, but they have almost nobody who plays Modern more than once in a blue moon and it really hurts the quality of the product and, subsequently, is damaging to the average person's sense of what the format is like.
With apologies for picking out this post in particular, Twin is a deck that makes a lot of decisions and which is pretty interactive (Bolt, Remand, Cryptic Command, Snapcaster, etc. are all cards intended to let you just play Magic against the other player). I love getting the opportunity to watch people play Twin because outside of the occasional games where the opponent taps out and the Twin player gets to cast Deceiver into Twin early, it involves a lot of options and rewards people for getting it right. I don't see how any serious Modern player would consider it anything but a treat to see someone like Patrick Dickmann play the deck on camera. I had the opportunity to play against it quite a lot at the GP and I was excited to do so, since I felt like I could use my skill in Modern to get an advantage over my opponents. I understand that it feels bad when they just "have it" and you've got nothing, but it doesn't feel any worse to me than Thoughtseize into Tarmogoyf free wins or turn 1 Cranial Plating free wins or getting Infected out turn 3.
Twin spends the majority of its game playing skill-intensive interactive Magic. I can't argue that your opinion is invalid, but I seriously would like to know what kind of decks you do like to watch or play against if Twin doesn't manage to meet your approval on either count.
Standard has been much more static than Modern over the course of the past ~10 months, so I don't understand this at all. Modern is the fastest-growing format and has been responsible for some of the largest GPs in Magic history. Why would they opt against supporting it at the Pro Tour level?
The problem with the rock-paper-scissors reasoning, of course, is that it's a weighted game of rock-paper-scissors. Sure, GW hate bears beats Pod. Hope you're planning to play against all Pod players in a tournament, because your deck isn't very good. Unless Pod has a bad matchup against something that is independently powerful, it's the presumed best deck and will in fact rise to the top.
That said, the top in Modern is no more than like 30% of decks, generally, so that's not the end of the world. Also, Zoo can always nut draw people and kill about as fast as the combo decks in the format, depending on the build, so it's hard to see it not being a good choice anyway. Unlike some of the examples you cite in your rock-paper-scissors analogy, Zoo is an independently powerful deck so you shouldn't be overly fearful when playing it unless the metagame becomes extremely hostile. (E.g., if I knew the meta would be 25% Pod, 20% UWR, and 10% Bogles I would go looking somewhere else... but that's not especially likely.)
EDIT: figuring out how to use these newfangled forums
If it's not even good, why print it?
I am glad all those Chromatic Lantern decks in Modern are immune too...
Decks playing more than one or two colors are not inherently problematic. They pay in terms of consistency and life/speed as well as opportunity cost (there are good colorless lands in the format). I know those things are hard for people to see, or don't satisfy them, or seem irrelevant because they're used to Wasteland in Legacy, but they are real things that affect deckbuilding choices and outcomes of games.
Hey, I get it, I would love to be able to play UU, counter target spell, scry 3. But at a certain point what you want and what would be a good idea/healthy for the game do not necessarily line up. Good designers can separate their own likes and dislikes from what is needed or not needed and make cards accordingly. (This is part of the reason I don't like Ken Nagle much as a designer- you can pretty easily spot which sets he's worked on based on how much they support the things he likes. He loves BG, and no other guild got as many gifts in RTR. He loves the fatties, and Theros is all about huge idiots crashing around.)
That's all I'll say on the subject, no point in going any further down this rabbit hole.
The only thing harder to get rid of in Magic than global enchantments are emblems.
They don't tend to print hate cards that can't be answered because then... you drop the hate card and the game is over. That doesn't really make for enthralling gameplay.