As much as I enjoy URx vs BGx, I completely agree that they need bad match ups for the meta game to cycle.
I agree wholeheartedly. I think any metagame where bogles is regularly at the top of the format or that the 13 planeswalker Gideon deck is even playable to be a sign of a serious imbalance and I think grindy card advantage strategies are warping the format around them. Anecdotal for sure but I played BG midrange at a 1K on the weekend, saw Burn, Humans, Ponza and UR tempo in my Swiss, lots of Taxes and other stuff around the room, and the finals ended up being myself, 4 Jund decks (well 3, one was blue Jund that cut bobs for Jace), Ponza, UR Thing and Dredge just stomping everyone. It's anecdotal and not statistically significant but I think it's what we're going to see a lot of moving forward where the format is slow enough that we're gonna see bogles and hollow one vs planeswalkers at least until the meta corrects somehow.
The reason it works is because a blinked leonin arbiter is a new instance of leonin arbiter, so the one that was "paid for" no longer exists and your opponent has not paid to ignore the effect of the leonin arbiter currently on the battlefield. The relevant thing to remember in these interactions is that paying for leonin arbiter's ability is a special action that does not use the stack and the stack does not resolve until both players have passed priority without taking an action. So you can't respond to your opponent paying 2 to ignore leonin arbiter's effect (and your opponent may call you on this and try and argue this point) by blinking leonin arbiter, but you will receive priority again after your opponent pays 2 to ignore leonin arbiter's effect and before the fetch resolves as they have not passed priority without taking an action. Opponent's will often try and say "I pay 2 and the fetch resolves since this doesn't use the stack you don't get priority" which is incorrect.
While I understand that it's human nature to frame things to support one's belief and that's it's always tempting to use rhetoric, it's still annoying to constantly read negatively framed positions.
What I'm tired of reading about is the tired "free wins".
Some cards are good against some matchups. That's the point of playing them, isn't it? When a deck has cards that are good against a given deck and that deck pilot fails to sideboard or play properly against said card, it's not a free win. It's just wise deck building. I've watched a match this week-end where a multi-colors deck pilot chose to fetch shock land instead of basics and got locked out of his colors due to a blood moon. His opponent was ponza. It was not the first game. Fetching non-basics was just a plain greedy error.
What people call free win fall into one of the categories:
1. Early powerful cards. (Cranial plating for example)
2. Good sideboard cards. (Blood moon for example)
3. God hands. (Turn 3 Karn for example)
4. High-variance decks that can get an early win. (Let's say charbelcher, even though it's not played to any extent. Or reanimator.)
All of these are actually balanced plays. Affinity can fold to hate. Blood moon is entirely dead in some matchups and can be dead if played around smartly. Karn is a dead card if they don't assemble tron.
You don't like these cards? Fine. Just say it.
You think a card is unfair and should be banned? Fine. Just say it.
Stop talking about "Free wins." A win is a win whatever the turn it was decided, some decks are just inherently designed to be fast.
While I do generally agree with this sentiment, you also have to understand that "free wins" are a thing in Modern. Going back to the whole Brainstorm discussion a few pages back, Modern is not a format that enables people to really work their way out of these match up crushing cards. So if Karn gets out on you before you can interact, the win% spikes dramatically.
Is that all that different from playing a creature deck and getting supreme verdicted after you've played out a bunch of elves on your past three turns? You've lost your entire board, your opponent has more cards in hand and more selection than you and the ability to generate further card advantage, why is it "gg ez" when Tron Karns you on turn 3, but when you're playing wraths against a deck that relies on playing out a bunch of creatures to win it's suddenly some brutally hard win that you had to eke out against all odds?
I don't even remotely agree with this. If a UW player keeps a hand of Serum visions, Snapcaster, 2 paths and 3 lands against Traverse Shadow, that's game over from the opening 7. If your midrange opponent kept a hand full of removal and light on pressure and you're playing a deck with no good targets for removal, you're already at a huge advantage that will likely carry into a win just because you can spend all your time sculpting your draw while your opponent has to rely on the randomness of the top of their deck to keep up. What would a free win otherwise even look like in your deck that is purposely built not to be proactive in the early game?
It feels like humans has really invalidated tax decks in modern. Why on earth play mono white or any variation when you can play humans, who has more tempo, synergy and individually more powerful cards?
Humans certainly has more tempo and synergy but on an individual card for card basis Death and taxes probably pulls ahead and is why the deck is better against massed removal than Humans is. Don't get me wrong, I think Humans all things taken into consideration is a more powerful deck because it's gameplan is just more pro active, but in terms of late game cards that are good to cast onto an empty board after your opponent has exhausted their removal killing every other creature you've played, Humans has exactly Mantis Rider while Death and Taxes has Blade Splicer, Flickerwisp and Resto Angel. Taxes can also protect their own creatures against removal a bit better than Humans can.
As for "why play taxes?", it's never been a top tier choice and has always been chosen because it's rewarding and fun to play. I don't think it's any worse positioned now than it's ever been, it's always been a fine choice that is still sub optimal compared to your other options in the meta.
RG Eldrazi matchup is not good, people continue to play Eldrazi Tron for some unknown reason which can be IME slightly unfavoured and rejection is great there, and gaining percentage points against Affinity and good Tron isn't the worst plan considering they're common matchups and aren't any where near easy enough that I wouldn't have anything for them in my board at all.
I honestly feel like Jace is a lot better than his performance seems to indicate solely because BBE is so busted and is very heavily keeping Jace in check. We saw BBE Elves and BBE Humans do well this weekend which are shells where logically BBE really shouldn't be a good fit except that the card's power level is so high that at this point it probably literally goes in every deck that can produce green and red. I still suspect that in a world where JTMS was unbanned but BBE was not the card might have become oppressive, but with BBE in the format it makes it a lot harder for Jace decks to get an edge against fair creature based decks that have access to the elf.
Oh no way, it'd been long enough since I played for the card that I thought the activation cost was just phyrexian mana. I don't know if you can actually turn 3 with it in that case, but either way the problem with the card has nothing to do with potential for turn 3 kills anyway.
It's fine if you don't feel POD would break the format, but I question what you understand about this format on a fundamental level if you can't realize all of this, and that you think you'd prefer CoCo.
Fundamental level, jajajaj, I'm not idiot man, where are the admins here?
I assume you said about the same about Jace and BBE. Powerlevel has changed. Would you kill before turn 4 with POD? hint: NO.
Shut up your mouth.
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Turn one birds, turn two pod sac birds for spellskite to protect combo. Turn 3 play finks, sac finks getting felidar guardian targeting pod, sac finks again getting resto angel targeting felidar guardian targeting pod, sac felidar guardian getting Kiki win the game on turn three
With Felidar Guardian Pod combos just with Kitchen Finks on the board. No, thank you. Besides it is a very strong grinding machine.
This. I played Pod, you could often times just find whatever the best card in your deck was at will, it was absurd. With today's card pool you can turn 4 combo with birthing pod and virtually any creature in the deck in your opening hand. If you have a mana dork and a finks it's a turn 3 combo. If your opponent is going to disrupt your combo you just pod into siege rhino on turn 4, then siege rhino on turn 5, then siege rhino on turn 6 on top of whatever creatures you're actually casting from hand. The deck is ******* nutty. It's amazingly fun to play, and I wish there was a world where I could play it again that wouldn't be toxic as hell to the metagame, but it shouldn't be coming back any time soon.
We're even a dog to Jund without a good way to fix the matchup, just like Twin
I've been playing your morphose version without blue and I've actually found the Jund matchup quite winnable. I'm playing lingering souls in the board and that certainly helps the matchup, but I find that as long as we get off to a decent start they can have trouble keeping up with us since we do so much more in the first few turns than they do and many of their cards actually line up quite poorly against ours in terms of immediate impact on the board. Bolt does virtually nothing except in multiples to our face, scooze requires more investment in mana than they can realistically afford to make it into a credible blocker/attacker, and BBE does draw into a card but until they have 2 on the field to double block isn't really a relevant body at all. If we go discard into threat into interaction + another threat I find the matchup to be totally reasonable as long as we don't fall behind on board, which is doable because of how clunky their deck is compared to ours.
On the same day Wizards releases the competitive league 5-0 list showing 15 distinct Jace the Mind Sculptor decks, saying wizards hasn't achieved "competitive diversity" among blue decks is a very hard position to take.
Jace is not a deck. Jace, is a blue engine.[/quote]
Yes that would be why I used the words "15 distinct Jace the Mind Sculptor decks" to indicate I was referring to the fact that there were fifteen different blue decks that 5-0d a comp league since the last data dump.
I agree wholeheartedly. I think any metagame where bogles is regularly at the top of the format or that the 13 planeswalker Gideon deck is even playable to be a sign of a serious imbalance and I think grindy card advantage strategies are warping the format around them. Anecdotal for sure but I played BG midrange at a 1K on the weekend, saw Burn, Humans, Ponza and UR tempo in my Swiss, lots of Taxes and other stuff around the room, and the finals ended up being myself, 4 Jund decks (well 3, one was blue Jund that cut bobs for Jace), Ponza, UR Thing and Dredge just stomping everyone. It's anecdotal and not statistically significant but I think it's what we're going to see a lot of moving forward where the format is slow enough that we're gonna see bogles and hollow one vs planeswalkers at least until the meta corrects somehow.
Is that all that different from playing a creature deck and getting supreme verdicted after you've played out a bunch of elves on your past three turns? You've lost your entire board, your opponent has more cards in hand and more selection than you and the ability to generate further card advantage, why is it "gg ez" when Tron Karns you on turn 3, but when you're playing wraths against a deck that relies on playing out a bunch of creatures to win it's suddenly some brutally hard win that you had to eke out against all odds?
I don't even remotely agree with this. If a UW player keeps a hand of Serum visions, Snapcaster, 2 paths and 3 lands against Traverse Shadow, that's game over from the opening 7. If your midrange opponent kept a hand full of removal and light on pressure and you're playing a deck with no good targets for removal, you're already at a huge advantage that will likely carry into a win just because you can spend all your time sculpting your draw while your opponent has to rely on the randomness of the top of their deck to keep up. What would a free win otherwise even look like in your deck that is purposely built not to be proactive in the early game?
And I get to play Stripmine in Modern and all I had to do to make it work was fill my deck with a bunch of underpowered bears!
Humans certainly has more tempo and synergy but on an individual card for card basis Death and taxes probably pulls ahead and is why the deck is better against massed removal than Humans is. Don't get me wrong, I think Humans all things taken into consideration is a more powerful deck because it's gameplan is just more pro active, but in terms of late game cards that are good to cast onto an empty board after your opponent has exhausted their removal killing every other creature you've played, Humans has exactly Mantis Rider while Death and Taxes has Blade Splicer, Flickerwisp and Resto Angel. Taxes can also protect their own creatures against removal a bit better than Humans can.
As for "why play taxes?", it's never been a top tier choice and has always been chosen because it's rewarding and fun to play. I don't think it's any worse positioned now than it's ever been, it's always been a fine choice that is still sub optimal compared to your other options in the meta.
Turn one birds, turn two pod sac birds for spellskite to protect combo. Turn 3 play finks, sac finks getting felidar guardian targeting pod, sac finks again getting resto angel targeting felidar guardian targeting pod, sac felidar guardian getting Kiki win the game on turn three
This. I played Pod, you could often times just find whatever the best card in your deck was at will, it was absurd. With today's card pool you can turn 4 combo with birthing pod and virtually any creature in the deck in your opening hand. If you have a mana dork and a finks it's a turn 3 combo. If your opponent is going to disrupt your combo you just pod into siege rhino on turn 4, then siege rhino on turn 5, then siege rhino on turn 6 on top of whatever creatures you're actually casting from hand. The deck is ******* nutty. It's amazingly fun to play, and I wish there was a world where I could play it again that wouldn't be toxic as hell to the metagame, but it shouldn't be coming back any time soon.
I've been playing your morphose version without blue and I've actually found the Jund matchup quite winnable. I'm playing lingering souls in the board and that certainly helps the matchup, but I find that as long as we get off to a decent start they can have trouble keeping up with us since we do so much more in the first few turns than they do and many of their cards actually line up quite poorly against ours in terms of immediate impact on the board. Bolt does virtually nothing except in multiples to our face, scooze requires more investment in mana than they can realistically afford to make it into a credible blocker/attacker, and BBE does draw into a card but until they have 2 on the field to double block isn't really a relevant body at all. If we go discard into threat into interaction + another threat I find the matchup to be totally reasonable as long as we don't fall behind on board, which is doable because of how clunky their deck is compared to ours.
Jace is not a deck. Jace, is a blue engine.[/quote]
Yes that would be why I used the words "15 distinct Jace the Mind Sculptor decks" to indicate I was referring to the fact that there were fifteen different blue decks that 5-0d a comp league since the last data dump.