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Quote from Eruza4 »

Quote from gkourou »

Quote from darkvoidman »

U dont really have to seas their valakuts.Targeting a stomping or a cinder glade is effective and slows them down

This is entirely wrong. Spreading Seas is usually a 2 mana redraw when spent on a non-Valakut land of theirs. The explanation is obvious. They play Valakut and then kill you with Scapeshift or with Valakut triggers the same way.
If you play Spreading Seas, 99% of the time keep it for Valakut, The Molten Pinnacle unless if they re colour screwed, which is super unlikely.

the problem is they don't need all 4 the valakuts to kill so it's unlikely that you will be able to put it on the molten pinnacle. That's the main reason I don't have a single copy of spreading seas in main deck or side. Usually if you sesolve a geist on t3 and keep attacking with countermagic backing you up u are in a great spot

As someone who has played against Scapeshift and Titanshift a ton I think Spreading Seas is not much better than a redraw. It doesn't matter if you put it on a valukut (rarely happens anyway) They just sac all their lands and kill you. Or cast Titan and get two more.

Seas does nothing.

I think most of you guys have never played with Opt before. You can't pull lands out of the deck for a one scry cantrip. It's much less powerful for filtering than it's being hyped. Opt can be compared to Peek as they are the same card with a different wrinkle. Seeing the hand vs. a scry one.

Scry one is not good at filtering. Scry two is MUCH stronger. The reason people would include Opt would be for combo decks that are going to take the cheapest filtering they can get or decks that want to play draw-go. I could see 2-3 making it into Nahiri decks to find Nahiri or a Path when needed. But Opt doesn't do much digging. Sleight of Hand is a stronger digging effect.

Quote from gkourou »

Hey, guys. Just made the switch to Jeskai Control(from UW), because
1) Tron/Eldrazi has a free fall in my area and
2) more aggro decks have started to popping up.
3) Still a control heavy meta though.
This is the list. With that in mind(we are talking a lot of control decks), would you change anything to the list?

A) Not too sure about Ajani, only 2 Think Twice and Secure The Wastes
B) Also, not too sure about not playing Spell Queller, but I believe it's bad vs control, right?
C) What would you say are the pros and cons of Spell Queller? What are the matchups he's good and what are the bad ones?

DeckMagic OnlineOCTGN2ApprenticeBuy These Cards
Lands (25) 4x Celestial Colonnade 4x Flooded Strand 4x Scalding Tarn 2x Steam Vents 2x Hallowed Fountain 1x Sacred Foundry 2x Island 1x Plains 1x Glacial Fortress 2x Spirebluff Canal 1x Ghost Quarter 1x Desolate Lighthouse Spells(30) 4x Serum Visions 2x Supreme Verdict 4x Path to Exile 3x Lighting Bolt 1x Spell Snare 3x Lightning Helix 2x Logic Knot 2x Negate 2x Think Twice 2x Electrolyze 1x Secure The Wastes 1x Sphinx's Revelation 3x Cryptic Command	Creatures (4) 3x Snapcaster Mage 1x Torrential Gearhulk Planeswalker(1) 1x Ajani Vengeant	Sideboard (15) 2x Dispel 1x Negate 2x Anger Of The Gods 1x Celetial Purge 1x Supreme Verdict 1x Wear/Tear 2x Crumble To Dust 2x Relic Of Progenitus 1x Izzet Staticaster 1x Geist Of St. Traft 1x Elspeth, Sun's Champion

4th snap is always better than 1st gearhulk. That's been figured out ad nauseum on here.

Quote from 0oSunnYo0 »

@tlhunter07

Yeah I first was considering a split of;

2x Mana Leak
1x Logic Knot
1x Muddle the Mixture or Negate

I've seen Tamada's List and it's offshoots and I like them a lot. I just really like the idea of playing Geist of Saint Traft main-deck and Spell Queller in the side-board to trick the opponent into boarding out spot removal.

Do you know what tricks people to board out spot removal more than playing Geist? Not playing creatures.

Quote from Bearscape »

Quote from TomCourtenay »

1) Torrential Gearhulk as great in combination with 4CMC cards. It provided a win condition as well as giving flashback to Supreme Verdict for clearing a board full of pesky creatures. I didn't miss the 4th Snapcaster Mage.

sounds like you cheated, read gearhulk again

now snapcaster on the other hand could have actually legally flashbacked verdict, for the same cost, so I guess you did miss that 4th snapcaster after all

Yeah, I cringed when I saw that. Gearhulk can NOT flashback sorceries. I know you like to say you don't miss the 4th Snapcaster but you certainly do and have proven it here = p

Quote from ctaylor33 »

I can't imagine playing draw-go without Think Twice.

Always try to do things you can't imagine doing. This leads to growth.

Quote from colakki »

Is it more fun to die to Storm going off T3 or to an Inkmoth T2?

I've never died to T2 Inkmoth. That's a pretty big stretch to compare casting T3 Karn, which happens often to dying to T2 inkmoth which is rarer than me lucky pot o'gold.

How to make fewer mistakes and win more.

I've been playing U/W and primariy Jeskai control based variants in modern for many years. The things that have kept me coming back time and again to the deck are the chances for consistent interaction, the interesting and difficult decision points, and the ability to give yourself a huge advantage against a correctly predicted field by playing the right number of specific elements in your 75.
Along the way, I've met many Jeskai players. Some I've learned a lot from and this has really helped my game. But I'd have to say that on average the Jeskai players I have come across tend to be calcified in their card evaluations and very rarely think deeply on decisions. This is something I want to discuss briefly and if anyone wants to chime in for a more in-depth discussion feel free.

1. Fetch/shocking too aggressively(or not aggressively enough).
This is one I see often. Jeskai player is against some kind of control deck with a R/B land on the battlefield, a Sacred Foundry, and two fetches in hand. Player proceeds to play Foundry untapped (or fetch shock for a Hallowed Fountain). Doesn't go for any basics. After these games I often inquire, "Why did you fetch up the third shockland?" The answer is something trivial like "I wanted double white, and of course I need more U for Cryptics". I look through the deck seeing that there is only a singleton Supreme Verdict for WW, and can't find any other useful uses of WW. In these situations, don't shock, it's rarely worth it. And there are other times I see what seem like rather obvious mistakes. Opp is playing against burn and on T1 doesn't fetch/shock the Goblin Guide. After the game he says, "I wanted to save the life". I explain to him that if he had shocked it would have been the same two life he let the GG hit him for and he would have used his mana on T1 and had up his Mana Leak for T2. To which he responds, "Oh," and doesn the same thing when I saw him playing burn a couple weeks later.
Be careful, guys! Think about why you are doing something. Don't just go off habit = )

2. "Card X has always been great for me". This is a big deal and one of the reasons IMO that Jeskai gets held back as an archtype. other decks seems to be fine with adding and removing cards when they are less optimal. But Jeskai players are very calcified in their card evaluations. Have you heard of these? "I would never run Jeskai without Cryptic", "4 lightning bolt is always correct," "You'd be crazy not to have a 4-mana sweeper in the main," "I always run Gideon because he's always great for me," "I'd never run AV because it seems slow to me (but I run Sphinx's Revelation)".
Try to be able to see when cards are good and when they aren't. There are lots of metas where I've argued to forgo 4 mana sweepers, and many where I've said Cryptic isn't good. But currently I think they are both fine. This is based on what my opponent's are bringing to the table, NOT my own card preferences.

3. Using Remand incorrectly. One thing about remand I've always found strange is that people use it on their own spells far less often than they should. For example, your opponent has a goyf and your hand is bolt, remand. You can bolt him end of turn, maintain priority and remand your bolt to cycle the remand. I see players in this kind of situation all the time and they don't cycle their remand. Give it the due consideration it deserves. I also see many players remanding their opponent's counterspells in the hopes of drawing into an answer instead of just remanding their own spell. Example- I play snap, you spell snare. DON'T remand the spell snare! I see this a lot. Remand your snapcaster for super value!

4. Not activating colonnade enough in post board games. In game one many opponents are stuck with removal in hand against Jeskai. But they usually shave some number during sideboarding. It's often correct to jam with your colonnade and force them to have it. I think people have a hard time going from the mindset of "I'm going to control the game" to "Now I'm going to race you, can you race my 4/4 flier?"

5. Not mulliganing enough against linear match-ups. Post board hands are much less keepable in the linear match-ups like Dredge, Tron, etc. Provided that you have brought appropriate hate you should be rolling the dice more to get a hand that can win. I see WAY TOO MANY people keep hands just because they are "lands and spells". Lands and spells don't help you beat Dredge, lest you forgot?

Anyway, those are five tips off the top of my head. Hope they provide some food for thought.

Quote from Jex »

But we don't need to race. We have burn spells, Colonnades, Snapcaster and Secure the Wastes. I'm running a durdly deck which is similar to the 2014 era deck and Gearhulk still sucks in it. We don't have enough high value cards to make use of Gearhulk. Cryptic is the only one. Wafo-Tapa generally plays a low number of Snapcasters.

Wapo-Tapa is also no longer any sort of control barometer. He just jams whatever he likes over and over again and you get to see the ones that squeak out results.

If you want to race you can add some Vendilion Cliques they are much better at racing as they don't need to have six mana to cast and they hit almost as hard with evasion.

Good luck

Pointing out that Flusterstorm is a "storm" card is pretty misleading.

It's a very situational counterspell which is in many cases worse than Spell Pierce (which is meh). No one is comboing off with Flusterstorm. Flusterstorm is a card that hates out the degenerate storm cards so if wizards didn't like people dying to storm cards they should be supporting Flusterstorm.

That may be the best thing to come out of the WotC office in a long time. It is great to hear how they are approaching the ban list and that they are acknowledging the serve lack of answers printed in the last few years.

It does not take a pro player to understand why probe was broken.
People who defend it for tier 3 decks can just replace it with another card and it requires mana.

A 0 mana investment card that replaces itself and does 5+ things is already a siren alarm.

Sam Black doesn't intricately understand that using actual mana for a deck to ascertain it will win or not over a 0 mana card makes the format slower, which is good for format health. Keeping the card to help tier 3 decks doesn't make sense when the overall harm is t3 or even t2 kills in the format that preaches itself to be a t4 format. It just makes thoughtseize and inquisition more integral to winning with the deck.

Quote from ktkenshinx »

Quote from Lilijuana »

Their reason for banning probe was as succinct and to the point as it gets...and correct. I don't see how tournament reports are necessary when they are addressing how the card influences gameplay.

You mentioned the Delver deck above. It runs 17 lands and essentially 56 cards b/c Probe enables such a composition to be viable when normally it would not.

This rationale is arbitrary and applies to dozens of cards in the format. Gameplay reasons are all subjective. That is why we should prefer objective reasons like T4 rule violations and format diversity violations. Name a Tier 1 staple in Modern and I'm sure half a dozen people in this thread could knit together a rhetorical argument about why that card is busted because it is too strong in gameplay. We cannot have Wizards start banning cards for those reasons because it's completely unpredictable and doesn't necessarily improve the format.

This post is not directed at ktkenshinx, I'm just using it because it's well written and succinct.

I don't normally bite into banlist discussion, but I agree with Lilijuana. Not everything needs to be objective, not everything needs to be supported by data. The reasons WOTC gave were adequate and completely understandable. "Predictable?" maybe not (that's a subjective point of view, to me this is an entirely predictable ban given which decks are currently T1 and what Wizard's general idea of a healthy meta is), but data is not predictable either: E.g. even if a ban claim is supported by data, the interpretation of data itself is subjective- how many times in this or past threads have people debated what percent of the meta is too much, how consistently a deck needs to T3 before its too fast, what level of play needs to be seen by a card before it becomes oppressive? Can Wizards act prospectively, or does a banlist have to be retrospective? etc., etc., etc....

I think the real reason people are upset is because Wizards didn't (un)ban what they wanted (un)banned. Nothing will solve that problem, people will always be upset when others don't behave exactly the way that person wants them to. People *wanted* a preordain unban and started to make arguments and see trends in support of that position. Imagine their disappointment when Wizards didn't see the same trends and arguments.

I see it all the time, even in many non-MTG contexts: people over-analyse [policy documents] or past statements by [company here]'s employees and treat them as if they are gospel laws written by professional drafters and interpreted by machines with statistical ratios and weightings that automatically demand responses at particular threshold levels, with references to clearly defined samples and the absolute exclusion of all other data.

Then they hype themselves up on the mere possibility that something might happen and get upset when their expectations are wrong. Honestly, its impossible for any company to avoid such criticism, its just more acute in MTG since there's so much money riding on the cards.

For example, there are many people in this thread who are already saying that this is a gearing up to an unban: to that, I say "sure, maybe you're right" but also "maybe means maybe. Not definitely. Don't get too disappointed if you are wrong.".

That said, I think the two bans are almost no-brainers and entirely consistent with the spirit of the ban list. I barely blinked when I heard the news. I'm not saying "I told you so" since I certainly did not predict the ban, but I am not surprised by it. I'm also not saying whether or not the bans are healthy, I don't know whether or not they are. Time will tell.

Here's the Probe rationale I would have written, assuming I had their data:

"Looking at the results of Modern games on MTGO, we found that no single top-tier deck was consistently winning before turn four and violating the turn four rule. That said, many players complained about how fast the format was. We did a deeper dive and also found that too many overall games were ending before turn four as a result of numerous fast, linear, aggressive strategies, although no single deck was to blame. Rather than ban individual cards from each of these decks (no one of which was alone in violation), we looked at cards shared between all of them to decrease the overall number of games won before turn four. Probe was the most offensive of those shared cards, appearing in the greatest percentage of pre-turn four wins relative to any other shared card.

This finding is supported by Probe's gameplay: it gives perfect information, draws a card, fuels delve, and even pumps creatures for basically no investment. Although it is unfortunate other decks will suffer from Probe's removal (e.g. Delver, U/R Storm), we believe Probe's banning will have a net positive on the format as it overall decreases the chance of fast, top-tier decks winning before turn four. Those decks will likely also find replacements and stay viable. In the interest of the turn four rule, Gitaxian Probe is banned."

This took me ten minutes to write and probably summarizes Wizards' analysis of the card. It also would have preemptively addressed most of the anger around the ban.

I honestly don't think this kind of post would placate people. People might say *oh what a great post, if Wizards said that, there'd be no haters*, and maybe they're right. Or maybe the've got a case of 20-20 hindsight and really have no idea what their reaction would be if they saw this post on wizard's homepage.

For example, I can easily image a world where people try and over-analyse what is meant by "too many overall games were ending before turn four". People would debate the data on exactly how many T4 losses were actually occurring, how many of those involve GP, and debate what threshold levels had to be reached until "too many" T4 games had been breached. Then they'd argue that this isn't the normal T4 rule they'd see, and that it represents a pardigm shift from Wizard's usual policy. Other People would argue over whether GP really was the "most offensive" card, as compared to become immense, etc.

Having said all that, I can see one way Wizards can avoid alot of criticism on banlist discussions: have a periodic, rapid (say, monthly or fortnightly) post of "caution cards"- cards that are on their radar. Post a "format health update" regularly and keep people in the loop. Then people will know at least that what they are buying into is risky- which is really what alot of the anger is about. People will also know more about the thought mentality of WOTC and wouldn't need to over-analyse static documents like banlist rules threads and old AMAs. This doesn't stop the criticism, it just helps people make better investment choices, which takes some (but not all) of the sting out.

The longer WOTC leaves between banlist updates (or, rather, commentary), the more the community has an opportunity to set itself up with unreasonable and impossible expectations that are doomed to failure. I think banlist updates are too far between, and gives people way too long to mull over them (by updates I don't mean changes, I mean general discussion or news articles. Changes should be few and far between).

This of course would require active resourcing by Wizards, and represents a fundamental cultural shift on the company's part, so is of course unlikely. More likely? They don't give a stuff about complaints unless sales are affected. Though I'm without data, I don't think I'd be sticking my neck out to say that Modern is not a huge sales area.

TL;DR: the real culprit here is long periods of non-communication. Neither the bans themselves nor the reasoning would ever not be controversial (with narrow exceptions like Eldrazi winter).

Pardon my asking here, but is it not true that in the State of the Meta thread, almost everybody was asking for better control decks? Is it not true that many, many, MANY players, both professional and not have expressed major dislike of the fact that to be competitive you have to build these non-interactive combo or combo-esque style decks? Many naming Infect, Suicide Zoo, and other similar decks as the examples?
So wizards bans a card that takes care of Infect and suicide Zoo, making said combo decks harder to win with and making it easier to play a midrange/control deck and all everybody wants to do is say that theyre quitting for the attempt at moving a format toward the style of play that the majority of players say they wish that they could have?

Quote from ktkenshinx »

Quote from Tanukimo »

Quote from ktkenshinx »

The anger at this announcement is unusually overblown and unwarranted, even considering the general Modern outcry at such changes. Although there are definitely some legitimately scary elements of the ban update, most people are complaining about elements that are totally fine, or even heartening.

The GGT ban is perfectly fine. It keeps the deck a top-tier contender without leaving it a Tier 1 mainstay. This lets other GY decks return (remember old faithful Abzan Company?) and lets everyone free up SB slots to fight other decks. The "scary" part about this ban is that it's a reversal of a previous ban, which is unprecedented but not really that scary. I'm fine with companies and organizations changing their minds based on new realities. In these regards, the GGT ban gets top marks from me.

Probe ban gets a B-. Yes, it's effective at taking a little bit off the top of most fast decks without killing any of them outright. In that regard, it's a solid A. Unfortunately, it does this at the expense of very fair Delver decks, which were great for format health. That's C-, unintended consequence ban territory. More importantly, these kinds of silly bans just underscore Modern's problems: WHERE THE HECK ARE OUR GENERIC ANSWERS AND POLICING CARDS/STRATEGIES?? You don't see these absurd bans in Legacy because the format has internal regulation from cards, not external regulations from bans.

What about the Gitaxian Probe ban? They didn't even pay lip service to killing off lower-tier decks with the banning. And their reasoning for all of the bans was really weak compared to previous bans.

Sorry, the post wasn't finished when you quoted it. Had some posting issues; the final version talks about the weak reasoning.

I'm less concerned about Wizards failing to address Probe's impact on decks like Storm. I can't expect them to test a ban's impact on every Tier 3 or lower deck, and I think some of those "killed decks" aren't as killed as many believe. But I can definitely expect them to articulate their reasoning at all. The article totally failed to draw on tournament finishes, format guidelines, ban policies, etc. It didn't address possible fears and didn't mention other Modern articles and updates to that time. It just reads like it was thrown together in the hour before publication, and that frightens me as a Modern player. Something so important needs more thought and effort put into its release and publication.

Their reason for banning probe was as succinct and to the point as it gets...and correct. I don't see how tournament reports are necessary when they are addressing how the card influences gameplay.

You mentioned the Delver deck above. It runs 17 lands and essentially 56 cards b/c Probe enables such a composition to be viable when normally it would not.

Honestly bans like this give me a ton of confidence in wizards at the modern level.

Kinda disappointed not to see an unban, but I suspect they don't want to do bans and unbans at the same time unless forced, since it makes for wildly unpredictable metagame shifts and no real firm idea of cause and effect.

I expect a wildly popular unban next time.

You run RIPs because they can win you the game. Wheel cannot. Turning off Snaps is near meaningless.

Like tapping stones has said an awful lot, if I want a sideboard card for dredge, I'd rather just play RiP.
It doesn't matter if it makes it harder for me to win too, because unless its answered (in which case its also not hurting me anymore) dredge has to legitimately hard cast its creatures to win, which is not going to beat us.
Wheel gets hit by all of the hate dredge has for rip, but doesn't even provide us with anything if it gets killed the turn after its cast.

Surgical is not a good card. RIP is better. Run RIPs.

Or you could just accept the fact that you're not as good as you think you are.