My first reaction is I shouldn't bother to react, as I was going to take a break anyway, and I have no reason to believe this is not just another interaction in constantly reinventing the block-structure wheel.
When I came back, I was at first excited to hear about the big-little, no core set, fast rotation coming up, as I was playing Standard at the time and I recognized it could get pretty stale pretty quick. But they didn't even really try the new rotation, they just basically took Khans out early and left Battle in a little longer. Now they're changing their mind again.
I could care less about the Gatewatch, and think Masterpieces are silly anyway, so I'm going to ignore those two. My main concerns are:
One big standalone set
If you ignore Khans/Fate and Fate/Dragons, which had their own weird quirks, we've really only done the big/little thing three times yet. I don't think it's fair to say that the little set coming out is more of the same, not if you're drafting deep and looking at the sets carefully. Oath of the Gatewatch was completely different than Battle, for example, and I go completely different feels from Shadows/Eldritch (liked Shadows but loved Eldritch) and Khaladesh/Aether Revolt (liked Kaladesh, didn't like AR). The existence of a new environment changed the values of lots of big-set cards once the little set came out, and it felt like you got some extra value out of learning that giant big set when the little set came out. Learning a list of 300+ cards, then throwing it out and starting fresh every few months, sounds exhausting to me.
Core sets
I was barely paying any attention to MtG between about Darksteel and Gatecrash, so "core sets" were always this weird thing shoved into the Magic experience for me. When I was a kid, Revised/4th Edition/et al were strictly reprint sets, so new players could buy packs or newer copies of cards they needed and old players could safely ignore them, but I guess they weren't selling well, so they came up with this "core set" idea... big sets that are part reprints and part new cards. I can't think of anything that would make me want to play Magic less. Don't pay any attention to this thing because you already have all this stuff but wait you can't ignore it because there's going to be a vital new card hidden in all the crap that you can't afford to miss. Sorting and collecting stuff from these was such a headache that I was immensely relieved when Origins rotated and I could just be done with the mess for good. That doesn't seem like it was that long ago.
But here we are, back again, and I'm sure they'll change it again before I have much reason to care, but drafting Core Sets does not sound like fun at all, at more gems hidden in a big fat stinking pile of reprints does not make me excited to play Constructed...
I'm not sure I believe the design helps more people than it harms, either. I wouldn't be able to see the sideways thing in my graveyard. I stack my graveyard vertically so I can read the names of the cards at a glance.
I'm usually the guy who's all "chill out, MtG community, you ride Wizards too much over little things," but I'm right on the hate bandwagon with this one. When I saw these spoiled my immediate reaction was "what the crap am I looking at?" It took me a while to realize that there was still a title box, and even though it was garbled, it said "Containment Priest," which is a real magic card that does... something (I don't play Legacy). After a bit more searching I tracked down the power/toughness, type box, mana cost basically where they usually are and trained my eye to read them... and then went on to read the rest of the list...
Trouble is, they decided to add a bunch of extra faux-hieroglyphic noise in the title box of the cards that have really short names (Daze, Stifle). This is my biggest complaint. I got a headache staring at #$@WD+__STIFLE!#$Q#FI)DI/ trying to get a clue what the card was until I finally just gave up and read the text. "Oh, that sounds familiar. That's a blue spell, it's been around a while... what was it called? Stifle?"
This is awful for me. I used to hate playing EDH because around my shop people feel it's necessary to make really bad black-and-white photocopies of cards they don't own and stick them in sleeves. "Are you done with your turn?" "No, hang on, I'm trying to figure out what that blur is on the other side of the table." Bleh. Cards should first and foremost be easy to recognize at a distance. Part of the reason for Magic's success is the simple, loud design: turns out bright colors and big numbers convey a lot of information really quickly. And while I agree that the classic frames were better than the new frames, this is a huge step off the beaten path, and it seems like a slippery slope to me as far as the Masterpieces are concerned. With the first Expeditions it was like "cool, those can be full art and shiny, they're just duals, the text doesn't really matter anyway." Then the second set added a bunch of other lands which weren't quite as simple, then the big change to gaudy copper border for the last block, now this. They really don't seem to care about making these aesthetically pleasing or readable, it seems like the gaudier the better because that's what they think people want and now the rest of us have to suffer across the table from the person whose deck, ten years down the line, has a different frame for every single card. No thanks.
Now, to be fair, I thought foils and mythics were dumb, too, so I'm obviously not the target audience for these things. But there's a difference between clinging to my original-from-Antiquities-with-the-brown-frame-and-the-DaVinci-looking-design Ornithopters and saying "I'm not touching that copper monstrosity, but you go right ahead" and having to struggle to actually read my opponent's card. At least the ugly Ornithopter still looked like a magic card. These look like a parody of a Magic card, or a quirky alternate-universe idea of what a Magic card could be. I'm okay with people doing their own thing with what I don't find aesthetically pleasing, but when the cards are so poorly designed that they can't be easily read, that's interfering with the game itself.
My only hope at this point is that they misdesigned them on purpose so that the backlash will give them an excuse to prematurely dump the whole "expeditions in every set" idea.
I've been picking up the pieces for this for a while now, and now finally have everything I need to start piloting it at FNM. This is the list I'm working with at the moment:
I agree that the Grixis matchup is really bad, and there's a lot of Grixis at my shop, so mainly tweaking to beat that (if I wasn't eager to learn Lantern control, I'd just be running Tron). I'm thinking the Dark Betrayals would be good here because Tasigur and Kalitas are difficult to deal with with the other interaction in the deck... excepting a Bridge, which can get blown up by a Kolghan's Command. Would probably be better to run more Surgical Extractions to deal with the Kolaghan's Commands? But at the moment I only own one and can't spring for extras.
Anyway, I went 2-2, losing to Grixis and Enduring Ideal (which I had never seen before and probably couldn't have beat even if I had known about it), and winning against Affinity and Elves. Affinity was close because I got down to a pretty low life total before getting a bridge down and then still had to deal with double Galvanic Blast game 1, but I was able to marshall my early-game resources to drag the game out until I had enough stuff to win. Elves was pretty easy, even though the elves player was a lot more experienced than the Affinity player, because Elves seems to have so few lines of attack that it's easy to lock them out without too much trouble.
I'm really enjoying learning the deck, would be interested in how other people deal with the bad matchups like Grixis.
If it was a set packed with playable modern cards and NOT built for drafting, it would be opened way more.
At that point why not just release pre-packaged lists, as in Duel Decks or From the Vaults? A random-pack release that exists solely so that people can gamble on getting value out of those packs doesn't really serve anyone. Modern Masters 2015 was a great draft environment, deep enough and replayable enough that it encouraged people to keep playing it, thereby getting those cards into circulation. Designing a draft environment also gives them an organizing principle as to which cards to put in the set; a release that was just a checklist of the 250 most expensive Modern cards would be silly.
While the sticker shock can be a problem for someone looking to sit down and draft one of these sets, I think that's largely a matter of perception: as long as payout's in packs, you're getting a proportionate value back, plus there are more money picks, so it's not really more expensive overall (for someone with a decent winrate) than your typical Standard set.
A format in which you can't effectively interact with a deck for 3-4 turns is not healthy. A format in which you can be non-interactive for 3-4 turns and win on the spot in not healthy. This is why right now it is very problematic that Tron, Bant Eldrazi and RG Ramp are the best decks. I don't go to tournaments to play 4 turns of solitaire and watch my opponent win on the spot without me having a real say in it. Right now there are no real answers to a turn 2 TKS, turn 3 assembled Tron etc, RG ramp just putting lands on the field. At this point it is 100% clear something must be done.
There are plenty of answers to those things. A Thought-Knot Seer, even as early as turn 2 (which is quite rare), is a waste of mana against an opponent holding two cheap removal spells (I recall resolving a topdecked Seer the other night and conceding once I saw my opponent's hand was three ways to remove it). Crumble to Dust is a great answer to Tron, and Ghost Quarter slows it down a lot, as does having a lot of bolts or creatures to deal with its walkers. Ramp is tricky to interact with, but not impossible.
It's untrue to say that you can't interact with these decks, and it's certainly untrue to say that they never interact. I've played Tron for a while now, and while there are games where I just goldfish for the first few turns in an attempt to get Tron on and deal with issues then, there are games where I spend my mana dealing with threats and staying alive because of a slow hand or a fast opponent. A lot of games with Tron are won or lost based on judging how much time you have to respond to your opponent's game plan. There's no "t3 Tron, win on the spot." While it's certainly possible in some matchups to lock your opponent down with a t3 Karn or whatnot, it's silly to suggest games are just automatically won by having 7 mana.
If you honestly feel you're playing solitaire, I think you should step back and reevaluate your choices in those matchups. Because my experience playing with and against more combo-based decks is that the games are often quite interactive and involve a lot of tough choices (ignoring bad hands or players who just don't understand their opponent's gameplan).
Fair enough. In my opinion everyone should get into Legacy, so if you ever get the chance I'd recommend it. I particularly like the way that Wizards only steps in when things are grossly degenerate.
It would be nice if they would treat Modern that way, so we had a format that was open and hands-off that didn't include the reserved list.
As for Frontier, players who have a bunch of leftover Standard staples aren't being scammed. Or anyone who bought in before it got popular. There is demand for a place to use newer, high-print run cards that doesn't have such a huge pool of rarely-reprinted things. So I think it's fine for now; I see the economic issues being the same down the line as for Modern, of course.
Structurally, it does irk me that they add M15 & Origins, as these sets are full of reprints and risk bringing with them the same problems 8th & 9th Ed does for Modern... random cards from old sets where things didn't work the way they do now tends to throw a wrench in the works.
A lot of people seem to be confused about what people are arguing here.
On one side people are saying "Modern format was bad and needed these bans!"
The other side is saying "The modern format was bad BECAUSE IT CAN'T POLICE ITSELF and thus wizards keeps having to ban stuff, and we dont like that ban everything mentality."
There are more than two sides. "The Modern format can police itself just fine, and bans for decks that aren't particularly dominant set a dangerous precedent" is a side. It may be underrepresented on this forum, but that doesn't mean it's not a valid perspective.
Stirrings is not a stupid suggestion or an unlikely one
No offense, but you were way off the mark about WOTC's mindset and all of your posts in the other topic were pretty far off
I don't mean it an insult, or an attack on you, it's more that you seem HEAVILY biased towards the combo aspect, and you're out of touch with WOTC's rationale
Until preordain is unbanned, WOTC is clearly showing they don't want cantrips stronger than serum visions, they want serum visions to be the ultimate cantrip in modern
I don't take it as an insult, but out of touch with whom? There's a tendency around here to pretend this forum represents a consensus about what is right for Modern, but as soon as I log off, most of the attitudes around here go away. There are plenty of players who don't waste time complaining about whether or not some decks can or cannot be interacted with reasonably, but just change their gameplan and try to increase their win percentage. There are plenty of players who don't hold "interaction" up as the end-all, be-all of every single game of Magic. There are plenty of players who understand that to call Tron "uninteractive" is reductive and silly, as there are a billion different builds of Tron and they run the gamut from very goldfishy to very controlly. There are plenty of players who see this:
I believe that as of late at least those cards should be up for consideration for a banning.
Fast Mana
- Mox Opal
- Simian Spirit Guide
- Tronlands
Creatures cheating mechanisms
- Dredge or Amalgams/Ghasts/etc(DONE)
A Phyrexian Spell
- Done
as definitively not Modern. A lot of these players have invested time and money but would be unwilling to do so if the new normal was "be ready to put a bunch of money down, because in order to compete you want the same sets of Lilis and Snapcasters and Goyfs that everybody else does, because WotC and a small faction of midrange players have decided that other options are not in the best interests of game balance." That's not an environment that encourages new blood and continuing competition. That's a perfectly balanced, but bland and stale game. And I want no part of it.
Not to disrespect or knock anyone's right to express their vision for the format, but the idea that it's a consensus or doesn't come with its inherent problems is just not true. To me, comparing Ancient Stirrings to Serum Visions shows a great deal of bias towards three-color midrange decks. Because to say "Ancient Stirrings digs deeper than Serum Visions" is to ignore the very real deckbuilding cost of even using Ancient Stirrings in the first place. It only gets colorless cards, which greatly limits the options of every deck that uses it. Serum Visions can go in any deck that has enough blue sources. Sure, Ancient Stirrings looks at more cards within a particular game of Magic, but the sheer number of cards Serum Visions can draw is much higher. There should be a place in Magic for skimping on card quality in exchange for exploiting powerful synergies. Otherwise everything is just good-stuff decks and there aren't any decks that have a strange and new line of attack that requires people to put more thought into both construction and play.
Now I'm not blind: I see that cards like Urza's Tower and Simian Spirit Guide would never be printed today, because they are relics of an age where Wizards was a lot more fast and lose with game balance (frankly, the reason I play Tron is that I'm nostalgic for the 90s and am not about to go back and rebuy all my Legacy pieces at 5x what I sold them for). I'd be fine if there were a new format that started late enough (Say, Lorywn/2010 Core Set) to kick out Time Spiral, Mirrodin, 8th/9th Ed, and Ravnica, because those sets, while fun, are full of the sort of problems that just don't come up anymore. That's a radically new format, but so was Modern when it started, right? It's cleaner and less disruptive than just putting a bunch of bandages on everything with a more aggressive banlist. I don't want to play in the Banned Age.
Now you're probably right, and Wizards probably doesn't want the Modern that I enjoy playing, but that doesn't mean that I'm clueless or that I'm all alone. Leaving Modern alone would not be the end of the world, especially since there's no Modern Pro Tour so there really are no stakes, and all the quirky fringe decks that people are saying are due for a ban are also the kind of thing that draws a lot of people to Modern. For me personally, if Wizards continues banning and nerfing decks I want to play, that basically does just leave Grixis and Jund. I'm not buying into Grixis and Jund. Not on a freelance artist's salary. So a Mox Opal ban would probably be the end of me attempting to play Constructed for a long time to come. If Wizards really does have it out for Lantern Control, Wizards has it out for the format I thought I was playing.
the number of people complaining that "only BG/x is safe" astounds me.
right, cause tron got banned (eye was incidental and didn't stop it at all), affinity got banned, literally all control decks got a ban, burn got banned, merfolk got banned, etc. /s
there are tons of 'safe' options that are available to you.
Are you sure? Because the consensus around here seems to be that the first two decks you cite are broken and should not exist in Modern. I've heard numerous people say things like "This was a good ban! Hopefully next time we get Mox Opal and Tron lands." Because of the lack of objective reasons from Wizards, the next round of banmania is going to make me extremely nervous. I've heard Mox Opal, Tron Lands, Simian Spirit Guide, Valakut, all of which make sense on some level if you stretch "too much for free" and then I hear nonsense like Ancient Stirrings and Arcbound Ravager. I think the reasoning is silly, but then I think the reasoning for banning GGT is silly. So with the lack of information and the long list of things that various people want banned, it's not surprising people don't want to get caught holding onto decks in this environment. A surprise ban with sketchy reasoning -- even if the actual affects on the metagame are relatively innocuous -- should worry people. Especially combined with the banning of three cards in Standard (which they rightfully tend to avoid banning things from) Maybe ktknshnx is right and they have good reasons that they suck at articulating, but all I see is an announcement that things don't necessarily need to be putting up insane results to get a ban.
So what's "safe?" I have three decks built, I should be good, right? But two of those three decks are Affinity and Tron, decks that some Modern players don't want to exist in any form. And another is Burn. If Tron goes away, I don't feel very comfortable playing Burn and hoping to draw really well in Jund matchup after Jund matchup.
I know a lot of people pick on Standard as being battlecruiser or superfriends or uninteractive or whatever, and I can certainly see that, but the times I've played Standard I found it fun and engaging. The main issue is I don't have the time and money to do a lot of trading and buying all the time, so I play Modern, where I can buy a few cards at a time and build up a collection of cards that aren't rotating. More bans harms my ability to do that and takes away the main appeal of Modern. I'm not really salty about eating $20 on a set of Gitaxian Probes, but I think it's rational to be nervous going forward when I come to this forum and there's a lot of talk about "ban all the things!" and Wizards' actions suggest that they tend to agree.
I think Tron will be well positioned for the near future, but I'm not sure which build is best.
I'm torn between running G/W for Path and Blessed Alliance or going back to G/R for the boardwipes. My meta has a lot of Burn, and Blessed Alliance is really good there, but a t2 Pyroclasm was also handy. The rest is mainly Grixis, a couple Affinity players, a blue Tron, and the occasional homebrew/budget deck.
Has anyone tried the B/G build? Where does it shine? Where does it falter?
I know I'm talking a bit too much about Standard considering this is the Modern thread, but my point is they have literally publicly announced that Standard (and Limited) is what they concentrate on, so how they handle Standard in particular still affects Modern, a secondary concern to them in quite the fashion. To put it bluntly, like many of us aren't really confident in their "Modern Banning Processes" and this particular announcement seems to imply Standard is headed down a similar path, which is a legitimate worry for even the Modern player base, even if we don't care too much about the Standard format itself, but we know WotC does.
On a positive note, I feel they do an amazing job with Limited -- Booster Draft is by far my favorite format -- but I agree that they seem to be a little hasty lately, changing too many things at once and not waiting to see how they pan out.
You do realize that Death's Shadow wasn't the card that got banned, right? For someone who is preachy about all the cool ways to play a card and how the format now discourages creativity, you seem pretty set on jumping ship without trying to toy around with it and "find a way to make it viable". I get that it sucks, but why not use the opportunity to contemplate a gitaxian-probe replacement or an alternate strategy before hitting the eject button?
I'm not hitting the eject button; I'm lucky enough to have not gotten on the plane. I'm not about to lay down hundreds of dollars for a deck that just got worse. All I had was a single Bauble and some Probes (which I thought were a safe buy precisely because they're used in so many decks, lol) I was out of the game for years and years and have only recently started building back a collection; it's very frustrating to try to buy the pieces for a format bit by bit and then have a deck nerfed before you've actually put it together.
If I had already committed to buying and learning the deck, then sure, make adjustments, it's probably still bad, but whatever. But now, why bother? There are plenty of other cute decks to play; I want one that also has a chance of being successful.
In any case, I'm not brewing with Death's Shadow because that problem's already been solved. That's an example, a stand-in for future interesting cards that I would like to brew with but probably won't, because if my brew's actually good, vaguely reasoned, hasty bans will jettison all my effort and leave me with a pile o random cards nobody wants.
I don't think it can possibly be as efficient as the entire community converging on the problem at once. For one thing, I'm pretty sure the cards are changing as they're testing them, so it's not like getting a spoiler and buckling down and learning more as you go -- adapting to the updates to design makes thing less cohesive, I imagine. Another important factors is that the pros who test heavily to find the best Standard decks have one singular goal and that's placing in the Pro Tour. WotC has less at stake, or at least has more factors to worry about: casual appeal, storyline, etc... given how dedicated Magic players are as a whole, it makes sense that balance issues fall through the cracks.
(not that I think the Standard bans were necessary; I'm just skeptical about how much we can expect from in-house testing)
My first reaction is I shouldn't bother to react, as I was going to take a break anyway, and I have no reason to believe this is not just another interaction in constantly reinventing the block-structure wheel.
When I came back, I was at first excited to hear about the big-little, no core set, fast rotation coming up, as I was playing Standard at the time and I recognized it could get pretty stale pretty quick. But they didn't even really try the new rotation, they just basically took Khans out early and left Battle in a little longer. Now they're changing their mind again.
I could care less about the Gatewatch, and think Masterpieces are silly anyway, so I'm going to ignore those two. My main concerns are:
One big standalone set
If you ignore Khans/Fate and Fate/Dragons, which had their own weird quirks, we've really only done the big/little thing three times yet. I don't think it's fair to say that the little set coming out is more of the same, not if you're drafting deep and looking at the sets carefully. Oath of the Gatewatch was completely different than Battle, for example, and I go completely different feels from Shadows/Eldritch (liked Shadows but loved Eldritch) and Khaladesh/Aether Revolt (liked Kaladesh, didn't like AR). The existence of a new environment changed the values of lots of big-set cards once the little set came out, and it felt like you got some extra value out of learning that giant big set when the little set came out. Learning a list of 300+ cards, then throwing it out and starting fresh every few months, sounds exhausting to me.
Core sets
I was barely paying any attention to MtG between about Darksteel and Gatecrash, so "core sets" were always this weird thing shoved into the Magic experience for me. When I was a kid, Revised/4th Edition/et al were strictly reprint sets, so new players could buy packs or newer copies of cards they needed and old players could safely ignore them, but I guess they weren't selling well, so they came up with this "core set" idea... big sets that are part reprints and part new cards. I can't think of anything that would make me want to play Magic less. Don't pay any attention to this thing because you already have all this stuff but wait you can't ignore it because there's going to be a vital new card hidden in all the crap that you can't afford to miss. Sorting and collecting stuff from these was such a headache that I was immensely relieved when Origins rotated and I could just be done with the mess for good. That doesn't seem like it was that long ago.
But here we are, back again, and I'm sure they'll change it again before I have much reason to care, but drafting Core Sets does not sound like fun at all, at more gems hidden in a big fat stinking pile of reprints does not make me excited to play Constructed...
I'm not sure I believe the design helps more people than it harms, either. I wouldn't be able to see the sideways thing in my graveyard. I stack my graveyard vertically so I can read the names of the cards at a glance.
"Judge, my opponent has a Yu-Gi-Oh card in their deck."
"It's not a Yu-Gi-Oh card. It's my sweet Masterpiece Vindicate!"
"If it's a Masterpiece, why isn't it in English?"
"It is. Look closely."
*squints* "Those are "I"s? They look like "C"s. And what's all that extra garbage in the text box?"
"Heiroglyphs, man! Hieroglyphs are cool!"
"..."
"What?"
"Judge, I concede. I'm going to go play Yu-Go-Oh! instead. At least there I can read the cards..."
Trouble is, they decided to add a bunch of extra faux-hieroglyphic noise in the title box of the cards that have really short names (Daze, Stifle). This is my biggest complaint. I got a headache staring at #$@WD+__STIFLE!#$Q#FI)DI/ trying to get a clue what the card was until I finally just gave up and read the text. "Oh, that sounds familiar. That's a blue spell, it's been around a while... what was it called? Stifle?"
This is awful for me. I used to hate playing EDH because around my shop people feel it's necessary to make really bad black-and-white photocopies of cards they don't own and stick them in sleeves. "Are you done with your turn?" "No, hang on, I'm trying to figure out what that blur is on the other side of the table." Bleh. Cards should first and foremost be easy to recognize at a distance. Part of the reason for Magic's success is the simple, loud design: turns out bright colors and big numbers convey a lot of information really quickly. And while I agree that the classic frames were better than the new frames, this is a huge step off the beaten path, and it seems like a slippery slope to me as far as the Masterpieces are concerned. With the first Expeditions it was like "cool, those can be full art and shiny, they're just duals, the text doesn't really matter anyway." Then the second set added a bunch of other lands which weren't quite as simple, then the big change to gaudy copper border for the last block, now this. They really don't seem to care about making these aesthetically pleasing or readable, it seems like the gaudier the better because that's what they think people want and now the rest of us have to suffer across the table from the person whose deck, ten years down the line, has a different frame for every single card. No thanks.
Now, to be fair, I thought foils and mythics were dumb, too, so I'm obviously not the target audience for these things. But there's a difference between clinging to my original-from-Antiquities-with-the-brown-frame-and-the-DaVinci-looking-design Ornithopters and saying "I'm not touching that copper monstrosity, but you go right ahead" and having to struggle to actually read my opponent's card. At least the ugly Ornithopter still looked like a magic card. These look like a parody of a Magic card, or a quirky alternate-universe idea of what a Magic card could be. I'm okay with people doing their own thing with what I don't find aesthetically pleasing, but when the cards are so poorly designed that they can't be easily read, that's interfering with the game itself.
My only hope at this point is that they misdesigned them on purpose so that the backlash will give them an excuse to prematurely dump the whole "expeditions in every set" idea.
2 Academy Ruins
4 Ancient Stirrings
1 Battle at the Bridge
4 Blooming Marsh
2 Botanical Sanctum
4 Codex Shredder
4 Collective Brutality
1 Crucible of Worlds
2 Darkslick Shores
4 Ensnaring Bridge
1 Forest
3 Ghoulcaller's Bell
3 Glimmervoid
4 Inquisition of Kozilek
1 Inventors' Fair
4 Lantern of Insight
2 Mishra's Bauble
4 Mox Opal
1 Pyxis of Pandemonium
2 Spire of Industry
1 Swamp
2 Thoughtseize
1 Trading Post
1 Welding Jar
The sideboard's a work in progress, tweaked it a bit after the first night:
2 Ghost Quarter
1 Grafdigger's Cage
3 Nature's Claim
2 Pithing Needle
2 Relic of Progenitus
2 Spellskite
1 Surgical Extraction
I agree that the Grixis matchup is really bad, and there's a lot of Grixis at my shop, so mainly tweaking to beat that (if I wasn't eager to learn Lantern control, I'd just be running Tron). I'm thinking the Dark Betrayals would be good here because Tasigur and Kalitas are difficult to deal with with the other interaction in the deck... excepting a Bridge, which can get blown up by a Kolghan's Command. Would probably be better to run more Surgical Extractions to deal with the Kolaghan's Commands? But at the moment I only own one and can't spring for extras.
Anyway, I went 2-2, losing to Grixis and Enduring Ideal (which I had never seen before and probably couldn't have beat even if I had known about it), and winning against Affinity and Elves. Affinity was close because I got down to a pretty low life total before getting a bridge down and then still had to deal with double Galvanic Blast game 1, but I was able to marshall my early-game resources to drag the game out until I had enough stuff to win. Elves was pretty easy, even though the elves player was a lot more experienced than the Affinity player, because Elves seems to have so few lines of attack that it's easy to lock them out without too much trouble.
I'm really enjoying learning the deck, would be interested in how other people deal with the bad matchups like Grixis.
At that point why not just release pre-packaged lists, as in Duel Decks or From the Vaults? A random-pack release that exists solely so that people can gamble on getting value out of those packs doesn't really serve anyone. Modern Masters 2015 was a great draft environment, deep enough and replayable enough that it encouraged people to keep playing it, thereby getting those cards into circulation. Designing a draft environment also gives them an organizing principle as to which cards to put in the set; a release that was just a checklist of the 250 most expensive Modern cards would be silly.
While the sticker shock can be a problem for someone looking to sit down and draft one of these sets, I think that's largely a matter of perception: as long as payout's in packs, you're getting a proportionate value back, plus there are more money picks, so it's not really more expensive overall (for someone with a decent winrate) than your typical Standard set.
There are plenty of answers to those things. A Thought-Knot Seer, even as early as turn 2 (which is quite rare), is a waste of mana against an opponent holding two cheap removal spells (I recall resolving a topdecked Seer the other night and conceding once I saw my opponent's hand was three ways to remove it). Crumble to Dust is a great answer to Tron, and Ghost Quarter slows it down a lot, as does having a lot of bolts or creatures to deal with its walkers. Ramp is tricky to interact with, but not impossible.
It's untrue to say that you can't interact with these decks, and it's certainly untrue to say that they never interact. I've played Tron for a while now, and while there are games where I just goldfish for the first few turns in an attempt to get Tron on and deal with issues then, there are games where I spend my mana dealing with threats and staying alive because of a slow hand or a fast opponent. A lot of games with Tron are won or lost based on judging how much time you have to respond to your opponent's game plan. There's no "t3 Tron, win on the spot." While it's certainly possible in some matchups to lock your opponent down with a t3 Karn or whatnot, it's silly to suggest games are just automatically won by having 7 mana.
If you honestly feel you're playing solitaire, I think you should step back and reevaluate your choices in those matchups. Because my experience playing with and against more combo-based decks is that the games are often quite interactive and involve a lot of tough choices (ignoring bad hands or players who just don't understand their opponent's gameplan).
It would be nice if they would treat Modern that way, so we had a format that was open and hands-off that didn't include the reserved list.
As for Frontier, players who have a bunch of leftover Standard staples aren't being scammed. Or anyone who bought in before it got popular. There is demand for a place to use newer, high-print run cards that doesn't have such a huge pool of rarely-reprinted things. So I think it's fine for now; I see the economic issues being the same down the line as for Modern, of course.
Structurally, it does irk me that they add M15 & Origins, as these sets are full of reprints and risk bringing with them the same problems 8th & 9th Ed does for Modern... random cards from old sets where things didn't work the way they do now tends to throw a wrench in the works.
There are more than two sides. "The Modern format can police itself just fine, and bans for decks that aren't particularly dominant set a dangerous precedent" is a side. It may be underrepresented on this forum, but that doesn't mean it's not a valid perspective.
I don't take it as an insult, but out of touch with whom? There's a tendency around here to pretend this forum represents a consensus about what is right for Modern, but as soon as I log off, most of the attitudes around here go away. There are plenty of players who don't waste time complaining about whether or not some decks can or cannot be interacted with reasonably, but just change their gameplan and try to increase their win percentage. There are plenty of players who don't hold "interaction" up as the end-all, be-all of every single game of Magic. There are plenty of players who understand that to call Tron "uninteractive" is reductive and silly, as there are a billion different builds of Tron and they run the gamut from very goldfishy to very controlly. There are plenty of players who see this:
as definitively not Modern. A lot of these players have invested time and money but would be unwilling to do so if the new normal was "be ready to put a bunch of money down, because in order to compete you want the same sets of Lilis and Snapcasters and Goyfs that everybody else does, because WotC and a small faction of midrange players have decided that other options are not in the best interests of game balance." That's not an environment that encourages new blood and continuing competition. That's a perfectly balanced, but bland and stale game. And I want no part of it.
Not to disrespect or knock anyone's right to express their vision for the format, but the idea that it's a consensus or doesn't come with its inherent problems is just not true. To me, comparing Ancient Stirrings to Serum Visions shows a great deal of bias towards three-color midrange decks. Because to say "Ancient Stirrings digs deeper than Serum Visions" is to ignore the very real deckbuilding cost of even using Ancient Stirrings in the first place. It only gets colorless cards, which greatly limits the options of every deck that uses it. Serum Visions can go in any deck that has enough blue sources. Sure, Ancient Stirrings looks at more cards within a particular game of Magic, but the sheer number of cards Serum Visions can draw is much higher. There should be a place in Magic for skimping on card quality in exchange for exploiting powerful synergies. Otherwise everything is just good-stuff decks and there aren't any decks that have a strange and new line of attack that requires people to put more thought into both construction and play.
Now I'm not blind: I see that cards like Urza's Tower and Simian Spirit Guide would never be printed today, because they are relics of an age where Wizards was a lot more fast and lose with game balance (frankly, the reason I play Tron is that I'm nostalgic for the 90s and am not about to go back and rebuy all my Legacy pieces at 5x what I sold them for). I'd be fine if there were a new format that started late enough (Say, Lorywn/2010 Core Set) to kick out Time Spiral, Mirrodin, 8th/9th Ed, and Ravnica, because those sets, while fun, are full of the sort of problems that just don't come up anymore. That's a radically new format, but so was Modern when it started, right? It's cleaner and less disruptive than just putting a bunch of bandages on everything with a more aggressive banlist. I don't want to play in the Banned Age.
Now you're probably right, and Wizards probably doesn't want the Modern that I enjoy playing, but that doesn't mean that I'm clueless or that I'm all alone. Leaving Modern alone would not be the end of the world, especially since there's no Modern Pro Tour so there really are no stakes, and all the quirky fringe decks that people are saying are due for a ban are also the kind of thing that draws a lot of people to Modern. For me personally, if Wizards continues banning and nerfing decks I want to play, that basically does just leave Grixis and Jund. I'm not buying into Grixis and Jund. Not on a freelance artist's salary. So a Mox Opal ban would probably be the end of me attempting to play Constructed for a long time to come. If Wizards really does have it out for Lantern Control, Wizards has it out for the format I thought I was playing.
Are you sure? Because the consensus around here seems to be that the first two decks you cite are broken and should not exist in Modern. I've heard numerous people say things like "This was a good ban! Hopefully next time we get Mox Opal and Tron lands." Because of the lack of objective reasons from Wizards, the next round of banmania is going to make me extremely nervous. I've heard Mox Opal, Tron Lands, Simian Spirit Guide, Valakut, all of which make sense on some level if you stretch "too much for free" and then I hear nonsense like Ancient Stirrings and Arcbound Ravager. I think the reasoning is silly, but then I think the reasoning for banning GGT is silly. So with the lack of information and the long list of things that various people want banned, it's not surprising people don't want to get caught holding onto decks in this environment. A surprise ban with sketchy reasoning -- even if the actual affects on the metagame are relatively innocuous -- should worry people. Especially combined with the banning of three cards in Standard (which they rightfully tend to avoid banning things from) Maybe ktknshnx is right and they have good reasons that they suck at articulating, but all I see is an announcement that things don't necessarily need to be putting up insane results to get a ban.
So what's "safe?" I have three decks built, I should be good, right? But two of those three decks are Affinity and Tron, decks that some Modern players don't want to exist in any form. And another is Burn. If Tron goes away, I don't feel very comfortable playing Burn and hoping to draw really well in Jund matchup after Jund matchup.
I know a lot of people pick on Standard as being battlecruiser or superfriends or uninteractive or whatever, and I can certainly see that, but the times I've played Standard I found it fun and engaging. The main issue is I don't have the time and money to do a lot of trading and buying all the time, so I play Modern, where I can buy a few cards at a time and build up a collection of cards that aren't rotating. More bans harms my ability to do that and takes away the main appeal of Modern. I'm not really salty about eating $20 on a set of Gitaxian Probes, but I think it's rational to be nervous going forward when I come to this forum and there's a lot of talk about "ban all the things!" and Wizards' actions suggest that they tend to agree.
I'm torn between running G/W for Path and Blessed Alliance or going back to G/R for the boardwipes. My meta has a lot of Burn, and Blessed Alliance is really good there, but a t2 Pyroclasm was also handy. The rest is mainly Grixis, a couple Affinity players, a blue Tron, and the occasional homebrew/budget deck.
Has anyone tried the B/G build? Where does it shine? Where does it falter?
On a positive note, I feel they do an amazing job with Limited -- Booster Draft is by far my favorite format -- but I agree that they seem to be a little hasty lately, changing too many things at once and not waiting to see how they pan out.
-- EDIT --
I'm not hitting the eject button; I'm lucky enough to have not gotten on the plane. I'm not about to lay down hundreds of dollars for a deck that just got worse. All I had was a single Bauble and some Probes (which I thought were a safe buy precisely because they're used in so many decks, lol) I was out of the game for years and years and have only recently started building back a collection; it's very frustrating to try to buy the pieces for a format bit by bit and then have a deck nerfed before you've actually put it together.
If I had already committed to buying and learning the deck, then sure, make adjustments, it's probably still bad, but whatever. But now, why bother? There are plenty of other cute decks to play; I want one that also has a chance of being successful.
In any case, I'm not brewing with Death's Shadow because that problem's already been solved. That's an example, a stand-in for future interesting cards that I would like to brew with but probably won't, because if my brew's actually good, vaguely reasoned, hasty bans will jettison all my effort and leave me with a pile o random cards nobody wants.
(not that I think the Standard bans were necessary; I'm just skeptical about how much we can expect from in-house testing)