This would require a lot more transparency than WotC has had thus far, but it could be done.
Its a huge ban list, but part of doing it all at once was to counteract some of that "and what all are they going to ban next time?" fear.
This list is very much about going 150% into a safe format, and then hopefully being able to scale back with time.
This would need to come with a very clear statement of what their intentions are, and that this ban announcement should not be seen as the typical modern ban announcement. "Let's move on like these mistakes were never printed, and go back to using the banned list only when something gets out of hand. We think though, that without leaning on mistakes like these, any decks will be much less likely to create an unanswerable domination of the format."
There would be a very serious backlash, that I do not doubt for a second. But I think there would still be plenty of people playing. And if those players then started telling everyone how Modern was the best format ever, even those that really do not like the rationale used for the bans would give it a try, and possibly get hooked.
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- Eepop
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I'm sad there wasn't anything that was truly new, but I certainly feel my assertion coming into the tournament that there was plenty of incentive for someone to metagame the tournament with something spicy was accurate.
Bogles isn't new, but it wouldn't have been on many people's shortlists of what would show up. Reid recognized that the tournament was going to skew towards a certain set of decks, and he found something he thought would do well against them.
If so, its possible he's not running Bogle but something like Blouses. Bogles is the most likely, but not the only possible hexproof deck.
I doubt its anything but Bogle, but just saying there is the possibility.
I don't believe vial was ever banned in modern. It was banned in old extended, but not modern. Most of the community thought it would be a terror in Modern, but WotC chose not to ban it, and it was fine. This one is actually a case of WotC being RIGHT about gauging power level.
That said, you could have swapped in Valakut instead of Vial and you have a valid argument.
I think there were probably people inside WotC that wanted to ban even more from the get-go, but there were others that (rightfully so) foresaw that people would flip their lids even if they made the list 20 cards long. If they wanted to be safe from having to ban more cards later, they would have needed to ban a lot more cards up front, and have dealt with the fallout of people raving about the size of the banned list.
Apparently, instead they opted for slow bannings over time and stretching out the raving of the fanbase over a few years.
To the contrary, I think thats exactly why innovation is possible.
Modern is a tough nut to crack in general because you will be playing many rounds, and there are many angles to fight. And with so many rounds, you are likely to run into some random angles through the tournament.
But we're talking about 16 decks here. How many decks do you need to know before you can make a deck metagamed against them? Even if you don't know what someone is playing from firsthand knowledge, you can often make an educated guess based on the types of decks they usually play.
Eternal Command's performance in the previous tournament was a result of predicting that the event would be Jund heavy, and making a deck that could have a shot at out grinding Jund.
The prize of the tournament is significant, and the metagame is at least somewhat predictable. So there is room to innovate a targeted solution with that in mind.
Anyways, I am just optimistic that we might see something fresh. I don't however hold much hope that even if we get such a deck, that it would be much good outside the event.
4 Strangleroot Geist = $1
4 Skaura-Tribe Elder = $3.20
4 Kitchen Finks = $12
4 Eternal Witness = $5.60
4 Obstinate Baloth = $1.60
4 Thragtusk = $16
2 Gaea's Blessing = $1.50
3 Beast Within = $4.75
3 Dismember = $0.75
3 Harmonize = $3.75
3 Garruk Wildspeaker = $11.25
22 Forests
This is hardly meant to be a finished deck, but
1) its reasonably cheap in my opinion (Less than $65).
2) You aren't playing anything thats just filler cards. (okay, maybe Gaea's Blessing is going a little too deep, but it shields you from anyone doing any mill combo engines, and it cycles for 2 any way. Fine to cut it if you don't think that will be a problem.)
3) You have lots of cards that discourage people from turning their removal your way (Geist, Finks, Thragtusk, Eternal Witness to rebuy things that get removed).
4) All those things from #3 are also pretty solid at keeping pressure up after board wipes like wrath of god.
5) You have easy paths for advancement if you want to slowly spend more money. You can get good things by slowly adding a splash of white (Loxodon Smiter, Wilt-Leif Leige, Path to Exile) or black (Maelstrom Pulse, Abrupt Decay, plethora of doom-blade variants at your whim).
Yeah, you can just play some infinite combo, and by strict mechanics, it seems like that is clearly the most effective thing to do. Afterall, you can kill all your enemies simultaneously.
However, Multiplayer has a political aspect to it as well as just how game mechanics play out. Many multiplayer groups gang up on people that try to perform infinite combos, which can lead to those being less of the multiplayer metagame than one might think.
I think the size of the event kind of makes any data we'd be able to gather pretty slim.
I just hope for some neat decks and some good games.
Under $20?
Under $100?
Under $200?
The popular midrange decks are horrendously expensive in Modern, so there is a lot of room for wanting something cheaper while still spending a good bit of money.
Its hard to direct you without knowing what ceiling we're talking about.
That said, he is awful in a different way than Wild Nacatl.
Wild Nactal warps the format by making most of the aggro decks run naya colors. Once you are 3 colors, there isn't a whole lot of room to do much else, so the decks end up looking very similar. You maybe splash blue and or black, you maybe run a bigger top-end, etc, but you still have a huge portion of your decks identical.
Deathrite Shaman requires a deck to be black or green, and to run one shockland to access the off color if they aren't black and green. That means he slots into tons of decks. This is awful because we end up seeing that card everywhere, but he's not forcing what colors people run nearly as hard as Nacatl does.
I think we can all agree that in an ideal world, all those aggro decks, including Naya aggro are viable and win occasionally.
I hear you say "but that diversity isn't winning anything!"
And you are right. But we have to consider that Theros is really the first time we'll be getting cards that were made after they were sure what Modern was.
Right now they need to make cards that
a) make those various decks competitive
b) are acceptable in standard
If Wild Nacatl is unbanned, they also have
c) make those cards able to compete with the efficiency of Wild Nacatl
That makes it much harder to design the cards.
Its frustrating to have to wait so long, but I hold out hope that once we start getting targeted new cards we'll start seeing those languishing aggro archetypes jump up to a more competitive level.
I completely understand the idea that "If we could just have Nacatl we'd at least have one competitive aggro deck!". The thing is that doing so could very likely slam the door on the hope of having multiple viable aggro archetypes.
You all know I want more banned, so I am not going through more effort trying to convince people something should be unbanned. I just had a friend that was convinced that unbanning Sword would fix all the ills of control in Modern. So I tested it out to see if it lived up to his expectations, it did not.
It was not only not game-breaking, it was hardly playable in my opinion, scraping tier 2.
But hey, I must just make bad decks right?
If you would play such a deck for sure, perhaps you would like to show the class the decklist that you would be excited to play in Modern if ThopterSword were legal.
I don't think a playable non-affinity ThopterSword deck even is tier 2 with the modern banned list (minus sword obviously). I'm setting the bar low here, you don't have to break the game, just show me its playable.
That said, like everyone said above, these cards just aren't quite up to snuff in modern.
Do not misunderstand me to say that I think UWR +ThopterSword would be any good. I was just trying to be as transparent as possible on what was and was not tested. I think that squeezing in thoptersword would just make UWR worse, but its not as if swapping Thirst for Knowledge in over Think Twice, and then squeezing in a couple swords and foundries would be hard to do. I think the cost in velocity would far outweigh any gains you get by having the combo though.
We definitely tried a tezzerator style list and none of the 4-5 attempts produced anything that was even scraping tier 2 really.
We did not try anything with Time Foundry, the LSV version was more trying to be controlling with things like Thirst for Knowledge, engineered explosives, etc.
But I can not even fathom that a Time Foundry version would work any better. The overwhelming feeling was that the thopter/sword combo was too slow to set up, too disruptable (abrupt decay being basically unstoppable), and not doing nearly enough once assembled. Adding in Time Sieve just feels like it is only addressing the third problem there, while making the first two worse.
My playgroup is a little tapped out on willingness to test wacky things with me for awhile.
Feel free to make a decklist and run it through some games though. But everything I saw out of Sword of the Meek was very underwhelming.
In the decks that use it the way people are worried about there was nothing that was impressive at all really.
Full disclosure, my testing was when Jund was a slightly bigger metagame share. But the combined Abrupt Decay count of the environment hasn't gone down a whole lot (since Junk and Melira tend to have it in their 75).
We tried
---a classic Thopter List as close as we could approximate to LSVs pre-depths Extended version (loss of chrome mox and seat of synod broke the deck)
---A gifts list (the depths plan was just taking up space and not adding enough value)
---A Tezzeret hater type list that tried to run things like grafdiggers and pithing needle to buy time to set up (too slow)
---A durdle-extreme deck trying to leverage things like liliana and lingering souls and thopter/sword to try to out grind anything (Still had trouble out-grinding Jund, controlling a combo like Twin or Pod, and of course Tron could supersede what we were doing with Emrakul)
---An affinity list that slowed down a little bit, and ran one sword, a few thopter foundries and steelshapers gift (reasonable, but a lot of the time you're still steelshaping for plating, so the thopter/sword is just a semi-free-roll at 3-4 cards)
We did not test trying to jam it into a UWR Wafo style list, as that deck did not really exist at the time. That could stand to be tested if someone has a chance. I doubt it would be workable, but its possible.
Also remember, I am VERY skeptical about unbans in general. I am absolutely not the guy that says something should be unbanned "just to see how things work out".
To get exact dates, you would go to the WotC site, check out when the Modern PTQs will be. The thing is, they aren't scheduled yet. So thats why no one can give you solid dates.
Mastodon's estimate of "Feb-April" is as good as you are going to get.