yea i mean RIP is certainly not bad against them... but it hurts your win condition just as much to the point where you're back to a traditional control shell without bolt snap bolt even... dredge will have at least 6-10 draw steps and they are about 33-50% to draw it naturally after seeing that many cards....
tormod's is good because you don't have to play it right away and there's no investment... you just have to be careful on when to blow it and play it and in some cases get lucky....
between RIP or tormod or relic... whatever it is i think you probably need at least 3 probably 4... and having 4 tormod's is probably better than 4 of the other two since there is more value in drawing multiple...
so much of the maindeck is blanked and it's really a hellish matchup.... so much in fact that if you want to make it an even matchup you really need 4 dedicated hate cards... the best one is tormod's crypt... relic costs mana and the tap ability is next to useless...
RIP is not that great... on top of having to side out nahiri some lists board in abrupt decay which the games are going to go long they probably will draw into it...
eidolon of rhetoric slows down a whole bunch of decks... esp when you're on the play... kiki chord decks don't really try to out tempo so it makes your opponent play at your pace.... shuts down living end, ad naus.... and seriously hurts burn, zoo, infect, suicide....
If we are talking about an unban of sfm then the current meta is definitely relevant.... i could mention unbanning twin but i feel like thats been argued to death already..
Because of the meta i dont think removing cards from the pool is the right way to go... nothing has quite high a share to justify that yet...
That leaves adding to the card pool.. and barring some targeted printing... its probably not coming from a standard set...
And if you look at the banlist .. the best two candidates are sfm and twin...
Thats if you subscribe to the theory that aggro being way overrepresented isnt a good thing.. and some might not think that now but i doubt in 6 months ppl will feel the same if not much changes...
i think the argument hoogland makes is that the body on finks isn't relevant enough to play it on it's own... if burn ever taps out you're going to want baloth instead of finks since if they ever untap with skullcrack or atarka's command you're going to want baloth instead.... baloth does more to deter attacking also... dropping one finks on the board by itself is not going to autowin against burn in other words...
i do see arguments for the 3 drop slot since there is a huge void there... and i think having one copy is fine for the jund matchup since it's probably your second best card there behind voice....
i do think scg balt is a precursor of things to come... having a top 16 dominated by linear decks shows how hard it's going to be for interactive decks to keep up....
we'll know more once the gp's run but i don't think much is going to change...
what i was saying was that there is an increase in linearity and that's because there's a decrease in overall interaction... the twin ban was telling in that you have less reason to interact now...
you could unban twin... but you don't necessarily have to do that... it's just one way... you either need to give interactive shells a boost or promote more interaction... but in any case, you need to inject different kinds of cards into the modern card pool...
i'm not disregarding Modo, i'm just stating that there are some technical faults that reduce it's reliability (a T1 deck is boarderline viable and infinitely frustrating due to bugs), while it's no secret that various trends take Modo by storm from time to time, there was a time in 2015 when everyone was going nuts with Grixis control, by djphan25's logic we should start considering unbaning cloudpost to police it...
also this whole discussion started fundamentally flawed because it was 'sneakily' assumed that a)Suicide Zoo is too good, b)Twin was supressing suicide zoo which are both extremely dubious claims
and even if suicide zoo proves to be a solid deck why is that a problem? aggro is part of the game, linear is part of the game
and even if indeed aggro is TOO high it is absurd to assume that Twin is the solution, i mean some say unban Twin, i say unban Pod, way better aggro police, if we start by taking flawed assumptions as basis we can claim whatever we want, doesn't mean there's any merit to those claims
currently no deck is causing problems in Modern, currently every single Top8 of every GP and every SCG Open had at least one Blue control/scapeshift deck in it, which means that Blue is definately viable, now if some folks get goosebumps from the excitement everyime they win a counterwar that's their problem and it has more to do with enforcing others to play Blue rather than not having the ability to play blue themselves
and again if Suicide Zoo is busted, common sense dictates that we ban something from this deck (Immense or Mutagenic probably) and not unban whatever we want to 'police' it, when Jund was busted we banned DRS we didn't unban cloudpost, when Eldrazi was busted we banned Eye of ugin, we didn't unban Brithing Pod, when TC Delver was busted we banned TC we didn't unban DRS...
i don't know how many times i have to tell you to quit saying things that i haven't said...
i have never said that suicide zoo is too good... i went out of my way to say that it was fine more than a few times... and i never said that twin itself was suppressing suicide zoo..
the fact that you are continuing to do this just tells me that you are just not reading... and that tells me that you are just not concerned with having an actual discussion....
again i never said it was busted... i actually said in itself.. it's fine....
but the fact that aggro is probably close to or over 50% of the meta... that's not fine... in aggregate you probably had to deal with the big 3 aggro decks with infect probably more tier 1.5.. it's probably closer to 4-5 now...
in any case... the deck is identical to what it was in 2015... 17 lands, the spells and the creatures only differ on if you play a single goyf or not which is the same as it was last year... it's virtually unchanged....
I mean if twin was supposedly able to keep suicide zoo at 1% despite it being secretly busted, why didn't twin do the same to affinity? The only deck twin Did any real policing of was Tron, and even there, it mostly just meant a 4-of rending volley in the side.
Also, bill, while I believe you're facts are straight (even if I think wotc pulled the trigger on twin a bit too soon), you're getting a bit flamey and it doesn't help anything.
again it's not solely because of twin.. it's a huge contributing factor... it's kind of silly to think that you could remove close to 20%(bloom + twin) of the meta and not have repurcussions....
like i said with my reasoning on metashifts.... suicide zoo's bad matchups are affinity, burn.. and when it was legal, twin.... that was a sizable chunk of the meta in 2015.. not so much this year... also one of it's most favorable matchups is infect... so no.. it's not solely because of twin but it's a huge contributing factor....
and a pretty poor example, what does Twin even have to do with balance? if anything balance is about having as much decks as possible equal (and since this is a competitive game starting from the top), Twin was above the other T1 decks disrupting balance, Modern is more balanced right now because a number of T1 decks are competing for the title of the best deck in Modern and we don't even know what that deck is, if there will be one
2015 was probably modern's most balanced year and it even had a problematic deck in bloom.... this year we had eldrazi and i bet that aggro will become a problem in short order....
the most popular deck is jund... whether it's the best deck remains to be seen but it's only a few percentage points away from twin's metagame #s..
as for suicide zoo i just don't get what's your problem with this deck and why you're bringing it up all the time, the deck is alot more complicated than you seem to believe (aggro is one thing simple is another you can search Sam Black's articles fore more on this), while even if it was that easy it has nothing to do with it's 'discovery', which is a matter of deck building and inovation, sometimes even easy to pilot decks take a lot of effort to fine tune, zooicide was simply put not there in 2015
i don't have a specific problem against suicide zoo... it's a fine deck in itself... i just used it as an example of a deck that basically hasn't changed and probably got helped immensely with the twin banning... and not so much that twin wasn't a great matchup for it....
it's absurd to imply that the deck was alway there and always T1 material and people simply didn't play (less than 1% of the meta) it because they were afraid of Twin , if this sort of reasoning had any merit Jund would be a homebrew by now, considering what a 'colossal jerk' Tron is to that deck
that said if the deck proves to be a problem, we ban immense and move on with our game, that's all really
i don't get why it's absurd... suicide zoo popped back up at the pro tour... and if it wasn't for the eldrazi probably would have made it's big splash then... it's been floating under the radar since and ppl have been picking it up in droves...
your suicide zoo arguement is too weak to make any link with the Twin ban (if that was the goal at least), Bloom was also legal for ages and it only got in the spotlight in mid 2014, also i kinda doubt that suicide zoo has a 'current form' even the creature package is up to debate as of now
are you really comparing bloom with suicide zoo? the learning curve is vastly different for one and bloom also had ban talks since it's first appearance... they have very different reasons on why its taken so long to gain steam....
now what you're searching for to drive down the linear decks is generic answers, cards no decks, that will in turn give tools to a whole number of fair decks against linear ones, it's generally accepted that Modern needs at least some better counterspells and potentially removal too, but it's off topic for this thread
i did not say that either... you can accomplish balance in a number of ways but twin was just one example... printing more generic answers has it's own set of problems and i never ever said that was a solution... you just need more of the type of decks that prey on linear decks to be successful.... that might mean banning a tron piece(not advocating that btw) or unbanning twin (i am advocating for this) or printing a decent card that can slot into multiple tempo/control builds...
tormod's is good because you don't have to play it right away and there's no investment... you just have to be careful on when to blow it and play it and in some cases get lucky....
between RIP or tormod or relic... whatever it is i think you probably need at least 3 probably 4... and having 4 tormod's is probably better than 4 of the other two since there is more value in drawing multiple...
RIP is not that great... on top of having to side out nahiri some lists board in abrupt decay which the games are going to go long they probably will draw into it...
Because of the meta i dont think removing cards from the pool is the right way to go... nothing has quite high a share to justify that yet...
That leaves adding to the card pool.. and barring some targeted printing... its probably not coming from a standard set...
And if you look at the banlist .. the best two candidates are sfm and twin...
Thats if you subscribe to the theory that aggro being way overrepresented isnt a good thing.. and some might not think that now but i doubt in 6 months ppl will feel the same if not much changes...
I never thought the format would get to a point we'd get to a sfm unban but we are getting there..
i do see arguments for the 3 drop slot since there is a huge void there... and i think having one copy is fine for the jund matchup since it's probably your second best card there behind voice....
we'll know more once the gp's run but i don't think much is going to change...
you could unban twin... but you don't necessarily have to do that... it's just one way... you either need to give interactive shells a boost or promote more interaction... but in any case, you need to inject different kinds of cards into the modern card pool...
i don't know how many times i have to tell you to quit saying things that i haven't said...
i have never said that suicide zoo is too good... i went out of my way to say that it was fine more than a few times... and i never said that twin itself was suppressing suicide zoo..
the fact that you are continuing to do this just tells me that you are just not reading... and that tells me that you are just not concerned with having an actual discussion....
and again look at the wmcq lists.... those probably line up more closely to what's going on....
but the fact that aggro is probably close to or over 50% of the meta... that's not fine... in aggregate you probably had to deal with the big 3 aggro decks with infect probably more tier 1.5.. it's probably closer to 4-5 now...
in any case... the deck is identical to what it was in 2015... 17 lands, the spells and the creatures only differ on if you play a single goyf or not which is the same as it was last year... it's virtually unchanged....
here's karsten's deck tech in 2015...
http://www.channelfireball.com/articles/brew-of-the-week-modern-suicide-zoo/
then compare that to any random list you see nowadays...
again it's not solely because of twin.. it's a huge contributing factor... it's kind of silly to think that you could remove close to 20%(bloom + twin) of the meta and not have repurcussions....
2015 was probably modern's most balanced year and it even had a problematic deck in bloom.... this year we had eldrazi and i bet that aggro will become a problem in short order....
the most popular deck is jund... whether it's the best deck remains to be seen but it's only a few percentage points away from twin's metagame #s..
i don't have a specific problem against suicide zoo... it's a fine deck in itself... i just used it as an example of a deck that basically hasn't changed and probably got helped immensely with the twin banning... and not so much that twin wasn't a great matchup for it....
i don't get why it's absurd... suicide zoo popped back up at the pro tour... and if it wasn't for the eldrazi probably would have made it's big splash then... it's been floating under the radar since and ppl have been picking it up in droves...
https://www.reddit.com/r/spikes/comments/4sue9t/modern_aggregated_wmcq_results/
those results line up closely to what's happening online... it's not an accident...
are you really comparing bloom with suicide zoo? the learning curve is vastly different for one and bloom also had ban talks since it's first appearance... they have very different reasons on why its taken so long to gain steam....
i did not say that either... you can accomplish balance in a number of ways but twin was just one example... printing more generic answers has it's own set of problems and i never ever said that was a solution... you just need more of the type of decks that prey on linear decks to be successful.... that might mean banning a tron piece(not advocating that btw) or unbanning twin (i am advocating for this) or printing a decent card that can slot into multiple tempo/control builds...