What deck is hated the most is a metric you don't have and there are thousands if not millions of players that haven't enjoy the misery of EOT Exarch into Twin, since they started playing after it got banned.
I want you to reread this sentence, because it's hilariously hypocritical.
Besides that wasn't even my point. Twin is problematic according to Wizards because they banned it. The optics that come if they unban a problematic deck to fix another problematic deck (that might not be even a problem) and also allow Twin to cover up the lack of answers in the format (which it did before) is even worse. Then comes what the community thinks and the "hatemail" Wizards will endure, because clearly the Twin topic is still controversial, 3 years after it's banning.
A card or deck is not problematic just because it was banned. It means WotC thought it was problematic. They've been wrong. They were wrong about Wild Nacatl, Bitterblossom, Bloodbraid Elf, Sword of the Meek, Ancestral Vision, Valakut, and JTMS. I think they're wrong about SFM, and possibly GSZ and Pod. And I think they were wrong about Twin.
You posit that Twin would slow down the format and then suggest that it wouldn't play cards to fight in that slowed down format? Twin will absolutely play Azcanta and/or Ancestral. Azcanta might be good even in the main because it helps all 3 plans of the deck. They, along with Jace are perfect cards to fight through their worst matchups (and by worst we're talking about 45-55). Jace is "ok" in Modern in the sense that it didn't break it. It's one of the best decks in the control decks that play it and it'll be one of the best in Twin for the grindy matchups.
Why would Twin play Ancestral? Even UW Control and Jeskai don't play the card, and if they don't then Twin definitely wouldn't. Azcanta is a slow control card. Twin's maindeck was a tempo/combo shell. You only had so many sideboard slots for control cards against the fair matchups, so what is Azcanta replacing? Are you playing it instead of Jace? How about instead of Keranos? Are you cutting Dispels or removal that kills 5 toughness creatures? The Twin main deck was focused on being able to assemble the combo asap. Azcanta would have been too slow for the main deck even back in 2015, it's way too slow today, and I just don't see what I would want to cut for Azcanta. And Jace is only really played in UW Control because it enables Terminus. You might have noticed how Jeskai doesn't play him at all.
Twin is not safe now for the same reasons it wasn't then; for fear of being the best deck in the format and hiding the inherent problems of the format behind a mask of "interactiveness" and the idea that it will force other decks to interact with it.
The second and third best decks of 2015 hardly see any play at all these days, so what Twin was in 2015 tells you nothing about what it would be in 2019. The fact of the matter is that there were a few powerful things to do in Modern in 2015, so the best 5 or 6 decks took up much more of the meta than the top 5 or 6 today. Modern is overall much more powerful than it was in 2015, and the power is spread out over far more archetypes. There is no chance that Twin comes back and dominates this Modern format. It didn't even dominate in 2018, it was just very good. In fact, I think most people in here will agree with me that Twin wasn't even the best deck in later 2015, it was Amulet Bloom.
And Twin would not "hide the problems with the format." It would help to fix them. That's like saying medicine only hides your problems when you start to get better. Part of the problem with Modern is the lack of police decks punishing linear aggro/combo decks that don't want to interact, thus why Modern has kept tending towards drag racing. Humans and GDS are both decks that help in this regard, but they're obviously not enough. Maybe Twin could be a third police deck and open up some more room for slower interactive decks in the meta.
I like the irony though. People were saying that the 3 UW control Top 8 in June was a fluke and a regional oddity, same as the 3 Twin Top 8, but KCI has 4 -one from the man that won 2 GPs with it- and the unban Twin pitchforks are out. The playing definitely wasn't suited to beat KCI or artifact decks in general, why isn't this top 8 considered a fluke.
The Twin triple top 8 happened in a warped meta, but it wasn't warped by Twin, it was warped by Amulet Bloom. That's like banning Living End because it had a triple GP top 8 weekend during Eldrazi Winter. The UW Control triple top 8 was proven to be a regional oddity. It's been successful the rest of the year, but not to that extent. Meanwhile, KCI was the most successful deck of 2018, despite seeing pretty low amounts of play overall because of how tedious it is. 4 in the top 8 could be a bit of variance, or we could be seeing the beginnings of another problem.
I doubt terminus encourages interaction in the format as a whole. Creature based midrange such as GWx simply lose to Terminus. The best creature decks now are able to threaten the kill fast enough to force the 'Terminus now or lose' situations. Slower interactive GWx decks such as Value Town, Bant Midrange, Big Zoo can't do that.
"In response to your Miracle trigger, Chord for 2?" And I don't know what you want me to tell you, but slow durdly midrange decks aren't supposed to beat blue control, because it's even slower and more durdley than you, lol.
Twin was far more of the meta in those days, than any deck today gets up to. Would not be surprised if it was upwards of 15-20%?
Twin was 10-11% for most of 2015, and peaked at 12% at the end of the year before it was banned, but that was largely because it was the only top tier deck that could beat Amulet Bloom. And I should specify that the 12% figure was all variations of Twin combined. UR Twin was the most successful version by far, and it was never more than like 6.5% of the meta. Meanwhile, Abzan and Jund Midrange combined for around 14% of the meta, but no action was taken against GBx Midrange. It's almost as if WotC's diversity justification in the ban announcement was a cover for another reason
And yes, Humans and GDS both reached similar metashares in the past two years.
Safety valves exist. I don't know if they are enough, but they do exist.
Humans is a nice safety valve. It's just that this deck is able to play 3-4 Engineered Explosives as part of it's combo and gets to ruin the deck. This is on the KCI deck. You don't really get to be super strong, while being able to play so powerful cards as part of your combo.
I play exclusively GDS, and it's another safety valve. I have a great win percentage against KCI. So big, that I don't want it banned to be honest. But if we all want a better Modern, that's what we should ask ourselves.
The safety valves exist, but not in enough numbers to keep these decks in check. Humans was only 3% of the GP meta, and GDS 5%. Compare that to earlier in the year when Modern was awesome, when Humans was close to 12% and GDS was like 3%, combining for 15%.
Yes Twin IS problematic. Banned rightfully or not, the past 3 years have shown that the mere mention of a 4 mana red enchantment is beyond toxic. However you cut it, Twin was/is a problem for a significant portion of the playerbase and for Wizards themselves.
People's subjective feelings aren't a good reason for banning a deck or keeping it banned. There are always going to be people who hate any deck. Besides, Twin was considerably less hated than a lot of decks that are still legal to play right now.
Also, no meaningful upgrades? Then what is Jace? What is Azcanta? What is Ancestral? What is Opt? Hell, what is Teferi, if not meaningful upgrades to fight UWx control/midrange and bury BGx, the two historically bad matchups of 45-55?
Twin would not play Azcanta or Ancestral. Azcanta doesn't find your combo creatures, and Ancestral has been proven to be too slow for Modern. And it doesn't really matter if Teferi would go into Jeskai Twin, because that was a bad deck, so I don't really care what they do. Opt is really a sidegrade for the deck. It's a worse cantrip than Serum Visions in terms of digging, which is very important for Twin, but Opt's instant speed just plays better with the instant speed nature of the deck. Finally, yeah I'm sure we'd replace Jace, AoT with Mind Sculptors for the fair matchups, but if this last year has proven anything, it's that Jace is just ok in Modern. So yeah, Twin has not been upgraded at the same rate as the format as a whole.
It's not Wild Nacatl, it's more Grave Troll after Eldritch Moon and Kaladesh. Saying that Twin is a safe unban and there is no chance of supplanting KCI as the best deck in the format is asinine and a very strong assumption.
Twin is a safe unban because it probably would have been safe to just not have banned it when they did in the first place. Yeah, Twin was the best deck of 2015, a bit better than Affinity and Jund were. It was 12% of the meta in December. Well, GDS was over 12% at one point in 2017, and Humans was 12% for a large portion of 2018, and both were considered the de facto "best deck" in those years, and yet they were both left alone. And thankfully so, because the meta shifted and they both settled into a comfortable position as just another good deck in the format. If you think Twin would still dominate the format today, look at what I said were the second and third best decks of 2015. Traditional Affinity practically doesn't exist anymore, and Jund has been on life support for years, despite WotC desperately pumping the shell with cards to keep it alive. You're absolutely out of your mind if you think Twin would be as good in 2019 as it was in 2015.
And finally, Twin itself was not inherently problematic. Twin being at 12% of the meta was borderline problematic, but any deck being that ubiquitous is a bit of a problem. WotC had never taken action on a deck as low as 12% before the Twin ban, though, and they haven't taken action on other decks that have reached the same metashare level that Twin did in the last couple years. And that's largely because of the backlash from the Twin ban. The outcry from that, along with the people who weren't happy about the Pod ban, made WotC realize that whack-a-mole bannings every year to keep the format power down weren't what the players wanted.
I honestly hope they don't start with anything banned in Standard+. They already made this mistake in Modern, and here we are 7 years later with some likely innocuous cards from the initial banned list still imprisoned. I would rather they just let the format play itself out, and make changes as they're needed.
The GDS vs. Burn matchup mostly depends on how good the Burn player is. If the Burn player is bad to mediocre, it's probably a positive matchup for GDS, but against a good Burn player who knows how to play the matchup, it's probably a bad matchup. The real key is to hold your burn spells and not burn them below 13, and try to set up a turn where you hit them with a flurry of burn on their end step, and then untap and kill them. Bad Burn players will just cast their spells on curve like they're used to doing against everyone else, and that's bad against an opponent playing Death's Shadow and Temur Battle Rage.
I think GDS far better than people think, but it is harder to play than Spirits and Humans and Tron, so..it is what it is.
Hows the GDS vs Tron btw?
Yeah, agreed with everyone else that it's a positive matchup. You do need to keep a hand that lets you put out an early threat, because you'll be racing, but you have the tools to play an effective tempo game against them. You can strip their payoffs from their hand with Thoughtseize, and Denial their O Stones or planeswalkers. Ceremonious Rejection is amazing in that matchup.
The Mythic Championships are just a rebranding of the Pro Tour, aren't they? That was the sense I got from the announcement, it didn't sound like they were actually changing much besides the name.
WotC historically has unbanned something at regular 1 to 1.5 year intervals. The last unbanning was February this year, so anyone expecting another unban before February 2019 was having some wishful thinking. The February announcement is the earliest we might see something come off. If we get nothing by August and the format has remained healthy, that's when I'll start getting upset about the lack of an unbanning
My best friend plays Dredge, so I've played his deck quite a bit, and it's not even close between that deck and GDS. The mulligan decision is usually the most important decision you make on Dredge, because once the game starts you basically follow the same formula: get a dredger into the graveyard, dredge until you hit a loam, getting your free ***** in the process, start loaming your lands to build up for a big Conflagrate. The only really skill intensive thing you can do with Dredge is knowing when to decline your Bloodghast triggers to play around sweepers like Anger. Otherwise the deck basically plays itself.
As for GDS, sure, you could pick it up and play, but you won't play it well. You'll lose a lot, and you'll think to yourself, "Why do people think this deck is good? I can't win an f'n game!" For instance, in the example you gave I'm absolutely deploying the threat. First, you have to kill your opponent before he ramps into the really scary stuff. I'm also not really worried about the 4 drops from green devotion or ponza, I'm more worried about the bigger stuff they want to ramp into. Even if I counter like a Garruk, he's still going to have 4+ mana the next turn and possibly have another scary thing. Basically, the game isn't getting better for you if it keeps going long, so you need to end the game quickly.
And yeah, Shadow does have some free wins where you land two Shadows on turn 2 and kill your opponent on 3, but those draws are pretty rare. I played the deck for a year and a half, and I think I only got a turn 3 kill like once or twice. The typical good draw is a turn ~4.5 kill if you're not interacted with.
GDS is definitely a high skill floor and high skill ceiling deck. I remember a certain streamer raging about how broken it was, and how it needed to be banned back in 2017, and he loaded up an MTGO league with it to show everyone, and he immediately went 0-3 drop. GDS is the type of deck where you're going to lose a lot when you first start to play it. Your decisions on the order you fetch your shocks matter. Sometimes you have to decide whether to deploy a threat or hold up interaction. You have to determine how low you can safely burn yourself. If you don't have a Shadow in hand, do you fetch shock even when you don't need the mana? There are a lot of little decisions like this where you lose yourself a lot of percentage points if you get them all wrong, but as you start to learn the right decisions and play patterns, the deck becomes very powerful.
The actual problem with Cheeri0s' is that it has too much air (20 equipment) compared to Grishoalbrand (4 Shoals and 2 Borb). That's a huge disadvantage that not even SV can overcome, and one that's frequently overlooked. Bubble Hulk is another deck that suffers from the same problem.
The biggest difference I've seen between the two decks is that Grishoalbrand is way more resilient to hate. Cheeri0s folds to interaction. Creature removal, discard, even counter spells can be good against them. Removal isn't good against Grishoalbrand, and they can still kill you if you bring in graveyard hate.
Good, good. I hope Grishoalbrand becomes a true tier 2 deck in the distant future (dedicated Grixis Shadow player, since before day 1 here)!
Bring it on
Another Faithless loot deck. Through the breaching a worldspine wurm is brutal...
Well, I'm not complaining. It takes some setup to get the combo going anyway.
And the deck has a real fail rate. It's decently consistent, but you do brick sometimes. Hoogland just played a game on stream with it where he had 3 Shoals and the Manamorphose he needed in the bottom 9 cards of his deck.
Well, I've decided to pull the trigger and trade out of Cheeri0s and into Grishoalbrand as my "linear people out" deck. Can't resist $15 Goryo's and Breaches. Sorry @ktkenshinx, I've failed you :'(
EDIT: Thats really interesting, because even in standard, you could look at UR Drakes/Arclight, with an Electromancer in play, and its just a ton of card selection at that point.
The Standard UR Phoenix deck is definitely a xerox deck. I pretty often get like 30 or 40 cards deep into my deck. They usually have 1 or 2 things they want to do, and a TON of velocity to increase their consistency so they can do one of those things.
The people asking Forsythe to unban Ferocidon in Standard amuse me. Mono-red players know that card isn't ok in Standard. The red deck is really really strong, and it's only being held back because you can't beat Golgari. Ferocidon swings that matchup by nullifying Wildgrowth Walker, which would basically mean mono-red would have no bad matchups. Let's try to keep discussion on Modern in this thread, please! --CWP
A card or deck is not problematic just because it was banned. It means WotC thought it was problematic. They've been wrong. They were wrong about Wild Nacatl, Bitterblossom, Bloodbraid Elf, Sword of the Meek, Ancestral Vision, Valakut, and JTMS. I think they're wrong about SFM, and possibly GSZ and Pod. And I think they were wrong about Twin.
Why would Twin play Ancestral? Even UW Control and Jeskai don't play the card, and if they don't then Twin definitely wouldn't. Azcanta is a slow control card. Twin's maindeck was a tempo/combo shell. You only had so many sideboard slots for control cards against the fair matchups, so what is Azcanta replacing? Are you playing it instead of Jace? How about instead of Keranos? Are you cutting Dispels or removal that kills 5 toughness creatures? The Twin main deck was focused on being able to assemble the combo asap. Azcanta would have been too slow for the main deck even back in 2015, it's way too slow today, and I just don't see what I would want to cut for Azcanta. And Jace is only really played in UW Control because it enables Terminus. You might have noticed how Jeskai doesn't play him at all.
The second and third best decks of 2015 hardly see any play at all these days, so what Twin was in 2015 tells you nothing about what it would be in 2019. The fact of the matter is that there were a few powerful things to do in Modern in 2015, so the best 5 or 6 decks took up much more of the meta than the top 5 or 6 today. Modern is overall much more powerful than it was in 2015, and the power is spread out over far more archetypes. There is no chance that Twin comes back and dominates this Modern format. It didn't even dominate in 2018, it was just very good. In fact, I think most people in here will agree with me that Twin wasn't even the best deck in later 2015, it was Amulet Bloom.
And Twin would not "hide the problems with the format." It would help to fix them. That's like saying medicine only hides your problems when you start to get better. Part of the problem with Modern is the lack of police decks punishing linear aggro/combo decks that don't want to interact, thus why Modern has kept tending towards drag racing. Humans and GDS are both decks that help in this regard, but they're obviously not enough. Maybe Twin could be a third police deck and open up some more room for slower interactive decks in the meta.
The Twin triple top 8 happened in a warped meta, but it wasn't warped by Twin, it was warped by Amulet Bloom. That's like banning Living End because it had a triple GP top 8 weekend during Eldrazi Winter. The UW Control triple top 8 was proven to be a regional oddity. It's been successful the rest of the year, but not to that extent. Meanwhile, KCI was the most successful deck of 2018, despite seeing pretty low amounts of play overall because of how tedious it is. 4 in the top 8 could be a bit of variance, or we could be seeing the beginnings of another problem.
Is GDS actually good against Phoenix? I haven't played the matchup yet.
"In response to your Miracle trigger, Chord for 2?" And I don't know what you want me to tell you, but slow durdly midrange decks aren't supposed to beat blue control, because it's even slower and more durdley than you, lol.
Twin was 10-11% for most of 2015, and peaked at 12% at the end of the year before it was banned, but that was largely because it was the only top tier deck that could beat Amulet Bloom. And I should specify that the 12% figure was all variations of Twin combined. UR Twin was the most successful version by far, and it was never more than like 6.5% of the meta. Meanwhile, Abzan and Jund Midrange combined for around 14% of the meta, but no action was taken against GBx Midrange. It's almost as if WotC's diversity justification in the ban announcement was a cover for another reason
And yes, Humans and GDS both reached similar metashares in the past two years.
Twin would not play Azcanta or Ancestral. Azcanta doesn't find your combo creatures, and Ancestral has been proven to be too slow for Modern. And it doesn't really matter if Teferi would go into Jeskai Twin, because that was a bad deck, so I don't really care what they do. Opt is really a sidegrade for the deck. It's a worse cantrip than Serum Visions in terms of digging, which is very important for Twin, but Opt's instant speed just plays better with the instant speed nature of the deck. Finally, yeah I'm sure we'd replace Jace, AoT with Mind Sculptors for the fair matchups, but if this last year has proven anything, it's that Jace is just ok in Modern. So yeah, Twin has not been upgraded at the same rate as the format as a whole.
Twin is a safe unban because it probably would have been safe to just not have banned it when they did in the first place. Yeah, Twin was the best deck of 2015, a bit better than Affinity and Jund were. It was 12% of the meta in December. Well, GDS was over 12% at one point in 2017, and Humans was 12% for a large portion of 2018, and both were considered the de facto "best deck" in those years, and yet they were both left alone. And thankfully so, because the meta shifted and they both settled into a comfortable position as just another good deck in the format. If you think Twin would still dominate the format today, look at what I said were the second and third best decks of 2015. Traditional Affinity practically doesn't exist anymore, and Jund has been on life support for years, despite WotC desperately pumping the shell with cards to keep it alive. You're absolutely out of your mind if you think Twin would be as good in 2019 as it was in 2015.
And finally, Twin itself was not inherently problematic. Twin being at 12% of the meta was borderline problematic, but any deck being that ubiquitous is a bit of a problem. WotC had never taken action on a deck as low as 12% before the Twin ban, though, and they haven't taken action on other decks that have reached the same metashare level that Twin did in the last couple years. And that's largely because of the backlash from the Twin ban. The outcry from that, along with the people who weren't happy about the Pod ban, made WotC realize that whack-a-mole bannings every year to keep the format power down weren't what the players wanted.
As for GDS, sure, you could pick it up and play, but you won't play it well. You'll lose a lot, and you'll think to yourself, "Why do people think this deck is good? I can't win an f'n game!" For instance, in the example you gave I'm absolutely deploying the threat. First, you have to kill your opponent before he ramps into the really scary stuff. I'm also not really worried about the 4 drops from green devotion or ponza, I'm more worried about the bigger stuff they want to ramp into. Even if I counter like a Garruk, he's still going to have 4+ mana the next turn and possibly have another scary thing. Basically, the game isn't getting better for you if it keeps going long, so you need to end the game quickly.
And yeah, Shadow does have some free wins where you land two Shadows on turn 2 and kill your opponent on 3, but those draws are pretty rare. I played the deck for a year and a half, and I think I only got a turn 3 kill like once or twice. The typical good draw is a turn ~4.5 kill if you're not interacted with.
Let's try to keep discussion on Modern in this thread, please! --CWP