MTG Salvation

This whole sky is falling notion is baffling to me, yup JTMS is bonkers, yup he's going to be expensive for the near future, he'll even warp the format in the next few weeks.

• Will the meta adapt? Of course.
• Can people jam 4 Jace and auto win? Likely impossible.
• Are lists bad with 2 or less points? Horrendously so.

This card just helps shore up our medium/good match ups, and is a bit of a liability in our weak ones unless we can drag the game out (like a control deck) and get to a comfortable place to slam the big boy. He's still trash against any go wide deck unless we can find a sweeper, gets wrecked by burn spells, and is as weak to the vast amounts of discard that dominates this format. Any control player upset by this unbanning I can only imagine is upset that they won't be able to pick up a few for a "reasonable" price for the next several weeks/months.

In the larger meta this may help spawn decks just on the power of Jace; Bant/Sultai/Esper Control, RUG tempo with BBE and Jace as top end, Miracles (rip brainstorm fish). We're in a wild west of sorts and its much more impactful than most new set releases have been for awhile.

I'm pumped, modern is sweet, time to brew and test!

Quote from Tar »

Actually, i'm not so excited. I was 50$ short from completing my uw list and start attending local fnms with it. God knows how much i have to spend now for an updated list. Thinking of selling everything back.

Dude(ette) its fnm, play what you have and go have a good time! You're not spending $800 to build a modern deck to go win $20 once a week, you're spending that to go have a blast of a time with your fellow nerds. play Jace, AoT and sling some spells. Just play what you have and work up to them overtime, who knows, they may re-ban it in a few months if it just starts dominating too hard.

Yeah I'm with TheAller here, we're not playing black so we need any amount of disruption we can get. Deaths Shadow and Jund decks are dominant because they combine disruption with a clock. Careds like Vendilion Clique, Spell Queller, Little Gideon, and Geist of Saint Traft are all huge in combo matchups since they either disrupt our opponent and provide a clock or just provide a huge clock that helps force an early engagement.

Tokens can't be named.

You are correct, good thing to know since I haven't picked any Runed Halos up yet.

Mates You should try him Smile He just makes a difference Smile

I have tried him, I'm not saying he isn't powerful, I'm just not convinced he's quintessential yet, nor what cuts I'd make to put 3-4 of them in. I'm still trying to find room for a second Jace AoT.

So here's where I settled on for finding room for Vendilion Clique, basically just -1 Condemn, -1 Negate, +2 Vendilion Clique. Not sure if it's right or not, I did like having access to 6 spot removal but I think with the Cliques disruption and clock that should make up for it.

Love the report! Also really cool list. I see you're not running any new gideon, any particular reason why? I've been going back and forth so many times as to whether or not I should give him a go. Seems like you did rather well without him. Was there any point that you felt he would've been a good add?
Thanks!

So I've got a few reasons I've stayed away from Gideon so far. Firstly I love As Foretold as a card, it's a card I see with an incredibly high power level that I can utilize and learn to play better with. Finding a way to merge As Foretold with Gideon is tricky, if you've read this thread for the past few pages you'll realize that pretty quick. It's pricey, Gideon is likely best played as a 4 of and for a card that I'm both not super keen on and don't have a n easy way to slot in my deck, I don't want to drop $80+ on a set (I know price shouldn't be a factor for this thread but it's just a personal reason of mine). On the topic of slotting in easily, Gideon likely plays best in a more creature heavy build than I'm running, whether that be UW midrange like Yuuya Watanabe's Worlds build or even with just a set of wall of omens. Either way it doesn't fit my personal play style which is more spell based control winning with Planeswalkers, Ambush-caster beats, or colonnades.

My local shop is weird, people don't always come week to week and when they do they also have decks to borrow or are trying something new, so my meta is pretty open. That said aggro isn't very common, I've only played against 1 Affinty deck in my few months of being there, and I've only seen 1 burn player there, and there was a random infect deck last night. So my As Foretold list kinda just runs up the score against the more midrange, control, spell based combo that tends to show up. Against more decks that show up, if I wanted cheap quick beats, I'd just play Geist of Saint Traft, which I'm playing 3 of.

Guys, what do we think about Mana Leak? Should we be playing 1 or more main? All the As Foretold build that have 5-0'd leagues have had a couple copies.

I think it depends on your build, I'd rather run a single disallow over a single mana leak in my list since I don't care about creatures very much with all my removal. Path and Mana leak are too much of a non-bo for me to want hurt my deck to run it.

Quote from Lejoon »

If you play Spreading Seas in your As Foretold list then you have too much "air". You can't have more than a certian percentage of your deck to be cantrips or you will fall behind too much in tempo and won't have time to play answers. I'm playing Crucible in main and I find the 3 maindeck GQ/TE with 3 Tolaria West that can find them at will is enough. As Foretold allow us to just use our land destruction at once since we make "land drops" by having As Foretold in play.

I've had 0 issues with running Spreading Seas, it's a proactive card that replaces itself, it's great early game and still decent late game when you can just slam it with as foretold. The card is straight gas in any build. Also 3 Tolaria West sounds like durdling too much or having too many tap lands.

So I was testing As foretold and New Gideon together in a list almost identical to @TheAller's List a few pages back and I'm just not sold on the combination. Perhaps it was the match ups I was facing, midrange and control which this list is not geared to beat but I'm not confident that playing a list so heavily geared to beat aggro and giving up a lot of ground in midrange/control match ups is worth it. Not having access to Snapcaster or serum visions felt like I was ignoring some of the key reasons (hehe Serum visions..) to play blue but it also felt necessary to cut them both to fit As Foretold and Gideon.

I think I'm going to stay away from trying to force them both together and just go all in on spell based As Foretold using 3-4 Geist of Saint Traft in the sideboard to replace Gideon. The hexproof on Geist seems much more powerful than Gideon Being a planeswalker that can get burned out or Pathed/Condemned.

That's what I'm going to start testing myself, I'll probably pick up some paper gideons as well before the Pro Tour since it's likely as cheap as it's going to get for the foreseeable future.

So played my As Foretold build at modern night last night and man, the card is just crazy good and saved my ass so much. Granted two of my matches were against people borrowing RG Ponza decks, but without As Foretold and Ancestral Vision I would have never been able to win through stone rain, moss, choke, bloodmoon. I'm also thinking As Foretold may let us drop to 23 land because once it starts ticking up you are likely set for the match, I never lost a game when As Foretold got past 4 counters. My night went as follows

1: RG Ponza 2-1 (1-0) Lost game 1, grinded game 2 and 3 out, Ponza is a very frontloaded deck that if you can survive the first 5 turns with some land you should be ok.
2: RG Ponza 1-2 (1-1) Turn 1 Blood moon isn't fun.
3: DS Jund 1-2 (1-2) Mulled to 4 in game 3 with a Mystic Gate that was supposed to be a Seachrome coast as my only land.
4: Skred 2-0 (2-2) He had turn two Chandra, Torch of Defiance on the play I managed to cryptic it with 7 counters then stabilized

The store I'm playing at seems to have a ton of variety of decks that people either have or can borrow, I rarely see the same decks week to week which is a stark change from my last store which was so aggro heavy (like 20% infect, 20% burn heavy). I think As Foretold is the real deal in the non aggro match ups we could use help with, being able to cryptic, snap, cryptic with only 6 mana is no joke nor is having Ancestral Vision be an amazing top deck late game. If the meta keeps slowing down I'd say we're poised for some good results.

I'm attaching my list, sideboard is just what I bring to an unknown meta with cards to shore up my least comfortable match ups (tron, storm, dredge, affinity). As far as the mainboard one of the verdicts should probably be a condemn or a disallow but my store was sold out of disallow and seachrome coast.

I use AV as a way to refuel, we're trying to run our opponents out of gas and AV helps us play a game meant to stall people and get them to a place where they can't do much. I like AV since it's a one mana and 4 turn investment, think twice is 5 mana for two cards, sphinx's rev is 5 mana for two cards, there's a pretty good return in AV compared to it's instant speed counterparts. We're playing a pretty similar build and AV does wonders in my build.

My personal opinion is to just drop the think twice's in place of AV, I'd also drop the Sphinx's Rev since you want 4 to maximize your turn one AV play.

I don't know what spell based combo will be as popular as storm, but I'm almost certain it's the aggro decks that will rise in popularity.

In regard to buying Jace, just be patient man! Magic isn't going anywhere. Wait for Masters 25 to come out and then consider buying it. Borrow from your friends or people or w.e. (buy fakes lol joking) so it doesn't hurt you financially. We're still people. We have bills to pay, food to buy, friends and family to see and spend time with. Probably wizards will recognize the demand and barrier of Jace (it'd be complete bull***** if you needed Jace to compete against fair decks AS a fair deck but couldn't afford it) and have an increase of supply for Masters 25, which will bring down the price by a lot.

Can we cut down on the inane criticism of one another? I enjoy reading this thread because I think it has the potential to improve my build/play. But the recent trend of aggravated disagreement over card choice is turning me off. Maybe a moderator could step in here?

I have no problem if you think Scour is a bad card or if you think my deck is bad. I had no problem with Lejoon's input until his last sentence. If I do get time to test online and I get positive results, I'll post my ideas here and make sure everyone knows the results so I can be taken seriously I appreciate everyone's input so long as it's constructive.

Cast Out is mostly for cycling in the early game if I draw it. It really doesn't cost as much tempo as some seem to think to cycle for one mana. I still have Wall of Omens, Paths and Spellskites for early aggro. Yes, I can see combo being a problem, however.

I just want to show some support for the concept that Wall of omens is a card we should all be trying very hard not to play in the maindeck (and therefore not in the 75). While the card does have value in some matchups, the fact that it is completely dead in some like Scapeshift, Ad Nauseam, Storm, etc illustrates why it is a card we should be trying to avoid.

Where previous years' metas were characterized by tons of aggro, finks/omens/resto were used to warp the deck to fight them. But those cards all leave you vulnerable to combo decks, and at this point wall of omens is the last vestige of this warping of UW control to fight linear aggro.

In other news, I'm going to update the primer next after the double GP weekend at the end of the month. If anyone has suggestions on improvements or decklists to feature in the OP, please send me a PM (don't want to clog up the thread with housekeeping stuff).

@Gustavito: The Ancestral Vision debate rages on. I'm currently on the AV build. The main downside is that AV is terrible late game. But early game, it is insane. At the moment, I'm of the mind that the insanity of the card in the early game justifies its late game terribleness.

Another argument for the AV build is that cutting AV gives you only four slots, and it's unclear that what you end up doing with those four slots legitimizes excluding AV. In non-AV Sphinx's Rev builds, you run 25 lands instead of 23. So two of the slots AVs were occupying are filled with lands. The remaining two slots are usually filled either with 2 Sphinx's Rev or 1 Sphinx's Rev and 1 (more) Jace, AoT. (Some builds make room for 2 Wall of Omens -- but I'm pretty sure this is a mistake, even though Walls do, if you draw them, sometimes buy you more time in the early game). So, when you cut AV, you get 2 lands and some combination of Sphinx's Rev and Jace, AoT. So the question is: do these additions make a real difference? And I think: not really. It's probably better to draw any of these cards instead of AV *late* game -- Sphinx's Rev, in particular. But drawing Sphinx's Rev *early* game is almost as bad as drawing AV late game.

So, it's complicated. But, as I said, at the moment, I'm of the mind that the AV build is the better build overall.