On a related note: I once read (can’t remember where) some statistics from a player with an enormous amount of matches on the same deck reporting a ~5% (from memory) winrate decline when comparing Friendly League results with those of Competitive Leagues. In other words, a pilot whose winrate is 60% over the course of many Friendlies could reasonably expect to clock in around 55% in Comps.
Does anyone here have supporting or countervailing data/experiences?
Interesting you should bring that up, as I set out to test that exact thing this month. I recently talked to a Storm grinder a bit who had reported a 68% win rate in Friendly over around 1000 matches, and it really piqued my interest; it seemed almost too good to be true. The vast majority of my recorded games with Tron prior to this month have been played in Comp leagues (around 1900) and my winrate in that sample is right around 60%. In December I've played the deck exclusively in the Friendly room, and over 240 matches so far my winrate is 65.5%. So I can definitely see the ~5% figure being accurate. For me it's closer to 6% as things stand now.
In terms of why it's that much easier, I've noticed a few things:
There's a higher percentage of homebrew/rogue decks. Not tons, but it's maybe 6% in Friendly as opposed to like 3% in Comp. I'm talking about decks like Mono Blue Boomerangs or GW Midrange with Search For Tomorrow and Farseek to "synergize" with Tireless Tracker and Courser of Kruphix, with no disruption of any kind. These are almost always free wins, and there are more of them.
There's a higher occurrence of loose/suboptimal plays. Quite a few times this month I saw my opponents do things like crack fetches main phase getting a tapped shockland, or firing off instant speed burn spells main phase, when they could hold the mana up and represent any number of things. I don't often see things like that in the Comp leagues.
There's also a higher occurrence of people playing meta decks but with some suboptimal card choices for the sake of interest or fun. That's all well and good, but the cards are suboptimal for a reason, and you will be handing your opponents some percentage points as a result.
On the whole though, ~5% is not a massive difference. It's still mostly good players playing good decks.
What about the EV though? Using the Goatbots EV calculator, about 7% is the key number when comparing Comp and Friendly. If your Comp winrate is 58%, and your Friendly winrate is 65%, that's basically the equilibrium point. +3.46 for Comp, and +3.42 for Friendly. If your Comp winrate is 59% and Friendly is 66%, you're better off playing Comp, as it becomes +4.09 vs +3.69, and the gap continues to widen as your winrate increases. On the flipside, if your Comp winrate is only 57% and you get 64% in Friendly, the EV is +2.83 vs +3.15 in favor of Friendly, and the gap continues to widen as your winrate goes down. 7% is a fairly big difference though, and given my experience that would seem hard to sustain. So if you can consistently achieve 59% win in Comp, that's the better EV play.
Wonderful post, man. This is exactly the sort of reply I was looking for. I can certainly accept 6% as an accurate approximation of expected winrate differential for the typical player. Thanks also for bringing up the EV angle; that’s something I hadn’t closely considered.
On a related note: I once read (can’t remember where) some statistics from a player with an enormous amount of matches on the same deck reporting a ~5% (from memory) winrate decline when comparing Friendly League results with those of Competitive Leagues. In other words, a pilot whose winrate is 60% over the course of many Friendlies could reasonably expect to clock in around 55% in Comps.
Does anyone here have supporting or countervailing data/experiences?
I saw your name in the practice rooms a few times yesterday, Galerion. I had a half day at work so I was able to just get some practice games in.
I used to invest into like every deck as well. I'm pretty much accepting that I own every GBx staple and Shadow. I have a decent amount of the URx staples, too. But I mean, I have a case and a half of GBx cards to pretty much playing anything that emerges unless it's using something obscure. I have Tron, just because it's nice to own and doesn't intersect with other stuff.
I would like to play Humans, but I have to be more responsible with my money nowadays and shouldn't just blow 1,500 dollars. Playing 4 different decks at once doesn't seem like good practice, either.
I had a lot of pieces into Phoenix so I thought, "why not?"
Owning the URx and GBx stuff really helps out. If you own all the shock lands/fetches and those you're pretty set. It's only when Tribal decks or combo decks emerge that I feel priced out. The Phoenix deck only required Arclight, Thing in the Ice, and the Manamorphose.
I'm pretty much just keeping my staples though, selling off staples has just hurt way more than helped. I sold off the UW Control pieces like 2x Teferi, 1x Jace, 1x Cryptic (4 seems like too much in modern nowadays) because I know I won't be going back to a super slow deck like that again. I still decided to keep things like Clique, 3x Jaces, etc because you never know.
Yesterday? Yeah that was the The Rock day. I must admit it felt good playing it again and the new tools like Assassin's Trophy and Tireless Tracker did tons of work. I was impressed.
But it also made me realize that I personally don't want to stick with a non-blue deck anymore. Little anecdote.
Yesterday I kept a decent BG hand and played turn 1 Inquistion of Kozilek and I see a hand of Faithless Looting, Night's Whisper, Through the Breach and lands so I was up against Goryo's Vengeance and I take the Looting away. On turn 2 I fire off another Inquistion and take Night's Whisper away. On turn 3 I play a Dark Confidant and after that nothing interesting happens until he has 5 lands in play. He obviously plays Through the Breach and put's Worldspine Wurm into play. I have the Assassins's Trohpy ready to avoid taking 15 from the wurm but he still gets the 3 5/5 Wurm tokens with Trample. What happens? With the Confidant trigger I reveal my single copy of Maelstrom Pulse, kill the tokens with it and win the game from there. My opponent wrote me "topdeck of the year" and despite me just answering with "yeah that's what the deck does" he was absolutely right.
The limitations of the deck were obvious in this game. Despite me having a decent hand with two discard spells, a Confidant and removal I could have easily lost that game. Inquisition is fine but its limitation of 3 CMC or less means I could not take his Breach away and the deck cannot interact any other way with that card.
Things like planeswalkers, permanents with ETB or LTB abilities and instants and sorceries all need to be interacted with on the stack. Otherwise the opponent will gain value out of them or outright win the game. With something like Stubborn Denial in my hand I would have had that game 100% on lock instead of having to get so incredibly lucky.
I still don't know if I want to stick with GDS but if I would have to choose between it and the BG/x decks my choice is now pretty clear.
Not to be that guy who always jumps in to defend BGx, but maybe I’m just actually that guy who always jumps in to defend BGx.
First of all, I’m a huge fan of Grixis/4c Shadow. The deck is the real deal and I’d happily agree with the consensus that it’s the most well-positioned Thoughtseize deck in the format right now.
That said, your anecdote doesn’t really serve as a condemnation of BGx’s power IMO. You had a solid hand, sure, but so did your opponent! A great many decks in the format would easily have been in for an early death, assuming some decent finds off Looting and Whisper. You also lacked a clock, and most times, if an early progression of discard into Bob isn’t setting your opponent back then finding you a clock, it’s setting your opponent back then finding you answers, which is what happened here. Finally, Shadow could indeed have had that game on lock more readily, but remember that Shadow thrives against combo decks—those Stubbs look a lot worse when the opponent is playing one of the format’s Aether Vial decks.
Again, I agree that Shadow is arguably the best place to be right now if you want to interact, especially if your heart’s not in the idea of BGx and/or you’re feeling the allure of what U brings to the table. But this notion that BGx is a far-distant second that just doesn’t have what it takes to rumble in Modern (not that you’ve said this, but it’s been implied elsewhere in this thread)...man, I just don’t see that at all. Every opposing matchup is within reason for a well-tuned Jund or Golgari deck now that Trophy has helped close the gap against big mana.
On the topic of the relative difficulty of the format’s most popular decks, the author’s personal ratings are fairly reasonable IMO. Personally, I’ve hopped decks an embarrassing number of times, having owned GB Elves, UBw Mill, Norin Sisters, Living End, D&T, Humans, UW Control, Ad Nauseam, Taking Turns, and Abzan/Golgari. For me, the linear aggro or combo decks were by far easier to pilot optimally than the interactive decks like D&T, BGx, and UWC (which I played during the pre-Jace meta when Shadow was king and the UWC decks were doing a lot of tapping out for Seas, Gideons, and Verdicts). I say this in full acknowledgment that I’ve never extensively played some of the more complex combo decks like Amulet Titan; nevertheless, my experience has been that linearity correlates with more easily obtained proficiency, on the whole.
Anyone can cast a Thoughtseize, a JtMS, or a Leonin Arbiter, but navigating your way to consistently strong results on the backs of those cards in a format as broad as this one is a very different story!
Akalah, thanks for posting the breakdown for us. Always nice to read how others are doing and the touts on the wins and losses.
I went 2-2 at FNM, with the Arclight deck as a loss, and that was the deck that went undefeated. I have done well against that deck online and went 1-2 irl. Beginning on the draw seems to be a bigger negative than against many other decks. Also my opponant was a very skilled player... better than me. I have faith in the BG build and believe that with tight play I can beat any deck. A dash of luck never hurts either.
On to the build... I used 3 Bobs, but think I will play with 4 going in ahead. Kalitas is a favorite of mine, but likely will put two in side with none in main. Keeping 3 trackers in main and use 4 liliana of the veils... on the play she is just money. I miss abrupt decay and will have to find room for one or two in the main. I will tighten things up and hope to report a better record next week.
Since the forum is quiet I decided to ramble on as Led Zeppelin would say...
Zeppelin <3
I’ve been doing well against the Phoenix decks, too—I think we’re solidly positioned against them—but their consistency means that they can punish us if we stumble. Similar to Burn in many ways, including play/draw, as you identified.
Including the 4th Bob is something that’s crossed my mind as well, but I’d toyed with moving Tracker #3 to the side in his place. It’s so tough to say, but 3/3 has served me so well since I moved off the Tasigur build that for now I suppose it’s a matter of not fixing what ain’t broke. Let us know how 4x Bobby works out for you!
I see little reason to be pessimistic about the future of this format (which should inform how we feel about the present state of Modern, of course).
WotC very obviously realizes the need to print powerful answer cards in new sets. KTK and id listed most of the recent ones a few pages back: Trophy, Sphere, etc. To me, this development is extremely encouraging, and I don’t think it’s quite recieved its due among the Modern community as a clear sign that answers (and therefore interaction) are going to be designed to thrive in eternal formats.
Would I like Modern to be more interactive than it is now? Yes, without question, and it seems that the majority shares this view. Still, the demise of interactive decks has been greatly exaggerated. We’re still doing fine in the meta—not amazing, but fine—and moving forward we can expect 1) new answers will continuously be printed with Modern (or Legacy) in mind, 2) any realistic unbans will surely help “fair”/interactive decks more than linear ones, and 3) any possible bans (which will likely only be used as a last resort) are almost certainly going to be aimed at something hyper-linear that shrugs off interaction, like Dredge.
Finally—and this is merely anecdotal—my two most recent (Friendly) leagues with Golgari went 4-1 and 5-0, and I did it while commentating live, which, let me tell ya, definitely makes playing optimally a lot harder, especially if you’re as new to it as I am! My advice is this: find a reasonably powerful deck that you love on every level and stick with it through thick and thin. Knowing your own deck is the key to success in this format, and the broader the metagame gets, the truer that will become IMO.
So, Spirits would probably play Stoneforge Mystic, right? Opinions on that?
If the card goes into a Tier 1 deck, that might be a concern for Wizards.
Absolutely. I see no reason why Spirits wouldn't run SFM.
It doesn't fly, it doesn't affect the board, it doesn't remove blockers, it doesn't synergize with anything else in the deck, the equipment is mostly dead outside of drawing stoneforge herself, it doesn't speed up the aggro clock, it doesn't meaningfully benefit from phantasmal image or any of the Lord effects, it can't be meaningfully cast off their tribal lands (is not a spirit), and the deck would need to completely rework its manabase to accommodate the W needed to activate her ability. It would only be played if the deck transforms into some random amalgamation mid-range deck, and not Spirits tribal.
All of this is true, plus the fact that the ~3 slots dedicated to the Equipment will make CoCos that much worse. SFM seems a much better fit in straight UW Spirits; she will probably only see sustained play in Bant Spirits if her power level proves to be significantly higher in the format than most people here are predicting.
The notion that any Modern deck is brain-dead, point-and-click, or bestows nothing but free wins upon its pilots is obviously ridiculous. This game is incredibly complex! Every deck has its foibles and nuances, its hidden tricks and unorthodox lines, its spicy fringe side tech for certain metagames; every deck provides dedicated pilots room for growth while rewarding experience and mastery. People denying this are either lazy thinkers who unwittingly broadcast their lack of understanding about the format; or, they are employing hyperbole and logical fallacies in order to air their particular grievances. Regardless, this type of commentary is inaccurate and unproductive, and I love to see people pushing back against it.
That said, the idea that every Modern deck is just as challenging to pilot optimally as the next one—which is a subtext found within the arguments of some who fight back against the erroneous thinking mentioned above—is also obviously incorrect. GDS has been the focal point of the last few pages and it’s the perfect example of what I mean. It’s just not true that most Modern decks require their pilots to make as many difficult decisions in an average game as a GDS pilot is required to make. The GDS discard decisions alone arguably rival all of the decisions made in an entire game by some of the format’s most linear decks...then when you begin to factor in developing the board vs holding up counters, which cards to delve away, when to go all-in on TBR, and of course the infamously difficult aspect of managing life totals unique to Shadow decks, etc...well, it’s really no contest.
I say this only to remind everyone that nuance and accuracy are necessary to foster the sort of productive discussion that can help make our format better. The radically dismissive mindset that “x deck could be played by a monkey” and the radically subjectivist mindset that “all decks are more or less equally difficult and rewarding of mastery” are two sides of the same coin IMO...and perhaps more importantly, the presence of one type of argument encourages people who disagree to make the other type of argument.
Anyway, this whole subject is a bit of a bugbear for me. Generally, in life as a whole, it’s bizarre to me how much time people spend communicating, but how imprecise and counterproductive that communication tends to be! Truly a strange phenomenon, if you ask me.
Reid Duke and Jabberwocki have elected not to play any Assassin Trophies in their decks. It's too tempo negative.
From memory, Reid was on a 2/2/2 Trophy/Decay/Pulse split when he released his Golgari video. The Jund video he released yesterday was recorded pre-GRN, thus the lack of Trophy.
As someone who basically plays Golgari Midrange in Modern to the exclusion of all else, I’d like to jump into the the “BGx is bad” discussion that’s been laced intermittently throughout the last several pages of this thread.
Lack of card selection is the great Achilles heel of the archetype; that is no secret. Cards like Grim Flayer and Traverse the Ulvenwald are too conditional, and too easily rendered toothless by both soft and hard forms of hate, relative to their mediocre ceiling. I think we just have to accept that card selection is not a tool that’s reasonably available to us—so how do we compete in Modern?
Well, first off we have to make sure we aren’t losing to our own deck. For now, this means playing only 2 colors IMHO. Fetch+Shock damage, Blood Moon, natural colorscrew...all of these risk factors are heavily mitigated with a 2c landbase, which also just so happens to comfortably leverage 2-4 Fields of Ruin and ~6 basic lands, giving the deck a huge amount of intrinsic value when competing on that axis.
Restricting ourselves to just the two core colors also means that the specific spells in our 75 are a lot more flexible. Golgari can easily support 4 Nihil Spellbombs, 3 Scavenging Oozes, and 1x each of Kalitas, Grafdigger’s Cage, and Surgical Extraction, which is what my current build runs. If the meta is extremely grindy it can support 4x each of Bob and Tracker. If Burn is king it’s not unreasonable to register 4x Brutality and 2x Finks is your 75.
I could go on, but the salient point is that our lack of card selection can only really be mitigated by playing a high density of whatever cards are most needed to survive against Modern’s linear insanity, and a two-color shell provides the most stable and painless base upon which to build a 75 that’s capable of interacting while keeping pace with the meta.
An awesome primer. Many thanks. Love having a place where Rock enthusiests can get together and ask questions, debate, and improve. Rock, Jund, Abzan.., all part of the same family.
I would recommend both new and experienced to tune into Mtg Grim Flayer on Youtube and watch the matchups and play patterns. It is incredibly good content for the Modern Rock player.
Thanks man, and it's great to see you on here!
Just had two games against Dredge: on the play both games, T2 Scooze both games, completely painless lands with access to GGG on T3 both games...aaaaand I got absolutely run over with no chance whatsoever both games. Pretty frustrating stuff, but I won't read much into it that we don't already know.
That said, how have people's experiences been with maindeck Spellbombs? I've been less than satisfied with including them main in the past--despite their high floor they can still be annoyingly clunky--but I'm certainly willing to revisit the notion. 1 main/3 side is what I'm leaning toward, any thoughts?
For what it's worth, the deck still feels very blue! Blue-red is much more tempo-y than other builds though (at least the way that I built it), so you do need to assess if you're the beatdown more often than with more controlling builds.
Oh, without doubt. The soul and core of the deck is still as blue as they come. Speaking of which, your build is very cool. Gelectrode is spice.
I had a chance to watch your debut video. Great work! Your voice suits the job very well, and you’re top class when it comes to explaining the less than obvious lines in a thorough but coherent manner. The amount of these that you saw over the course of the league was very impressive, and your talent as a pilot is obvious. That said, it almost seemed as though you were the victim of your own next-level insights in places, with one or two misclicks which surely would not have happened if you weren’t trying to explain complex lines while playing. No worries here; these will surely lessen with time as live commentating becomes second nature. (I’m a replay guy so I’m fortunate enough to not have this issue, otherwise you’d probably see 10x as many brain farts and misclicks from me!)
It must also be said that fortune was truly not with you over the league as a whole. After basically every match I was thinking “damn, pretty rough beats there, unlucky”. Not much you can do about that! But your build’s potential is clearly huge. Did this league make you rethink any slots, or was this just one among many testing sessions?
@zcowan: I do hope to return to cranking out Turns content in the not-too-distant future; but truthfully, at the moment, Golgari is where it’s at in terms of where my channel growth and Patreon support is coming from, and the variety of Rock builds is the subject of as much contention as splash colors and 75s here! Lots to still figure out as far as optimization goes.
I absolutely encourage you to give streaming/recording a shot if you think it’s something you’ll enjoy! You’ve got a subscriber in me.
Great posts, Hype_rion and Akalah. I don’t have much more to add. The crux of the matter IMO is that one no longer “needs” to splash a third color in order to achieve peak BGx competitiveness; and, when that splash color is no longer necessitated, it’s amazing how swiftly it can become a liability relative to the clean and painless consistency offered by a 2c deck.
Finally, I’d like to get some more Turns content up on the YouTube channel and at this point I wouldn’t mind taking someone else’s list for a spin, or at least using it as a starting point. Anyone been crushing it lately with a monoblue list? Can’t justify buying into a splash color at the moment.
Apologies for the wall of text! Hope you’re all doing well.
Mono U turns are pretty stock. My mono U list has 68/75 cards with your list. Maybe trying out a splash with cards that you currently have be better?
My SB has grafdiggers and relic. Mainly to stop coco and vizer decks. I'm looking for ways to stop spirits with Mono U but its pretty atrocious currently. I'm on a 2-11 losing streak against both UW and bant spirits currently.
Yeah, Spirits seem to be a real hurdle, especially for monoU. Unfortunately, I don't happen to own much in the way of anything splashable...the consequences of too much wheeling and dealing with spare cards!
@Grim Flayer, if that is a wall of text for you.. then you are going soft haha
Ha! True enough.
I haven't been playing as much lately (maybe 2 to 3 times a month with the deck) but have noticed that the format is getting to a point of diversity that is hard to answer in one color.
I think in pervious metas there was a dominant type like control where there were a lot of top tier decks but jeskai/UW/Death Shadow stood out. Or aggro/creature based decks were the leaders of the format. During those times I think mono blue shined better because you could kind of get away with hedging the sideboard to favor in those matchups. I think now there is too much diversity with a lot of decks all being really good.
Adding a color splash definitely feels right from my testing, but I totally understand not wanting to invest money into it at the moment.
I actually had a friend over and I had sleeved black/white/red variants and play tested them against proxied matchups and found red and black to be about even in the games we played. White was a little less favored in specific matchups (especially in UW control/Jeskai where the sideboard lacked strong resources other than additional counter magic) I think in those matchups red was more favored just because bolt adds a faster clock.
I think I liked the UB variant a little more and it suited my play style though because fatal push is an incredibly reliable creature removal spell and having access to thought seize and inquisition as well as surgical extraction seems to be a useful strategy right now. That along with Bontu's last reckoning kind of worked as a strong sideboard that hit all of the bases.
These are my opinions as of recently, but I am always up for debate! Like I said, these come from two days of playing magic to get away from the constant studying of nursing school lol so it isn't like it is a month of playing or anything like that by any means
You might be right, Z. A combination of speed, linearity, and diversity in the format is doing monoU no favors.
I was thinking about trying out some of the maindeck Thing builds—perhaps with Mission Briefing—that I saw a few pages back, but the most recent posts ITT have me wondering whether splashing a color has become obligatory. I sure hope not, but at the same time I don’t wish to deny reality. Any thoughts?
Finally, I’d like to get some more Turns content up on the YouTube channel and at this point I wouldn’t mind taking someone else’s list for a spin, or at least using it as a starting point. Anyone been crushing it lately with a monoblue list? Can’t justify buying into a splash color at the moment.
Apologies for the wall of text! Hope you’re all doing well.
Hey Grim_Flayer! In my opinion, the splashes are stronger in an open meta than any mono-blue list. Like you said, there's a lot of hostile decks like Infect or Hardened Scales, and mono-U doesn't have great tools to deal with them. Of course, mono-U is still powerful to do well in a local meta that has more favorable matchups, but I don't think it's the best choice for taking into Magic Online.
That said, your post and your channel inspired me to start making some content, so here's a Competitive Modern League with UR Turns. I'm open to suggestions on improvement (both in terms of deck construction or gameplay, and in terms of video creation), so let me know any feedback!
Wow, man, this is exiting stuff! I was feeling a little guilty lately, having started off my channel playing Golgari and Turns about equally, and then not releasing any Turns content for a long while...but now the burden has been lifted. I withdraw in the presence of the master. But for real, when I get the time to watch the league I'll be certain to give you my thoughts! Very happy to see our archetype's most recognizable player establish a presence on youtube.
Alright so in testing I played each variant against: Elves, Burn, Humans, UW, Jeskai, Storm, and Mardu.. sadly I don't own Spirits completely yet..
In that I would rate UR as being the best version currently as Bolt makes the deck a lot more aggro as you have mentioned. You are definitely able to close the game out quickly when you start chaining snapcaster mages and lightning bolts. I only had 3 snapcaster because my fourth is lost in an EDH deck somewhere so I used a 3/1 split with mission briefing and it actually worked really nicely. The surveil mechanic is definitely powerful, and being able to dig for things is always good in this deck. My only concerns with this version are: 1) Red lacks a guaranteed creature removal similar to path or fatal push. Pyroclasm/Anger of the Gods/Bolt all rely on the creatures having 3 toughness or less; and 2) You can't run Chalice of the Void anymore really.. I think that card is so good in this deck
In second place I would put UB. Fatal push is really strong and I like having Thoughtseize/Inquisition as sideboard options. A lot of the decks in the format right now are easily crippled by hand removal which is proven by the success of GB Rock (@GrimFlayer)
Lastly, White splash has the best sideboard options but that doesn't make it good right now. From testing path is really bad.
That's kind of what I have going right now.. Working on an excel spreadsheet of sideboard options. Tried experimenting with Geist and there seems to be some promise there
That's a pretty rough collection of matchups in general, so the fact that you came out feeling optimistic about any variant is a great sign.
Red, eh? A few months back I was pretty convinced UR wasn't where we wanted to be; but times change, and perhaps I was even wrong back then.
If so, that'll be a bitter pill to swallow. I hate red.
(Last call on foils, btw! Tomorrow I'll begin listing them.)
How do you play vs Hardened Affinity? Deck is a pain in the ass. Hard to deal with all that stuff.
This matchup is one of many, many reasons my sideboard looks the way it does, aka with lots of catch-all or highly flexible removal pieces which have x-for-1 potential.
Kalitas, Maelstrom Pulse, Golgari Charm, and Engineered Explosives are all hugely impactful against Scales. You’ll usually want to take away their namesake card ASAP, be it with removal or discard, and other than that: try to keep the board as clear as possible while sticking an early threat and/or planeswalker.
Wonderful post, man. This is exactly the sort of reply I was looking for. I can certainly accept 6% as an accurate approximation of expected winrate differential for the typical player. Thanks also for bringing up the EV angle; that’s something I hadn’t closely considered.
On a related note: I once read (can’t remember where) some statistics from a player with an enormous amount of matches on the same deck reporting a ~5% (from memory) winrate decline when comparing Friendly League results with those of Competitive Leagues. In other words, a pilot whose winrate is 60% over the course of many Friendlies could reasonably expect to clock in around 55% in Comps.
Does anyone here have supporting or countervailing data/experiences?
Not to be that guy who always jumps in to defend BGx, but maybe I’m just actually that guy who always jumps in to defend BGx.
First of all, I’m a huge fan of Grixis/4c Shadow. The deck is the real deal and I’d happily agree with the consensus that it’s the most well-positioned Thoughtseize deck in the format right now.
That said, your anecdote doesn’t really serve as a condemnation of BGx’s power IMO. You had a solid hand, sure, but so did your opponent! A great many decks in the format would easily have been in for an early death, assuming some decent finds off Looting and Whisper. You also lacked a clock, and most times, if an early progression of discard into Bob isn’t setting your opponent back then finding you a clock, it’s setting your opponent back then finding you answers, which is what happened here. Finally, Shadow could indeed have had that game on lock more readily, but remember that Shadow thrives against combo decks—those Stubbs look a lot worse when the opponent is playing one of the format’s Aether Vial decks.
Again, I agree that Shadow is arguably the best place to be right now if you want to interact, especially if your heart’s not in the idea of BGx and/or you’re feeling the allure of what U brings to the table. But this notion that BGx is a far-distant second that just doesn’t have what it takes to rumble in Modern (not that you’ve said this, but it’s been implied elsewhere in this thread)...man, I just don’t see that at all. Every opposing matchup is within reason for a well-tuned Jund or Golgari deck now that Trophy has helped close the gap against big mana.
On the topic of the relative difficulty of the format’s most popular decks, the author’s personal ratings are fairly reasonable IMO. Personally, I’ve hopped decks an embarrassing number of times, having owned GB Elves, UBw Mill, Norin Sisters, Living End, D&T, Humans, UW Control, Ad Nauseam, Taking Turns, and Abzan/Golgari. For me, the linear aggro or combo decks were by far easier to pilot optimally than the interactive decks like D&T, BGx, and UWC (which I played during the pre-Jace meta when Shadow was king and the UWC decks were doing a lot of tapping out for Seas, Gideons, and Verdicts). I say this in full acknowledgment that I’ve never extensively played some of the more complex combo decks like Amulet Titan; nevertheless, my experience has been that linearity correlates with more easily obtained proficiency, on the whole.
Anyone can cast a Thoughtseize, a JtMS, or a Leonin Arbiter, but navigating your way to consistently strong results on the backs of those cards in a format as broad as this one is a very different story!
Zeppelin <3
I’ve been doing well against the Phoenix decks, too—I think we’re solidly positioned against them—but their consistency means that they can punish us if we stumble. Similar to Burn in many ways, including play/draw, as you identified.
Including the 4th Bob is something that’s crossed my mind as well, but I’d toyed with moving Tracker #3 to the side in his place. It’s so tough to say, but 3/3 has served me so well since I moved off the Tasigur build that for now I suppose it’s a matter of not fixing what ain’t broke. Let us know how 4x Bobby works out for you!
WotC very obviously realizes the need to print powerful answer cards in new sets. KTK and id listed most of the recent ones a few pages back: Trophy, Sphere, etc. To me, this development is extremely encouraging, and I don’t think it’s quite recieved its due among the Modern community as a clear sign that answers (and therefore interaction) are going to be designed to thrive in eternal formats.
Would I like Modern to be more interactive than it is now? Yes, without question, and it seems that the majority shares this view. Still, the demise of interactive decks has been greatly exaggerated. We’re still doing fine in the meta—not amazing, but fine—and moving forward we can expect 1) new answers will continuously be printed with Modern (or Legacy) in mind, 2) any realistic unbans will surely help “fair”/interactive decks more than linear ones, and 3) any possible bans (which will likely only be used as a last resort) are almost certainly going to be aimed at something hyper-linear that shrugs off interaction, like Dredge.
Finally—and this is merely anecdotal—my two most recent (Friendly) leagues with Golgari went 4-1 and 5-0, and I did it while commentating live, which, let me tell ya, definitely makes playing optimally a lot harder, especially if you’re as new to it as I am! My advice is this: find a reasonably powerful deck that you love on every level and stick with it through thick and thin. Knowing your own deck is the key to success in this format, and the broader the metagame gets, the truer that will become IMO.
All of this is true, plus the fact that the ~3 slots dedicated to the Equipment will make CoCos that much worse. SFM seems a much better fit in straight UW Spirits; she will probably only see sustained play in Bant Spirits if her power level proves to be significantly higher in the format than most people here are predicting.
That said, the idea that every Modern deck is just as challenging to pilot optimally as the next one—which is a subtext found within the arguments of some who fight back against the erroneous thinking mentioned above—is also obviously incorrect. GDS has been the focal point of the last few pages and it’s the perfect example of what I mean. It’s just not true that most Modern decks require their pilots to make as many difficult decisions in an average game as a GDS pilot is required to make. The GDS discard decisions alone arguably rival all of the decisions made in an entire game by some of the format’s most linear decks...then when you begin to factor in developing the board vs holding up counters, which cards to delve away, when to go all-in on TBR, and of course the infamously difficult aspect of managing life totals unique to Shadow decks, etc...well, it’s really no contest.
I say this only to remind everyone that nuance and accuracy are necessary to foster the sort of productive discussion that can help make our format better. The radically dismissive mindset that “x deck could be played by a monkey” and the radically subjectivist mindset that “all decks are more or less equally difficult and rewarding of mastery” are two sides of the same coin IMO...and perhaps more importantly, the presence of one type of argument encourages people who disagree to make the other type of argument.
Anyway, this whole subject is a bit of a bugbear for me. Generally, in life as a whole, it’s bizarre to me how much time people spend communicating, but how imprecise and counterproductive that communication tends to be! Truly a strange phenomenon, if you ask me.
No video coverage. </3
From memory, Reid was on a 2/2/2 Trophy/Decay/Pulse split when he released his Golgari video. The Jund video he released yesterday was recorded pre-GRN, thus the lack of Trophy.
As someone who basically plays Golgari Midrange in Modern to the exclusion of all else, I’d like to jump into the the “BGx is bad” discussion that’s been laced intermittently throughout the last several pages of this thread.
Lack of card selection is the great Achilles heel of the archetype; that is no secret. Cards like Grim Flayer and Traverse the Ulvenwald are too conditional, and too easily rendered toothless by both soft and hard forms of hate, relative to their mediocre ceiling. I think we just have to accept that card selection is not a tool that’s reasonably available to us—so how do we compete in Modern?
Well, first off we have to make sure we aren’t losing to our own deck. For now, this means playing only 2 colors IMHO. Fetch+Shock damage, Blood Moon, natural colorscrew...all of these risk factors are heavily mitigated with a 2c landbase, which also just so happens to comfortably leverage 2-4 Fields of Ruin and ~6 basic lands, giving the deck a huge amount of intrinsic value when competing on that axis.
Restricting ourselves to just the two core colors also means that the specific spells in our 75 are a lot more flexible. Golgari can easily support 4 Nihil Spellbombs, 3 Scavenging Oozes, and 1x each of Kalitas, Grafdigger’s Cage, and Surgical Extraction, which is what my current build runs. If the meta is extremely grindy it can support 4x each of Bob and Tracker. If Burn is king it’s not unreasonable to register 4x Brutality and 2x Finks is your 75.
I could go on, but the salient point is that our lack of card selection can only really be mitigated by playing a high density of whatever cards are most needed to survive against Modern’s linear insanity, and a two-color shell provides the most stable and painless base upon which to build a 75 that’s capable of interacting while keeping pace with the meta.
Thanks man, and it's great to see you on here!
Just had two games against Dredge: on the play both games, T2 Scooze both games, completely painless lands with access to GGG on T3 both games...aaaaand I got absolutely run over with no chance whatsoever both games. Pretty frustrating stuff, but I won't read much into it that we don't already know.
That said, how have people's experiences been with maindeck Spellbombs? I've been less than satisfied with including them main in the past--despite their high floor they can still be annoyingly clunky--but I'm certainly willing to revisit the notion. 1 main/3 side is what I'm leaning toward, any thoughts?
Oh, without doubt. The soul and core of the deck is still as blue as they come. Speaking of which, your build is very cool. Gelectrode is spice.
I had a chance to watch your debut video. Great work! Your voice suits the job very well, and you’re top class when it comes to explaining the less than obvious lines in a thorough but coherent manner. The amount of these that you saw over the course of the league was very impressive, and your talent as a pilot is obvious. That said, it almost seemed as though you were the victim of your own next-level insights in places, with one or two misclicks which surely would not have happened if you weren’t trying to explain complex lines while playing. No worries here; these will surely lessen with time as live commentating becomes second nature. (I’m a replay guy so I’m fortunate enough to not have this issue, otherwise you’d probably see 10x as many brain farts and misclicks from me!)
It must also be said that fortune was truly not with you over the league as a whole. After basically every match I was thinking “damn, pretty rough beats there, unlucky”. Not much you can do about that! But your build’s potential is clearly huge. Did this league make you rethink any slots, or was this just one among many testing sessions?
@zcowan: I do hope to return to cranking out Turns content in the not-too-distant future; but truthfully, at the moment, Golgari is where it’s at in terms of where my channel growth and Patreon support is coming from, and the variety of Rock builds is the subject of as much contention as splash colors and 75s here! Lots to still figure out as far as optimization goes.
I absolutely encourage you to give streaming/recording a shot if you think it’s something you’ll enjoy! You’ve got a subscriber in me.
Yeah, Spirits seem to be a real hurdle, especially for monoU. Unfortunately, I don't happen to own much in the way of anything splashable...the consequences of too much wheeling and dealing with spare cards!
Ha! True enough.
You might be right, Z. A combination of speed, linearity, and diversity in the format is doing monoU no favors.
Wow, man, this is exiting stuff! I was feeling a little guilty lately, having started off my channel playing Golgari and Turns about equally, and then not releasing any Turns content for a long while...but now the burden has been lifted. I withdraw in the presence of the master.
That's a pretty rough collection of matchups in general, so the fact that you came out feeling optimistic about any variant is a great sign.
Red, eh? A few months back I was pretty convinced UR wasn't where we wanted to be; but times change, and perhaps I was even wrong back then.
If so, that'll be a bitter pill to swallow. I hate red.
(Last call on foils, btw! Tomorrow I'll begin listing them.)
This matchup is one of many, many reasons my sideboard looks the way it does, aka with lots of catch-all or highly flexible removal pieces which have x-for-1 potential.
Kalitas, Maelstrom Pulse, Golgari Charm, and Engineered Explosives are all hugely impactful against Scales. You’ll usually want to take away their namesake card ASAP, be it with removal or discard, and other than that: try to keep the board as clear as possible while sticking an early threat and/or planeswalker.