Wizards dropped support for Faeries after Lorwyn. It's got a block's creature base. Spirits are a recurring tribe now so they get better and better each year.
Many people are complaining about the fact that blue lacks generic answers and suggest cards like Counterspell to enter Modern which has no place imo. This refers to control, not just blue as a color although blue is essential part of most control decks and also top control strategies play blue but I admit that blue doesn't mnecessary mean control and vice versa. My point is that neither blue as a color neither control as an archetype don't need a help currently and would even be wrong to give them notable card after they got AV and Jeskai also Nahiri which are both decent tools. I mean there isn't any rule that some control shells needsto be the best deck in format and this exactly is the feeling I get a lot of the time when reading comments of people who play control.
I'm not sure how you can argue that control isn't weak. Modern decks attack along almost as many axis as they do in legacy (lands, poison, damage, instant/sorcery combos, graveyard, artifacts, creatures, spells) and modern has much weaker answers. You gave Jeskai as an example of good control but it's still a relatively weak deck and neither AV nor Nahiri are enough to make it strong.
The main problem I see here is that blue players wanted AV and were constantly complaning about it and how it should be unbaned to help control. They finally got it but they are still not happy and blue color as well as control is not bad positioned at all so there's no reason for such complaining. I agree that it's not the most represented archetype in format but that doesn't mean it's doing bad or that it needs help.
This seems like kind of an odd conclusion to make. People wanted AV unbanned because it isn't ban worthy. There are a lot of things that were snap banned by Wizards when modern was created that aren't really banworthy. Ancestral visions honestly isn't even that good of a card in a lot of cases, I played it a lot in the old extended and while it's great in grindy matchups it's absolutely terrible against anything fast. I don't even know that many decks are playing it, weren't there something like 3 copies total in all of the top 8's at the 3 recent GPs?
I also don't think anyone's saying that blue is bad. Blue has top tier choices in infect, Bant Eldrazi, Merfolk etc. They just all fit into basically the same archetype.
This is the best variant of the deck I've seen recently. It's a little less cute than some of the other variants (no shackles, no traverse, no blood moon) but it's solidly on the RUG gameplan and doesn't feel awkward very often. I grabbed the list from one of the top 32 decks at an SCG Open last month.
For the most part, I agree with this. Many users in this thread have historically been terrible at card evaluation when it comes to ban/unban effects.
-Valakut ban will break the format!
-BBE is gone. Jund dead.
-Song is gone. Storm dead.
-DRS is gone. BGx decks dead.
-Don't unban Nacatl! Zoo will dominate the format!
-Faeries = format crushing! BB must stay banned!
Of those evaluations, all but the Song one turned out to be wildly off base. Storm didn't die but it is definitely a lot less viable now than before. Everything else though? People were completely wrong.
Given this track record, I am suspicious of our evaluation of Sword. On the one hand, there is no reasonable way it can HELP aggro, which is probably reason enough to keep it banned. But on the other hand, it's probably not AS crippling to aggro as most people believe. The issue, as I see it, is that aggro is so non-viable in the format right now that Wizards doesn't want to risk giving it one more bad matchup. Maybe it would be safe and maybe we could show that with some testing. But I don't see Wizards unbanning it given the current state of the metagame, and given their desire to help aggro as much as possible.
I was telling people that those cards didn't matter and I'd still say that Thopter Foundry is too strong to take off the banned list. I played the old UB Fae when it had AV, Jitte, BB and everything else and it was a good but not amazing deck and wouldn't stomp the format if everything was unbanned in Modern. The Foundry Combo is a whole different beast, it barely takes up any slots in the decks that ran it (remember, it was generally jammed into a different combo deck because it required so little commitment) and it won you the game very fast when you assembled it. You could basically just take Modern Jund and jam it in there. If you wanted a dedicated build you could also go for a controlling midrange style like the UB Tezz deck from Japan (it basically gets to play the combo for free since it Tezz finds both halves very quickly). Unban it and it warps the format.
Now that I think about it, Lingering Souls even recurs Sword. That would be an insane control deck with Liliana.
Voice of Resurgence is mediocre. Not a bad creature at all but the initial 2/2 body isn't much to look at and a lot of decks either run at sorcery speed or they do something crazy enough that they don't care about the token (if Twin goes infinite they don't care much about the extra blocker). It's decent in a few decks but it's not much of a reason to build a deck.
Rug Midrange plays 24 lands though, so in a long game you can still cast the delve cards for mana and you have the means to counteract the graveyard hate. If this becomes common it's also easy to side out Goyf, side in some extra control cards and finishers (ie. +Baloths, Keranos, Batterskull, Huntmaster). It's not the best but grave hate is also relatively weak against these kinds of decks.
I'm pretty sure the new Delve cards will but RUG Midrange/Control on the map. I've been playing it for a bit and right now it's very powerful (on about the same level as BGx, maybe slightly worse) but it lacked anything truly strong to recommend it but the ability to draw 3/find two good cards in your top seven and then make plays the same turn gives it huge mid game boost that lets it close things quickly. I'd also look at UWR and BUG, the decks that grind things out early and explode late are going to love that extra draw power.
RUG Man is, abstractly, a pretty good card. The problem is that in the current lists that are most likely to use him, RUG Delver and RUG Midrange, he competes for slots with a bunch of other cards. There's obviously Delver, Goyf, and Tiago, but there's also Pyromancer, Huntmaster, Lavamancer, Clique, and a bunch of other cards that are vying for that slot. I don't see him being included over those cards, especially because his abilities are a little expensive in a deck that needs to retain mana to do other stuff. It does, however, give me great hope that BUG Man will be good enough to help out my favorite wedge, a wedge that currently doesn't see a lot of Modern play.
I'd disagree that it's outright not good enough to see play in a RUG Midrange deck. It does compete with Huntmaster and Clique but it is both more aggressive on an open board than either of them, it's harder to remove (Huntmaster and Clique both fail the bolt test and Knuckles passes without his abilities) and it has more immediate late game power than either. Clique is better against combo and Huntmaster is better against burn or grindy green decks but it's all a matter of trade-offs, not a simple choice of which is better.
Chromatic Star replaces itself if it dies while ensouled.
I know that. Same goes for if it is Shrapnel Blasted. But honestly, it is not what I would want to be running in an aggro deck if I wasn't trying to support Goyf.
You don't need it to cast goyf. You have 14 sources of Green mana without it, it's just a card that's good with the rest of the deck (cheap artifact that you can sacrifice without any harsh feelings). It isn't necessary to support Goyf (although you can use it to cast him if needed). I've played mono green stompy decks with less than 14 sources of green mana, he's fine.
Ok I looked in other sections but nothing .. Yet on the GP Kobe list...
I built it up and will try it out tonight at modern.
That said... I think this build could very well be a meta pick for the gp, as some of the numbers are a bit awkward ( just in fishing with it).. Namely 4x goyf and 4x blast... But well see!?
The basic idea with the deck is that you have both explosive starts and good topdecks. You have three main power cards, Goyf, Ensoul and Cranial Plating. You can get a t3 win with T1 Ensoul Ornithopter, T2 swing for 5 and cast goyf, t3 Swing for 6 (assuming a 1/2 goyf) and cast Galv and Shrapnel Blast. You can also swing in for a bunch late off cranial on a Blinkmoth or an Ensoul on a Citadel.
While Goyf is powerful, I can't see how you could justify cutting Ravager for it.
Because he didn't cut Ravager for it. He built a completely new deck. That deck is not anything near the Traditional Modern Affinity shell. About ~1/3 of the cards are different.
If you were to take a normal Affinity list -Ravager +Goyf, yeah it would be pretty bad. But he didn't do that.
I suppose that that is true. I just can't see how this would be better than normal affinity other than it being unexpected. Cutting Etched Champion and Arcbound Ravager to be able to support Tarmogoyf doesn't seem like a good tradeoff to me. I do like Ensoul Artifact and Shrapnel Blast though.
It's just fundamentally not an affinity deck. The deck lacks a lot of the synergy that affinity has where it can play a bunch of small guys and pump them up with signal pests, overseers, master of etherium and ravager. That swarm approach has been replaced by a new strategy where they play single threats that are hard to deal with using Cranial Plating, Ensoul Artifact and Tarmogoyf and then finishes the opponent with the most powerful burn in the format. This is a deck that can play T1 Baneslayer, T2 Goyf and then kill you t3 with burn.
I'm not sure how you can argue that control isn't weak. Modern decks attack along almost as many axis as they do in legacy (lands, poison, damage, instant/sorcery combos, graveyard, artifacts, creatures, spells) and modern has much weaker answers. You gave Jeskai as an example of good control but it's still a relatively weak deck and neither AV nor Nahiri are enough to make it strong.
This seems like kind of an odd conclusion to make. People wanted AV unbanned because it isn't ban worthy. There are a lot of things that were snap banned by Wizards when modern was created that aren't really banworthy. Ancestral visions honestly isn't even that good of a card in a lot of cases, I played it a lot in the old extended and while it's great in grindy matchups it's absolutely terrible against anything fast. I don't even know that many decks are playing it, weren't there something like 3 copies total in all of the top 8's at the 3 recent GPs?
I also don't think anyone's saying that blue is bad. Blue has top tier choices in infect, Bant Eldrazi, Merfolk etc. They just all fit into basically the same archetype.
2 Huntmaster of the Fells
4 Snapcaster Mage
3 Vendilion Clique
4 Tarmogoyf
4 Misty Rainforest
4 Scalding Tarn
1 Breeding Pool
1 Stomping Ground
2 Steam Vents
1 Forest
1 Mountain
3 Island
3 Sulfur Falls
1 Desolate Lighthouse
2 Lumbering Falls
4 Serum Visions
1 Mana Leak
4 Lightning Bolt
2 Electrolyze
3 Spell Snare
2 Cryptic Command
1 Dismember
1 Dispel
1 Roast
1 Roast
2 Anger of the Gods
1 Counterflux
1 Dispel
3 Fulminator Mage
1 Negate
2 Ancient Grudge
2 Threads of Disloyalty
2 Engineered Explosives
I was telling people that those cards didn't matter and I'd still say that Thopter Foundry is too strong to take off the banned list. I played the old UB Fae when it had AV, Jitte, BB and everything else and it was a good but not amazing deck and wouldn't stomp the format if everything was unbanned in Modern. The Foundry Combo is a whole different beast, it barely takes up any slots in the decks that ran it (remember, it was generally jammed into a different combo deck because it required so little commitment) and it won you the game very fast when you assembled it. You could basically just take Modern Jund and jam it in there. If you wanted a dedicated build you could also go for a controlling midrange style like the UB Tezz deck from Japan (it basically gets to play the combo for free since it Tezz finds both halves very quickly). Unban it and it warps the format.
Now that I think about it, Lingering Souls even recurs Sword. That would be an insane control deck with Liliana.
I'd disagree that it's outright not good enough to see play in a RUG Midrange deck. It does compete with Huntmaster and Clique but it is both more aggressive on an open board than either of them, it's harder to remove (Huntmaster and Clique both fail the bolt test and Knuckles passes without his abilities) and it has more immediate late game power than either. Clique is better against combo and Huntmaster is better against burn or grindy green decks but it's all a matter of trade-offs, not a simple choice of which is better.
You don't need it to cast goyf. You have 14 sources of Green mana without it, it's just a card that's good with the rest of the deck (cheap artifact that you can sacrifice without any harsh feelings). It isn't necessary to support Goyf (although you can use it to cast him if needed). I've played mono green stompy decks with less than 14 sources of green mana, he's fine.
The basic idea with the deck is that you have both explosive starts and good topdecks. You have three main power cards, Goyf, Ensoul and Cranial Plating. You can get a t3 win with T1 Ensoul Ornithopter, T2 swing for 5 and cast goyf, t3 Swing for 6 (assuming a 1/2 goyf) and cast Galv and Shrapnel Blast. You can also swing in for a bunch late off cranial on a Blinkmoth or an Ensoul on a Citadel.
It's just fundamentally not an affinity deck. The deck lacks a lot of the synergy that affinity has where it can play a bunch of small guys and pump them up with signal pests, overseers, master of etherium and ravager. That swarm approach has been replaced by a new strategy where they play single threats that are hard to deal with using Cranial Plating, Ensoul Artifact and Tarmogoyf and then finishes the opponent with the most powerful burn in the format. This is a deck that can play T1 Baneslayer, T2 Goyf and then kill you t3 with burn.