You want matt's numbers, or Tron numbers? If you want Tron's numbers you have to look/ask around we have sicsmoo's numbers (and they are impressive if you are a tron fan, horrific if not!) and I have seen another sheet that is similar.
That makes more sense.
I'd bet Corey Burkeheart's numbers aren't too far off on Grixis, nor is Hoogland on Kikichord. Using a single player's numbers can create huge skews in the data, based on their luck or play skill.
Unfortunatly its in Wizards best interests to hide the data, we dont 'know' how good Tron is now however if you look at what was added since one of the very few 'real' predators for Tron was removed from the format...
Infect wasn't removed from the format. It's still around. It's just way more difficult to play without Probe, so a lot of the deck of the month crowd dropped it.
Would you really play Bolas over another copy of Kolaghan's Command in a Grixis deck? Command has the same discard mode, but is cheaper and more flexible. If you use it to bring back and cast a Tasigur, the Golden Fang, you've spent 4 mana for a discard and a 4/5 mana sink. That's pretty close to 4 mana for a discard and a 4/4 flying mana sink.
I think the floor on Bolas is about the same as Command, but the ceiling on Command is a lot higher due to its multiple modes.
Comparing Bolas to Kcomamand is incorrect. If you run Bolas, you're running 4 Kcommand. He should be compared to P&K, Olivia, Thought-Knot Seer, or Kalitas- or even Tasigur. He'd be used in a slower, more discard focused version of Grixis as a finisher in place of Angler or Tasigur. In that context, I think he's pretty viable. He's extremely difficult to trade efficiently with. There's no targeted removal spell that trades well with him, his owner always ends up ahead a card.
I think you overestimate the game those decks actually have, and they are a lot closer to 50/50 at best.
sicsmoo's spreadsheet would lead me to think they are very good, or the matches are in Tron's favour...
Most match ups aren't actually all that far off from 50/50, frankly. 60/40 is the most lopsided I'd expect to see with the current deck building conventions and restrictions. Due to the turn 4 rule, decks get to be more durable without having sacrifice that durability for speed. If decks aren't fragile, you don't really get one-sided matchups that actually are 70-30 or 80-20.
Edited, my mistake as I was just scanning through and saw the Guide picture!
I think people need to start looking at Tron's game against the tier 1/2 field. They would probably not like what they see.
Other than Infect, is it a dog to really anything?
Uh, yeah. It's a dog to Bogles (I know it's got Ugin, Ratchet Bomb, and OStone, but those are not fast enough to handle the average hand for Bogles, in my anecdotal experience), Hollow One, Affinity, and fast aggro in general. It's also incredibly soft to KCI, ironically. Storm and most dedicated combo decks will ruin it.
Pods weakness at comboing was it required multiple activations or three cards, and Kiki pod was always medium. The ability to just untap on then 5 with a Finks, slam a pod and kill them dead is unprecedented.
I maintain that gsz is much lower risk.
I disagree, actually. I'd rate them about the same level of risk: low. The thing about GSZ is that it's a reasonable card to cast whenever you draw it, thanks to Dryad Arbor, which I'd rate as the card that makes GSZ appear broken. It's also more flexible in usage than Pod, which you have to plan around to make work. GSZ goes in any deck with primarily green creatures and makes them a lot more consistent. Remember, it wasn't a dedicated combo deck that got Pod banned, it was Abzan Angelpod. Pod is at it's strongest when you've got creatures that are good on their own by providing a lot of value. I don't see how an answerable turn 4-5 win changes this, especially because Melira Pod was able to win on turn 4 reasonably consistently. With Kolaghan's and Abrade, there are good, main deckable answers to Pod itself, which were lacking when Pod was banned. The only answer to GSZ is to counter it or resolve a Teeg/Cage.
Still, both cards are perfectly fine for Vanilla Modern.
Bolas could be the 4-drop of Grixis lists. I mean, Kalitas and P&K have already seen play there. With a specific build, 1x Bolas might work out in the main deck. It reminds me of Kess in a few Legacy Grixis lists.
Yeah, the new Bolas is pretty decent as a Grixis midrange/control finisher. The only way you'll go even on cards in a trade is if they've got a Planeswalker that kills him or a 4/5 or bigger flying blocker. Plus, most Grixis builds run Kolaghan's, making these trades way more favorable to you.
The new Ajani at 4 cmc is a borderline case I think. It's -2 pretty good with Snapcaster Mage, though.
I mean, Pod is almost certainly fine for Modern, but what makes Felidar break it?
It can untap pod on 4 which allows Finks to Kiki felidar/resto in three activations all in one turn.
If you could pod Finks into exarch you can bet it would be busted.
People used to do this with Glen elendra / conscripts but it was much slower and the cards were worse. Finks - guardian blink pod, Finks resto blink guardian blink pod, then guardian into Kiki is much stronger. only have to play a single bad card (guardian ) too.
Sure. It's pretty good, but it's hardly busted. That's realistically only going to happen on turn 4-5 or later, at which point you'll have ample options and time to answer this line of play. If you can't win or answer that fragile a win con by turn 4 in Modern, that's on you and your draws.
One of the interesting things about Pod is how well it can work with the Eldrazi decks. You can take cheap cards like Mimic, Skyspawner, or Reshaper, and turn them into Thought-Knots and Smashers. I've seen a few builds like that which are fairly effective in basically using Pod as Thought-Knot 5-8. Stoneforge is obviously not really overpowered.
This is an interesting point and Eldrazi Pod could be a cool deck - but is it better than the current Eldrazi lists?
It's not better against other Eldrazi lists, that's for sure. Colorless Eldrazi is fairly resilient against Thought-Knot, interestingly. You're trading some interaction for Pod's consistency and fixing, which can be worth it if you're running a colored Eldrazi list. The result is that you gain points against Tezz, Storm, and Miracles, but lose them against Elves, Affinity, URx Pyroclamp, Eldrazi, and other aggressive decks.
Now, I don't think most of the things suggested will happen, and I don't think that any one (or many) NBL tournaments will really give us useful data about what these cards would look like in normal modern, but he brings up some points that I think are pretty valid.
Cards he thinks are too good to ever be legal:
Dark Depths
Eye of Ugin
Sensei's Divining Top
Dig Through Time
Treasure Cruise
Gitaxian Probe
I agree with all of these being far too good or far too much of a problem with the exception of Dig deserving some exploration as to possibly coming off. All of these cards are tier 1 never getting unbanned, while that one seems like it's tier 1.5. Still busted, but maybe appropriately so with the rest of the things we're doing in this format already?
No, this is a pretty good list of the fundamentally broken cards in the Modern card pool. Add Skullclamp, Chrome Mox, Mental Misstep, and Jitte to this list, and I'd agree. The Dig/Cruise debate is more about which decks benefit more from which card, rather than which card is more fundamentally broken.
Cards that were difficult to properly evaluate after one tournament - either because they didn't show up or were dramatically outclassed by *more* broken things:
Ancient Den
Blazing Shoal
Chrome Mox
Cloudpost
Deathrite Shaman
Dread Return
Glimpse of Nature
Golgari Grave-Troll
Green Sun's Zenith
Great Furnace
Hypergenesis
Mental Misstep
Ponder
Preordain
Punishing Fire
Rite of Flame
Seething Song
Seat of the Synod
Second Sunrise
Skullclamp
Splinter Twin
Summer Bloom
Tree of Tales
Umezawa's Jitte
Vault of Whispers
Of the above, he suggests that Jitte, GSZ, Twin, Punishing Fire, and Preordain could probably come off due to their impact on the modern meta in that all of these cards promote slowing down games. I *really* like this line of thinking because I definitely think that giving some fair decks, or heck, decks that are centered around interactions, a shot in the arm might help those decks keep up with the linearity arms race. Something to think about.
To be fair, it's hard to get a coherent image of what NBLM looks like from a tournament like this.
These are cards he thinks were completely outclassed by the rest of the busted cards and should just come off:
Stoneforge Mystic
Birthing Pod
Yeah, I agree with this. We've had countless stoneforge conversations for years in this thread and we always get to the same spot, it's good, but it's not busted good. It helps white. Neat. Pod I think is in a weird spot in that it definitely re-enables a top tier strategy, but not one that I personally feel is anything as close to the degeneracy or the potential for dominance that we've seen out of modern both in the past and recently.
Thoughts?
One of the interesting things about Pod is how well it can work with the Eldrazi decks. You can take cheap cards like Mimic, Skyspawner, or Reshaper, and turn them into Thought-Knots and Smashers. I've seen a few builds like that which are fairly effective in basically using Pod as Thought-Knot 5-8. Stoneforge is obviously not really overpowered.
This t32 does hint at the actual problem with Chrome Mox quite well though- as long as your deck can deal with the CA hit, and has enough colored cards, it speeds you up a turn. That is a really, really low opportunity cost for so powerful an ability. There is no justification to not running it for fair or unfair decks. It enables everything, basically. Anyone can run it, so in essence, almost every deck starts with 4 Chrome Mox. That is why it's never, ever coming off the list- every top 8 would have 28-32 Chrome Mox regardless of the archetype spread.
this same logic can be applied to legacy, and yet it doesnt hold true at all. fast mana throughout magics history has proven to be one of the most fundamentally broken concepts. however that doesnt mean it can be used equally by everyone. chrome mox is simply better used as an enabler for broken ****, the same way SSG is.
Sort of. The difference between legacy and NBLM is that it's much easier to be punished for overextending on cards early. FoW is the premier example of this, but cards like Therapy fall into this category as well. Good fast mana is a lot more common in Legacy, so Chrome Mox has actual competition.
I don't entirely buy the argument that NBL is so different from Modern that we can't extrapolate at all from that format. It's closer to Modern than Legacy is, and we can definitely make extrapolations about card appropriateness and power level based on their Legacy performance. This isn't true for all cards but it is true for many of them, probably most of them. When it comes to conclusions from SCG Conn, here's where I'm at for NBL Modern consequences:
No. It's pretty different from Modern or Legacy. The best comparison for meta considerations is Vintage, IMO. From my experience with the format, it's balanced around prison elements, much like Vintage. This tournament is very clearly skewed towards what the players already knew how to play. Why else would we see 4 color shadow ported into NBLM? It's not an effective set of tools for the meta.
2. DRS is busted. A stock Jund list with +4 DRS and +1 MD Jitte/+1 SB Jitte got T16 in a field packed with Eldrazi. That's ridiculous.
Not as ridiculous as you might think, actually. The Eldrazi decks were really poorly optimized for NBLM- shockingly so, even. Eldrazi isn't that consistent, either, and a DRS Jund deck is absolutely able to capitalize on a stumbling Eldrazi deck. It's also got multiple main deck answers to Chalice, while having beefy 5/6+ Tarmogoyfs. Plus, DRS Shaman speeds up Jund a lot.
3. Mox disproportionately benefits broken things. It won't be unbanned.
I'd say that Mox isn't going to be unbanned, but your reasoning is faulty. First of all, this sample is disproportionately skewed toward what worked in Modern. Jund, Shadow (which is really baffling to me- why on earth would you pick this over Pyroclamp?), and especially Eldrazi. The only deck with more than one copy in the t32 which looked like it had at least thought about the meta was BG Depths. I mean, it could have been improved by dropping down to a functional 56 card deck with Probe... Or going for a more hybrid midrange build with Grim Flayer and Tarmogoyf in the main... Or running a Loam/Crime package to punish slower deck archetypes like Eldrazi and give you some serious inevitability... or splashing blue for Stubborn Denial, Snapcaster Mage, and Mana Leak... or red for Bolt, Kolaghan's, and Punishing Fire...
However, I digress.
This t32 does hint at the actual problem with Chrome Mox quite well though- as long as your deck can deal with the CA hit, and has enough colored cards, it speeds you up a turn. That is a really, really low opportunity cost for so powerful an ability. There is no justification to not running it for fair or unfair decks. It enables everything, basically. Anyone can run it, so in essence, almost every deck starts with 4 Chrome Mox. That is why it's never, ever coming off the list- every top 8 would have 28-32 Chrome Mox regardless of the archetype spread.
4. Hypergenesis is bad in a format packed with Chalices, but still another T2-T3 combo deck. Plus regular Modern has lower Chalice stock. Not getting unbanned.
Chalice's stock would rapidly increase if Hypergenesis was unbanned. Hypergenesis being unbanned would speed up the format, reducing the viable CMC spread, thus making Chalice stronger. It's a huge reason why the meta in NBLM evolved the way it has. It wouldn't break modern in half though- it's a pretty garbage deck on its own merits. Frankly, Living End is a more consistent deck, that's better against most of the decks in Modern right now than Hypergenesis is. The funniest mismatch I've seen is Boggles vs Hypergenesis.
Outside of that, it's hard to extrapolate a lot of "so whats" back to Modern. Obviously, SFM continues to be laughably safe, but I think Wizards will still wait until 2019 to unban because Standard is another hot mess that demands their attention. Twin is probably safe, but I don't see Wizards backpedaling on that one: too much ego, bad blood, and entrenchedness on all sides of the argument. GSZ is also probably safe, and Preordain would still probably benefit fair blue decks more than unfair ones.
I honestly don't think this tournament provided enough data to show anything of note, other than that people will gravitate toward known quantities, even if the known quantities have fatal flaws. If someone had thought to bring 4x Ensnaring Bridge and/or 4x Blood Moon, they probably could have top 8'd.
NBL Modern is a different format than Modern, so I don't think it has any use for predicting unbans.
Exactly.
As a NBL player and crafter, I get really mad on how bad most of the top 32 decks were designed. I'm also surprised that nobody played Tezzerator (arguably the strongest Control deck), Affinity(with Skullclamp, only one guy in day 2) and Dredge, however, I attribute this to the lack of knowledge about the format than anything else.
Though, the deck BBD played is REALLY good (from a deck design perspective), it's Eldrazi match-up is really good.
Also, something people need to realise about NBL Modern, the angst from Combo is an illusion, Control decks either play Chalice or Top + Counterbalance, the "Tempo" decks have enough disruption (be it Discard, Counters (MM, Spell Pierce, Leak), or hatebears (Thalia says hi)) and all other decks have either a combination of the last mentioned things, or can just race you.
So yeah, for me it was expected that the metagame will look something like this, cause it is the "lazy" approach (people knew what is obviously good so they played, for the next layer they didn't want to invest enough time).
Greetings,
Kathal
Well, in their defense, NBLM Tezz is probably about as punishing of poor play as Lantern Control. At this point it's pretty much the strongest control deck in the format thanks to its ability cheat on mana, but it's not an easy deck to pick up. Too many tutor effects. Honestly, I was more surprised at the lack of Pyroclamp. It's a pretty forgiving archetype, it does reasonably well against Eldrazi aggro, and you get to play Skullclamp, Treasure Cruise, Chrome Mox, Jitte, MM, and Probe. Ditto for Death and Taxes, pretty easy to play, reasonable matchups across the board.
I can't wait to watch the NBL modern tomorrow. Cedric said this is really an experiment to determine what can not come off the ban list pretty much ever. I predict we will be seeing eye of ugin, skullclamp and Dark Depths do very well. We may see splinter twin, DTT, treasure cruise, mental misstep, Preordain, birthing pod, glimpse of nature, hypergenesis, and a few others too.
But all that said, I am wondering what we will not see, and does that mean it would be ok to unban it?
I predict we do not see very much dread return, GGT, artifact lands, summer bloom or second sunrise. I am definitely NOT calling for these to be unbanned. Some cards I listed as doing well like preordain or twin are often named as possible unbans, but very few people would push for a GGT, summer bloom or second sunrise unban even if the decks perform very poorly in NBL modern.
I am really asking do the results of this tournament really matter at all for unbans or is it only solidifying the status of the most broken cards?
I am open to a list of about 10-12 cards that I think may be acceptable in modern today and I don't think I would be upset if they were unbanned. If those appear oppressive tomorrow I think I will change my mind on the offending card and I will want it to stay banned, but I do not think a card that is under performing tomorrow will change my mind the same way if I thought it should be banned originally.
I dunno. Right now, I'd expect Storm, U/x Tezzerator Prison, Grixis Pyroclamp, W/x D&T, Affinity, Elves, and Eldrazi Aggro to be the clear top teir. Post decks I think are going to be hit hard by Damping Sphere. Miracles has been hit hard by Sorcerous Spyglass of all cards, since it's so easy to cast on turn 1 in NBLM, and there's no FoW for Miracles to use as a crutch. Needle, at least, can be answered with Misstep. Bloom, Combo Dredge, Hypergenesis, Eggs, and Combo Infect are going to see play, and then get promptly destroyed. Bloom and Dredge are just too easy to shut down with common prison elements, though if they get the nuts they're really strong. Hypergenesis, Combo Infect, and Eggs just aren't really that good. Belcher is a wildcard, as always.
Pod, Aggro Dredge, Jund, UB control (not Jim Davis' janky superfriends list), Fairies, Twin, and Reanimator are all solid decks that could do well, but I think meta concerns lock them out of the top tables in larger sample sizes. Pod, Aggro Dredge, and Reanimator get maimed by commonly maindecked cards like Grafdigger's Cage and Spyglass... but they have good beatdown plan b. Fairies needs Chrome Mox in their opener to be effective. Twin, Jund, and UB Control are just too fair to ever really overtake the format.
And what exactly are you basing this on? Just a gut feeling?
That makes more sense.
I'd bet Corey Burkeheart's numbers aren't too far off on Grixis, nor is Hoogland on Kikichord. Using a single player's numbers can create huge skews in the data, based on their luck or play skill.
Infect wasn't removed from the format. It's still around. It's just way more difficult to play without Probe, so a lot of the deck of the month crowd dropped it.
Comparing Bolas to Kcomamand is incorrect. If you run Bolas, you're running 4 Kcommand. He should be compared to P&K, Olivia, Thought-Knot Seer, or Kalitas- or even Tasigur. He'd be used in a slower, more discard focused version of Grixis as a finisher in place of Angler or Tasigur. In that context, I think he's pretty viable. He's extremely difficult to trade efficiently with. There's no targeted removal spell that trades well with him, his owner always ends up ahead a card.
Most people just want cards like Blood Moon, Boil, and Flashfires out of the format, so the answer I'd think is usually "no."
Most match ups aren't actually all that far off from 50/50, frankly. 60/40 is the most lopsided I'd expect to see with the current deck building conventions and restrictions. Due to the turn 4 rule, decks get to be more durable without having sacrifice that durability for speed. If decks aren't fragile, you don't really get one-sided matchups that actually are 70-30 or 80-20.
Uh, yeah. It's a dog to Bogles (I know it's got Ugin, Ratchet Bomb, and OStone, but those are not fast enough to handle the average hand for Bogles, in my anecdotal experience), Hollow One, Affinity, and fast aggro in general. It's also incredibly soft to KCI, ironically. Storm and most dedicated combo decks will ruin it.
I disagree, actually. I'd rate them about the same level of risk: low. The thing about GSZ is that it's a reasonable card to cast whenever you draw it, thanks to Dryad Arbor, which I'd rate as the card that makes GSZ appear broken. It's also more flexible in usage than Pod, which you have to plan around to make work. GSZ goes in any deck with primarily green creatures and makes them a lot more consistent. Remember, it wasn't a dedicated combo deck that got Pod banned, it was Abzan Angelpod. Pod is at it's strongest when you've got creatures that are good on their own by providing a lot of value. I don't see how an answerable turn 4-5 win changes this, especially because Melira Pod was able to win on turn 4 reasonably consistently. With Kolaghan's and Abrade, there are good, main deckable answers to Pod itself, which were lacking when Pod was banned. The only answer to GSZ is to counter it or resolve a Teeg/Cage.
Still, both cards are perfectly fine for Vanilla Modern.
Yeah, the new Bolas is pretty decent as a Grixis midrange/control finisher. The only way you'll go even on cards in a trade is if they've got a Planeswalker that kills him or a 4/5 or bigger flying blocker. Plus, most Grixis builds run Kolaghan's, making these trades way more favorable to you.
The new Ajani at 4 cmc is a borderline case I think. It's -2 pretty good with Snapcaster Mage, though.
Sure. It's pretty good, but it's hardly busted. That's realistically only going to happen on turn 4-5 or later, at which point you'll have ample options and time to answer this line of play. If you can't win or answer that fragile a win con by turn 4 in Modern, that's on you and your draws.
How exactly is this any better than Podding into Deceiver Exarch? Or Siege Rhino? Or Sunscourge Champion? Or Renegade Rallier?
I mean, Pod is almost certainly fine for Modern, but what makes Felidar break it?
It's not better against other Eldrazi lists, that's for sure. Colorless Eldrazi is fairly resilient against Thought-Knot, interestingly. You're trading some interaction for Pod's consistency and fixing, which can be worth it if you're running a colored Eldrazi list. The result is that you gain points against Tezz, Storm, and Miracles, but lose them against Elves, Affinity, URx Pyroclamp, Eldrazi, and other aggressive decks.
No, this is a pretty good list of the fundamentally broken cards in the Modern card pool. Add Skullclamp, Chrome Mox, Mental Misstep, and Jitte to this list, and I'd agree. The Dig/Cruise debate is more about which decks benefit more from which card, rather than which card is more fundamentally broken.
To be fair, it's hard to get a coherent image of what NBLM looks like from a tournament like this.
One of the interesting things about Pod is how well it can work with the Eldrazi decks. You can take cheap cards like Mimic, Skyspawner, or Reshaper, and turn them into Thought-Knots and Smashers. I've seen a few builds like that which are fairly effective in basically using Pod as Thought-Knot 5-8. Stoneforge is obviously not really overpowered.
Sort of. The difference between legacy and NBLM is that it's much easier to be punished for overextending on cards early. FoW is the premier example of this, but cards like Therapy fall into this category as well. Good fast mana is a lot more common in Legacy, so Chrome Mox has actual competition.
No. It's pretty different from Modern or Legacy. The best comparison for meta considerations is Vintage, IMO. From my experience with the format, it's balanced around prison elements, much like Vintage. This tournament is very clearly skewed towards what the players already knew how to play. Why else would we see 4 color shadow ported into NBLM? It's not an effective set of tools for the meta.
Yeah. Eye is never going to be unbanned. It does way, way too much.
Not as ridiculous as you might think, actually. The Eldrazi decks were really poorly optimized for NBLM- shockingly so, even. Eldrazi isn't that consistent, either, and a DRS Jund deck is absolutely able to capitalize on a stumbling Eldrazi deck. It's also got multiple main deck answers to Chalice, while having beefy 5/6+ Tarmogoyfs. Plus, DRS Shaman speeds up Jund a lot.
I'd say that Mox isn't going to be unbanned, but your reasoning is faulty. First of all, this sample is disproportionately skewed toward what worked in Modern. Jund, Shadow (which is really baffling to me- why on earth would you pick this over Pyroclamp?), and especially Eldrazi. The only deck with more than one copy in the t32 which looked like it had at least thought about the meta was BG Depths. I mean, it could have been improved by dropping down to a functional 56 card deck with Probe... Or going for a more hybrid midrange build with Grim Flayer and Tarmogoyf in the main... Or running a Loam/Crime package to punish slower deck archetypes like Eldrazi and give you some serious inevitability... or splashing blue for Stubborn Denial, Snapcaster Mage, and Mana Leak... or red for Bolt, Kolaghan's, and Punishing Fire...
However, I digress.
This t32 does hint at the actual problem with Chrome Mox quite well though- as long as your deck can deal with the CA hit, and has enough colored cards, it speeds you up a turn. That is a really, really low opportunity cost for so powerful an ability. There is no justification to not running it for fair or unfair decks. It enables everything, basically. Anyone can run it, so in essence, almost every deck starts with 4 Chrome Mox. That is why it's never, ever coming off the list- every top 8 would have 28-32 Chrome Mox regardless of the archetype spread.
Chalice's stock would rapidly increase if Hypergenesis was unbanned. Hypergenesis being unbanned would speed up the format, reducing the viable CMC spread, thus making Chalice stronger. It's a huge reason why the meta in NBLM evolved the way it has. It wouldn't break modern in half though- it's a pretty garbage deck on its own merits. Frankly, Living End is a more consistent deck, that's better against most of the decks in Modern right now than Hypergenesis is. The funniest mismatch I've seen is Boggles vs Hypergenesis.
I honestly don't think this tournament provided enough data to show anything of note, other than that people will gravitate toward known quantities, even if the known quantities have fatal flaws. If someone had thought to bring 4x Ensnaring Bridge and/or 4x Blood Moon, they probably could have top 8'd.
Well, in their defense, NBLM Tezz is probably about as punishing of poor play as Lantern Control. At this point it's pretty much the strongest control deck in the format thanks to its ability cheat on mana, but it's not an easy deck to pick up. Too many tutor effects. Honestly, I was more surprised at the lack of Pyroclamp. It's a pretty forgiving archetype, it does reasonably well against Eldrazi aggro, and you get to play Skullclamp, Treasure Cruise, Chrome Mox, Jitte, MM, and Probe. Ditto for Death and Taxes, pretty easy to play, reasonable matchups across the board.
I dunno. Right now, I'd expect Storm, U/x Tezzerator Prison, Grixis Pyroclamp, W/x D&T, Affinity, Elves, and Eldrazi Aggro to be the clear top teir. Post decks I think are going to be hit hard by Damping Sphere. Miracles has been hit hard by Sorcerous Spyglass of all cards, since it's so easy to cast on turn 1 in NBLM, and there's no FoW for Miracles to use as a crutch. Needle, at least, can be answered with Misstep. Bloom, Combo Dredge, Hypergenesis, Eggs, and Combo Infect are going to see play, and then get promptly destroyed. Bloom and Dredge are just too easy to shut down with common prison elements, though if they get the nuts they're really strong. Hypergenesis, Combo Infect, and Eggs just aren't really that good. Belcher is a wildcard, as always.
Pod, Aggro Dredge, Jund, UB control (not Jim Davis' janky superfriends list), Fairies, Twin, and Reanimator are all solid decks that could do well, but I think meta concerns lock them out of the top tables in larger sample sizes. Pod, Aggro Dredge, and Reanimator get maimed by commonly maindecked cards like Grafdigger's Cage and Spyglass... but they have good beatdown plan b. Fairies needs Chrome Mox in their opener to be effective. Twin, Jund, and UB Control are just too fair to ever really overtake the format.