I've always been a fan of the deck but said the same thing. This deck fails as a mid range. It needs to be fast. I think young wolf really fixes that. I think I'll be doing some testing of my own, basicly a speed wolf version. Cheap burn, curve ending at 3 (Maybe with huntmaster/curse of exhaustion, but I'm sure you all will test it more than me.)
Edit: tweeked my numbers. Huntmaster is diffently a 3 of, but young wolf is amazing. He solves alot of the decks problems. Hes ammune to removal and blocks like a champ. I'm actually having success with my build. He takes out rdw. Best yet, Ive been doing it with out flipping over things, the threat of flip has been good, the day sides just working (Pump, snipe, undieing, extra wolf) has been enough.
Gotta admit, I LOVE the idea of focusing less on the werewolves & more on the wolf/werewolf RG Aggro plan. Young Wolf ftw. However, to that end why are you running Scorned Villager? I can't figure out what you could hope to be ramping into; and if you want to be aggro, why not just swap it out with the beefier Gatstaf Shepherd?
Wait... is it because you only want werewolves with effective human sides as well? I could see that. Maybe if you're ramping into T3 Garruk that'd be sweet... dunno. I can't figure out Scorned Villager yet.
Also, if we're doing wolf/werewolf aggro... why play Huntmaster when you can play Garruk? He's a free wolf every turn! And if he ends up flipping over, then they have to deal with lord-buffed deathtouch wolves! Seems better to me than Huntmaster.
EDIT: Also, what's your thought of Kruin Outlaw? Seems better in a straight-up wolf/ww aggro deck than Daybreak Ranger, though of course there should be 3 Rangers in the side...
The main advantage is that it doesn't die to Day of Judgement, of which I run 3. I run 25 Lands and with those 4 spheres, I never have trouble hitting the bigger creatures.
So are you running a more ramp/control deck, then? Spheres, lands, removal, and then bombs like Garruk, Elspeth, Sorin, Grave Titan, and Hero? I take it no Doomed Travelers, no Blade Splicers? What about Intangible Virtue? Also, do you run BoP?
he also says because the card had so many functional elements they had trouble balancing it at first. so i think complexity is a pretty accepted aspect of the card. it certainly has a symmetry, but i don't think it has an obvious concept. which is fine, they couldn't possibly come up with a top down conceptual justification for every card. i just prefer it when they do for a gold mythic rare with that much text.
Funny, I always just thought of it as the front side being the green side and the back side being the red side. Being symmetrical REALLY helps you remember what this guy does, and while there isn't an external concept for reference, per-say, the symmetry makes it easily grokkable.
Yes. Fortunately, they've succeeded there. Legacy feels much more organic- like it grew naturally and makes a good deal of sense. Modern feels like someone put it in a vice and squeezed.
Honestly, that's basically to be expected. Legacy was, for all intents and purposes, the first of its kind, and so it would only make sense for it to develop 'naturally.' They had a sense of what kind of things needed to be banned already, as they had been banned in Vintage prior to the creation of Legacy, but when they created Legacy I *promise* you they didn't have a sense of where they wanted Legacy to go or what it would look like as a healthy format.
In comparison, after all the things that WotC has learned about eternal formats--and all the things that *we* have learned about eternal formats--in the last 7 years means that when going into the process of creating a new competitive eternal format, everybody is going to have a preconception of what they *want* it to look like, whether it's like Standard 2.0, Legacy 2.0, Old Extended, or something entirely new. With Legacy, there were nowhere near as many preconceptions about what the format "should" look like. But so long as these preconceptions exist about Modern, it's going to feel a little overly-manipulated. It's not WotC's fault at all; that's simply the only way it could have happened.
As a side note, if Modern *were* to develop naturally, it would have been able to do so only if Old Extended had never existed and nobody had anything that they could use to compare.
I love this! I have a casual deck that does something like this that I now intend on upgrading to be a competitive Modern deck (but without all the silly shocks and fetches). After minimal playing with it on Cockatrice, here are a few thoughts:
> Visions of Beyond is AWESOME. I have yet to live my dream of T0 Archive Trap x2, T1 Visions, but it's won me games.
> I don't see why at least 2x Into the Roil isn't in people's maindecks. It's good for knocking out Leylines, but it's also good as a boomerang (for annoying threats), which is no laughing matter. It's nice to basically be running 6x Smother for enemy Goyfs, considering I can Roil their threat and then counter it following turn.
> Speaking of counters, why Remand? I would expect Rune Snag to be the go-to counterspell 5-8 (after Mana Leak).
> I'm still interested in Leyline of the Void in the side, as a 3x to swap in to replace Visions (since they're so anti-synergistic) if needed. Against graveyard-based decks... which, frankly, is probably most decks, Leyline is REALLY GOOD. Stops Eldrazi shuffle effects, neuters Goyfs, shuts down Punishing Grove (not that we're worried about that), neuters Life from the Loam and Snapcaster... and I know that Surgical Extraction is more ideal, since it still works with Visions, but I feel like sometimes you just need the Leyline. Am I crazy, or is there other reasons not to include it?
> I also have considered both Jace Beleren and Liliana of the Veil as supporters, but I'm not sure how badly I want them. At the moment I've replaced Jace with Twincast (can't decide between the two) and Liliana would go in if Leyline came out (of the sideboard). Just thought I'd suggest those two, since Jace can be obscene card advantage and Liliana can ruin pretty much any deck (although having played against her with this deck... she didn't really bother me ).
I don't want Modern to be a format where your victory hinges on your opening hand; and luckily I think that Wizards agrees with me (which is why Mental Misstep will remained banned).
You mean grapeshot storm, right? Because empty the warrens in pointless here. Leyline of Sanctity does a handy job of making that grapeshot dead, but I agree it can be difficult to get ll the pieces in play fast enough to survive.
I also run three Ethersworn Canonist in the side to deal with Storm. Does its job well, though if the Heartless Storm deck that's floating around these forums picks up steam, I'm going to have to go find some Rule of Law. :/
I was going to reply, and then realized this is one of those discutions that could go on and on and we aren't going to get anywhere because we have already set our minds haha.
I really hope they fix this and we end up with a fun and diverse format. I'm just a little scared that Wizards vision of that is a format where you can play all kind of different mid-range strategies. Also I'm sad for the death of fast combo
Haha fair enough. You're definitely right about us arguing semantics.
However, considering a format that allows midrange strategies to be viable is absolutely a format I'd love to play, and I hate hate hate fast combo, I think what you want out of Modern and what I want out of Modern are completely different things
Jace can be handled by a lightning bolt. Or a pulse. Or a tribal flames, or a lighting helix. or one swing from a nactl. That is a terrible example of something that is hard to deal with because it is far from hard to deal with.(the only reason it was banned in standard was because wotc forgot to print ways to kill planeswalkers other than burn)
Really? Jace was only banned in Standard because WOTC forgot to print ways to killplaneswalkers other than burn? (and that's just from when Jace was in Standard) Where are you getting your information from?
Jace was banned because he was AN ENTIRE CONTROL DECK BY HIMSELF.
However I do not see the argument that bolting a Jace after he brainstorms is suddenly a 2-for-1. Is every ETB creature now automatically a 2-for-1? I wouldn't say so. (Maybe it technically is, but that's obviously not always good enough to be dominant, or else the only creatures anyone would play would be ones with ETB effects.)
The thing is not all the old cards are broken, some are unbelievable broken, some are unbelievable bad and some others are ok. Among the cards you mentioned, all of them have been printed again (at least until Masques, wich was a reasonably fair set) because they are among the "ok" cards. I'm putting the old broken cards (Black Lotus, Ancestral Recall, Time Walk, the 5 Moxes, etc.) in a different category than the rest (like Earthcraft). The cards on the first group have a much higher power level than the other 10.000 cards. That isn't the case for the cards on the second group, they are just punctual design mistakes, most of them aren't that bad because designers have been doing better and better along the years, some aren't that strong by themselves but combine powerfully with another cards, others are indeed very strong, but not stupidly strong, just a little stronger than we'd like to.
So what I'm trying to say is: Modern is free from the cards of the first group. All of the cards in Modern's banned list are punctual design mistakes, wich aren't very common anymore, and hence is unfair to say Modern's banned list is proportionally smaller than Legacy's one, because Legacy has an aditional problem with its card pool (in addition to the ocational punctual design mistakes) which are the flagrant design mistakes present in the first sets.
Okay, that argument seems a bit more reasonable. The difference is not that they design cards differently now than they used to (which is true) but, basically, that Legacy includes cards from sets that were poorly designed (also true). But that's not really a structurally sound argument either, because those cards that were from earlier, poorly-designed sets ARE a major part of Legacy. ABU duals are not on the Legacy ban list, but they're still miles ahead of the power level of anything in Modern; they are from the same poorly-designed sets that gave us the Power Nine (your example). And yet they're not banned. If we're going to rule out cards just because they're from earlier sets that were punctuated with what we, from our modern perspective, would call "design mistakes," then we either have to rule out all those cards (like the original dual lands, as I said before), or else concede that we're no longer comparing Modern to Legacy any more.
Ultimately, if you try to say "cards X-Y can be discounted because they were [mistakes/poor design/from early sets/etc]," then you're no longer comparing to Legacy. You're comparing Modern to Format-That-Resembles-Legacy-Somewhat. Part of what makes Legacy what it is are those really old, really powerful cards. Some are banned, some are not. You can't discount them, because then it's not Legacy.
The other thing is that your same argument could be made for the Mirrodin artifact lands. Yes, they were design mistakes that were the first of their kind (who would have known how powerful an artifact land would be? (mirrodin) Who would have known how broken a Mox would be? (alpha)). However, they existed within a larger set of which the rest is legal in Modern. You can't just discount cards that you want to.
Legacy and Modern have roughly proportional ban lists for the size of their card pools. Modern is a growing format that is growing shakily but is very quickly becoming balanced and fun. Both of these things are true. Could some things come off the ban list? Sure. Will they? I don't know, but if WotC's attitude towards Legacy is any indication, I'd expect them to start picking cards off over the next several years, assuming no major catastrophes appear again (lolstoneforge).
Dark Depths, Sword of the Meek, and many other banned combo piecers are also perfectly fair cards by themselves. It's the combo which is too powerful in those cases. In this case, it's the fetch+shocks combo which is too powerful.
And to ban the combo, you've got to ban one of the perfectly fair combo pieces.
I would still disagree that the Fetches are ban-worthy.
Gotta admit, I LOVE the idea of focusing less on the werewolves & more on the wolf/werewolf RG Aggro plan. Young Wolf ftw. However, to that end why are you running Scorned Villager? I can't figure out what you could hope to be ramping into; and if you want to be aggro, why not just swap it out with the beefier Gatstaf Shepherd?
Wait... is it because you only want werewolves with effective human sides as well? I could see that. Maybe if you're ramping into T3 Garruk that'd be sweet... dunno. I can't figure out Scorned Villager yet.
Also, if we're doing wolf/werewolf aggro... why play Huntmaster when you can play Garruk? He's a free wolf every turn! And if he ends up flipping over, then they have to deal with lord-buffed deathtouch wolves! Seems better to me than Huntmaster.
EDIT: Also, what's your thought of Kruin Outlaw? Seems better in a straight-up wolf/ww aggro deck than Daybreak Ranger, though of course there should be 3 Rangers in the side...
So are you running a more ramp/control deck, then? Spheres, lands, removal, and then bombs like Garruk, Elspeth, Sorin, Grave Titan, and Hero? I take it no Doomed Travelers, no Blade Splicers? What about Intangible Virtue? Also, do you run BoP?
Funny, I always just thought of it as the front side being the green side and the back side being the red side. Being symmetrical REALLY helps you remember what this guy does, and while there isn't an external concept for reference, per-say, the symmetry makes it easily grokkable.
This is what I'm going to make when I eventually make a Horde deck. However I think that cube vs Horde has much more promise than EDH vs Horde.
Honestly, that's basically to be expected. Legacy was, for all intents and purposes, the first of its kind, and so it would only make sense for it to develop 'naturally.' They had a sense of what kind of things needed to be banned already, as they had been banned in Vintage prior to the creation of Legacy, but when they created Legacy I *promise* you they didn't have a sense of where they wanted Legacy to go or what it would look like as a healthy format.
In comparison, after all the things that WotC has learned about eternal formats--and all the things that *we* have learned about eternal formats--in the last 7 years means that when going into the process of creating a new competitive eternal format, everybody is going to have a preconception of what they *want* it to look like, whether it's like Standard 2.0, Legacy 2.0, Old Extended, or something entirely new. With Legacy, there were nowhere near as many preconceptions about what the format "should" look like. But so long as these preconceptions exist about Modern, it's going to feel a little overly-manipulated. It's not WotC's fault at all; that's simply the only way it could have happened.
As a side note, if Modern *were* to develop naturally, it would have been able to do so only if Old Extended had never existed and nobody had anything that they could use to compare.
Ah, but Gifts Ungiven does
> Visions of Beyond is AWESOME. I have yet to live my dream of T0 Archive Trap x2, T1 Visions, but it's won me games.
> I don't see why at least 2x Into the Roil isn't in people's maindecks. It's good for knocking out Leylines, but it's also good as a boomerang (for annoying threats), which is no laughing matter. It's nice to basically be running 6x Smother for enemy Goyfs, considering I can Roil their threat and then counter it following turn.
> Speaking of counters, why Remand? I would expect Rune Snag to be the go-to counterspell 5-8 (after Mana Leak).
> I'm still interested in Leyline of the Void in the side, as a 3x to swap in to replace Visions (since they're so anti-synergistic) if needed. Against graveyard-based decks... which, frankly, is probably most decks, Leyline is REALLY GOOD. Stops Eldrazi shuffle effects, neuters Goyfs, shuts down Punishing Grove (not that we're worried about that), neuters Life from the Loam and Snapcaster... and I know that Surgical Extraction is more ideal, since it still works with Visions, but I feel like sometimes you just need the Leyline. Am I crazy, or is there other reasons not to include it?
> I also have considered both Jace Beleren and Liliana of the Veil as supporters, but I'm not sure how badly I want them. At the moment I've replaced Jace with Twincast (can't decide between the two) and Liliana would go in if Leyline came out (of the sideboard). Just thought I'd suggest those two, since Jace can be obscene card advantage and Liliana can ruin pretty much any deck (although having played against her with this deck... she didn't really bother me
Just some thoughts to spark conversation.
I also run three Ethersworn Canonist in the side to deal with Storm. Does its job well, though if the Heartless Storm deck that's floating around these forums picks up steam, I'm going to have to go find some Rule of Law. :/
Haha fair enough. You're definitely right about us arguing semantics.
However, considering a format that allows midrange strategies to be viable is absolutely a format I'd love to play, and I hate hate hate fast combo, I think what you want out of Modern and what I want out of Modern are completely different things
Really? Jace was only banned in Standard because WOTC forgot to print ways to kill planeswalkers other than burn? (and that's just from when Jace was in Standard) Where are you getting your information from?
Jace was banned because he was AN ENTIRE CONTROL DECK BY HIMSELF.
However I do not see the argument that bolting a Jace after he brainstorms is suddenly a 2-for-1. Is every ETB creature now automatically a 2-for-1? I wouldn't say so. (Maybe it technically is, but that's obviously not always good enough to be dominant, or else the only creatures anyone would play would be ones with ETB effects.)
Okay, that argument seems a bit more reasonable. The difference is not that they design cards differently now than they used to (which is true) but, basically, that Legacy includes cards from sets that were poorly designed (also true). But that's not really a structurally sound argument either, because those cards that were from earlier, poorly-designed sets ARE a major part of Legacy. ABU duals are not on the Legacy ban list, but they're still miles ahead of the power level of anything in Modern; they are from the same poorly-designed sets that gave us the Power Nine (your example). And yet they're not banned. If we're going to rule out cards just because they're from earlier sets that were punctuated with what we, from our modern perspective, would call "design mistakes," then we either have to rule out all those cards (like the original dual lands, as I said before), or else concede that we're no longer comparing Modern to Legacy any more.
Ultimately, if you try to say "cards X-Y can be discounted because they were [mistakes/poor design/from early sets/etc]," then you're no longer comparing to Legacy. You're comparing Modern to Format-That-Resembles-Legacy-Somewhat. Part of what makes Legacy what it is are those really old, really powerful cards. Some are banned, some are not. You can't discount them, because then it's not Legacy.
The other thing is that your same argument could be made for the Mirrodin artifact lands. Yes, they were design mistakes that were the first of their kind (who would have known how powerful an artifact land would be? (mirrodin) Who would have known how broken a Mox would be? (alpha)). However, they existed within a larger set of which the rest is legal in Modern. You can't just discount cards that you want to.
Legacy and Modern have roughly proportional ban lists for the size of their card pools. Modern is a growing format that is growing shakily but is very quickly becoming balanced and fun. Both of these things are true. Could some things come off the ban list? Sure. Will they? I don't know, but if WotC's attitude towards Legacy is any indication, I'd expect them to start picking cards off over the next several years, assuming no major catastrophes appear again (lolstoneforge).
I would still disagree that the Fetches are ban-worthy.