Fresh 'pro' article on the state of Standard. I completely disagree with keeping the faster rotation, as that raises the cost of standard, which is already too high, and decreases the volume of cards to brew with but he echos what many are saying here about the format's condition.
He makes a good point about formats being solved so quickly.
I am going to disagree with him about Ravnica/Time Spiral standard being solved in today's age though. One thing he forgot about RAV/TSP was the fact that it had such an enormous card pool, and that card pool did not have all the power concentrated in a few rares and mythics. It probably would have been "solved" in the way Legacy is today.
The smaller sets with tournament staples being solely at the rare/mythic spectrum mean formats get solved faster.
The big issue is that it isn't like Jace and Stoneforge where there were just two really problematic cards and removing them would fix things up, or even Affinity where you just had one particular deck that was way overpowered and had to be stamped out. It's more like the format itself (rather than one particular part of it as was the case with Jace/Stoneforge, Affinity, and Skullclamp for that matter) is messed up and that's not really something you can fix up with bans. Actually a bit reminiscent of the Urza's Saga block, where they had to just hit a ton of different cards in order to get the format into something decent.
Yeah, this is years of bad development decisions culminating into what we're seeing now.
To be honest I really want to see another wave of bannings happen again. Some combination of HoK/Gideon/Cat/Scrounger would be ideal.
R&D and the FFL are rotten to the core, and there needs to be another "get pulled into the president's office and yelled at" moment like there was during Urza's Saga to insure that a massive overhaul to the development of this game happen.
Why is there so much emotional attachment towards blue?
To me it is unreal how there continues to be a faction of players who will ***** and moan until the end of time about a single color not being good enough. You don't see this sort of complaining about white, which is another color that isn't exactly well-represented in Modern either. It seems like every time we talk about color + archetype strength and weaknesses, the discussion tends to devolve into "blue isn't good enough".
Why is this? Is is because blue has been historically the strongest color in the game and thus there has to be precedent for blue always being good? Is it because people get a rush from playing counterspells? (which happen to be one of the most powerful mechanics in the game, by the way) Is it because people enjoy card drawing and card selection that assuages the randomness of the game? (such as Preordain) Is it because people like always doing everything on their opponent's end step? Is it because blue has the stereotype of being the "intellectual color" that a large number of players align with due to the game's demographics?
I like playing blue myself, but it's become clear that there are a lot of people who have an absolutely massive amount of emotion invested into one color that MUST BE GOOD. Which I find quite ironic, given that blue is, philosophically speaking, the least emotional color out of the five.
From my experience at least here in Oregon, the racial makeup of a city isn't always a good indicator of determining economic well-being. There are towns that are ~90% white and they can be very wealthy or very poor. Education levels, human capital, and local infrastructure are what really determine your economic fate.
I think that the problem with Standard is that the power creep of value creatures has finally caught up with the design of sets. They haven't had a reset in power creep since Theros and that was 4 years ago. Its a awkward song and dance that WotC has to do in which players want to play with strong cards that do powerful things but that has a compounding affect and eventually needs a set to be obviously under powered to reset this but that almost ensures a poor selling block which of course I doubt Hasbro is happy to hear about.
Part of the power level issue isn't so much the creep, but the way power is distributed in the rarities. There is too much power being concentrated in the flagship/story cards of the set that it creates metagames where everything gravitates toward those cards. Cards like Gideon and Emrakul get pushed deliberately because they are the faces of the sets and Wizards will do everything it can to get their flagship cards shown on a Twitch stream. Same goes for a flashy new mechanic they want people to play with, such as vehicles.
This is also caused by Wizards heavily micromanaging Limited. Commons and uncommons have been massively and deliberately nerfed in power level because Wizards wants to make specifically curated Limited environments where they do not want to see a common or uncommon define the format. Remember how in Innistrad Limited you had entire decks built around stuff like Travel Preparations or Spider Spawning? Wizards despises those kinds of cards, and to make sure those build-around-me Limited cards don't exist they took a scorched earth policy toward the power level of common and uncommon cards. By doing this, Constructed suffers in that there are now very few format-defining cards at those rarities. Most of the utility cards and Constructed staples are now at rare or mythic. A card like Fatal Push being at uncommon has become the exception to this rule.
The micromanaging of Limited also made its way into Modern Masters sets. Rather than being sets that reprint needed Modern staples, we get an insane amount of garbage like Long-Forgotten Gohei that has no business being in a MM set. But the reason all that garbage is in the sets is because of WotC's unhealthy obsession over making sure a set has the Limited format they want to sculpt.
The more I think about it, the more I believe that Wizards micromanaging Limited is crippling the game in so many ways.
No I actually have a preference towards counterspells this isn't a Bias that I have it is a bias that WotC has against them. WotC has said in the past that they don't like cheap counters without a draw back or the chance to play around them like Leak, They have compared counterspell to Dark Ritual and Swords to Plowshares it isn't coming back. R&D is of the opinion that a hard counter is better costed at UU1 situational counters can cost 2cc and this has been the case since they decided that Cancel would replace counterspell.
I never said it wouldn't be fine for Modern but that isn't the test that new cards have to past now is it? They do not want counterspell in Standard just look at the Jeskai Saheeli deck it is counterspell heavy and you think this signals that WotC wants to print straight up UU level counterspell with no draw back? Thoughtseize is a card that R&D has said was a mistake to reprint in Standard precisely because it was to strong and defined the format for its entire legality. They want counterspells that are in some way at least tangentially connected to set mechanics not some vanilla permission spell that just beats out every mechanic tied option available in standard.
This is somewhat untrue. Wizards knows that 3 mana for an unconditional counter is slightly too expensive, which is why they've done 3 mana counters with upside for a while. Examples include Dissolve, Dissipate, and now Disallow.
The real cost of an unconditional counterspell is about 2.5 mana. The problem of course is that the game doesn't allow for half mana costs, so they're stuck between too good (Counterspell) and too weak (Cancel) with very little middle ground to play with.
And then you have the basket of deplorables. Mostly, I'd call them yuppies but most of them aren't that young now. A lot of them in banking and tech. (Steve Bannon, for instance, worked for Goldman Sachs.)
Yuppies? I must be missing something here. The "basket of deplorables" refers to working-class whites that hold politically incorrect views that cosmopolitans mercilessly mock. i.e., people that are far away from being yuppies. Think Archie Bunker from All in the Family.
One of the more hidden criteria for banning a card is if it violates the principles of opportunity cost. This was exactly why Gitaxian Probe was banned. The reasoning behind banning Probe was because it did too much for too little of a cost. In other words, Probe had little to no opportunity cost attached to it. Paying 2 life and no mana should not be rewarded by giving yourself critical information on your opponent's hand, a card to fuel Delve, +2/+2 to Death's Shadow, AND a card to replace itself. There was too much reward for playing the card and no real drawback to having it in your deck.
DRS is also another banned card that violates opportunity cost principles. It's a one mana dork that is also graveyard hate, a buffer against burn, and a late-game finisher all wrapped into just one mana. People joked about it being a one-mana planeswalker, which was an appropriate analogy for a card that did too much for too little.
Twin is another opportunity cost violator. It's a deck that, realistically speaking, had no weaknesses to speak of and could bail out players game after game with an easy-to-assemble combo. You could never afford to tap out for the rest of the game once Twin reached its third land; lest you risk instantly losing to a zero-opportunity cost combo. But not tapping out for the rest of the game also meant you were likely going to lose the attrition war to Snap/Bolt or Keranos or whatever. It was damned if you do, damned if you don't. Twin almost always had the advantage.
Which gets us into the issue of GSZ: there is no opportunity cost for playing the card; as it is never a dead card at any phase in the game. It's mana acceleration on turn 1 that can grab midrage threats, finishers, and silver bullets all wrapped into a single card. Why play a mana dork that risks being a dead draw when you can simply play GSZ and have access to a mana dork on turn 1 that is never a dead card? (Note how you can ask this exact same question with DRS as well.) There really is no drawback to playing with GSZ, which is why the card is one that stifles diversity and makes green decks forced to run a similar shell of cards in their decks. Mana dorks have opportunity cost attached. You're putting acceleration in your deck with the tradeoff that you risk drawing a blank later in the game. That is a good thing. It means players have to make actual decisions as to what cards they play with.
Wizards believes that opportunity cost should exist on cards and that cards that skirt the opportunity cost too much should not be allowed. And quite frankly, that's design philosophy I can get behind.
I highly recommend reading the above article. It paints a very detailed description as to how just how damning it was for Clinton to ignore states like Michigan.
On the morning of Election Day, internal Clinton campaign numbers had her winning Michigan by 5 points. By 1 p.m., an aide on the ground called headquarters; the voter turnout tracking system they’d built themselves in defiance of orders — Brooklyn had told operatives in the state they didn’t care about those numbers, and specifically told them not to use any resources to get them — showed urban precincts down 25 percent. Maybe they should get worried, the Michigan operatives said.
Nope, they were told. She was going to win by 5. All Brooklyn’s data said so.
In at least one of the war rooms in New York, they’d already started celebratory drinking by the afternoon, according to a person there. Elsewhere, calls quietly went out that day to tell key people to get ready to be asked about joining transition teams.
But an hour-and-a-half after polls closed, Clinton aides began making rushed calls, redrawing paths to 270 through the single electoral vote in Maine and Nebraska. Still assuming wins in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, Michigan suddenly looked like the state that was going to decide the presidency.
They scrambled a call with campaign attorney Marc Elias, prepping for a recount in a vote that oddly looked like it would be a narrower win than they had ever prepared for. An hour later, after they hung up, they realized it was over. They could tell by the numbers they were seeing — not the numbers being spewed from their own internal analytics team, but the numbers sitting at the bottom of the TV tuned to CNN. With the recount frozen, Clinton lost Michigan by 10,704 votes.
That wasn't Obamacare premiums that cost Clinton the Rust Belt states. It was cosmopolitan hubris that backfired on her in the worst possible way.
My only doubt is that they should ban both Dredgers(Imp and this) or just ban Prized Amalgam instead.
This ban completely reminds me of the Bloodbraid Elf ban, when Deathrite Shaman was allowed to roam free. When dredge gets busted good again (which it can), they will eventually find out that Amalgam was the culprit, and thet Golgari Grave-Troll had nothing to do with it.
This is exactly what confuses me about Wizards. It's like their bias is so ridiculously intertwined with their ideologies that they can't distinguish actual problem cards anymore.
Cathartic Reunion became Draw 15 instead of Draw 18. That's all this banning did.
Wizards is never going to stop printing cards like Reunion and Amalgam. Dredge will always continue to find new friends to cause problems with; you can't just keep banning auxiliary cards while keeping a degenerate mechanic legal. Banning Amalgam over GGT is sort of like banning Siege Rhino instead of Birthing Pod or Dryad Arbor instead of GSZ.
I think people have a seriously warped reality of expecting what can be unbanned. I don't see SFM or BBE ever seeing the light of day in Modern. Yet everyone in this forum was SO CONVINCED that such unbans were going to be coming.
I don't see Stoneforge Mystic or Jace being unbanned. I don't think people realize that R&D considers those cards to be radioactive waste.
And yet one was the GP promo last year and the other was an Eternal Masters staple. Clearly they have some place in MTG. It just remains to be seen if that place is in Modern. Given that Forsythe publicly waffled about Sword of the Meek being problematic in Lantern Control before unbanning it a few months later, I'm open to unban possibilities.
A lot of it has to do with optics, which is why I made the radioactive waste comparison. A card like Sword of the Meek has ok optics in that it really hasn't been so utterly reviled by Wizards. Sure it was a part of the Thepths deck that terrorized Extended but at the end of the day Sword of the Meek isn't a card that gives Wizards a black eye. Jace and SFM on the other hand are cards that get lumped in with other degenerate mistakes that ruined the game, like when Aaron Forsythe directly compared SFM to Tinker. If you think about it, Jace and SFM potentially cost Wizards tens of millions of dollars of lost revenue in the form of declining tournament attendance and sales when they terrorized Standard. Can you blame them for not wanting to unban those two cards? It sounds irrational, sure, but we all know they have a burning hatred for those Frankenstein creations. I will be shocked if those cards ever get unbanned.
There are 270 electoral votes required to win the presidency. Hillary needed 38 more to make that total. Had she won the states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, states that normally lean blue but went red in this abnormal election, she would have won the election. Clinton lost by 0.3% of the vote in Michigan, 1% in Wisconsin, and 1.2% in Pennsylvania.
That is damn close.
It's why this narrative of a blue collar revolt, a revolution of the white working class is so ridiculous. Trump barely won the presidency, and even in the states he was able to wrestle away from the Democrats, he only was able to just barely scrape by. And certainly this notion of a landslide victory that Trump seems to think he achieved is ridiculous. Trump did not win by a landslide, he won by the skin of his teeth.
You are looking at the election results without much context. Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania are traditionally safe states for Democrats. The last time all three of those states went red was when Mondale got wiped out by Reagan in 1984. Speaking of Mondale, Democrats almost lost Minnesota as well. You brush off the results by thinking "oh, this isn't bad, this was damn close" but I see otherwise. Democrats should not be losing those states, but they did because they have become too cosmopolitan for the Rust Belt.
Second, and more importantly, Democrats have been getting clobbered in non-presidential races. Don't just focus on the presidential race. Republicans have won so many seats at the state and federal level that they are actually extremely close to being able to call a constitutional convention. They are only ~1-2 state legislatures away from having the power to amend the Constitution.
This is ridiculous.
I have already pointed out that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, rendering the narrative that this election is a result of the "silent majority" in this country speaking up an absurdity.
I have already pointed out how Trump only barely won this election, rendering the narrative that Trump represents a sort of white working class uprising an absurdity.
Yet here is an OP trying to create the same narrative, that Trump represents a landslide populist revolution against the wealthy elite, a narrative which is clearly absurd at this juncture now that the man has demonstrated his cabinet choices and the ineptitude exhibited therein. "That the voters expressly voted against?" On what parallel universe does Trump represent anything other than a wealthy elite out of touch with reality?
Have you seen what is happening with the West? There is absolutely a massive populist revolt going on in multiple countries. We had Brexit in the UK and Trump getting elected in the US. France and the Netherlands are likely going to be the next countries to go through this same "stick it to the man" wave. I fully expect Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders to win their respective elections now that they're energized by what has happened in the Anglosphere.
I think that of the potential unbans, the artifact lands are the most likely. Like, what can you really do with them? Affinity wouldn't be any more broken. Ironworks wouldn't be broken. If anything, it opens up plenty of cards and decks. Krak-Clan Ironworks as mentioned, Thirst for Knowledge and U/B Tezzeret... I think it would be really cool.
Artifact lands:
- Turn Cranial Plating into a degenerate piece of equipment
- Can be fed to Ravager
- Get Metalcraft online very quickly
- Make Master of Etherium stronger
Among other interactions.
Artifact lands are one of the biggest mistakes in the game's history and deserve to be permanently outlawed from the format.
When I compare cards, I look at them from a game theory point of view. I don't take expansion symbols, rarity, or any of that into account. I look at the functionality of the cards (ie what it says on the card).
Both elves are the exact same at what they do. The only thing different are their names (which is irrelevant because Meddling Mage can equally block either one from being played).
Tyler Durden, saying Ashcoat Bears is strictly better than Grizzly Bears is just plain incorrect. Maybe you won't come across a crazy Mindslaver situation over the course of a game, but the fact of the matter is, that situation is possible in a game of Magic and it exists. This throws the 100% better in every single situation out of the window, and it completely invalidates the argument that Ashcoat is strictly better than Grizzly.
Mindslaver makes sure that "strictly better" doesn't exist in Magic. It still boggles my mind how people haven't grasped onto that concept yet.
BTW, Murganda Petroglyphs makes it so Grizzly Bears is better than Ashcoat Bears.
He makes a good point about formats being solved so quickly.
I am going to disagree with him about Ravnica/Time Spiral standard being solved in today's age though. One thing he forgot about RAV/TSP was the fact that it had such an enormous card pool, and that card pool did not have all the power concentrated in a few rares and mythics. It probably would have been "solved" in the way Legacy is today.
The smaller sets with tournament staples being solely at the rare/mythic spectrum mean formats get solved faster.
Yeah, this is years of bad development decisions culminating into what we're seeing now.
To be honest I really want to see another wave of bannings happen again. Some combination of HoK/Gideon/Cat/Scrounger would be ideal.
R&D and the FFL are rotten to the core, and there needs to be another "get pulled into the president's office and yelled at" moment like there was during Urza's Saga to insure that a massive overhaul to the development of this game happen.
Why is there so much emotional attachment towards blue?
To me it is unreal how there continues to be a faction of players who will ***** and moan until the end of time about a single color not being good enough. You don't see this sort of complaining about white, which is another color that isn't exactly well-represented in Modern either. It seems like every time we talk about color + archetype strength and weaknesses, the discussion tends to devolve into "blue isn't good enough".
Why is this? Is is because blue has been historically the strongest color in the game and thus there has to be precedent for blue always being good? Is it because people get a rush from playing counterspells? (which happen to be one of the most powerful mechanics in the game, by the way) Is it because people enjoy card drawing and card selection that assuages the randomness of the game? (such as Preordain) Is it because people like always doing everything on their opponent's end step? Is it because blue has the stereotype of being the "intellectual color" that a large number of players align with due to the game's demographics?
I like playing blue myself, but it's become clear that there are a lot of people who have an absolutely massive amount of emotion invested into one color that MUST BE GOOD. Which I find quite ironic, given that blue is, philosophically speaking, the least emotional color out of the five.
Part of the power level issue isn't so much the creep, but the way power is distributed in the rarities. There is too much power being concentrated in the flagship/story cards of the set that it creates metagames where everything gravitates toward those cards. Cards like Gideon and Emrakul get pushed deliberately because they are the faces of the sets and Wizards will do everything it can to get their flagship cards shown on a Twitch stream. Same goes for a flashy new mechanic they want people to play with, such as vehicles.
This is also caused by Wizards heavily micromanaging Limited. Commons and uncommons have been massively and deliberately nerfed in power level because Wizards wants to make specifically curated Limited environments where they do not want to see a common or uncommon define the format. Remember how in Innistrad Limited you had entire decks built around stuff like Travel Preparations or Spider Spawning? Wizards despises those kinds of cards, and to make sure those build-around-me Limited cards don't exist they took a scorched earth policy toward the power level of common and uncommon cards. By doing this, Constructed suffers in that there are now very few format-defining cards at those rarities. Most of the utility cards and Constructed staples are now at rare or mythic. A card like Fatal Push being at uncommon has become the exception to this rule.
The micromanaging of Limited also made its way into Modern Masters sets. Rather than being sets that reprint needed Modern staples, we get an insane amount of garbage like Long-Forgotten Gohei that has no business being in a MM set. But the reason all that garbage is in the sets is because of WotC's unhealthy obsession over making sure a set has the Limited format they want to sculpt.
The more I think about it, the more I believe that Wizards micromanaging Limited is crippling the game in so many ways.
This is somewhat untrue. Wizards knows that 3 mana for an unconditional counter is slightly too expensive, which is why they've done 3 mana counters with upside for a while. Examples include Dissolve, Dissipate, and now Disallow.
The real cost of an unconditional counterspell is about 2.5 mana. The problem of course is that the game doesn't allow for half mana costs, so they're stuck between too good (Counterspell) and too weak (Cancel) with very little middle ground to play with.
Yuppies? I must be missing something here. The "basket of deplorables" refers to working-class whites that hold politically incorrect views that cosmopolitans mercilessly mock. i.e., people that are far away from being yuppies. Think Archie Bunker from All in the Family.
One of the more hidden criteria for banning a card is if it violates the principles of opportunity cost. This was exactly why Gitaxian Probe was banned. The reasoning behind banning Probe was because it did too much for too little of a cost. In other words, Probe had little to no opportunity cost attached to it. Paying 2 life and no mana should not be rewarded by giving yourself critical information on your opponent's hand, a card to fuel Delve, +2/+2 to Death's Shadow, AND a card to replace itself. There was too much reward for playing the card and no real drawback to having it in your deck.
DRS is also another banned card that violates opportunity cost principles. It's a one mana dork that is also graveyard hate, a buffer against burn, and a late-game finisher all wrapped into just one mana. People joked about it being a one-mana planeswalker, which was an appropriate analogy for a card that did too much for too little.
Twin is another opportunity cost violator. It's a deck that, realistically speaking, had no weaknesses to speak of and could bail out players game after game with an easy-to-assemble combo. You could never afford to tap out for the rest of the game once Twin reached its third land; lest you risk instantly losing to a zero-opportunity cost combo. But not tapping out for the rest of the game also meant you were likely going to lose the attrition war to Snap/Bolt or Keranos or whatever. It was damned if you do, damned if you don't. Twin almost always had the advantage.
Which gets us into the issue of GSZ: there is no opportunity cost for playing the card; as it is never a dead card at any phase in the game. It's mana acceleration on turn 1 that can grab midrage threats, finishers, and silver bullets all wrapped into a single card. Why play a mana dork that risks being a dead draw when you can simply play GSZ and have access to a mana dork on turn 1 that is never a dead card? (Note how you can ask this exact same question with DRS as well.) There really is no drawback to playing with GSZ, which is why the card is one that stifles diversity and makes green decks forced to run a similar shell of cards in their decks. Mana dorks have opportunity cost attached. You're putting acceleration in your deck with the tradeoff that you risk drawing a blank later in the game. That is a good thing. It means players have to make actual decisions as to what cards they play with.
Wizards believes that opportunity cost should exist on cards and that cards that skirt the opportunity cost too much should not be allowed. And quite frankly, that's design philosophy I can get behind.
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/michigan-hillary-clinton-trump-232547
I highly recommend reading the above article. It paints a very detailed description as to how just how damning it was for Clinton to ignore states like Michigan.
That wasn't Obamacare premiums that cost Clinton the Rust Belt states. It was cosmopolitan hubris that backfired on her in the worst possible way.
Wizards is never going to stop printing cards like Reunion and Amalgam. Dredge will always continue to find new friends to cause problems with; you can't just keep banning auxiliary cards while keeping a degenerate mechanic legal. Banning Amalgam over GGT is sort of like banning Siege Rhino instead of Birthing Pod or Dryad Arbor instead of GSZ.
I think people have a seriously warped reality of expecting what can be unbanned. I don't see SFM or BBE ever seeing the light of day in Modern. Yet everyone in this forum was SO CONVINCED that such unbans were going to be coming.
A lot of it has to do with optics, which is why I made the radioactive waste comparison. A card like Sword of the Meek has ok optics in that it really hasn't been so utterly reviled by Wizards. Sure it was a part of the Thepths deck that terrorized Extended but at the end of the day Sword of the Meek isn't a card that gives Wizards a black eye. Jace and SFM on the other hand are cards that get lumped in with other degenerate mistakes that ruined the game, like when Aaron Forsythe directly compared SFM to Tinker. If you think about it, Jace and SFM potentially cost Wizards tens of millions of dollars of lost revenue in the form of declining tournament attendance and sales when they terrorized Standard. Can you blame them for not wanting to unban those two cards? It sounds irrational, sure, but we all know they have a burning hatred for those Frankenstein creations. I will be shocked if those cards ever get unbanned.
You are looking at the election results without much context. Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania are traditionally safe states for Democrats. The last time all three of those states went red was when Mondale got wiped out by Reagan in 1984. Speaking of Mondale, Democrats almost lost Minnesota as well. You brush off the results by thinking "oh, this isn't bad, this was damn close" but I see otherwise. Democrats should not be losing those states, but they did because they have become too cosmopolitan for the Rust Belt.
Second, and more importantly, Democrats have been getting clobbered in non-presidential races. Don't just focus on the presidential race. Republicans have won so many seats at the state and federal level that they are actually extremely close to being able to call a constitutional convention. They are only ~1-2 state legislatures away from having the power to amend the Constitution.
Have you seen what is happening with the West? There is absolutely a massive populist revolt going on in multiple countries. We had Brexit in the UK and Trump getting elected in the US. France and the Netherlands are likely going to be the next countries to go through this same "stick it to the man" wave. I fully expect Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders to win their respective elections now that they're energized by what has happened in the Anglosphere.
Artifact lands:
- Turn Cranial Plating into a degenerate piece of equipment
- Can be fed to Ravager
- Get Metalcraft online very quickly
- Make Master of Etherium stronger
Among other interactions.
Artifact lands are one of the biggest mistakes in the game's history and deserve to be permanently outlawed from the format.