In general, I think its good. Playing even 2 is still pretty reasonable. Its not uncommon for me to grab 2 inspectors off a ranger of eos if I'm just trying to grind, or force them to spend removal on *****ty cards before bringing out all the ascendants.
Donny and Moondrius have streamed the deck before. I don't believe either of them use youtube but they probably have twitch vods saved.
Otherwise, I'm not aware of anyone who has a noteworthy amount of content on the deck.
Doesn't seem good for us. We should rarely be in the situation where we're at such a low life total but a 5/4 flier will stabilize us. Its usually wrath or bust at that type of scenario.
The W/B split card seems more appealing to me, since we can reanimate hawks and stuff with it.
Condemn isa lot worse because of discard. If ashadow player expects it, they can wait to attack until they find a discard/counter spell. Not the case with plow.
How are those cards comparable at all? Render silent doesnt do anything meaningful against the decks you want timely reinforcements for. Absorb atleast still gains life.
For sure interactivity questions, I think the easiest solution would be to add a third category. Instead of simply "interactive" and "non interactive" try "non interactive" "interactive threat" and "interactive non-threat" with each category worth a different amount of points (maybe 0, 1, 2 is correct, or 0, .75, 1.25, or whatever is better)
I would never consider lava spike an interactive card (its just going upstairs, its less interactive than any vanilla creature), but boros charm is sometimes interactive, so maybe thats enough to put it into the second category. Bolt is somewhere between threat/nonthreat depending on the deck as well.
This also somewhat solves the tron problem.
In theory, ugin is an interactive card, but in practice, its a coinflip of a few bolts/EEs or just straight up wins the game because the other player can't possibly beat it, so it should be worth less points than O stone, but more points than urza's tower.
Burn seems like a pretty good choice vs uw/tron/gds too, especially if you go hard on stuff like firecraft.
Burn is positive in the dataset against Gx Tron and GDS. It's around 44% vs. UW Control with about 75 matches recorded. Most GDS pros seem to think Burn is actually about even with GDS too, so the true MWP might be lower. Complicating matters further, Nassif thinks UW Control is actually unfavored vs. Burn, so that's another discrepancy with the data. Most of the better players I could find on Reddit/Twitter put it more in the "even" category.
As for Bant Spirits vs. Tron, I've looked at a bunch of pro articles, Reddit comment threads, and forum discussions. The consensus seems to be it's about even overall and worse in G1 than in G2/G3 where Spirits can win back percentage points: see Mengucci, Stevens, Strasky, and PVDDR for pros who echo that sentiment. Baumeister rated it as favorable, but he's less experienced with the deck than people like Strasky, so I don't credit his opinion too heavily.
Overall, matchup estimations are pretty messy. I rarely find clear answers to these questions, and I'm only confident in the MWP numbers that are >100 matches. In the dataset, that really limits it to stuff like Humans vs. Gx Tron, Humans vs. Burn, and UW Control vs. Humans. Karsten wrote a great article on using smaller Ns to estimate matchups (https://www.channelfireball.com/articles/magic-math-how-many-games-do-you-need-for-statistical-significance-in-playtesting/), demonstrating how we don't need 10,000 games to actually have a good sense of the matchup odds. By those metrics, we'd probably find a lot of matches closer to even than we think. Some would still remain polarized, such as the notoriously bad Jeskai vs. Gx Tron, Gx Tron vs. Infect, and others.
I have not looked at the data, but to my knowledge, burn is good against tron, even-ish against gds (I think play skill matters a lot here, but I think if you're willing to heavily sideboard for 3 matchups, burn can really swing this one), and I agree with nassif, that burn is good vs UW control. In my experience, a vast majority of my wins as UWX against burn are won because my opponent made mistakes. Nonetheless, this is another matchup that can be swung with enough sideboard cards if you wanted to. I'd happily play 4 firecrafts in my board if I were focusing on such a narrow field.
Given that neither deck has more than a tiny handful of results, its kind of hard to point to gifts as better.
Gifts has some better matchups, some worse matchups, but imo is less powerful overall. Most of the matchups elesh norn is good against, terminus is also good against, and terminus cant be pathed or spell quellered, unlike gifts.
I use to play 2 copies of gifts, 1 rites, and a couple of dudes in the board a while back has a "gotcha" sb plan but I wouldnt do that nowadays when i could just play terminus.
Yea occasionally you'll get stuck in positioned where if you drop jace you'll immediately die, but realistically, theres no card in that slot that would save you.
Gideon of the trials is a better creature-defensive walker, but his ceiling is very low. I do like the card, but I think he shines in decks that can utilize a 4/4 beater better.
Otherwise, we're still king in control mirrors. We almost never have to be the ones aggressively slamming things. If my opponent never gives me a good opportunity to go for it, I'm happy waiting until I can mind rot them out of the game before resolving something.
Teferi being able to downtick is for sure annoying, and you rarely want to be the first one to drop a walker in the control mirror for that reason, but thats easily managable for us. Most of the other control decks in the format have no way to get ahead besides walkers/cryptic/SFA, which doesn't match up well against this deck.
For sure jace isn't the most perfect card imaginable for this deck, but I can't say I've been unhappy playing him. Certainly not unhappy enough to drop him, and I can't say the same for SFA.
Sometimes I feel like the only person on the planet who likes jace and dislikes sfa.
Jace is legitimately powerful in this deck. Hes relatively easy to kill, and he is sorcery speed, but hes only 4 mana, and his floor is better than draw a card + gain 3 life, which is more appealing to me than most other wincons. Hes a goid card advantage engine, he actually wins the game if needed (and through bridge, infinite life, etc), and he attacks on a unique angle (fateseal) that synergizes well with mind rots. He does require a clean board, but this deck in general does too.
Not to mention that bouncing a creature lets us counter it again, or forces them to commit into board wipes.
And of course, that doesnt touch on how useful brainstorm (compared to just drawing) can be.
I feel like im just listing out what the card does, which everyone knows, but jace has legitimately played well for me since hes been unbanned. Im not sure if other peoples experiences are widely different, but I frequently find myself wanting to draw him, and he does ditch multiples. Theres also the usefulness of splitting walkers so you can have 2 in play at once.
I do still enjoy the pure draw-go style, but I dont think we can still convince ourselves its worth playing now that we have real woryhwhile options at sorcery speed.
In general, I think its good. Playing even 2 is still pretty reasonable. Its not uncommon for me to grab 2 inspectors off a ranger of eos if I'm just trying to grind, or force them to spend removal on *****ty cards before bringing out all the ascendants.
Otherwise, I'm not aware of anyone who has a noteworthy amount of content on the deck.
The W/B split card seems more appealing to me, since we can reanimate hawks and stuff with it.
I would never consider lava spike an interactive card (its just going upstairs, its less interactive than any vanilla creature), but boros charm is sometimes interactive, so maybe thats enough to put it into the second category. Bolt is somewhere between threat/nonthreat depending on the deck as well.
This also somewhat solves the tron problem.
In theory, ugin is an interactive card, but in practice, its a coinflip of a few bolts/EEs or just straight up wins the game because the other player can't possibly beat it, so it should be worth less points than O stone, but more points than urza's tower.
I have not looked at the data, but to my knowledge, burn is good against tron, even-ish against gds (I think play skill matters a lot here, but I think if you're willing to heavily sideboard for 3 matchups, burn can really swing this one), and I agree with nassif, that burn is good vs UW control. In my experience, a vast majority of my wins as UWX against burn are won because my opponent made mistakes. Nonetheless, this is another matchup that can be swung with enough sideboard cards if you wanted to. I'd happily play 4 firecrafts in my board if I were focusing on such a narrow field.
Gifts has some better matchups, some worse matchups, but imo is less powerful overall. Most of the matchups elesh norn is good against, terminus is also good against, and terminus cant be pathed or spell quellered, unlike gifts.
I use to play 2 copies of gifts, 1 rites, and a couple of dudes in the board a while back has a "gotcha" sb plan but I wouldnt do that nowadays when i could just play terminus.
Gideon of the trials is a better creature-defensive walker, but his ceiling is very low. I do like the card, but I think he shines in decks that can utilize a 4/4 beater better.
Otherwise, we're still king in control mirrors. We almost never have to be the ones aggressively slamming things. If my opponent never gives me a good opportunity to go for it, I'm happy waiting until I can mind rot them out of the game before resolving something.
Teferi being able to downtick is for sure annoying, and you rarely want to be the first one to drop a walker in the control mirror for that reason, but thats easily managable for us. Most of the other control decks in the format have no way to get ahead besides walkers/cryptic/SFA, which doesn't match up well against this deck.
For sure jace isn't the most perfect card imaginable for this deck, but I can't say I've been unhappy playing him. Certainly not unhappy enough to drop him, and I can't say the same for SFA.
Jace is legitimately powerful in this deck. Hes relatively easy to kill, and he is sorcery speed, but hes only 4 mana, and his floor is better than draw a card + gain 3 life, which is more appealing to me than most other wincons. Hes a goid card advantage engine, he actually wins the game if needed (and through bridge, infinite life, etc), and he attacks on a unique angle (fateseal) that synergizes well with mind rots. He does require a clean board, but this deck in general does too.
Not to mention that bouncing a creature lets us counter it again, or forces them to commit into board wipes.
And of course, that doesnt touch on how useful brainstorm (compared to just drawing) can be.
I feel like im just listing out what the card does, which everyone knows, but jace has legitimately played well for me since hes been unbanned. Im not sure if other peoples experiences are widely different, but I frequently find myself wanting to draw him, and he does ditch multiples. Theres also the usefulness of splitting walkers so you can have 2 in play at once.
I do still enjoy the pure draw-go style, but I dont think we can still convince ourselves its worth playing now that we have real woryhwhile options at sorcery speed.