The Fluff wrote: ↑3 years ago
I remember a deck in mtgsalvation.... Ashton Kutcher's Monkey Grow deck, it seems to be an attempt to copy the play pattern of the Tempo Thresh deck in legacy. Not sure if Monkey Grow is still played today.
link
I will admit. MTGSal name Ashton or Jordan, his real name, did do well with several decks, including putting Eldrazi Aggro on the map. I even built his RUG Deck, or how he calls it - Counter Cat. I built it and tested it. It was okay. A lot of things had to go right for you and some things had to go suboptimally for the opponent. I guess you could say that about any match, but I didn't want to risk running it at FNM. I did loan it to my friend, who is a super talented player, and he did somewhere between 3-2 and 4-1 on average with it. While that's good, it's worse than his average at that FNM spot, as well as mine.
Players like Jordan can take advantage of their skill and their knowledge of the format over some huge percentage of players. It is similar to that for me, when I play at FNM, people expect me to win. Sure there's a few times a Pro Player comes by and then it's close, but the average person at FNM can be beaten, even through some variance, in Modern by making mostly good plays. While I know I've gotten lucky with Elementals, I also realize that most players couldn't duplicate that, even if they drew the same as me.
Aazadan wrote: ↑3 years ago
Tempo has at times been playable, but outside of Treasure Cruise was never top tier.
I do feel like the format is open enough to brewing at the moment, but as a paper player it's rather difficult to do right now. Been trying to make Painters Servant work since Oko personally. Aether Gust has been a nice tool in boosting it, Torbran as well and both benefit from naming Red.
This was the point I was getting at. Nothing against Tempo. I don't want to talk %$#% about anyone's deck. But many people here judge a deck based on GP or Pro Tour (I know, not anymore since they're all Arena Standard). Skred won a GP. Merfolk won a GP. A tempo deck hasn't unless it had 4 Ancestral Recall in the deck.
Treasure Cruise is an amazing card. This marked the first time that I ran Burn in Modern. I ran Burn with 4 Ancestral Recall because it had a positive matchup vs. Delver, even if Rhino Pod was tough. It had game vs. Affinity and Amulet Bloom, 2 of the other top decks at the time.
I love
Painter's Servant. I played Imperial Painter for my first few years of Legacy, so it has a place in my heart. It would be cool to see it in Modern, but I just don't know how all of that would work. I guess I'm asking for a decklist, lol.
*This last part is just my opinion, but I feel one of the reasons that Tempo hasn't been good in Modern is because of its matchups. Modern has always been dominated by Aggro. Aggro decks normally beat Tempo because they are going straight to the point, no BS, just trying to run you over without any disruption. I know this is an oversimplification, but Aggro normally should have a good matchup vs. Tempo. Tempo beats Control, but there's been few Control decks in Modern and the matchup usually is pretty close in Modern. I'm not sure if Tempo is known for beating Ramp or not, but in my testing at that time, Counter Cat had trouble with Tron, Titanshift, and a bit with Amulet too. That's not a good place to be, unless you're crushing the number 1 played archetype - Aggro. Even with the matchup that should be favored, Combo, while I do think it's favored for Tempo in Modern, it's also closer than it should be. This could also be because the Combo decks are often focused on many different things.
Now I will get to the card pool. Yes, WotC has not printed stuff that allows Tempo to flourish. They probably figure that Delver has been the best or nearly the best deck in Legacy since the beginning. We don't need it in Modern. Just some thoughts - not how
I feel about what should be or shouldn't be. And I could be completely off-base.