drmarkb wrote: ↑4 years ago
My worry with Twin is Force of Negation, and the fact that one cc renoval that kills the combo with a 1/4 is limited to Path, Dismember and Push.l plus the rather poor black Force of Despair.
Force doesn't protect the combo on our turn. It only can be used proactively like that if you try to kill the creature on your turn, which admittedly is pretty good if the opponent tapped down to one land and we play the combo creature to tap it. As a former Twin player, I'm mostly playing Force as a defensive card, though.
drmarkb wrote: ↑4 years ago
There is currently a range of UR decks, I am not sure there would be with Twin at large.
What UR decks? Izzet Phoenix is the only good UR deck right now, and that would continue to exist alongside Twin. Remember that UR Storm always existed alongside Twin. Twin would almost certainly supplant Blue Moon, but that deck has never been good. So instead of having 1 good UR deck, we would have 2.
drmarkb wrote: ↑4 years ago
Perhaps if more one cc stuff existed to nerf the combo I would be fine, but going second means I have a narrow window to land a card to stop the combo, and with Force it becomes hard.
I'd like to remind you that Twin only had the turn 4 combo ready 20% of the time, so you probably had a bigger window to find removal than you thought you did. Also, there's Slaughter Pact, Force of Vigor, Nature's Claim, Gut Shot (for Pestermite), Rending Volley, Murderous Cut, Magmatic Sinkhole, etc. There are also a ton of great 2 mana answers, and a ton of great permanent-based answers, like Spellskite, Meddling Mage, and Torpor Orb. There are tons of good answers to the Splinter Twin combo for any deck to play.
drmarkb wrote: ↑4 years ago
I would like to see more free effects in the game, and a bit more uncounterable stuff - via the mechanic of cannot be countered, Split Second or Leylines etc.
This is literally the last thing we need. Free spells are almost always broken, and mechanics that say, "You can't play fair Magic," lead to uninteractive games, and when a format is filled with such effects it leads to an uninteractive format. Like, I'm playing UW Control now, and I'm obviously playing Dovin's Veto, but I wasn't happy when I saw the card because it's not something they should be printing. Counter battles are some of the most fun moments in Magic for me. Dovin's Veto just stops those moments from happening, and that sucks.
drmarkb wrote: ↑4 years ago
that is easier to do when you have not got game ending combos running about t4 though.
You do realize that almost every one of the unfair decks in Modern kill pretty regularly even earlier than that, right? Just because most of them aren't killing you with an infinite combo doesn't make the game any less over. Twin only won on turn 4 like 5 to 10% of the time, Sheridan knows the exact number, he had the data from when he was at Modern Nexus. These aggro/combo decks, they only get banned for T4 rule violations when they have turn 3 or sooner kills in the 20 to 25% range,
and they're popular enough to be a decent chunk of the meta. That means that decks like Neoform and Grishoalbrand very well might have <T4 kills above 20%, but they're allowed to exist because they aren't popular. It also means that there are probably a bunch of decks that kill on T2 or T3 more often than Twin killed on T4. And let's not forget that Twin helped keep these other fast unfair decks in check when it was legal.