[Official] State of Modern Thread (B&R 07/13/2020)

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Post by Aazadan » 4 years ago

idSurge wrote:
4 years ago
At the time Twin was banned, we didnt play Probe. When people say 'I wish there was more interaction' they mean BGx, and URx. They mean Discard, Removal, Counters. They mean Abrupt Decay, Bolt, Remand, and IoK. They mean Cryptic Command.

They dont mean 'I cast my chalice on 2, thats proactive interaction!'

That said, if I was in the market, I would play the UG/Sultai Urza deck in a heartbeat. There's no way its not the best deck once people put in the reps, and the lists I've seen look amazing.
Most interaction in the format doesn't happen in counter battles or removal these days. Instead it's primarily about board presence.

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Post by idSurge » 4 years ago

I'm aware. An entire section of what makes Magic different and (imo) better than other games has been cast aside.
UR Control UR

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Post by ktkenshinx » 4 years ago

I really can't handle more Twin talk on a weekend where we actually have a new, major event to discuss. Here's the table showing Day 1, Day 2, and 27+ point counts for all reported decks. The final column sorts the decks by their conversion rate from Day 1 --> 27+ points. 14% is about average, but this includes some small N decks like Naya Zoo and Paradoxical Urza. tT
image.png
Humans and Azorius Control looked great in the 9-3+ bracket. T8 and better standings will obviously change the picture, but it's nice to see data right now. We can also remove all decks with <11 showings to look at performances with a slightly higher sample. Here, average conversion is about 10%:
image.png
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Post by idSurge » 4 years ago

If I remember right, Humans are the answer to ETron are they not, and UW beats up on all Tron?
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Post by True-Name Nemesis » 4 years ago

Based on what I can deduce from the CFB tweets. Locked for top 8 so far are 2x humans, 1x green tron and 1x sultai whirza

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Post by FoodChainGoblins » 4 years ago

idSurge wrote:
4 years ago
If I remember right, Humans are the answer to ETron are they not, and UW beats up on all Tron?
Humans does indeed walk all over E Tron. As for UW vs. Tron, of course it varies from build to build (Miracles, regular Control, Stoneblade variants), but it seems fairly favored overall for UW. I would say that it is slightly favored in my own opinion. I have constantly asked people who play the decks who I trust about their input in the matchup and most have UW favored. My close buddy and teammate at Trios events said as a Tron player that he has walked all over that matchup in experience, but he can admit that it probably is favored for UW. I personally feel that it's close though because there's not much of a clock (although planeswalkers can be a clock in themselves), so Tron can draw out of Field of Ruin heavy games.

On another note, Modern for me the past month has been "who nut draws who" or "who draws their devastating sideboard card and puts pressure before the other player draws their hate for the sideboard card." I know there are stats that show that Modern is one of the most thought provoking formats in the recent history of MTG, but my own experience has been exactly this.

*I am considering playing a friendly, small Modern tournament today (where they give Eldraine promo packs). I am wondering if I can draw better than my opponents. There is not much thought to outplaying my opponents; just drawing better. Obviously I'm going to try my best to play my own deck to my best ability, but outside of that, the tournament is literally just to see if I am slated to draw better than my opponents this Sunday.
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Post by Tzoulis » 4 years ago

FoodChainGoblins wrote:
4 years ago
*I am considering playing a friendly, small Modern tournament today (where they give Eldraine promo packs). I am wondering if I can draw better than my opponents. There is not much thought to outplaying my opponents; just drawing better. Obviously I'm going to try my best to play my own deck to my best ability, but outside of that, the tournament is literally just to see if I am slated to draw better than my opponents this Sunday.
I mean, I get that feeling and I can understand it, but it always has been like that. Even with Twin or Pod, the rest of the metagame was as linear and disinterested in interaction as today. Instead of Jund/Abzan you have DS variants, but that somehow isn't enough for people. Instead of UWR control you have UW, which is as said before very well positioned. Instead of Merfolks you have Humans. You still have Jund.

Printing almost 3k new cards and banning/unbanning is bound to change the dynamics. If you had the same decks at the top you'd have stale meta.

It's not that there isn't viable interactive options, it's just that the people that mostly complain don't like the new "sheriffs", because those don't adhere to some romanticized idea of what the meta was back then.

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Post by drmarkb » 4 years ago

cfusionpm wrote:
4 years ago
drmarkb wrote:
4 years ago
'Two ships passimg on the night, one of them on fire' is the general descrption.
Not sure twin was interactive, eot flash t3, probe, twin gg. Still I won't be discussing the sodding deck, I guess a fair few fell in love with it.
I think modern is still two ships.
This is a disingenuous to borderline insulting interpretation of the deck.
What it did was ask opponents: You can choose to play the most simple, basic, broad, and maindeckable answers, or you can choose to ignore me and risk outright losing.

What deck does that today? What deck says "You have to interact with me or lose"? What drawback is there to simply trying to ignore your opponent and race them instead? Or ignore your opponent and go wildly over the top of them instead? And then hope that your sideboard silver bullets + London Mulligan get you there?

It's a joke how brutally punished players are for playing decks that try to interact with each other, rather than being punished for playing ones that don't.
I don't want to discuss twin, it has gone, it won't return most likely, even without braindead cards like Probe that should never have existed. No offence is meant, btw. I owned the deck, I did not much like it but enjoyed it from time to time.

I will say wizards want O ring/B light and wrath effects to be a large chunk of maindeckable answers to critters, which rules out combos with instant flash speed critters being involved with them from Modern and Pioneer going forward.
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Post by drmarkb » 4 years ago

drmarkb wrote:
4 years ago
cfusionpm wrote:
4 years ago
drmarkb wrote:
4 years ago
'Two ships passimg on the night, one of them on fire' is the general descrption.
Not sure twin was interactive, eot flash t3, probe, twin gg. Still I won't be discussing the sodding deck, I guess a fair few fell in love with it.
I think modern is still two ships.
This is a disingenuous to borderline insulting interpretation of the deck.
What it did was ask opponents: You can choose to play the most simple, basic, broad, and maindeckable answers, or you can choose to ignore me and risk outright losing.

What deck does that today? What deck says "You have to interact with me or lose"? What drawback is there to simply trying to ignore your opponent and race them instead? Or ignore your opponent and go wildly over the top of them instead? And then hope that your sideboard silver bullets + London Mulligan get you there?

It's a joke how brutally punished players are for playing decks that try to interact with each other, rather than being punished for playing ones that don't.
Double post, sorry
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Post by metalmusic_4 » 4 years ago

I'm not upset by that top 8. I'd like a bit more diversity, but that top 8 Looks ok. The meta game break down is too much whirza IMO but we'll see how the meta keeps shifting. I'm not surprised amulet did so poorly. Oko hits both the amulet and the titan, so what do you expect. what a terrible match up.

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Post by drmarkb » 4 years ago

idSurge wrote:
4 years ago
drmarkb wrote:
4 years ago
'Two ships passimg on the night, one of them on fire' is the general descrption.
Not sure twin was interactive, eot flash t3, probe, twin gg. Still I won't be discussing the sodding deck, I guess a fair few fell in love with it.
I think modern is still two ships.
At the time Twin was banned, we didnt play Probe. When people say 'I wish there was more interaction' they mean BGx, and URx. They mean Discard, Removal, Counters. They mean Abrupt Decay, Bolt, Remand, and IoK. They mean Cryptic Command.

They dont mean 'I cast my chalice on 2, thats proactive interaction!'

That said, if I was in the market, I would play the UG/Sultai Urza deck in a heartbeat. There's no way its not the best deck once people put in the reps, and the lists I've seen look amazing.
Without wishing to discuss twin further, I played Probe, and as I recall most did. I could be mistaken, but my experience was probing.

Abrupt decay is an odd card. It feels like an interactive card if you have it, and not like an interactive card if you have a counter in hand and want to stop it..... Chalice feels interactive in Legacy, the first one ir two normally get countered one for one or one for two if forced, they don't last that long and do get set to different values too besides 1.

The problem with Modern is the one cc slot is so bad that Thoughtseize is all you can do, one reason I dislike Jund back then was black thoughtseized, blue cantripped and white weenie could do nothing by comparison.
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Post by drmarkb » 4 years ago

Modern is not full of interesting descion trees, it never has been to be honest...twin era, eldrazi era, pod era, blazing shoal infect era. Because there is so little tutoring it always feels like a drawing competition.

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Post by True-Name Nemesis » 4 years ago

drmarkb wrote:
4 years ago
Without wishing to discuss twin further, I played Probe, and as I recall most did.
Without wishing to say you're lying, because Twin DID use git probe in earlier iterations.

However, claims like this are very easily fact checked. And Twin variants have mostly moved away from running it in 2015. Maybe you did. But most did not.

https://www.mtggoldfish.com/archetype/m ... 3420#paper

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Post by Mtgthewary » 4 years ago

Wow, again 2 whirza in top 8 and 50% top 4 is urza and it is in finals. What a surprise. Time to talk how this means nothing because reasons like mtgo meta changed some days ago. I can't hear excuses anymore! How many data we still need? Can we just stop this and talk about solutions NOW?
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Post by ktkenshinx » 4 years ago

Complaining about the G Tron Karn Creator lines is fine, as long as we remember this is part of the 2019 design disaster. We can talk about bans regarding Tron, Whirza, or other undesirable top decks, but as long as Wizards continues to create cards like these, we'll just see more broken cards emerge and more ban calls without fixing the underlying problem. Do not let Wizards off the hook for these disastrous decisions by allowing our conversation to be distracted by bans.
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Post by Mtgthewary » 4 years ago

OK ktkenshinx, we get it... Wotc made a lot of mistakes. But I will ask you, is it possible first to accept it now? Or we still need to talk about data?? Please don't defend this overpowered deck/s anymore (not you, you are talking about data even we had it long time ago)

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Post by ktkenshinx » 4 years ago

Mtgthewary wrote:
4 years ago
OK ktkenshinx, we get it... Wotc made a lot of mistakes. But I will ask you, is it possible first to accept it now? Or we still need to talk about data??
We have one recent data point that unequivocally points to Whirza being broken: SCG Open Atlanta. Then we have a suggestive data point in GP Columbus, but it's not really that bad. We've seen plenty of GP where a single deck sends 2 representatives to T8 or even T4.
Do you have other convincing data points to cite?

To be clear, I fully agree Whirza variants are the best decks in Modern. My post history for the last few months should nake that extremely clear. But formats are allowed to have best decks. The bar to declare a deck "the best" and declare it "bannable" are different, even if they have overlapping measures.
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Post by metalmusic_4 » 4 years ago

True-Name Nemesis wrote:
4 years ago
drmarkb wrote:
4 years ago
Without wishing to discuss twin further, I played Probe, and as I recall most did.
Without wishing to say you're lying, because Twin DID use git probe in earlier iterations.

However, claims like this are very easily fact checked. And Twin variants have mostly moved away from running it in 2015. Maybe you did. But most did not.

https://www.mtggoldfish.com/archetype/m ... 3420#paper
I played twin for several years and I always ran 3 git probes. Most twin decks did not, but it won me several games.

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Post by Mtgthewary » 4 years ago

I hope your solution is not again wasting 6 months for data even everyone and everywhere, we all can see it? Time to accept? Then we can think about and going forward instead beginning allways again like we didn't knew anything and like it's a new deck

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Post by cfusionpm » 4 years ago

drmarkb wrote:
4 years ago
idSurge wrote:
4 years ago
drmarkb wrote:
4 years ago
'Two ships passimg on the night, one of them on fire' is the general descrption.
Not sure twin was interactive, eot flash t3, probe, twin gg. Still I won't be discussing the sodding deck, I guess a fair few fell in love with it.
I think modern is still two ships.
At the time Twin was banned, we didnt play Probe. When people say 'I wish there was more interaction' they mean BGx, and URx. They mean Discard, Removal, Counters. They mean Abrupt Decay, Bolt, Remand, and IoK. They mean Cryptic Command.

They dont mean 'I cast my chalice on 2, thats proactive interaction!'

That said, if I was in the market, I would play the UG/Sultai Urza deck in a heartbeat. There's no way its not the best deck once people put in the reps, and the lists I've seen look amazing.
Without wishing to discuss twin further, I played Probe, and as I recall most did. I could be mistaken, but my experience was probing.
Let's just be clear about revising history: No deck played any copies of Gitaxian Probe whatsoever, in any of the Top 8 GP or PT placements for Twin in all of 2015. There had been 3 decks that played a single copy of Peek, but that seemed to be a trend that mostly died off after February of that year.

Whether or not *you* played Probe, it was not an accepted or competitively successful choice for players. I personally never played it in any version of Twin I ever played. You either wait until you have a protection spell, jam it and hope for the best, or rely on Vendilion Clique.

Again, I hate having to continue to talk about this, but it bothers me to no end when people simply state blatant falsehoods and misrepresentations. The myths and legends of Twin are so hilariously blown out of proportion, you'd think that the card personally murdered every Magic players' families or something. Goodness f**king gracious.

Meanwhile Urza is still a better, more powerful, more robust deck than Twin ever was.
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Post by Mtgthewary » 4 years ago

Tzoulis is surprised now I think. How this can happen even if mtgo adapted allready. Makes me so sad. I should laugh, but I can't. Let's wait for more data bevore we react.

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Post by Tzoulis » 4 years ago

gkourou wrote:
4 years ago
ktkenshinx wrote:
4 years ago
Complaining about the G Tron Karn Creator lines is fine, as long as we remember this is part of the 2019 design disaster. We can talk about bans regarding Tron, Whirza, or other undesirable top decks, but as long as Wizards continues to create cards like these, we'll just see more broken cards emerge and more ban calls without fixing the underlying problem. Do not let Wizards off the hook for these disastrous decisions by allowing our conversation to be distracted by bans.
While i think what you are saying in general is fine, and while Karn was part of their 2019 bad design philosophy, I don't think that's the problem here. Karn exists in Pioneer as well and he is perfectly fine with it. Why? Because we don't have Tron, we don't have artifacts-remnants of the old days that are bad, outdated designs and ultimately the huge cardpool of modern is going to break them in half. Still, I would say Karn is fine, wasn't it there for tron or mox opal to accelerate the card and cast it on turn 3/4.

Literally, Modern seems to be in large about who is going to slam Karn first here. Now, I am saying Tron needs to be banned, but if there wasn't Tron, Karn would literally be a slower card to play and fetch and play something out. You can play Lattice on 5 or 6 mana, for all I care.
Also, the Urza deck being too good, is forcing everybody that can, to just play Karn, TCG. This could be a kind of a warping effect Urza has on the metagame.
A few things:

First, Karn isn't played in Pioneer because you don't have: a) Wurmcoil, b) Oblivion Stone and most importantly c) Mycosynth Lattice. Also, when aggro is SO prevalent, ramp is bad. It's easy to get to 6-10 mana the first 4-5 turns in Pioneer, especially for G-Devotion. None of the artifacts that Tron plays is a bad design. They don't somehow become bad retroactively, that's silly. And to be frank I don't find Karn TGC to be a bad design in itself, it's paying homage to it's original creature form and his lore.

Secondly, LOL at the idea that Urza is FORCING everyone to play Karn. The decks that are playing Karn, were playing it before Urza was even printed. Urza is trying to play for the mirror with Karn TGC, as did Twin when it morphed to Grixis or less often Jeskai or Temur Twin.

If modern was "literally" who would cast Karn first, you'd see WAY more of him, not decks that already played it since it was printed, and another playing for the mirror.
Mtgthewary wrote:
4 years ago
Tzoulis is surprised now I think. How this can happen even if mtgo adapted allready. Makes me so sad. I should laugh, but I can't. Let's wait for more data bevore we react.
Man I'm not surprised. You're just %$#% salty. With the way you were describing it one would think that the Top 8 would've have been 6 copies of Urza decks, but there were 4 different archetypes in the Top 8. So I was correct, I guess?

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Post by ktkenshinx » 4 years ago

gkourou wrote:
4 years ago
While i think what you are saying in general is fine, and while Karn was part of their 2019 bad design philosophy, I don't think that's the problem here. Karn exists in Pioneer as well and he is perfectly fine with it. Why? Because we don't have Tron, we don't have artifacts-remnants of the old days that are bad, outdated designs and ultimately the huge cardpool of modern is going to break them in half. Still, I would say Karn is fine, wasn't it there for tron or mox opal to accelerate the card and cast it on turn 3/4.
When we're talking about new cards breaking old formats, which we've seen a lot in 2019, we also have seen many cases where the new card gets banned, not the old pillars. Examples from this year include Karn, Hogaak, Narset, Forge, and W6. Wizards might certainly go after old pillars if new cards make them broken (Looting and DRS comes to mind), but they also tend to avoid those old pillars if they are defining elements of a given deck. I do not envision a scenario where Tron is banned. I could envision a scenario where either Karn or Lattice got banned, especially Lattice, because those cards aren't actually central to any deck's identity. But again, from what I have seen, the data isn't really there to support either banning. There just haven't been a lot of major events in recent months. The only deck/cards worth discussing from a ban perspective are Whirza pieces, because that deck is clearly the best thing you can be doing in Modern. Again, that doesn't necessarily make it bannable because all formats tend to have best decks. But decks that get banned are typically best decks at the time of the ban, so that's at least a yellow flag.
Mtgthewary wrote:
4 years ago
I hope your solution is not again wasting 6 months for data even everyone and everywhere, we all can see it? Time to accept? Then we can think about and going forward instead beginning allways again like we didn't knew anything and like it's a new deck
I might have been unclear in my last post, so I'll ask the question again. What are the other anti-Whirza datapoints you have in mind when you suggest/state the deck has bannable cards? I know about SCG Atlanta (horrible) and GP Columbus (not great in context of Atlanta, but not that bad overall). There have been plenty of GP where a well-known, powerful deck sent 2 copies to the T8. So what are the other events you are thinking of when you say we have data proving Whirza is broken? I'm not saying they don't exist. I am simply asking which ones you are referring to.
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Post by Simto » 4 years ago

gkourou wrote:
4 years ago
idSurge wrote:
4 years ago
If I remember right, Humans are the answer to ETron are they not, and UW beats up on all Tron?
E-Tron certainly became a better deck than back then. It took Blast Zone as a 2-off that's great vs Humans and also Karn, The Great Creator who can search up Ensnaring Bridge from the sideboard(also Torpor Orb if you really feel about it) and cancelling Aether Vial. It has a closer matchup than back then for sure. It is a better deck overall.
Blast Zone is legit one of my favourite cards in my Tron decks. It's just absolutely amazing! :)
I still get my ass handed to me against humans and spirits and stuff like that hehe, but I still love it.

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Post by drmarkb » 4 years ago

True-Name Nemesis wrote:
4 years ago
drmarkb wrote:
4 years ago
Without wishing to discuss twin further, I played Probe, and as I recall most did.
Without wishing to say you're lying, because Twin DID use git probe in earlier iterations.

However, claims like this are very easily fact checked. And Twin variants have mostly moved away from running it in 2015. Maybe you did. But most did not.

https://www.mtggoldfish.com/archetype/m ... 3420#paper
Well I did sell out pre ban - as anyone who has read my previous posts know. I liquidated a lot of stock pre ban on a hunch, kept bits and bobs- prob about the end of 2014. Pribe was certainly used by some then- and Mtg top 8 will show that - you can search by year. I certainly faced probe in Twin, abd infect iirc. Ddt was about then. I had the deck since the start. It would be disingenuous to suggest probe was not a part of the deck over that time, not that anyone is suggesting that I am sure. I actually had two versions of the deck.

But once again people are discussing Twin, it has gone, and probably won't come back.

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