Modern

Modern Time – Ffej’s Banned List and Ultimatums

As the end of October nears, my intensity of focusing on Modern also increases. GP Brisbane is already in the books, with Affinity winning and two Junk lists like the one I posted in my last article making the top eight. It’s a good feeling to know you understand a format to the degree that you can see what is good. Now, I won’t claim I am a Modern expert, and I still have a lot of things to explore, but I have a decent grasp on the decks and what makes them good or bad in the current metagame.

Still, I am testing as much as possible. I played a bunch of [card]Scapeshift[/card] and Paul Cheon’s Grixis control recently, trying to get some more familiarity with the blue decks. In addition to testing, I am watching streams and reading about Modern as much as possible. I am trying to see other people’s perspectives to compare them with my own. I lend decks to people to pick their brains about how they performed, cutting the amount of work I have to do myself and seeing how their view of a matchup differs from mine.

When I saw an article on StarCityGames.com on Modern by Jeff Cunningham, I was very much excited: first because it was basically guaranteed to be a good read (it was), and second because his thoughts on Modern were most likely to be helpful in my testing (they weren’t – he wasn’t talking strategy). I was sad when I found out the article wasn’t going to be helpful in deciding on a deck, but this was still a Jeff Cunningham article, so I couldn’t be all that disappointed. In the article, Cunningham discussed the banned list and why it doesn’t do a good job at fixing the problems with Modern, which he calls “unstable,” “unsexy,” “familiar” and “inelegant.” He ends his article with a revised banned list and his explanation for it. I’ll start mine the same way, giving you guys a quick look at how I perceive what should be done to make Modern the most fun/interesting format it can be.

More Ban Talk
My ideal banned list would look as follows:

[card]Arid Mesa[/card]
[card]Chrome Mox[/card]
[card]Cranial Plating[/card]
[card]Dark Depths[/card]
[card]Dread Return[/card]
[card]Glimpse of Nature[/card]
[card]Hypergenesis[/card]
[card]Marsh Flats[/card]
[card]Mental Misstep[/card]
[card]Misty Rainforest[/card]
[card]Ponder[/card]
[card]Rite of Flame[/card]
[card]Scalding Tarn[/card]
[card]Second Sunrise[/card]
[card]Sensei’s Divining Top[/card]
[card]Skullclamp[/card]
[card]Stoneforge Mystic[/card]
[card]Verdant Catacombs[/card]

While I like most of what Cunningham proposes, I think we have to be a bit more careful to start with, so I added a couple of the cards he left off. From the four cards he flagged as “potential bans” I would keep [card]Sensei’s Divining Top[/card] and [card]Mental Misstep[/card] banned, as I am neither a fan of time consuming cards that “do nothing” to further the board, nor am I a fan of Cunningham’s idea to experiment on top of a larger experiment. If his experiment fails, it’s already hard to see why, and if we have side experiments going at the same time, it becomes even more convoluted.

[card]Bitterblossom[/card] and [card]Blazing Shoal[/card] (the other two “potentials”) are dangerous, I admit. However, [card]Bitterblossom[/card] is still a “fair-deck” card, and I doubt the Shoal deck can’t be stopped if people are actively trying. You’re still a combo deck that relies on creatures, and it’s not like there isn’t already a deck in Modern that can kill you on turn two (Tin Fins/Turn 2 Titan), and without Ponder, this should happen less often.

[card]Ponder[/card] and [card]Preordain[/card] Cunningham also took off the banned list, but I’m too scared to take off both. I’d rather try one first, and to me the choice between the two is obvious: [card]Preordain[/card] gets to come off, being “just” a better [card]Serum Visions[/card], whereas Ponder does something I dislike a lot that is, in my opinion, better for combo decks trying to find specific pieces. With [card]Preordain[/card], you always see a maximum of three cards, whereas with Ponder you get that, and then you get to shuffle if you don’t like those, virtually letting you look an extra card deeper for the same cost.

And that thing I dislike about [card]Ponder[/card]? More shuffling. One of the few things I actively dislike about Magic is the downtime. Shuffling is minutes and minutes wasted doing something that adds nothing to game play (aside from being a form of library manipulation if you have specific knowledge about the location of certain cards). Shuffling is one of the main reasons I added five more cards to the banned list compared to Cunningham: the fetch lands.

I’ve written about my arguments to ban those before, and I’ve heard the arguments against it. I know it’s an unpopular opinion, but unpopular does not mean it is not right. Community backlash might hurt the format-it’s true-and the community backlash might be enormous, as might it be when we make other drastic changes to the banned list. This is very, very sad, because being scared of doing something unpopular is exactly what makes Wizards act scared, and what makes this banned list such an eyesore.

Still, we cannot ignore the people playing, so here’s my proposed solution:

Use the people to figure out what needs to get banned.

How? Well, from what I understand, games like Starcraft have beta testers who test new releases before they actually come out. Unlike the beta testers we have on MTGO, which are just looking for bugs, these testers are actually an extension of the development process. They go for maximum cheese, just trying to “break” whatever strategy they can, and the actual game developers adjust the pieces accordingly. (I’m not very familiar with Starcraft, so excuse me if I sound like a dumbass.)

Why don’t we do this with MTGO? Why don’t we have a Modern-Beta format online, where people can play with banlist X, to see if certain unbannings are safe? Wizards gets to see all the info, and they can make informed decisions based on thousands of matches between beta testers, rather than trying to work these types of things out only amongst themselves (or by listening to a crazy person like me). If people like Aaron Forsythe admit it is a problem that we solve formats too fast nowadays, turn it upside down: instead of telling us it is a problem, tell us it is our goal to solve formats. Then, keep adjusting the real format according to how we do.

Don’t make another Gavin Verhey have to step up and create “ModernMaxed,” Wizards. Don’t force us to try to help you by running tournaments on programs you do not make money off of. Let us help you make us happy.

Back to Testing
Like I mentioned earlier, I’ve been tapping out for UUBBBRR spells lately, and so far, the deck has seemed to like me quite a bit. I’ve been on a winning streak, and I’m actually enjoying myself playing with the deck. This weekend, I won a GPT, going nearly completely undefeated in games until I punted one in the finals against the Junk list that I posted in my last article. Thankfully, this did not come back to haunt me.

This is my most recent list, still heavily inspired by Paul Cheon’s:

[deck title= Grixis by Jay Lansdaal]
[Creatures]
3 Snapcaster Mage
1 Vendilion Clique
[/Creatures]
[Spells]
4 Lightning Bolt
1 Magma Spray
2 Spell Snare
3 Mana Leak
1 Pyroclasm
1 Shadow of Doubt
1 Terminate
2 Think Twice
3 Electrolyze
1 Hero’s Downfall
4 Cryptic Command
1 Damnation
2 Mystical Teachings
1 Batterskull
1 Consume the Meek
2 Cruel Ultimatum
[/Spells]
[Lands]
2 Blackcleave Cliffs
1 Blood Crypt
4 Creeping Tar Pit
1 Darkslick Shores
2 Island
2 Misty Rainforest
1 Mountain
4 Scalding Tarn
2 Steam Vents
2 Sulfur Falls
2 Sunken Ruins
1 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
2 Watery Grave
[/Lands]
[Sideboard]
1 Dispel
2 Thoughtseize
1 Devour Flesh
1 Rakdos Charm
1 Spellskite
1 Anger of the Gods
2 Counterflux
2 Vendilion Clique
2 Sowing Salt
1 Batterskull
1 Engineered Explosives
[/Sideboard]
[/deck]

The only changes I made were to add two Theros cards: [card]Hero’s Downfall[/card] and [card]Anger of the Gods[/card]. I’m not 100% sure [card]Anger of the Gods[/card] shouldn’t just be another [card]Damnation[/card], or perhaps it should replace the [card]Pyroclasm[/card] in the main, but I would like a few more games before I decide on that one. The [card]Hero’s Downfall[/card], though, has been awesome; it’s a [card]Terminate[/card] that kills Karn against Tron, Gideon and Ajani out of UWR, and Liliana or Chandra from Jund.

Killing Karn and Chandra are the most important of those, as they are hard to kill otherwise. Chandra going to five immediately puts her out of burn range quickly, and the continuous source of card advantage is hard to overcome. Other than that though, I quite like my BGx matchup. The Grixis deck has a ton of removal, and a lot of card draw or cards that give you card advantage, which lets it easily keep up with decks like Jund if the game comes down to topdecking.

During the GPT, I played the deck without the [card]Shadow of Doubt[/card], as I expected next to no [card]Birthing Pod[/card] and even less [card]Scapeshift[/card]. It’s just not popular in this area. There was bound to be a ton of Jund, and indeed, about 30% of the tournament was playing some form of BGx-good news for me! I ended up playing the same Junk player twice (once in the swiss, once in the finals), but no other BG decks. I was paired against UWR twice, Naya, WB tokens and GR aggro, so we had a nice little “fair” metagame going on. I was happy I cut the [card]Shadow of Doubt[/card] for this particular tournament.

When comparing Grixis to other blue decks like [card]Scapeshift[/card] and UWR, I think I like [card]Cruel Ultimatum[/card] better. It is more devastating than [card]Sphinx’s Revelation[/card] against most decks, and while it doesn’t auto-win like resolving a [card]Scapeshift[/card] does, it’s pretty damn close. When their hand is empty, and yours is stuffed, it doesn’t take much to kill your opponent. Can you imagine how easy it is after you Snapcast it too? Also, with [card]Cruel Ultimatum[/card], you don’t have to warp your manabase to include a color you barely use otherwise.

I’ve played against UWR with Grixis a few times in tournament settings now and have won every match I actually finished. (I believe I play at a decent pace, but not every control player does.) However, I don’t feel like it should be this way generally. Perhaps I got lucky, or perhaps my opponents weren’t as skilled in control mirrors, but I always felt like things could go a lot more wrong than they did. That’s a matchup I’ll have to playtest more to figure out what the deal is exactly.

For now, I’ll be sticking with this Grixis deck for a while, until I either find flaws it can’t overcome, or someone shows me an awesome Nykthos powered Modern list… [card]Master of Waves[/card] with Phantasmal Image? Vial it in, make a bunch of tokens, copy it with an Image, smash for a million… Merfolk might actually be good now? Can somebody please break the format and ship me a list? Thanks in advance!

May you chain Cryptics into Cryptics like it’s Lorwyn Standard all over again,

Jay Lansdaal
iLansdaal on Twitter and MTGO

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