gkourou wrote: ↑4 years ago
Saying Modern Challenges are skewed is obviously wrong, so whatever fits whoever's narrative, I guess. Modern challenges hide no data at all. They literally show you the top 32 performing lists. Using a compined canvas of the latest MOCS and Modern Challenge events(and the latest GP event), it seems like Izzet Phoenix is struggling and hitting consistently 0 or 1 decks at the top 32 of any major MODO event.
I'm not 100% sure which post you were responding to, but I don't think this is an issue of the published Challenge results themselves being misrepresented. As you said, it's the unabridged T32, and it's been that way for a while, unlike the 5-0 results which are skewed the moment they get released. The Challenge results are "skewed" only in the sense that a single Challenge is often not representative of anything. For example, here's the Challenge from the weekend before Bridge's banning:
https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/a ... 2019-07-07
There are 0 Hogaak Bridgevine decks in the T8, 1 in the T16, and 4 in the event overall. That actually doesn't look too bad; there's actually more E-Tron in this event than Bridgevine. But we already know Bridgevine was super broken and dominant. The Challenge just didn't capture it. Of course, other Challenges did accurately capture that brokenness, but we would not always know by looking at one Challenge on its own. We needed multiple Challenges to draw conclusions. That's all I mean when I say a Challenge is potentially skewed. One event may or may not represent anything, but we can never tell based on the event alone. We need multiple datapoints to draw any conclusions.
cfusionpm wrote: ↑4 years ago
If it was unclear, I was classifying UW in its current iteration as a prison deck. I know it's definitely up to individual interpretation, but I definitely have vomited a bit lately looking at some of the recent UW lists. The 0 Snap, maindeck RIP ones are particularly egregious.
I can say that if I could play against Jund and Jund-like decks every round of every event, I would be in absolute heaven. Some of my absolute best and most favorite games have been against grindy value decks like Jund. It's just unfortunate how rarely that actually happens.
Arkmer wrote: ↑4 years ago
This is likely the reason the control players here call it a prison deck while the rest of the meta thinks we're crazy. If you aren't playing the majority of your deck at instant speed, you simply are not seeing the full affects and do not understand the degree to which it shuts you out. Given that without a reasonable glut of creatures, walkers are much more difficult to remove, you can understand why this card is such an issue for the "subset" of the meta that is control.
From a diversity standpoint, I'll reiterate that we have many multiple of many strategies in T1 & T2 except control. There may be the occasional UR control list, but they're certainly the exception and not the rule. I would credit this largely to UW just being good on its own and oppressive to its own archetype. Between Teferi and Veto, UW(x) will always be the dominant control variant and obsolete other control lists.
As CFP said later, I think Arkmer's quote accurately describes why some players might call UW a prison deck, but other players would not. But I also think there's more to it. Part of this definition disagreement comes out of unclear terminology. Incidentally, this is a huge Modern and Magic problem generally (as anyone who has seen the interactive/uninteractive, fair/unfair, warp/adapt ,etc. arguments can attest), but I'm sticking with the prison/control disagreement for now. Prison is more or less widely understood to mean preventing an opponent from executing their gameplan or, as Ari Lax once said, making an opponent unable to win. Control is more broadly understood to mean answering and reacting to an opponent's gameplan.
But it just takes a cursory glance at those definitions to see they are basically the same thing. In fact, Reid Duke defined Control in a 2014 Wizards mothership article as: "Their top priority is to stop the opponent from executing his or her game plan." Umm. That's basically just prison, right? And when you think about it, control at its most optimal should feel like a prison deck. If a control deck is constantly answering everything an opponent is doing, then the control deck (or prison deck) isn't trying to win so much as making an opponent unable to win. If you Verdict/Terminus/Path/etc. all my creatures away, the end result is no different than if you have Bridge out and I can't attack. Now we're in real semantical trouble, because our two different terms look like they start meaning the same thing.
Planeswalkers and permanent-based sources of control make this even tougher. JTMS, the Teferis, and Narset provide ongoing investments to control a gameplan. Countermagic and removal are one-use. This makes us feel like any ongoing source of control is prison and any single-use source of control is "proper control," but that can't be right either because they effectively accomplish the same objective of preventing opposing gameplan execution. Permanents might just be more efficient at that (one card answering multiple game actions), but Teferi stopping a player from playing instants is effectually no different than a control player countering every single instant the opponent plays. One of those just has the illusion of action and interaction (counter wars, even if they were already decided before they started), and the other is an ongoing, deterministic effect (T3feri's static). Same with the removal vs. Bridge example.
I think this comes down to an illusion of interactivity. We think it's prison if we have known permanents preventing us from doing things. We think it's "proper control" if we have counterplay and resource/card exchanges using hidden cards in our hands. But we also think it's "proper control" even if they control player is so far ahead that it's just an illusion of counterplay. From the control side, control players don't actually want uncertain one-for-one or even two-for-one exchanges that depend on good topdecks. They want the game locked out of an opponent's grasp ASAP. If the best way to do that is counter-bolt-snap-counter-bolt, then that's their way of executing a prison mechanic to prevent an opponent from winning. If the best way to do that is planeswalkers, then they will take that option instead.
Ultimately, I think the prison and control distinction is a misnomer. Instead, I believe all control aspires to be prison where the control player completely prevents an opponent from winning. Only inefficient and uncertain control where we're relying on topdecks and matching reactive answers to proactive threats will look like "proper control,, even if there's nothing "proper" about it: it's just inefficient and uncertain. Similarly, all control players whose primary goal is winning will just gravitate towards prison, because an ongoing lockdown is more efficient than a one-for-one or even two-for-one exchange rate. When your only way of doing this was
Icy Manipulator, this looked bad (and was bad).
Counterpsell decks looked better. But with planeswalkers being so good (potentially a separate issue), the best way to optimize control is using those ongoing effects alongside "proper" reactive answers. Prison is secretly what control players were evolving to all along.
Last note on this: I also don't think all control players just want to win. I think many of them want a good game of Magic where they ultimately win or lose in tight 49/51 or 51/49 edges. This makes control players feel smart, gives a sense of agency/expertise, and, less cynically, is probably more fun. But this entire set of motives is not optimized for winning, and an incentive-based game economy like MTG rewards winning strategies. In that environment, efficient prison decks will always be better than inefficient "traditional" control decks.
Zorakkiller wrote: ↑4 years ago
if modern's banned list was more reasonable, there would be much more reasonable ban talk. remember the people managing the banned list saw fit to unban goglari grave troll before blood-braid elf. there are reasons why the modern player base is the way it is. hopefully this is clear and won't be misquoted or lumped into someone else's argument.
The GGT/BBE comparison doesn't work for me because one of those cards was never legal in Modern and Wizards was just giving it a chance (GGT). The other card was demonstrably part of an overly dominant strategy (BBE). The unban record shows Wizards is far more likely to unban cards that never saw Modern play (Valakut, BB, GGT, AV, Sword, JTMS) as opposed to giving a second chance to cards banned after the format started (Nacatl, BBE). JTMS and GGT are better comparisons because both were on the original banlist, but even there, I still understand why Wizards unbanned GGT first. GGT is an extremely limited card which realistically only impacts a small set of decks which saw very little Modern play at the time GGT got freed. JTMS is a much broader tool that benefited a wider range of decks. Wizards was just more conservative in that unban case. As for GGT, the card didn't do anything for months until Wizards printed not one (Neonate), not two (Amalgam), but three (Reunion) outrageous additions to the deck in less than a year. This does not indict the original GGT unban, which was fine, but does seriously call into question the communication between R&D and Design/Development, and/or R&D's ability to know which upcoming cards will impact Modern. I would hope the community does not hold the GGT/BBE and/or GGT/JTMS "discrepancy" against Wizards or the banlist in general.
I think a much bigger issue than perceived inconsistencies between legal and banned cards (e.g. SFM banned, Neobrand okay), is Wizards' overall propensity for banning cards. Even after creating the original banlist, Wizards banned 8 cards in 2011, 0 in 2012, 3 in 2013, 1 in 2014, 3 in 2015, 2 in 2016, 2 in 2017, 0 in 2018, and 2 by July of 2019. That's a lot of bans! The original banlist had 21 cards on it. Since then, Wizards has banned an additional 21 cards. I'm not saying some/many of those bans were unjustified, but it primes the community to think in banning terms. If Wizards addresses problematic decks with bans, and if Wizards is unclear about the criteria for "problematic," the community is naturally going to gravitate towards ban mania as a default way of thinking. Players have a responsibility to try and get out of that mindframe, but Wizards shares some of that blame.