Aazadan wrote: ↑4 years ago
Is it that, or is it that decks have different sideboard strategies? A less interactive deck primarily only needs to sideboard against the hate cards that will be brought in against them, and the range of effective hate cards in Modern is quite low. If we power down the artifact/enchantment destruction we're still going to wind up with something like Naturalize or Deglamer as the anti hate card.
Of course less interactive decks have different sideboard strategies. It's just that cards like Force and Claim disproportionately end up in those decks and not interactive decks because those decks can ignore the costs. Fair decks turn to other types of enchantment/artifact removal. Unfair decks use these cards to beat hate pieces, and a great way to trim the power of unfair decks at their margins is to make their G2/G3 win percentages worse. Removing cards like Claim/Vigor does just that. We're not saying unfair decks can't fight back against enchantments/artifacts. I'm just saying they shouldn't be so efficient in doing so, which means if they switch from Claim/Force to Naturalize/Deglamer, we're depowering the deck. This is the very essence of the nerf ban idea.
I'm curious how your numbers change if you pick a date range where decks like Amulet and Infect are the decks to beat. But, I'm not sure we've had that metagame since Force of Vigors printing to confirm that theory unless we look at Legacy/Vintage metas instead (and even then we might not have it). I will say though, and I've been saying this since it became apparent that Oko was very pushed, I really don't think it's a coincidence that he's the colors of the best Force cards.
Force of Vigor showed up in hundreds of decks before Oko. In a sample of 390 of those 600+ decks, 85% of the decks were decidedly unfair with the remaining 15% representing a mix of fair and unfair. Vigor decks included Amulet (16.5%), Infect (9%), Titanshift (27%), Bogles (5%), Hogaak (23%), and others. Oko has nothing to do with Vigor being played in unfair decks because Oko is allegedly shifting decks to green. Noninteractive green decks just play Vigor to beat hate pieces without losing tempo. Again, this is the kind of trim at the margins nerf ban which hurts top decks without destroying their identity. It's a great option going forward.
Mtgthewary wrote: ↑4 years ago
By the way, I think we didn't talked about. Scg Player championchip has same results in paper like allways. Best 16 player, 3 of them played urza and all of them logically on top 8. Finals was urza versus urza. Their is a big difference between eldrazi Tron in paper and urza in paper, compared to urza and eldrazi on mtgo. No mtgo is not better in this case again, like on last gp this time the best players was there, so again real pros one more time. And please stop this : it was 3 formats and maybe they was good at standard and legacy talk. Urza is allways on paper far ahead test of field. Seems it have real problems in mtgo because maybe time and not because they adapted better. It's proofed again and again how strong urza in reality is
Urza is obviously the secret/not-so-secret best deck in paper, even if MTGO is lagging behind. But again, Wizards is never going to ban cards based on results from isolated events like the SCG PC. Nor should they, because smaller events are less likely than larger events to be representative of the metagame. Without good MTGO data, they can't even act on Urza because they simply don't have enough data points of meaning. Wizards will need a string of larger paper events to really allow Urza to prove its worth as the best deck. As I've said before, this was the secret cost of the egregiously stupid decision to not ban Hogaak earlier in the summer: we lost numerous GP to use to determine metagame health.
iTaLenTZ wrote: ↑4 years ago
I keep saying it, the problem is Emry. Getting to recycle EE, Mox, Bauble, Astrolabe puts you ahead in resources as soon as turn 2 and any attrition war. Emry potentially comes turn 1 and from there its a uphill battle for any deck trying to compete. As if weren't enough Emry also blocks any 2 power creature.
Emry is certainly a contributing problem to Urza decks and a great example of a potential nerf ban to trim decks at the margins without destroying their core identity.
The sad thing is Emry was exclusively designed for Modern to go into this deck while Urza was already the best deck. This was a deliberated decision to what end? To make Modern unpopular due to balance issues right before announcing Pioneer? Is this also the reason why they are withholding from bans until after the Pioneer GP's in January? I really feel the state of Modern is being sacrificed to push Pioneer because if Modern were in a good state and people were happy with it and enjoying the format there would be less need for a new eternal format like Pioneer. There is also a huge financial aspect. Standard has been in shambles for at least a year. Sales and attendance have dropped significantly. War of the Spark was a huge mistake. Wizards can take a financial loss but your LGS can't. A lot of LGS have struggled this year to sell their Standard stuff have taken a big financial loss. Introducing Pioneer instantly increased the price of many boosterboxes and cards that have been on the shelfs for many years and that really financially helped a lot of LGS's out this winter. Wizards inflated demand for Pioneer cards by making Modern as bad as possible. Modern has been the most popular format for years now so they think it can take a short-medium term hit like this. The question is where do they go from now? Will they start fixing Modern by the end of January or will they wait until Pioneer is more established or will they do nothing and just let the ship sink completely? Nobody knows. The truth is Modern has been amortized. There isn't much more money to make without fundamentally breaking the format. Decks become more streamlined, more consistent every year. Powercreep is real without the safety valves of Legacy. Modern has some serious design flaws and problems moving forward and I think we might have reached the end. In an ideal world with no Reserve List, Legacy and Modern would merge into 1 format and Pioneer would take its place.
This is not a tin-foil-hat theory. Wizards is a huge company with a lot of financial advisors etc. Decisions are not made randomly nor without a clear objective and thought. I worked in the financial world and this is how decisions are made. You look at benefits and compare them to short-long terms. And when it comes to corporates money is always the biggest factor when decision making so you always have to look for the financial aspect to understand where the decisions come from.
This theory connecting EMRY to Modern's current downfall so far off base I'm not even going to respond to every individual point. It's flagrantly wrong on even the most fundamental, factual levels. Most importantly, Emry was designed literally months in advance of Urza being played. Wizards can't even test for Standard, let alone Modern. It's beyond implausible that Wizards was able to design this synergy to deliberately empower a deck, and even more implausible that they did so to actively hurt the format. These kinds of outrageous conspiracy theories hurt the format and game just as much as Wizards' bad management decisions. Emry is just one of literally two dozen plus bad 2019 design decisions because Wizards wanted to push cards and sell packs.
Is Modern in trouble due to Pioneer? Yes. Does this have to do with financial decisions, MTG Arena, selling Standard packs, etc.? Probably. But the ELD rare Emry has absolutely nothing to do with any of that. Just because we're all anxious and unhappy with this current situation does not give us license to invent and peddle wild conspiracy theories to match the facts around those anxieties.