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

blkdemonight
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Post by blkdemonight » 4 years ago

How did Aria of Flame impact modern? I'm out of the loop

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Tzoulis
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Post by Tzoulis » 4 years ago

blkdemonight wrote:
4 years ago
How did Aria of Flame impact modern? I'm out of the loop
gkourou wrote:
4 years ago
Aria of flame + finale of promise back then, meant you deal 1+2+3=6 damage. Plus lava dart 6+4=10. Plus flashback lava dart, sac a mountain it's 15.
Also, it means that, as opposed to Pyromancer's ascension, which meant the deck was heateable by cards like RIP, this card does not get hated by graveyard hate, thus giving the deck a totally strong and other angle, which made it more resilient and hate robust.
It basically replaced Crackling Drake.

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FoodChainGoblins
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Post by FoodChainGoblins » 4 years ago

gkourou wrote:
4 years ago
blkdemonight wrote:
4 years ago
How did Aria of Flame impact modern? I'm out of the loop
Aria of flame + finale of promise back then, meant you deal 1+2+3=6 damage. Plus lava dart 6+4=10. Plus flashback lava dart, sac a mountain it's 15.
Also, it means that, as opposed to Pyromancer's ascension, which meant the deck was heateable by cards like RIP, this card does not get hated by graveyard hate, thus giving the deck a totally strong and other angle, which made it more resilient and hate robust.
I love the Nikachu video!

Regarding UR Phoenix, I see the stats that you present and they are certainly interesting. UR Phoenix was the best deck, with decks like KCI, Dredge, and Red Prowess close behind. I saw it as presenting better numbers than Twin decks of the past, but not by a huge amount. The difference in my opinion was that Twin was allowed to do so for years - ever since 2011 when I faced Preordain/Ponder/sometimes Probe Twin decks. But I didn't even feel like they were too strong then. You came with a preconceived plan, just like against Jund and Affinity, which were also super strong decks of the time. UR Phoenix was allowed to go on, but WotC dropped the hammer on them with the Faithless Looting ban, an unpopular one, but a very good one in my opinion (even if it hurt). WotC believed UR Phoenix to be too strong. That's why they dropped the Looting ban, after the Hogaak deck was already dismantled with the HOGAAK ban. Looting was going to be a problem in the Phoenix/Dredge/Prowess decks. Excellent ban...

Regarding the Nikachu banning, I believe that he is spot on. Amulet is too good right now. WotC is likely to ban something like Primeval Titan, when they could just unban something like Splinter Twin instead. Everyone here knows it. They are much more likely to do anything in this freaking world than unban Twin. Very sad in my opinion. Twin definitely polices Primeval Titan. I would say that Remand and the combo itself are the scariest things as a Primeval Titan player myself.

But there are also a few things to consider. I see a "bye bye Mox Opal" poster in the background of the video. Merfolk always lost to Affinity. Of course he is going to be biased against Mox Opal, which many of us consider to be a poor ban, myself included. Urza decks are slower, but UB Urza right now with Mystic Sanctuary and Archmage's Charm is a very strong deck still. Urza is the much stronger card. But Merfolk had a positive Twin matchup near the end. When they have a "bounce your bro" in Harbinger of the Tides, along with a quick, proactive clock, and Dismember, they will always have a fighting chance. Personally I know good Merfolk players who looooved to face Twin. I was surprised, but they put up numbers to prove it. All of this doesn't mean that I don't believe Nikachu is correct. I do believe he's correct. I think many of you also would be fine with Twin. The main problem is that WotC hates to go back on these types of things, even if 50,000 new cards have entered the format. There can always be an argument that "X card" will help Twin. If we can't get over these things/irrational fears, they there will honestly be NO unbans ever in Modern. I personally think that stuff like Jace, the Mind Sculptor and possibly even Stoneforge Mystic are more broken in a bubble than something like Twin and definitely more risky. And those have proven to be fine, although admittedly right now is an emergence in Stoneblade decks. :thinking: We'll see how that pans out.
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Commander - Nope

Aazadan
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Post by Aazadan » 4 years ago

Ed06288 wrote:
4 years ago
Just pick a deck list from a recent paper or online tournament that you think is fun to play. Play with it in small tournaments and tweak it each time to your desired liking.
That provides literally none of the information I'm looking for when building a deck.

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Post by Tomatotime » 4 years ago

Aazadan wrote:
4 years ago
Want to know what my issue is right now? I can't find a deck. I can go on MTGTop8 and look at lists that have done well, but MTGS is dead for deck discussion as is this forum. I can't actually easily find a bunch of threads talking about various decks and how they've done in the current meta from the people playing those decks, see what people think, and cards they've discussed. The closest I can get to that, is trying to find Discord channels for 500 different decks, many of which might be more obscure, then joining every single one of those, and scrolling back through months worth of chat to try and catch up
I would say the main issue here (not to be a downer) is that the format is relatively solved, there is no real need for deck discussion to occur anymore as the gap in power between T1 and T2/untiered decks has simply grown too large. You want a deck to play in Modern? Amulet/Titanshift/Tron is the format and will continue to be on an indefinite basis. You want a different playstyle? Then you play some gold fish solitaire deck like Infect or Burn. In a meta without Mid range, and very little Control, there is simply no need for decklist discussions, there is nothing to discuss, your predators are simply other solitaire decks who either have a faster gold fish or win the die roll. Just my 2 cents as to why you and others may have trouble during this period.

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Post by Aazadan » 4 years ago

Tomatotime wrote:
4 years ago
I would say the main issue here (not to be a downer) is that the format is relatively solved, there is no real need for deck discussion to occur anymore as the gap in power between T1 and T2/untiered decks has simply grown too large. You want a deck to play in Modern? Amulet/Titanshift/Tron is the format and will continue to be on an indefinite basis. You want a different playstyle? Then you play some gold fish solitaire deck like Infect or Burn. In a meta without Mid range, and very little Control, there is simply no need for decklist discussions, there is nothing to discuss, your predators are simply other solitaire decks who either have a faster gold fish or win the die roll. Just my 2 cents as to why you and others may have trouble during this period.
It's not though, there's plenty of conversation to be had. It's just all divided up in a way that makes it entirely inaccessible unless you get really invested in any specific deck. I can go into any deck discord and find constant conversation, usually across multiple chat channels. That is somewhat inaccessible though to scroll back months of years, see what has been said, cross reference time/date stamps of each conversation in each chat channel, and do this in every single discord as i track it down.

If I see a card in a list, I want to know why beyond "it won, so everyone played it", and more importantly I want to know what other cards were competing for that slot and why they weren't picked instead. I can brew my own decks, but I don't always want to do that and I don't want to copy a list without knowing why I'm playing what I'm playing. This happens in solved metas too, as solved metas still adjust sideboards to a meta, and local metas rather than the more broad tournament scene vary from location to location.

All of that stuff used to be available. I could read 20 pages on each forum thread for 40 different decks, in about 2 hours, and catch up on everything across the entire format from basically every perspective. Doing so now is much, much harder because organized Magic communities have essentially collapsed.

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Post by Tomatotime » 4 years ago

Aazadan wrote:
4 years ago
All of that stuff used to be available. I could read 20 pages on each forum thread for 40 different decks, in about 2 hours, and catch up on everything across the entire format from basically every perspective. Doing so now is much, much harder because organized Magic communities have essentially collapsed.
Okay but why did they collapse? Also can we actually say all of them collapsed, or is it just Standard and Modern?

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Post by Aazadan » 4 years ago

Tomatotime wrote:
4 years ago
Okay but why did they collapse? Also can we actually say all of them collapsed, or is it just Standard and Modern?
Because Wizards has promoted an awful community structure.

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Post by Tomatotime » 4 years ago

Aazadan wrote:
4 years ago
Because Wizards has promoted an awful community structure.
Okay but what community structure did Wotc actually promote?

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Ed06288
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Post by Ed06288 » 4 years ago

Even when modern was more popular, there never was a perfect stock build for some decks. I always remember affinity having a bit of variety to it. Maybe build a sideboard that is very flexible.

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pierreb
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Post by pierreb » 4 years ago

I always thought the collapse was due to the total f fest that was MTG Salvation closing / no closing and MTG Nexus showing up in parallel. In the confusion and the division, people have deserted.

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Post by idSurge » 4 years ago

pierreb wrote:
4 years ago
I always thought the collapse was due to the total f fest that was MTG Salvation closing / no closing and MTG Nexus showing up in parallel. In the confusion and the division, people have deserted.
This, plus people moving towards silo-ing themselves in discord communities, really hurt what was so great about the cross deck collaboration and discussion.
UR Control UR

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Post by Aazadan » 4 years ago

pierreb wrote:
4 years ago
I always thought the collapse was due to the total f fest that was MTG Salvation closing / no closing and MTG Nexus showing up in parallel. In the confusion and the division, people have deserted.
Not really, because the same thing happened to TheSource which was where most of the Legacy content was. That forum is also a graveyard now. Threads that used to generate 2 to 3 pages per day now generate more along the lines of 1 page per month or two. The community isn't gone, it's just all on Discord now.

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Post by Aazadan » 4 years ago

Tomatotime wrote:
4 years ago
Aazadan wrote:
4 years ago
Because Wizards has promoted an awful community structure.
Okay but what community structure did Wotc actually promote?
They used to actually promote forums, and dedicated spaces for specific decks. Most of the community they promote these days pushes people to Twitch, and they didn't really step in to do anything to stop people from flocking to Discord. Neither of which is great for interaction or easily archived writings.

Let me give an example from after things went to hell. I'm going to use Affinity since another poster mentioned that deck. Something that was a hot topic for a while was using Mystic Forge in the deck. Lets say the deck was still viable and I wanted to find out why Mystic Forge didn't ultimately pan out, to see if conditions are changed. You can check MTGS right now, and there's literally only a single mention of that card in their threads which was from me. Even though it got a ton of video content for a while. Good luck finding those videos now though (especially since Twitch doesn't save them), and if you do... good luck watching all of them to see each persons perspective, and cross referencing that with other topics from that same time.

Essentially, the current structure wipes out basically all historical conversations. That's not good.
idSurge wrote:
4 years ago
This, plus people moving towards silo-ing themselves in discord communities, really hurt what was so great about the cross deck collaboration and discussion.
And Wizards 100% promoted it. Worse than discord is Twitch, which is where many pro's have their community outreach now. Trying to pick through Twitch chat and many, many hours of video content to find something that might be referenced.

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Post by Tomatotime » 4 years ago

Aazadan wrote:
4 years ago
They used to actually promote forums, and dedicated spaces for specific decks. Most of the community they promote these days pushes people to Twitch, and they didn't really step in to do anything to stop people from flocking to Discord. Neither of which is great for interaction or easily archived writings.
Not saying your lying, but I've been playing the game for years, and I've never seen Wotc promote forums, are you talking about their old official forums on the mothership?
Aazadan wrote:
4 years ago
And Wizards 100% promoted it. Worse than discord is Twitch, which is where many pro's have their community outreach now. Trying to pick through Twitch chat and many, many hours of video content to find something that might be referenced.
Does Wotc actually promote Discord? Is there some provable pattern to show this? I know Wotc shares twitch links because they want people to view their tournaments but....Isn't that kinda normal?

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Post by Aazadan » 4 years ago

Tomatotime wrote:
4 years ago
Does Wotc actually promote Discord? Is there some provable pattern to show this? I know Wotc shares twitch links because they want people to view their tournaments but....Isn't that kinda normal?
It's more a matter of where they drive conversations. Which they've done by encouraging more and more casual methods over time.

They also completely failed to step in and rectify issues when it became apparent what was happening. Largely because that's what they want. Ineffective communication makes it harder to prove a card needs to be banned. It's part of what is essentially their information warfare against the playerbase.

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Post by ThatStoryTeller » 4 years ago

Well as the creator of the Faeries discord (struggling to keep up, we know...laugh it up) I was always curious of if there was a reference being built of Modern Magic related discord links. Would there be a positive use for a Modern-HUB Discord with a library of deck discord links? And such a library could be duplicated here on Nexus Mtgsalvation and Twitter

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Wraithpk
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Post by Wraithpk » 4 years ago

Hey, I've been trying to catch up on the recent conversation, and I've got a few comments:

Amulet Titan

I'm not on the "Ban Amulet Titan" train yet, but if something needs to be banned they need to just bite the bullet and ban Primeval Titan. That's the broken card, and it's going to keep breaking periodically when they print new things that synergize with it. The funny thing is that I think the deck is still pretty good without Titan. Field of the Dead and Valakut are a strong combination.

Phoenix

Let's be clear about something: Phoenix was not singled out for a targeted ban. Faithless Looting didn't get banned solely because of Phoenix. It was because of Phoenix, Dredge, Hogaakvine, Hollow One, Grishoalbrand, etc. Modern as a whole became too centered on the graveyard. If Phoenix had been the only Faithless Looting deck, the card would likely still be legal. I argued at the time that Phoenix itself wasn't a problem, and I still believe that, but the graveyard decks all combined were a problem.

Twin

I don't think Veil of Summer breaks it. We already had Dispel to protect the combo. If you're winning that turn, it doesn't really matter if Veil draws you a card. I do think it's a little better overall than Dispel in a Twin deck running green, but I don't think it moves the needle a great deal.
Modern
ubr Grixis Shadow ubr
uwg Bant Stoneblade uwg
gbr Jund gbr

Pioneer
urIzzet Phoenixur
rMono-Red Aggror
uwAzorius Controluw

Commander
bg Meren of Clan Nel Toth bg

Aazadan
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Post by Aazadan » 4 years ago

ThatStoryTeller wrote:
4 years ago
Well as the creator of the Faeries discord (struggling to keep up, we know...laugh it up) I was always curious of if there was a reference being built of Modern Magic related discord links. Would there be a positive use for a Modern-HUB Discord with a library of deck discord links? And such a library could be duplicated here on Nexus Mtgsalvation and Twitter

These are around here and there. It doesn't fix the problems inherent to the medium.

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Post by blkdemonight » 4 years ago

Tzoulis wrote:
4 years ago
blkdemonight wrote:
4 years ago
How did Aria of Flame impact modern? I'm out of the loop
gkourou wrote:
4 years ago
Aria of flame + finale of promise back then, meant you deal 1+2+3=6 damage. Plus lava dart 6+4=10. Plus flashback lava dart, sac a mountain it's 15.
Also, it means that, as opposed to Pyromancer's ascension, which meant the deck was heateable by cards like RIP, this card does not get hated by graveyard hate, thus giving the deck a totally strong and other angle, which made it more resilient and hate robust.
It basically replaced Crackling Drake.
Huh, to think aria was actually viable for modern.

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Ed06288
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Post by Ed06288 » 4 years ago

pierreb wrote:
4 years ago
I always thought the collapse was due to the total f fest that was MTG Salvation closing / no closing and MTG Nexus showing up in parallel. In the confusion and the division, people have deserted.
I noticed this too. I really want either this site or mtgsalvation to close so the userbase isn't split.

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Wraithpk
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Post by Wraithpk » 4 years ago

Salvation is closed for all intents and purposes. Their State of the Meta thread has like 6 comments over the last 6 months.
Modern
ubr Grixis Shadow ubr
uwg Bant Stoneblade uwg
gbr Jund gbr

Pioneer
urIzzet Phoenixur
rMono-Red Aggror
uwAzorius Controluw

Commander
bg Meren of Clan Nel Toth bg

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Ed06288
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Post by Ed06288 » 4 years ago

But some of their other threads are still active. They're unrelated to the more competitive side of magic. I still miss some of their input. It's no biggie, I'm sure I'll grow accustomed to this site over time.

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Post by Simto » 4 years ago

I only look at Salvation for the rumor section since it's pretty active. Some of the people posting are a bit obnoxious but still.
But yeah, I miss the individual threads about stuff since it "shut down". Not a fan of the whole discord thing either.
Pretty much only look at this thread now.

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Post by The Fluff » 4 years ago

I think one thing that also contributed to the weakening of mtgs is the EU email thing, it hit many active users, I remember seeing people upset why their accounts were deleted without warning. Some accounts were restored, but I saw some leave because of that fiasco. But as some people has already said. Some parts of mtgs are still very alive.
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