Truly impressive, awesome number of techs and great philosophical approach. I love your structure, too. May I suggest two things I learned along the way that would make your articles even better-looking?
1. Don't use the (pic=name) command of the editor. The resulting pictures are all over the place. Use the "insert image" command and just paste the picture's address from Gatherer. This way, the pictures will all look the same size, the same black-bordered frame, and well, good.
2. You should put anchors at the beginning of each section so the summary at the beginning of the article can link them and be a true hypertextual summary.
The Gatecrash evaluation is coming. I sat too much on this one, so in the end I decided to wait and have them both back to back.
Also, the Gatecrash one will be a little lighter. When I did M13, I didn't realize that the new stuff in a core set is just 50% of the total, but in a regular large set there's way too much filler, and the kind of creatures printed for Limited purposes only doesn't really warrant a comment.
Well Omnidoor is basically a worse Sphinx Revelations deck than Bant or Esper. It has that extra appeal but it soon died out.
I agree that the solution isn't banning cards. Because to create a better format we'd have to go on a mass ban.
Of course Price couldn't be "destroy target creature". But having a Doom Blade would be a start. It would kill Hellrider, Thundermaw, Huntmaster (leaving you with a 2/2 so the Huntmaster player is still ahead) but it wouldn't kill zombies or Falkenrath. That is very fair in my opinion.
Creatures like Thragtusk and Huntmaster already trade favorably with spot removal. Falkenrath is hard to kill. Thundermaw and Hellrider have haste and punish your life total by a lot if you have to wait to untap and kill them. These creatures are already good against removal. Is it really necessary to not have something like Doom Blade?
It's not a rant, it's how I see things. Some people look at a spoiler and see many good cards, I usually see mostly bad cards. This is not really bad evaluation on either side, it's more like those people want new cards to be good and they love their upsides and diminish their downsides at their first thoughts and I do the other way around. So there's probably a correlation to how I think of a format. It's still magic.
Standard is always the most popular format, that doesn't mean it's good.
I like diversity (up to a point because have 15 or more good decks actually makes pairings have a bigger impact than usual). I just point out diversity because it isn't as diverse as people claim it to be.
The major cards I dislike I know they are beatable, but usually by drawing more of them, a certain card at the right time or the card that beats that one.
I know how archetypes work. But like I said before, most deck in each archetype are more similar and share more cards between them than usual.
Bad removal has been a fact since RTR came out. Before there was Doom Blade, Go for the Throat, Dismember, Gut Shot and the actual best removal in the format was Vapor Snag. Yes, Tragic Slip is good against Noble and Falkenrath but against most other creatures it's pretty bad. It's fine if you are attacking with 3/3s against Restoration Angel but it's pretty bad against Hellrider, Thundermaw and Huntmaster. Again it doesn't feel smart to have the right removal piece and instead lucky. Every format with good removal, aggro was still a very valid choice.
This is my opinion. I know some agree with me and others don't. I've seen a few articles praising this Standard and none pointing out its problems so I decided to do it.
The auras deck was a very good choice for the GP it won and it surely was a good decision playing it. However in terms of gameplay it doesn't have anything to go for and the rest of the format isn't much above this.
The Hellkite Tyrant from Gatecrash seems like another great combo with Mycosynth Lattice. Steal all your opponent's permanents if you hit them; win if you have 20 permanents.
Another fun combo coming based on a Gatecrash card is Duskmantle Guildmage + Mindcrank. Whenever these two are in play, if a card goes to your opponent's card or you make them lose life you can activate Duskmantle's first ability and mill their whole deck making them lose 1 life for each card put into the 'yard.
This has probably been my favorite Standard ever as a deckbuilder. Making tweaks to the decks all throughout the season, and having to change my decks almost daily has been a lot of fun for me.
On the other hand, I have thought this is a very boring Standard season to actually play. Most decks feel very similar, are very few tough decisions to make, and most games end up coming down to who curves out better.
So I guess as long as you enjoy brewing, and make sure to double queue while playing Standard, it seems fine to me.
I read the whole way through. Pili-Pala was the only combo I already knew about. I tried it out in Modern, but there's too much removal in that format...
Additionally, I've always managed to crash the client by casting Primal Surge with the following results:
-Cathars' Crusade
-Rampaging Baloths
-Avenger of Zendikar
Put Infinite Reflection on your Avenger before its token trigger resolves and you've got infinite Avengers. Not sure if you can close that loop of if you just draw the game, though.
The problem with standard is primarily that it's a creature-based format. You either play creatures, play ways to get rid of creatures or a mix of both. This tends to warp the format in weird ways. I think with a few more effective combo decks, standard would be a bit more fun. As it is, it's basically play a creature, attack, cast a burn spell, win. I think I'll pass on that.
The format IS healthy, it's just not very fun. Any deck can win an SCG Open with proper tuning, after all, who would've thought Omnidoor Thragfire would be a viable deck going into RTR-INN Standard? There are problem cards in the sense that once they're played it's hard for you to win (Sphinx's Revelation being the biggest one), but none of them are so overtly powerful that they deserve to be banned. As far as removal goes: you can't always have good removal, otherwise people couldn't play creatures. Imagine of Ultimate Price was "destroy target creature" instead of "destroy monocolored creature". Everyone would play black in their control decks just to have that awesome piece of spot removal.
Good removal can be just as bad, such as when it stifles aggro from existing. If we had most any of the removal spells you mention, standard would be a bunch of Snapcaster decks, and we've already had that standard environment last year. Control decks often are just as mindless in my eyes as some of these decks are to you. Play land, cast removal on big threats, draw cards EOT, untap, repeat cycle.
Polluted bonds is not a card Id recommend for commander (multi) or just multiplayer in general unless you like being the Archnemesis. Me? I hate being ganged up on for one card. So I tend to avoid cards like this unless I am building the deck with that kind of game in mind.
Tuga I don't know why but this comes off as a rant more than a rational expose into the problems of a popular format (The most popular format??). I feel that some of the comments here are really dead on in criticism of this theme.
- The diversity of the format IS a good thing despite you disliking it.
- The major cards you dislike are very beatable but to do so you need skill and as always with mtg a little luck.
- The fact that the decks break down into familiar archetypes is as Runeliger comments no coincidence. This is how the game works in meta. Knowing this should be the guide to how sideboarding works.
- Bad removal has been a fact for a while now. (Interesting how if we look back people said that during Zen block and Som block.) Figuring out which pieces of the puzzle are relevant is an important skill and while I agree that Falkenrath Aristocrat out of the blue to win is a hose imagine their surprise when you tragic slip it. The black edict currently available is over costed and perhaps not so great vs a tokens build but is damned near gold vs Auras. The problem as I said is sussing out what cards to play and what cards to leave out. This is an INTERESTING problem to have. The alternative would be a stale boring format with much fewer decks to contend with.
I expect a better article from someone of your caliber and I feel like you let your emotional response to the way the game feels to you interfere with an otherwise interesting premise. I am not going to downrate it because I feel like on average your articles deserve more merit than I would give this one.
I have to keep repeating this: my main problems with the format isn't it being varied or not, I just pointed that out because people who claim the format is good, say it is very varied. A varied format doesn't mean it is good. I loved the days of Caw-blade, Faeries and UB Control (before worldwake) in Standard because although those were the best decks in the format (only caw-blade was oppressive), they required skill and many games come down to mistakes one player made.
Of course those archetypes share similar mechanisms and some cards. But sharing Mutavault is much different than sharing both Jaces, Tamiyo, supreme verdict, azorius charm, sphinx revelations, nephalia, think twice, terminus and a few more like both control decks. Or sharing 80% or more of the deck like Rb and monored. Or sharing Thratusk, huntmaster, garruk, bonfire, searing spear and a few more on the midrange decks.
Jace wasn't format destroying. Before caw-blade no one was asking for a Jace ban. I wish I was in the caw-blade era but I have to agree that not everyone wants to have such a clear best deck.
That's my reason not to play Modern. I also played big extended irl, but now I only play online. Modern also doesn't appeal to me for the reasons I said. Anyway, this is about Standard and its problems. I could say the same to people who didn't like caw-blade to go play another format.
I'm talking mainly pre gratecrash so I wasn't really taking into account that tournament. But still the Boros deck doesn't count, it's basically monored. Naya Humans should probably play Tusk in the SB anyway.
That grixis was the exception that confirms the rule. It's a much worse deck than any control deck with Sphinx.
I know that there will always be some outstanding cards and some overlap. My point is that the format isn't nearly as diverse as people who defend it claim to be.
I agree that without Sphinx control would pretty much be unplayable. That's not good. I'd rather have 3 or 4 good cards pushing us to play control than just a very good one. Like I said in the article many games come down to the control player drawing or not Sphinx.
My problem is that many cards push towards mindless play and randomness more than usual. Miracles, hexproof+auras, cards that resolved most likely win the game.
if you believe that "huge variety" isn't a good rule of thumb to analyze Standard, then what alternative do you suggest? It isn't hard to find issues with a format, but simply claiming that variety is a bad metric doesn't suffice. The burden then falls on you to provide another metric of analyzing the health of a format. Please let me know if you have a suggestion.
To your second point, Aggro decks, control decks, combo decks, and mid-range decks will always have similar mechanisms. That's partially why they're archetypes. Esper and Bant control are similar, because, as you see in their name, they're "control" decks. Same thing for Rb and mono red, they're aggro decks. The aura deck in this sense, is close to a combo deck (hence their lack of Thragtusk). And the mid-range green decks? They play mid-range green cards!
While I agree Miracle is a bad mechanic for competitive strength (especially without a Sensei's top-esque card in the format), the other points you make with regards to the cards used are rather moot. You use Lorwyn standard as an example, but every one of the decks you just named used a card called Mutavault. Was that a reason that format wasn't healthy? I'd argue against pinpointing specific cards that are used in great demand as completely format warping. Jace the Mind sculptor was format destroying. Mutavault/Thragtusk are merely format drivers.
Last, the crux of your argument seems to be "I play standard because it is the format I have the cards for". And then you go on to say you don't play Modern because you don't have the cards for that format and it's a cost issue. This speaks nothing of the format and just of your personal preference. Cost wise, magic has always been around this cost point, Modern is actually cheaper than the "big extended format" you enjoyed (Trust me on this, I played a lot of Extended lol) and at the end of the day, you just acquire the cards necessary to play what you want and you go for it.
I agree with you on the Thragtusk, the format has evolved that it is "only" a good card. But that's what I say in the article, the format had to evolve in a certain direction because of Thragtusk.
My problem with the lack of good removal is that creatures keep getting better and removal is worse than ever. That isn't good for the game.
I don't get it. How do you manage to get infinite Avengers from Infinite Reflection? It says "nontoken".
Truly impressive, awesome number of techs and great philosophical approach. I love your structure, too. May I suggest two things I learned along the way that would make your articles even better-looking?
1. Don't use the (pic=name) command of the editor. The resulting pictures are all over the place. Use the "insert image" command and just paste the picture's address from Gatherer. This way, the pictures will all look the same size, the same black-bordered frame, and well, good.
2. You should put anchors at the beginning of each section so the summary at the beginning of the article can link them and be a true hypertextual summary.
Other than that, amazing job!
The Gatecrash evaluation is coming. I sat too much on this one, so in the end I decided to wait and have them both back to back.
Also, the Gatecrash one will be a little lighter. When I did M13, I didn't realize that the new stuff in a core set is just 50% of the total, but in a regular large set there's way too much filler, and the kind of creatures printed for Limited purposes only doesn't really warrant a comment.
Well Omnidoor is basically a worse Sphinx Revelations deck than Bant or Esper. It has that extra appeal but it soon died out.
I agree that the solution isn't banning cards. Because to create a better format we'd have to go on a mass ban.
Of course Price couldn't be "destroy target creature". But having a Doom Blade would be a start. It would kill Hellrider, Thundermaw, Huntmaster (leaving you with a 2/2 so the Huntmaster player is still ahead) but it wouldn't kill zombies or Falkenrath. That is very fair in my opinion.
Creatures like Thragtusk and Huntmaster already trade favorably with spot removal. Falkenrath is hard to kill. Thundermaw and Hellrider have haste and punish your life total by a lot if you have to wait to untap and kill them. These creatures are already good against removal. Is it really necessary to not have something like Doom Blade?
It's not a rant, it's how I see things. Some people look at a spoiler and see many good cards, I usually see mostly bad cards. This is not really bad evaluation on either side, it's more like those people want new cards to be good and they love their upsides and diminish their downsides at their first thoughts and I do the other way around. So there's probably a correlation to how I think of a format. It's still magic.
Standard is always the most popular format, that doesn't mean it's good.
I like diversity (up to a point because have 15 or more good decks actually makes pairings have a bigger impact than usual). I just point out diversity because it isn't as diverse as people claim it to be.
The major cards I dislike I know they are beatable, but usually by drawing more of them, a certain card at the right time or the card that beats that one.
I know how archetypes work. But like I said before, most deck in each archetype are more similar and share more cards between them than usual.
Bad removal has been a fact since RTR came out. Before there was Doom Blade, Go for the Throat, Dismember, Gut Shot and the actual best removal in the format was Vapor Snag. Yes, Tragic Slip is good against Noble and Falkenrath but against most other creatures it's pretty bad. It's fine if you are attacking with 3/3s against Restoration Angel but it's pretty bad against Hellrider, Thundermaw and Huntmaster. Again it doesn't feel smart to have the right removal piece and instead lucky. Every format with good removal, aggro was still a very valid choice.
This is my opinion. I know some agree with me and others don't. I've seen a few articles praising this Standard and none pointing out its problems so I decided to do it.
The auras deck was a very good choice for the GP it won and it surely was a good decision playing it. However in terms of gameplay it doesn't have anything to go for and the rest of the format isn't much above this.
Great work!
The Hellkite Tyrant from Gatecrash seems like another great combo with Mycosynth Lattice. Steal all your opponent's permanents if you hit them; win if you have 20 permanents.
Another fun combo coming based on a Gatecrash card is Duskmantle Guildmage + Mindcrank. Whenever these two are in play, if a card goes to your opponent's card or you make them lose life you can activate Duskmantle's first ability and mill their whole deck making them lose 1 life for each card put into the 'yard.
This has probably been my favorite Standard ever as a deckbuilder. Making tweaks to the decks all throughout the season, and having to change my decks almost daily has been a lot of fun for me.
On the other hand, I have thought this is a very boring Standard season to actually play. Most decks feel very similar, are very few tough decisions to make, and most games end up coming down to who curves out better.
So I guess as long as you enjoy brewing, and make sure to double queue while playing Standard, it seems fine to me.
I read the whole way through. Pili-Pala was the only combo I already knew about. I tried it out in Modern, but there's too much removal in that format...
Additionally, I've always managed to crash the client by casting Primal Surge with the following results:
-Cathars' Crusade
-Rampaging Baloths
-Avenger of Zendikar
Put Infinite Reflection on your Avenger before its token trigger resolves and you've got infinite Avengers. Not sure if you can close that loop of if you just draw the game, though.
The problem with standard is primarily that it's a creature-based format. You either play creatures, play ways to get rid of creatures or a mix of both. This tends to warp the format in weird ways. I think with a few more effective combo decks, standard would be a bit more fun. As it is, it's basically play a creature, attack, cast a burn spell, win. I think I'll pass on that.
It would still see use in legacy infect no?
The format IS healthy, it's just not very fun. Any deck can win an SCG Open with proper tuning, after all, who would've thought Omnidoor Thragfire would be a viable deck going into RTR-INN Standard? There are problem cards in the sense that once they're played it's hard for you to win (Sphinx's Revelation being the biggest one), but none of them are so overtly powerful that they deserve to be banned. As far as removal goes: you can't always have good removal, otherwise people couldn't play creatures. Imagine of Ultimate Price was "destroy target creature" instead of "destroy monocolored creature". Everyone would play black in their control decks just to have that awesome piece of spot removal.
I want to leave it in for a couple more weeks, to track it as it falls. Buy adding mask is a good idea.
Good removal can be just as bad, such as when it stifles aggro from existing. If we had most any of the removal spells you mention, standard would be a bunch of Snapcaster decks, and we've already had that standard environment last year. Control decks often are just as mindless in my eyes as some of these decks are to you. Play land, cast removal on big threats, draw cards EOT, untap, repeat cycle.
Thanks! Yeah, it definitely is a great format, after playing in my first event I could tell it's a great format :)
Hmmm it feels like this is a few months overdue. Nice coverage of the various critters. Would have been sweet if you included the gatecrash guys too.
Hey! New avatar! :D
Polluted bonds is not a card Id recommend for commander (multi) or just multiplayer in general unless you like being the Archnemesis. Me? I hate being ganged up on for one card. So I tend to avoid cards like this unless I am building the deck with that kind of game in mind.
As always love the graphics.
Tuga I don't know why but this comes off as a rant more than a rational expose into the problems of a popular format (The most popular format??). I feel that some of the comments here are really dead on in criticism of this theme.
- The diversity of the format IS a good thing despite you disliking it.
- The major cards you dislike are very beatable but to do so you need skill and as always with mtg a little luck.
- The fact that the decks break down into familiar archetypes is as Runeliger comments no coincidence. This is how the game works in meta. Knowing this should be the guide to how sideboarding works.
- Bad removal has been a fact for a while now. (Interesting how if we look back people said that during Zen block and Som block.) Figuring out which pieces of the puzzle are relevant is an important skill and while I agree that Falkenrath Aristocrat out of the blue to win is a hose imagine their surprise when you tragic slip it. The black edict currently available is over costed and perhaps not so great vs a tokens build but is damned near gold vs Auras. The problem as I said is sussing out what cards to play and what cards to leave out. This is an INTERESTING problem to have. The alternative would be a stale boring format with much fewer decks to contend with.
I expect a better article from someone of your caliber and I feel like you let your emotional response to the way the game feels to you interfere with an otherwise interesting premise. I am not going to downrate it because I feel like on average your articles deserve more merit than I would give this one.
Some players are new. some folks forget combos exist, if you knew 99% of these than that's awesome for you but not everyone can make that claim.
An excellent overview. Can't argue with the best in show choices either.
I have to keep repeating this: my main problems with the format isn't it being varied or not, I just pointed that out because people who claim the format is good, say it is very varied. A varied format doesn't mean it is good. I loved the days of Caw-blade, Faeries and UB Control (before worldwake) in Standard because although those were the best decks in the format (only caw-blade was oppressive), they required skill and many games come down to mistakes one player made.
Of course those archetypes share similar mechanisms and some cards. But sharing Mutavault is much different than sharing both Jaces, Tamiyo, supreme verdict, azorius charm, sphinx revelations, nephalia, think twice, terminus and a few more like both control decks. Or sharing 80% or more of the deck like Rb and monored. Or sharing Thratusk, huntmaster, garruk, bonfire, searing spear and a few more on the midrange decks.
Jace wasn't format destroying. Before caw-blade no one was asking for a Jace ban. I wish I was in the caw-blade era but I have to agree that not everyone wants to have such a clear best deck.
That's my reason not to play Modern. I also played big extended irl, but now I only play online. Modern also doesn't appeal to me for the reasons I said. Anyway, this is about Standard and its problems. I could say the same to people who didn't like caw-blade to go play another format.
Collossal effort - but 99% of those combo's are old news.
I'm talking mainly pre gratecrash so I wasn't really taking into account that tournament. But still the Boros deck doesn't count, it's basically monored. Naya Humans should probably play Tusk in the SB anyway.
That grixis was the exception that confirms the rule. It's a much worse deck than any control deck with Sphinx.
I know that there will always be some outstanding cards and some overlap. My point is that the format isn't nearly as diverse as people who defend it claim to be.
I agree that without Sphinx control would pretty much be unplayable. That's not good. I'd rather have 3 or 4 good cards pushing us to play control than just a very good one. Like I said in the article many games come down to the control player drawing or not Sphinx.
My problem is that many cards push towards mindless play and randomness more than usual. Miracles, hexproof+auras, cards that resolved most likely win the game.
if you believe that "huge variety" isn't a good rule of thumb to analyze Standard, then what alternative do you suggest? It isn't hard to find issues with a format, but simply claiming that variety is a bad metric doesn't suffice. The burden then falls on you to provide another metric of analyzing the health of a format. Please let me know if you have a suggestion.
To your second point, Aggro decks, control decks, combo decks, and mid-range decks will always have similar mechanisms. That's partially why they're archetypes. Esper and Bant control are similar, because, as you see in their name, they're "control" decks. Same thing for Rb and mono red, they're aggro decks. The aura deck in this sense, is close to a combo deck (hence their lack of Thragtusk). And the mid-range green decks? They play mid-range green cards!
While I agree Miracle is a bad mechanic for competitive strength (especially without a Sensei's top-esque card in the format), the other points you make with regards to the cards used are rather moot. You use Lorwyn standard as an example, but every one of the decks you just named used a card called Mutavault. Was that a reason that format wasn't healthy? I'd argue against pinpointing specific cards that are used in great demand as completely format warping. Jace the Mind sculptor was format destroying. Mutavault/Thragtusk are merely format drivers.
Last, the crux of your argument seems to be "I play standard because it is the format I have the cards for". And then you go on to say you don't play Modern because you don't have the cards for that format and it's a cost issue. This speaks nothing of the format and just of your personal preference. Cost wise, magic has always been around this cost point, Modern is actually cheaper than the "big extended format" you enjoyed (Trust me on this, I played a lot of Extended lol) and at the end of the day, you just acquire the cards necessary to play what you want and you go for it.
I agree with you on the Thragtusk, the format has evolved that it is "only" a good card. But that's what I say in the article, the format had to evolve in a certain direction because of Thragtusk.
My problem with the lack of good removal is that creatures keep getting better and removal is worse than ever. That isn't good for the game.