Standard vs Modern: I think that the day any Eternal format will be as popular as Standard, it's the day we should start to fear this game is in decline. Of course Standard attracts more players: it's the new thing; it's the state of the game. If you follows MTG at all, you want to play with the latest cards, and that's Standard for most of the players. Not to mention, 90% of the marketing efforts from WotC are addressed to Standard, as Standard is what sells the boosters. So Standard is what makes the whole system possible. It's the fuel for the machine. That's why the day Standard declines, it'll be the beginning of the end for this game.
This said, I'm not sure Modern has a higher money cost than Standard. I mean, are we talking competitive or casual here? Competitive Standard has an insanely high cost, since you essentially want to play with all the latest Mythics, and the latest Mythics are always awfully overpriced, because, you know, they are in Standard. Once a power card rotates out of Standard, its price normalizes (sometimes it crashes badly, look at the SOM cards), and at THAT point you take them to play Modern, which will use those cards forever. The casual side of both formats is equivalent, you only play with cards you like, you avoid the overpriced ones. Even in this case, in Modern you can build nice casual decks with Planeswalkers or other power cards made cheap by the fact that they aren't in Standard anymore; in Standard, not so much, you'll just play with the cards the pros aren't using.
Just a note most of my decks cost comes from 4 paths to exile which cost 12.48, if I would of swapped them out for swords to plowshares the deck would of costed 6.01 tix.
Of course there is a ton of room for improvement with the Swords of XXX but hey Swords and birds... sounds to familiar.
Addendum: please read Vantar's explanation of our current pairing system based on DCI rules, which causes rare occurrences of duplicate matches in the same event. If you have any idea how to help him fix this, please tell him in the forum (and I hereby officially ask for a solution that would prevent this from happening, since people don't come to play twice with the same opponent).
I have to say I haven't tried anything like it but this might serve as a bit of extra inspiration for your ideas.
I'm sure nobody will thank you for playing a Land Destruction deck in a casual environment as having their lands blown up does not tend to be something people enjoy. I think GR Land D is a deck that could well be competitive, though I doubt at the highest level, as there are some very greedy manabases out there. Not least the most recent development of Spirit Jund, a Jund deck that adds a white splash to the decks already non-basic heavy manabase to play Lingering Souls. Also Land D should be very good against the Valakut Scapeshift decks and Tron decks.
On the negative side there are a few points. Firstly, some decks will be more susceptible to Land D than others. For example, Souls Sisters decks or Red Deck Wins will probably brush off Land Destruction without too much of a problem. You therefore need to be conscious of these bad matchups. Secondly, another potential problem is that most Modern decks run on a very low curve. Destroying one of their lands on turn 3, or even turn 2, probably isn't going to stop them playing a Tarmogoyf. Thirdly, and linked to my previous point, a lot of decks (particularly Jund) are now running Deathrite Shaman who exiles lands from the graveyard to add 1 mana of any colour. This mitigates the loss of lands going to the graveyard as they can still make mana and generate the colours they are looking for.
Ultimately there's probably only one way to find out and that's to give it a go. How good Land D is will heavily depend on the decks you are expecting to face and the methods that decks that are susceptible to it have to deal with it.
Thanks a lot for your comment and a very interesting discussion point. I hope this has gone some way to answering your questions.
I love to see variations on Green/Red for formats where it isn't supposed to be any good. I started playing when Erhnam-n-Burn'Em was a top deck and we'd casually push out 'quick' Shivan Dragons using Tinder Wall and Orcish Lumberjack. I like the idea of these decks, but I've recently been tinkering with a GR Modern deck that includes 3 Magus of the Moon and a medium land destruction package (4 Stone Rain, 3 Boom//Bust, 2 Sowing Salt, and 2 Shivan Wumpus plus 2 Molten Rain in SB). The deck would also include a few copies of Faithless Looting to provide an outlet to dump these spells depending on match-up and Grim Lavamancer to eat them either way. The local shop is getting ready to run Modern once or twice a month (not that I'll get to go - I'm a returning player who has a family now). In your opinion, is this too mean for casual but not quite ready for the real deal or in a good position to take on some greedy mana-bases? It gives up a lot of the 'pop' of these pure aggro decks but I feel like the possibility a first/second turn Magus of the Moon is worth considering!
I do basically agree with you - there's a good possibility that this won't work. I do note, however, that many of the third party sites (mtgstats etc.) do use DE list publishing as a key source of data so this change will affect the robustness of a lot of third party analysis. Also the offline meta, which SCG uses for some of its stats articles, seems to be more affected by card availability and generally slower to shift around than the online meta.
And as I said in my op, I do of course agree with your second last para. The comms (of this and many other things) by WoTC is really, really poor.
I did make it to the end but the Treasure Chest had already been looted and the NPC I was supposed to get the next quest from only had this to say "Sorry this section of the game has not been completed. Thanks for playing!"
No seriously though I don't know how many ways this can be said but the current state of affairs is unacceptable.
Hyperbole pisses some people off? Too bad. It isn't being done to be histrionic or exaggerate the importance of the issues. I'm annoyed by the arguments that because of how OUR message is being put across that that invalidates the message. I completely and utterly disagree.
Hyperbole aside this is an important issue of communication and deceptive thinking. The communication angle we've been over but the deceptive thinking part may have gone unnoticed.
The fact that we are getting less information as you said doesn't negate the problem that it is supposed to solve. Instead it exacerbates the problem. Because the guys going out and buying singles who aren't on the pro tour, are the very ones who rely on diverse information that comes cheaply.
If the information is truncated as has been pointed out many times the formats will be staler not more fun as the middle tier players fall back on Captain Obvious decks. This is the point being ignored (and I guess those who ignore it are hoping it goes away.)
I'd really like a more in-depth explanation from WOTC how this isn't so. How their solution really works. But I expect to get none. Why? Because of the culture they live in.
So, it would seem that we came off as somewhat ranty in our post. I will try and clarify my position and reasoning behind being annoyed with this decision.
According to the post in Blippy's thread by our newest community liason, WotC's argument is:
"This was a conscious decision by the Wizards R&D team that wasn’t made lightly. Ultimately, we feel that publishing every deck list leads to solving constructed formats far too efficiently, resulting in early stagnation that’s not fun for anybody. We still want to show new deck ideas every day and provide insight into the Magic play environment, but we don’t want metagame development to become purely a function of data analysis."
As far as the issue of this information being limited in an effort to fight formats being solved quicker, I don't think we will see a significant impact from this decision.
Here is what I feel is the impact of the decision: WotC will be posting limited metagame information from MTGO on the official MTGO page, but nothing will be changing for other MTGO and MTG strategy sites. We will continue to see massive amounts of decks, strategy, and information flowing from these other sites, that less savy players or players new to the competitive scene may or may not be aware of. The information will still be out there, but only the sharkiest of sharks will no where to find it early on. As players start to dig into the interwebz outside of the official MTGO page, they too will find the treasure trove of STD and block constructed data out there, and we will continue to have rapidly solved formats.
Basically, I think WotC is being a tad niave or narcissistic to assume that it is their stream of data that is solving formats and not everyone's combined stream of data for the most popular formats that is contributing to this issue. Are formats being solved quicker than they were 5 years ago? yes. Have we seen an exponential increase in the amount of information available about formats with the smallest card pool in conjunction with even more competitive tournaments with big cash prizes cropping in the last 5 years? yes.
This is all speculation of just one man, so like you said maybe it is worth it to WotC to try and stem the tide. I just don't think it will work.
I agree with you that calling this out as oppressive censorship is hyperbolic. I do think that this decision will harbor ill will, and will leave players worse off while doing almost nothing to the speed of format solving.
The bigger issue for me is the continued ineptness with which WotC communicates this information. A quickly cobbled together post on a thread started by a community member after the policy is put into place, and perhaps a tweet by a company rep? Give me a break. That is another example in a long history of piss poor communication by Wizards. It is the terrible communication of these decisions that really irks me. How is it that they have continued to have such a terribly inefficient method of getting important information out to the players of the community? I think it shows sloppiness on their part and is disrespectful to the community that makes this game a reality.
I know you're mostly an eternal format player, and I agree that those formats probably can't be solved. But did you follow standard and especially block over the past year or so? Each of those formats, especially block, were clearly solved by the time new cards were added to the pool. Post AVR block showed the progression most starkly. The AVR pro tour block format was extremely diverse - hexproof/pump, UW miracle, frites, big green, holdover boros aggro - but about a month into the format someone (I think it was Kibler) found the jund deck and that progressively grew to dominate until by the end no one was playing anything else (eg. see the comments http://puremtgo.com/articles/state-program-august-3rd). The same had happened previously in that format with the tokens and then (to a bit of a lesser extent) the boros aggro deck. I think for these formats, which are the ones WoTC cares most about, "solving" is a very real issue given the relatively small size of the card pool.
I agree that the link between more information and quicker format solving isn't 100% provable but I do think that it's pretty obvious that if there were NO decklists posted then there would be less people who were able to figure the format out; clearly publicisation of information has some effect on people finding out what are the best decklists. The only question then is whether a reduction but not an elimination of the information flows will have a slowing effect on the speed at which these formats are figured out. It's at least arguable that it does. Take a look at blippy's latest meta graphs, where ~75% of winning decklists are "unknown". it's just impossible to do detailed tracking of both the overall meta and which specific cards are most commonly used in particular archetypes if such a large proportion of sucessful decklists are unknown. Yes, there are people who will just copy the lists that are published but you have much less certainty that that particular card combination is optimal because you can't see the makeup of that archetype replicated as many times as you could previously.
You're asking for proof of something which is unprovable, but as I said I think Wizards at least has the right to try this out and an arguable case that it could be correct.
I didn't really glean too much about your argument as the dissenting voice. Most of your statement was a rebuttal to certain claims made by people who are upset by the move. I don't have any issues with those rebuttals, but there isn't much substance to the other side of the argument. Perhaps it is bad for formats to be "solved" (I cringe when people use that word because you can't really "solve" a format, but that's the buzzword, so I just get to keep cringing), but is it really clear that restricting the decklists will keep a format from being "solved" as quickly? I could easily argue that fewer decks for people to look at would cause MORE logjamming and copying than a glut of decks. I'm not saying you can't have an argument on that side, I'm just not seeing much of one.
Well, seeing as everyone has hyperbolic herd-mind going on the topic, I might as well be a dissenting voice on the whole DE list publishing thing. Well, I don't disagree with everyone on the "WoTCs communication sucks" part of it, because clearly that's true, but on the substantive point then I think WoTC actually does at the very least have a right to limit this information and, potentially, might even be correct that it's good for the game to do so to some extent.
First of all, the claims of "censorship" and the like a pretty overblown. WoTC isn't positively restricting anyone from publishing any of their own decklist that they choose to do so, they are just refraining from actively publishing a certain number of lists. They already restrict the publication of the vast majority of lists that they have access to on both MODO and the offline game (eg. there is no publication of the non-winning lists in dailies or the lists of decks in 8-person etc. queues). The publication of all of those lists would, obviously, substantially increase the amount of information available about a format but no one's asking for those to be published and that's an implict recognition that WoTC has the right to draw the line *somewhere*.
Second, I think they have an arguable case that increased data publication and the associated third party data mining accelerates the "solving" of formats, particularly the smaller ones (block and standard). Eg. each of the ISD block formats were solved quite quickly and if you followed the attendence in block daily events, particularly towards the end where the post-AVR Jund deck was just dominating, you noticed that as the format got more and more stale attendance dropped off more and more.
Is this "solving" a problem? Seb on the podcast dismissed this by reference to chess. I cringe whenever I see anyone try to compare a TCG to chess. TCGs are absolutely NOTHING like chess and all attempted comparisons are utterly bunk. Chess is a pure strategy game with no randomness, TCGs inherently have a much higher random element and are attractive for many other aspects than just strategic solving. Due to their higher randomness TCGs can NEVER be as satisfying on a purely strategic level as chess, they simply can't have the same type of strategic depth due to their randomness - and this isn't to say TCGs are inferior, they're just an utterly different type of game. Given their relative lack of strategic depth, the deeper attraction of TCGs lie in other aspects of the game - discovery of the card pool, novel interractions, doing things no one expects, taking your pet "bad" cards and winning with them, making your own personal mark on your deck, ownership of your ideas. These things all become harder to maintain when a format is solved and X combination of cards is clearly the optimal one to play (much more of a problem in smaller formats eg. block). Magic is inherently less satisfying when the deckbuilding side of things is completely solved and all that's left is Rock-Paper-Scissors matchup and the flip of the coin and topdeck luck.
In their, understandable, hurt at having previously published data taken away I don't feel like anyone's really addressing WoTCs argument from the perspective that their primary interest is in preserving the health of the game and that, at some level, "solved" formats can really hurt that - as I've said repeatedly, particularly for the most popular standard and block formats.
That list does look a little more resilient and less likely to run out of gas. The version I used doesn't have the best long game.
I played Leatherback Baloth in a Dungrove Elder-based Modern deck in one of my other articles and really liked it. A vanilla 4/5 is surprisingly good in this format due to all the small creatures people are playing.
Lead the Stampede doesn't seem amazing but it has to be said there aren't a lot of other green draw spells. Harmonize seems like the next best thing, otherwise I guess you could just put a few more creatures in its place.
I've played the second deck you posted a little bit on MTGO. I was surprised at its resiliency. It lacks the speed of the all-haste deck, but it is a little hardier. Leatherback baloth is a house and can go toe to toe with a lot of creatures. I'm not sure about Lead the Stampede, but I'm not sure what a decent replacement might be.
I was actually thinking that Smash to Smithereens would be a good card for a bit of damage and destruction.
I agree though that Shattering Spree can be a real blowout against Affinity/Robots. Particularly good considering that the deck is pretty popular right now.
Definitely one to consider!
Well Ive pretty much posted my opinions on this subject on the mothership but to reiterate here: I really dislike the decision itself as if correct it is incredibly counter intuitive and if incorrect seems terribly obtuse. In addition as Keya ranted somewhat eloquently, communication is important. If you ignore it as a company what does that say about your attitude towards your customers? Forget the ccc, forget the fun stuff that happens occasionally, forget the fact that the game itself is fun still. If you ignore your player base then you are saying you don't care about them.
In addition, as Keya indicated the communications fail is systemic at this point and needs to be addressed. I don't mean to knock WotC_Sean who seems to be an OK from what people have said (though I haven't found him online yet) but if he is doing this alone he is definitely in deep waters.
"The problem: I made money. Enough that I covered all my losses to date, and am doing pretty well. "
Results didn't line up with hypothesis? That's always a problem.
Keep in mind that you're slightly above the breakeven point after a year, and only that after spending most of the year in the red. Now that you're at this point, a collection doesn't gain traction or continue to grow like a business whose advertising is finally paying off. You can quit now, and say that it's possible to make twenty bucks a year (roughly the amount of change I lose in my couch) or you can keep trading to find out of this is long-term viable or just a blip in the data. You have to continually make trades, and if the past year has taught you anything, those trades will put you back in the red for most of the time.
At twenty or thirty bucks in a year, you're making less than one tenth of the most poor people in the developing world. I wouldn't call this an "easy" way to turn a profit.
This was very fun to read. Having recently done a video about control builds in legacy tribal wars, I found much of the discussion section very familiar to things I was thinking about recently.
I completely agree with Paul about the deckbuilding for control needing to defend against multiple angles of attack. I've been pushing the idea for months (in comments threads here) that control decks need to consider how they can be built to control more than just the basic creature-based strategies. Countermagic is the most versatile way to answer a wide variety of threats, and I just can't imagine not taking at least a few counterspells with me into the event with any control deck. The main problem IMHO is that you don't have alot of deck space for pure card-drawing, which is part of what limits the effectiveness of 1-for-1 answers like countermagic.
And that is part of the reason for the overabundance of board sweepers in control lists in tribal wars, as it is an easily obtained form of card advantage in many matchups. But 12 sweepers seems like overkill (mitigated a little by 4 of them having cycling -- I actually think the choice of sweepers is excellent here). The matchup against aggro is good enough that you can shave a few percentage points there to fight along other angles. The lifegain guys have sligh decks handled, and surely 6-8 sweepers would be enough to take care of linear aggro? If you could improve your combo matchup from 25/75 to 40/60, would that be worth reducing your aggro matchup from 99/1 to 90/10? Those percentages aren't meant to be exact, that's just the kind of idea I'm talking about.
This kind of 12sweepers.dek list basically cannot lose to vanilla aggro decks. If you get lucky and face just aggro all day, you probably cruise to x-0 without breaking a sweat. But in this event when you did face an aggro deck, it attacked along an angle you weren't prepared for with Armageddon -- a sorcery that is crushing to control and can only be interacted with on the stack by countermagic. I would argue that all but the most brutally swift aggro decks should nearly always be built with at least one alternative angle of attack, like Armageddon or Manabarbs, precisely *because* control decks are overly-reliant on board sweepers and light on countermagic.
Another example of the utter failure of both communication and programming colliding to make a sweaty man-pile of disgust is when the removed the Multiplayer rooms from V3 because V4 doesn't support them, but V4 doesn't support the COmmand Zone (instead sticking your Commander in the middle of the play area). And of course they didn't announce removing the multiplayer rooms, and haven't acknowledged or fixed the command zone bug. So Commander players either can't find a game or can't play properly. I haven't even played a single game since I saw this change. I log on once in a while to see if it's fixed, but I'm always disappointed.
I think it would be beneficial to the readership to have more deckbuilding articles and other how-to type articles such as how to analyze and build a sealed deck. most of the limited articles are mainly "pat-myself-on-the-back", I built an awesome deck and destroyed the field, with emphasis on the playing-not on the building (drafting) of said deck.
I'm trying not to do interviews, though (except I'll do again next year after we'll have a new Tribal Champion and Number 1 Player in TribAP). These deckbuilding articles are fun but really time-consuming, so I don't think I'll be able do them too frequently. Possibly the next one will come sooner, though. Once me and my hosts will find a serious deckbuilding challenge involving Aggro.
About the answers of this deck, at least the counter angle was covered by Cavern of Souls. :)
Standard vs Modern: I think that the day any Eternal format will be as popular as Standard, it's the day we should start to fear this game is in decline. Of course Standard attracts more players: it's the new thing; it's the state of the game. If you follows MTG at all, you want to play with the latest cards, and that's Standard for most of the players. Not to mention, 90% of the marketing efforts from WotC are addressed to Standard, as Standard is what sells the boosters. So Standard is what makes the whole system possible. It's the fuel for the machine. That's why the day Standard declines, it'll be the beginning of the end for this game.
This said, I'm not sure Modern has a higher money cost than Standard. I mean, are we talking competitive or casual here? Competitive Standard has an insanely high cost, since you essentially want to play with all the latest Mythics, and the latest Mythics are always awfully overpriced, because, you know, they are in Standard. Once a power card rotates out of Standard, its price normalizes (sometimes it crashes badly, look at the SOM cards), and at THAT point you take them to play Modern, which will use those cards forever. The casual side of both formats is equivalent, you only play with cards you like, you avoid the overpriced ones. Even in this case, in Modern you can build nice casual decks with Planeswalkers or other power cards made cheap by the fact that they aren't in Standard anymore; in Standard, not so much, you'll just play with the cards the pros aren't using.
Just a note most of my decks cost comes from 4 paths to exile which cost 12.48, if I would of swapped them out for swords to plowshares the deck would of costed 6.01 tix.
Of course there is a ton of room for improvement with the Swords of XXX but hey Swords and birds... sounds to familiar.
Pete, great article as always.
Tarmogoyf is currently 67.80 tix at MTGOTraders. It's big jump since last week. Does anyone have any comments about why it's increasing. Thanks.
Addendum: please read Vantar's explanation of our current pairing system based on DCI rules, which causes rare occurrences of duplicate matches in the same event. If you have any idea how to help him fix this, please tell him in the forum (and I hereby officially ask for a solution that would prevent this from happening, since people don't come to play twice with the same opponent).
I have seen a GR Land Destruction deck a little like you are describing:
http://www.thecouncil.es/tcdecks/deck.php?id=8018&iddeck=58434
I have to say I haven't tried anything like it but this might serve as a bit of extra inspiration for your ideas.
I'm sure nobody will thank you for playing a Land Destruction deck in a casual environment as having their lands blown up does not tend to be something people enjoy. I think GR Land D is a deck that could well be competitive, though I doubt at the highest level, as there are some very greedy manabases out there. Not least the most recent development of Spirit Jund, a Jund deck that adds a white splash to the decks already non-basic heavy manabase to play Lingering Souls. Also Land D should be very good against the Valakut Scapeshift decks and Tron decks.
On the negative side there are a few points. Firstly, some decks will be more susceptible to Land D than others. For example, Souls Sisters decks or Red Deck Wins will probably brush off Land Destruction without too much of a problem. You therefore need to be conscious of these bad matchups. Secondly, another potential problem is that most Modern decks run on a very low curve. Destroying one of their lands on turn 3, or even turn 2, probably isn't going to stop them playing a Tarmogoyf. Thirdly, and linked to my previous point, a lot of decks (particularly Jund) are now running Deathrite Shaman who exiles lands from the graveyard to add 1 mana of any colour. This mitigates the loss of lands going to the graveyard as they can still make mana and generate the colours they are looking for.
Ultimately there's probably only one way to find out and that's to give it a go. How good Land D is will heavily depend on the decks you are expecting to face and the methods that decks that are susceptible to it have to deal with it.
Thanks a lot for your comment and a very interesting discussion point. I hope this has gone some way to answering your questions.
I love to see variations on Green/Red for formats where it isn't supposed to be any good. I started playing when Erhnam-n-Burn'Em was a top deck and we'd casually push out 'quick' Shivan Dragons using Tinder Wall and Orcish Lumberjack. I like the idea of these decks, but I've recently been tinkering with a GR Modern deck that includes 3 Magus of the Moon and a medium land destruction package (4 Stone Rain, 3 Boom//Bust, 2 Sowing Salt, and 2 Shivan Wumpus plus 2 Molten Rain in SB). The deck would also include a few copies of Faithless Looting to provide an outlet to dump these spells depending on match-up and Grim Lavamancer to eat them either way. The local shop is getting ready to run Modern once or twice a month (not that I'll get to go - I'm a returning player who has a family now). In your opinion, is this too mean for casual but not quite ready for the real deal or in a good position to take on some greedy mana-bases? It gives up a lot of the 'pop' of these pure aggro decks but I feel like the possibility a first/second turn Magus of the Moon is worth considering!
I do basically agree with you - there's a good possibility that this won't work. I do note, however, that many of the third party sites (mtgstats etc.) do use DE list publishing as a key source of data so this change will affect the robustness of a lot of third party analysis. Also the offline meta, which SCG uses for some of its stats articles, seems to be more affected by card availability and generally slower to shift around than the online meta.
And as I said in my op, I do of course agree with your second last para. The comms (of this and many other things) by WoTC is really, really poor.
I did make it to the end but the Treasure Chest had already been looted and the NPC I was supposed to get the next quest from only had this to say "Sorry this section of the game has not been completed. Thanks for playing!"
No seriously though I don't know how many ways this can be said but the current state of affairs is unacceptable.
Hyperbole pisses some people off? Too bad. It isn't being done to be histrionic or exaggerate the importance of the issues. I'm annoyed by the arguments that because of how OUR message is being put across that that invalidates the message. I completely and utterly disagree.
Hyperbole aside this is an important issue of communication and deceptive thinking. The communication angle we've been over but the deceptive thinking part may have gone unnoticed.
The fact that we are getting less information as you said doesn't negate the problem that it is supposed to solve. Instead it exacerbates the problem. Because the guys going out and buying singles who aren't on the pro tour, are the very ones who rely on diverse information that comes cheaply.
If the information is truncated as has been pointed out many times the formats will be staler not more fun as the middle tier players fall back on Captain Obvious decks. This is the point being ignored (and I guess those who ignore it are hoping it goes away.)
I'd really like a more in-depth explanation from WOTC how this isn't so. How their solution really works. But I expect to get none. Why? Because of the culture they live in.
Warning: wall of text approaching.
So, it would seem that we came off as somewhat ranty in our post. I will try and clarify my position and reasoning behind being annoyed with this decision.
According to the post in Blippy's thread by our newest community liason, WotC's argument is:
"This was a conscious decision by the Wizards R&D team that wasn’t made lightly. Ultimately, we feel that publishing every deck list leads to solving constructed formats far too efficiently, resulting in early stagnation that’s not fun for anybody. We still want to show new deck ideas every day and provide insight into the Magic play environment, but we don’t want metagame development to become purely a function of data analysis."
As far as the issue of this information being limited in an effort to fight formats being solved quicker, I don't think we will see a significant impact from this decision.
Here is what I feel is the impact of the decision: WotC will be posting limited metagame information from MTGO on the official MTGO page, but nothing will be changing for other MTGO and MTG strategy sites. We will continue to see massive amounts of decks, strategy, and information flowing from these other sites, that less savy players or players new to the competitive scene may or may not be aware of. The information will still be out there, but only the sharkiest of sharks will no where to find it early on. As players start to dig into the interwebz outside of the official MTGO page, they too will find the treasure trove of STD and block constructed data out there, and we will continue to have rapidly solved formats.
Basically, I think WotC is being a tad niave or narcissistic to assume that it is their stream of data that is solving formats and not everyone's combined stream of data for the most popular formats that is contributing to this issue. Are formats being solved quicker than they were 5 years ago? yes. Have we seen an exponential increase in the amount of information available about formats with the smallest card pool in conjunction with even more competitive tournaments with big cash prizes cropping in the last 5 years? yes.
This is all speculation of just one man, so like you said maybe it is worth it to WotC to try and stem the tide. I just don't think it will work.
I agree with you that calling this out as oppressive censorship is hyperbolic. I do think that this decision will harbor ill will, and will leave players worse off while doing almost nothing to the speed of format solving.
The bigger issue for me is the continued ineptness with which WotC communicates this information. A quickly cobbled together post on a thread started by a community member after the policy is put into place, and perhaps a tweet by a company rep? Give me a break. That is another example in a long history of piss poor communication by Wizards. It is the terrible communication of these decisions that really irks me. How is it that they have continued to have such a terribly inefficient method of getting important information out to the players of the community? I think it shows sloppiness on their part and is disrespectful to the community that makes this game a reality.
Congrats if you made it to the end.
I know you're mostly an eternal format player, and I agree that those formats probably can't be solved. But did you follow standard and especially block over the past year or so? Each of those formats, especially block, were clearly solved by the time new cards were added to the pool. Post AVR block showed the progression most starkly. The AVR pro tour block format was extremely diverse - hexproof/pump, UW miracle, frites, big green, holdover boros aggro - but about a month into the format someone (I think it was Kibler) found the jund deck and that progressively grew to dominate until by the end no one was playing anything else (eg. see the comments http://puremtgo.com/articles/state-program-august-3rd). The same had happened previously in that format with the tokens and then (to a bit of a lesser extent) the boros aggro deck. I think for these formats, which are the ones WoTC cares most about, "solving" is a very real issue given the relatively small size of the card pool.
I agree that the link between more information and quicker format solving isn't 100% provable but I do think that it's pretty obvious that if there were NO decklists posted then there would be less people who were able to figure the format out; clearly publicisation of information has some effect on people finding out what are the best decklists. The only question then is whether a reduction but not an elimination of the information flows will have a slowing effect on the speed at which these formats are figured out. It's at least arguable that it does. Take a look at blippy's latest meta graphs, where ~75% of winning decklists are "unknown". it's just impossible to do detailed tracking of both the overall meta and which specific cards are most commonly used in particular archetypes if such a large proportion of sucessful decklists are unknown. Yes, there are people who will just copy the lists that are published but you have much less certainty that that particular card combination is optimal because you can't see the makeup of that archetype replicated as many times as you could previously.
You're asking for proof of something which is unprovable, but as I said I think Wizards at least has the right to try this out and an arguable case that it could be correct.
I didn't really glean too much about your argument as the dissenting voice. Most of your statement was a rebuttal to certain claims made by people who are upset by the move. I don't have any issues with those rebuttals, but there isn't much substance to the other side of the argument. Perhaps it is bad for formats to be "solved" (I cringe when people use that word because you can't really "solve" a format, but that's the buzzword, so I just get to keep cringing), but is it really clear that restricting the decklists will keep a format from being "solved" as quickly? I could easily argue that fewer decks for people to look at would cause MORE logjamming and copying than a glut of decks. I'm not saying you can't have an argument on that side, I'm just not seeing much of one.
Well, seeing as everyone has hyperbolic herd-mind going on the topic, I might as well be a dissenting voice on the whole DE list publishing thing. Well, I don't disagree with everyone on the "WoTCs communication sucks" part of it, because clearly that's true, but on the substantive point then I think WoTC actually does at the very least have a right to limit this information and, potentially, might even be correct that it's good for the game to do so to some extent.
First of all, the claims of "censorship" and the like a pretty overblown. WoTC isn't positively restricting anyone from publishing any of their own decklist that they choose to do so, they are just refraining from actively publishing a certain number of lists. They already restrict the publication of the vast majority of lists that they have access to on both MODO and the offline game (eg. there is no publication of the non-winning lists in dailies or the lists of decks in 8-person etc. queues). The publication of all of those lists would, obviously, substantially increase the amount of information available about a format but no one's asking for those to be published and that's an implict recognition that WoTC has the right to draw the line *somewhere*.
Second, I think they have an arguable case that increased data publication and the associated third party data mining accelerates the "solving" of formats, particularly the smaller ones (block and standard). Eg. each of the ISD block formats were solved quite quickly and if you followed the attendence in block daily events, particularly towards the end where the post-AVR Jund deck was just dominating, you noticed that as the format got more and more stale attendance dropped off more and more.
Is this "solving" a problem? Seb on the podcast dismissed this by reference to chess. I cringe whenever I see anyone try to compare a TCG to chess. TCGs are absolutely NOTHING like chess and all attempted comparisons are utterly bunk. Chess is a pure strategy game with no randomness, TCGs inherently have a much higher random element and are attractive for many other aspects than just strategic solving. Due to their higher randomness TCGs can NEVER be as satisfying on a purely strategic level as chess, they simply can't have the same type of strategic depth due to their randomness - and this isn't to say TCGs are inferior, they're just an utterly different type of game. Given their relative lack of strategic depth, the deeper attraction of TCGs lie in other aspects of the game - discovery of the card pool, novel interractions, doing things no one expects, taking your pet "bad" cards and winning with them, making your own personal mark on your deck, ownership of your ideas. These things all become harder to maintain when a format is solved and X combination of cards is clearly the optimal one to play (much more of a problem in smaller formats eg. block). Magic is inherently less satisfying when the deckbuilding side of things is completely solved and all that's left is Rock-Paper-Scissors matchup and the flip of the coin and topdeck luck.
In their, understandable, hurt at having previously published data taken away I don't feel like anyone's really addressing WoTCs argument from the perspective that their primary interest is in preserving the health of the game and that, at some level, "solved" formats can really hurt that - as I've said repeatedly, particularly for the most popular standard and block formats.
Thanks for the comment.
That list does look a little more resilient and less likely to run out of gas. The version I used doesn't have the best long game.
I played Leatherback Baloth in a Dungrove Elder-based Modern deck in one of my other articles and really liked it. A vanilla 4/5 is surprisingly good in this format due to all the small creatures people are playing.
Lead the Stampede doesn't seem amazing but it has to be said there aren't a lot of other green draw spells. Harmonize seems like the next best thing, otherwise I guess you could just put a few more creatures in its place.
I've played the second deck you posted a little bit on MTGO. I was surprised at its resiliency. It lacks the speed of the all-haste deck, but it is a little hardier. Leatherback baloth is a house and can go toe to toe with a lot of creatures. I'm not sure about Lead the Stampede, but I'm not sure what a decent replacement might be.
Thanks for the positive review Blippy.
I was actually thinking that Smash to Smithereens would be a good card for a bit of damage and destruction.
I agree though that Shattering Spree can be a real blowout against Affinity/Robots. Particularly good considering that the deck is pretty popular right now.
Definitely one to consider!
I've found that Shattering Spree is an *AWESOME* sideboard card against Robots in a R heavy deck. Take out his entire army on turn four? Yes, please!
I'm sure you're well aware of my views on this issue. Another rant upcoming.
Well Ive pretty much posted my opinions on this subject on the mothership but to reiterate here: I really dislike the decision itself as if correct it is incredibly counter intuitive and if incorrect seems terribly obtuse. In addition as Keya ranted somewhat eloquently, communication is important. If you ignore it as a company what does that say about your attitude towards your customers? Forget the ccc, forget the fun stuff that happens occasionally, forget the fact that the game itself is fun still. If you ignore your player base then you are saying you don't care about them.
In addition, as Keya indicated the communications fail is systemic at this point and needs to be addressed. I don't mean to knock WotC_Sean who seems to be an OK from what people have said (though I haven't found him online yet) but if he is doing this alone he is definitely in deep waters.
"The problem: I made money. Enough that I covered all my losses to date, and am doing pretty well. "
Results didn't line up with hypothesis? That's always a problem.
Keep in mind that you're slightly above the breakeven point after a year, and only that after spending most of the year in the red. Now that you're at this point, a collection doesn't gain traction or continue to grow like a business whose advertising is finally paying off. You can quit now, and say that it's possible to make twenty bucks a year (roughly the amount of change I lose in my couch) or you can keep trading to find out of this is long-term viable or just a blip in the data. You have to continually make trades, and if the past year has taught you anything, those trades will put you back in the red for most of the time.
At twenty or thirty bucks in a year, you're making less than one tenth of the most poor people in the developing world. I wouldn't call this an "easy" way to turn a profit.
This was very fun to read. Having recently done a video about control builds in legacy tribal wars, I found much of the discussion section very familiar to things I was thinking about recently.
I completely agree with Paul about the deckbuilding for control needing to defend against multiple angles of attack. I've been pushing the idea for months (in comments threads here) that control decks need to consider how they can be built to control more than just the basic creature-based strategies. Countermagic is the most versatile way to answer a wide variety of threats, and I just can't imagine not taking at least a few counterspells with me into the event with any control deck. The main problem IMHO is that you don't have alot of deck space for pure card-drawing, which is part of what limits the effectiveness of 1-for-1 answers like countermagic.
And that is part of the reason for the overabundance of board sweepers in control lists in tribal wars, as it is an easily obtained form of card advantage in many matchups. But 12 sweepers seems like overkill (mitigated a little by 4 of them having cycling -- I actually think the choice of sweepers is excellent here). The matchup against aggro is good enough that you can shave a few percentage points there to fight along other angles. The lifegain guys have sligh decks handled, and surely 6-8 sweepers would be enough to take care of linear aggro? If you could improve your combo matchup from 25/75 to 40/60, would that be worth reducing your aggro matchup from 99/1 to 90/10? Those percentages aren't meant to be exact, that's just the kind of idea I'm talking about.
This kind of 12sweepers.dek list basically cannot lose to vanilla aggro decks. If you get lucky and face just aggro all day, you probably cruise to x-0 without breaking a sweat. But in this event when you did face an aggro deck, it attacked along an angle you weren't prepared for with Armageddon -- a sorcery that is crushing to control and can only be interacted with on the stack by countermagic. I would argue that all but the most brutally swift aggro decks should nearly always be built with at least one alternative angle of attack, like Armageddon or Manabarbs, precisely *because* control decks are overly-reliant on board sweepers and light on countermagic.
Another example of the utter failure of both communication and programming colliding to make a sweaty man-pile of disgust is when the removed the Multiplayer rooms from V3 because V4 doesn't support them, but V4 doesn't support the COmmand Zone (instead sticking your Commander in the middle of the play area). And of course they didn't announce removing the multiplayer rooms, and haven't acknowledged or fixed the command zone bug. So Commander players either can't find a game or can't play properly. I haven't even played a single game since I saw this change. I log on once in a while to see if it's fixed, but I'm always disappointed.
Anybody want to buy a collection?
I think it would be beneficial to the readership to have more deckbuilding articles and other how-to type articles such as how to analyze and build a sealed deck. most of the limited articles are mainly "pat-myself-on-the-back", I built an awesome deck and destroyed the field, with emphasis on the playing-not on the building (drafting) of said deck.
really liked the break down of this looking forward to more. :)
I'm trying not to do interviews, though (except I'll do again next year after we'll have a new Tribal Champion and Number 1 Player in TribAP). These deckbuilding articles are fun but really time-consuming, so I don't think I'll be able do them too frequently. Possibly the next one will come sooner, though. Once me and my hosts will find a serious deckbuilding challenge involving Aggro.
About the answers of this deck, at least the counter angle was covered by Cavern of Souls. :)
You always need to consider the angel angle!