Thanks to everyone for the responses. I think there is definitely a learning curve, so I'll work on the formatting you all mentioned for the next time.
I was so giddy, that I was just throwing stuff around before the event started, and I didn't actually test. It was huge in my downfall because half the time, I didn't even know what my outs were. Basically this pile was formed because of a bunch of last minute tweaks that didn't make sense.
I saw that Darwin Kastle was using Kargan, and honestly I just wanted to try him out. I still like him, but he does not fit my playstyle.
Arc Trail is in there as a way of nullifying some Squadron Hawk advantage from Caw. Of course, I didn't play a single Caw matchup, so my preparation for the deck was useless in the context of these matches.
I expect that I will do better overall next week. The biggest lesson here for me was to stick with what you are familiar with. I like more "controlling" RDW lists, with few creatures, more burn, and Shrine as the general finisher.
I am not giving up. I appreciate your feedback. You also seem like a good dude.
I hate to be "that guy" but now that I'm back in town...
I had an INCREDIBLY hard time reading this article. The ideas were good, the thoughts and opinions were good, but the formatting left a lot to be desired. It came off as a giant wall of text, and somehow the deck list formatting fell apart. It would do you a lot of good to review your formatting before submitting, as an article that is ascetically unpleasing is, unfortunately, often an article unread.
How did you wind up with that list? Your creature strategy is pulling in opposite directions. Kiln Fiend wants you to play burn immediately to do damage. Chandra's Phoenix wants you to hold burn to get value.
Kargan Dragonlord is powerful but it is too slow vs Valakut, too slow for the mirror, and the control decks all play bounce spells that will time walk you. It also requires you play a lot of lands, which means less spells and burn.
Lavamancer and Hero are definitely good. Shrine of Burning Rage is insane - especially with StaggerShock which I like a lot more than Arc Trail. It deals more damage and gets your double activations on Shrine.
I've seen a few lists running Stormblood Berserker which requires 12 1 drops (Guide, Lavamancer, Furnace Scamp) or you can run Ember Hauler, because it works as a 2 or a 3 drop after shrine, or possibly both.
Many people run 3 Act of Treason due to the blowout potential vs Splinter Twin (Act of Treason in Response to Splinter Twin being cast. Make a bunch of dudes at your end step before AoT ends, tokens remain and attack for the win). The life loss isn't relevant in any matchup I can think of, since they are only brought in vs Twin and Valakut.
Aggro is very much about correct sequencing and hoping for the right topdecks. At the very least, your games are over quickly.
I don't want to be one of "those guys" that makes excuses for poor editing, so I blame the 3:30 AM time that I submitted this. I am new at this writing thing, and I am also trying to get better at that.
I am just learning all kinds of new things XD.
1. I talk about Geopede, but I ended up cutting him before the event. I played with Kiln fiend instead. I got it switched in the Deck editor, but not in the article. Sorry. Plus there is a typo in the section where I talk about Geopede (alos = also).
2. I had intention of posting 4 rounds, but I only played 3 (scruuub). So there is that.
3. I also had a whole section where I talked about R3. It must not have saved before I submitted. Here is that discussion.
R3- I played decently. I was able to assess that he just didn't have it game 1, so I went for my own kill. I made a huge punt by not attacking with both Goblin Guide and Lavamancer. He was forced to block at that point, and the dead Lavamancer and fetch land would have been enough food for the other Lavamancer I had in hand. C'est la vie.
g3 was also a close affair. This time he overwhelmed me with a Wurmcoil Engine. Again, I think my play was okay here, but I just didn't draw enough gas.
Join me next week. I may play this deck again, not without a major overhaul though. Or I might play something else, like my own Splinter Twin or Pyromancer Ascension. What do you want to see? Do you have any suggestions, comments, or feedback? Please leave those in the comment section.
I have it on reliable intell that 8-4s have a high varience of skill levels. You will find more competition but you may randomly run into guys/gals that do not understand signals, cutting etc.
Hey Welcome to Puremtgo. I liked the premise of your article as it really is something that is often not addressed on modo. I have a policy in general of not joining random games unless I am wearing my elephant hide skin since people can be really abusive with decks and chat. I much prefer to ask a buddy if they are up for a game and then see what happens with a person I know in the mix. It makes breaking the ice with the other two people a bit easier. Unfortunately people tend to not read the notes in the advertisement or don't understand them or don't care so if you rely totally on potluck you get just that.
It would be very nice if the client had a way to mark people as either desirable or undesirable commander players (for your own information) so as to have reminders when playing "in the wild" but until that I guess we need to keep notes elsewhere.
About formatting on here. Please check and make sure you have closed your html tags (the < and > elements) in the text. If you need help with this ask one of us veterans for help in client. Another thing is the bottom section is a wall of text. Using <p> tags to separate your ideas will make them more readable as will interspersing images through out to illustrate points and give the eyes some relief.
I also do about 95% MTGO and 5% paper as I also have a full time job, wife and 2 kids so time is something I don't have the luxury of having, but MTGO makes it a lot easier to enjoy the game I love to play. I also started playing 4-3-2-2 and won a few of them, but I felt I wasn't getting the payout and experience I could with swiss which is my new friend and I always end up with something even if its just 1 or 2 packs.
Haha, the cascade mechanic is so hopelessly broken when combined with TSP suspend cards. Why they even thought to print a "fixed" balance is beyond me. At least with Ancestral Visions, you have to choose, counterspells or cascade.
I always wanted a metagame with 4 Nix in the sideboard.
Control decks always work better in an established and relatively stable metagame. Before you know what other decks are about, you simply don't know what your control deck needs to pack answers to.
I'm sure control of some form will appear by the pro-tour (if wafo-tapa wasn't banned, i'd stake my kingdom on mystical teachings!).
So I jumped on the Modern Bandwagon after a long promise to my Legacy format that I wouldn't become a cheating heart. I decided to buy the Dragonstorm stuff as it was my favorite deck from years back.
After several TP test runs, I gotta agree with you,Restore Balance is annoying and probably deserves the ban hammer. It is unfun to play against and I hardly doubt Wizards wants that kind of deck dominated a new format. I guess I could run Trickbind maindeck to counter the cascade effect or do as you suggested as well.
Either way, not sure Dragonstorm was the best purchase as so far it appears weak overall. Ignite Memories against an opponent holding Emrakul is pretty funny though.
If you guys are interested (like I often find myself to be) in what the hell is the gender of the characters we're playing, I usually check that on MTG Salvation wiki. There, you can find that Kiki-Jiki is actually a male akki/goblin (the name is never a clue in these cases, Japanese names are mostly unisex, for the one famed female Kiki from Miyazaki's movie there are several other well-known male characters also named Kiki). The same goes for Meloku, who's actually portrayed, along with the other male moonfolk, as your typical highly stylized male courtier from 18th Century Japan.
As I also said in the article, the meta in the TP Room currently is:
Zoo
12 Posts
Affinity
Merfolk
Restore Balance
Then I'm also seeing a lot of Hive Mind, RDW (very dangerous), Pyromancer Ascension, Jund and Dragonstrorm decks. There are also some Reanimator decks and Elves decks around. Oh and I should also mention Bant and Boros as well.
So as you see, no one is playing Control. No one! People do play counterspells in their decks of course, but that doesn't mean that they are playing Control decks (Blightning doesn't make Jund a discard deck).
Control may come back in time, especially in the form of some Mystical Teachings decks, but at the moment it is safe to call it a dead archetype.
You say banning Mental Misstep will kill control...
But wasn't control a viable archtype before Mental Misstep was printed? Couldn't it theoretically still be?
That is sort of unavoidable but you can "tech out a bit" the maindeck and sideboard for it. But some games you just won't have a chance, and in others you auto-win. The Cloudpost really become insane. Green has huge bombs for the mirror in Primeval Titan (maindeckable) and Tooth becomes quite easy to cast, whereas blue has permission and can sideboard into Bribery or other options like Annex or Vedalken Plotter. Tectonic Edge or Ghost Quarter maindeck are probably a good idea.
12-post is extremely popular online so expect also to see more and more hate. I don't think it will be as popular in the PT but on the other hand I also don't think it will get totally hated out.
Thanks bocco for the kind words but this wasen't an article about Standard Constructed. This was about Scars of Mirrodin Block Constructed, which means that you can only use cards from the Scars block (Scars of Mirrodin - Mirrodin Besieged - New Phyrexia). So M12 doesn't effect this format.
Thanks for your comment and I hope you're enjoying Magic.
Ancestral Visions- Really? This card has always been fair. Also, this card has hardly made an impact in Legacy. Tom Lapille is either exaggerating, or he is entirely clueless. Maybe he got it mixed up with brainstorm.
Mental Misstep- Again, no. Saying that it is good in Legacy is not good enough justification for banning it in Modern. MM is good in legacy because Blue is the best color (and its not even close). Also, there are many more format defining cards at 1cmc(STP, Brainstorm, Dark Ritual, Goblin Lackey(Dead now, but MM was part of its demise, Aether Vial, SDT etc...)
Valakut-Having never played with or against Valakut I don't have much to say. The combo decklists that I have seen seem good but decidedly fair.
Bitterblossom- Yeah I know faeries. This IS NOT STANDARD. Let me say that again. MODERN IS NOT STANDARD. Like the above poster mentioned, this format has plenty of ways to deal with faeries.
Dread Return- If Wizards really wanted to kill dredge, then we all know what card actually makes the card a deck. Either ban it, or leave the deck intact. MaRo always spouts about how elegance is one of the key tennets of design. Why not apply this theory to the banlist as well? As for the dredge deck being banned... Well this one I'm not so sure on. Being a Legacy and Vintage dredge player, I'll always have a place in my heart for dredge;however, I can recognize that WOTC might not want a deck in the format that basically forces other decks to have at least 4 narrow cards in the sidedboard. Modern dredge would actually be an entirely different animal from the legacy or vintage version as it is significantly slower and less resilient to countermagic. I think that it would be reasonable to allow the deck to exist in its fully powered form, and to only ban if it began to warp the format.
Cards that I would allow in Modern if I was in charge:
Everything. I'm not kidding. The appeal of eternal formats is that you get to play with powerful cards. None of the cards on the banlist seem completely broken to me. I would wary of Thopter Foundry, Dark Depths, and SFM, but I would think that the metagame would still be varied.
Use the preview button before submitting, especially when you're getting started. It helps find dead links, walls of text and so forth.
Thanks to everyone for the responses. I think there is definitely a learning curve, so I'll work on the formatting you all mentioned for the next time.
my mtgo name is drawingdead (obv lol) if you'd like to get some playtesting in just hit me up i'm around most nights.
I was so giddy, that I was just throwing stuff around before the event started, and I didn't actually test. It was huge in my downfall because half the time, I didn't even know what my outs were. Basically this pile was formed because of a bunch of last minute tweaks that didn't make sense.
I saw that Darwin Kastle was using Kargan, and honestly I just wanted to try him out. I still like him, but he does not fit my playstyle.
Arc Trail is in there as a way of nullifying some Squadron Hawk advantage from Caw. Of course, I didn't play a single Caw matchup, so my preparation for the deck was useless in the context of these matches.
I expect that I will do better overall next week. The biggest lesson here for me was to stick with what you are familiar with. I like more "controlling" RDW lists, with few creatures, more burn, and Shrine as the general finisher.
I am not giving up. I appreciate your feedback. You also seem like a good dude.
Wanna playtest?
Thanks for the comment.
I hate to be "that guy" but now that I'm back in town...
I had an INCREDIBLY hard time reading this article. The ideas were good, the thoughts and opinions were good, but the formatting left a lot to be desired. It came off as a giant wall of text, and somehow the deck list formatting fell apart. It would do you a lot of good to review your formatting before submitting, as an article that is ascetically unpleasing is, unfortunately, often an article unread.
How did you wind up with that list? Your creature strategy is pulling in opposite directions. Kiln Fiend wants you to play burn immediately to do damage. Chandra's Phoenix wants you to hold burn to get value.
Kargan Dragonlord is powerful but it is too slow vs Valakut, too slow for the mirror, and the control decks all play bounce spells that will time walk you. It also requires you play a lot of lands, which means less spells and burn.
Lavamancer and Hero are definitely good. Shrine of Burning Rage is insane - especially with StaggerShock which I like a lot more than Arc Trail. It deals more damage and gets your double activations on Shrine.
I've seen a few lists running Stormblood Berserker which requires 12 1 drops (Guide, Lavamancer, Furnace Scamp) or you can run Ember Hauler, because it works as a 2 or a 3 drop after shrine, or possibly both.
Many people run 3 Act of Treason due to the blowout potential vs Splinter Twin (Act of Treason in Response to Splinter Twin being cast. Make a bunch of dudes at your end step before AoT ends, tokens remain and attack for the win). The life loss isn't relevant in any matchup I can think of, since they are only brought in vs Twin and Valakut.
Aggro is very much about correct sequencing and hoping for the right topdecks. At the very least, your games are over quickly.
I liked the tone that your article took. You didn't whine and you articulated your thoughts well.
I like your responses. You seem like a good dude. Thank you for reading and for the advice. I also like Latin.
Yeah 330 am is a bad time to submit if you aren't normally wide awake at that time. Better to wait till you are actually awake and compus mentus. :D
I don't want to be one of "those guys" that makes excuses for poor editing, so I blame the 3:30 AM time that I submitted this. I am new at this writing thing, and I am also trying to get better at that.
I am just learning all kinds of new things XD.
1. I talk about Geopede, but I ended up cutting him before the event. I played with Kiln fiend instead. I got it switched in the Deck editor, but not in the article. Sorry. Plus there is a typo in the section where I talk about Geopede (alos = also).
2. I had intention of posting 4 rounds, but I only played 3 (scruuub). So there is that.
3. I also had a whole section where I talked about R3. It must not have saved before I submitted. Here is that discussion.
R3- I played decently. I was able to assess that he just didn't have it game 1, so I went for my own kill. I made a huge punt by not attacking with both Goblin Guide and Lavamancer. He was forced to block at that point, and the dead Lavamancer and fetch land would have been enough food for the other Lavamancer I had in hand. C'est la vie.
SB: -4 Burst Lightning, -4 Kargan Dragonlord; +4 Dismember, +2 Combust, +2 Act of Aggression.
g3 was also a close affair. This time he overwhelmed me with a Wurmcoil Engine. Again, I think my play was okay here, but I just didn't draw enough gas.
Join me next week. I may play this deck again, not without a major overhaul though. Or I might play something else, like my own Splinter Twin or Pyromancer Ascension. What do you want to see? Do you have any suggestions, comments, or feedback? Please leave those in the comment section.
Thanks again for reading.
Andrew
apaulogy@gmail.com
@apaulogy on Twitter
apaulogy on MTGO.
No love for lark? Or is it hidden?
I have it on reliable intell that 8-4s have a high varience of skill levels. You will find more competition but you may randomly run into guys/gals that do not understand signals, cutting etc.
Hey Welcome to Puremtgo. I liked the premise of your article as it really is something that is often not addressed on modo. I have a policy in general of not joining random games unless I am wearing my elephant hide skin since people can be really abusive with decks and chat. I much prefer to ask a buddy if they are up for a game and then see what happens with a person I know in the mix. It makes breaking the ice with the other two people a bit easier. Unfortunately people tend to not read the notes in the advertisement or don't understand them or don't care so if you rely totally on potluck you get just that.
It would be very nice if the client had a way to mark people as either desirable or undesirable commander players (for your own information) so as to have reminders when playing "in the wild" but until that I guess we need to keep notes elsewhere.
About formatting on here. Please check and make sure you have closed your html tags (the < and > elements) in the text. If you need help with this ask one of us veterans for help in client. Another thing is the bottom section is a wall of text. Using <p> tags to separate your ideas will make them more readable as will interspersing images through out to illustrate points and give the eyes some relief.
I also do about 95% MTGO and 5% paper as I also have a full time job, wife and 2 kids so time is something I don't have the luxury of having, but MTGO makes it a lot easier to enjoy the game I love to play. I also started playing 4-3-2-2 and won a few of them, but I felt I wasn't getting the payout and experience I could with swiss which is my new friend and I always end up with something even if its just 1 or 2 packs.
Haha, the cascade mechanic is so hopelessly broken when combined with TSP suspend cards. Why they even thought to print a "fixed" balance is beyond me. At least with Ancestral Visions, you have to choose, counterspells or cascade.
I always wanted a metagame with 4 Nix in the sideboard.
If zoo and 12-post are the two most popular decks, surely it's time to be trying out G/B death cloud?!
Control decks always work better in an established and relatively stable metagame. Before you know what other decks are about, you simply don't know what your control deck needs to pack answers to.
I'm sure control of some form will appear by the pro-tour (if wafo-tapa wasn't banned, i'd stake my kingdom on mystical teachings!).
So I jumped on the Modern Bandwagon after a long promise to my Legacy format that I wouldn't become a cheating heart. I decided to buy the Dragonstorm stuff as it was my favorite deck from years back.
After several TP test runs, I gotta agree with you,Restore Balance is annoying and probably deserves the ban hammer. It is unfun to play against and I hardly doubt Wizards wants that kind of deck dominated a new format. I guess I could run Trickbind maindeck to counter the cascade effect or do as you suggested as well.
Either way, not sure Dragonstorm was the best purchase as so far it appears weak overall. Ignite Memories against an opponent holding Emrakul is pretty funny though.
If you guys are interested (like I often find myself to be) in what the hell is the gender of the characters we're playing, I usually check that on MTG Salvation wiki. There, you can find that Kiki-Jiki is actually a male akki/goblin (the name is never a clue in these cases, Japanese names are mostly unisex, for the one famed female Kiki from Miyazaki's movie there are several other well-known male characters also named Kiki). The same goes for Meloku, who's actually portrayed, along with the other male moonfolk, as your typical highly stylized male courtier from 18th Century Japan.
As I also said in the article, the meta in the TP Room currently is:
Zoo
12 Posts
Affinity
Merfolk
Restore Balance
Then I'm also seeing a lot of Hive Mind, RDW (very dangerous), Pyromancer Ascension, Jund and Dragonstrorm decks. There are also some Reanimator decks and Elves decks around. Oh and I should also mention Bant and Boros as well.
So as you see, no one is playing Control. No one! People do play counterspells in their decks of course, but that doesn't mean that they are playing Control decks (Blightning doesn't make Jund a discard deck).
Control may come back in time, especially in the form of some Mystical Teachings decks, but at the moment it is safe to call it a dead archetype.
LE
You say banning Mental Misstep will kill control...
But wasn't control a viable archtype before Mental Misstep was printed? Couldn't it theoretically still be?
just use the embed code that youtube provides. It helps if you understand basic html...
That is sort of unavoidable but you can "tech out a bit" the maindeck and sideboard for it. But some games you just won't have a chance, and in others you auto-win. The Cloudpost really become insane. Green has huge bombs for the mirror in Primeval Titan (maindeckable) and Tooth becomes quite easy to cast, whereas blue has permission and can sideboard into Bribery or other options like Annex or Vedalken Plotter. Tectonic Edge or Ghost Quarter maindeck are probably a good idea.
12-post is extremely popular online so expect also to see more and more hate. I don't think it will be as popular in the PT but on the other hand I also don't think it will get totally hated out.
Thanks bocco for the kind words but this wasen't an article about Standard Constructed. This was about Scars of Mirrodin Block Constructed, which means that you can only use cards from the Scars block (Scars of Mirrodin - Mirrodin Besieged - New Phyrexia). So M12 doesn't effect this format.
Thanks for your comment and I hope you're enjoying Magic.
LE
Cards that absolutely shouldn't have been banned:
Ancestral Visions- Really? This card has always been fair. Also, this card has hardly made an impact in Legacy. Tom Lapille is either exaggerating, or he is entirely clueless. Maybe he got it mixed up with brainstorm.
Mental Misstep- Again, no. Saying that it is good in Legacy is not good enough justification for banning it in Modern. MM is good in legacy because Blue is the best color (and its not even close). Also, there are many more format defining cards at 1cmc(STP, Brainstorm, Dark Ritual, Goblin Lackey(Dead now, but MM was part of its demise, Aether Vial, SDT etc...)
Valakut-Having never played with or against Valakut I don't have much to say. The combo decklists that I have seen seem good but decidedly fair.
Bitterblossom- Yeah I know faeries. This IS NOT STANDARD. Let me say that again. MODERN IS NOT STANDARD. Like the above poster mentioned, this format has plenty of ways to deal with faeries.
Dread Return- If Wizards really wanted to kill dredge, then we all know what card actually makes the card a deck. Either ban it, or leave the deck intact. MaRo always spouts about how elegance is one of the key tennets of design. Why not apply this theory to the banlist as well? As for the dredge deck being banned... Well this one I'm not so sure on. Being a Legacy and Vintage dredge player, I'll always have a place in my heart for dredge;however, I can recognize that WOTC might not want a deck in the format that basically forces other decks to have at least 4 narrow cards in the sidedboard. Modern dredge would actually be an entirely different animal from the legacy or vintage version as it is significantly slower and less resilient to countermagic. I think that it would be reasonable to allow the deck to exist in its fully powered form, and to only ban if it began to warp the format.
Cards that I would allow in Modern if I was in charge:
Everything. I'm not kidding. The appeal of eternal formats is that you get to play with powerful cards. None of the cards on the banlist seem completely broken to me. I would wary of Thopter Foundry, Dark Depths, and SFM, but I would think that the metagame would still be varied.