[blogpost] A New Modern Era // Setting Sights for GP Vancouver

[MrShine]

So I started a blog! My attempt at the moment is to chronicle everything to do with my preparations for GP Vancouver next month (Feb 20th), which will of course be Modern.

This first one is a tad late is coming into being; it's mostly an initial format evaluation, but I'll be coming out with some more specific ideas (and decklists) later this week.

Enjoy! And of course Feedback is greatly appreciated.

https://diabolicintent.wordpress.com...-gp-vancouver/

Cheers,

MrShine

[Mr. Safety]

Solid read and a good evaluation of the format. Considering there will be more zoo, more ascendancy, more junk, how does Blood Moon fit into the metagame? Seems well placed, other than the reasonable amount of burn left in the meta.

[MrShine]

I'm not well versed on how Blood Moon fits into the puzzle; it always seems to get lots of respect for keeping people honest with their manabases, and straight shutting down some decks, but also seems very swingy - either it wins you the game or just kinda bugs people with basics until it gets removed.

A low-level analysis says that it is good vs Junk/d, Tron, and sometimes UWR, but like I mentioned is highly dependant on what they have already fetched and whether you are landing it T3 on the play (vs draw) or seeing it lategame to shut off manlands and topdecks.

I've always thought Blue Moon was a decent sort of strategy, but again lack any significant experience to say for sure. Twin and Storm have been known to run them out of the SB, anyone have any experience with either of these configurations, or Blue Moon?

[Lord Seth]

So how is the meta going to shake out in the wake of this upheaval? Consensus (on teh internetz) seems to say that many of our old favourites from the pre-KTK metagame (Twin, Junk, UWR, Affinity) will come back as viable, and likely tier-1 choices, while other format tier-2 ringers such as Tron will have a little more room to breathe in the absence of having multiple Treasure Cruises shoved down their throats.

Tron actually didn't care much about Treasure Cruise, at least not directly. Fact is, a Treasure Cruise isn't going to do much to affect the game against GR Tron, because they either blow you out or you kill them first. The new card that actually perturbed Tron from Delver was Monastery Swiftspear, because it made UR Delver faster and was able to dodge Pyroclasm. Treasure Cruise only hurt Tron in the way that it made Delver good against other decks so it rose to prominence, so Tron now had to deal with the Monastery Swiftspears.

And to be honest, I thought Tron was just fine in the previous meta. Maybe even better than the current one. Angel Pod was everywhere, and that was a tremendous matchup for Tron. People go on about how Tron is good because it beats Junk, but it beat Angel Pod way more harshly than it beat Junk. Just watch here to see what happens when Tron goes up against Angel Pod. It's not pretty.

With Pod gone, we’re going to start to notice a number of cascading effects on the meta, namely, a strong resurgence of Aggro strategies, especially at the higher tables; the ability to consistently tutor up a never ending stream of Finks and Rhinos definitely puts the damper on any deck hellbent on taking you from 20 to 0 as fast as possible.

I'm not really sure if Pod was keeping aggro down as much as people think it has. Merfolk and Zoo just got a Top 8 at the most recent Grand Prix. Zoo and Merfolk have never gotten a Top 8 at a Grand Prix before. Aggro decks weren't able to get Top 8 at a Grand Prix (unless you count Delver or Burn as aggro) until Birthing Pod was at its most powerful.

A low-level analysis says that it is good vs Junk/d, Tron, and sometimes UWR, but like I mentioned is highly dependant on what they have already fetched and whether you are landing it T3 on the play (vs draw) or seeing it lategame to shut off manlands and topdecks.

Blood Moon is highly overrated against GR Tron. You need to be able to beat the deck quickly while the Blood Moon is down or else it'll just hardcast its threats, including the possibility of casting an Oblivion Stone one turn and then cracking it the next to take out Blood Moon. The problem is that the decks that are best at doing that are aggro decks that are highly vulnerable to Pyroclasm, which Blood Moon actually makes easier to cast. I agree with what Ari Lax said; Blood Moon against Tron isn't that impressive unless your strategy doesn't lose to Pyroclasm, Oblivion Stone, or Combust.

That's not to say Blood Moon is bad against Tron, it's still decent, but it's not as good as people seem to think it is. I've actually played games as GR Tron where I was perfectly fine with my opponent having a Blood Moon in play because it was actually hurting them more than it was hurting me!

[MrShine]

Tron...

I mostly picked Tron as an example of a tier-2 deck that might have just gotten left by the wayside due to all the UR-craziness flying around; for a while it was sort of a "budget" deck (at least at GP Toronto in 2012, tons of people were playing it as their only option), and perhaps UR supplanted it in that role.

I also find it strange that it didn't perform better under the Pod-"dominated" meta (I use quotations because I don't actually think it was that pervasive; look at GP Omaha Grinder results, Top 32, and SCG columbus, but of course this is irrelevant now); I used to play Angel Pod and every time someone led with an Urza land or Expedition Map I would cry a little inside. I don't think I ever won a match.

I think there was a lot more going on than perhaps my overview indicates, but expounding on large meta effects is fairly imperfect for the most part, and you can't really argue that Pod preyed on Zoo and other 'Sligh' strategies. FWIW I don't consider Merfolk to be aggro; you'll notice I try and class it more as Midrange/other, as it doesn't have a blistering start and relies mostly on critical-mass-synergy (unlike affinity, however)... but perhaps that designation is something I've defined more in my head than in that article specifically.

And yeah, as far as Blood Moon is concerned, your experiences with Tron seem to indicate how weird it is as a card; sometimes it just completely locks people out, sometimes its more of a damper and the other guy ends up getting to 6 mana anyway and starts windmilling Wurmcoils :P

[Phoenix Ignition]

I'm still under the impression people are completely underestimating how much the format will change since Pod is gone. Your article doesn't really say anything new, we all know Siege Rhino is out there and that BGx is good.

What Pod did was shut off decks that don't have either A) a consistent kill that is faster than Podding into a 2-creature win con (which was fast!) or B) Both creature combo hate and the ability to go through infinite creature recursion. With an added bonus of killing any deck that relied on a specific strategy that was completely neutered by a single, searchable creature (tokens because of Orzhov Pontiff, or any artifact/enchantment lock piece, graveyard stuff with Scavenging Ooze among many others).

Most decks can't do both, or even the 2nd one well. People always try to bring up the "turn 4" format as if it was an inevitable turn to win on, kind of like how Legacy or Vintage are looked at by outsiders as turn-1 formats, but if you look at the format without Pod, we see combo decks that are pretty easy to hate out, unlike Pod. Splinter Twin and Jeskai Ascendency both die very easily to Abrupt Decay and its ilk, or a well placed discard effect (yeah, I know, Spellskite, but that's post sideboard where you can also add in additional creature kill or other combo hate). Storm is no better than it was before Treasure Cruise, which means it's okay but only with the perfect pilot and it still can just get killed to its own draws or graveyard hate.

This is really cool, we now have combo decks where you can interact with them to slow them down. The problem with Pod was that it nullified all ways to fight it by running Abrupt Decay of its own and having Pod which was too big CMC-wise to hit with your own Abrupt Decay. Without a deck that has virtually infinite card value through recursion, we can once again play removal that matters. Supreme Verdict used to be complete garbage because Pod would just get back Finks + Voice Tokens, and you'd be dead for wasting 4 mana on something inconsequential.

There now exists a deck slot that can go bigger than GBx midrange strategies, strategies that have special lock pieces that are hard to answer without silver bullet creatures, and more. Tokens may come back, GW hatebears might come back (as the annoying recursion strategy), control decks now have a chance again (wrath is turned back on), maybe even some Dredgevine will be viable again.

It's too soon to say where the dust will settle, but the doom and gloom of BGx being the entire metagame just isn't accurate. Niche decks can now thrive without the infinite card value, instakill deck Pod. It's kind of a deck builder's dream scenario, since really a lot of things can beat BGx goodstuff.

I'll be on 4c gifts now that its worst matchup is gone.

[MrShine]

I was trying to cut right back to the basics of format evaluation now that I don't know what I'm playing anymore, and step 1 was examining the new stuff we have to work with.

Since I'm heading to a GP, and am aiming to do well, my focus is on what I'm going to (hopefully) see at x-2 or better; and yeah, I'm putting a lot on Siege Rhino, for sure. That doesn't mean that I'm not testing against other decks, and it doesn't mean I'm upset about it at all, I'm just trying to leverage that knowledge into an informed decision.

For example, I messed around a bit with RW Vial Humans, and lo and behold, couldn't beat a Siege Rhino to save my life. So I dropped it.

Yeah, it's not the whole meta, but if there is a high likelihood that I'll see some variant of BGx at high-bracket tables, I want to be as best positioned as possible against it.

TLDR: I'm trying to outline my own thought process going into testing. My next one will dig a little deeper, and perhaps show you better the angle that I'm trying to attack the metagame from :)

[Lord Seth]

I mostly picked Tron as an example of a tier-2 deck that might have just gotten left by the wayside due to all the UR-craziness flying around; for a while it was sort of a "budget" deck (at least at GP Toronto in 2012, tons of people were playing it as their only option), and perhaps UR supplanted it in that role.

I also find it strange that it didn't perform better under the Pod-"dominated" meta (I use quotations because I don't actually think it was that pervasive; look at GP Omaha Grinder results, Top 32, and SCG columbus, but of course this is irrelevant now); I used to play Angel Pod and every time someone led with an Urza land or Expedition Map I would cry a little inside. I don't think I ever won a match.

This puzzled me as well. And it's not like Delver is amazing against Tron either, I'd consider it probably to be slightly in Tron's favor. On paper it should be decidedly in Tron's favor, but in practice seems like they always have the Spell Snare for your Pyroclasm and the Vapor Snag for your Wurmcoil Engine. Still, Tron smashed the face of one of the two top decks and was slightly favored against the other. Meanwhile, one of its worst matchups, Splinter Twin, disappeared.

The best guess I've come up with is this. GR Tron is a deck notorious for having some very one-sided matchups. Thus, for many players, it's a deck you play for when you think the meta is right and a deck to discard otherwise rather than a deck that you would actually stick with. And if not many people are playing Tron, you won't see many big results for it. I'm thinking that Tron's results seem to be less dependent on how the meta shakes up for it and more dependent on how the general public thinks the meta shakes up for it.