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Thread: Best Forum for Modern

  1. #1

    Best Forum for Modern

    Looking to try modern. This forum doesn't appear to be too active. Is there a really good Modern forum somewhere else?

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    Re: Best Forum for Modern

    For modern, the forums over at mtgsalvation are much more active, although I'm generally not too impressed with the content over there.

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    Re: Best Forum for Modern

    Quote Originally Posted by The_Dingo View Post
    For modern, the forums over at mtgsalvation are much more active, although I'm generally not too impressed with the content over there.
    You've got to sift through shit loads of, well, shit to find the goods but it's there. Some people actively playtest and have insightful things to say.

  4. #4

    Re: Best Forum for Modern

    Quote Originally Posted by The_Dingo View Post
    For modern, the forums over at mtgsalvation are much more active, although I'm generally not too impressed with the content over there.
    There's a lot of dumb people over there--then again, The Source is not without its share of dullards either--but there's still some good discussion.

  5. #5

    Re: Best Forum for Modern

    MTGS has the most discussion out of any place, but you have to sift through a lot of junk. It also has the ignore user feature which is amazing and will add years back to your life. I think my ignore user list is at a couple hundred people.

    Reddit has a lot of junk as well, and there's no ignore user feature (unless you download mods?)

    http://www.reddit.com/r/spikes/
    http://www.reddit.com/r/ModernMagic/

    the spike reddit has higher quality posts, but not that much modern talk. the modern reddit has more modern posts, but most are low quality

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    Re: Best Forum for Modern

    Yeah, I'm pretty sad that there's no good forum for Modern either. I go to mtgsalvation to discuss a few decks I like, simply because there is no other option. But, it gets really frustrating because the quality of posts is way down (on average) compared to here. If you find any better place, let me know. It's also frustrating because there's only frequent activity for some types of decks. For example, I don't get many or any responses for new deck ideas I'm working on in a lot of cases, and responses for fringe decks are few and far between a lot of times.
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    Re: Best Forum for Modern

    Its very hard to get a discussion going on Titan Scapeshift pretty much anywhere as it always devolves into "Why aren't you playing RUG Scapeshift?"

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    Re: Best Forum for Modern

    MTGSalvation is a waste of time because 95% of people don't understand how Modern works in terms of mechanics, timings and skill cap required for a card/deck to perform. Thus, you will find that almost all the threads in Developmental are horrible block decks ported to Modern or people with budget concerns trying to make their brew seem legit.

    Which also happens in Estabilished and Proven all the time. It's a struggle to find good content amongst the piles of spam posted by incompetent players or those trying to save up on their wallet because their aspiration is winning a 6-men FNM.

    If you are experienced enough you should have developed an instinct in recognizing what's good and what's bullshit.
    Avoid that forum like pest and stick to private discussions via Facebook/Twitter/whatever with good Modern players who carved themselves a fame out their successes. I confirm there is no good public substitute.
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    Re: Best Forum for Modern

    Looks like it's on us guys!

    Gonna start testing a lot for GP Vancouver (coming up in 6 weeks) so I'll be trying to generate some useful ideas! All help is welcome, us Sourcers must stick together.

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    Re: Best Forum for Modern

    Quote Originally Posted by Piceli89 View Post
    MTGSalvation is a waste of time because 95% of people don't understand how Modern works in terms of mechanics, timings and skill cap required for a card/deck to perform. Thus, you will find that almost all the threads in Developmental are horrible block decks ported to Modern or people with budget concerns trying to make their brew seem legit.

    Which also happens in Estabilished and Proven all the time. It's a struggle to find good content amongst the piles of spam posted by incompetent players or those trying to save up on their wallet because their aspiration is winning a 6-men FNM.

    If you are experienced enough you should have developed an instinct in recognizing what's good and what's bullshit.
    Avoid that forum like pest and stick to private discussions via Facebook/Twitter/whatever with good Modern players who carved themselves a fame out their successes. I confirm there is no good public substitute.
    I'm a moderator on the Modern boards at MTGS and I want to speak to this.

    First off, the community there is huge, which almost guarantees that we have more crappy posts. On the Source, we have only 2-6 people viewing the Modern subforums at any given time. On MTGS, it's maybe 2-6 people on average per thread, with the larger threads regularly having a dozen active users and the overall forum having hundreds. With that many people, there is almost no way you won't see idiots, trolls, spammers, etc. You need only to look at r/spikes to see that in action. But that's just the price of any large community.

    Second, although some posters definitely have no idea what they are talking about, many of them do, or are at least interested in discussing the decks. Conversations can be incredibly active and technical, especially in the Proven threads. Sure, you have guys who want to know how they can budget up a Junk list to take down their FNM for under $200, but you also have people who are genuinely interested in improving their decks. So whether you are looking for high volumes of active discussion, or lower volumes of high-expertise discussion, MTGS has that going on. Maybe there's a place for high volume, high expertise discussion, but I don't think such a place exists on the internet, let alone with respect to Magic or Modern.

    Does MTGS Modern have some issues? Absolutely. But are those issues so bad or so unique to MTGS that it should be avoided entirely? Probably not. It's a large community, especially around Modern, and large communities always come with their share of problems and benefits. So if you don't mind dealing with those, it's definitely the place to be for primers, active format and deck discussion, accurate metagame data, etc.

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    Re: Best Forum for Modern

    Quote Originally Posted by ktkenshinx View Post
    I'm a moderator on the Modern boards at MTGS and I want to speak to this.

    First off, the community there is huge, which almost guarantees that we have more crappy posts. On the Source, we have only 2-6 people viewing the Modern subforums at any given time. On MTGS, it's maybe 2-6 people on average per thread, with the larger threads regularly having a dozen active users and the overall forum having hundreds. With that many people, there is almost no way you won't see idiots, trolls, spammers, etc. You need only to look at r/spikes to see that in action. But that's just the price of any large community.

    Second, although some posters definitely have no idea what they are talking about, many of them do, or are at least interested in discussing the decks. Conversations can be incredibly active and technical, especially in the Proven threads. Sure, you have guys who want to know how they can budget up a Junk list to take down their FNM for under $200, but you also have people who are genuinely interested in improving their decks. So whether you are looking for high volumes of active discussion, or lower volumes of high-expertise discussion, MTGS has that going on. Maybe there's a place for high volume, high expertise discussion, but I don't think such a place exists on the internet, let alone with respect to Magic or Modern.

    Does MTGS Modern have some issues? Absolutely. But are those issues so bad or so unique to MTGS that it should be avoided entirely? Probably not. It's a large community, especially around Modern, and large communities always come with their share of problems and benefits. So if you don't mind dealing with those, it's definitely the place to be for primers, active format and deck discussion, accurate metagame data, etc.
    I appreciate your very polite answer in the face of my not-so-polite argument, which was probably a product of the frustration I felt everytime I tried to kickstart a high-level discussion about certain cards in certain archetypes (although I'm active in the Blue Tron post for the most) and got very poor replies.

    You are right when stating that the compromise of having a huge community is dealing with a lowered quality but honestly it seems that MTGS is *really* just posts from people trying to budgetize things or without a grasp of how competitive games get played out.
    I consistently query every topic in search for the next Big Thing, especially those in New and Developmental, and this impression is strenghtened each day.

    What I fail to see is proper argumentation taking into account the current metagame, which is the factor everyone should prioritize, especially in a format where top dogs shift way more often than the slightly more stale Legacy (because of bans, because of local metagame, because of trends). Only a very few people build their points of view with this into account and I appreciate them a lot, but again- unfortunately they are one grain in the sand.
    Although I'm not active on here since a lot time, TheSource may be way tinier in terms of attendance but the ratio of rotten apples is 1 out of 10; on MTGS I would say it is 8 out of 10.

    ---
    Perhaps you should try to promote a policy of higher-quality interventions in the Competitive and Proven forums. Obviously within the range of not going fascist and blaming everyone who posts content not perfectly fitting in, but that could be a first step towards an improvement. Number-wise MTGS is indeed the biggest community and it could become a hub for top-level concepts if only the crap was reduced. Its bad reputation detracts competent players from joining in as they mostly limit to private discussions.
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    Re: Best Forum for Modern

    Quote Originally Posted by Piceli89 View Post
    I appreciate your very polite answer in the face of my not-so-polite argument, which was probably a product of the frustration I felt everytime I tried to kickstart a high-level discussion about certain cards in certain archetypes (although I'm active in the Blue Tron post for the most) and got very poor replies.
    No worries. It's helpful to hear feedback from other players and I'm always happy to talk about the good and the bad (especially the bad!) regarding the MTGS Modern community.
    You are right when stating that the compromise of having a huge community is dealing with a lowered quality but honestly it seems that MTGS is *really* just posts from people trying to budgetize things or without a grasp of how competitive games get played out.
    I consistently query every topic in search for the next Big Thing, especially those in New and Developmental, and this impression is strenghtened each day.

    ...

    Although I'm not active on here since a lot time, TheSource may be way tinier in terms of attendance but the ratio of rotten apples is 1 out of 10; on MTGS I would say it is 8 out of 10.
    I think there are a few factors at play here. For one, there are definitely instances where MTGS did get to the next big thing before any other large site. The most recent example that stands out to me is RG Breach Valakut, a deck that saw a modicum of success on MTGO but met our criteria for Established promotion even before KTK. We had a primer and a discussion going on in that thread before it was really on the radar of any other forums or articles (to my knowledge, at least). Given that this deck eventually made it to a PT T8 after rising from MTGO obscurity, that's great news; the pilot of that deck even credited MTGS for some of the reasons that he picked up the deck in the first place. That said, I do understand that it can be hard to identify a deck like that when surrounded by decks like UW Heroic and Pitch Control that are clearly pretty far from competitive status.

    As to the ratio of terrible players to competent ones, I have found that a large part of this is attributable to Modern as a format. Legacy, a more expensive and older format, tends to cater to more experienced and mature players, the former because of the relative complexity of the format and the latter because of the price differences in the formats. This in turn leads to a more experienced and older player-based, which definitely plays out in the community. That's not to say that older players don't play Modern or that younger players don't play Legacy. But it is to say that the next hot thing of Modern can definitely attract younger players with less experience and maturity than a format like Legacy. Indeed, we need only look to the enduring conflicts between Modern and Legacy players to see why some of those older Legacy vets don't take Modern very seriously. That plays out in the quality of posts in the forum.
    What I fail to see is proper argumentation taking into account the current metagame, which is the factor everyone should prioritize, especially in a format where top dogs shift way more often than the slightly more stale Legacy (because of bans, because of local metagame, because of trends). Only a very few people build their points of view with this into account and I appreciate them a lot, but again- unfortunately they are one grain in the sand.

    ...

    Perhaps you should try to promote a policy of higher-quality interventions in the Competitive and Proven forums. Obviously within the range of not going fascist and blaming everyone who posts content not perfectly fitting in, but that could be a first step towards an improvement. Number-wise MTGS is indeed the biggest community and it could become a hub for top-level concepts if only the crap was reduced. Its bad reputation detracts competent players from joining in as they mostly limit to private discussions.
    I view these points as related and want to address them together.

    To me, metagame analysis and understanding is a critical part of being a meaningful contributor to a format. It's what separates the bad players from the good ones, and then again what separates the good ones from the great ones. That's particularly true in a format like Modern where so many in-game and deckbuilding decisions do come down to metagame and card pool knowledge. Moreover, the skills needed to analyze a metagame and translate that analysis into deck developments are the same skills that are needed to have a smart conversation about a deck itself.

    But a big problem here is that Modern metagame data is not easy to come by and players everywhere have a poor understanding of the format. This is because shitty sites like MTGTop8, mtgdecks, TCDecks, topdecks, etc. all purport to describe the Modern metagame but do so in a way that is misleading or flat out disingenuous. SCG and ChannelFireball articles tend to be little better, with most of them doing a bad job at describing the Modern metagame or explaining its nuances.

    We have tried to address this by running our own Modern metagame dataset and publishing those results in the forum. Starting in the next week, we are going to be even more intentional about how we do this, adding more graphs, more frequent forum updates, and overall a much more deliberate emphasis on how we present this kind of data. This ideally has three effects. First, it educates the playerbase and community and gets them critically talking and thinking in the way that we want users to critically talk and think on the forum. Second, it grounds the discussion in data that is meaningful and accessible, so we are all speaking the same language around the format. Finally, it makes the forum itself a more current and technical place to discuss Modern by providing information that isn't accessible elsewhere. This makes the place more attractive to other players and generally raises the level of conversation.

    So yes, we are totally aware of these issues that you point out and are working to fix them. I think that things have always looked different on The Source because there is a relatively high barrier to entry, both in format knowledge and access to Legacy cards, that has always kept discussion quality pretty high here. Because we don't have that barrier, we need to find other ways to improve the discussion quality that don't also exclude people. Metagame data, regular forum updates, and current primers are a great way to do this, and it's something we have been working on for months now. Things are WAY better now than they were a year ago.

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    Re: Best Forum for Modern

    The trick with Salvation is learning who is worth talking to, people like rickster can be blunt and harsh, but at lest he ain't fucking around. You can pick out these faces quickly and you can tell those who know what they are doing by the fact that they tend to post and then vanish when all the shit starts, only to come back when they have something to say or someone has quoted them with a valid point. Also, as said, there is the ignore list.

    Those that plan to put in the time will shine, like a certain jack-o-lantern and his infatuation for Zoo. You see these faces, you ask them directly. You will get your answers.

    If anything, I think the Legacy forums over there are worse. I just had a rant against Legacy elitist and their joy in watching Pod fall. Modern over there is bad, but Legacy needs someone to go on with a big black boot and just be ruthless with some of the attitudes I see in there. Having more funds doesn't mean you get to look down on those that are morning the loss of their money.
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    Re: Best Forum for Modern

    I also used to go on MTGS regularly but got fed up with the noise. I'm not sure forums can really handle that much traffic without forcing people to look through multiple pages of posts for something interesting. Piceli's right that too many of the forums devolved into discussions over budget decks, it happened to the couple threads I was actually paying attention to. You'd get random posts that list a variant of the deck without the expensive cards claiming that they've had "pretty good results so far on cockatrice" or some other equivalent valueless statement (happens here all the time too, "I've had promising results" is the herpes of magic forums) and then argue how it's fine to not use Tarmogoyfs or whatever in their deck.

    The real problem with a forum and that many people is each post takes up an equal amount of space. Reddit at least has upvotes to put valuable statements up at the top, though that has its own array of problems too. Scrolling through pages of text really isn't worth it to me, especially when I have enough experience to know pretty quickly whether a deck will at least run okay by looking at the list.

    That's one of the main things, though, regarding experience in players for something like the Source and MTGS. People on MTGS largely have a beginner's level of experience with magic and still post new piles of crap saying that they've had good results so far. People with a lot of experience can look at a deck's manabase, mana curve, and overall strategy and have an idea of what it can do, whereas people there seem to put square wheels on their deck and think it'll run smoothly.

    Maturity/experience aren't easy to come by, and having so many posters really dilutes the amount of good posts. Heavy moderation on flaming is great, and keeps discussions civil, but how many times can you argue with budget concerns before you just give up?

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    Re: Best Forum for Modern

    Also, you can try Facebook. I joined a Modern Meta Master's thread on it and so far I have at least found a group of them who I respect and work with on various projects.

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    Re: Best Forum for Modern

    Quote Originally Posted by nodahero View Post
    Also, you can try Facebook. I joined a Modern Meta Master's thread on it and so far I have at least found a group of them who I respect and work with on various projects.
    Just had a friend of mine invite me to that group as well.
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    Re: Best Forum for Modern

    The moderators on MTGS are more concerned about being policemen issuing infractions and catering to the frail egos of the lowest common denominator. I actually went by mtgs yesterday just to read about all the rage quitting over bans after not visiting for a half a year.

    The "us vs them" attitude of the staff still remains. I'll be honest, I personally think its a joke that a user here feels the need to sig they are a moderator on MTGS while on a other site. It shows that they don't actually understand how the rest of the community looks at their site, and it shows that even not on their own site they are always trying to play the "authority card"

    If you have the time in the world to waste. I guess you can waste it on MTGS. But if you actually have a life.... "Ain't nobody got time for that shit"

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    Re: Best Forum for Modern

    There are a quite a few bad moderators on MTGS, but AFAIK, ktkenshinx does his job well. I think they could be a little bit more lax with the "everything in the ban thread" attitude after an actual B&R update, but it's a really tough task, especially with that crowd.

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    Re: Best Forum for Modern

    Quote Originally Posted by Tormod View Post
    The moderators on MTGS are more concerned about being policemen issuing infractions and catering to the frail egos of the lowest common denominator. I actually went by mtgs yesterday just to read about all the rage quitting over bans after not visiting for a half a year.

    The "us vs them" attitude of the staff still remains. I'll be honest, I personally think its a joke that a user here feels the need to sig they are a moderator on MTGS while on a other site. It shows that they don't actually understand how the rest of the community looks at their site, and it shows that even not on their own site they are always trying to play the "authority card"

    If you have the time in the world to waste. I guess you can waste it on MTGS. But if you actually have a life.... "Ain't nobody got time for that shit"
    I put that note in my signature so I can be totally transparent about my relationship to that site, and about my commitment to its forums and the format as a whole. The only card that I'm trying to play is the "I LOVE MODERN" card.

    I fully understand that people have issues with MTGS which is one reason I am in this thread right now. Some of those issues are legitimate; it's a large community and there are some pretty ridiculous comments made and users who make them. But many of those issues are often overblown by others, in some cases without a lot of explanation. Yes we do a lot of moderation. It's necessary in a large community, especially given the types of post we are moderating. We have seen what the forum would look like without that strict moderation, especially with respect to posts about banlist talk and Legacy/Modern comparisons and bashing. That just leads to lots of trolling and flaming, or just distractions from the deck discussions at hand. That's one reason we are strict about it and the community is better off for it.

    Acknowledging that, we still have a ton of Modern discussion and development that goes on throughout the forum. We are also always trying to raise that conversation level, both through moderation of problematic posts and through giving the community the tools that it needs to improve (e.g. metagame data).

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    Re: Best Forum for Modern

    Quote Originally Posted by Tormod View Post
    The "us vs them" attitude of the staff still remains. I'll be honest, I personally think its a joke that a user here feels the need to sig they are a moderator on MTGS while on a other site. It shows that they don't actually understand how the rest of the community looks at their site, and it shows that even not on their own site they are always trying to play the "authority card"
    Ktkenshinx is one of the top 3 quality posters on any magic site, in my opinion. I actually only look up certain user's posts on MTGS now, due to my previously stated issues, but s/he's one of them.

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