It is more the banning essentially killed Hive Mind and was unwarranted, WotC stated the deck wasn't dominating and tbh the turn 3 kill was not that often maybe 25% of the time, but the same thing happens with Eggs and Infect
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It is more the banning essentially killed Hive Mind and was unwarranted, WotC stated the deck wasn't dominating and tbh the turn 3 kill was not that often maybe 25% of the time, but the same thing happens with Eggs and Infect
What WOTC are doing is really a massive joke. They are trying to create an eternal format by banning all the fun, enjoyable, and powerful cards that makes eternal formats work.
Setting a turn 3 kill limit is quite possibly the stupidest thing I've ever heard, I thought it was a joke when I heard about it before this article.
Blue still doesn't beat anything else in the format though. My thought is that Olivia makes a better 4 drop than Huntmaster, for the most part. Also, Jund was never a good deck to begin with. It was 45% vs. the field. Zoo was better before they banned Nacatl (52% at Worlds, although Tribal Flames Zoo skewed that down with a 42% win percentage; straight Zoo was around 56%). I think people will move away from Jund. A fair portion of them will move to Pod. Pod has already been seeing an uptick in play, with more PTQ T8's than any other deck by a fairly decent margin. The loss of Storm just makes Pod that much better, as it beats all of the fair decks by stalling out with Finks and Restoration Angel until it can combo off. The massive amount of creature search the deck runs combined with a plethora of good utility creatures means it's difficult to hate out. What it does poorly against are stack-based decks as it doesn't really interact well with cards that don't turn sideways. But there are precious few of those decks anymore. I predict Pod is going to be a problem for the PTQ circuit for the next month or two until people bring enough hate to force it out, similar to what happened to Twin in the wake of Philly leading up to Worlds in 2011. G/W Hexproof also gets a boost, as its success was directly related to Jund dropping Liliana. With Jund taking a massive hit to field saturation (and it will take a big hit), Boggles are going to be everywhere. Spellskite is still a good answer, but not as good as it is vs. Infect. Past the next 2 months, I'm not sure where the format is going to go. If I had to guess, I'd say Bant will be the next big thing, but it's too hard to say at this point. Magic players can be a bit unpredictable. But Bant has the potential for massive amounts of damage and it has the durdley midrange appeal that Jund has, it just has less card advantage and more explosive potential.
So why isn't Lingering Souls banned?
It has DERP written all over it because it's just f'ing boring. When Jund starts splashing white for these type of cards, they should also be weary of whats going on. I actually watched some Modern at a European GP. No offense but usually it was who draws Lingering Souls.
I mean in half a dozen of the cases the answer to the question: "Am I dead now?" , was "Yes, unless I draw Lingering Souls"
Feels like they want to turn the format into Turbofog.
Anyways, no problem I'll bring Eggs to next tourny I play, and combo for 20mins on turn 3. I'm sure new players will enjoy that.
You should be happy they didn't bother banning Infect cards quite yet.
Why is anyone surprised by this again? They've stated their guidelines from the format and have shown on multiple occasions that they have no reservations about shaking up the format and slamming anything they feel either wins before T4 with too much consistency or narrows the viable decks of the format too much. As for the 'let all the banned cards back!' people, FFS do you not remember that the first Modern PT was defined by everyone killing each other on T2/3?
This is the first format that Wizards / DCI have actively taken a part in shaping how it goes by actual criteria instead of just by feel and tournament attendance. If you can't stand Modern having an active ban-list, then I suggest finding a new format until the format stabilizes into something everyone is happy with. As Chapin and CeddyP put it, these bans show the way they want to go in the future and no-one should be surprised if Modern season a year from now has another 5-7 cards banned.
In general I'm ok with the massive initial and follow-up bannings, and I also think that is important to have a diverse meta and if a deck is too powefull or dominant something has to be done. Modern is not Vintage or Legacy.
But that into the consideration, the reason I and many people despise the Sheething Song ban is that the deck wasn'y overly played, didn't dominate anything, didn't consistently win in turn three and facing minimal disruption, that even didn't need to be dedicated hate, it didn't combo out at all. It didn't shape the format and it didn't narrow the viable decks. If that's the case, I would say that ramp or tron decks do more to the viability of decks overshadowing any control approach that tries to get to late game. The only thing it did was being slightly overplayed in MOL, and that wasn't about power, but because if you made concessions to the manabase, which the deck could support without losing much power, it was dirt cheap.
One thing to take into consideration with this ban everything that stands out is that every time there is a ban Modern is losing more players which get fed-up with searching, buying and mastering the top tier decks just to see all their effort wasted. In this couple of days two of the things that I'm seeing at my local store are people selling their modern collections because of their main deck was jund and people trying to borrow cards like Karn Liberated, because even if they want to play the next top decks, no one wants to invest in another tier deck in case it is the next one to get the bans.
:cry:
Three fundamentally different combo decks in one format seems perfectly reasonable to me. I've never felt UR Storm to be a particularity strong meta choice both pre and post bans, which is why I've never sleeved it up outside of running the gauntlet. Content is an interesting issue considering the past three pages have been completely devoid of it. The field is littered with outrageous absolute statements from individuals who seem to be relatively out of touch with how this format functions. Artowis pretty much hit the nail on the head.
Well at least now the tempo oriented meta can adjust to the durdling by leveraging synergistic flex-slots and becoming more midrange than aggro.
To be fair, I was testing the deck with Guttersnipe, which increases the consistency and allows you to bypass a lot of traditional storm hate. So my experience may be somewhat different than yours. My curve was a little higher than the average storm deck, but I had increased consistency and resiliency to compensate for the loss of half a turn.
The issue is that players who leave the format may not come back. Speaking from my own experience, I was incredibly excited for Modern, and really enjoyed the format, but the forced metagame-shifting/active banned list managed to turn me off enough that I left. And right now, I don't see any real reason to get back in - the issues I had with it are still there, and the decisions being made by WotC aren't resolving them, they're exacerbating them. The same is true of most of the people I'm familiar with - of the group I typically game with, I believe that there's maybe one or two out of fifteen people who still have even a passing interest in the format, and all for pretty much the same reason.
Wizard absolutely has the right to do what they want with their product, and their decisions may indeed bring the format more in-line with what they want - but there is a real cost in alienated players who dislike what's going on. And a "take it or leave it" approach might end with too many deciding to leave it, and drive Modern down the road Extended went (more or less irrelevant outside of the Extended Season).