Modern: Huge Tracts of Unexplored Land
It has been said of Modern: “The most important thing about Modern is diversity. It’s by and far the most open format right now, there are huge tracts of land no one has explored. It’s the new frontier of competitive Magic,” and “The nice thing about Modern is that the format is very open. There’s a lot of room to explore and find decks that can work.” And just to hammer that point, here are maps from some recent explorations:
Elemental Combo - broers (4-0) Modern Daily #4453174 on 10/21/2012
|
| ||||||||
This is a cool deck that showed its face to the world at PT Seattle, and has since made numerous appearances in the daily SEs. The basic game plan is to throw down Kiln Fiend or Nivmagus Elemental, then use a bunch of cheap/”free” (phyrexian mana) spells to pump ‘em up and swing. There are also a “suicide” version floating around that uses Death’s Shadow in place of Harbinger and a “storm” version that uses rituals and Manamorphose as its “pump” spells. While it is a powerful deck, and has the capability of winning as early as Turn 3, its major weakness is to instant-speed removal such as Terminate, Doom Blade, Geths Verdict, etc.
GR Aggro (Haste Stompy) - AlexSama (3-1) Modern Daily #4485704 on 10/28/2012
|
| ||||||||
This nasty little surprise features a smorgasbord of hasty, tasty beaters: every single creature in this deck comes out swinging.
I’m Just Rakdos That Way
Who you tryin’ to get crazy with, ese? Don’t you know I’m loco?
“… Obviously, time and the growth of the Internet made Wizards realize that sharing information, not withholding it, was a key part of building the community and metagame.“
- Mark Rosewater, 2009
“… Note that we are still showing a lot of decklists so that players can have an idea of what decks are being played and can metagame, but we are making it tougher to crunch hard data.” – Mark Rosewater, 2012
By now you know my feelings on this matter, where WotC informed us they had changed their daily Scheduled Event results reporting policy two weeks prior to telling us. In a forum post.
Once again, here is the complete text of their “announcement”:
“Sorry for the delay in responding here. In regards to the recent reduced event coverage, 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. Going forward, we’ll still provide the winning deck lists from all Premier Event top 8′s. We will also show the 4-0 and 3-1 deck lists for one completed Daily Event in each format per day.“
Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I still believe the timing involved was done with forethought, and image-preservation, in mind.
At this time, it appears that that forum reply, and the subsequent tweet explaining that WotC would publish the highest-attended event in each format, is the only “official” notification we’re going to get.
It also appears I’m the only one still upset about this. Oh, well. Call me the Lone Ranger, then.
Imagine if the NFL only released scores from the games that had the highest attendance in each division. Imagine if you had to rely on word of mouth for your footy scores. Imagine watching the championships with no clue how the teams playing got there. This is what WotC wants MTGO to become. A vague realm where we have no real idea of what’s going on in the game.
In my eyes, this is not “trying to do the right thing,” or even “for a format’s own good.” It is downright censorship. It is purposefully, and maliciously, withholding information that is vital to deckbuilders and competitive players. In my eyes, these actions are no different than those of despots and dictators trying to steer their populaces’ behavior. This is a very slippery slope.
Other than the daily results, Modern has no real source of information. Modern GPs and PTs occur infrequently, so we only get those kind of results a few times a year. Right now is an exception to this rule. Usually, WotC has very little coverage of any meta outside of Standard.
Large outside venues, like Star City Games, have an awkward relationship with Modern, due to their promotion of other formats. Very few places have any kind of regular Modern coverage. While this is slowly changing as the format gains popularity, my own writings, lame rambles tho they may be, are one of the few sources of Modern information out there. Think about that for a minute.
WotC, please reconsider this policy change.
The New Modern Meta
With this new results censorship policy in place, I’m still going to try and bring it. Boy howdy! Shackled to a big ol’ ball and chain and with one hand tied behind my back, no less! Since all the SE data for October was hopelessly skewed, I scrapped it totally. Other than the PE meta and Attendance data, I am starting fresh with November 1.
Speaking of PE meta data, did you know I kept track of that, as well? Since those types of results are still being published, I didn’t scrap it when I cleared the SE spreadsheets. Here’s what the Premier Event meta for Modern looks like so far for Q4 of this year:
Expect something similar when PTQ season comes up next month. The spreadsheets are already in place, and I’m going to have tons of fodder to sift through.
I also am still keeping faithful attendance (low & high) records, which you can see at the bottom of this article.
Anyway, there is an average of 2* censored, with (sometimes significantly) lower attendance, events in a day. I still have to figure a way to deal with this if I’m going to be able to present you with any kind of meaningful information. Since I have no way of knowing what’s what in the censored events, I can’t assign them anything other than an edjookat’d ges with some arcane digital feng shue randomness:
0.75+(RANDBETWEEN(0,999)/1000))*(Total 4-0 Decks)
plus
0.95+(RANDBETWEEN(50,999)/1000))*(Total 3-1 Decks)
This results are a constantly shifting blob of unknown information that we have to deal with in some way. This blob changes every time I enter results into the spreadsheet. We demand rigorously defined areas of doubt and uncertainty! I never imagined I’d have to use a line from The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy to justify my math, but it just seems so apropos. So. There it is.
Since this data is only a week and a half old so far, we’ll see how it ends up. I will be constantly reminding you that any of this information should not be taken for the entire Modern meta, only for the very limited portion we are allowed see.
*There are 21 scheduled Modern SEs in a week. They report each day’s largest attended event’s results, or 1 per day. 7/21 (reported events/scheduled events in a week) = 14/7 (censored events/days in a week) = 2 events/day average.
GP Lyon
Lyon first enters the history books as a Roman colony in 43 BCE, called Lugdunum, but was in existence long before. Due to its position on the natural highway from northern to south-eastern Gaul, and the convergence of two navigable rivers, it was a natural communications and transportation hub. It became the starting point of the principal Roman roads throughout Gaul, soon becoming the capital. Two emperors were born in this city: Claudius and Caracalla. Today, the archbishop of Lyon is still referred to as “Primat des Gaules” and the city often referred to as the “capitale des Gaules”.
On November 3rd, 1326 warriors entered their weapons into the lists, and descended upon the Cite Centre de Congres Lyon (Editor’s Note: Would that our backend software permit accents and French characters! –PlanetWalls) to do battle in the Modern arena. There were exciting matchups, and interesting decks, but what I remember most was the wonderful video coverage!
I picked up the coverage in Florian Chaminade’s Robots vs. Rafael Lecy’s ZombieVine matchup, and it was exciting to see. I missed several key moments, but what I did see was exciting. I’ve seen several different Vengevine builds in the past few weeks: GBW, GBR, GB, GR, and even straight G No Dredge (huh?). We’ll see how many turn up here. Go Zombies! BRAAIINS!!
Throughout the day, I caught portions of whatever I could. I also spent a lot of time pressing the F5 key. I puttered around the house and such when it wasn’t actually on. I also visited my landlord and got him outside, watching muskrat cavort on the ice. So I probably missed some of it. But from what I did see, there were several exciting matches, and some very good basic decktech. We even saw this on the live stream:
GP Chicago
With this article scheduled to run on November 12, and GP Chicago happening the day after my submission deadline, I got nuffin. The GP is finished, and the decklists are/should be already published by the time you’re sitting here reading my drivel.
By the time Overdriven! 49 comes out, GP Chicago will be old hat, and the decks already well discussed.
I plan on watching as much of it as I can, of course, and will scrawl my impressions as much as possible. So be prepared for a timewarpy disjointed ramble on that front. In the meantime: Da Bears!
A quick reminder that Eurodrive! and Where Angels Fear To Tread have starting times based on GMT. Those of you who live in time zones that observe Daylight Saving Time, please take note!
Overdrive! start time remains at 8:30 PM Eastern.
Overdrive! #68
Overdrive! #69
Eurodrive! #49
Eurodrive! #50
Where Angels Fear To Tread #29
Players: 17(18) (I played to even pairings)
4-0: RoccoCiccio
3-1: _Kumagoro_, sadisteck, caliban17, Ranth, _BIG_BROTHERS_
Players, pairings, and results from WAFTT #29 can be found here.
All decks from WAFTT #29 can be found here.
Where Angels Fear To Tread #30
Players: 11(12) (I played to even pairings)
4-0: _BIG_BROTHERS_
3-1: slug360, DirtyDuck, SethDrone
Players, pairings, and results from WAFTT #30 can be found here.
All decks from WAFTT #30 can be found here.
Dark Wars: A Legacy Of Evil
SSeason 1 Qualifier 1
Players: 21
Players, tables, and results can be found here.
Season 1 Championship: January 30, 2013
11/07/12: Bigwilly5555
11/21/12: Seat 2
12/05/12: Seat 3
12/19/12: Seat 4
01/02/13: Seat 5
01/16/13: Seat 6
Interesting Tidbits
Our next Modern GP will be GP Toronto on December 8.
PTQ Season for PT “Friends” (codename for the first set of the block after Return To Ravnica) will be Modern, and begins December 22.
Did you notice I’ve started calling the artifact aggro archetype “Robots” instead of “Affinity”? While I still call it Affinity in my head, I figure I should at least show some form of support for wizzo’s continued coverage of Modern by adopting their term for it. After all, they did manage to separate Soul Sisters and White Weenie, and that’s a big step!
Modern attendance has been on par again.
tldnr
As always, very usefull information for Modern players.
About the Wizards announcement on their results reporting policy I dissagree too. Eventhough I don’t use it much, whenever I wanted to start playing a new format looking at the results from Daily Events was a good starting point, and it gave you a chance to begin swimming with the sharks.
Anyway, I am sure you’ll manage to get around this.
you’re not the only one still angry, think people just loose steam when you realize there’s nothing you can do to change and how it often seems no matter how loud you yell no one’s listening.. quite wrong to see that 62% missing
I’ve never agreed with wizards MORE. I wish any deck you played had an ‘OPT IN” feature. I used to make pretty steady money selling tech/decklists…now any clown can copy/paste and attempt to run it. Takes all the mystique and mystery out of the game. Hopefully they keep squeezing this till there are no current decklists and people actually have to use their own brains to meta. rant off~