I’d love to build Grishoal brand, but i only own 20% of the list and would need to sink in a decent amount to get it going, which would lead toward the issue of it getting banned.

Someone else was right, Storm with Seething Song was popular because it was good and cheap, but Bloom and Grish arent exactly cheap with cards that you can transfer to a similar, different, deck if something like Goryo’s gets banned hammered.

That’s a reasonable and interesting comparison. Esper mentor is to grixis control what abzan midrange is to jund.

When lingering souls and path are better than bolt and kolagan’s the white options will be more interesting.

I think he meant U-tron?

I love when bgx players cry

Well, we tried that already. It apparently didn’t work, because both DRS and Bolt were legal at the same time and DRS was still a trainwreck for the format and its diversity.

Self police? Lightning bolt your deathrite.

I read that article, and it felt very subjective and like an absolute whinefest. He makes casual allusions to numbers without explaining his methodology in detail (thus failing to make the article stand-alone content) and his latter paragraphs reek of personal bias. I don’t really consider that type of analysis to be on the same caliber as the stuff that the folks here have striven to give us, so I wouldn’t treat it with the same deference.

In case you were interested, someone cited your article to Jeff Hoogland on reddit yesterday and he said this in response:

“Bloom had success at a number of large profile events winning on turns 2 and 3.
All this author is doing is speculating on things we can’t actually know about. That is why I don’t bother discussing or speculating on these changes any more. Wizards is going to do whatever they want regardless of what actual data says.
The honest answer is that they likely won’t touch the format until the next modern PT regardless of how degenerate it gets.”

And then this in a meadery comment: “It isn’t a matter of “you can hate out goryo and bloom”. It is a matter that the format is too open to meta game these TWO decks so if you are trying to beat them you are losing to a lot of other things.”

I expect we’ll see something from him on the meadery, since he’s been very vocal about modern in the past. He has analyzed data as well, though he only covered, at most, top 64 in several events for a total of 230ish data points for “high level” performers. He thusly complained about the cruise and pod ban here: http://themeadery.org/articles/ban-list-blues/ . I expect to see something similar from him before too long.

If you subscribe to Wizards’ fundamental format rules, then these cards have to stay banned. DRS broke the format: I saw the metagame data and it was awful from tournament to tournament. No one enjoyed a format that was 20% BGx varieties with DRS (and that’s not even counting Melira Pod with DRS). Why would you risk opening that up again just to “prove” a card is broken? We already have the datapoint that suggests it’s broken.

There are a dozen reasons Wizards needs to be conservative with unbannings, including format stability, player retention, price management, consistency as a managing entity, etc. It’s fine for Wizards to revisit old bans/unbans and check them against the current environment, but this needs to be done methodically. It also needs to be a cost/benefit analysis for format health. Take Song, for example. Maybe an unbanned Song just brings Storm up to a 5% metagame share and is kept in check by other decks. Or maybe Song sees Storm rise to 11% again, re-violating the rules under which it was first banned. Why risk that? That decision does not inspire long-term confidence in the format: it just suggests Wizards is catering to the masses at the expense of format stability.

The point is, you don’t want to just randomly unban cards in a metagame that is already undergoing change. There’s no such thing as an inherently safe card: all cards are only safe in the context of the metagame. BBE seemed like a great unban back in February when Abzan was at 18%+ and Jund was practically nonexistent. But now it would be a ridiculous unban that would only serve to increase the metagame share of the current most-played deck. To prove that a card like BBE is safe, you would need to wait a few ban cycles to see how Jund did throughout that time.

The same goes for Control cards like AV and Sword. Maybe Grixis Control leaps to 20% of the metagame. Maybe it stays at 5%. We just don’t know right now because the metagame is in the process of evolving, so there’s no good reason to tamper with that until it’s clear that the metagame’s rate of change has slowed.

Also, from a purely PR perspective, Wizards wants to reserve some unbans specifically for those slower periods of Modern growth. Maybe Control stagnates for a while and starts to backslide, while aggro is on the rise: that’s a great time to unban something like Sword. But you aren’t going to just release all the unbannable cards at once, because if any one of them is a problem, you can’t figure out which one it is or why that card failed to do what it was supposed to (or did it too well).

I strongly encourage everyone to spread the word about this article and the banlist philosophy in it. Although I am not a big fan of shameless self-promotion, the doomsaying and misevaluations around the banlist are incredibly unhealthy for this format and need to stop. They reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of most of the banlist criteria and also the metagame itself. People who compare Seething Song Storm and Grishoalbrand either have no idea about the history of Storm and the reasons for its banning, or have no idea about Grishoalbrand’s current metagame representation.

So spread the word far and wide!

I find it a bit odd that you can on one hand say “Why can’t we just let the format self-police?” and on the other hand not be on board with unbannings.

Some things are clearly broken (Blazing Shoal, Treasure Cruise) or cause logistical nightmares (Sensei’s Diving Top – that card needs to say, once per turn and/or sorcery speed and then we can have something like that in Modern).

But others are just powerful (Seething Song and Deathrite Shaman come to mind) – why can’t Modern be allowed to police those cards?

I’m not here to advocate a mass unbanning – but I’m just against your argument because a lot of the cards we want unbanned are merely powerful (but not broken) effects or were banned for creating ‘homogeneity’ – only to be replaced by other homogenous cards (Serum Visions, Tarmogoyf etc).

My point is this. It doesn’t matter that Grixis “Control” (I’ll agree that it is Control for this conversation) is in flux. No matter how good Grixis Control gets, unless if it gets to a bannable meta share, the overall amount of Control in the meta is still going to be below 20%, which makes it highly underrepresented. I agree that Sword probably won’t be unbanned at least until the PT (they never haave unbanned anything except for right before the PT), but it still deserves to be unbanned as soon as possible and the format would either benefit a lot from it or not be affected at all.

It’d be nice if those people would stop and read an article like this before complaining about lack of bannings.

We had some early pre-trends suggesting the deck was good, but they never materialized. A huge reason for this was the hype around Kolaghan’s Command, an awesome card that Esper can’t run. This shifted players away from Esper and into Grixis colors, where you also got access to Bolt when Esper was stuck with Disfigure and Path. In a fairer metagame with bigger creatures, Esper becomes a lot better for the same reasons Abzan becomes better (Souls, Path, etc.). But this current metagame isn’t as hospitable to it, so it’s just not doing much right now.

It doesn’t matter why a deck was top-tier. It just matters, to Wizards at least, THAT a deck was top-tier. Storm had a huge metagame percentage at the time and Grishoalbrand does not. So long as a deck continues to not have that high metagame share, it doesn’t trigger violations of the turn four rule. The best reason for this is sample size. If a deck is routinely winning on turn two/three when it’s only 2% of the metagame, who knows why that is. Maybe the deck is broken. Maybe people just don’t know how to beat it, aren’t playing cards against it, or the deck is just getting lucky with matchups. Only when a deck reaches top-tier status can you really know if the turn three or less win rate is real or just within expected variance.

The key here is not that Grixis Control “shouldn’t” get unbans. The key is that while a control deck is currently in flux, there is no good reason to unban another control card. It’s much safer to just wait. It’s also better from a PR perspective, because you can just unban the card when the format needs more help and the unban will drum up more popularity. Given that the deck has only been around in any serious capacity for a month, there’s just no reason to initiate unbans right now. Wizards is much likelier to wait until the format looks different.

If a card doesn’t need to be banned, it should be unbanned. This should be true no matter how healthy the format is. Also, I am not asking for specifically blue control decks. I’d love more blue control, but I’d also be fine with decks like Monoblack Control, White Red Prison, Land Destruction, Skred Red, or even just some control decks that are bigger versions of Jund and Junk. But RG Tron is not a Control deck. It doesn’t want to interact. It plays board-wipes out of sheer necessity. It is trying to ignore you as much as possible. That is not how Control works, and until Control is equally represented with the other archetypes, the format will be imbalanced.

Modern has nothing to lose? How about the healthiest metagame in the history of the format?

I don’t why people think blue control needs to have a higher share of the meta than it does now. Modern doesn’t really need more than one good blue control deck. You can always play Tron too, playing control doesn’t have to mean playing draw-go for 15 turns and then winning with celestial colonnade.

Just seems a little silly to ban a spell that gains X life and nothing else. Griselbrand, being a Yawg’s bargain on a stick and all, is just asking to be abused, and him being around might restrict design space for reanimation spells in the future. He is clearly the broken piece of that deck, not Goryo’s or Shoal. The deck will be dead of any of those 3 are banned (it was not competitive before playing shoal anyway) so there’s no real reason to ban an innocent card like Shoal in the hopes that it will not kill the deck.