Are you a Quiet Speculation member?
If not, now is a perfect time to join up! Our powerful tools, breaking-news analysis, and exclusive Discord channel will make sure you stay up to date and ahead of the curve.
At Pro Tour Origins and in the weeks leading up I played a lot of matches with the new mulligan rule. As soon as I saw the rule I liked it, and playing with it more has only upset me in that it hasn't been implemented for every tournament yet. I'm firmly in Ben Stark's camp on this one.
Those opposed to the mulligan rule cite the success of aggressive decks at this PT, but I believe this argument is somewhat dubious. For the first time that the cards have been in Standard, we finally had a shell that could utilize Ensoul Artifact and Shrapnel Blast. That deck was going to be strong one way or the other. And if you want to talk about the Monored decks, well, they won the last Pro Tour, too. If you design a card like Searing Blood, and even it isn't clearly the best card in the red decks, then people are going to get demolished by some red decks.
Of course, this is just an example of critiquing a bad example, and ignored the overall point. The argument is that the rule favors aggressive decks more than controlling ones. It's true that when you're always looking for something very specific that "scry one" is going to have a higher impact in your deck, but it seems to me that whatever deck has access to more relevant tools in a given matchup is going to take the best advantage of this rule, rather than just whoever is playing the aggressor.
This rule helps combo decks and aggressive decks, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't help controlling ones. I do like that people want to see more data. I'm not one to criticize the scientific method, but I think it's clear that this rule reduces non-games, and if it just makes aggressive decks too good then we can address that problem later.
123
I don’t think the rule actually helps aggressive decks as much as it helps non-aggressive decks.
Aggressive decks tend to have more redundancy. More often than not, they’re gonna be looking to scry away a land and keep literally anything else. Since they don’t tend to have as many lands anyway, they will often be able to keep off the scry, meaning the main benefit to them is going to be knowing what’s coming off the top (and in Standard, that’s not altogether a critical benefit before turn 1).
Control and midrange decks tend to be looking for more specific parts of their deck, and crafting a more balanced opening hand is important. Depending on your keep, you might want to increase the odds of another land, or a Wayfinder, etc., counter magic, or removal (basically, whatever your keep is lacking most).
I think this rule may very well have a larger impact on older formats. It’s probably very potent for combo decks and Delver decks in Modern and Legacy, and this may be a problem going on…
Most feedback I’ve seen from the Pro Tour has been good (Ari Lax being a notable exception), so I think moving to a larger testing is the next step. I plan to try it in test games with my friends.