I actually do think Wizards needs to ban a card. Something from Bloom has to go. The deck is unquestionably top-tier and also wins too consistently before turn four. I’m writing up my rationale for next week’s article, but for now suffice to say it’s a problem. I expect either Summer Bloom to go (if Wizards follows the Storm/Song precedent), or Amulet itself (if they just want to kill the deck ala Blazing Shoal).

Otherwise, I agree we will see no bans and hopefully at least one unban.

Ban whining is the absolute worst. I’m expecting to see even more whining than usual these next months, between the banlist update, the analysis (if it can be called that) of that update, and new decks making waves in tournament scenes.

I waffled back and forth a lot in Modern trying to find a deck I enjoyed playing, not just one that did well. Delver, Twin, Infect, I went back and forth but none of them ever felt ‘fun’ for me and my playstyle. Then I came across a Chord variant that used Bring to Light (and also almost completely folded to t2 Blood Moon) instead of Chord of Calling, and have been having an absolute blast with it in the format. Now I have something to spend the year building on and enjoying so that my love of the format continues to grow.

or we can wait for R&D to reprint Mana Severance by mistake.

Don’t worry. That’s one of the decks I’m working on and, with luck, we’ll see a brew article about it soon.

The Cloudstone Curio Combo Elves deck is more fragile than most of the currently played decks. It relies on several combo pieces, which can be all killed via Bolt. If you want to play green combo, go for Mono Green Devotion, if you want to play Elves, play Aggro CoCo Elves, which is the best Elves deck.

Griselbanned was never that widely played, it is still a very solid deck, but not mainstream. It needs something to be Tier 1 material, cause atm it is still a little bit to inconsistent (I’m one of the innovator of the Shoal version, so trust me on this one).

Greetings,
Kathal

Yep, home sweet suburban-Chicago! How I miss it so!

Tron hit a lot of hype after it won both the player’s championship and accompanying open (aka “when the O-Stone bubble burst”). It’s not like it was a weird choice or anything, it was just a moment where half the community collectively realized that it was still a good deck. The same thing happens whenever a solid deck that seems to have disappears suddenly wins a tournament.

Since we’re on the topic of hype trains, how about that cloudstone curio? I don’t want to add heritage druid to the mix since the aggro elves deck has stuck around, but evolutionary elves was literally around for one week before abruptly disappearing. At least Grishoalbrand has the decency to occasionally win an IQ!

If you’re looking at blood moon decks there’s a great one in R/G turbo mmon that I’m sure you’ve seen online. Salvation has a decent rundown of it athttp://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/the-game/modern/deck-creation-modern/569795-turbo-moon. I personally think that the deck should run utopia sprawl to help live that turn 2 moon dream of yours. But nevertheless it looks like fun.

Cheers!

If your home state is Illinois, you’d probably be doing a better budget job than Mr. Rauner!

I actually don’t count those investments as hype trains. Tron, Amulet Bloom, and BGx Midrange were all pretty solid metagame calls with lots of good data behind them. Hype trains are more like Slivers, Bubble Hulk, and Restore Balance. Although there are hype train elements to something like Jund, especially back in late May and early June, those were still relatively grounded buys.

Most interesting Moon build I have seen atm was Bloody Jund (MD Blood Moon in Jund). Wrecks most opponents game 1 (cause, who expects Moon from Jund, especially game 1) and due to Birds + Hierarch (6 dorks) you can play Moon on turn 2, or Lilli, or w/e you just want to cast 🙂

Greetings,
Kathal

Here’s the prices I spent (or pucatraded) for the following cards since last Januray (each was a playset): $11 Through the Breach, $5 Huntmaster, $3 Thragtusk, $1 Ancient Stirrings, $15 O-Stones, $27 Grove of the Burnwillows, 2x $25 Ugin, $100 MM2 goyfs. This also isn’t counting the $45 spent on a deathmist raptor playset and $10 on a den protector playset.

There’s really no big secret here I bought into R/G Breach last January because Scott Lipp’s GP Omaha deck looked like a blast (and it was!). I saved for R/G Tron for three months and bought in a week after GP Vegas when Karn stopped dropping. I used a work bonus to buy into Jund at half price because I realized I had most the cards and could obtain $150 of cards from pucatrade. For the standard cards, I bought them right before Dragons released since I was on G/W devotion and they looked like a good fit.

The common thread is that I decided which decks I enjoyed and wanted to play based on my own preferences and goldfishing, not what was getting attention at the time. As such, I didn’t cash out on any of these cards for profit, even if my Tron deck was $250 more expensive literally three weeks after I finished it.

I know the feeling! I’m trying to find something I really love by working around my current Blood Moon obsession, so perhaps something will come out of that. All of my other fringe preferences are too weak in this metagame, so it’s a struggle to really invest in a deck.

@Article, especially the last point is something I hate about the Modern community. As soon as something does well, people are crying out for bans, without thinking twice. It is getting tiresome to argue with those guys -,-*

Greetings,
Kathal