Thank you for the reply and I agree with you point of looking at the meta game in the long term. I hadn’t considered how things would shake out after the meta adapts to Hollow One and Bridgevine and those decks decline in popularity. Where as SFM’s constant presence, if unbanned, would be something to always consider when constructing decks and tweaking sideboard.

As for Twin you also make great point and one that I forgot to consider is how versatile the deck was and how rendered any other blue deck inferior options. I remember it used to occupy and unhealthy % of the meta for that reason. I just kept thinking about how he have so many options to combat Twin, however, as you mentioned that isn’t the problem. For that reason and in attempts to maintain format diversity I can see Twin not ever being unban. As much as I miss playing against that deck, it is a necessary evil that it remain banned.

You’re asking the wrong question. It’s not about the short term metagame or immediate impact. The needle is constantly moving in Modern, and right now the metagame looks to be moving towards graveyard decks and large creatures and yes, that does make turn three Batterskull look mediocre at best. However, that won’t always be true. The question is whether the metagame can handle Stoneforge when busted linears aren’t in vogue. When things mellow out, would Stoneforge be a positive or negative for Modern’s diversity?

I can’t say for certain what Stoneforge would do, but I do know that it puts a severe roadblock to any deck looking to fight on the same axis as Batterskull. It would be inadvisable to play any ground attacking traditional aggro deck because Batterskull is a pretty clean answer. This would push decks to either go under Batterskull or pick a different battle. It is possible this would work out, for example more players planning for grindier midrange games involving equipment ala Legacy Stoneblade, while aggro decks take to the skies ala Spirits. It is equally possible that it stops players wanting to play creature aggro at all and instead polarizes the format between decks that can fight ‘skull equitably (midrange and control) and decks that ignore it (combo and Infect). The question isn’t whether Modern can handle it right now, the question is whether it incentivizes a metagame that is good for Modern.

As for Twin, I doubt I’ll be testing it because it’s not easily testable. Twin wasn’t banned because it was necessarily too powerful but because there just wasn’t much reason to play a non-Merfolk blue deck that wasn’t Twin. It could play midrange or combo games and was just better than everything else. Why play Storm when Twin can fight hate more easily? Why play control and win eventually when you can just win turn four? That effect is really hard though not impossible to statistically test, but the real killer is logistics. Getting a statistically significant sample size is hard enough for the normal tests, gathering significant samples from multiple decks to prove that whether Twin is just better is prohibitively challenging.

Also I would LOVE to see a similar article/experiment done on the unbanning of Twin. I feel like it would be a safe unban. And if it is not? Do what they did with Grave-troll: say “oops” and re-ban him…