Modern is Moving in the Wrong Direction

Hello Everyone!

Over a month ago I wrote about the Legacy banned list and thought about why cards are actually banned and which cards would be safe to remove. Of the 60 cards on the banned list, only 2 could reasonably come off. Today, we had the Banned and Restricted announcement, which I didn't know was being moved to line up with new set's releases. Nothing was changed in Legacy, however Modern did get a pair of bans.

Bloodbraid Elf and Seething Song are now banned.

This is the wrong direction to go with Modern. Here is the Modern banned list. For starters, Jund without Bloodbraid Elf will still get a top 8 in every event. The thing with Jund is it's just a pile of really good cards. Dark Confidant + Liliana is still a perfectly legitimate game plan, and cards like Tarmogoyf are still insane beaters. Bloodbraid Elf is simply another sweet card, nothing else. PV wrote an article recently where he talked about what makes a deck good. One major defining factor is that you have to play good cards that you never mind drawing. Look at this Jund list, what cards do you never want to draw in it?

"Damn, I drew a Maelstrom Pulse" - said no one ever

If we take Jund and then replace the 4 Bloodbraid Elves with 2 Kitchen Finks and 2 Huntmaster of the Fells, the deck hardly changes and we still have a dominant beast to be reckoned with. So banning Bloodbraid Elf doesn't get us very far.

Another angle I have heard people talking about is that we can just cut red out of Jund completely. The only other utility we were gaining from playing red was Lightning Bolt and Terminate, two cards that can be easily replaced, so we are free to explore other options. Jund has already been playing Lingering Souls, so why not go deeper into white?

3 mana 5/5, is that good? Pro Tour Amsterdam in 2010 Brian Kibler and Brad Nelson both came in the top 8 with the Treefolk Shaman. Here's his deck tech. Keep in mind that this format was Extended with legal sets ranging from Time Spiral through Magic 2011, so the format was vastly different, however it's an inherently powerful deck and can probably be effectively ported to Modern.

However before we look at Doran, Seething Song also got banned.... and no one knows why.... Storm is not a good deck in modern, and the loss of Bloodbraid Elf is not going to make it any better. The only reason that I think the DCI banned it is because they're trying to elimate combo decks from the format. This is a bad idea. No one likes getting combo'd out, but without the threat of powerful combo decks the rest of the format completely changes the way it interacts and the range of potential decks shrinks.

Here's a few legacy decks you may expect to see at a given tournament:
RUG Delver
Shardless BUG
Show and Tell
ANT
Miracles
Dredge
Goblins
Elves

Each of these decks have completely different game plans and so being able to fight against everything is simply impossible. The types of disruption each deck folds to is different, and this creates a tension in sideboard construction because you have to choose what you want to beat and what you want to lose to. Let's compare this to Modern:

Jund
Infect
Pod
UWR
Eggs
Storm
Affinity
Valakut

Abrupt Decay and Thoughtseize answers everything. Storm could previously fight through Thoughtseize, but now without their best ritual, the deck lost its legs and will probably never see play anymore (not that it was ever good before...). With Storm now out of the picture this less diverse list becomes even tighter and decks like Eggs and Infect will have a lot more focused hate making them even more fragile and therefore weaker choices to play. This means that the only decks that are left are fair decks. That's not very exciting and the format will lose its tension and identity.

Restricting the kinds of unfair things that can be done in a format is ultimately worse for that format. I'm not saying this just because I like playing unfair decks, I also play standard. Modern is slowly becoming Standard with a bigger card pool. This is a flawed strategy. Standard is popular because every 3 months the format completely transforms so there is a constant draw to deckbuilding and innovation. With the addition of Gatecrash we go from 1144 cards to 1393. This is a 21.8% increase in the card pool - a very significant increase. Compare this to Modern which is going from 7276 to 7525 cards, a 3.4% increase - fairly negligible. Since Modern can't reasonably expect to be shaken up dramatically with every new set to the point that people find a new interest every couple months, it needs another approach to be popular. Legacy does this by having a diverse metagame and approximately infinite viable strategies so the meta is constantly shifting. Without any new cards the format shifts constantly which maintains an interest. That's the direction Modern needs to go.

So what am I suggesting to improve this? Just unban (almost) everything! The format will go into limbo and will be insane at first, but we will quickly see the decks balance themselves out against each other. The only card I think should stay banned is skullclamp, but all the others can come off. This will create more combo decks, but cards like Bitterblossom, Jace TMS, Mental Misstep, Stoneforge Mystic, and Sensei's Divining Top will open up 2 flavors of control (Caw-Blade and Faeries) to help counteract it. Midrange decks like Jund will still be viable because they can use hand disruption to slow down the opponent and let their proactive game plan take over.

The major reason all the combo decks were too good before what that WotC neutered the control decks and then wondered why they were absent. You know what wrecks Hypergenesis? Spellstutter Sprite. You know why no one is playing that card? Bitterblossom is banned. Why is Bitterblossom banned? I don't know.... We have Volcanic Fallout, Great Sable Stag, and Zealous Persecution as hate for starters....

We have the tools already in the format to not have a broken format, but instead we're not allowed to have any fun, and this is a major detriment to the game.

If you want to try Doran, here's an untested list I would start with:

4 Deathrite Shaman
4 Doran, the Siege Tower
2 Treefolk Harbinger
4 Dark Confidant
4 Tarmogoyf

3 Inquisition of Kozilek
3 Path to Exile
2 Thoughtseize
2 Abrupt Decay

1 Maelstrom Pulse
2 Lingering Souls

3 Liliana of the Veil

1 Forest
1 Plains
1 Swamp
1 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
4 Marsh Flats
4 Verdant Catacombs
3 Murmuring Bosk
1 Temple Garden
1 Godless Shrine
1 Overgrown Tomb
3 Razorverge Thicket
3 Treetop Village

Sideboard:
3 Kitchen Finks
2 Rule of Law
3 Blind Obedience
1 Golgari Charm
1 Path to Exile
3 Duress
2 Loxodon Smiter

That's all I have for today! Until next time, stay classy!

Ryan Lackie
Ryan.Lackie92@gmail.com
@ThingsILack