I play Modern mostly where most decks are three or four colours so having easy nonsense with the mana base is fairly ordinary. I don’t mind running lots of colours either, I loved Shards of Alara and the Khans wedges were cool.
It’s worth noting that running lots of colours does make you more vulnerable to land hate in sideboards, especially because they printed this,
The only constant 3 color decks are Grixis Control, Jund, Junk and Burn (which comes in two flavors). Then at 2 colors you have twin (can add a third color depending on meta), infect, Elves (with two flavors too), tokens, hatebear, boggles, rg through the breach, storm, RG Tron, some other things I’ve missed. Mono color decks then you get Blue Tron, the enchantment prison deck, Black Tron, Affinity (because for all the colored sources tap for all colors), Genesis Wave, Merfolk, 8 rack etc.
Do you ever get tired of saying ridiculous shit?
Slight clarification. I hate payoff cards that read like this:
I like payoff cards that read like this:
Four colors in modern? For what? There is zero reason to play an uncomfortable mana base unless treasure cruise is legal or a card like bring to light.
I actually hate this, both from financial perspective and from a game design one. Some people made a comparisson, and some standard decks costs as much as a modern one. When a standard deck costs almost as much as Tron, something’s wrong.
From a design point of view, this is really boring. Just toss in everything good and call it a deck.
Also, I’m surprised you don’t hate BFZ more. I reviewd all the cards recently, and I kept telling myself a lot - “this scard is unplayable unless mechanic x is viable”. If things like Allies, Devoid/ ingest are not viable , 1/3 of the cards will be unplayable.
I mean, you might hate Nykthos, but cards like polukranos, courser, caryatid, arbor colossus or boon satyr were still good by themselves. Even burning-tree had more applications than fueling nykthos
It’s mostly because the set has been so weak that it’s virtually absent from the meta. Instead, players are using the excellent KtK block spells and pairing them with the Tango lands for broken mana. The end result is a format where the deck strategies have less dependencies and the mana is very good. I think I would hate BFZ way more if the Devoid/Ingest strategy was actually constructed-worthy. As it is I am thankful that BFZ added five lands and a Planeswalker to the meta.
I would have had waaaaaaay more fun the last two years if Devotion had just been completely unplayable. Man, pure RtR or KtK strategies with Scry lands and none of that Devotion nonsense? Sounds good to me.
I’ve played a lot of Jund decks that have splashed White. I’ve seen Grixis control splash White for Souls as well. Black / Green / Red decks splashed Blue with the Twin combo in them are popular here. I see four colour far more often than monocolour so I’m not too surprised when it happens. It’s a* hell *of a lot less common than three colour but it’s not non-existent and it’s easy to manage with fetch/shock.
Three colour decks… well UWR control and Esper control still get used here, Jund, Abzan, Grixis Control and those last three are three of the most common decks I face. Scapeshift is R/U/G. Modern Sultai decks are around. Zoo/Naya is another three colour deck, the local Wizards rep runs that. Grixis Delve is 3 colour. There is a good aggressive Jeskai deck, RGB Dredge reanimator… there are a bunch of weird combo decks and some other odd stuff around and altogether it constitutes most of what I play.
I still see decks like Prison, RG Tron, Soul Sisters, Merfolk, Affinity and Infect etc. at big events but I play against a lot of different decks. Saying I face it is not, ridiculous shit, it’s being part of a diverse community where not everyone net decks Tier 1 and calls it a Bible.
Some intersting comments about mtg finance
http://www.mtgsalvation.com/articles/47161-the-magic-street-journal-wizards-always-hurts-the
@FrostyAU Idk why the hell I would play souls in Grixis Control when I can Kolaghans Command a Tasigur/Angler to hand . And no Jund deck that I know of wants an even more painful landbase.
No Ban Modern Elves in action:
Turn 1) Llanowar Elf
Turn 2) Some other shit.
Turn 3) FUCK YEAH WOOO!
.
The land is pretty easy to manage man. You never played against Ajundi? That kind of stuff was really popular for a while. I’m pretty sure if you looked up Jund primers you’d still see it. People put Rhino+Pod in Jund as well before Pod got banned. Running a single Blue dual land is all you need to cast Exarch, you run the risk of losing that land but it’s easy enough to fetch for a blue / something land if you have Exarch and want to combo to win the game. If you looked up the reports from the local 100+ player events you’d see the deck.
As for Souls in Grixis, it doesn’t happen so much any more. People run that 21 land Grixis Delve control now (http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/daily-deck/modern-grixis-control-2015-06-19). There are plenty of older examples of Grixis decks splashing for Souls.
I made a rather nutty combo deck to play Ulamog turn 5 in Standard -
Out of all the things you could reanimate, you chose the one that has no evasion, offers no disruption and doesn’t really impact the board all much?
If you’re gonna do that, might as well replace umalog with the bana ged guys or the one that stops even numbered spells.
It’s Indestructible so it survives your own sweepers and can be impossible for some decks to remove. Even if they have enough blockers to chump block it it will mill them in three turns.
The tutors can find sweepers the turns after you reanimate him as well. Dark Petition with all those spell cards in your graveyard can find and cast Languish for 6. Bring To Light for 5 can cast Languish. Necromantic Summons can reanimate their creatures as well.
It’s in early stages anyhow. If they have a lot of exile effects which they might like Stasis Snare etc. some kind of dragon reanimator with Atarka could be better.
It’s not that hard to deal with Ulamog, though. Abzan charm is everywhere, Stasis Snare, Crackling doom, etc.,
Your deck has minimal interaction, almost no blockers, and no ramp. That means you need to play a land every turn, find 1 of the 2 copies of ulamog, put it in the yard, then find a reanimation spell, and hope to go off on t5. And even when everything is perfect, you have to hope your opponent doesn’t have an answer, and even then, you kill them in 3 turns…
I like your idea, Dark petition is a very nice find, but you need to make the deck faster/have more interactions, or to have more win conditions.
I like reanimation strategies, but I don’t think they are good right now. In general, you want creatures with etb trigger to reanimate, and the best one - Atarka - can just be hardcasted by green ramp decks.
But speaking of playing Ulamog -> I also had a funny idea. You gus remember Savage Ventmaw ? It’s the dragon that when attacks, gives you 6 mana. You know, if you play VEntmaw on t4 -> with Shaman/rattleclaw, you have enough mana to hardcast Ulamog on t5. So, t3 Shaman, t4 Ventmaw, t5 Ulamog. Pretty hilarious
It’s not the difficulty that keeps 4 color decks from being played in Modern. I think the only legit 4+ color deck is Tribal Zoo, which is a fringe strategy. I can’t remember last time I saw a Jund deck splashing for white. The main reasons for that are:
Right now in Standard there’s little to punish for going crazy with your mana, that’s why there’s so many 4/5 color decks
I’ve tweaked the deck a fair bit since, it’s now more of a Dragon thing, you’re right about the amount of exile in Standard. The deck does draw a lot so it tends to hit 5 land but it may want one or two more. It’s going off fairly consistently turn 5 - 6 on Tapped Out though.
While the deck is linear what it wants to do other than reanimate is play boardwipes. It can tutor them, draw into them, it just wants to wipe the board and if they do kill the bomb it can tutor another reanimation to reanimate him again or a different copy in your grave.
It fuels Delve with the way it mills itself/fetches so that could be an alternate strategy to play more threats but fitting everything in is hard. Really this deck was just a random idea for something different not my PTQ entry. Stringing all this stuff together is proving fairly complicated however to the point it may not be worth the effort.
As for that other stuff I know four colour isn’t that common in Modern. I’ve seen it and still do see it but it’s unorthodox. A few of the guys here do still do it though. Three colour is the majority of what I personally face playing Modern. My own deck that I use most of the time in Modern is three colour. When I made that original statement those three colour decks were mostly what I was referring to and I rattled off a huge list of them above.
(Yeah, the lack of punishment for crazy manabases in Standard at present is part of why I want to play Red in between access to Crumble to Dust and Jeskai Charm.)
That said, when I realized that Nightmare was back due to Magic Origins, it got me slightly excited due to wondering if maybe Mono Black Control would work due to how slow Standard looks to be. Then I realized that, unfortunately, Corrupt didn’t come back, which makes doing that somewhat more difficult, but now I do rather wonder if it could work, especially since Black was basically the only other color besides Blue to get more than few good cards out of Battle for Zendikar.
Either way, I think found a decent enough basis that Green and White enchantment deck post-Theros, though it could use some work, especially since the lack of Frontier Siege is really, really odd to me due to how good that card is: http://deckstats.net/decks/47637/333947-dromoka-s-pillowfort/en.
You missed the boat. Mono-black control was the best deck in Standard for an entire year, during RtR/THS.
(Lame.)
I suspected as much, though part of my wondering was if it could still work due to the aforementioned sluggishness of everything. I’ll grant it lost Thoughtseize, but beyond that, Drown in Sorrow and Bile Blight, I can’t think of anything super significant that it lost and Duress and Languish are still around, so…
Actually, since we’re talking about this, I’ll ask a question that I think I asked before but I can’t remember if it got answered: Did Mono-Black Devotion ever “take off”? All I hear about is either Mono-Blue or Red-Green Devotion, so I’m guessing no, but…yeah.
Now that I’m remember and FrostyAU brought up Reanimator, was there ever a “thing” while Theros was around?
It lost Pack Rat, the card that proved in my mind how random MtG really is. Pack Rat basically gave Mono-black the option to be consistent in a way no other standard deck could hope. You get a 2-drop, a 3-drop, and from then on every card you draw is the same card. You never get flooded or screwed or anything. Turn one Thoughtseize even allowed you to protect your Pack Rat engine. After Pack Rat left the format Mono-black stopped being the most consistent deck. Instead the consistent decks were all multicolor because they could play Scry Lands.
http://www.channelfireball.com/articles/owens-a-win-black-devotion-still-the-best-deck/