People are already innovating. If they weren’t, the Standard meta would be the same as the PT meta. However, time and time again we’ve seen the Standard meta compress to a small number of top decks shortly after the PT. This is how it almost always plays out:
There are a few obviously powerful pushed cards and strategies in every block, that can be built fairly easily by anyone. We can call these level 1 decks.
The Pro Tour has some number of level 1 decks, but there are usually more decks built to prey on the level 1 decks. We can call these level 2 decks. PTs tend to be dominated by level 2 decks.
After the PT, there is a lot of diversity in Standard for a short time. However, the level 1 decks soon figure out how to tech for the level 2 decks. Now they retain most of their power but the decks built to beat them can no longer expect to do so without resistance.
Standard stagnates as it becomes a meta of level 1 decks teched out to beat level 2 decks and each other.
It compresses because a good idea is a good idea and developing good ideas takes time and indepth knowledge of deck building and the format people don’t have.
It’s the same in Modern, it’s not solved, there is a lot of viable stuff you can do, it just requires you know how and you know what you’re facing.
Most people’s experiences against rogue decks are new players and it’s an inaccurate representation as those decks are built due to lack of knowledge, not crafted with it.
The reason you don’t see it more is because it takes hundreds of hours to turn into a card encyclopaedia full of theory, plus you need creativity and you need to playtest. People are lazy, they want instant success. The problem is they adopt it as the only way to play. It’s like KBR and his success in Marvel. Now it’s an accepted team, it never used to be.
That’s the thing though. It doesn’t take much time anymore. To put it more simply, no matter what other cool synergies you find a Siege Rhino is still a Siege Rhino so you’ll probably just put whatever innovative thing you found into an existing Siege Rhino shell. This is why Standard stagnates.
I still disagree with this. Look at MTGO reports. People are constantly trying new brews. It’s not that people are lazy in general. It’s that being lazy in deckbuilding gets better results. You get to take all that time you would have spent coming up with an innovative deck and instead use it for playtesting a known good deck. So while other people are brewing, you are winning. Then when someone else finishes coming up with an actually good new list, you can just copy him.
For every new list that succeeds in carving out a permanent place in the meta, there are hundreds if not thousands of brews being worked on by hundreds of thousands of players. You never hear about these players because only a tiny proportion of them ever see their creativity pay off.
EDIT:
Owen Turtenwald is intensely unlikable, but he’s super smart:
A lot of the people that try new brews do it on a budget. You still need to run power cards, so yeah, maybe it’s a variant on something but you can start from scratch and still have success, you just need to be able to identify the most powerful cards and build a strategy around them. Even in Modern there is a lot of viable stuff that people aren’t doing, it’s just expensive and you need to ask yourself a lot of questions why. I’ve had a bunch of success running different things. I won a Grand Prix Trial for GP Melbourne playing Jeskai Geist, I’ve won plenty of FNMs with odd stuff before as well. I feel good about that Standard Affinity deck I posted above or the Converge one.
The “right” in that sentence is throwing me off. Like maybe you meant “why the game sucks, right?” or maybe you wanted to say that the game sucks, but in the correct way. Like, sometimes the game sucks wrong but now it sucks right.
What? Burn! Maybe not the stock build, but mono red budget burn
Same. I can test U/B Faeries again or swap to Naya Burn…but all of the cards are being mailed (packed the orders into the same one to save on shipping).
Won one of the least fun drafts I’ve had for a while. I managed to make a near optimal U/W blink deck and didn’t lose a single match. Problem because of that was that people didn’t want to keep playing even after the two games. It also didn’t feel that great because people were losing me almost entirely because they passed me amazing commons and uncommons just to invest in colors that everyone else was going for. Spent most of the time just catching up on emails in-between matches. I know some people might say “who cares, winning is winning” but I treat drafts as ways of having that fresh brew vs brew feel. Only a fool would go into a hobby (note, not dedicated profession) weighing financial gain as priority 1.
Same here, I just enjoy playing and I try to only base my trades on my desire to play with a certain card rather than its monetary value (to a certain extent).
I think I already addressed this. You either spend hundreds of dollars building a flexible and fun deck but play it as cutthroat as you can, or you spend $100-$200 building an aggro deck that can’t be played any way but cutthroat. Or you spend $100-$200 brewing something with potential and maybe, just maybe you find that it’s actually a good deck. At that point you’re probably better off buying lottery tickets though.
FTFY
Just to clarify. There was a time, many years ago, when getting into MtG was a good idea. And if you’ve got an existing collection there will be many chances to get back into MtG even after you quit. But I am convinced that if you haven’t bought into the game yet getting in now is almost certainly a mistake.
Played some Modern today. Decks went well. That Grixis Tasigur Control deck is super powerful and flexible still but requires some piloting skills. A skilled pilot makes that deck insane though.
Tron is still Tron, I was playing against the BG version which uses Collective Brutality and Fatal Push.
Also played some Infect minus Gprobe which is a thing still I guess but didn’t phase me too bad
It’d be awesome for me if Mox Opal were to be banned in Modern. I need the price to tank because my Legacy Affinity deck is all in Japanese except for a single Mox.
It does look very lackluster, but WotC tends to take a heavy hand at manipulating the meta to force certain mythics into playability. Sorta like what they did with Ishkanah.
Honestly seems weird to me, given how much better in function the deck version of Tezzeret seems to be compared to this one.
Looking over stuff in the set and nothing really sticks out as really working well with him, but might just need some time.
Looks like the Saheeli combo will be a real thing in standard for now though.