BTW I’m not sure why it’s surprising or shocking that there are very similar decklists in the top 8, those players (LSV/Floch/Nakamura, and Brown/Tao) were members of testing teams. Such teams will often converge on a single deck and play extremely similar lists, sometimes the exact same 75.
The new PT Gauntlet format on MTGO will provide some incredible data, essentially playtesting the top decks from the PT thousands of times against each other. That kind of data should demonstrate whether the Eldrazi deck is really that good, or whether it was a fluky-good showing.
Well, not really. None of the non-Eldrazi decks have any anti-Eldrazi sideboard tech, for one thing.
That… sounds very very dumb. :smack:
That is the key factor. The other linear aggressive decks either have lots of hate cards available (Affinity alone can be preyed on with Stony Silence, Shatterstorm, Ancient Grudge, and Vandalblast) or can be fought with traditional anti-aggro cards (such of Anger of the Gods, highly effective against Zoo). There’s nothing like that available for Eldrazi.
I spent yesterday testing against some Eldrazi decks with Kiki Chord, and got decent results from Worship - when I landed one, I had lots of time to attack in the air or combo off; their only defense was slowly ticking up a Ratchet Bomb to 4. The u/r Eldrazi has access to blue bounce effects like Cyclonic Rift, and the g/r version has World Breaker to exile enchantments, so it’s a flimsy solution, but nothing else worked.
It sure does. Wizards is a small company (IIRC, the Magic division has 40 employees), but still, spend a weekend testing for Modern, y’know? This wasn’t some obscure combination of cards.
Mornington Crescent!
OK, let me explain some of the terminology, then.
Magic: the Gathering is a collectible-card game. That means that you buy cards, usually in randomized packs but possibly also specific cards from dealers, and can assemble a deck (of at least and usually exactly 60 cards) from those cards. You can then play with your deck against other people who have their own decks.
There are officially-sanctioned tournaments for this game, for which there are a variety of formats. Some allow only cards printed in the past couple of years, some allow cards from any time in the game’s history, etc. Serious competitors for these tournaments typically buy exactly the cards they want, to assemble a deck that works precisely the way they want it to.
One particular tournament format is called Modern. In this format, all cards printed past a certain date are legal. That date is now a good many years in the past, so there are quite a lot of cards legal for this format, but it still disallows the very early cards, from before they knew what they were doing with the game balance.
A few years back, they introduced a type of creature card called Eldrazi, eldritch horrors along the lines of Cthulu. At the time, the Eldrazi creatures available were all so big and powerful that casting one would virtually guarantee a win, but to counterbalance that, they also had very high costs, requiring a large amount of in-game resources to play them.
But they still wanted it to be possible to get them out before the end of the game, so they also created some cards that would make it a little bit easier to play Eldrazi cards. One of these cards, Eye of Ugin, reduces the cost of Eldrazi creatures by 2. This wasn’t a big deal at the time, because it might reduce a cost from, say, 15 to 13. Eye of Ugin was useful, but was only one of many pieces you needed to make the big Eldrazi work.
Flash forward to now. They decided in the most recent expansion to revisit the world of the Eldrazi, except to shake things up, now they’re not all big huge game-ending creatures. Now there are more reasonable-sized Eldrazi creatures also, with more reasonable costs, like 2 or 3.
But suddenly, this means that Eye of Ugin is now much more powerful than it used to be, because while reducing a cost from 15 to 13 might not be that big of a deal, reducing it from 3 to 1, or from 2 to 0, is.
The result of this is that, even with such a huge variety of cards to choose from, a bunch of different players decided that a deck based on this was the best possible deck available.
The last year of Magic has made me completely quit. I usually at least go to the pre-release, but I didn’t even do that this time because of how many idiotic things they were doing, and none of it had anything to do with Modern as a format (I only play Limited, really). The game is becoming increasingly boring creature combat instead of about, you know, Magic. Spells should be powerful, and creatures merely workhorses. That they keep pushing creatures more and more, while making spells, particularly ones that get played in Limited, weaker and weaker. It’s just not interesting any more.
The absolute last straw was the colorless mana symbol. Way to change the functionality of hundreds of cards that were balanced around the fact that their mana could only be used to pay generic costs. Now that they have a “color” of their own, these cards seem absurdly powerful, especially because the cards in the “colorless” color seem to be costed as though the fact that they require colorless mana specifically makes them harder to cast! I saw the same thing with Devoid in the previous set: they were making something that was pretty much always a positive thing costed as a drawback! Absolutely unreal, and screams that they’ve run out of interesting things to do.
I can always tell who would’ve enjoyed the days of Prosperous Bloom, High Tide, and Draw Go. 
I personally like that we’ve gone beyond the days where an entire class of card (creatures) was basically worthless.
And I don’t get how the colorless mana symbol changed functionality of any cards…?
OK, look at something like Desert. It has an extra ability beyond what most lands have, which is good. But that’s balanced out by only producing colorless mana, instead of the colored mana most lands give. Colorless mana is strictly less useful than colored, so this serves to balance it out.
Except that now, there are cards with costs that must specifically be paid with colorless mana, just like there are cards with costs that must specifically be paid with red mana, or with blue. So “colorless” is now effectively just another color. And so now something like Desert has the advantage of being able to do damage, and the advantage of producing this particular kind of mana that you might want. So Desert is no longer balanced.
Lather, rinse, and repeat for every single card ever that produces colorless mana. In every one of those cases, when designing the card, they took into account the fact that colorless mana is worth less than colored mana, and used that as a balancing factor. And it’s not valid any more.
Agreed, and I think Standard and Modern are in a pretty good place with creature: spell balance. At the most recent SCG Standard Super IQ, the creature : spell breakdown in the top 8 was:
1 4C Company 26:9
2 BW Warriors 27:11
3 Abzan Aggro 20:15
4 WB Eldrazi 23:13
5 Temur White 20:16
6 Hardened Scales 21:17
7 Abzan Blue 25:9
8 Abzan Blue 20:14
And it was only 18 months ago that a zero-mainboard-creatures deck won Pro Tour M15.
Perhaps he or she means that lands like Mutavault and Blinkmoth Nexus get better when you aren’t hindered by needing colored mana? Thing is though, there are only 8 cards in Magic that require colorless mana, and colorless decks have been around forever: Metalworker/12-Post/MUD, Tron, Affinity, Shops…
This has been true for as long as there have been colorless decks. Affinity gets to use Inkmoth and Blinkmoth Nexus. MUD/Metalworker/12-post gets to use Ancient Tomb, Cloudpost, and City of Traitors. Tron gets to use the Urzatron lands. The price you pay is in the limited pool of cards you get access to, relative to colored cards, the availability of hate cards against you, and the higher CMC of colorless cards relative to colored ones with similar effects. Colorless mana is easier to make in abundance, but can only be used for a relatively small number of overcosted effects.
By way of specifics, there are 1,662 non-land colorless cards. Red gets 3,041, and has access to all but 8 of those colorless cards.
The Eldrazi deck is part of this same tradition: you get a lot of colorless mana (some of virtual, via cost reduction) that you can use on a narrow set of cards. The problems are a) that the particular combination of Eye of Ugin and Eldrazi Temple make gobs of mana before any answers available in Modern come online, and b) no hate cards exist.
No, that’s not what is meant, here. In an all-artifact deck, for instance, the mana produced by a desert is just as good as the mana produced by a mountain. You can use the desert instead of the mountain and take advantage of its other ability, but there’s no advantage to its mana: Its mana is, at best, just as good as the mountain’s. But if your deck has something like Bearer of Silence, then the mana produced by a desert is better than the mana produced by a mountain.
Picture an alternate-history version of the development of Magic, where there were no blue cards, but cards which produced blue mana still existed for some reason. You could still use blue mana to pay nonspecific portions of mana cost, but you could use other colors for that, too, so there would be no point to the blue mana-producers. So to compensate for that, they would give extra abilities to all of the blue mana-producers. The game could be balanced this way. But now if, all of a sudden, they created blue cards, too, now you’d have colors that didn’t have the extra abilities, and a new color that did have the extra abilities. Blue would become overpowered.
I get your meaning, which is why I emphasized the narrow card pool. Again, there are 8 cards that require colorless mana to cast. I assure you that those 8 are not better than all the blue cards ever printed.
The Eldrazi deck exists because casting any reasonable beater at a deep discount is a fine strategy in a format with no real control deck (see also: the Living End deck, which does the exact same thing, albeit in a fashion that’s slower and easier to disrupt), and few combo decks that can outrace you. Without the Eye/Temple mana engine, no one would be running Bearer of Silence because it also let them run lots of utility lands. The colored spells are simply better.
If colorless-mana cards become part of every set moving forward, then there’d be a problem, but I don’t believe that is the plan. We’ll see.
I think the “balancing” factor is that there aren’t going to be very many cards that require colorless mana, so you won’t have the same kind of flexibility you have with other “colors”. But that’s hardly an issue when you have enough different kinds of cards to be able to support three distinct archetypes able to dominate the field in a format that includes a ton of cards. Sure, the Eye and Temple are part of those tons of cards and won’t be able to help for Standard, but I’m assuming for the most part that they are balancing colorless in Standard as just another color (see: Wastes) so this isn’t much of a problem. It’s really only a significant problem in Modern where you have these couple of enablers and don’t have the outright truly broken cards of Legacy and Vintage. But to me it’s more of a conceptual problem, akin to the change in functionalities brought in by 6th edition rules, as well as whenever they got rid of “Damage on the stack”. Those particular changes were very good for the game in general and simplified things quite a bit over what the prevailing rules were, but this change is totally unnecessary and only part of something they are doing story-line wise. There’s no reason to make colorless into a fake color like they have in terms of rules, and yet they changed the functionality of a lot of cards that were balanced around not having a functionality besides producing colorless mana. In fact, that they even printed Wastes shows just how absolutely bonkers all the colorless-producing lands are now; they are absolutely strictly better than a basic land (other than being non-basic), while in the past 15 years at least have given every other non-basic land some sort of drawback that makes it worse in some particular situation than a basic land.
I absolutely enjoyed those days. I don’t like how it seems these days in Standard every deck has the same basic game plan of play efficient creatures and attack with them (I really don’t know anymore since I stopped following it, but that’s what it seemed like). The name of the game is Magic, not Magical Creatures. While the game certainly should provide ways for creature decks to be able to win, I don’t feel like they should be the absolute only way to play the game.
The printing of new magic cards always changes the relative value of old cards.
The fact that a handful of new cards make old colorless producing mana sources marginally better (if you play those cards) doesn’t unbalance the game. Honestly, it’s an incredibly small shift compared to the sorts of changes that any new set brings.
ModernNexus, which tabulates metagame data, has some sobering statistics: Eldrazi decks are currently 41.5% of the Magic Online metagame.
I sure hope we aren’t headed for a Mirrodin situation, where there’s one king deck, decks designed explicitly to beat it, and nothing else.
Back in my day, we had Terror and Counterspell and Plainswalk, and that’s the way we liked it!
Seriously, did anyone, ANYONE, think in 1993 that M:TG would survive, and flourish, for more than 2 decades?
Bring back Banding!
Amen to that, Jophiel! I still don’t understand why everyone thought banding was so confusing. It was a subtle, low-power ability that shifted the outcome of games when used well, and promoted strategic thinking. That’s the kind of ability we need to see more of.