General [Format Discussion] Modern Masters is Totally Incredible

[CML]

HOOOOOOLY SHIT it is good. I gotta run to a soccer game so i'll keep it short:

the tribal synergies don't really result in linear strategies. like i hate tribal for the most part because it's so oppressively parasitic and lazy and easy but the archetypes work well with one another. the poison principle is observed (to disambiguate, nothing is 'poison'), so it's possible to go 1 color, two color, three colors.

to this end there's a nice amount of decently-powerful fixing you feel good about playing. cycling in its various forms is the perfect mechanic.

the games are long and interactive. there aren't all that many bombs. my biggest quibbles are that rebels is pushed a little hard, there's not much spot removal, and straight-up aggro is kinda meh. the drafting process is complex without being complex to the point where i felt like saying 'fuck it.'

my only complaints are that, with the team capable of hitting it out of the park like this, they choose to make bad formats like AVR and Modo Cube as well as mediocre formats that could easily have been great ones like DGR. also the print run was way too low, it costs too damn much etc.

the MM experience gels with the gossip i've heard that the developers and designers are great at their jobs, but hasbro forces them to release inferior products. the extent to which they meddle, and the extent to which their meddling constitutes a reason and not an excuse, is unclear. i'm not sure how much of what i've heard is classified, but i'd love to share it with y'all later -- for now, though, MODERN MASTERS.

post your MM experiences here!

 

[Dom Harvey]

...Chris is praising a Wizards product?! When can I expect the apocalypse?

 

[Chris Taylor]

I'm just cheesed I opened a 300$ box with one mythic: Kokusho.

Statistically I shoulda gotten 3, but I'll make up for it in the rares, right?
Nope, nothing over 10$ save the 1 doubling season.

MM can bite my ass

 

[Jason Waddell]

Looking forward to playing it. A local player is cracking a box and has invited me to join in his draft. He'll take all the cards home, and there's no cost for me, so it's pretty much ideal.

 

[CML]

dom: I LIKE GOOD THINGS ILL HAVE YOU KNOW

chris: ugh, this must be both why they blew it with the limited print run and why they had a limited print run. sorry to hear it. some fun drafts can still result!!

 

[Chris Taylor]

I'm sure there's a full on rant about the limited print run products coming on sometime. From the vaults can similarly bite my ass. It took me a whole damn year to find that foil serendib because I, in my hubris, didn't want to pay 250$ for FTV:Exiled

 

[tomchaps]

Yesterday's MM event was the very first time I've ever played Magic officially. I've never done a draft at a store, an FNM, anything. Seven rounds of sealed in a stuffy sweaty basement with no time to get anything to eat, and serious players (Competitive Rules Enforcement in effect!) It was great, but it mostly reminded me how much I enjoy cubing with good food and great beer and a loose but competitive environment. Ten hours of trying not to forget Suspend triggers is hard!

Anyway, I was lucky to have most of my matches be good ones--close and full of interesting play decisions. I only steamrolled one guy, and was only steamrolled by one guy. My pool was very slow, but I had a great late game: Verdeloth the Ancient, Skeletal Vampire (lookit those money rares! woo!), Oona, and Rude Awakening. At 6-8 mana, I rocked the house. My real money rare was Doubling Season, which I decided to maindeck (I had Reach of Branches, too). Probably silly, but I was able to T5 Doubling Season, T6+ token-producing bomb to win games I otherwise shouldn't have won.

I lost one game three with my opponent at one life to an unexpected Blinding Beam my blockers + Glacial Ray for exactly lethal. That was after a game with a fully stalled board, me at 4 life, him at 20 and me milling him with Oona. I was able to look three turns ahead and guess that he'd win with the mill-loss on the stack by zapping me with his Blightspeaker once a turn, and that's precisely what happened. I love games like that, even when I lose.

I was able to trade a Gifts Ungiven (which I already run in my cube) for a Kira, Great Glass Spinner. Noone was interested in trading for my Doubling Cube, sadly. That's the only new card coming into my cube from the day, sadly.

3-4 overall, then I had to RUSH to get to my real game night. Got home at 2:30 in the morning. At least I won in Cyclades! (Hint: Pegasus will wreck you if you're not careful.)

 

[Eric Chan]

Seven rounds of sealed in a stuffy sweaty basement with no time to get anything to eat

Geeeeez. The main reason I didn't play in my local store's MM event Friday night is cause they were also running sealed, and seven (!) full rounds of it, which apparently started at 6 pm and ended at 1 am.

When I heard that, I thought the store was crazy. Turns out there are crazy stores most everywhere.

 

[CML]

sometimes i forget how blessed i am to be in seattle. of course i always remember when i drive to portland or vancouver for ptq's. those are nice cities with no shortage of space but GOD are those tournaments miserable. here i can just show up to card kingdom and play a 4-rounder against fairly strong opposition while eating a sandwich, drinking a beer, chillin' with the homies, punting a match, going 3-1 and getting 4 prize packs.

the contents of said packs were something like path, path, maelstrom pulse, ge archmage, bridge from below, elspeth. i dunno what chris is doing wrong

 

[BennyD]

What I liked about the format:

• Skill-testing games with complex board states
• Mana ramp is confined to green
• Interactive environment
• Actual archetypes (rather than just a collection of good cards)

What I disliked about the format:

• Too many parasitic mechanics
• Drafting felt confining; once in an archetype, it wasn't correct to switch

All in all, I was pleasantly surprised. This should serve as a model for what a cube can be - though I would have done things differently.

 

[Eric Chan]

I learned that it's never correct to suspend a Pardic Dragon. Everything after firebreathing is actually flavour text.

Suspend is such a sweet mechanic, though. It's perfect for a complex, deep format like Modern Masters. I didn't play Magic back then, but I'm starting to understand why Time Spiral block draft was such a beloved format.

 

[Lucre]

Man it's totally unlike cube.

I mean, I've made Gargadon / Knight of Reliquary decks before in cube.
But I've never made ones with like 3x Glacial Ray 3x Kodama's Reach before. That format is so funny.

 

[Eric Chan]

I'll be honest - I never really knew what splice onto arcane was. But there's something about hot gluing a Glacial Ray onto a Peer through Depths that's deeply satisfying.

 

[Lucre]

I always loved that mechanic. I think me and chris were both really excited about spells matter decks featuring splice cards and old izzet cards like gelectrode and Wee Dragonaughts. Man I hope they can bring that mechanic back some day without the dumb spirit dead weight.

Though I did love my Celestial Kirin Deck to death. That card was a house. Also sliding Hikari, Twilight Guardian in and out was really cool before blink decks were a real thing outside of astral slide.

 

[Chris Taylor]

Well lucas remember that enchantment I made a few weeks back? "Instants and sorceries have splice onto instant or sorcery, the splice cost is equal to their mana cost"?
Could be done.

 

[Jason Waddell]

Finally had the chance to draft MM.

I pretty much ignored all the themes of the set and drafted a RUG value deck with:
2 Kitchen Finks
2 Trygon Predator
Murderous Redcap
Eternal Witness
2 Tribal Flames
3 Rift Bolt
3 On-color Vivid lands

I went 2 - 1, losing to WB Rebels.

Thoughts: The decks were fun to play, but some of the drafting was kind of off. There were a lot of super narrow "the ____ deck" cards that had no real value outside of some tribal or artifact theme. Trygon Predator in a set with Affinity as an archetype felt off. I drew a Predator both games against an Affinity player (the guy hosting the draft) and just wanted to profusely apologize. "Sorry, your entire deck is nullified."

I also found it quite fun to play with some of the "medium" power level cards that don't make the cut in my main cube. Trygon Predator concerns aside, one of the things that made the draft a lot of fun was that the games still felt like playing Magic, instead of just getting blown out by some ridiculous card you have nothing to do with.

All said I think Wizards did a pretty good job, especially given the restrictions. There are a lot of disjoint themes going on in the sets they had to work with, and tying them together cohesively while still showcasing that era's history is a difficult task.

EDIT: Also, Basic Landcycling remains a really fun limited mechanic.

 

[Eric Chan]

...Did we draft the exact same deck? I also packed my bags and made a trip to Value Town with RUG. I even had the same record, getting dispatched by faeries in the finals. That's where I learned that when you suspend a Pardic Dragon on turn 2, you can still lose on turn 10 and have more suspend counters on the Dragon than you started with.

The artifact theme seems a bit dodgy to me. You need some artifact hate in the format, because otherwise Bonesplitter cracks your skull in half every time. But too much artifact kill then makes it like robots fighting through Ancient Grudges in Constructed. I'm not sure I've really seen the artifact deck come together, so it could just be my perception, but as a fair aggro deck, it doesn't seem like the strongest archetype.

Btw, how does dredge work in this format? I've seen people filling up their graveyard, and then.. nothing happens. What are the key cards for this archetype, besides Worm Harvest?

And yeah, Traumatic Visions reminded me of how good basic landcycling was back in Shards block, particularly in blue. Lay of the Land / Counterspell split card is all any blue mage ever wanted.

 

[Jason Waddell]

Yeah, I opened a Pardic Dragon and was like "this thing can only be hardcast". Then in the next pack I discovered Fury Charm is in the set. Fury Charm was also in my deck against the Artifact deck. Which would have been useful, but T3 Trygon Predator plague-winded his board and I ended the game with a "still had all these" hand of Rift Bolt, Rift Bolt, Fury Charm, Traumatic Visions, and a Greater Gargadon just hanging out suspended.

Life from the Loam got played in the double Terramorphic Expanse deck.

 

[CML]

munch munch munch. one of our playgroup is addicted to modo drafting this set and is not losing a great deal. here are some findings:

the archetypes ended up being underpowered due to the steep power curve (limited-filler commons vs. powerhouse u/r/m reprints) -- read into that what you will.

oddly this is the only format ever where drafting the 5c goodstuff deck (feat. tromp the domains, sweet uncommons and none of those bs latchkey faerie or arcbound stinger style cards) is actually good. of course it has to do with a steep power curve instead of a shallow one.

i think you can beat the domain deck with an open archetype but it has to be one of only a few and it has to be really open.

kodama's reach is the best common in the set by an enormous margin.

 

[Jason Waddell]

Maybe it was just my deck (lowish curve) but I had Kodama's Reach and Rift Bolt and definitely preferred the bolts. Those things killed everything (including my opponents).

 

[Spiderdoofus]

Yeah, I really like MMA as well. I have done 4-5 drafts, 1 sealed GPT, and my playgroup has collectively done probably three to four times that. I think all the archetypes are good enough to win, though RW seems the weakest. Green seems to be the most consistently good color (splash for removal), although rebels and affinity have higher variance. If you get enough of the rebel/affinity cards it can be very powerful. Arcane is fun, but you can't just draft all Arcane spells. Those are my thoughts at least.

This set has changed a lot about how I view cube. I started with a C/Ube and slowly built it up with rares until it now resembles most everyone's cube online. On one hand, I like working with others to achieve consensus on what should be in "the cube." However, MMA showed me how oppressive including the best cards can be. The lower power level lets fun, gimmicky, synergistic archetypes breathe a bit more, which I like.

There are some negatives to MMA. I think the giants theme fails to deliver. There could be more bleed between the archetypes, more chance for new archetypes to be found in overlaps, though I think this exists to some extent. The necessity of reprinting Modern staples means some cards are stupidly good, and some rares are near unplayable. Though I will hand it to the guy who blocked 2-3 cards in my hand with Chalice of Void for 2, bouncing it each turn with Esperzoa.

 

[CML]

hey jim, welcome!

i think it's not so much low power level so much as it is flat power level that's to be pursued in cube. though of course it's impossible to have a flat power curve with power maximized as there aren't 360-720 "other skullclamps"

 

[Spiderdoofus]

Thanks for the welcome!

What I meant was that when you include cards like Balance, Hero of Bladehold, Jace, the Mindsculptor, Goblin Guide, Sulfuric Vortex, Umezawa's Jitte and so forth it pushes out cards like Corpsejack Menace. The power level could be flat, but still too high for gimmicky stuff like arcane. Sure, you could design a cube where Corpsejack Menace is playable (working on that!), so I am mostly referring to the mainstream of cubes.

For reference, I have a 450 unpowered cube, which includes all the cards I listed earlier. I really like drafting it, even when I lose to broken cards like Skullclamp. While I ban the worst offenders (e.g., Sol Ring), I personally like to have some "villans" in the draft. Villans need to be powerful, and wield weapons like Jitte, because it makes it sweet when you manage to take them down. Plus, it's fun to be bad!

 

[Jason Waddell]

Thanks for the welcome!

What I meant was that when you include cards like Balance, Hero of Bladehold, Jace, the Mindsculptor, Goblin Guide, Sulfuric Vortex, Umezawa's Jitte and so forth it pushes out cards like Corpsejack Menace. The power level could be flat, but still too high for gimmicky stuff like arcane. Sure, you could design a cube where Corpsejack Menace is playable (working on that!), so I am mostly referring to the mainstream of cubes.

For reference, I have a 450 unpowered cube, which includes all the cards I listed earlier. I really like drafting it, even when I lose to broken cards like Skullclamp. While I ban the worst offenders (e.g., Sol Ring), I personally like to have some "villans" in the draft. Villans need to be powerful, and wield weapons like Jitte, because it makes it sweet when you manage to take them down. Plus, it's fun to be bad!

I agree with both what you and CML are saying. It's a mix of absolute power level and relative power level distributions that are at play here. Either is capable of ruining an environment. There's a whole range of "buh-roken" cards that haven't even been printed that would lead to terrible games, even if the environment had a flat power level.

 

[Chris Taylor]

Not to mention the perfectly fair (or even bad) card which just lead to horrible games.