Dies to Removal

http://www.wizards.com/Magic/TCG/Resour ... /sfrmodern

The following cards are banned in Modern tournaments:
•Ancestral Vision
•Ancient Den
•Bitterblossom
•Blazing Shoal
•Bloodbraid Elf (banned effective February 1, 2013)
•Chrome Mox
•Cloudpost
•Dark Depths
•Dread Return
•Glimpse of Nature
•Golgari Grave-Troll
•Great Furnace
•Green Sun's Zenith
•Hypergenesis
•Jace, the Mind Sculptor
•Mental Misstep
•Ponder
•Preordain
•Punishing Fire
•Rite of Flame
•Seat of the Synod
•Seething Song (banned effective February 1, 2013)
•Sensei's Divining Top
•Stoneforge Mystic
•Skullclamp
•Sword of the Meek
•Tree of Tales
•Umezawa's Jitte
•Vault of Whispers
•Wild Nacatl


Seething song ?

I think they should've just nuked Storm from orbit instead of an accelerant. But what do I know.

Wonder if Doran will make a resurgance now that BBE isn't pushing Jund over the top. RIP Zoo

Jund will probably exist with Huntmaster in the place of BBE.
Doran could easily make a resurgence as it loses Terminate and Bolt but gains Doran and Path

http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/A ... ture/244b2

Second sunrise has now been banned.

thank RnD.
Now I don't have to play against that stupid deck anymore.
Similar banning justification to Top.

I think preordain should be unbanned. While the main reason it was banned in the first place was the consistensy it gave to combo, combo is not a strong as it was back then. I wouldn't think UWR would run it, just twin/storm/scapeshift. It just seems like it wouldn't make that big of an impact on the format. Just - Sleght of hands, + Preordain in the respective decklists. It doe

Hard to say ~ it is subtle, but Preordain is quite a bit better than Sleight of Hand; sitting just below Ponder and Brainstorm.

Here's my take on preordain:

Think of poker. What's a good poker player called? A card shark. If the good players a shark, the bad players are fish. Sharks eat fish. If the best poker players or "sharks" always won, they'd eat all the fish and the ecosystem would collapse or more plainly, the bad players would quit playing cause they're just giving away money. However, with the luck element, sometimes the fish wins and that high of victory keeps them playing which is good for the sharks because they win in the long run and can remain profitable.

Preordain takes away the luck. Part of the success of agro decks comes from you getting free wins whenever your opponent gets manascrewed: a key component of the game. If you virtually never get manascrewed, there's a much bigger incentive to play blue decks and agro losses a LARGE chunk of free wins which is a significant blow to the win percentage. That and the
game gets boring. Why do limited players hate constructed? A big reason I here a lot is because the games are always the same and it gets boring. This is partially true, but with effects like preordain, the consistency of decks gets exaggerated to the point where they DO start playing out the same all the time. I believe MJ said on stream once that the reason we play a card game is because the luck element makes it fun. If you want games to play out the same way and for the better player to win all the time, play chess(I don't play much chess so I'll assume this is close enough to true to not matter).

I'm not saying preordain will break the format, but I can understand the card staying banned after living through Caw-Blade.

I don't see preordain getting unbanned. It'd push combo and delver decks a lot, possibly too far.

I would absolutely hate it if Preordain came back. I've had enough of Delver for a lifetime. No, thank you.

yay for Zoo. Not sure why DRS was banned, to be honest. I understand its power level, but shouldn't both Faeries and Zoo be bad matchups for BG/x already? Is turn 2 Liliana that much of a beating?

Burn got Bump too but you're right, DRS was worth splashing for on his own. I really like the card, sad to see him go

yay for Zoo. Not sure why DRS was banned, to be honest. I understand its power level, but shouldn't both Faeries and Zoo be bad matchups for BG/x already? Is turn 2 Liliana that much of a beating?

Unless you're playing an aggressive deck, yes.

yay for Zoo. Not sure why DRS was banned, to be honest. I understand its power level, but shouldn't both Faeries and Zoo be bad matchups for BG/x already? Is turn 2 Liliana that much of a beating?

Shaman was banned not from being overpowered, but for homogenizing the format by being too good while not being broken.

And any deck that runs birthing pod isn't really gonna have a "bad" matchup in the classical sense.

Your insight, explanations and analysis are consistently excellent LP, thank you

So what should I play?

Jeskai Ascendancy combo has everyone real butt hurt because it's a combo deck that isn't an a+b combo

Banworthy, fine or the side effects of ebola creeping in?

Personally I think if you take out cruise, the deck becomes a lot more vulnerable to discard (which seems to be the preferred method of beating combo in this format), but thats just me

Give the meta a few weeks to adjust to the new deck. If it's still dominating, then maybe a ban is in place.

I'm not sure if I would ban Jeskai Ascendancy itself because that would only revert the format back to the one before it.

The format as such with no exploration looks to naturally evolve into: UR delver, Twin, Jeskai combo, Burn.

Banning jeskia ascendancy opens that up a bit to allow more disruption based decks to operate since Jund/junk say can still fight twin and friends ok, but is a dog to a more pure combo deck that invalidates hand disruption. You still have this problem where UR delver is crushing.

Banning a bunch of new cards is unfun and uninteresting. Banning treasure cruise works since the card is vastly more powerful then most of the format and warps things around itself, but having it around opens the door to possible unbannings to ramp up the power level of the format. I don't know what the "other" would be, but I like the idea of contributing to a new format with new tools.

The big concern though is making sure you don't end up with legacy lite. For me personally, decks like Pod, Twin, and Affinity seem reasonably important enough to keep around for the sake of maintaining format identity and any bans/unbans should keep that in mind.

According to CalebD and the banned series, the deck is actually fine with the artifact lands unbanned. They marginally increase the powerlevel without helping the deck in area's where it's actually weak.

Unbanning them would actually be step in the right direction for the imaginary world where treasure cruise stays legal because it probably increases affinity's clock by half a turn and makes maindeck burn/coutnerspells more reliable for whichever route you decide to take.

Recent reports from various people suggest that Treasure cruise needs offing.

splinter twin and summer bloom both banned.