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Sooo, we have a Top 8, and as predicted, it's fairly combo heavy (Higher seeds listed first, will have play/draw option)
Top 8 Show  

Other talking points

Love Janse (Of shark hat fame) DQ'ed for intentionally ignoring rules to gain an advantage (Fraud)

Sam Black starts 2-2-1 with Infect, goes 10-2 the rest of the way to make top 8


 

Sep 3, 2011 -- 5:48PM, Mono789 wrote:

I was surprised at the DQ.
All this comborificness is insane.  I find it interesting that WotC failed at their goal of stopping combos that win before turn 4.  The infect combo deck wins on turn 2 or 3.

I may be too early to tell since the draft portion makes top8 results unreliable. Just by looking to the combo lists, however, it's clear that those are capable of consistent turn 3 kills with the ocassional turn 2 win. A second round of adjustments should be on the way, since the turn 4 goal is worth accomplishing: The way I see it, these could be the changes:

Unbanned (not that they are too crucial, but getting some cards back will help to keep the whining low):

Ancestral visions. Cloudpost decks are still good enough to keep control in check and extra cards won't be a problem since they still be lacking answers.
Mental misstep (unlike Legacy, onedrops shouldn't be defining Modern and neither of the top decks actually relies on key one drops too much).

Banned:

Rite of flame. This is the most explosive of the rituals and the one whose draws enable turn two kills. Without it, ritual storm decks are far more fair.
Pyromancer ascencion. The most debatable, I think the format doesn't benefit of it at all. It doesn't have any fair uses here, and it is the card breaking all that otherwise silly one mana cantripping.
Deceiver exarch. Even if combo is weakened, the Exarch - Pestermite - Twin - Kikijiki combination seems to be strictly better than any other possible control endgame. Although banning the 4 cards would be overkill, exarch is the only putting it over the top with its high toughness. Without it, it is far less consistent and people would be searching other stuff.

The only un-banning that's even remotely possibly at this point is ancestral visions. The modern combo strength presents only half of a problem for WotC, and I'll explain that.

Combo is easily hateable, but only efficiently for blue, since it has access to spell pierce and dispel. Thoughtsieze also goes a long way, but it's less than ideal. The real issue is that R&D doesn't want the combo solution to force every deck to splash blue just for cheap countermagic. When your on the draw, sometimes even an Ethersworn Canonist isn't enough, while red- and green-based decks are stuck sitting on their hands in regards to combo interaction.

This is what I expect to see in coming down R&D's pipeline - A colorless or red-based answer to combo decks. They're already testing the waters with stuff like Chaos Warp and Stranglehold , and I wouldn't be one bit surprised to see those spells suddenly show up as 2-cmc creatures in the near future, with the Chaos-warp-on-a-stick not being able to target lands.

Sep 4, 2011 -- 2:03AM, ReleaseTheAnts wrote:

Twin is easy to stop on paper, and the lack of people playing mindbreak trap for storm and pyromancer decks is absolutely jaw-dropping. 

So yes, if you don't run combo stoppers, you can't stop combo :o ! WEIRD!!1!

Mindbreak doesn't really stop something like living end (which actually saw a significant portion of the field) or the mono-blue infect. The other issue is that dedicating 12 of your sideboard slots to beating combo means that you better have an AMAZING maindeck against 12-post and zoo.

12-post definitely revealed itself as a mediocre deck, which a lot of people fail to realize when they look at the MTGO dailies. 4 rounds isn't 8 rounds, and never will be. I am legitimately surprised at the zoo lists not packing enough blue though. CFB's crew saw the need for anti-combo tech in a zoo list, but it looks like most people still thought burnwillows/punishing fire was somehow a good idea against combo decks and the mirror /mindboggle.