I still stand by this 100%.

why is modern not an eternal format?

Seriously, Tasigur is about the closest any card has come to being Tarmogoyf-lite in Modern. Playtest him if you need further proof.

🙂

Hatebears pretty much isn’t a thing anymore. The two decks it preyed upon were pod and delver. It has lost its best matchups and gained no new tools.

Personally, I didn’t expect them to ban the whole deck, but just a piece of it (archangel, spike, finks, …). But it shakes up the format, and combined with MM15, change can stimulate the interest in the format.

However, I’m curious to know how deep economics is involved in this decision. Maybe it has nothing to do with the bannings…

I totally agree with this point. by saying they want other creature decks to be a viable option is good in theory but every other creature deck runs tarmogoyf as a 4 of meaning the barrier to entry is now very high. like Nick said if the upcoming MM2015 was a high print run and the booster packs not over priced then this wouldn’t be so bad as players would find it easier to move to another deck.

I mean why would anyone spend high amounts to build a tier 1 modern deck when it will just have a key card banned. by being successful you shoot yourself in the foot. the barrier to change decks is just too high

Regrettably, Wizards seems to care little about the cost of entry in their eternal formats, making a ban like this far more catastrophic than it should be. Instead of resigning to building another $150 deck, we are instead forced to build another $900 deck.

Lower costs would also soften the blow of investing in a theory-deck which didn’t quite work out, letting more people experiment with decks and thus lowering the compulsion to netdeck and once again diversifying the meta.

Also MM15 will only go to further harm the cost of entry, as small-scale reprints like these create far more demand than supply, creating even higher prices.

The biggest problem for most ban arguments, is they rarely account for how the Meta shifts in response to said ban. Sometimes it grows more diverse, but more often than not it turns into whack-a-mole. In this instance I feel modern gets less diverse causing another change to the ban list within the next two sets.

Very well put^

Good article Danny!

As exciting as it is to see my favorite format showcased at the ‘Pro Tours’, the cost of this is just too steep when every card is under the micro for WOTC ‘pros’
….and for now seeing this most recent bans- which I believe was extremely carelessly executed (I believe the problem could have been solved by some careful Unbans- which would have propped up the format, encouraged brews and still made for an interesting and diverse PT)….
One of the biggest pulls for me into modern was diversity of cards, archetypes and strategies…WOTC seems to want to make modern into standard 2.0> which imo will kill it….
…I’ll be interested to see how my local modern community rebounds from this and how the format evolves (it was hard enough to get modern events to fire before this…..)

I’m not a MtG financier, but if I were I would ditch Modern cards in the very short term. The format is too prone to reprints and bans, and the unknown print run for Mod masters 2 should be a real concern. WotC clearly doesn’t want to leave lots of money on the table with this set like they did with Mod Masters 1, which means the print run will be large enough to keep the packs at the $10 mark. I’m reminded of so many collectibles in other hobbies where the first version was a Grail item and the second version with the “slightly” larger pressing started out pricey but then quickly plummeted in value as people realized it wasn’t really THAT limited like the first one was.

My plan now is basically to try my very best to tweak a Melira deck by removing Pods, adding Chords back, and making the deck mostly focused on the combo. If this fails, I’ll likely bail on Modern. I really don’t want to drop hundreds of bucks to build some other deck – especially when I KNOW so many cards are about to be reprinted. 🙁 Maybe if decks get cheap after MMA2015 I’ll re-evaluate.

There’s no good entry point for people who crave the “stability” of only having to freshen up their favorite deck periodically with cards from new sets because the key cards of the format are simultaneously expensive and at risk of becoming valueless.

This is remarkably in contrast with expectations for the format and that’s going to lead to an awful lot of tears over the years, assuming this particular fiasco doesn’t deal Modern a fatal blow. If you were burned by Deathrite / the cruise meta and switched to Pod only to get banned again, are you really reinvesting? At some point it’s cheaper to buy a fucking Xbox already.

In any case I think it’s very important to stop buying foils of Modern staples. It’s clearly not a format where you should be “pimping” your favorite long-term deck. Instead the mandate is to stay liquid, and frankly that isn’t what people were hoping for.