Hey Jake!

As Dylan said below, Burn is a very real issue for Storm decks. It’s true that Burn is a less pronounced part of the metagame now than a few months ago, but it’s still very much present and very much a problem for Storm players. Maindecking Bolt is a great way to handle them in game 1, although you’ll still need to dodge the Jund and lingering Abzan players in the format.

One hidden strength of Burn is its ability to get consistent turn 2 Moon in some key matchups. I will say that if you are using Bolt and Moon in your deck, you don’t want to be using Desperate Ravings. Switch that to Faithless Looting, so you have a better chance of going turn 1 dig into a turn 2 ritual/Moon or turn 2 Bolt on a recently dropped Eidolon.

As I said in today’s article on the overall GP, if you have mastered the ins and outs of Storm, then the deck can probably succeed at large events (especially with metagame adaptations). People won’t expect it, so as long as you are prepared for them, you can take advantage of them not being prepared for you.

There is a full 10% of the day two field running 4 maindeck hate cards for storm in eidolon. It is the same problem infect had against pod and now against abzan company, but worse because they run more of them and they lock you out harder.

This is also a reply to your comments below with TehLittleOne, but I am also very interested to see what happens with the stats for the remainder of the GPs. GP Charlotte should go down as not only a great GP with fringe decks and a healthy metagame, but also the GP in which players were prepared for land based combo decks. While I completely agree that Jund and grixis twin were hyped coming into Charlotte, there were deafening levels of hype about Tron and Amulet Combo. Practically every site ran articles regarding beating the land decks with the writer’s pet deck.

Heck, modern Nexus ran a whole article on blood moon!

The levels of hate that the land decks saw GP Charlotte weekend must be similar to what burn and affinity feels every weekend. It is easy to imagine the number of hate cards being cut slightly to fit in the latest tech against Abzan Company. Jund decks were maindecking fulminator mage – which is fairly outrageous. The amount of decks playing the full 4 fulminator mage in the board is fairly amazing.

My call is that this weekend out of the spotlight will create a very reasonable metagame for Tron and Amulet moving forward. I think this weekend will be the blip in the upward trend of Amulet, because the metagame was so hateful this weekend which, with the prevalence of new decks to tech against, cannot remain so.

That being said, my history of calls recently has not gone so well – turns out Merfolk couldnt sneak into the top 32.

There is pretty much zero Storm hate at the moment, so I can’t see a reason it can’t power through. Jund’s popularity (at the time) and possible decline could further open the way for the deck. Delver is another deck that would’ve been a problem but is taking a back seat to the Twin/Control Grixis lists.

Although now that Goryo.dec is coming into play you might find more graveyard hate to incidentally shut down the Past in Flames game plan.

I am a UR Storm player and I was wondering how you thought that the deck works in the metagame now. I believe that the commentators said on Saturday that it, like Burn, works, but isn’t the best, at least at the GP. Do you agree with that, or do you think that it’s probably unlikely to do very well? There was a deck that came in 39th place, and it runs 3 Lightning Bolts maindeck.(http://magic.wizards.com/en/events/coverage/gpcha15/archetype-exemplars-top-decks-of-grand-prix-charlotte-2015-06-13#royce_walter__storm__th_place) Do you feel that that this helps make it work in the metagame, giving it the ability to stop Eidolon of the Great Revel, or not?

Sorry if the questions are a little unrelated to the article, but I was interested after seeing the dekc at the GP.

Thank you very much, and I loved the article today. Really looking forward to your upcoming article(s) about the rogue decks at the GP. I think it would be fantastic to here more about them, or maybe a list of possible rogue archetypes.

Hope you enjoyed watching the GP as much as I did! : )

—Jake

Yeah, Charlotte seems good for Amulet’s longevity. The one thing I forgot is how much people had to tune sideboards to beat Amulet/RG Tron. A lot of options that people normally wouldn’t play, like MB Fulminator Mage or sideboard Crucible+LD+Loam (which some BGx players were doing). It feels as if they overboarded for it. Not that it was wrong, but just something to note.

I’m going to discuss this a bit tomorrow, but Amulet is looking a lot safer now than it did a week ago. That said, we still need to get through two more GPs to have enough data to conclude anything definitively. For me, the most important thing is if Modern can self-police the deck. GP Charlotte suggests this is possible, both through better card/deck choices, and through just learning how the deck plays. But it’s also possible that Charlotte was the exception and Amulet is going to cause serious problems at the upcoming two GPs. We’ll have to wait and see. I will say that, as long as Charlotte sets the tone for the month, Amulet will be a much safer investment now than it was earlier.

I have it labeled as something stupid on the spreadsheet (“Podless Pod”). I’m going to clean up the spreadsheet soon, which will include some cleanup on the names. The Top Decks tables have the correct names, however.

I’m discussing Amulet in my next article. We still have two GPs left in the month to really prove anything about the metagame, but preliminary results are promising for people who were worried about Amulet Bloom. The Bloom MWP is still very real, but we are increasingly seeing that this is in part a function of a) player inexperience against the deck and b) player unpreparedness against the deck. But this was always a real possibility that I considered in past articles, so it’s not too surprising to me. The most important takeaway here is that Modern is proving it has the tools to self-police and self-regulate beyond bans. This includes both improved player knowledge (knowing how to interact with Amulet) and better preparation (running Moon). If this continues through June, we will be in a really great spot for the metagame.

It wins before turn 4 a decent amount of the time, which is certainly a problem. However, Hive Mind kills aren’t that common. Also, early Primeval Titan games often don’t end until turn 4 or later, even if they are “over” in a sense much earlier, the way RG Tron games with Karn are “over” on turn 3.

Secondly, the deck isn’t good for streaming purposes. You can’t do that well streaming it because it’s a confusing deck to watch and commentate. It’s also not very interactive at all, so it’s generally less enjoyable to watch. I think that was partially why Eggs got the ban hammer, but Eggs made us either scoop and not see the win, or take an hour doing some boring sequence.

I don’t know if these are counteracted hard enough by the downsides to the deck. Of course, the deck is difficult to pilot, which makes people not want to play the deck in turn. On top of that, there are clear cut answers to it as we saw. A lot of Blood Moons and Ghost Quarters, and watching Hayne vs Chapin, it seems that control isn’t that great of a matchup.

The one thing I still note is that top players still seem to be doing well with the deck. Hayne was deep on day 2, which is another strong showing for him on the deck. That’s certainly an important factor when deciding the ban, that good pilots can still produce good results.

NM, found it. Not sure how I missed it :).

On a side note, I noticed that abzan is completely missing from your top decks spreadsheet. I’d expect it would at least be listed as a tier 2 deck, right :)?