Hi Jordan, thanks for the thought-provoking response. Your comments are making me really reflect and somewhat reshape my thinking (in a good way, I think). I really liked your re-categorization of the decks, as well as the explanation for them and think it (mostly) makes a lot of sense. Calling them fair, (somewhat/sometimes) unfair, and outright unfair seems a good way to categorize them.

I absolutely agree both Jund and Merfolk are “fair” decks, and have never thought otherwise, I was just trying to say that under the definition you had I think they both win in “unfair” ways sometimes. For both, however, I think that may be more a reflection of the decks that I tend to play, and how those two decks have to shift roles somewhat (especially Merfolk) to beat the decks I play, rather than how those two decks play against the field. That’s definitely narrow-sighted, and I didn’t fully realize that until I thought a bit about your comment. You see, I tend to play creature-heavy aggro or midrangy decks (ie. Hatebears, D&T, Wilted-Abzan, Wb Tokens). Jund sometimes can’t just go ground beat-down vs. these decks (due to my decks out-creaturing it), and needs a haymaker like Olivia to stick around, or to get in just enough damage to then be able to send 1-2 burn spells to the dome for the win. Dark Confidant is one of the worst cards to see for me because it means I’ll lose the card advantage race if I don’t kill it and the game goes for a while. Merfolk, on the other hand, has lots of creatures but often can’t profitably attack into my dudes (ie. first strike Golem tokens, Loxodon Smiter) without a bunch of lords (usually 3+) in play and/or the lord + seas combo/synergy. I’ve had a lot of games vs. the fish where the board stalls out on the ground and I’m getting in there with fliers (Flickerwisp, BoPs) while they wait to draw into enough un-answered lords or the combo. From personal experience, I can say Merfolk does, at least vs. some decks, take a player from 20 (or 15-17, as is often the case with a modern land-base) to 0 in one attack. Your definition of zero-to-hero is: “securing a victory in a single turn from a position resembling the game’s original state – in other words, dealing 20 points of damage or 10 points of poison.” It’s certainly not the zero-to-hero style that Storm has (basically no board presence at all), but it still can go from being out-gunned to winning the game immediately with the right draw. How often does that zero-to-hero happen? I couldn’t say for sure, I’ve not tracked it. But I’ve had it enough times to not want to rely on fliers to gradually peck away at a Merfolk players’ life total unless I have no other choice, because eventually they’ll draw the right piece(s) to win with an all-out attack that ends the game on the spot.

Again, I think that speaks to the importance of the discussion about shifting roles (like Merfolk going from Aggro-Control to somewhat Aggro-Combo), and how in a competitive format like modern either your deck has to be both powerful and very pro-active (like infect, amulet bloom) or it has to have the ability to shift roles to survive a diverse meta-game.

Like you, I feel modern is currently a format dominated by unfair decks and I’ve recently switched to playing Abzan Company instead due to its ability to threaten a win out of nowhere – “fair” decks like tokens and wilted-abzan just don’t seem to cut it right now with so many combo decks. I mostly like the meta, but I’m hoping that changes sometime in the future since my favourite games are the tight, grindy ones that reward tight play.

I don’t feel like I have fully captured what I think should define “fair”/“unfair”, but you’ve really got me thinking about it and hopefully I’ll be able to share that with you in a post in a future article you write.

Thanks very much for the thought-provoking articles and comments. 🙂

Gotcha. Unfortunately, it’s pretty hard for us to make calls about what Wizards does and does not see as they put new cards through testing. The Urza lands seem pretty intentional to me, but Tron is otherwise unfair according to your definition. On the flip side, Bolt-Snap-Bolt seems accidental and is seen exclusively in fair decks (or in gray area decks playing a fair game).

By unintentional, I mean literally “Wizards did not foresee or intend this interaction to occur.” In the case of Exarch/Twin, it’s documented (although I apologize but I’m not going to google for a source) that it was a screw-up. I don’t think anyone at Wizards considered Nourishing Shoal’s implications when they printed Grizzle, or how Tolaria West would be a lynchpin card in an Amulet of Vigor deck or Valakut/

Now, you can make the case that they didn’t “intend” any synergy between Goyf and Liliana of the Veil, but I’m talking about interactions that generate insane value or “zero to hero” moments.

I already said I wasn’t looking for consensus, which is impossible. I’m just sharing what’s helpful for me!

Careful – you’re using that term ‘in general’ 😛

It may seem like a game of gotcha – but my goal really isn’t to prove you wrong or me right – rather to get a better understanding of Modern and the decks.

Going by http://www.mtggoldfish.com/archetype/modern-grixis-control-17114#online – Grixis Control is favoured against the Tempo strategies (RUG and Grixis Delver, as well as TarmoTwin – the tempo version) but is unfavoured against the two Midrange decks (only marginally in the case of Jund).

What’s Grixis Control good against – unfair decks.

But this doesn’t mean anything in the context of fair/unfair. If your argument is Tempo beats unfair, midrange beats fair (by being the better fair deck) then maybe. Although I think Midrange is the police beating up on the unfair decks as well (mostly through hand disruption).

I’m now going around in weird circles that I’m not sure of.

I really just want to go back to my main point – let’s define fair first. Then whatever is not that is unfair, that’s the cleanest way of describing things. But I don’t think you’re going to get consensus on what’s fair either.

I think we agree on our definitions. But what do you mean by “unintentional?”

Good question. It helps understand the positioning of Tempo and Midrange, and the interactions the blue and green lines have in relation to fair and unfair strategies. In general, the Tempo decks beat up on unfair strategies, while Midrange beats up on fair ones. Tempo decks beat Control, for example, while Midrange decks lose to it (see archetype spectrums above).

I don’t really think classifying decks as fair/unfair actually helps anyone other than those trying to prove/disprove some point regarding Modern/the Modern banlist.

(For the record I think it’s silly to not play a deck with ‘free wins’ in Modern – which probably means ‘unfair’ decks – and I think that is shown by the top decks in the format barring Grixis Control)

I suppose here’s a question back at you – what does it help you to classify UWR Control as unfair?

For me the only thing that really matters in Modern (and Magic in general) is “whose the beatdown?”. Once you figure that out, your decision making will improve regardless of discussions about fairness in particular (and arguments about affinity is combo or aggro as well).

What unfairness helps understand is ‘if I tap out do I die’ or ‘how long do I left have to win this game’ – but those are matters of deck knowledge rather than fair/unfair knowledge.

For the record, I do think Modern is defined by unfair, aggressive strategies. The only viable interactive decks are in BGx and URx, since those are the colors of Inqusition/Decay/Goyf and Bolt-Snap-Bolt, respectively. Other colors really don’t offer much in the way of interaction, pushing decks made up of those colors into linearland.

Still, I don’t think you understood “zero to hero.” Merfolk, for instance, does not go “zero to hero.” It’s a synergistic Fish deck (aka interactive – see Vapor Snag, Dismember, Seas, Pierce) that boasts scaling damage via lord synergies, but how often does it take opponents from 20 life to 0 life in a single turn? I would argue never.

When it comes to winning via nontraditional means, there’s a big difference between drawing an extra card every turn with Confidant (and usually, immediately playing it) or winning with a playset of Lightning Bolt that you happen to draw and having the reliable plan of burning opponents out from their starting life total because you amass so much card advantage. As I said in the article, decks trying to win in nontraditional means are only unfair if they have an unfair win condition as a reliable strategy. Jund doesn’t go into matches thinking, “okay, I have to deal with my opponent’s plays, then land a Confidant and draw four Bolts off it.” They just want to deal with opposing plays and attack for the win. They can win with reach sometimes, but the deck is by no means built to win that way.

As for the gray area section, I think most of these decks are on a spectrum. It’s always going to be difficult to give decks a hard categorization. Like I said, you need to have a reason to categorize so that it’s helpful; categorized this way, the dynamic between Tempo and these decks, or Midrange and these decks, becomes very clear (Tempo is a watered-down aggro deck built to beat unfair strategies, and Midrange is one built to beat fair strategies). I put a “~” next to the Unfair section with the most contentious inclusions.

Here’s how I would organize the list you posted (I put a * for decks I changed around, including titles):

Fair:
Grixis Control
Abzan Midrange/BG Rock
Zoo
Delver Decks
Merfolk*
Jund*

~Unfair*:
Jeskai Control
Scapeshift
Tron
8-Rack
Living End
Twin*
Abzan CoCo*
Kiki Chord/Company decks*
(the few decks at the end generally win with creatures and have a combo element)

Outright unfair:
Elves
Infect
Grishoalbrand
Amulet Bloom
Storm
Time Walk decks

Fair Magic – Your decklist consists of creatures, removal and utility spells that generally improve your board position or disrupt the opponent.

Unfair Magic- Your decklist eschews one or all of the above completely, preferring to utilize unintended synergies and interactions between cards that realign the game axis away from the battlefield.

This is a continuum: Fish is fair. Zoo is fair. BGx is fair. Burn is mostly fair, but tilts in favor of unfairness by biasing most of its axis of attack to the stack rather than battlefield. Affinity is mostly fair, except it abuses a lot of unintentional synergies. Twin actually kinda plays fair Magic, but its decklist includes an unintended interaction that generally results in instant victory if it resolves and sticks. Infect is less fair, abusing unintended interactions (might of Old Krosa or Become Immense + Infect Creature) to win absurdly fast despite using “battlefield and stack”. Tron is unfair as it uses unintended interactions to ramp its mana nonlinearly, and then attack mostly through non-battlefield means (Karn, Ugin, etc). Bloom Titan is unfair, as the entire decklist is almost devoid or normal elements and is instead devoted to landing an early hasty titan that de facto ends the game. Storm, Ad Nauseam and Eggs are hardly recognizable as Magic decks to initiates (eschew the battlefield completely) and need to be explained, and thus are deeply unfair.

Thanks for the response. 🙂 First off, I hope you don’t feel I’m attacking you by disagreeing with you, that’s definitely not my intent – I enjoy academic disagreement as it creates thought-provoking dialogue that enables me to expand my thinking about theorizing and conceptualizing MTG.

I agree with everything you said in your response and perhaps could have been clearer in my initial post. However, I still think the criteria you use for fair/unfair is problematic (though I totally understand when you say it’s useful simply as way of organizing/processing information).

Below is a list of T1+T2 decks (according to mtgsalvation) along with a couple “developing” combo decks. What I think this illustrates is that under this definition of fair/unfair, most decks in modern are either outright unfair, or sitting on the gray area between fair/unfair, and there are very few truly “fair” decks in the format (especially as combo decks usually are specifically designed to be zero-to-hero decks). Now, that could be just how you feel about modern in general, that it’s an “unfair” format.

Personally, I would argue that most of the decks in the gray area are “fair” (Merfolk, Jund, Jeskai Control, Burn, 8 Rack, and, more controversially, maybe even Scapeshift) because none of them have infinite combos or typically violate format general rules (ie. killing before turn 4), even though some may win in a non-traditional way. My suggestion would be that non-traditional-ness shouldn’t be a major consideration for “unfairness” since non-traditional decks (ie. Burn) can still operate on the basic, newbie principles of magic – draw one card, play one land per turn.

Now maybe this is just a semantic debate, but I think it’s worth thinking about and talking about and I appreciate your article and insight. 🙂 Thanks.

The List:

Fair:
Grixis Control
Abzan Midrange/BG Rock
Zoo
Delver Decks

Gray Area:
Merfolk (as it can do zero-to-hero finish off of Spreading Seas/Lord synergy)
Jund?? (difficult to say, but it wins quite a few games off card advantage from Confidant [stockpiling] and/or moving into burn finish with Bolt and/or Kolaghan’s Command)
Jeskai Control (due to card advantage/ burn finish)
Burn (especially creature-light builds due to the non-traditional way of winning – burn)
Scapeshift (non-traditional way of winning)
Tron (mentioned in your article)
8-Rack (non-traditional way of winning)
Living End (zero to hero)

Outright Unfair:
Any Twin Deck
Abzan Company
Elves
Infect
Grishoalbrand
Amulet Bloom
Storm
Time Walk decks
Kiki Chord/Company decks

In that case, how many boxes do decks have to “tick” to be categorized as unfair? It just becomes impossible at that point to categorize anything. And if we can’t categorize, we can’t reap the benefits of doing so (listed at the bottom of the article).

Like I said, we all have our own definitions of fair and unfair, and there’s no reason to have definitions at all if they don’t help us. I have the definition I described in the article because it’s easy to apply to decks (i.e. less ambiguous) and is very helpful to me when it comes to brewing/preparing for events/making in-game decisions. My goal with this article is to share what I’ve found helpful with the community. If your definition benefits you, then by all means, continue using it! But it doesn’t work for me, for the reasons stated in my post above.

Thanks for the response.

My reason for defining fair first – was because once you know what fair is, everything that’s not that is automatically unfair. In general you define the non-dependent set – in a world of no fair decks, there can’t be unfair decks.

My definition of fair was intentionally gray because I know decks slide on a spectrum and that not all boxes can be ticked. So to go to all your counter-examples – by my definition they’re all still fair because they fulfill the majority of the criteria I listed (note the word “Generally”).

When a deck goes out of its way to specifically break one of those rules, it starts edging towards unfair.

To go to your discussion about ‘zero to hero’ or ‘winning from a losing position’ – I think I need to be more clear here. Let’s take Storm as an example (although Twin and Ad Naus do play this line in a similar way). Effectively you spend your turns crafting your hand, while your ‘fair’ opponent develops their board and starts attacking you and bring your life total lower and lower. Eventually you’re at the point where you die next turn – so you hit the ‘let’s do it’ button and you try combo off.

Top decking Tribal Flames isn’t at all the same thing that I’m talking about – because that’s just a finisher to a bunch of work that was done by your creatures/burn spells beforehand.

Amazed that you got my name wrong since it’s right next to the photo of me you’re referring to. Debuted this mullet in the Magic community at the same time as Monkey Grow (see below). “Retro” hairstyles are really well-positioned in the meta right now, and I always felt like mullets never got enough play.

http://tinyurl.com/pd3tfbh

Zero to hero and winning in nontraditional means (not through attacks) are not necessarily the same thing. Jeskai never wins in a zero to hero way, but I think winning through card advantage (i.e. stockpiling burn) is nontraditional. According to my definition, traditional means attacking with creatures.

Hi Jordan, thanks for insightful article. I really like that you’ve built on your previous article as well as addressing some concerns from it. The spectrum idea & diagram, I feel, add a lot and help explain the concept of shifting roles.

I do, however, agree with justaguy as far as Jeskai Control goes – typical Jeskai Control builds are as “fair” as it gets – even when they win partly through a planeswalker activation. In this example Jace has to pull out burn spells to be able to win on the spot – pure card advantage, but sorta similar to a good topdeck, and burn spells are a “fair” win con – or to pull out some kind of spell-based combo, which itself might be “unfair”. A planeswalker’s activations don’t, in and of themselves, outright win a game out of nowhere in zero to hero fashion though they can be backbreaking (ie. Liliana of the Veil ultimate); instead they can potentially enable something else to win the game for you (the spell-based combo, burn, help get through creature damage). The other aspect of that is that, due to the loyalty counters, a planeswalker’s ultimate is never zero-to-hero in the sense that you always know it’s coming (and when it’s coming) several turns before it happens (outside of T-Woos Doubling Season deck) and you can interact with the planeswalker to stop it.

I know that comes back to the definition of what’s fair/unfair, as you said, but I guess I’d like to say that I think that just because something is non-traditional (ie. getting two final burn spells off of Jace) doesn’t make it “unfair” by explicit or implicit game or format rules, especially when it seems that game mechanics like planeswalker activations were specifically designed by WotC to act they way they do.

Thanks for all you, and the entire quietspeculation.com team, do to keep the community informed and entertained.
Cheers.

Well, I’m glad you took the time to digest it! I like efficient and dense, but clear, writing. I value articles that ask readers to look over them twice before fully understanding more highly than those that don’t, but are twice as long.

I also agree with your ideas. Lots of decks boast what I call “combo elements” without actually having a two-card instant-win-from-any-position. Elves, RG Tron, Infect, and Affinity all fall into this “synergy-based combo” category, which just plays differently from stuff like Ad Nauseam and Titan.