You’re right, I just looked it up and we had spoken about Tokens in the context of the article on how to beat Abzan. I had completely forgotten about that. Thanks for responding again!

I recently talked about this in an email to another user (might even have been you, but I don’t have the email onhand). The biggest problem with BW Tokens is its lack of powerful spells. There’s no Snapcaster, no Angler/Goyf/Tasigur, and definitely no Twin, Plating, Wurmcoil, etc. There’s not even a topdecked Chord or Company. This leads to situations where you can gradually build up advantages so long as you keep the disruption flowing to keep an opponent off balance, but not to situations where you can just explode from behind. The closest card to this is Sorin, who can lifelink your team and instantly turn a game around on turn four, but that’s only relevant in a few matchups. Another way to think of it: BW Tokens often feels TOO fair.

Short answer: no.

Longer answer: Even at its least fair, Affinity never totally dominates a format. It definitely wins games and tournaments, but never for lasting periods of time and never in the face of too much hatred. It’s not like Pod or TC-Delver decks, which were actively reducing metagame diversity and excluding other options from the metagame. Affinity has never cracked 10% of the metagame for longer than a month or two, which is not where we would expect a problematic deck to be.

That deck seems very much like a Blue Moon deck we’ve seen in past metagames (I believe it was Jeff Hoogland who innovated a Temur Moon splash in early 2015). From a metagame perspective, these styles of decks have almost been completely overtaken by Grixis decks, and I don’t see that changing now. UR Pyromancer seems like a worse UR Twin to me. They both have the blue-red controlling options, but the threat of a Twin win at instant-speed buys significantly more tempo than a little Pyromancer and his 1/1 army. You could also view it as a worse Grixis Control because you lose the Plan B of Angler/Tasigur (and the board presence more generally, even if not used as a win condition). I see reasons to run this over UR Delver in cheap-removal-heavy metagames, but overall I think this is a metagame call deck that we won’t see again, in the same history as the Eternal Command deck from Worlds 2012.

There are some two-colored decks that will likely use them, but those two-colored decks are underplayed in Modern to begin with. It’s not like these new lands will suddenly be the enabler UW Control, BG Rock, Deadguy Ale, or other decks have been looking for. I do think they are more playable than a lot of people give credit, especially in grindy matchups or metagames where you want to keep up mana development past turns 4-5 but don’t want to keep taking incremental damage. Fetchability is still very strong, so I see them showing up as 1 or 2-ofs in various decks.

Except for that part where Mono-Colour decks don’t run fetchlands and definitely wouldn’t want to see 2 of these in their opener.

Merfolk won’t run these because they are looking for Choke protection and not to splash colours.

You seem to have missed the point of these lands entirely. They are designed with two-colour decks in mind, opposite to Modern’s usual three- or one-colour dominating lists. They work best, however, in mono-coloured decks that splash for either sideboard cards or a few maindecks. Things like Merfolk that already play a vast number of basics will be very happy to have essentially “free” duals for black, red or whathaveyou sideboard answers.

In addition to that, the most basic line of play you see in any Modern game is fetch->shock, right? Well have you noticed that the majority of fetching happens end-of-turn to avoid the shocking? Guess what, when you do that with these lands, it’s the same! Absolutely no difference.

Now, of course, to be fair, the shocks are way better in a vacuum, able to be played untapped on curve and all that. With all of this in mind, nobody is talking about the new duals to be as good as them, rather “occasionally just as good” and in a few corner cases that have really needed attention in Magic, such as splashing in a mono-coloured deck, they might even be better.

I really love this kind of UR Deck, but it really misses Delver in my opinion. You seen the importance in the match against UW Control from Watanabe, he was the beatdown but have nothing really to beat with. An unanswered Delver would destroy UW or would eat a path and give you an extra land, which is really good against control.

We can talk about a new UR Delver style with more control elements and less removel than Grixis Delver, but Delverless UR without Twin is not really possible for the lack of resilient creatures and removel.

That would be a very short article.

“unplayable. no impact”.

I cannot think of any deck that would want these since the whole point of playing fetch/dual is to get your required mana available as soon as you need it. Going basic-basic-fetch is not going to reliably do this for many decks, not to mention the risk you open a hand of fetchland, new dual, new dual… so you fetch a basic and then play 2 lands into play tapped? no thanks.

If they had been 2 lands period we might have had something interesting, but the fact that you not only need 2 lands but two BASIC lands means these have no obvious place in modern. Maybe, and this is a massive maybe, in a deck splashing a 2nd colour for a late game play, and I’m still pretty sure you’d be better off with the equivalent shockland so that you can curve out if its in your opener.

All those pesky U names. Fixed!