I’m generally pretty positive about these decks. Even though Jund and Twin do a lot of policing and stop some “fun”, they never make up more than 25% of the metagame collectively. That leaves a lot of room, both in principle and in practice, for other decks to succeed. Overall, these police buddies lead to a healthier format with some safety brakes and regulators as opposed to a linear combo/goldfish fest that Modern would likely become if the decks disappeared.

As an Affinity pilot, allow me to shed led on the UR Twin matchup. It is, in fact, one of the worst match-ups for the deck. The only other deck that’s as bad or worse is Jeskai Control. You might be seeing me coming here, but that pretty much makes Jeskai Twin the ultimate nightmare for Affinity.

Combine EIGHT 1-mana removal spells, Electrolyze, Spell Snare which hits every good card in the deck other than Champion, flying blockers and the Twin combo and it doesn’t get much worse than that. And that’s without the Stony Silence in the board, plus card draw/selection to find all these atrocities. The only way to hate Affinity harder with this deck would be to cut the Remands and throw in a sweeper for good measure, but honestly, it’s a testament to how strong Affinity (and those two pilots) are that they each won a game against Jeskai Twin.

The lead tech has been a deck varient for at least a month (duoing with Sylvan messanger to replace the chord/bullet package).

I used to play the chord version but like the resilience of the new version so much better

Totally agree that Affinity is a format pillar and that it probably still has a bad Twin match up (though exactly how bad is certainly a legitimate question). And yeah, I’m sure variance played a huge role, but that’s kind of my point; in a huge tournament with thousands of players, you’re going to see plenty of linear decks dodge their bad match ups. Or, if they don’t dodge the match up, they play it and win anyway (I think it’s fairly rare to encounter a true 20/80 match up in Modern, for example).

With regards to the 20-80/80-20 argument with smaller tournaments, I don’t think this explains why linear decks would do better at smaller tournaments and worse at larger ones. Frank Carston wrote a great article explaining this in detail: http://www.channelfireball.com/articles/can-it-pay-off-to-play-a-high-variance-deck/

In case you don’t want to read the article (it is fairly long), consider the following scenario:

Say you are choosing between playing two decks, a super linear deck with only 20/80 and 80/20 match ups and the platonic mid-range deck with 50/50 match ups. Imagine that for the linear deck, there’s a 50/50 chance they will play a good match up or a bad match up (the field is completely split between them).

Imagine playing a super blitz 1 round tournament with both decks. If you play the mid-range deck, your odds are 50/50 of winning the tournament. If you play the linear deck, 50% of the time your odds are 20% and the other 50% your odds are 80% to win Put mathematically, that’s 0.5*0.2 + 0.5*0.8 = 0.5. 50%. Overall, you have the same odds.

Now imagine a tournament with 20 rounds where, for the sake of making things REALLY simple, you need to win literally every match to win. The mid-range deck has a 0.5^20 chance to win, where as the linear deck has a (0.5*0.2 + 0.5*0.8)^20 to win, or the exact same chance to win the tournament! In short, they’re both hugely unlikely to win, but that’s the case for any large tournament.

Winning a string of 50/50 matches is just as unlikely as winning a string of matches where you’re hugely favored or a huge dog, assuming both decks have the same overall win percentage. So the explanation needs to rest somewhere else:

-Maybe most linear decks just have worse win percentages overall and just randomly spike the occasional small event due to variance. If a linear deck has a bunch of 80/20 and 20/80 match ups, but there are twice as many 20/80 match ups, that’s really bad news, for example.

-Maybe the field is different in small events and linear decks take advantage of that (i.e. people sleeve up their pets decks that are easy targets for a deck that just wants to goldfish), where as at large events the field is bad for them. Totally plausible, but that might mean we really want to play linear decks at small events to prey on people’s deck choices.

-Maybe people just play more linear decks at small events (and fewer at large events) as you suggest and so they just rack up more wins because they are a bigger percentage of the field.

-Maybe the best players tend to play non-linear decks like Jund and Twin. This is almost certainly the case to some degree; most Pros seem to prefer a deck like Jund or Twin to something like Affinity or Burn. If the best players are playing a certain deck, that’s certainly going to affect the field.

Perhaps, but there are always a few random linear decks that eke it into the Top 8/16. I don’t know how much that says about the format other than “weird decks sneak into Top 8/16s in Modern”. I doubt this could happen at scale, even if an isolated occurrence looks awesome on paper.

I don’t think Affinity really falls in the same category as all the other linear decks. It’s a format pillar and THE premier aggro deck of Modern. That said, we also know from numerous sources that Affinity has a bad Twin matchup, particularly in game 1, and I suspect this will even out Affinity’s performance over the longterm. Variance plays a part here: we have no idea how many Twin vs. Affinity matchups happened en route to the Top 32. It’s possible Affinity got lucky and dodged Twin matches. Or maybe Affinity did well and the old rule about Twin vs. Affinity is no longer true. Until we get that evidence, I’m just going to assume Twin remains as good against Affinity as it has always been. Given that we watched Bianchi beat Affinity twice in the finals (ostensibly the best Affinity pilots in the event), I think this is a decent assumption.

As for the linear decks, most of them are 20-80/80-20 decks. At a large tournament like a GP, it just takes 2-3 bad matchups or bad draws to torpedo their chances of a Top 8 run. At a smaller tournament, however, you’re much more likely to dodge the bad matchups. That’s particularly true at smaller events where players sometimes shy away from Twin and Jund, instead playing whatever linear deck of the month strikes their fancy .

Agreed with Rory. During the last GP season, Elves and Affinity won big, and I don’t think it’s because of variance. Granted, both those decks can be hated out (Elves more so than Affinity), but I think that they’ve proven to be potent enough to see you through to a top table (see Andrew Sullano at GP Oklahoma City). And as he mentioned, Merfolk is strong against both of those police decks.

I did like most of the other content in the article, though. Bloom is shaping up to be a potent (but not broken) contender in the competitive scene, and seeing Scapeshift do well is fun and novel.

No, it makes perfect sense, you have overlooked the different reasons that people take an interest in fighting.

For instance, when I was young, I had problems with other kids and didn’t want to be perceived as weak. I didn’t even end up in real fights until much later.

There are plenty of ways to rationalize anything(e.g.: martial arts cultivates discipline, self-defense, etc etc) but in the end, we are taught to want certain things too, like respect even if it is for the wrong reasons. A sense of sevurity cannot be underrated either as a big potential motive.

Either way, if you use your proverbial “social imagination” and thinking about your own experiences, you should be able to cone up with your own plausible accounts for why mtg and martial arts might overlap.

Cheers,

To add another anecdote, when I started taking karate lessons at my university I was surprised to see my LGS’s Mono Red Sligh player was one of the black belts teaching.

I don’t think it’s tier one by any means but this isn’t the first time it has snuk its way into a top 32 at a gp. I do think however that it’s very unexplored as a modern archetype.

i was so certain i’d be the only one(stereotypes about card games and nerdy/brainy types always come short) and it turned out about 1/6 of my local meta are into ma too!

I’m loving the Faeries performance, but I’m also wary of jumping on hype trains in a format as open as Modern. Lots of decks can sneak into the top tables without themselves having what it takes to be top-tier. We’ll need to wait and see how the deck shapes out elsewhere.

You mention that linear decks usually crumble to the combined hate that is Twin and Jund. However, that doesn’t really seem to have been the case for Affinity this time around. Sure, Affinity lost in the finals to a bad match up, but overall it had an excellent showing and performed far better than Jund did. It had strong Day 2 numbers and had 2 showings in the top 8 and another 3 in the top 32. Why do you think it was able to rise through the hate when the other linear decks struggled this time around?

I’m trying to wrap my head around the argument that linear decks tend to do better at smaller events and do poorly at larger events like a GP. Ultimately, isn’t a deck’s overall match ups against the entire field the best predictor of how well a deck will do, i.e. if you breakdown all of a deck match ups and the prevalence of those match ups, won’t a deck with a 55% win percentage on average going to tend to do better than a deck with a 45% win percentage on average? The only fundamental difference between a big event and a small event that I’m aware of is that ANY individual deck (including a bad one) has a better overall chance of winning because there’s less competition overall. Sure, you’re more likely to dodge your bad match ups in a small event, but isn’t that true for everyone? Jund still wants to dodge the Bloom and Tron match ups, for example, and it needs to win more 50/50 match ups than a linear deck, which theoretically has a fair number of match ups where it’s more heavily favored.

Is the argument that at the end of the day linear decks have worse match ups overall against the average field (i.e. their overall win percentages are less than 50%) and they are just spiking smaller events due to variance? Or is the argument that people are able to predict the metagame at a smaller event and target them more precisely (i.e. people realize it’s time to sleeve up Burn because everyone is running Tron)?

It’s also worth noting that there are linear decks with decent match ups against both Twin and Jund. Merfolk comes to mind. It has a great Twin match up, and its Jund match up is pretty close (honestly not sure who is favored; probably comes down to SB cards). A Merfolk player isn’t particularly worried about hitting Jund or Twin; they are looking to dodge Affinity, Elves, and other bad match ups.