I say give the girl a chance!

Of all the things that decks currently do in Modern, people are spending a ton of time concerning themselves with the most “fair” and “slow” of interactions. I sit across from players in 10+ round tournaments and nearly over half of them have a degenerate kill combo (ie. Coco, Twin, Grishoalbrand, Knightfall, Storm, etc) or mana ramp variant that goes over the top of this cards strategy anyway (ie. Tron, Scapeshift, Bloom.) I can understand the fear of the 50% of the field, according to mtgtop8, being aggressive based strategies would be reduced back down to probably 35-40%.

What a shame that would be.

My bias is not based on the fact than I can benefit from the card but because it produces more adjusted results. I big winning % of my deck is in the sideboard. The healthier a format, the more productive games 2-3 can be. When nearly, 40% of my board has to be ready to fight aggro and the rest disrupting combos, it makes for poor meta and inbred results. If more “fair” decks had access to main deck resources such as Stoneforge Mystic, it requires less sideboard aggression while also creating room and opportunity for new sideboard options. In example, if I main deck the mystic and batterskull, I am no longer incentivise to have 40% aggro/burn disruption in the sideboard. Now I can adjust and allow diversity amongst my 15. This will glance a few sideboards because aggro decks will have to prepare to blow out Stoneforge Mystic/Batterskull.

A final note regarding the K Command.

That is not the only card that disrupts the whole Stoneforge + Batterskull alliance. Quite a few decks have maindeck answers to the two.

Here goes just a few examples:
Lightning Bolt
Etched Champion
Qasali Pridemage/Reclamation Sage
Vendilion Clique
Inquisition/Thoughtseize
Abrupt Decay
Maelstrom Pulse
Mirran Crusader/Tasigur/Gurmag Angler
Dismember/Vapor Snag
Spell Snare
Leonin Arbiter/Aven Mindcensor
Terminate

These all exist before a sideboard is introduced. My argument is not strictly for Stoneforge Mystic. There are numerous reasons to access some of the tools that have been pulled away from Modern. I do not expect to receive any of them January 18th but hope Wizards will do some analytics such as Sheridan has done here and make some welcome returns (as they have been doing) to the format over the next couple of years.

Thanks for reading!

I’d vote for Merfolk. When piloted correctly I find it’s a great baseline for testing and test many of my new ideas against it.

Wow, was super unclear in my last post

I meant that Zoo could be negatively effected playing against SFM decks

Affinity is so linear it may not even be effected by SFM too much, which your testing is showing, I think more people are worried it’ll effect other fair decks. I think Zoo would be a great place to go next

You should REALLY try testing against Naya Zoo next, since if any deck could be in danger from a SFM unbanning, it’s that one

Maybe Jeskai Twin, too?

Thanks for the articles, keep up the good work

Leonin Arbiter nonbo though

Contextually – this B&R announcement does bring about excitement (because of the potential for an SFM unban).

So I guess my comment was more general – whereas yours was more specific.

PS Merry Christmas and thanks for the site.

Sheridan is correct, I was just running a test gauntlet to see if the deck worked so I don’t have enough quantitative data to actually say anything about how Twinblade compares to known decks. What I can say qualitatively is that it is a very different deck to play against, and my test partners and I agree that we were not playing optimally against Twinblade though we also aren’t sure what the optimal lines were. I think this is due to unfamiliarity, but it’s also possible that the threat of recurring, cheap Batterskull coupled with the Twin combo makes this a feature rather than a bug.

Woops, miscounted siding in. Keep the Denial in the board.

Also, maybe keep Overseer in and side out Spellskite.

Blood Moon is the best card in this matchup. It’s absolutely dominating play or draw and should always be sided in against Abzan. A big reason to play Jund over Abzan is that you DON’T fold to Blood Moon like Abzan does.

Thoughtseize is terrible. Especially on the draw. On the draw, you need to have it turn 1 to hit Stony Silence, which is difficult to accomplish at all after you side out Memnites and a Drum without completely stunting your development if they don’t have it in hand. It’s cute to hit SFM searches but that’s not terribly relevant as game 1 testing showed. I can see it on the play but even then we can do better.

Like Ghirapur Aether Grid. This is one of the key matchups that earns Grid its slot. It allows you to have a game under Stony Silence while cleanly countering Lingering Souls tokens and keeps Lillie from every doing anything impressive (you should be siding some more Lillies out on the draw imo) Fulminator Mages are quite good because, as you noticed, Inkmoth is a key card post-board. Also, you can cast Mages under Blood Moon. Which is relevant to do something with your mana while you draw to basics.

I generally do not like having the full 4 Signal Pests post-board because of just how bad they are against Lingering Souls.

I’m usually not a fan of Wear // Tear. You need to have Glimmervoid or be floating mana to beat a Stony Silence and, like Thoughtseize, you most likely won’t have mana floating for turn 2 on the draw. It may be better in a SFM meta, that I don’t know anything about. But generally, the correct plan for successful Affinity lists is ignore Stony Silence and try to win around it with Aether Grid and Etched Champions.

I’ve traditionally snap boarded out all of my Galvanic Blasts against Abzan so keeping them is going to be a change but you may be correct here.

I sometimes bring in Stubborn Denial against Abzan. They tend to have a Creeping Corrosion or Fracturing Gust floating around.

So my siding would probably have been something like…

Play:
Out
2 Memnite
1 Steel Overseer
1 Springleaf Drum
1 Signal Pest
(2 Galvanic Blast)

In
Whipflare
2 Blood Moon
2 Ghirapur Aether Grid
1 Stubborn Denial
(2 Dismember)

And I wouldn’t be playing Wear // Tear at all.

I was speaking specifically to the “update” aspect of the banlist, which hopefully includes two unbans and 0-1 bans. Bans are definitely not exciting (unless that ban is DRS). The unban part of the update, however, should be great.

To test Twinblade, we would need to test the Jeskai Twin vs. X matchup without Mystic, and then the Twinblade vs. X matchup with SFM in the picture. I’m not sure what X should be, however. Jeskai Twin already has a better matchup against midrange decks (due to Path and the manlands) and about an even matchup against the aggressive decks (+ points for white sideboard cards and extra removal, – points for fewer combo options). It’s worse against combo decks than UR Twin because it can’t combo as consistently. This makes it tricky to decide on a match to test SFM. We’d probably want to test either Burn or Jund, but we would need to run the pre-SFM matchups as a control.

Any thoughts (open question!) on the next matchup?

Thanks! I’ve enjoyed writing them and I hope they prove valuable to the community. Maybe we’ll even see less crazy hyperbole about the banlist!

We could only hope that SFM would power up niche Tier 3 decks like BW Pack Rat and Deadguy Ale. I fear it would have much wider-reaching implications, however.

How much stronger is Twinblade than Tarmotwin in your testing?

How is this not a problem?

We shouldn’t be looking forward to bannings/unbannings. (Ok maybe we can look forward to unbannings, but definitely not bannings)

I proxied up Twinblade when I saw it. I haven’t done any rigorous testing, but in the games I’ve played fair decks are severely disadvantaged unless Stoneforge dies the turn it is played. Otherwise they’re paralyzed by fear of dying to Twin while losing to Batterskull, and so it’s been winning a lot. I don’t know if this is because of the power of the two combos together or simply that the deck is very hard to play against. Unfair decks can mostly ignore it.

In principle I agree that Batterskull is the real problem, but it also has fair applications where Mystic does not. Wizards also has stated that they prefer to ban enablers rather than the power cards so Mystic would stay banned rather than banning the Skull.

Twinblade vs GR Tron? Actually, that is not a matchup in which you would think it would have much effet. What about twinblade vs burn. If you modified jund to a power stoneforge world, twinblade vs jund would be fantastic.

Stoneforge mystic loses a lot of her power if batterskull is banned. It just seems to me a no brainer to ban batterskull, a card that is not really impacting the format, and replace it with Stoneforget Mystic. This just seems like a “this will promote deck diversity” while the banning of batterskull would be “this is to ensure that aggressive decks remain viable post the stoneforge unbanning”.