In reality I don’t think it has anything to do with solving the format, but rather that their relatively unstable server is put under unnecessary stress from the bots scraping.

That’s really unfortunate. I guess I can understand that WotC doesn’t want people “solving” the format, but at the same time, Modern is expensive and it’s nice to know how a deck is likely to perform in your local meta before shelling out 500-1500$. I guess I’ll just have to flip a coin to decide what my alternate deck will be :p

1 – champion of the parish
2 – mayor of avabruck
3 – cavern of souls

To me you need to explain what these cards are providing – when is champion better than wild nacatl? When is mayor better than lord of atlantis? Does the combination of a nacatl+lord make it better/different than zoo/merfolk? Is mayor ever going to flip in this deck?

Because if champion+mayor are not pulling their weight, there is absolutely no reason to hem yourself in with the human tribe – not a single other card in the deck (besides cavern which other tribe decks play too) pays you out for humans only.

Goblin-wide decks are the same – it comes down to grenade and piledriver in those lists and many of them don’t even run the piledriver. For the wide goblin deck to be good goblin grenade has to be amazing (and it often is). Champion/mayor are not as easy to figure out as a grenade.

Hey Jordan! Honestly, the deck is going to be a slightly worse Gruul Zoo in a lot of situations. The one place where Humans has an edge is in that early-to-midgame transition where Gruul Zoo is still rolling around with 3/3s and Humans has some indestructible 4/4s and a scaling one-drop that grows better than E1. You’re also going to go a bit wider with a potentially flipped Mayor (or an unflipped Mayor buffing the team), and you have slightly better defensive options off Kytheon. Multiple Mayors also go significantly wider than Gruul Zoo can hope to match.

Goyf is still a major problem here because it’s an aggro two-drop that outclasses almost everything we’re doing, and I think the marginal benefits in the early-to-midgame phase and in going wide don’t outweigh the consistent speed of Gruul Zoo. Even so, these are still some differences that distinguish the decks, even if they won’t always be decisive.

Hierarch just seems slow. This deck is also in no position to abuse the dork factor, because any card we’re accelerating into also wants us to be attacking with more creatures. We can do a turn three Charm/Command, but now we’ve committed one of our potential attackers to making that happen. And then we lose out on a possible Kytheon flip. Agree that Elite is really quite terrible, but I’d rather go for random Guide wins and abusing Guide speed than stick too heavily to a slower Human theme.

KJ hit the nail on the head. MTGO’s revamp took away our main source of data, and Wizards shut down the data-scraping programs used by MTG Goldfish. This puts these projects on precarious grounds, especially if we’re using any kind of automation to collect the data. There might be other ways to obtain this information, but it’s not looking great right now.

Niall is spot-on with his analysis. There are only a few situations where I want to play Company in aggro. The first is if I’m playing dorks. Turn three Company is waaay stronger than turn four Company, even if it’s just the threat of it. The second reason is if I’m playing more expensive creatures that beat the CoCo mana value. Flipping a Smiter and a Goyf at instant speed is gamebreaking. Flipping a Mauler and an Emissary is just sad. This makes Naya Humans a poor choice for Company much like Gruul Zoo is a poor choice.

Agree on the Goblins similarities. That’s another random aggro deck that is just as likely to appear as a Humans deck, or any of the other weird, tribal, “go-wide” strategies. There are a few differences between the lists (Humans have a cheaper lord, the average Goblin requires more synergy to deal damage than the average Human, etc.), but the two decks are definitely similar.

As for those other decks, 8Rack is not what I want to be doing in a Burn-packed metagame. It’s also not what I want to do against Affinity. Insofar as 8Rack is a Bridge deck, Lantern Control is going to be significantly better because it has a much higher chance of finding the Bridge due to its cantrips. You could maybe fix this with 8Rack maindeck adjustments, but as it stands, I’d rather play Lantern Control if I wanted to do a prison, Bridge strategy. RB 8Rack strategies do a better job at this by playing better board control en route to finding the Bridge, but those decks have other problems in Modern.

this was me B T W

If you really want to beat Twin, Path in the board doesn’t seem useless, and there’s always Rending Volley for the desperate. I actually think Goyf + Bolt decks might be the biggest challenge for Naya Humans.

I think that’s rather unlikely. The primary data for those win rate analyses came from dailies. With dailies being largely abandoned following the entry fee increase, there’s much fewer matches to go through. The alternative(that isn’t more detailed data from WotC) is scraping 8mans for matches, which you really need bots to do as it’s an incredible time sink to do manually. MTGGoldfish launched such a scraping program, but WotC told them to stop it.

The problem with CoCo in these sorts of lists is that you’re often actually getting shorted on mana. You have so many 1 and 2 drops that at most you’re getting mana parity, which isn’t what you really want. CoCoing into extreme speed advantage (elves), into combo (Melira), or into extreme value (Bant Coco – Smiters, E-Witt, Geist, etc), are all where the card shines. 2 1/1s? Not so much.

With this said, I think a deck that might be poised against this sort of metagame is the RB 8-Rack strategies that pop up from time to time. So many decks get hosed by Anger of the Gods and Ensnaring Bridge.. so why not play both maindeck? I know the deck isn’t perfect and has many other problems, but it seems VERY strong if it’s in the right place.