Our fears should never be Eldrazi – Quarter is a win more card against those guys. Ghost quarter is only really useful against Tron, and Tec Edge is good against a range of decks such as Jund and Gifts (which is a deck I think is seriously under-valued – it’s the new twin).

I just came back from FNM and playing T1 vial, T2 chalice, T3 Harbinger and Tidebinder Mage, T4 Negate felt pretty interactive against my Burn opponent who expected a race. That felt pretty disruptive to me.

It has spells to interact but it’s not strictly an Interactive deck, such as midrange or control, it’s light interactions are mainly to push your game plan against opposing disruption rather than to disrupt your opponent’s game plan.
For example spreading seas can interact with your opponent’s lands but it’s main purpouse is to make your dudes unblockable so that your opponent cannot interact with them throught the Combat phase, and the same can be said about aether vial, cavern of souls and kira.

Uh do you think Fish is not interactive..? 21 out of 41 spells in Rogers’ list can target the opponent’s spells, and the creatures often do blocking duty. Fish is tempo, not aggro, and very interactive as far as I can see.

For a few hours after the event finished it showed him as second so I can understand how it might have happened.

I don’t disagree that it has its place but I prefer to outright kill the lands against the decks that go long. It’s personal preference depending on how people feel about their match-ups. I’m pretty comfortable against infect (big fan of keeping spreading seas in for inkmoth instead of quarter) but If you aren’t comfortable with the plans I’ve chosen with tectonic edge then ghost quarter is the better of the two. I might adopt a 1 of mainboard and a 3/1 split in the sb for tectonic edge/quarter.

I actually think Quarter is better right now than Edge. There are matchups where Edge gets the, well, edge: killing enemy manlands is a big one. But if your fears are Tron and Eldrazi, Edge is not the solution. Also, Edge is not what I want to be doing against Inkmoth Nexus. Those three situations point me much more to Quarter than Edge in the current format.

Jund had been up on the SCG site at 2nd in the standings for a while, and then again at 2nd on the deck page for a while longer. I think Trevor and I checked it on the deck link, which has since been updated. We fixed the link here to reflect that though.

I don’t see where he ever said Dustin Green placed second. But maybe he saw this and corrected his mistake, who knows.

I don’t agree. Ghost Quarter is safer to include in the maindeck manabase (because it can fetch you U in case of emergency and save you from color-screw), and it is more potent against the decks that are actually ascendant (or at least predicted to be) in this post-Twin world. Tectonic Edge has its perks, and if we find ourselves overrun with BGx and UWx Control, maybe I’ll reconsider my stance.

P.S.: I’ve been singing Ghost Quarter’s praises for months now (go to the Merfolk primer on MTGSalvation and look up rothgar13 if you don’t believe me). ModernNexus confirmed what I was already saying, which is just further evidence that I was on to something.

You are wrong dude – Tec Edge is better – although Ghost Quarter is the new cool land due to the heard mentaility on MTG salvation

Its not heard mentality at all Tec Edge is overall a better card in Merfolk for a number of reasons. Ghost quarter is heard mentality..

Is there a light of at the end of the tunnel for interactive decks? What can wizards give us that will help us engage with other players rather than ignore them?

(Eldrazi terrify me more than any other deck, what is a midrange mage to do against that mence?)

Thanks for all you do, Modern Nexus you’re the first site I visit after work each day.

I made a caveat in my previous post to account for experienced players who just prefer to use TecEdge because they assume that they’ll land one Spreading Seas or are more concerned with their opponents hitting a certain land count. I will say that the reasoning is theoretically sound, and I apologize if I implied otherwise.

However, I don’t necessarily agree with the reasoning – I think that assuming you’ll hit a Spreading Seas during the course of the game is dangerous (since the hypergeometric distribution says it’s a roughly 50/50 proposition by Turn 3, which is the absolute latest you’d be safe hitting one), so I prefer standalone land hate that doesn’t require other cards to function. Furthermore, in my experience it doesn’t matter if they slow-roll their way to 5 lands without full Tron and have enough to activate O-Stone – by then, they tend to be dead to pressure.

My eternal dissatisfaction with Delver decks in Modern, summarized succinctly in one sentence. Hopefully we get Preordain back, or those Prowess decks people are messing around with pan out.

Ah yeah, I forgot to discuss the manland angle. Tectonic Edge is generally considered to better against UWx Control and BGx Midrange, because those decks generally have things that they want to do that cost 4+ mana (plus manlands that take 4+ mana to activate), but Ghost Quarter is considered to be better against Affinity, Eldrazi, Infect, and Tron (because their manlands take 1 mana to activate or they only need 3 lands to drop huge threats on you). Given that you can tune your sideboard in other ways to combat BGx effectively (Relic of Progenitus and Tidebinder Mage spring to mind) and that UWx is a rarity unless explicitly shown otherwise, I stick with Ghost Quarter and use the additional sideboard room on something else.

Thanks for catching that, it’s fixed. And your comment is why I added the note in about Spreading Seas.