The lists I’ve seen lately have typically had two misty rain forests for a total of 10 fetches, and the addition of Kitchen Finks to the deck puts it above 800 or 900 dollars. I think at that point it isn’t a cheap deck anymore. That is also not including owning any maybeboard cards which are very important to the deck’s versatility. When you get down to it the deck is more than dredge,burn, tron, affinity, merfolk, and valakut breach. It is cheap compared to decks playing Lilis and Goyfs, but I think to call it cheap is a lie.

Disrupting Shoal has the right idea, but the card is just so bad to play with.

…You do realize that part of Burn’s favorable positioning is that it can effectively combat other linears, right? Burn morphs into sort of a tempo deck against the likes of Affinity, Infect, and Death’s Shadow Zoo. Those decks are capable of beating it in a “ships passing in the night” race, but not so much when Burn is removing their guys. The deck is capable of far more interaction than what you’re giving it credit for. The GP-winning list had 4 Path in the sideboard, for crying out loud.

I agree with you. There are just so many people saying how hard it is to play control in modern. I think counterspell could be a good catch all that isnt free. its cheap but restrictive with its UU casting cost. Im very much the aggro player and i wouldnt mind counterspell.

Here’s the concern with Counterspell: Midrange/Control are good against the creature-based aggro decks, and kept in check by big-mana and over-the-top strategies like Bant Eldrazi and Tron. If you make it too easy for them to beat up on their natural predators, they might take over the metagame.

That said, I don’t think Counterspell is good enough to lead to that result. But I could be wrong, and you have to tread carefully.

I’ve written about this elsewhere, but my issue with Disrupting Shoal is just that it isn’t very good. Card disadvantage AND inflexibility. There’s a reason it sees little play.

I think this is where Disrupting Shoal pops up. The card answers every one of these concerns and can dominate games when used appropriately. Modern is fast. I can link any number of authors who have identified that Modern is so fast that tempo is better than card advantage. Shoal conforms to and confirms that rule.

I realize that. And if I wanted to become a pptq grinder over anything else I could probably have the deck in two months by saving up. I am just saying that me, personally, cannot bring myself to spend that much on 4 cards. Noble Hierarch in particular is close to $70 now. Virtually every good modern deck has that “money card.” It has one card, maybe two, that costs forty dollars or more each and requires the full playset, whether it is enemy fetchlands, hierarch, snapcasters, goyfs, etc.

Hell Aether Vial, an uncommon in darksteel, is about forty dollars each.

I may or may not have done something similar with small pox and pyromancer. *cough*

However, I think this issue stems a lot from the mana bases in modern too. Burn essentially starts with an 8 card hand+SSG when you go 17 off your fetch, which is pretty nuts for an extremely efficient and consistent combo deck. Being what is essentially a 50/50 deck, but unlike Jund it sort of feels like 50% of the time your opponent doesn’t play Magic and 50% of the time, you just lose kind of ruins some games. I don’t know, I absolutely never enjoy playing against burn.

At least with Infect, you’re fighting this battle over their 1/1s and it’s fought on the stack and there’s key timing and blue spells and things involved. Dredge is trying to battle hate and pull off creature synergies. Death’s Shadow is pushing themselves to super dangerous life totals. Affinity is synergistic and somewhat complex with a lot of scary hate out there. There’s definitely mindgames against these decks. Burn just doesn’t feel like that. With the advent of Nacatl burn and the addition of Atarka’s Command, old favorites like Spellskite and Leyline just don’t pack the same punch anymore.

Not instead. In addition to.

I agree with you that the format could probably use another strong removal spell, and I think a good counterspell (but not a free one!) could do some work too. I’d be very curious to see if Absorb and Undermine could cut it in Modern. They’re “Cancel with upside” with a more restrictive mana cost, so I think they could go through Standard, and in some match-ups would be almost like a better Cryptic Command (think Jeskai vs. Burn). I don’t think they’d revolutionize the format or see play as 4-of’s, but I do think they might be a worthwhile addition. The Counterspell variants proposed on reddit might have some merit too, (either the ones templated like Abrupt Decay to counter spells with CMC 3 or less for UU or the ones with a kicker on top of that to make it counter any spell in the late game). Obviously any of these would require extensive testing to see if they’re genuinely good for the format, but I think at the very least all 3 ideas have potential to make our already great format better.

Infect, believe it or not, is relatively cheap. Once you get the inkmoths and the Noble Hierarch’s the deck is super cheap compared to the rest of the format.

It’s certainly not bad, and it would be better than Path for sure, but the question is if it would be better enough to make a difference. Affinity doesn’t really care about the extra land, they’ve probably already dumped their hand, and neither does Dredge. I don’t feel like it would make a lot of difference against Burn, they’re going to dump their hand in the first few turns either way and don’t really need the extra mana. It would be pretty good against Suicide Zoo just because the life gain interacts in a funny way with their gameplan, so it’s actually an upside against them. I think it would also be a bit better against Infect, because most of their spells cost 1, so they make better use of the extra land from Path. Overall, though, I just don’t know how much of a difference it would really make against those decks if we had Swords instead of Path, but my guess is that it would have minimal effect on the format. I think what would work better would be some kind of fixed Mental Misstep like I suggested. Something that would let you protect yourself on the first turn when you’re on the draw, delaying the aggro decks by a turn.

I think the primary argument against that, and I could be wrong on that this is well out of my control, is that if you make a Modern specific set then you’re specifically taxing Modern players when the cost of the format is already considered by many to be a problem. You would also have the issue for many players of having new card face supplemental product that is legal in Modern, and others that aren’t. Having non-Modern legal Commander product and then a special Modern product causes some unnecessary confusion I would imagine. I think that the ability to print cards just for Modern would be good, though I understand why they don’t.

So, did you scroll down like two paragraphs in and miss the section on Swords to Plowshares, or do you for some reason think that card is bad against aggressive decks?

There are a couple reasons why this has happened in Modern. First of all, the natural predator to Aggro decks are fast Combo decks, because Combo goldfishes faster than Aggro when not interacted with. The problem is that all the fast Combo decks in Modern have been banned thanks to the Turn 4 rule. This has resulted in Aggro being the fastest archetype in the format, since these decks are able to reach the artificial floor that WotC has implemented in Modern. There’s not really a clean solution to this that I can see. Either you ban a bunch of stuff from the Aggro decks to slow them all down by a turn, or you adjust the philosophy behind the Turn 4 rule to allow Combo decks that are a little faster than the Aggro decks are. The former is probably not an option, as it would be very unpalatable to most Modern players, and the latter would be sooo difficult for the DCI to get right.

So the real question we need to ask is: “How do we slow down the Aggro decks without mass bannings?” Twin used to do this. I’m not here to advocate for a Twin unbanning because although I loved that deck, I believe that there is potential for a healthier format without it. However, it filled a role in Modern that has not been filled since its departure. I don’t think we need Force of Will or Daze in Modern. Maybe something like a fixed Mental Mistep. Perhaps a counter that counters CMC = 1 for free if you reveal a blue card from your hand. It would restrict it to blue decks, which was the problem with Mental Mistep, and it would probably not be run in Infect, since most of their cards are green, and they would probably rather just run the new +2/+2 hexproof pump spell.

Either way, what Modern really needs is a way to slow the format down a bit. I love Modern and what it stands for, but the aggressive strategies are getting out of control. Pun intended 🙂