Comments on: Testing Bloodbraid Elf: An Exercise in Futility https://www.quietspeculation.com/2016/12/testing-bloodbraid-elf/ Play More, Win More, Pay Less Wed, 21 Feb 2018 20:13:29 +0000 hourly 1 By: Cornelius J Ehmke https://www.quietspeculation.com/2016/12/testing-bloodbraid-elf/#comment-2127452 Wed, 21 Feb 2018 20:13:29 +0000 http://34.200.137.49/?p=12560#comment-2127452 Bit late to the party, but by your account the Jund player never had delerium active. only ever having Land, Sorcery, and Instant in the bin.

Along with this you had 2 towers, 1 mine, 1 plant, 1 brushland in play, 1 tower in hand on 8 life.
You’re also both topdecking at this point:

Play Tower.
TapSac Tower to activate World Breaker.
Play World Breaker (7 Life), Exile Liliana.
Play Map with the 1 left floating.
Play Tower.
(With 2 towers Jund can’t answer the tower, the map acts as insurance on the other 2 lands)

At this point they can swing into the breaker to keep the pressure on but suffering attrition. 6 live draws in the deck that make this a 2 turn clock, but you’re not dead on board.

You still have 2 Wurmcoil Engines, 1 Worldbreaker, 2 Ulamog, 3 Karn, 2 Ugin which can pull you ahead. along with 2 stirrings, Spellskite also stalls the board. iow you had 13 cards left in the deck that could either stabilise or pull you ahead.

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By: Cornelius J Ehmke https://www.quietspeculation.com/2016/12/testing-bloodbraid-elf/#comment-2127451 Wed, 21 Feb 2018 19:41:42 +0000 http://34.200.137.49/?p=12560#comment-2127451 In reply to Greg Castanon.

This also means that if it is improving your draws then you have to pay more attention to shuffling as you’ve not sufficiently randomised your deck

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By: Michael Ferguson https://www.quietspeculation.com/2016/12/testing-bloodbraid-elf/#comment-2127450 Wed, 21 Dec 2016 23:52:26 +0000 http://34.200.137.49/?p=12560#comment-2127450 10 games is not an adequate sample size for deciding if a card is ban-worthy or not.

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By: artfranc007 https://www.quietspeculation.com/2016/12/testing-bloodbraid-elf/#comment-2127449 Wed, 21 Dec 2016 20:54:59 +0000 http://34.200.137.49/?p=12560#comment-2127449 i dont see the point of these articles. BBE will most likely never see an uban, while jund remains at tier 1 status. more likely to see a become immense ban rather than an ubanning, which is still unlikely. the general consensus seems to be that modern is in a great place, full of diversity and is just downright fun to play. why consider throwing a card in the mix that will most definitely make an already successful archetype even? articles like these just add to the disappointment when i visit this site. for months now there has been no update to tier list, and almost every article is about some hypothetical or just downright boring. you guys should really take a look at what saffron olive is doing. consider that one person is putting out substantive content almost daily, while you guys put out 1 good article a week if that, and you’ll realize what a said state this site is in. hope you guys take this criticism to heart…

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By: Roland F. Rivera Santiago https://www.quietspeculation.com/2016/12/testing-bloodbraid-elf/#comment-2127448 Wed, 21 Dec 2016 18:20:46 +0000 http://34.200.137.49/?p=12560#comment-2127448 I think that most of the argument around Bloodbraid Elf staying banned should center around Cascade. That was clearly a mistake of a mechanic, and WotC is not fond of mistake mechanics seeing the light of day once they’ve been put down. Combine that with the fact that it can swing games by digging Jund out of desperate situations – you might not get the card that you want out of it, but you’re getting to dig for another card, and in an answer-stuffed deck like Jund, that matters a great deal – and I don’t really see it getting unbanned. WotC can always surprise us, I suppose, but I would bet against it.

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By: Zach Stackhouse https://www.quietspeculation.com/2016/12/testing-bloodbraid-elf/#comment-2127447 Wed, 21 Dec 2016 16:06:57 +0000 http://34.200.137.49/?p=12560#comment-2127447 In reply to Tommy Hoff Hansen.

WOTC prioritizes limited play and standard in testing new sets, and believes that time spent investigating a new set’s impact on modern or other older formats takes away from their bread and butter, draft and type 2. I mean, how do you print a new card that addresses powerful banned cards like Ponder, Seething Song, or Chrome Mox? They can’t exactly print a blue instant that costs zero and reads “counter target spell named Chrome Mox.”

WOTC is not going to print hate cards anymore. SOI block didn’t even have any type of graveyard hate, despite the block having a graveyard subtheme with zombies and delirium.

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By: Mantis Rider https://www.quietspeculation.com/2016/12/testing-bloodbraid-elf/#comment-2127446 Wed, 21 Dec 2016 13:27:04 +0000 http://34.200.137.49/?p=12560#comment-2127446 ¨Incidentally, this really makes me question why we still tolerate Ancient Stirrings, but that’s a subject for another time.¨

THANK YOU!!!! this is the real question in modern, Im a control player and i really dont understand why i cant search for answers in my deck but Tron and Eldrazi can search for threats…

David i beg you an article about Ancient Stirrings in modern…

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By: Tommy Hoff Hansen https://www.quietspeculation.com/2016/12/testing-bloodbraid-elf/#comment-2127445 Wed, 21 Dec 2016 12:31:32 +0000 http://34.200.137.49/?p=12560#comment-2127445 As long as there is a banlist, people will want things to be both banned and unbanned.

Since unlimited, I’ve been speaking for a banless game, with wotc having more focus on how to solve problemcards through the printing of new cards.

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By: Darcy Hartwick https://www.quietspeculation.com/2016/12/testing-bloodbraid-elf/#comment-2127444 Wed, 21 Dec 2016 01:50:35 +0000 http://34.200.137.49/?p=12560#comment-2127444 I will say I’m a little more skeptical of BBE after this, but by no means convinced it needs to stay banned.

I don’t like a couple of your angles – specifically the idea we shouldn’t be saying a card is not strong and can therefore be unbanned. That is literally the reason something would get unbanned. The fact Bitterblossom, AV, and Sword haven’t rocked the foundations of Modern means they did not belong on the banlist and were justified in coming off. People saying BBE is fine and should be unbanned are saying the same thing – in the spirit of a logical and small banlist it doesn’t belong there, and maybe someone will brew something up with it.

The other argument I have some issue with is “its fine now, but in the future when Wizards makes other printings/bans/unbans it won’t be”. That is so far out in hypothetical lala land that we can’t take it seriously. You could say this about every card in the format and even when it sounds plausible its still purely speculation and not a sound rationale to make decisions around.

Finally the Jund question is most certainly not put to rest by picking a matchup where a 4 mana 2-for-1 haste 3 power creature is at its absolute highest impact. That’s like testing stoneforge mystic vs burn and deciding “no way, makes too much of a difference in the match”. I don’t know what the avg 4-drop count in Jund is these days but I believe its been in a steady decline, especially with Dark Confidants in the deck. Bringing that count back up while also dropping kalitas has to hurt your aggro and burn matches as a result due to slower hands and more painful confidant flips and the loss of a big lifelink body. Is it a big deal if Jund can now choose to beat tron and instead lose to burn? I’d think it makes things more interesting as you actually have a choice to make there that didn’t exist before.

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By: Greg Castanon https://www.quietspeculation.com/2016/12/testing-bloodbraid-elf/#comment-2127443 Tue, 20 Dec 2016 21:13:25 +0000 http://34.200.137.49/?p=12560#comment-2127443 Fun math point: Casting Bloodbraid Elf doesn’t actually improve your draws. That bit in your article is based on your experience, not math.

Sloppy proof:
1.) For simplicity, let’s assume that cascade triggers on every non-land card in your deck. Let’s assume the remainder of your deck has a K:1 Land-To-Spell ratio.
2.) When you cascade, the expected number of lands you’re going to flip to the bottom is K. (Your deck is K/(K+1) percent lands. Flipping a M%-heads coin until you hit tails yields an expected number of (1/(1+M) )- 1 heads. Plug in K/K+1 for M and you get an expected number of lands = K.)
3.) You’re also going to lose 1 spell, ’cause you cast it from the cascade trigger.
4.) You’ve thus subtracted K lands and 1 spell from the set of cards you could draw next, thus maintaining your K:1 Land-To-Spell ratio

This math probably changes slightly if you’ve got a couple spells over 4 you could shuffle to the bottom also, and on what you consider “gas”, but fundamentally, cascade triggers don’t change the expected probability of drawing lands.

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By: Ryan Overturf https://www.quietspeculation.com/2016/12/testing-bloodbraid-elf/#comment-2127442 Tue, 20 Dec 2016 20:33:26 +0000 http://34.200.137.49/?p=12560#comment-2127442 Glad to see some sense being talked here. Bloodbraid Elf is very clearly too good for Modern, and discussing how it impacts Jund’s matchup versus Tron is brilliant. Currently, the two things keeping Jund down are Urza’s Tower and Snapcaster Mage more than anything. BBE is great against both.

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By: Rory Alexander Farrell-Madden McDonough https://www.quietspeculation.com/2016/12/testing-bloodbraid-elf/#comment-2127441 Tue, 20 Dec 2016 20:33:15 +0000 http://34.200.137.49/?p=12560#comment-2127441 Good article.

Ultimately, I’m just always going to be weary of unbanning a card that would slot into an already tier 1 deck. If a deck is already 8%+ of the meta in a field as diverse as modern, I don’t think it really needs more help.

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