Interesting. That seems decent if you’re really going for Become Immense, but I’m skeptical of it actually being worth it. Wait and see I suppose.
I’m sure they will. Cards like that are welcome additions to any brewing kit. I just have doubts that they will actually be good.

I think Sram in GW Tokens may be playable (I believe Sam Pardee played a GW Tokens list on Channelfireball a while back). Lines such as:
T1 BoP
T2 Spectral Procession / Nissa Voice of Zendikar
T3 Sram + Beck//Call or Nissa

Those sort of lines, even if you replace procession with raise the alarm, lead to a decent amount of tokens, or cards in hand, or anthem effects. Its pretty easy to splash U for the Beck half, and allows you to play Beck + Raise the Alarm on 4 mana should you miss the combo. In addition, Windbrisk Heights casts Beck//Call too. My initial goldfishing went pretty smoothly, but as many before me have pointed out – i’m not sure how much it improves your bad match-ups. However, if it turns your 50/50 matches into 60/40 (whilst leaving bad match-ups bad), why wouldn’t you do that?

Sram is not what tokens wants. Tokens wants good ways to speed up its clock.
Need to deal with Tron, Living End, Ad Naus. If it doesnt do that or is a strict upgrade to an existing card it doesnt want it.

The difference is esper is absolutely full of removal and countermagic.
When you run 4 ancestral vision and maybe 2 yahenni’s expertise it’s quite likely you end up with a visions in your hand (the game goes long and you’re definitely going to see a lot of cards)

In my previous esper control build I only ran a single boardwipes because I found that when. You’re running path, slaughter pact, cut, countermagic and hand control, rarely does the field really flood effectively.

The main reason I had a wipe at all was to hedge against tokens and super wide zoo rush. (Also it was solid vs affinity)

Esper control almost never runs out of cards it’s more an issue of mana efficiency. Yahenni’s with no card cast is worse than supreme verdict. By a lot. Unless you have tasigur in play.

However when you begin casting just about any spell (a lingering souls following the wipe is going to be extremely hard to beat) it solves more problems for esper than a hard wipe does.

It allows you to immediately turn the corner and the prevent some haste effects or follow ups from leaving you open to death.

Last night I used expertise into snapcaster to remove two birds of paradise and flashback thoughtseize to remove their next major play.

Ancestral visions may be the BEST play with it but it’s been treating me extremely well.

No Im not objective because I’ve tested almost 60 games with some competitive results. I’m not meaning to sound angry, I’m just dissapointed at the, “Well this is a waste of time.” Attitude.

Remember the phrase Let it Go was used. That’s disappointing to hear to someone doing everything possible to test viability. Not that I’m mad even.

Also when you add instant win to the potential, it may be much more playable/ competitive.

Artifact hate is a way of life in Modern, which keeps Affinity down, meaning that a ban there is unwarranted. You can beat Affinity’s busted draws by normal interactive means, so there’s no reason to act. The only way that Opal gets axed is if Lantern or a combo deck start really gaining metagame share.

If they’d banned Stinkweed too I don’t think there is a Dredge deck anymore. I’m ok with that, but I don’t think Wizards is. I think they just wanted to weaken it enough that it falls out of Tier 1 and players don’t have to run so much graveyard hate, which this should accomplish. If it doesn’t then they may get more aggressive later.

The problem is actually fitting it in and the tokens it creates. I agree that three tokens is good deal, but servos are worse than spirits. I don’t think that they’re the kind of token you really want, so for the main effect I don’t think that you’d play Sram’s Expertise. As for the second effect, I’ve never had problems when I played BW Tokens playing lots of spells or just flooding the board with tokens. The problem was actually turning them into wins and I don’t think Sram solves that. People will be trying it out, so I may be wrong. We’ll see.

I agree that Yahenni’s makes sense in Esper, the problem is that I don’t know if you want it to. Again, the number of decks where -3/-3 is better than Destroy All Creatures is fairly small. Drawing three cards as well is good when you pull it off, but what about all the other cases? Yes, you can sweep small creatures and then kill a large one for four mana, but Damnation would have done that too. If you’re using it to place a threat or Liliana of the Veil, wouldn’t you want it in play before you sweep in a lot of cases? I’m just not convinced that the effect is enough to be worth the cost long term.

If you want objectivity, do the testing and prove people wrong. Don’t get mad when someone has an opinion you dislike unless you plan to bring evidence to the table proving otherwise. Your pro-cat post wasn’t exactly objective either. And if blinking VC, snap and pia/kiran was so good, a deck like that may have already existed with existing blinkers like eldrazi displacer and flickerwisp. Yet…they don’t except for fringe jeskai midrange decks.

Yahenni’s expertise coupled with fatal push enables some esper and UB strategies very heavily, especially alongside ancestral visions.

I do believe there is enough reason to justify esper over jeskai control now.

*this

Anyways as for the GGT ban: Was he enough? They said they were going after the dredge mechanic itself. I guess the better question is: What did WOTC set out to do when addressing Dredge? Was it to obliterate it completely? Make it tier 1.5? What? Just where they say they were targeting the mechanic itself I think if they really wanted to make dredge hurt Stinky should have gone too as well.

A card I am bullish on, however, is Renegade Rallier. That card is going to be spectacular in GW Death & Taxes.

As for speed and consistency… well, you’re going from a 56 card deck to a 60 card deck, so each piece is less common. You’ll have a slightly lower concentration of infecters, but a higher concentration of pump spells (based on proposed changes from players like Tom Ross). Assuming you have your infect dude, you’re probably goldfishing slightly faster.

So basically, the deck is a bit better against lightly interactive decks, and a bit worse against the interactive decks. Part of this argument is also that Become Immense is better against something like BGx than against Tron.