There are two problems with Green Sun’s Zenith. The weak one is that it’s too good with Dryad Arbor, acting as a mana accelerator turn one and getting progressively better as the game goes on. Mana elves are very powerful, but are generally balanced by how bad they are after the first few turns. GSZ has no such weakness.

The better one is it’s a more efficient Chord of Calling. Chord is more versatile, but it costs more (even with Convoke), to the point it doesn’t realistically do anything until turn three. If you drop three mana elves turns 1-2 then Chord, you can get a three drop. GSZ will get you a five, and in the sorts of decks that already abuse Chord this is too good. Tutoring is problematic in general, efficient tutoring is busted. Whatever positive impact GSZ would have on midrange decks it would be far better in creature combo, to the point of being dangerous. Maybe the day will come, but I don’t think that’s now.

When I think about what zenith could do for the format, mostly I think it could open up some currently unused deck space in toolbox and tempo decks. Zenith has some amount of history in RUG style decks where it can grab wild nacatl and tarmogoyf as part of a tempo shell, something we currently don’t have. It could also open up toolbox decks other than kiki-resto decks to become competetive, which would be very interesting to see in the format.

The downside I can think of for zenith is that it slots pretty well into two existing archetypes. Infect with access to zenith gains a functional 4 additional glistener elves, and I could see that being very dangerous. The other existing deck that could use zenith is the counters company deck that is the evolution of pod decks. In order for those decks to effectively use zenith though they have to choose to lose out on either the card advantage of collected company, or the instant speed power of chord, both of which are major strengths of the deck.

As far as I can see, Zeith opens up space within the meta without breaking any existing archetype, so I think it would be a good unban.

I feel this is pretty unfair. The workload involved in these tests is already ridiculously high. If you were to design to truly rigorous, complete top-down study of a specific card’s impact on a format as enormous as Modern, you would have basically just written your Ph.D. thesis. Wizards R&D members are paid full time to do nothing but project metagame pictures, and they still mess it up all the time.

On the other hand, I have found David’s treatments of the banned cards, while flawed, to still provide illumination on the state of the banlist. Take Stoneforge Mystic. We don’t know what the format will look like with a dedicated UW control shell built from the ground up to abuse Mystic/Batterskull. But we do know what it looks like in Abzan or Midrange more generally. We know it will do little to alter unfair matchups, and will punish fair creature decks not running Mystic themselves. Those are relevant data points in the unban discussion.

So if your hypothesis is sfm is too strong for modern, and your tests determine that your win rate is virtually unchanged whether you use sfm or not, then your “not maths” conclusion should be dont unban sfm because “prolly nobody will play jund no more”?

Why bother testing at all if the test results have literally no bearing on your conclusion regarding how safe it is to unban the card.

I mean its fine to say this is a shitty test that wont prove or disprove the hypothesis and is basically a complete waste of time, but I wouldnt expect that from the very person doing the tests.

Eh, troll’s gotta troll. I’ll just prove him wrong once the data’s in.

You do understand that the scientific method involves generating a hypothesis (an idea), testing it, then accepting or rejecting said hypothesis? It doesn’t just stop at saying “this is the maths.”

Step 1: generate semi-scientific evidence.
Step 2: make conclusion unrelated to said evidence.

Yes, right now Twin is not woth the risk. Blue controlish decks are doing okay, and DS is playing a similar role of policing but in a less opressive way gameplay-wise. However, i think within a year of printings and potentially Bloodbraid Elf Junding Modern, Twin will look safe to unban, because linearity and goldifishing decks will still be a part of the format, and becoming a PT format means Pros can dicatate the outcome of the gameplay they want, and that’s not a uninteractive one(regardless of how the regular players feel about). They actively say that Modern is a “2 ships passing in the night” format and that won’t change with BBE, but it’s a start.
Anyway, the only card left on the banlist to unban will be Twin after the potential BBE unban, because in my book SFM and Jace are super dead for Modern, because of what i mentioned above.

Regarding DRS, i think he hurts diversity far worse than Twin in their respective formats. I don’t think DRS should be banned because of the ‘glue’ work that does in Legacy. Gitaxian Probe is a much likely candidate(if a ban were to happen).
Twin would be a direction towards a more interactive metagame, without the need of massive bans. That’s why the PT holds so much weight, if a Top 8 looks bad diveristy-wise, bans could happen.
I’m of the opinion that Twin being banned and ETron,Valakut and Storm being solid Tier 1 decks is a wrong basepoint for the game. If Twin is off the table, and those decks dominate Modern for another year, i think a ban of Street Wraith, Chalice of The Void and Grapeshot would do good for the format overrall.

To me, Splinter Twin in Modern has a lot of parallels to Deathrite Shaman in Legacy. They both do a number of good things for the format, primarily keeping certain degenerate strategies down. They also do bad things to diversity. It was hard to justify playing a blue deck that did anything similar to Twin but wasn’t actually Twin. Shaman is so powerful that any deck that could run it does so or fights at disadvantage. The question is whether the powers that be consider the trade-off worthwhile. The answer for Twin is currently no.

I have to disagree on Twin, at least for the foreseeable future. The elephant-in-the-room reason (in addition to more empirically-driven ones) that Twin got banned was that having to slow down gameplans to keep mana up for the combo was frustrating for many players, and directly went against Magic’s modern game philosophy of proactively doing the thing you want to do (even if that this is answering opponent’s threats). Whether or not a given individual agrees with that philosophy, it feels clear that this is the direction Wizards wants to go with the Modern format. Fatal Push is doing a fine job keeping aggro decks in check, and as for other linear decks, well, Humans just came around to prey on Storm.

BBE seems very safe right now, and even if it unfortunately breaks Modern, they can easily ban it again and shut our mouths about unbans for a couple of years. From a meta perspective, it incentivizes midrange players to fight Death’s Shadow and create some diversity in that archetype, by preying on DS, it could avoid Street Wraith getting banned(and the continuing chain that a ban breaks out).

Splinter Twin will be unbanned in the future unless they take the other direction, and ban the hell out of Modern combo, especially Storm. The only problem with this card is that it will be the boogeyman of the format. If WOTC is okay with it being a 10-13% deck and warping Modern, but also checking unfair decks and Eldrazi decks, then so be it.

SFM and Jace are tremendous cards in Legacy and are staples of it. I doubt they will unban 2 cards that will clearly define Modern, and make it lose its identity. That’s another nod to Twin, it doesn’t see play in Legacy, it’s a Modern classic, it gives Modern identity. Jace and Twin won’t be together in Modern even in the salty Twin player wildest dreams. It’s one or the other, and there’s a clear ‘safest’ choice.

Unless the Pro Tour shows a nasty metagame(which will lead to bans rather than unbans), i think BBE is the first one to join the party again. Twin probably the next year(April 2019 or so).

Wizards doesn’t need to bring back cumulative upkeep though haha what a pain that was.