Whether or not you personally enjoy diversity, Wizards has stated multiple times that it’s their #1 priority when it comes to Modern 🙂

I wasnt even disagreeing necessarily with proactive decks leading to more diversity, my main point about that is there are no reactive decks in modern, in the reactive sense, that play the way twin did; and the current forms of reactive decks we have are UW (Jeskai) Control, jund and shadow which all play far more on a proactive axis than a reactive one. Jeskai being the closest and only true reactive strategy in modern.

And about Baral, I agree it is easier to kill than exarch; my point was more to the effect that there are already cards in the format that require an immediate answer the turn they are cast or you die. The only difference is exarch comes eot and baral can be targeted by sorcery speed removal (even though that point is largely mute considering how little sorcery speed removal is played, especially in the first 3 turns). He does get killed by more removal spells and I agree that it wasnt a perfect example, but that wasnt my point at large, although, I do see where those concerns come from. In this scenario I think simply dismember would see a raise in popularity.

Also idk how much diversity is a good thing. I agree the more decks the better generally, but we are in a spot where every deck attacks at its own angle and games arent fun anymore bc both players are simply goldfishing each other. Twin had that element to it, but the games where often far more interesting and I personally miss that aspect of modern. Also alot of the tiered decks have answers to twin that arent strictly removal, through thalia, spell queller, meddling mage, etc.

All in all, the point I want to hit home the most is if the ban didnt accomplish any of its goals and the community can’t definitively decide on whether the resurgance of the strategy would be a net negative, then it shouldn’t be on the banned list.

keeping fetch up every turn so that push disrupts the combo = never extracting mana from that land = stone raining yourself

Fair enough. I think there’s a pretty big difference between cracking a fetch and stone raining yourself though haha

By heavy-duty, I mean removal spells that remove a wide set of creatures but come with a significant drawback. Path gives opponents a land, and is in one of Modern’s least-splashable colors; Push requires you to essentially Stone Rain yourself to have revolt available, and regardless is more medium-duty in the greater scope of the format. The other ways to kill Exarch at instant speed cost two or more mana, so holding those up turn after turn generates an immense tempo loss.

I don’t just mean non-Bolt, but even if I did, I think the distinction would be fair. Bolt is currently played in 3637 of all Modern decks according to MTGGoldfish, and Path in 25%. A lot of the burden of removing creatures rests on Bolt and Path, which are listed as the only “Top-10 cards in Modern” removal spells. The only others on the Top 50 list are Push (kills Exarch conditionally), Trophy (costs 2), Brutality (doesn’t kill it), Abrade (doesn’t kill it), Anger (doesn’t kill it), and Dismember (currently in just 8% of Modern decks for obvious reasons). (source: https://www.mtggoldfish.com/format-staples/modern/full/all)

To summarize, the only three spells listed in this post that unconditionally remove Exarch at instant speed are Path, Trophy, and Dismember. I would consider all of them heavy-duty both for their coverage and costs.

I get what you’re saying here other than the heavy-duty removal part. Doesn’t this literally mean non-Bolt removal? I hardly think that’s a fair distinction.

Re: reactive interaction: A format full of decks doing their own thing is bound to be more diverse than a format full of decks running the same high-powered interactive cards. There’s always more room for diversity among proaction. See Legacy as an extreme example of a homogeneous format (relative to Modern) thanks to the sheer power of the best disruption cards in the format. Modern also appears far more diverse now to many players, myself included, even if GP/PT Top 8s (a tiny sample size, albeit one Wizards seems hell-bent on monitoring when it comes to the ban list) don’t reflect that reality.

Re: Baral: The difference between Baral and Exarch is that Baral dies to pretty much everything while Exarch requires more heavy-duty removal. Also, Baral can be removed at a player’s leisure, while the mere threat of Exarch asks players to hold up mana for that expensive removal spell as of turn four. Same goes for other must-kill creatures in Modern, such as Devoted Druid and Blighted Agent.

First, the only defensible reason that twin should stay banned is the metagame share it held while playable. I would counter this with a couple different points, a few coming as a refresher as you covered some in your article; i) blue decks sucked back then as evidenced by none of them taking twins spot post-ban (excluding Jesakai but that only held 3-5% share before the ban anyways); ii) being that twin was the only viable blue deck it makes sense it would have a disproportionately higher metagame share given it was the only playable deck featuring that color of the pie, and that doesn’t count as “homoginizing” the format if all the other options where bad not being stifled; iii) you can’t cling to the arguement of, it homogenized the format when it didn’t, as evidenced post-ban and therefore, we have no evidence that it would homogenize the format now that we do have a couple playable blue decks; iv) the blue decks that currently encompass the space play on a very different axis with a very different gameplan than what twin plays on.

So the reasons it shouldn’t be banned; please see this entire article. If it didnt have the desired effect, if in fact nothing changed at all, than the idea that it should stay banned is simply wrong and the idea that we gained diversity by twin being banned is similarly wrong. We gained diversity with new cards that where printed, boosting the colors overall power level (thank you power creep). Furthermore, there is no deck akin to twin currently; which wasnt a control deck but a blue-based tempo deck featuring a combo finish. The closest competitive comparison would be GDS and they don’t play remotely similar game plans and the blue portion of that deck is rapidly being replaced by RGB. You shouldn’t unban twin for a “diversity reshuffle” as you suggested, you should unban it because banning it did not provide the desired result; not only not the desired result but not any of the desired results as you already mentioned mentioned.

This leads me to the next reason it is still banned; it pushes the format toward reactionary interaction as opposed to proactive interacting. But “Doesn’t forcing one kind of interaction over another work against diversity?”, so you mean sort of like shaping the format in such a way that you force one kind of interaction (proactive) over another going against diversity? This thought process literally cant withstand it’s own logic turned so that’s where I’m going to leave it. I also dont see how the decks who do strive for proactive interaction / current creature (spell-less decks) will struggle with a twin unban. The top decks right now are RDW, Spirits, Humans, UW control, affinity and dredge. RDWs doesnt care about twin and was a 50/50 matchup previously; spirits runs tons of interaction with the inclusion of spell queller, wanderer, vial and coco to name a few disruptive elements. Humans has meddling mage, reflector mage backed with vial, thalia, hell, phantasmal image to copy your exarch and tap your land on upkeep. UW control with path and counterspells, affinity and dredge will just kill you if you dont combo them on t4. Like the deck has counters/is countered/ is at best 55/45 against most of the tier one decks right now and these decks dont even run the powerful new kill spells like fatal push or trophy out of the true reactionary decks of moderns past. And on top of all that; there are already decks that require you to kill a creature on t2 or t3 or you die. I dare you not to kill that Baral on t2 and see if you live until your t3 for example.

I dont think you give enough credence to the idea that they wanted to “spice up the pro tour” it seems entirely viable to me and your own comments back up my claim on this; “Unbans are a tool Wizards uses to generate excitement about Modern, so I don’t think they will unban something unless there’s a lull of some sort, no matter how safe something is or isn’t.” If this applies to unbans, isnt it equally possible it can apply to a ban?

Finally, I get it, salty tears from a twin player. That said, I still think it is insane that a deck loved by so many, a deck that is the epitome of moderns rules and power level, with a high skill cap and low barrier to entry; is banned for reasons that didnt event come to fruition. There is a reason it became a meme, hopefully, I laid out a strong, relatively articulated opinion on why it became one.

Considering that both Shadow and UWx would likely have very favorable Twin matchups, it seems highly unlikely a Twin unban would harm them in any way.

There’s no way to know if that’s actually true, which i think will hold Wizards back from an unban. The risk of again homogenizing blue decks outweighs the potential benefit (?) of a metagame reshuffle.

Twin was actually more like 6-8% for the first few years of Modern. It didn’t jump up to 10% until after the DRS ban. Weakening Jund made Twin better.

That was only true at the time because all the other blue decks sucked. Twin was the only competitive one. That was why the other blue decks didn’t suddenly spring up to fill in the meta vacuum the Twin ban created. Twin wasn’t suppressing them, they just were bad. That isn’t true today. UWx Control is very good, and Grixis Death’s Shadow is good. People would still play those decks if Twin was legal.

The reason why Twin made the format more interactive was because of the pressure it put on the format, especially when it was at 12% of the meta deck. Twin punished linear and uninteractive aggro and combo decks. If you refused to run interaction, Twin would slow you down until they found their combo and killed you. This made a lot of these decks run maindeck pieces of interaction, which diluted their linear plan and slowed them down. On the other hand, Twin lost to the interactive fair decks. If you could prevent them from comboing, they were nothing but a shitty version of Blue Moon. Jund would grind you into the dirt, and the UWx control decks would just out-interact you.

So that’s why Twin would make the format more fair. I don’t think Twin would be a 12% deck today still, but even if it’s at 6% it would have a small effect.

Power-wise, I think Stoneforge and Preordain could come off right now. Zenith is riskier but should also be looked at IMO. Unbans are a tool Wizards uses to generate excitement about Modern, so I don’t think they will unban something unless there’s a lull of some sort, no matter how safe something is or isn’t.

Right, but since there’s so much evidence to the contrary of that conspiracy theory, I don’t usually indulge it 🙂

As for the safer options, what are your top 3 safest choices for unbanning in Modern?
In no particular order, mine are:
– Artifact Lands: Robots (as I prefer to call Affinity, since the deck doesn’t really use the mechanic) and other heavily artifact-based decks have come a long way and would not necessarily benefit from unbanning these cards. The least safe of these would probably be Tree of Tales, since it would give KCI decks another artifact to sacrifice for mana.

– Stoneforge Mystic: Not much explanation needed for this card. Playing this on turn 2 and flashing in Batterskull on turn 3 won’t do much against a lot of Modern’s players right now.

– Preordain: In a previous article here, this was tested as a slot replacement for Sleight of Hand. It didn’t have much of a positive impact on the deck it was tested with (that was Storm iirc) and I doubt that it would have a lot of impact if players try replacing Serum Visions in their Uxx decks with this card. There are some strategies that would benefit being able to draw the 2nd top of the library, but there are also strategies that would benefit getting a blind draw but also sculpting the 2nd and 3rd and potentially having access to another blind (and possibly better) draw after scrying.

P.S. I wanted to ask for your top 5 at first. Then as I was trying to pick 5 for my list, I could barely get to three. XD

Unless Wizards didn’t ban Twin for its metagame share, but rather to spice up the Pro Tour.

You’d have to ask Wizards if it’s significant enough! mtgtop8 may be considered the best currently, but I’m sure we both agree that it’s not close to as comprehensive as the data we used to have, so the numbers may be off. Part of the reason for that is that Wizards has deliberately made it harder for third parties to amass that data in hopes of preventing the metagame from becoming “solved” so easily.

As for 7% vs 10%, assuming what numbers we do have currently are correct, it would appear that there is a difference, as Wizards has not banned a card out of Humans.

A lot of folks consider “fair” to mean “not cheating on resources” or exclude infinite combos from the definition. It’s a contentious term and tough to have a discussion around without first establishing meaning.

Re: interaction, there is also proactive interaction, such as targeted discard and sorcery-deployed taxing effects. Reactive cards are always interactive, but proactive cards can be interactive or not. Twin asks us to consider the difference, since a huge subset of Modern’s current go-to interaction could be invalidated by its presence.