Saw the writing on the wall with this one, right from the start. It’s great that you’re doing this work for the community.

However, would it be fair to say that you’re presenting a final conclusion as something objective, when really this is an opinion piece?

It’s no secret throughout your writing here that the undercurrent for this entire piece of work was a lack of enjoyment, or even boredom. It’s mentioned numerous times and sort of deflates the tone of the whole piece. By the end of the first article, I already knew what you were going to say, not based on any data or analysis but just from your lack of enjoyment, which I think it’s fair to say, became the primary factor in your roundup at the end.

There’s nothing wrong with expressing an opinion, and actually as an audience member, we like opinions and personal stories. It’s fun! However I think there’s a misstep somewhere with this series, which appears to be trying very hard to make solid,verifiable conclusions or recommendations from mountains of testing data.

I’m sure there’s a comfortable compromise here actually. Something as simple as “here’s the objective results” and “here’s my personal opinion” and while your writing does make efforts to create this distinction once or twice, it’s not consistent throughout all the articles. Your apparent misery at having to playtest this card sort of permeates the whole thing, whereas it would have perhaps been the better structural decision to leave that part out, except for an emotive, opinion summary at the end which could give everyone a bit of personal narrative about your feelings on the whole thing. Y’know, like the end of a Scrubs episode or something hahaha.

Anyway I hope you can see that I’m a fan, I enjoy your writing and your efforts, but this one (even as a reader) felt like a slog, and it didn’t need to. Even if the testing was long or arduous, I think that stuff needs to be encapsulated somehow, ring-fenced from the bulk of the analysis. Is that fair? Maybe you agree, maybe you don’t. That’s fine either way =).

‘A’ for effort. You’re a trooper.

If there’s a pattern, that’s because that’s just how it works out. There’s a lot more to these tests than pure matchup numbers. Sometimes it’s the things that you can’t see that are the problem.

I also take a more cautious approach with the cards. Preordain had no measurable impact and felt about the same as Sleight of Hand, so I didn’t have a problem with unbanning it, though I also said it was a non-starter since Opt was reprinted. With Jace, Stoneforge, and BBE the issue I found in testing was that their impact was limited to fair matchups. They were good enough there that I couldn’t think of a reason that fair decks wouldn’t be built around them, and so they would impact diversity. They could also incentivize decks to be more unfair to avoid their impact. Given the unfairness in the format at the time they were tested, I considered the risk of incentivizing unfairness too high compared to the potential boost to the fair homes for the cards. I was looking for the overall impact and arguing about whether the expected change could be healthy.

I also can’t predict how things will actually shake out in the metagame. These days Jace is in every control deck, as I predicted, but he’s played in addition to Teferi. Which is actually better is up for debate, though the fact that Jace is generally a 3-of to Teferi’s 2 is suggestive. The only reason Jund isn’t the BGx deck of choice is Tron’s everywhere and Field of Ruin is necessary. I never tested Thopter Sword, I was just going off of instinct and history. Had I done any testing, the fact that it’s mediocre at best would have been readily apparent, and I recall outright stating that somewhere. As for GSZ, I’m fairly certain it did have a substantial impact on Elves’ win percentage despite the fact that the deck wasn’t optimally built. This is a strong indication that the card is actually busted.

With Fire there was no concrete data saying that it has an impact on win percentage. However, I have strong data saying that it drags out games. Given history, cards that do that well and consistently are cards that get and stay banned. That is a data driven result and a reason to keep Fire banned. The fact that I was nearly bored to death is mostly ancilary.

Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s fantastic that you’re putting in the time and effort to test all these cards, but as time goes on I find myself having more and more trouble taking your qualitative assessments seriously. You advocated for keeping BBE, JTMS, and Sword of the Meek banned, none of which broke Modern by any stretch of the imagination. Jace is certainly good, but arguably worse the Teferi in most builds, Jund still isn’t much of a deck and the Thopter/Sword combo was basically never good enough to make an impact. Based on that, how can we determine that SFM, GSZ or Punishing Fire can’t come off? Again, please don’t take this personally, I just feel like it’s something worth pointing out after this pattern has repeated itself once again.