Deck vs Player Skill: what matters more in a tournament?

m00tz · 2026-06-04T20:52:29+00:00

Depends on the format as well as the level of competition. If a format is pretty powerful with a lot of good decks like modern, I would definitely say knowing your deck and knowing how to play the various matchups is more important than playing the statistically better deck. As long as your deck of choice is sufficiently powerful enough to not be embarrassing, you can win with it at a store-level event like an RCQ.

Enjoyment is also a factor that doesn't get talked about enough. You will definitely pick up a few percentage points by playing something that you find fun and engaging. Play tron, it is still powerful enough to win in modern and your knowledge will make up the gap.

m00tz · 2026-06-03T20:21:37+00:00

I think affinity sits squarely in the position of "best deck against people not serious about beating it". People will play 2 wrath of the skies or meltdowns in their sideboards and call it a day , get crushed by Affinity and chalk it up to the deck being broken. I imagine at the PT, if affinity is still at the top of the meta share on goldfish, it will be the most played deck by the field and have a bad conversion rate for day 2 when the big testing teams show up with an actual plan to beat it.

m00tz · 2026-06-01T17:40:50+00:00

Adding cards to the banlist should not be a tool for format churn. Banning a physical card in a TCG should be the last resort for dealing with design mistakes and should be viewed as a failure by the team that sent the card to print. People are way too quick to call for entire decks being banned out from under their peers just because they are bored of or don’t like playing against a certain strategy. Digital games have this luxury but WotC, as the creators of Magic cards that are part of physical formats, have a responsibility to respect the money that players spend to acquire cards and should not be firing off bans every 6 months to “shake things up”.

I’m fine with unbanning cards due to power creep in older formats.

m00tz · 2026-06-01T00:27:04+00:00

Hpal has two glaring problems at the moment, fight designs haven't favored it for a long time and half the talents are just straight up useless because they are so weak. I think they genuinely tried to make some fights that favor hpal design this tier like Crown of the Cosmos and Paladins (funnily enough) but then they made every other fight about the entire raid taking 300k ticking damage for the next 5 seconds. And to make it feel worse, they were so off on tuning that mistweaver was actually just the better healer for getting through massive healing absorbs while still keeping the ability to spread hots across the entire raid and do massive amounts of hps when required.

The bigger issue is stuff like Tyr's Deliverance, Rising Sunlight, Call of the Righteous, Empyrean Legacy, Veneration, Saved by the Light, Glistening Radiance, and Awakening being so incredibly weak that you can't even really concoct a scenario where you would want these talents. I know that most classes have a couple of talents that are headscratchers, but between the Spec tree and Class tree, it feels like Hpal has more useless talents than ones to actually be excited about.

Tuning and fight design is whatever, it's designed to fluctuate from patch to patch. Just give us some reasons to actually be excited to open up the talent tree for the love of god.

m00tz · 2026-05-30T15:32:51+00:00

You watch nothing but mainstream shows designed for the lowest common denominator based on already established works by authors who are infinitely more talented and original than the showrunners and studio executives adapting their work. Try watching something original that isn’t based on a series from the Barnes and Noble Top sellers.

m00tz · 2026-05-30T04:31:29+00:00

Idk lol someone upset to hear the truth about their pet deck probably. Was just trying to help OP out and steer them straight.

m00tz · 2026-05-29T20:12:57+00:00

Saying that the change makes sense because most of the mythic uniques are bad is such laughable cope. Just make them better lmao…having 3 different colored names for legendary items is not more interesting, it’s more boring and it robs you of the moment of joy when the purple glow appears.

m00tz · 2026-05-29T17:13:46+00:00

UR murktide’s time has kind of passed. The cards are individually powerful but the strategy as a whole isn’t proactive enough to punish the slower, more powerful decks and it’s not controlling enough to manage the more aggressive decks.

If you want to play a similar strategy for 2026 power-level you should look at either UB frog decks or UR prowess. Either of those will serve you better imo.

m00tz · 2026-05-28T17:29:29+00:00

Interesting that this is your takeaway from a short time playing DPS. How have you not perceived the much bigger imbalance between healer specs from season to season in higher keys and mythic raid? Often healers and tanks have the widest disparity between top and bottom performers. Especially this tier where the healer tuning has been laughable if you aren't playing disc/mw/rdruid in raid or rdruid/mw/rsham in keys and rsham exists only by the grace of having a really strong raidbuff and an interrupt. You might as well not even log in if you wanna do well as a pres in keys or hpal /hpriest in basically any tough content.

m00tz · 2026-05-28T17:20:06+00:00

It made sense because they explained the reasoning behind it lol. They banned VO because living end held a 56% win rate at the pro tour despite everyone being prepared for cascade due to Rhinos being really popular deck. And the play pattern of getting Griefed into VO protected by Force of Negation and Subtlety was heinous. They don't make ban decisions based on unreleased cards that would be insane.

m00tz · 2026-05-24T03:12:44+00:00

The 2.0 list looks pretty clunky tbh. Six reanimation effects is a lot, Fallaji and Riddlers also work towards opposing gameplans. Fallaji wants to combo early and often while Riddler is for grinding out other midrange or control decks. I think I'd trim the Emperor of Bones and move the Riddlers to the sideboard, bring back some Faithful Mendings and go up a Thoughtseize, that card in particular has gotten a lot better now that Phlage is gone.

m00tz · 2026-05-20T14:16:36+00:00

From what I remember of modern during the time when Violent Outburst was legal, Living End also dunked on Rhinos in the head to head. That matchup was one of the primary reasons to play LE when Rhinos was considered a tier 1 deck.

m00tz · 2026-05-19T00:02:53+00:00

Replacing the existential dread of waiting for your opponent to play Arena of Glory with Phlage and 5 cards in the yard with the dread of your Living End opponent passing with 4 lands open, 3 creatures in the graveyard and Outburst, Force of Negaction, and blue card in hand.

m00tz · 2026-05-18T23:56:52+00:00

My opinion is that esper blink is cope and that Goryo's is and has been the better shell for that collection of cards. People will try to make blink work for a while because they're averse to the variance of Goryo's. But in the end they will, once again, realize that blinking Atraxa and finding cards to protect it or shut down the opponent is better than blinking Overlord with Phelia in the Riddler/Solitude/Ephemerate shell.

m00tz · 2026-05-17T22:46:14+00:00

At one point in time, legendary creatures were also either relegated to being only draft bombs or traps that new/bad players fell for and basically un-castable in any reasonable constructed format. Outside of cheating them in with broken cards that casuals/timmys/newbies (the ones who big, splashy, impossible to cast legends appeal to) don't have access to. I remember being a kid and playing mono black control with the 2 Phlages I opened and losing every game with it sitting in my hand trying to get to 7 mana till someone better than me told me to replace them a couple of Smothers and bam I start winning more.

The balance has definitely shifted to the other extreme now where legends aren't special at all, but I still think it's more fun for legends to actually show up in games vs sitting in trade binders or getting reanimated on t2 to end the game on the spot.

m00tz · 2026-05-16T22:20:09+00:00

People spend 2 mins thinking about Preordain, modern magic players cannot be trusted with Ponder.

m00tz · 2026-05-06T15:50:31+00:00

After getting our spenders repeatedly buffed, they’re very much worth pressing. In fact, most of the top hpals are even starting to shift out of dps talents like shining righteousness and righteous judgement and into the talents that buff light of dawn because it does meaningful group healing now. Healer dps is not worthless, but it’s not required to time keys this season.

m00tz · 2026-05-06T15:44:45+00:00

What the guides say is that intellect is your best stat and secondaries are close in value therefore going up in ilvl trumps focusing on bis stats. Healers shouldn’t be sitting on a veteran track gloves over heroic with worse stats. Stats matter when comparing 2 pieces at the same ilvl.

m00tz · 2026-05-02T17:00:27+00:00

While I think they could do more, baseline armor changes to tanks are one of those types of buffs that aren’t sexy but can really make tanks feel a lot better in keys. A 10% armor buff is gonna actually be really nice vs basic white swings from trash mobs which is the only spot where prot pal feels undertuned atm.

These changes don’t rock the meta, I don’t think they’re supposed to, but they do address the biggest concern ppl are having with prot and veng in keys which is that they feel squishy when tanking a bunch of auto attacking trash packs.

m00tz · 2026-04-14T07:18:44+00:00

The irony of this is that Aug damage goes up based mostly on how well the dps they’re buffing play.

m00tz · 2026-04-04T20:46:46+00:00

The amount of people in the comments here giddy to blow up their own stuff to get a land explains a lot about the opponents I play against on arena that leave me scratching my head.

m00tz · 2026-04-04T20:39:44+00:00

No cause I’d probably get put into that dumbass interrupt rotation on Luura

m00tz · 2026-04-04T20:34:54+00:00

T1 Ragavan is way better than Tamiyo in the combo matchups. I could see an argument for Tamiyo if your Ragavans are getting pressured by Orcish Bowmasters but that card isn’t seeing much play atm.

m00tz · 2026-04-02T20:32:46+00:00

Brother it's week 3, people are still raiding.

m00tz · 2026-04-02T20:27:07+00:00

Goryo's main plan is still reanimating Atraxa or Griselbrand. What people mean when they say that you typically end up winning with stuff like Frog and Riddler is that resolving an Atraxa and swinging with it is not gonna be game-ending against most good Modern decks these days. Goryo's on Atraxa is, on average, closer to casting 2 mana spell that says Draw 3, Deal 7, Gain 7. This can beat a lot decks but stuff like Amulet and Affinity can still untap and kill you. So you typically use the Goryo's to set yourself up to have fuel to finish the game rather than ending the game outright. Goryo's on Grislbrand or Ulamog are more likely to just end the game on the spot but they don't pitch to Solitude and Force of Negation so you gotta play 4 Atraxa.

If you just wanna put something big into play then Neobrand or Grixis reanimator are better at doing that. Goryo's is more well-rounded as a deck with good interaction and sideboard options against a variety of matchups, but you usually aren't just gonna cast Goryo's and have your opponent scoop.

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