This is Andrea Mengucci channel, where I'll be playing every format of Magic from Pauper to Vintage! If you love paper Magic make sure to check Mengu's Workshop RU-vid channel. For the best paper Magic content! You can also find me on Twitch @Andreamengucci, on Twitter @Mengu09 and on Channelfireball.com!
32:12 "I think a lot of the oppression The One Ring can be doing to the format is actually Phlage" (Javier) 33:52 "...there's much less counterplay to it, like you have cards like Surgical, but the Phlage player can play around it" (Anthony) This makes so much sense. Boros playing The One Ring sets off our alarms, but Phlage has been a value-engine for both aggro and control decks ever since it was printed. As a Dimir Murktide player, I've grown to hate The One Ring, but in practice I'm actually comfortable against every Ring deck besides Jeskai. Would love to hear advice on winning that matchup
My point is that the ring nullifies having to manage resources. You can just dump all your hand, get a turn of immunity, and then fill back your hand. Managing Card advantage is meaningless in a Ring match
Gonna build this deck in paper aswell, looks so clean. Maybe gonna fix the board to match the local meta, but otherwise it's beautiful. Always love the pauper content Mengu, keep it up!
I play mono blue in paper, I would say it's a fundamentally different deck, mono blue is aggro, this is more of a control deck. Whether it's better or worse Idk, but aggro decks do see more play in mtgo for time reasons(faster leagues).
Though modern still seems to be the king of 60 card constructed formats, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on the current standard format sometime (if standard interests you at all). I like somewhat casually coming up with deck ideas after a set rotation, but the perspective of a non-casual player focused on winning as much as possible is always appreciated (so I better know what my deck brews will be up against). I'll always prefer deeper comentary from a pro like you than just browsing MTG top 8.
The One Ring is disgusting. The Value and Math of The One Ring is crazy. 3 Turn Cycle if you're drawing with it every turn since casted : T1. 4 mana cost > get prot and draw 1 card T2. Lose 1 life > Draw 2 cards T3. Lose 2 life > Draw 3 cards So, basically you get 5 cards for 3 life points with a high chance of drawing another ring in a 4 rings deck. In the meantime, 2 mana wraths, high life-gain with Solitude and Phlage.... I'm amazed that the pro players are saying that the one ring is 'medium' and can't do anything against most decks. It's not the ring itself, its the prot+excess card advantage not the card itself.
The card is ridiculously broken. They said amulet titan wants to combo at turn 3. Sure, but when they do not have the exact mana to explode, ring is the best thing to do to stall a turn and next turn you can draw 3 and ramp to 4+ more mana than previously
One Ring getting banned would be lame. I don't even play anymore and this stuff still gets to me lol. I get the Grief ban, though I wish there was better ways to combat it than to just straight ban it. Bans are just not a good time and are why I quit a couple years ago.
I think that Javier made a point here: Grief is not good right now, but is literally just one card away from beeing broken. Yesterday we tried Scam with "Fear of missing out" from Duskmourn, just for fun. Scamming your opponent turn 1, and hasting a FOMO turn 2 with an Arena of Glory is brutal. Double Thoughtseize + 10 DMG Turn 2. Thats just ridiculous. By the way, I am a Grief lover, but that's just to much. :D
The ban on grief made me finally quit modern. Fury should have never been banned, back then it should have been grief. Scam has seen two bans now, LE and Rhinos have seen two bans too. All along the One Ring is choking all the fun out of the format.
I think TOR is far more liked than people like to admit Not saying it is secretly loved but I definitely feel like it's only ever a problem card to people when it's the opponents TOR their own is ok , so it's much more 50/50 like and dislike
If the One Ring is fine, why are Uro, Glimpse of Nature, Faithless Looting, Dig Through Time and Treasure Cruise on the banlist? They're all way worse at generating card advantage and harder to build around.
ok but treasure cruise is actually just insanely broken TOR costs 4 mana and takes 2 turns to generate what treasure cruise does for 1 mana and no life. imagine DRC bauble treasure cruise... 😬
@@thonk7611 Sure let's imagine. Turn 1 fetch, DRC, Bauble Turn 2 fetch, counterspell Turn 3 land, Bolt, Treasure Cruise Even in magical Christmas land, you're casting Cruise turn three at the earliest. Almost like a certain legendary artifact that happens to also give protection from everything🤔
@@arvidsteel6557 i would say that's not close to magical christmas land t1 fetch drc bauble bauble t2 fetch cantrip treasure cruise there's lots of ways to do it too, especially if you throw thought scour into the mix either way, it's not really the same play pattern as TOR at all. they don't play like the same cards, probably wouldn't go in the same slots or even the same decks. you probably wouldn't put the one ring in a phoenix deck yknow (not that phoenix is broken)
@@thonk7611 My bad, didn't know your definition of "Magical Christmas land" doesn't include bad decks incapable of interacting with the opponent in a relevant way (Maybe add some Street Wraiths and Gut Shots while you're at it! Turn 1 Cruise!) Ofcourse TOR wouldn't see play in the same decks as Cruise. Because Cruise has more deckbuilding restrictions and weaknesses that leave you not being able to run the ramp or boardwipes that make TOR optimal.
28:28 Thats precisely what I think is the biggest issue with the Ring, or perhaps more with the extremely efficient Wrath of the Skies control decks have access now - you feel like you cannot be fast enough to get under a 2 mana Wrath anyway and since combat damage isn´t happening either you feel pressured into running Ring yourself to refill your hand and not just waste a turn. Control and Aggro decks running the same card to fuel their gameplan is one of the biggest signs something is wrong with a card, that its just too good at what it does.
"Fun" aside, I think the main problem with Grief is that it has a similar issue to when Jace the Mind Sculptor was first printed, i.e. you could play a long interactive game after Grief resolves and they rip your two best cards and drop a huge body on turn one. Just like you could play a long game after Jace resolved. But your likelihood of winning from that point is so low, and it warps the game so much. So regardless of how miserable it might feel, I think the insidious thing is that you think you can still win even though your percentage chance went down so much just because of one card, or in the case of Grief, two cards (Grief plus a way to bring it back).
Agree with most of what was said in this podcast, and I enjoyed it. Sadly I feel like I must take a break from Magic due to the WotC staff response to "the Nadu situation" as MaRo called it on his blog post today. The blog posts miss the mark imo, and smack of damage control rather than actual transparency. Which is only to be expected from PR posts. Maybe I'm just cynical, but it's really diminished my trust in WotC to balance their game for 1v1 players.
@@eikumbokum like all corporations WOTC cannot actually affect knowledge of the problem - that they keep printing busted cards - without jeopardising the way that they run things more broadly (and their profit margins obviously). Its why most companies eventually eat themselves and collapse.
@@danielklein5829 True. It's interesting to contrast things with how Konami approaches Yu-Gi-Oh. Namely, they provide very minimal insight to their internal process and decisions. In some ways, I prefer their approach. Feels more genuine.
@@eikumbokum i think yugioh is a considerably worse game but I do think the deeply american style that WOTC affects is often annoying and leads to more anger and consternation because when they make an "illogical" argument which avoids the point that's considerably more infuriating than saying nothing at all.
@@danielklein5829 whether Yu-Gi-Oh is a worse game is subjective. My observation was simply regarding the objective difference in communication styles. But yes, to your point WotC's willingness to engage with the community often seems to backfire.
@@eikumbokum idk man I think a game which only rotates via powercreep and lasts only two turns is bad. But yes I accept that this is a subjective claim.
People have a tendency to only remember the bad experiences over good ones. One of favorite games I played against scam, my opponent Griefed me turn 1 and looked at my hand and said… “I am going to lose this game.” I have played scam at certain times also mostly mono black or orzhov and yeah. You can have busted starts or grindfests. Most of the time you are out of gas as much or more than your opponent when you turn 1 scam especially if you mulligan and they don’t.
@@joshuagriffith9191 you are remembering a uniquely positive experience and using that as justification that grief isn't a problem. I am sure we can all remember the time we have thoughtseized someone and realised their hand was too good, that doesn't make thoughtseize a bad card, it just means your opponent got lucky. Now do two thoughtseizes and a menace body 4/3 menace body on turn 1 and the number of non-games goes up significantly. I am extremely pleased with them banning cards that do that even when their winrates aren't significant, bans should be about curating a better play experience too. Grief is well, only fun for griefers (maro's word for people who derive joy from their opponent's sadness).
@@danielklein5829Please lets remember the original point of my sarcastic comment. The Grief opening happens roughly 13/15% of the games. Meanwhile, everyone talks about this event as if its super regular. Should we also talk about the "Titan opening" where the card combination allows them to win for sure on turn 3? The argument of fun also doesnt make sense, its subjective and lazy. Getting hit with TOR and losing to protection plus insane card advantage is not fun at all. Let alone chains of it.
Javi, do you have a post nadu ban Jeskai list? Im playing in an RCQ saturday and would love to jam it. I played your Pro Tour MH3 list at an RCQ 2 weeks ago and top 8ed.
I would love to see it too , now I’m just rooting outside the energy package, turn it back to doman for the binding e solitude back in cus It’s better against boria energy and every other matchup
There is a lot of over-reaction to the one ring in my experience. I am not sure what it is to be honest. There are answers to it, if it's such a big deal and it upsets people so badly, they should play those answers, but in my experience they are not and I don't know why. You can easily turn it into a 4 mana fog if you have instant removal held up for it and respond to the first activation. Or you can counter it, or thoughtseize it, or whatever else. In modern if you allow 4 mana cards to resolve, and you don't deal with them for more than 1 or 2 turns you should expect to lose the game, and the one ring is no different. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-ddbRmgfhI-s.html I have literally had this situation where my opponent salted off about the one ring, after I won a game with Jeskai casting wrath of the skies as a 6 for 1 against boros energy. I tried to discuss with him, but he refused to hear it, all he had in his mind was that I had cast a one ring that game so I must have won because of that. It couldn't be that he over-committed to a board when I had wrath of the skies since my opening hand, it had to be the one ring in his mind.
People let cards they do not like cloud objective judgment. Back when I played EDH, I would immediately get complaints about extra turns, but no one said anything about the fact I had triple the mana and cards compared to them, lol.
Its so nice to say there are good answers outthere to the one ring, because people are dumb and dont play them. thats simply not true people play answers but it doesnt fare well against the normal gameplan of ring decks. Example: Colorless Eldrazi: They Play only big hitters, you have to answer that, after that ring comes, draws more. Jeskai Control is different, it plays many answers and in non-ring formats, on turn 4 the opponent gets a hole in which he can place something thats sticks (for example std) ring stops that, there is no hole (thats the reason aggro decks are dead in modern).
Only counters are good answer. Other than that you are minimum down a card and cant attack for one turn and if you have no answer at the spot, the card just gives the opp such a lead, you cant come back from. How often have i faced a board state that was winable and the one ring alone turnes everything arround
@@C42ST3Nyou aren't necessarily minimum down a card, but i get what you're saying discarding it and removing it in response to the first draw are both ways to 1 for 1 it
Grief has always been a miserable play experience, and not to mention another free spell with no drawbacks. The force cycle is the perfect example of a balanced free spell in modern. They put you down a card after all is said and done, but the tradeoff is that you get to play a spell for no mana. (Force of Vigor could be argued to be too strong as well, because its 2-2 at best for 0 mana.) And here's what a scammed Grief entails: - Getting 2x Thoughtseized on Turn 0, while also presenting a 4/3 Menace. - "Hoops" to jump through: 1x Grief, 1x Undying Effect, 1x ANY Black card. (~2.1 card combo) - 0 Card disadvantage for playing a free spell. Grief player trades one undying card and any black card in exchange for the two best cards in Opponents hand. And is also left with a 4/3 which opponent MUST topdeck an answer for because their hand has already been destroyed. On turn 0. - Next to no counterplay if you are on the draw. - Scamming a grief should be a high-risk, high reward play. Maybe if regular removal could have disrupted the grief player and put them down CA if they themselves are on the draw it would probably be fine. But we can stack the triggers to thoughtseize first and also hold up the undying effect, it narrows down counterplay options to very specific SB cards. (Again, assuming you win the die roll) IMO, free spells in modern should ALWAYS come with a drawback. Evoke is nowhere near enough of a drawback with the cardpool we have access to.
@@violin23232323 I agree that it is a cost, but (Any Black Card) is the least costing "cost" that you could tack on as a drawback in predominantly black decks.
