I think my favorite thing about watching Seth's videos, particularly the more Against the Odd's style ones, is the pauses when the opponent has to stop to read the cards.
I played 8 rack for years until I finally got burnt out by trying to keep up with modern power levels and I turned the deck into a Liliana Oathbreaker. This video legit is tempting me back into Modern
Tell me about it. My first modern FNM win was with 100$ 8rack (well, back then it was 100$). A list inspired by Professor's video on the budget 8rack. I took a little break after the rack could no longer damage planeswalkers which became way too annoying to deal with on the budget. After I decided to give the deck another go it was no longer the same modern and I got powercrept out of the format, essentially.
@@Suavek69 lol, it was the Prof's video for me too that helped me decide what deck to build. Also big mood at the Walker change. I did some weird things where I started running stuff like Vampire Hexmage as PW removal
@@bronsonkim6652 yeah LOLLL I still have hexmages in my binder to this day. It was all around terrible, insignificant change for 99% of players, tragic news for rack players
@@Suavek69 Haha, I was also inspired by Prof's 8 Rack video and played the deck for several years both online and in paper. That was when I was first learning how to play and 8 Rack was my deck of choice for a quite a while.
38:00 Seth doesn't have the exile zone open to see that Living End is exiled with a Void counter and that he can sac Void Walker to re-cast Living End and wipe the board clear and then likely just win with rack damage.
@@MTGGoldfish yeah, it was like the pithing needle came out of the deck in slow motion, because my brain kicked on the adrenaline in response to seeing such horrors unfold before my very eyes
An interesting tidbit about the flavor text of Wrench Mind, since Olive commented on it. "What is the sound of one neck snapping?" Is a reference to what's called a Koan. A Koan is a riddle Zen Buddhist monks ask their pupils. It's a question without an answer, and it's purpose is to encourage thought & contemplation in students. "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" is the classic example of a Koan
Same, I kinda want a format like classic modern which is just modern without the horizon or lotr sets. The concept of designing sets to fit into modern was cool at first, but they just went too hard on the powerlevel.
Well we are about to get rotation for modern next year with the next modern horizons set. Maybe some new decks can emerge but yes, modern was better before
Voidwalker is VERY hard for living end to beat. If you can get it in the yard (sac it or just thoughtseize yourself), the way the ordering works, living end will bring it back to play, then finish resolving, putting it to dauthi-board. Then just sac dauthi to living end THEM. Dauthi will go to yard, then come back with ANOTHER LIVING END. You can now cast living end every turn.
@@friedaiceborn1663 well yes true but if you are worried about decks that go faster than you and taking you down low on life then I would suggest adding the cards in and add ravens crime and a dredge land or two so you can literally keep discarding your opponents cards down so you wont worry about your opponents having a full hand though or let your opponents draw their deck out
@@Alex_Simpson711 true. I mean that there could be a dimir controll deck with the rack as a wincon. Get your opponent hellbent and answer their one card per turn while the rack whittles them down
Neat build. I would just need the MH and LOTR cards to upgrade my old Rack deck and I'm there! Now to take a big sip of coffee before checking the price on those and-
I don't know if anyone else is thinking about this, but in match 5 game one, Seth gets to tutor with Urza's Saga and chooses the Rack, but couldn't he have gotten the pithing needle and named shadow spear? The spear wasn't equipped at the time, so with my understanding this would prevent the spear from being equipped and all the life gain that was the primary cause of the loss? Am I wrong?
@meagherman1013 life loss is a thing, while pitching cards has never been an issue for the deck..one of my preferred discard spells has always been black mail, you can even steal a land
Saffron Olive playing interesting and fun/janky Modern Brews will always be my favourite MTG Content! The Modern Card Pool is so big to pick Cards from and whenever new Cards come out and are legal in Modern you can go through the whole Card Pool again and probably find some fun and janky Combo that only works now because of a new Card and doing that itself is fun as well! Prost & Cheers from the Snow-Covered Bavarian Alps
I may be alone on this, but i prefer see mtgo games over Arena games when Seth plays to show us decks, and i play only arena, maybe its the feeling over so much years watching Seth with Mtgo. Iam on point that when an arena video is out i dont get excited to see, but when a mtgo video comes out i see it from begining to end 😅
"you know what would be nice, a discard spell" (has augur on board and skips through upkeep) - you figured it out a turn late, but you gave them an extra turn in which they could have double bolted you for the win
the punt of taking the rack over pithing needle for shadowspear hurt my soul so very much, good to see one of my fave archetypes alive and well though, even if its purity is diluted by MH2 nonsense
I appreciate that you always choose to play first. Going second is the biggest lie I've ever seen 8 rack players believe. You just can't beat a turn 1 thoughtseize/grief scam.
at 33:06 i think you could have won instead of putting your opponent to 3. You use Srza's Saga and Mishra's Factory to make 2 artifacts to deal 10, i think if you had used Urza's Saga to transform Mishra's Factory opponent would be at 5 then used your 3 black mana to shrieking affliction and augur of skulls(sacrifice) to put opponent to 0 cards in hand which would rack + shrieking to deal 6? Sorry if I'm wrong, I'm not good at following the state of the game on magic online.
After the episode a couple days ago where it took Seth forever to recognize what that users twitch name was, I'm concerned that he didn't see the easy pun about rack with the thumbnail and Liliana.
Seth you really made a great pro modern horizons argument after match 1! With some mh cards you can even play the rack in modern. And like win games too
I'm working on changing my perspective about Modern Horizons. Rather than feeling bad when I play Modern Horizons cards I'm coming to grips with the idea that you just have to play them, but try to use them to do something cool or unique rather than what everyone else is doing. Like how you can do a lot of wild things in Legacy, but you have to play the good cards like Force of Will and Brainstorm to have any chance of keeping up. Still miss old Modern, but this is my current theory for enjoying the current version of the format.
Love changing the perspective. From a content perspective I’d much rather watch you possibly win some games in Against the Odds, using these new cards. Sometimes the game might turn into saga token beat down, but that’s magic. Keep up the good work!
@@MTGGoldfish I've always held the opinion that Modern should be a community-moderated format. I could imagine something like the "usage stats" that Smogon uses to create their tiering system would be very helpful in picking out problematic cards without the obfuscating factors of tilt or mob psychology coming into play. MTGA and MTGO already exist and could easily be used to harvest the data needed for this, as well as for polling and suspect testing. At least, if not modern, there should be a format like this. If fricking Pokemon can do it, so can we.
Yeah I finally had to bite the bullet on the elementals myself for my flash deck to make it playable. Now it's Esper Flash Scam. I do agree with MH you're either playing them or you aren't competing.
I love Rack, I have a Pox-esque 12 Rack deck, 12 might sound like a lot, but when you Rack someone for +10 damage on one upkeep it starts to make sense. Not sure if Dark Ritual into a Hymn is better or worse than cheating out a Grief. I also have a Rack Commander deck, it's due for an upgrade but it's still a hilarious mix of weenies, discard effects/payoffs and Stax to make sure people have to sit there and suffer. It's a different kind of fun than some people are into, but I think when I throw in some more powerful cards it'll run more smoothly. There isn't enough Rack content out there!
Even with the Undying Malice effects...Augur of Skulls seems like a slower, more expensive mind rot. The base form is 4 total mana to make them discard 2. And you can't even chump-sac like a Steve If you undying it back, you're spending a card and another 3 mana, so 7 mana and 2 cards to discard 4...2 mind rots would be cheaper
How are you mathing this? Augur costs 2 mana. His discard ability doesn’t cost anything. Augur plus malice effect is 3 mana total to rip 4 cards from the opponent.
I forgot Funeral Charm was in Modern. I wonder if it could be good outside of a Rack deck nowadays with Orcish Bowmasters and Ragavans out there to kill with it.
Spoilers Jeaze that last match was brutal. Thats happened to me going into game five with a 4-0 playing my homebrew flash deck. Played tron 3 times and match 3 was game five and it was eldrazi and they ran perfect.
omg it happen I ask for it on the description of so many video ... I did want you to use the battle rack the invasion of eldrain on also since it eldrain spoiler season it would have fit so well
I'm surprised he's not using Malakir Rebirth as well for the scam. Is the loss of 2 life too much of a cost for it? Haven't played Modern in a while so IDK if it's just been found to not be a good card for the strategy.
Its more the fact that its a tapped land in a deck that wants to do everything in the early game, and at the same time you don't want to overload on reanimation in case you draw all feign deaths and no griefs
@@drakeconsumerofsoulsandche4303 Yeah, you'll notice that in the control game he tried to play out his hand before the two-mana counterspells came online. Its wild how fast it is. Sometimes I swear modern plays faster than legacy or vintage in terms of turns.
@@derrickthewhite1 In general, Modern is faster than Legacy because Legacy has Force of Will and slows down the games. Yes, you can get actual turn 1 killed in legacy, and not in modern, but Modern fast snowballs much more quickly because of the lack of Force of Will and Wasteland. Modern needs some lighter version of Wasteland. That would get mono-colored decks like this truly back on the map.
I've been playing rack for years and I can say the biggest upgrade is Haywire Mite. Run a bunch of fetches with one copy of overgrown tomb and wallah. You have a stone cold answer to leyline that you can find off a saga
Arena IS designed to keep you at a 50% winrate, but I don't think it uses the shuffler to that end in most formats. It makes them more money because matchmaking algorithms have observed how many bad matches people will endure without quitting the game outright and abuses that to force wins/losses for players that will keep playing because of the win/continue playing in spite of the loss. Every modern game with skill based matchmaking is designed to function this way, which is why matchmaking is generally a bad mechanic that players dislike compared to server browsers or hosted games. Essentially matchmaking is a scam designed to get players to play the game more and engage with MTX more in all videogames and MTGA is definitely no exception to that.
yeah the shuffler is just kind of crappy, in fact I daresay it isn't even sophisticated enough to be able to be rigged against you. True randomness is functionally impossible above the quantum scale; MTGA's hand smoothing algorithms could hardly be further from randomness. That said the matchmaking algorithm is absolutely trying to give you a 50% average winrate, and this means you do not get a 50-50 chance of winning any given ranked game. Some games are 20-80 and others are 80-20. Sure it averages to 50-50 but it doesn't feel that way and frankly wasn't that way at all.
I loved 8 Rack for a long time, but sadly yeah the busted cards ruined it for me and I left Modern and will now only play Commander with Proxies and having fun
Rack tron takes the win!!! (Disregard the part where the racks where just 1 mana artifacts to buff the karnstruct army the saga tron pooped out, and that said saga tron is whats fetched all the racks too xD)
If you're talking about Quest for the Nihil Stone, it's a definite thought but I assume it loses points due to being a bad topdeck compared to Rack/Affliction which are both golden if they come off the top while the opponent is already hellbent.
I don't care how you build it, if you play against any rack deck it just feels like a scam. Feels great to play though. One of those "All the fun for me and none for you" strats.
