Imagine you get matched with saffronolive, one of your favorite content creators, well known for his spicy brews and playing outside the box decks, and he's playing %*@(#,÷$ scam lol

I would love a full series of color shifted modern archetypes...

One of the biggest issues I have with the grief scam decks is the play draw difference. I would bet that when scam decks get the play first in match 1 they have a huge win rate advantage.

Lmfao @26:26 activating Dauthi into Lavinia was hilarious!

Agreed with your assessment. These games proved why Fury absolutely needed to go; you'd have closed out games so much faster, likely turning a couple losses here in to wins. But to me, watching this, it's not just that Grief feels so bad to play against, it's that it warps the game so much. You're using 3 non-lands to get rid of 3 non-lands; it's fair, in a sense, and usually can't quickly win afterwards (Voidwalker shenanigans notwithstanding), but it puts you both in to top-deck mode far quicker than the game is 'supposed' to. That's not healthy for the game, even if it's not particularly overpowered (eg you couldn't do much against that man-lands/efficient Eldrazi creatures deck, because their average card power was high and didn't need all that much synergy to do stuff).

Not that many people are aware of this because the elementals were kinda rare at first when they came out, but BW stoneblade and BW shadow were the proto scam decks where you could scam and play your Grief turn 1, Shadow or mystic on turn two, followed by a Kaldra turn 3. The problem with that deck is the same as the one you see here, the scam pattern itself felt kinda pointless, you lose three cards to take three cards and you can't attack until turn 3 with a 3/2, which is fairly underwhelming, it's counter intuitive, you can even see Seth discovering that undying effects like "Not Dead After All" are a better scam combo than Ephemerate BECAUSE of the extra power and additional attack turn. Yes you take your opponent's best 3 cards, but that's not really much of a bargain because you're putting what is essentially "air" in your deck just to do it with all the undying and ephemerate effects, meaning it's about as miserable to play WITH as it was to play against said pattern. Of course, this deck soon got overshadowed by the Yorion Elementals/moneypile deck of the time, so maybe it'll play a bit better now, but I really doubt it. All in all, the reason Fury was a problem in and of itself is that it edged out go wide decks LIKE humans, Merfolk, Goblins, etc., which are really strong against, you guessed it, targeted removal like Solitude, so while the Grief pattern was miserable to play against, it also added insult to injury by raining on other unrelated decks' parade.

Was it a misplay around 17:54 to not Ephemerate the troll on the opponent's turn, removing the -1/-1 counter to speed up the clock by a turn?

"Everyyyybody puuuuuunts!....soooometiiiimes" -R.E.M.

If anything I think the occasional punt improves the video quality, because it drives comments + engagement of people pointing out the punt :) (Also, it can be very entertaining!)

26:30 I don't think you're actually lost. If you don't draw with castle locthwain, you can attack with troll, kill Jirina, and then ephemerate to untap the troll. Now they can't attack, because if they do you can block it and then attack them back for the win.

Hey Seth it was super cool to see the humans deck in round 3, maybe Richard can take a few pointers from that deck to build around Lavinia like he mentioned in the earlier podcast. Hope you guys can make a video about that brew!

Seth, i find it funny that you went on a rant about recovering from punts right after conceding a game that you hadn't even lost yet because you punted. Match 3, after running into Lavinia, you could have attacked, and then Ephemerated Troll in response to the Jhoira sac, giving you a blocker and having them go down a creature, letting you survive. You just scooped because you punted, though.

Grief needed to go alongside fury. Fury, at least for me, was only a real problem after grief robbed me of my two best cards slowing me down and making my creatures far more important

I saw that Lavinia misplay coming from a mile away. Screaming at my monitor like that picture of Walter White in the car.

Modern's version of Dark Ritual + Hymn to Tourach + Thoughtseize, but this leaves a 3/2 Menace in play. So much fun as a play pattern. You can't leave this powerful opening in a format without a true Force of Will.

U should try the persist +trumpeting carnosaur version of B/R midrange too. I feel like you would like the play style 😄

You punted at 36:55 but the opponent didn't see/punish it. They could have activated the Blinkmoth to pump the construct up 4/4.

First game against Eldrazi Tron is a good illustration of just how many broken cards there were in MH2. Opponent more or less won with two specific lands (Urza's Saga), didn't need to cast spells.

Man every time seeing him scoop with so many outs in his deck is just... Augh!

Reprieve to steal a turn is sweeet!

17:50 you could have blinked the troll and that would have let you kill opponent who was at exactly 9

Been so long since we see Seth play modern on Budget/Much/Against. Miss the days when we get one of each every week.

The first game against Tron was close they just drew insanely well after you got rid of all there cards

Yes, finally some modern. Thank you!

Seems like stoneforge mystic with kaldra compleat and stuff is probably better than the troll persist package. Helps to close out games quickly post scam

Nah. Grief and Fury are both powerful, but the deck's ability to shred your hand and overpower the board (with the 8 damage of a scammed fury) was backbreaking. Grief often just gets outpaced on the board with a good hand or a decent draw. Now its a pretty good deck, but it doesn't decide the game on mulligans

Thank you for your comment on punting! Super helpful approach!

At least Ozhov is more lore appropriate to be running scams.

Urza's saga is an insane card. No nonland cards in hand and Urza's Saga claws the opp. back into the game

I'd love to see an internal tournament of the banned decks in Modern history where the key cards for the decks are allowed. Think pod vs twin vs storm vs eldrazi, vs oko, vs hogak, vs scam. I think it would be very interesting to see how the "busted" decks from ten years ago hold up against current standards given all of the cards printed since most of these bannings.

When you play against tron You should always be destroying not the tower. The thought process there is to make them use the tower to crack maps or do whatever to reassemble tron but then the tower is tapped, when tower is the piece played to complete tron they have more mana than if it were a mine or plant, seems counter intuitive but this is my bad paraphrasing of Jim Davis explaining when he was still playing tron and modern in general

I'm glad this archetype earned a name: I'd been wanting to build around those 1-2 mana 'black flickers" for a while.

BW Ephemerate scam has been a deck since MH2's inception, and has always been a lackluster deck. Red is just a more powerful color than white in modern, and turn 1 Fury is so much better than a turn 1 Solitude

Nah, they made a mistake officially supporting commander.

CannibusBoy has apparently never met an alt art they didn't love.

Some great words of wisdom around 29:38 :)

The fact that Urza's Saga is still legal is absolutely baffling to me.

WotC be like "The One Ring is totally ok but Up The Beanstalk needs to be banned immediately" ok buddies

Have just gotten to the deck tech, and boy, is this a beauty.

Yo Seth, been inspired by a couple of your fling decks and I've been trying to pull it off in standard Been playing: [Bloodletter of Aclazotz] + [Ziatora] Made two brews so far: 1. Try and get the biggest [Thousand Sun's Smithy] golem possible and toss a single golem for lethal 2. Panharmonicon Dragon Tribal, grab the kamigawa spirit dragons (Tried a lot of combinations of them but settled on 4x red, 2x Green/black), 4x bonehoard dracosaur and 4 roaming thrones and take advantage of the on death trigger value Very fun, very against the odds

I very much agree with your assessment at the end. Fury was good and powerful but I think they should have hit Grief instead. Keep Modern powered Flametongue Kavu. All the talk about "now the small creature decks get to make a comeback" is pretty silly IMO. Yawgmoth gets to come back and it FEASTS on small creature decks. I'm not convinced they made the right choice in banning the fair card over the unfair card. Then again, there is a history of that in Modern where degenerate nonsense seems to thrive more often than not (look to Tron's continued existence over many many many years)

I feel like I like how they did the bans. Like they definitly made scam worse, but they didn’t just make it unplayable. Like I feel like scam is a fun deck that deserves to be tier 1

Looks like scam might be... _not dead after all_

even if Scam isn`t as good when running Grief and Solitude, with the evoke cycle still in modern, sooner or later, wotc will print somethig that will make up for the lack of fury, perhaps with more card draw, more pitch spells etc. So Scam already has the foudnations for being a pusted "fair deck." With solitude and grief, Grief for dealing with the hand of the opponent and solitude to deal with the creatures of the opponent.

@mtggoldfish , You should do a video like this, but for the restricted list in Timeless ("Is Channel too powerful to restrict?" kind of a video). I have personally found that 1 [[Channel]] is still enough to reliably win on turn 2 or 3 if you have 8-ish tutors in your deck. I clean swept the Midweek Magic: Introducing Timeless event with just an absolute pile of whatever I had (with the game plan of channeling [[Realmbreaker, the Invasion Tree]]), so you could definitely plan some content around it if the games aren't too short.

I feel like everyone has blinders on, Fury was *the* ban target on everyone's mind, not because Scam was at the top of the meta, but because Fury was everywhere and completely dicked on X/1s. They actually banned what everyone wanted gone without banning the deck.

I should read the ban announcement but my reasoning behind why ban fury and not grief: grief is always either a 2 for 1 or 3 for 2 on yourself. If the opponent top decks removal and it's even. Grief is hit by almost every removal in the format where fury dodged them.

me aftering "lavinia"....."maybe we sac voidwalkee" (insert that pic of walt in the back of the suv)

That art in that tron deck….

I think the swamp cycle troll is a bit hopeful and gets stuck in your hand a bit where you could swamp cycle it but it isn't really good. Maybe Malakir Rebirth as you can scam with it, pitch, or use it as a land if you have to. Even though it isn't the fastest, I think the stoneforge mystic package is good here as I see that the deck with white seems to get ahead but then at times suffers from individual cards not closing out the game. The other creatures already demand removal which takes heat off stoneforge. No fury makes stoneforge safer. The usual scam pieces are kind of decent cards to protect stoneforge from removal. The other parts of the deck are fast whereas stoneforge is card efficient.

Did the same thing in pioneer hit karn and not nkytho's witch powers down but dose not kill TBH now karn is gone there are better ways to play it

I know you love the white counter....but is there potentially a more competitive card to run in its place? Format looks healthier, at least.

I love opening up a vid and seeing this ms dos browser game.

I don't know much if anything about Modern.. didn't expect Vindicate to be a good enough removal spell for this format, especially since it is a Sorcery.

We saw dauthi voidwalker cast an opponents ulamog in the finals of pro tour lord of the rings between calcano and Jake great match awesome play line against Tron from the scam deck #scamsnotdead

I’ve been saying this even before they banned. They needed to ban both. As much as I wanted fury not to go. But fury and grief both needed to go.

17:53 for the easiest "how do you hit for lethal instead of activating castle" puzzle in the world.

Wotc should really consider respecting their own resource system built into their own game. Or, you know, they can keep printing yugioh cards into magic, whatever.

Cauldron Haze might be interesting for this variant: Can be pitched to both elementals, can save a creature while double solituding at instant speed, might be neat.

It's not a Thoughtseize, it's a Pilfer or a Distress. No life needs to be paid here for the cascade of discard effects on the first turns. Paying 6 life for that kind of play pattern would make a difference in a lot of match-ups.

"its ok, theyre just topdecking with tron" welcome back to modern seth...

Could we see an orzhov card that gives -X/-X to the board to mimic Fury and pitch to our elementals? Zealous persecution comes to mind.

It appears to me that, without Fury as the backup scam target, Scam decks really do get much worse because they need the faster clock to capitalize on the tempo advantage of a scam. Grief is still not fun, Scam might still be too viable for health/fun of the format, and I'd be happy to see it gone just because, but Orzhov Scam is definitely a worse gameplan than Rakdos Scam.

Against tron, you can attack Karn then cast the Karn using Dauthi. It was a line in match 2, game 1.

Damn Seth that SH eating grin after you stompped Tron

Yeah, one of the big problems with scamming grief is that it's a powerfully proactive play using nominally reactive cards.

Okay grief was fun and all, but the troll plan was what i was all in on this video, janky reanimator against the odds next?

So in yuigoh there is a card called smoke grenade of the thief which when destroyed let's you send a card from your opponents hand to the graveyard. There was a combo deck that let you repeat this 3 to 5 times . It is still banned to this day. So it's easy to say having a deck that can discard just as much isn't good

Wasn’t the first MH2 deck you played after it’s release something similar to this deck?

I wonder if that budget Historic Lingering Souls deck could be fun in Modern without Fury. Anthems or just going super wide seems to be able to deal with W+6 or Bowmasters, and otherwise the removal is just 1 for 1ing your stuff.

21:12 this is the correct reaction whenever tron loses!!!!!!!

I think scam as we know it is actually dead. HOWEVER, I think this Orzhov flicker package centered around the ever-abusive pitch elementals is a very real thing that might be more powerful than B/R scam in a meta where scam doesn't exist. The awkward part of this list, as correctly identified, was the fact that solitude can't close games anywhere NEAR as brutally fast as the rakdos package that included fury and bloodtithe and Voidwalker and Stoopid Monkey. What it can do, however, is G R I N D. Reprieve can ship big spells back to hand making them vulnerable to midgame grief flickers, the addition of White answers big midgame threats far better than Red can, and most importantly traditional scam being removed from the metagame means more or the the only fast deck it has to contend with is Delver, another deck that will sorely feel the loss of Fury. So ditch the void walkers, ditch the mana tithes (they're cute, but no) maybe even the vindicates?, ADD SHEOLDRED (a miser copy that you never drew doesn't count as running it), find some card advantage (the biggest downside of running white), and generally go up the curve. We've seen Elish Norn absolutely dumpster beanstalk moneypile decks and the W/B flicker-scam is a natural home for it. With some tuning, this might be a real force in the modern midrange value dumpster.

I'd say yes but to be honest I'm surprised they banned what they did it made the formate healthier but not as good as they could have at least we don't gotta deal with fable scame anymore

I feel like the deck kinda lacks power. When you scam fury you get a 4/4 double striker, which is actually a really good body, 3 turn clock on its own. Scamming solitude with ephemerate leaves behind a 3/2 lifelinker, which is an 7+ turn clock, since it also gains life for the opponent. This pile is a lot more like traditional control, but without the good counterspells, so a lot less protections against instants and sorceries. I think the deck needs some better strategy to close out the game. Since the deck does so much less damage, the oponent can just draw back and rebuild from the 3x grief.

Pretty telling on the ineptitude of WotC when the most obvious card of the Scam deck dodges the ban. Makes me curious if MH3 has the 5 evoke elementals and they are trying to avoid having to ban as many elementals as possible because often, when a brand new card(like Hogaak) isn't a key part of the deck, they just ban the most obvious card of the deck so they don't have to ban twice. MH2 has been out for a while so they've largely made most of the money they will off it so a Fury + Grief ban is pretty safe financially unless those cards will be reprinted soon.

LAVINIA!!

35:45 why did he not cast Mana Tithe targeting Chalice?

The Eldrazi Tron player had you dead in that third game a few different times. I suppose what you said about punting comes full circle, though. 🤷‍♂️

I was calling for Grief to get banned over Fury since the before the no-ban announcement a few months ago, but they went with Fury. I still think that was a mistake and I will stick to believing that.

My thoughts: “doesn’t Lavinia stop Voidwalker?” Seth: “I think we’ve got this one… I’ll sac the Voidwalker…” Lavinia: “I’m about to end this man’s whole career…”

I need more modern content! give it to me!

When I saw Fury getting banned but not Grief, the first thing I thought was "Doesn't this just make people build Orzhov Scam?", so this video makes me feel kind of vindicated. Not as vindicated as a tron land, but kind of vindicated nonetheless.

I will say this deck did struggle more against multiple creatures and closing the game opposed to Rakdos scam.

Why mana tithe the crab? Couldve played solitude, pitch tithe, ephemerate and you get two kills and a creature

Fury was really a problem. It worked well not just with scam strategies. It could be played in control, jeskai, beanstalk, rhinos. To me that was the issue..not the scam deck.

I played a modern FNM tonight and lost to Thragtusk while playing Scam...

I think maybe try mono black. The white didn’t seem too great anyways

It’s almost as if wizards has been making cards that go against the “spirit of the game” for years

I really dont think Grief is an issue because its always putting you down more cards than your OP. On the other hand Fury was pretty much always a net positive exchange for whoever cast it

I do like the thinking on the banns though they powered down the builds but didn't kill the deck most modren decks have the capability to put the game on lockdown turn 2

Lavinia is the best 2 mana hate bear ever printed

My take on this is that wizards did not make a mistake. Scam is kind of a combo deck and as for play pattern of getting thoutseized while annoying is not meta breaking. Hell, people found bogles to have a really annoying play pattern at one point. Wizards goal is not to ban everything people find annoying but rather make the format a playground for a variety of different decks. The problem was that fury was pushing out a ton of aggro archetypes out of the format which is why that is what should have been banned. Banning grief would just make the entire archetype obsolete and if we start banning entire archetypes cuz we don’t like to play against it everyone would have the same deck of generic creatures with no one able to have fun with their own unique tastes of what they find fun

Thanks for making the point by doing this. "I bet our opponent thought this was over, they thought it was done." 😂 Lol. I wasn't playing Modern because of the Grief play pattern. Now that Wizards refused to ban it, it's all I'm going to do until it's banned, with Teferi, Time Raveler. I don't think it's okay, Wizards does. See you all in the Leagues, enjoy :))

17:45 you coulda ephemerated troll to hit for nine the next turn

Mono Black scam is so much better than all the others versions. It's not even close, wotc trolled everyone by leaving grief lol

Ive been running something similar to this minus the mana tithe. Scam is just going to be b/w now

The troll persist thing does not seem worth it here in the slightest.

Not just Tron but blinged out Tron

If they ban grief instead of fury there'll be a very fast evoke boros burn scam

Not playing tidehollow schuller so you can go t1 grief into schuller feels wrong tbh.