As someone who follows the No Banlist modern Meta, most tournaments Top 8 are 4 Izzet Phoenix, 3 4cc good stuff and 1 pet combo deck that the pilot has played since 2016 and mysteriously takes the price home. If you think Hogaak is bad, you haven't seen what 4 Mental Misstep can do.
@@Netro1992 I think the most recent one I saw Depths took it all. The combo decks in no ban modern are all busted. It just depends which one the tournament isn't prepared for.
That was after Seth said his Wall of Roots had one power, which it did not. The minus one,one counters would have negated his enchantment's boost. JUDGE, hahahah.
This is awesome! Can we see a Round 2 wherein Hogaak builds with the cards printed in his absence and Nadu gets a chance to build with the expectation of playing against him? At the time of Hogaak, Leyline was a staple because people anticipated seeing him.
@PinkSpaceHippy This is true, but I am curious about this aspect specifically because 4C Nadu performed lower than Bant. I'm wondering if the color black changes its performance against Hogaak, or if it is in fact so monolithic that it would do better to Two Ships the matchup.
Yeah, Nadu wasn't built to beat faster combo decks because there just aren't any. That said Hogaak is legit threat in Vintage still so anyone who thinks Nadu is as bad as Hogaak was nuts from the beginning. Lol
the worst part is he was actually misplaying a bit, so this was hogaak, with not the best list, while being sorta misplayed. the gaak's absurd. (example of where he messed up, game 2 if he's going to sac his creatures with a single bridge in grave, he should've casted hogaak first to tap them and mill 8 more, and then sac the tapped creatures for untapped zombies)
The funniest part of hogaak is that he was playing the worse version of the deck. When bridge got banned people realized that going 100% beatdown was much much better than the combo plan, and so with bridge banned people were forced to play the good version of hogaak.
While more broken than Nadu, I appreciate Hogaak for killing you quickly instead of durdling through a non-deterministic combo that may or may not kill
If I'm not mistaken, Urza's Saga could have fetched one of the Haywire Mites instead of Shuko at 12:05, since this would have given Seth two more triggers to find lands with. I'm not sure how much it would actually end up mattering though, since Richard might've just won anyways with the combo.
Also many lists ran springleaf drum. Fetch that insead of 2nd shuko and you can still cast the noble heiarch. Also also, endurance outs the combo kill so the missing 4th mana actually mattered a ton.
Cardmarket MTG's channel has hosted a pretty cool series of flashback videos in this vein of having tournaments of all of the standout decks in a given format against each other. Thus far, they've gone through the various Worlds decks, Modern, and Pauper.
@@SpiritWing546 Nadu wins, current versions have plenty of endurances in the deck so the evoke trigger would force the bridges to self exile and the reshuffle effect would deal with the vengevines.
I howled with laughter when the chipmunk voices started on that fast forwarded Nadu combo. Wish there was an IRL option to do that - would make it bearable. Awesome video!
I think Richard missed approximately 23 full zombie movies worth of zombie triggers in that 2nd game. Also in game 4 I think Richard shuffled Polluted Delta back into his deck instead of putting it in the GY when fetching on turn 2.
He also milled less cards than he was supposed to a few times and sacrificed Hogaak and put him in the exile pile a couple times. Even with some blunders, it's still so powerful.
I really love 1v1 Goldfish content! I would love to see some more stuff like this where you play decks/match-ups that you would never see being played on Arena/MTGO.
100% down to watch more paper magic between you two and/or Crim! Matchups like this or just playing current Modern or Legacy - I'd be here for it all 🤠
I'm not surprised that Hogaak goldfishes better, but it's much easier to hate out, which is why it was less successful in its first PT when compared to Nadu. Nadu here has the disadvantage of being tech'd for the real PT meta and not a parallel universe where Hogaak is still legal. Would be interested to see what this matchup looks like if both sides are fully teched out for a meta of Ruby Storm/Nada/Gaak
It's an interesting question. That being said, I think people underestimate how hard it is to hate out Gaak. They play 3 Wispmares, 3 Wear//Tears and an Abrade. Gaak decks can also just absolutely go off from low resources. Game one is an example of this. If you take to turn two to stick an Unlicensed Hearse, it's too late. If you mull to 5 for a Leyline and Gaak mulls to 5 for Wear//Tear, the Gaak deck will stomp you in a functionally 4 card vs. 4 card hand. Also, I'd guess Gaak would run at least one Boseiju maindeck now, if not more.
Well, it can be hated out, but you still win on the play, can side in plenty of anti-hate, and are probably still significantly favored in games 2 and 3, based on raw power.
The fact that gaak performed so well then though every deck has 6+ hate pieces against it, often 4 in the main board should tell you that it's a more powerful deck than Nadu.
Nadu players really said that Thoracle wasn't the proper win con and reinvented four horseman combo that's tournament legal solely because it advances the board state despite being non-deterministic infinite loop. "Trust me, eventually my stack of cards will be in the right order to let me win and I do it infinite times. But I'm making bodies so it's legal."
It's deterministic if you do it properly, which Seth didn't quite do here. You make infinite mana first, then get waterlogged grove in play, do the loop putting only otawara/boseiju into the deck, draw it, and repeat.
@@jaredwonnacott9732 you only put otawara or boseiju into your deck. The waterlogged grove is already in play from a previous iteration where you went through the entire deck and put all the lands into play.
@@zacharylohner Oh, yeah, that makes sense, you'd have a two step cycle, essentially, one where you get the Waterlogged Grove back and one where you draw and use your Channel lands. If I'd actually played the deck, I'd have probably figured it out eventually, but A) I don't really have anyone to play modern with, and B) there's no way I could afford that deck.
35:27 is it me or Seth didn't fully demonstrate the loop here? I was confused about how to shuffle the lands back into your library after the first time playing Endurance. Turns out it works by enchanting Endurance with Nantuko to create copies of Endurance on land etb.
@@Netro1992 While Nadu is probably the correct ban, Shuko is not comparable whatsoever to Bridge. There's literally no deck shuko is playable in without Nadu
@@Il_Dilettante It is comparable in that banning shuko will not solve anything, but not reducing the expect sales by banning the biggest card in the set is a higher priority than having a working metagame, so down the banlist cards that shouldn't be there go yet again until they have to ban it anyway.
@@nvvv_ I can understand why they wanted to ban faithless looting. But yeah, their public reasoning for it was a load of hogwash that killed a bunch of fun decks, again, for the crimes hoogak WotC is run by the biggest hasbro clowns they could find.
@@SkillsByNiels The thing is that isn’t assured. So there is the possibility of the Nadu player still losing. That is the problem since it means the game doesn’t immediately end. Since you could have an enemy board wipe still since it doesn’t destroy basics. Thus it is a non deterministic win condition.
The thing about Hogaak is that, while it's the most broken game one deck in the history of Modern, it's also a graveyard deck, which is probably the one mechanic most vulnerable to hate. The amount of graveyard hate cards printed to date, even back in 2019, dwarfs any other type of effect. So this was a really powerful deck with an insane game one win rate, but its game two/three win rate was considered below 50% around the time Hogaak was finally banned. If you were actually playing against Hogaak in a tournament or a league, at the time of Hogaak's dominance, your sideboard would be full of graveyard hate, probably 8 or more graveyard hate pieces, and you'd of course side in every last one of them. So you could just mulligan down to 3 to get a hate card if you needed to. At that point, of course, Hogaak was also probably mulliganing looking for Force of Vigor to deal with your hate pieces. So it could be a reasonably fair matchup, but Hogaak probably had fewer anti-hate cards than you had hate cards. However, militating against Nadu is that it's blue green. It has fewer graveyard hate pieces than other decks that play white or black. You'd have to play suboptimal colorless graveyard hate cards like Tormod's Crypt, Relic of Progenitus, etc. and you'd feel some pressure to choose other higher quality colored cards over these, possibly resulting in having fewer than 8 hate pieces. And maybe you'd stick with 8 or more but then you'd be weakening your deck against the other decks in the field. It's not like it was ONLY Hogaak back then. Fortunately you would have a pretty good matchup against them as Nadu, since they'd all be gearing their sideboard to beat Hogaak and those cards do nothing against Nadu's combos. So it's a difficult analysis. I think Nadu has a pretty bad matchup against Hogaak in isolation, and without sideboarding there's a very poor chance to beat Hogaak unless you're also playing Hogaak. But if you have sideboarding and it's a tournament environment with multiple decks, where Hogaak is basically the deck to beat, Nadu wouldn't necessarily be terrible. Its sideboard plan would basically be "mulligan to find multiple graveyard hate pieces" and you can just ignore everything else. So you can play the same graveyard hate minigame as every other deck, which at least gives you maybe a 40% win rate against Hogaak, assuming like a 25% win rate in game one and a 60% win rate in games two and three. And you'd have a pretty good matchup against every other deck in the metagame, which might make up for your weak matchup against Hogaak, depending on just how centralized the metagame is in our thought experiment.
Yeah, but if there are two decks equally dominating the meta, but one of them beats the other when they meet, that one is obviously going to be the betrer performer.
Everyone talking about hogaak comming in using a land, but no one talking about when the nadu combo happened seth played endurance and everyone just thought he had infinite endurance triggers so he had infinite mana and tokens. He didnt infinitly loop it till he bestowed the springheart nantuko on it which they showed AFTER he went infinite which is just not possible
He didn't, but can't he also sac the Endurance to put it into his graveyard before the trigger resolves, then shuffle it back into his library to redraw it with his Nadu triggers still on the stack?
this is a great content for viewers like me. i am not sure how many viewers are like me, I dont play MTG anymore, not on any platform, but still watching MTG content and keeping up with all the news. I never played morden before, This really gives me an idea what is all these Nadu talk and Hogaak talk about.
You dont mess with the Gaak :) Would be fun to watch this again but with sideboard cards. If Nadu were to face Hogaak, there would 100% be leylines or Rips in the sideboard. Amazing content guys! Thanks for this
This was a fun matchup to watch! Forgot how strong Hogaak was ^^ Would be cool to see other banned Modern decks up against it! Eldrazi Winter, 12 Post, Scam w/ Fury, etc.
I like this concept of playing modern (or other formats) decks that in substance got banned being pitted against each other. You should keep do a series about this
Well, the arbor we can give him, since we don't know if he needed that draw. (No Nadu or blue manasource in hand) But the 2nd shuko from Urza's? Yeah, that was bad. Especially, since you only need 1 to get all the Nadu triggers, as you can re-equip an equipment to the creature it is already on.
Honestly, they were both a bit off with their decks and the decisions they made with them. Seth ran Nadu on stream on before the change away from Thoracle as the win con. Hogaak has only been Legacy legal for years at this point. In that way, it was fair. I get the feeling that Hogaak was winning regardless.
35:00 How does Seth loop the Endurance? If he's playing it each cycle to shuffle his graveyard he needs to play one each loop. Even evoking it he'll run out of green cards to pitch before a million mana. Edit: oh okay at 36:30 he attaches the Nantuko to the Endurance. I think he should have done that first but that should work.
These are old Hogaak decks with New Nadu deck Hogaak has 5 years less cards But Nadu wasn’t built against Dredge style it was built against Mirrors and Storm so Dredge has a big advantage no triple leyline
You can argue Hogaak wasn’t built for the Nadu matchup either. So Hogaak might be the better unfair deck (though I’m only through the first two games atp)
Seth! I think you should have fetched for dryad arbor instead of the surveil land on the end of Richard’s turn in game 2. It would have given you 2 more triggers at least lol
@@efuii if we are letting Nadu sideboard against Gaak, then Gaak can sideboard against Nadu, which also has a large amount of counters. And the rest in peace or Leyline argument is solved by a single Endurance. point being, pound for pound, card for card, Gaak is the more explosive, consistent, and powerful strategy of the two.
Really enjoyed the video, would love to see more like it. Hogaaks back up plan definitely seems better than nadus, but also Seth couldn’t seem to find nadu or chord of calling as much as Richard found hogaak, so that played a part as well. Both are completely miserable and both should live in the shadow realm forever.
@@MagizardInternet exactly seth build is using only one endurance which is a huge mistake as endurance is one of the win-cons in Nadu sheels, he not knowing how to play the deck also does not help.
37:48 That Nadu combo is orders of magnitude worse than I thought. For the game. Springheart Nantuko is from Modern Horizons 3 too so WotC definitely knew what they were doing. They probably expected people to use Thassa's Oracle and didn't think they would come up with this convoluted series of repeated land sacrificing in order to avoid using Oracle because it's bad to draw before the infinite draws start.
At 17:40 where Richard is demonstrating loop, wouldn’t he only need one copy of BFBelow and the altar to loop? Mill 8, delve 6 + convoke 1 can repeat infinite if I’m not mistaken
How does the Endurance re-shuffle all of the lands back into the deck after it's initial cast? 35:16 for infinite mana? As i understand it, the Endurance trigger resolves and only shuffles your cards into your deck once right? Wouldn't you need the nantuko before you can loop?
around 37:00 how are you infinitely recurring endurance? evoking it exiles cards and i don't recall you sacrificing it or showing a way to sacrifice it oh my bad i missed that you bestowed nantuko to endurance
Can someone explain how Seth was able to go infinite with just the one Endurance? How is he able to keep putting the lands back into his deck? Or was in implied that he had already used the Nantuko to keep copying it? Don't actually play MTG so that part lost me.
Watching Seth go through the endgame combo was splendid. It's wild that we found a way to revive The Four Horsemen into Modern. Because an opponent would be well within their rights to make you play it out, in case random chance could mean they never get the draw-land first. It's a tiny chance, approaching infinitely small, but it's very possible. Since they can't say how many repetitions of the loop they're performing, they have to track every single one...
RULE QUESTION: at 12:00 Seth floats a colorless during his draw phase. How does he spend it during his main phase to cast Nadu? wouldn't the mana pool empty between phases??
sagas trigger their ability at the beginning of the pre combat main phase, which is directly after said draw phase - and since the tap is a mana ability, its fine while that final trigger is on the stack. So he's doing it during his main phase, not the draw step.
@@purplecharmanderz2975 Oh, I thought "after you draw" in the reminder text meant "at the end of your draw step". Should they have written "after your draw step" instead then?
54:08 - On Rules for Damage Redirection and Trample. So, before any of the Damage happens, players of course have to assign how they'd like the damage distributed, and before any damage is assigned to the next target in the stack, one must assign lethal damage to whatever's first in the stack. Blockers declared, Use the Outrider to Target Wall of Roots twice, because you're feeling fun. Now damage assignments happen: Hogaak must assign 5 damage to the Wall of Roots before it can assign any damage to face, even if we all know that additional damage will be occuring simultaneously from another card effect. Hogaak cannot assign only 3 damage to the Wall of Roots and 5 to face, because it must finish assigning what it sees as lethal damage. Now, after damage assignments have been chosen, damage is dealt, all simultaneously. The damage redirection will occur, and you will have an unharmed Outrider, a Wall of Roots with 10 damage on it, and 3 trample getting to face. Then State Based checks, the Wall dies. So it would not have a deleterous effect to Outrider en Kor the Wall of Roots in the face of a Trampler.
I love a good best deck in history ladder type of event, or better yet, some no ban list content to show off just how nuts they could be. What I've always wanted to see is comparison of these decks across formats. Its just interesting to me how with all the extra tools in legacy and vintage these decks are way more busted compared to each other but also just fine to even bad compared to the rest of that format.
how do you get the loop after the initial endurance play without more copies of endurance? You need to be making copies of endurance for this to do anything no?
19:25 this is the second time richard sacrifices hogaak to the altar but places hogaak in exile.. thats why a bit earlier he had to "find his hogaak" his first was wrongly placed in exile as well also missed to make 3 zombies buts its ver complicated yes
i am quite curious what seth hand looked like in game 2, since he apparently kept a starting hand with no turn 1 or turn 2 plays. against a deck that can win on turn 2 or 3 (which is what happened)
The strongest sorcerer of today vs the strongest sorcerer of history.
With this treasure I summon…
Mahoragaak!
Gambare, gambare
It’s not Gojover
"You were magnificent Nadu"
"I shall never forget you as long as I live"
-Hogaak
Judegman is like, Lantern Control in this analogy then?
Watching Hogaak go off that first game was just stupid in all the good ways. So broken. Thanks for putting this together.
At least it doesn't take 10 min to kill
Yeah, definitely more explosive power against unsuspecting opponents. Nadus strengths lie more in resilience
@@wyqted
That's the point. Hogaak was broken, but it was fast. It was fun to watch. Probably most fun to watch bseides hollow one.
@@malte54 totally, Hogak and Hollow One were both really fun to watch. No matter what happened, you knew it was happening quickly in most cases.
The problem with nadu is the lack of viable counter play.. hogak is dead to any GY hate sideboard 😂
Sometimes I wonder and go, "Maybe just unban it all and let the magoc gods sort it out"... then I watch this and go "Oh yeah."
These both still probably lose to an inkmoth and a blazing shoal.
@@thedoctorbob7
Wasn't that the winner of the last no ban list modern, with hypergensis closely behind?
As someone who follows the No Banlist modern Meta, most tournaments Top 8 are 4 Izzet Phoenix, 3 4cc good stuff and 1 pet combo deck that the pilot has played since 2016 and mysteriously takes the price home. If you think Hogaak is bad, you haven't seen what 4 Mental Misstep can do.
Everything would be twelvepost, and it would be glorious
@@Netro1992 I think the most recent one I saw Depths took it all.
The combo decks in no ban modern are all busted. It just depends which one the tournament isn't prepared for.
51:34 Richard casually tapping a land for mana to cast Hogaak. You thought we didn't notice, but we did. JUDGE!!!
I think it adds more realism to the replication of FNM experience of the time. I saw this move done multiple times, so upvote for historical accuracy.
Two explores
That was after Seth said his Wall of Roots had one power, which it did not. The minus one,one counters would have negated his enchantment's boost. JUDGE, hahahah.
@@Kasigi03 Wall of Roots gives itself -0/-1 counters, not -1/-1.
@@kaszael Whoops, you're right
This is awesome! Can we see a Round 2 wherein Hogaak builds with the cards printed in his absence and Nadu gets a chance to build with the expectation of playing against him? At the time of Hogaak, Leyline was a staple because people anticipated seeing him.
And maybe a Hogaak without Bridge since it's the arguably the stronger version (after ban)
Leyline was a staple and yet it didn't matter. Most played card at the PT and Hogaak still put up 56% WR and was 45% of decks 8-X or better
@PinkSpaceHippy This is true, but I am curious about this aspect specifically because 4C Nadu performed lower than Bant. I'm wondering if the color black changes its performance against Hogaak, or if it is in fact so monolithic that it would do better to Two Ships the matchup.
Yeah, Nadu wasn't built to beat faster combo decks because there just aren't any. That said Hogaak is legit threat in Vintage still so anyone who thinks Nadu is as bad as Hogaak was nuts from the beginning. Lol
@@Marksmaan isn't mono red storm a turn 2 win combo deck, and the second most popular deck in play rate on the pro tour?
Never actually see a Hogaak match but wow... That is honestly brutal!
the worst part is he was actually misplaying a bit, so this was hogaak, with not the best list, while being sorta misplayed. the gaak's absurd.
(example of where he messed up, game 2 if he's going to sac his creatures with a single bridge in grave, he should've casted hogaak first to tap them and mill 8 more, and then sac the tapped creatures for untapped zombies)
The funniest part of hogaak is that he was playing the worse version of the deck. When bridge got banned people realized that going 100% beatdown was much much better than the combo plan, and so with bridge banned people were forced to play the good version of hogaak.
@@ShinkuDragon
Watching Nadu combo must be what having a stroke feels like
While more broken than Nadu, I appreciate Hogaak for killing you quickly instead of durdling through a non-deterministic combo that may or may not kill
51:35 Richard tapped a land to cast hoggak. He needed to exile one more card from yard.
Beat me to the comments by 18mins
Beat me by 8 hours!
Beat me by 24 hrs
Beat me by 3 months
If I'm not mistaken, Urza's Saga could have fetched one of the Haywire Mites instead of Shuko at 12:05, since this would have given Seth two more triggers to find lands with. I'm not sure how much it would actually end up mattering though, since Richard might've just won anyways with the combo.
Yes, that would have been correct, I think. The mite could have also stopped the combo, if he hits a green source off of the 2 additional triggers.
Seth also very clearly doesn’t understand you only need one Shuko to trigger Nadu twice, even with no other creatures.
He could also have gotten a Dryad instead of a surveil land for two more so he missed out on four triggers.
Also many lists ran springleaf drum. Fetch that insead of 2nd shuko and you can still cast the noble heiarch.
Also also, endurance outs the combo kill so the missing 4th mana actually mattered a ton.
He mentioned while searching that Shuko was his "only legal target", did he later find out that he was running Mite after all?
Very cool content idea! Would love to see more stuff like this
It used to be a series called goat magic
CGB did an eldraine unbanned video which is similar but not quite as busted
Cardmarket MTG's channel has hosted a pretty cool series of flashback videos in this vein of having tournaments of all of the standout decks in a given format against each other. Thus far, they've gone through the various Worlds decks, Modern, and Pauper.
@@rayndeon1I think they're currently working on a Legacy video?
"If Hogaak got a god hand...I'd have a little trouble."
"But Nadu, would you lose?"
"...Nah, I'd Win."
i reckon it should be the other way round. Hogaak being the strongest deck in history and Nadu the strongest deck today
@@SpiritWing546 Correct, time to edit it
@@SpiritWing546 Nadu wins, current versions have plenty of endurances in the deck so the evoke trigger would force the bridges to self exile and the reshuffle effect would deal with the vengevines.
@@jormungardwe”nadu wins”, nadu just lost 4-1 in a bo7.
@@frankchu7190 using only 1 endurance in the main which alone destroys the bridge hogaak deck
I howled with laughter when the chipmunk voices started on that fast forwarded Nadu combo. Wish there was an IRL option to do that - would make it bearable. Awesome video!
sped up Seth is hilarious!
I was watching this video while going to bed, and my partner was already asleep... The chipmunk voices woke her up 🤦
I think Richard missed approximately 23 full zombie movies worth of zombie triggers in that 2nd game. Also in game 4 I think Richard shuffled Polluted Delta back into his deck instead of putting it in the GY when fetching on turn 2.
He also played Hogaak from his hand in second to last game
@@vladimirgm1773you can cast hogaak from hand you just can’t spend mana on it.
He also milled less cards than he was supposed to a few times and sacrificed Hogaak and put him in the exile pile a couple times. Even with some blunders, it's still so powerful.
@@pandasawrus ohhhh right, thought it was like Haakon, mb. Guess it is more broken than I thought...
That second game he blundered left and right but still won haha
I really love 1v1 Goldfish content! I would love to see some more stuff like this where you play decks/match-ups that you would never see being played on Arena/MTGO.
Would love to see more paper Webcam magic on the channel! This was awesome
Well, every episode of Commander Clash is now paper. But yeah, I'd like to see more 1v1 like this.
I had this exact thought yesterday about these decks, but I feel like players would find a way to play hogaak in the nadu deck
Now they have to play Nadu Hogaak vs Original Hogaak just to find out.
"I make 7 insect tokens, tap them to convoke Hogaak. Equip Shuko to Hogaak twice, put two lands into play, make two insect tokens..."
@@Daniel-q9f8p holy shit thats actually cracked
100% down to watch more paper magic between you two and/or Crim! Matchups like this or just playing current Modern or Legacy - I'd be here for it all 🤠
I hope this seen!
I'm not surprised that Hogaak goldfishes better, but it's much easier to hate out, which is why it was less successful in its first PT when compared to Nadu. Nadu here has the disadvantage of being tech'd for the real PT meta and not a parallel universe where Hogaak is still legal. Would be interested to see what this matchup looks like if both sides are fully teched out for a meta of Ruby Storm/Nada/Gaak
It's an interesting question. That being said, I think people underestimate how hard it is to hate out Gaak. They play 3 Wispmares, 3 Wear//Tears and an Abrade. Gaak decks can also just absolutely go off from low resources. Game one is an example of this. If you take to turn two to stick an Unlicensed Hearse, it's too late. If you mull to 5 for a Leyline and Gaak mulls to 5 for Wear//Tear, the Gaak deck will stomp you in a functionally 4 card vs. 4 card hand.
Also, I'd guess Gaak would run at least one Boseiju maindeck now, if not more.
Well, it can be hated out, but you still win on the play, can side in plenty of anti-hate, and are probably still significantly favored in games 2 and 3, based on raw power.
@@ericfaulk2204absolutely. During that Hogaak era, everyone prepared for it and it didnt matter.
@@derekcline950 Obviously we couldn't successfully hate out Gaak, that's why it was banned. Still a lot easier to target than Nada.
The fact that gaak performed so well then though every deck has 6+ hate pieces against it, often 4 in the main board should tell you that it's a more powerful deck than Nadu.
Nadu players really said that Thoracle wasn't the proper win con and reinvented four horseman combo that's tournament legal solely because it advances the board state despite being non-deterministic infinite loop. "Trust me, eventually my stack of cards will be in the right order to let me win and I do it infinite times. But I'm making bodies so it's legal."
It's deterministic if you do it properly, which Seth didn't quite do here. You make infinite mana first, then get waterlogged grove in play, do the loop putting only otawara/boseiju into the deck, draw it, and repeat.
Still non-deterministic. 50% is a lot better than 8%, but it's still possible to have Otawara on top every single time.
@@jaredwonnacott9732 you only put otawara or boseiju into your deck. The waterlogged grove is already in play from a previous iteration where you went through the entire deck and put all the lands into play.
@@zacharylohner Oh, yeah, that makes sense, you'd have a two step cycle, essentially, one where you get the Waterlogged Grove back and one where you draw and use your Channel lands. If I'd actually played the deck, I'd have probably figured it out eventually, but A) I don't really have anyone to play modern with, and B) there's no way I could afford that deck.
@@jaredwonnacott9732 yeah I wouldn’t buy it anyway if you could afford it, it’s gonna get banned
35:27 is it me or Seth didn't fully demonstrate the loop here? I was confused about how to shuffle the lands back into your library after the first time playing Endurance. Turns out it works by enchanting Endurance with Nantuko to create copies of Endurance on land etb.
Not just you. I watched twice and he skips the step that explains how Endurance is looped.
@@lowemargasyeah cos it wasn’t looped until nantuko, but he made it seem like he already had infinite mana…
@28:57 the F6 token 😂😂 gotta start bringing that to commander games
Bridge from below died for Hogaaks sins
And what's worse is that there is no good reason to keep it in jail, but you can bet the next ban is shuko because WotC is run by clowns from hasbro.
@@Netro1992 While Nadu is probably the correct ban, Shuko is not comparable whatsoever to Bridge. There's literally no deck shuko is playable in without Nadu
@@Il_Dilettante
It is comparable in that banning shuko will not solve anything, but not reducing the expect sales by banning the biggest card in the set is a higher priority than having a working metagame, so down the banlist cards that shouldn't be there go yet again until they have to ban it anyway.
So did Faithless Looting. The ban reasoning for Looting is some of the dumbest cope I've ever read in my life.
@@nvvv_ I can understand why they wanted to ban faithless looting. But yeah, their public reasoning for it was a load of hogwash that killed a bunch of fun decks, again, for the crimes hoogak
WotC is run by the biggest hasbro clowns they could find.
OMG watching that first Nadu loop was mind boggling...
And it doesn’t even win the game at the end….
It won so what you mean?
@@SkillsByNiels They mean that it doesn’t win the game instantly. Things still have to be played out.
@@MultiKbarry What is the difference? Either way they lose
@@SkillsByNiels The thing is that isn’t assured. So there is the possibility of the Nadu player still losing. That is the problem since it means the game doesn’t immediately end. Since you could have an enemy board wipe still since it doesn’t destroy basics. Thus it is a non deterministic win condition.
Hogaak is legal in legacy, but is really easy to hate out due to 30 years of graveyard hate. He shows up in turbo dredge sometimes.
Having boards flip this way hurts! But love the content, would love for goat magic to come back as regular thing!
The thing about Hogaak is that, while it's the most broken game one deck in the history of Modern, it's also a graveyard deck, which is probably the one mechanic most vulnerable to hate. The amount of graveyard hate cards printed to date, even back in 2019, dwarfs any other type of effect. So this was a really powerful deck with an insane game one win rate, but its game two/three win rate was considered below 50% around the time Hogaak was finally banned. If you were actually playing against Hogaak in a tournament or a league, at the time of Hogaak's dominance, your sideboard would be full of graveyard hate, probably 8 or more graveyard hate pieces, and you'd of course side in every last one of them. So you could just mulligan down to 3 to get a hate card if you needed to. At that point, of course, Hogaak was also probably mulliganing looking for Force of Vigor to deal with your hate pieces.
So it could be a reasonably fair matchup, but Hogaak probably had fewer anti-hate cards than you had hate cards. However, militating against Nadu is that it's blue green. It has fewer graveyard hate pieces than other decks that play white or black. You'd have to play suboptimal colorless graveyard hate cards like Tormod's Crypt, Relic of Progenitus, etc. and you'd feel some pressure to choose other higher quality colored cards over these, possibly resulting in having fewer than 8 hate pieces. And maybe you'd stick with 8 or more but then you'd be weakening your deck against the other decks in the field. It's not like it was ONLY Hogaak back then. Fortunately you would have a pretty good matchup against them as Nadu, since they'd all be gearing their sideboard to beat Hogaak and those cards do nothing against Nadu's combos.
So it's a difficult analysis. I think Nadu has a pretty bad matchup against Hogaak in isolation, and without sideboarding there's a very poor chance to beat Hogaak unless you're also playing Hogaak. But if you have sideboarding and it's a tournament environment with multiple decks, where Hogaak is basically the deck to beat, Nadu wouldn't necessarily be terrible. Its sideboard plan would basically be "mulligan to find multiple graveyard hate pieces" and you can just ignore everything else. So you can play the same graveyard hate minigame as every other deck, which at least gives you maybe a 40% win rate against Hogaak, assuming like a 25% win rate in game one and a 60% win rate in games two and three. And you'd have a pretty good matchup against every other deck in the metagame, which might make up for your weak matchup against Hogaak, depending on just how centralized the metagame is in our thought experiment.
Yeah, but if there are two decks equally dominating the meta, but one of them beats the other when they meet, that one is obviously going to be the betrer performer.
props to seth for actually narrating that whole nadu turn, even if it was fast-forwarded
Everyone talking about hogaak comming in using a land, but no one talking about when the nadu combo happened seth played endurance and everyone just thought he had infinite endurance triggers so he had infinite mana and tokens. He didnt infinitly loop it till he bestowed the springheart nantuko on it which they showed AFTER he went infinite which is just not possible
Came here to find this!
He didn't, but can't he also sac the Endurance to put it into his graveyard before the trigger resolves, then shuffle it back into his library to redraw it with his Nadu triggers still on the stack?
@@DarthChocolate15 What would he have sacrificed it to?
@@whowherewhat-q8uitself, but he'd have to evoke it.
Yeah I don't get how this would work because... how would he get all the lands back before having infinite mana?
this is a great content for viewers like me. i am not sure how many viewers are like me, I dont play MTG anymore, not on any platform, but still watching MTG content and keeping up with all the news. I never played morden before, This really gives me an idea what is all these Nadu talk and Hogaak talk about.
This was cool, and the "fast forward" (and F6) made me laugh out loud. I'd like to see Nadu vs Eldrazi (with Eye of Ugin) or Eldrazi vs Hogaak.
You dont mess with the Gaak :) Would be fun to watch this again but with sideboard cards. If Nadu were to face Hogaak, there would 100% be leylines or Rips in the sideboard. Amazing content guys! Thanks for this
This is such a great idea! Would love to see more.
GOAT Magic returns! Now do them against Eldrazi!
That one might be close.
And follow that up with matches with updated lists.
@@Welverin Hogaak today would probably be nuts. No faithless looting but so many other tools that would probably make it crazy
Oh cool, we haven't seen Richard for any GOAT Magic in years!
I loved this style of content. I would love more videos similar in this style
This was a fun matchup to watch! Forgot how strong Hogaak was ^^
Would be cool to see other banned Modern decks up against it! Eldrazi Winter, 12 Post, Scam w/ Fury, etc.
I second this! Add phoenix to that list!
Cardmarket has a GREAT series where they play the best decks in modern against eachother
I like this concept of playing modern (or other formats) decks that in substance got banned being pitted against each other. You should keep do a series about this
Love watching 60 card paper magic!!
I love this idea and seeing you guys play each other. I’d love to see y’all playing super interactive matchups!
Like the layout, would be nice to see more paper magic matches like this. Preferably formats other than modern.
What makes modern specially you not interested?
Love that you made these best of 7! Amazing content!
THIS 👏🏼 IS 👏🏼 WHY 👏🏼 WE 👏🏼 PLAY 👏🏼 LIMITED👏🏼
This was really fun guys, would love more
Honestly Seth didn't know Nadu well enough to pilot it. Surveil land instead of dryad arbor and not grabbing haywire mite G2 make it obvious.
Well, the arbor we can give him, since we don't know if he needed that draw. (No Nadu or blue manasource in hand)
But the 2nd shuko from Urza's? Yeah, that was bad. Especially, since you only need 1 to get all the Nadu triggers, as you can re-equip an equipment to the creature it is already on.
Really funny how people think re-equipping doesn't work... Even L2 judges...
@@wurgel1 weirdly enough he does use re-equipping later on
Honestly, they were both a bit off with their decks and the decisions they made with them. Seth ran Nadu on stream on before the change away from Thoracle as the win con. Hogaak has only been Legacy legal for years at this point. In that way, it was fair. I get the feeling that Hogaak was winning regardless.
This is an awesome idea and format, please keep them coming!
35:00 How does Seth loop the Endurance? If he's playing it each cycle to shuffle his graveyard he needs to play one each loop.
Even evoking it he'll run out of green cards to pitch before a million mana.
Edit: oh okay at 36:30 he attaches the Nantuko to the Endurance. I think he should have done that first but that should work.
Yeah, the end game is to get a Nantuko on Endrance so you can keep copying it as you loop the lands.
@@MTGGoldfish Magic is hard
Great video. Great layout and visual production in general
If everyone at the pro tour made their opponent play it out then nadu wouldn’t have been a problem
I found this video very educational. Having never played modern, I've only known Hogaak by reputation, and Nadu in the context of Commander.
Can I have more Seth and Richard just jamming modern
I really enjoy this type of content from you guys. Would LOVE to see more 1v1 type of games.
Magic as Garfield intended
YEEEESSSS THE RETURN OF GOAT MAGIC!!! PLEASE KEEP MAKING VIDEOS LIKE THIS
I was hoping someone would make this video. Gotta love MH sets 😂
I’m a huge fan of this style of content. I’d love to just see y’all play normal decks against each other without any special gimmicks too
These are old Hogaak decks with New Nadu deck Hogaak has 5 years less cards
But Nadu wasn’t built against Dredge style it was built against Mirrors and Storm so Dredge has a big advantage no triple leyline
You can argue Hogaak wasn’t built for the Nadu matchup either.
So Hogaak might be the better unfair deck (though I’m only through the first two games atp)
People were ready for hogaak decks before it was banned with all the leylines and RIPs they could muster.
Didn't help then either.
Love this type of content. It’s fun comparing the best to the best.
Seth! I think you should have fetched for dryad arbor instead of the surveil land on the end of Richard’s turn in game 2. It would have given you 2 more triggers at least lol
seth did not pilot the games well. leading with urzas over playing a dork is bad
@@JT-91 I get that he wanted to get the shuko, but yeah. I could see that being the wrong play most of the time. Hard deck to pilot IMO
Really enjoyed this, would definitely watch more in this vein!
As it turns out, a deck that can win by turn 3-4 often loses to the deck that can win by turn 2.
The thing is, Hoogak would be toast if Nadu had Layline in the side board witch it had none.
@@efuii if we are letting Nadu sideboard against Gaak, then Gaak can sideboard against Nadu, which also has a large amount of counters. And the rest in peace or Leyline argument is solved by a single Endurance. point being, pound for pound, card for card, Gaak is the more explosive, consistent, and powerful strategy of the two.
@@efuiiduring hogaak summer leyline was a maindeck staple and still hogaak was far better than any other deck in the format
Really enjoyed the video, would love to see more like it.
Hogaaks back up plan definitely seems better than nadus, but also Seth couldn’t seem to find nadu or chord of calling as much as Richard found hogaak, so that played a part as well.
Both are completely miserable and both should live in the shadow realm forever.
51:34 Richard spent mana to cast Hogaak
This is an awesome idea and I love the video set up!
Now do vs KCI. Let's see which is the better solitaire deck.
This is such a cool video and series concept!!!!
I think I always knew Hogaak was more broken. Though, I wonder how graveyard hate that can be tutored by Urza’s saga would impact this matchup.
Tormod's Crypt, Relic of Progenitus, Nihil Spellbomb, Grafdigger's Cage. Hogaak has trouble surviving an Urza's Saga meta.
Not enough. Urza's Saga's tutor is on the 3rd Chapter. Still immensely too slow. Endurance is a better answer to Hogaak in this matchup
while that is interesting, we did see Hogaak go off turn 2 quite a bit, so even on the play Saga is possibly too slow lmao
@@MagizardInternet exactly seth build is using only one endurance which is a huge mistake as endurance is one of the win-cons in Nadu sheels, he not knowing how to play the deck also does not help.
Both sides are legal in legacy and people are still trying to build Nadu while Hogaak is at its best a fringe deck.
I loved the fast-forward bit.
Awesome content guys, love watching paper magic and loved seeing this very interesting match up
Great video, well played! Just a small detail, it seems Richard forgot the 'You can’t spend mana to cast this spell.' for Hogaak a few times.
37:48 That Nadu combo is orders of magnitude worse than I thought. For the game. Springheart Nantuko is from Modern Horizons 3 too so WotC definitely knew what they were doing. They probably expected people to use Thassa's Oracle and didn't think they would come up with this convoluted series of repeated land sacrificing in order to avoid using Oracle because it's bad to draw before the infinite draws start.
At 17:40 where Richard is demonstrating loop, wouldn’t he only need one copy of BFBelow and the altar to loop? Mill 8, delve 6 + convoke 1 can repeat infinite if I’m not mistaken
Delve only pays for generic costs, so you have to convoke 2 for the B/G pips on Hogaak
He could have once the second hogaak was in bin by casting 2nd hogaak tapping first and a zombie then saccing first in response.
Me: "Wow, Hogaak was kind of a bear to watch when it comboed off." Seth 30 minutes later: "Hold my beer."
How does the Endurance re-shuffle all of the lands back into the deck after it's initial cast? 35:16 for infinite mana? As i understand it, the Endurance trigger resolves and only shuffles your cards into your deck once right? Wouldn't you need the nantuko before you can loop?
he was supposed to evoke the endurance so it shuffels it selfs back aswell
Thank you for explaining the Endurance loop, that's sick as hell. I'd also never want to play that out past game 1 in a tournament
Loved the format of this video
around 37:00
how are you infinitely recurring endurance?
evoking it exiles cards and i don't recall you sacrificing it or showing a way to sacrifice it
oh my bad i missed that you bestowed nantuko to endurance
Oh my god !!! The return of goat magic !!! It has been so long !!!
Return of GOAT magic thanks! Love this sooo much
I’d love to watch more non-commander paper magic!! Great stuff 🙌
Even though everything happening on the table was just disgusting ha
love this. pitting other pro-tour winning decks against each other would be super fun
Out of curiosity: how much time did we safe with the fast forwards in total when you combo'd off with Nadu? I'm gonna guess 15 minutes?
Really cool video, love seeing 1v1 matches on this channel
Can someone explain how Seth was able to go infinite with just the one Endurance? How is he able to keep putting the lands back into his deck? Or was in implied that he had already used the Nantuko to keep copying it? Don't actually play MTG so that part lost me.
he bestowed springheart nantuko on endurance, creating a new endurance with every land fall trigger of springheart nantuko.
That was a really fun video!
Watching Seth go through the endgame combo was splendid.
It's wild that we found a way to revive The Four Horsemen into Modern. Because an opponent would be well within their rights to make you play it out, in case random chance could mean they never get the draw-land first. It's a tiny chance, approaching infinitely small, but it's very possible. Since they can't say how many repetitions of the loop they're performing, they have to track every single one...
Im loving the live gameplay. Hope to see more:)
RULE QUESTION: at 12:00 Seth floats a colorless during his draw phase. How does he spend it during his main phase to cast Nadu? wouldn't the mana pool empty between phases??
sagas trigger their ability at the beginning of the pre combat main phase, which is directly after said draw phase - and since the tap is a mana ability, its fine while that final trigger is on the stack. So he's doing it during his main phase, not the draw step.
@@purplecharmanderz2975 Oh, I thought "after you draw" in the reminder text meant "at the end of your draw step". Should they have written "after your draw step" instead then?
How did Seth get the endurance loop in the third game? I didn't see it shuffle in or have him be able to reuse it.
at 12:00 couldn't you get a Haywire Mite instead of the second shuko to have a second creature to combo with?
G3, Richard got the full LGS experience, man could've ordered a pizza, gone for pickup, ate the pie, and still been waiting for the turn to end 😂
54:08 - On Rules for Damage Redirection and Trample.
So, before any of the Damage happens, players of course have to assign how they'd like the damage distributed, and before any damage is assigned to the next target in the stack, one must assign lethal damage to whatever's first in the stack.
Blockers declared, Use the Outrider to Target Wall of Roots twice, because you're feeling fun. Now damage assignments happen: Hogaak must assign 5 damage to the Wall of Roots before it can assign any damage to face, even if we all know that additional damage will be occuring simultaneously from another card effect. Hogaak cannot assign only 3 damage to the Wall of Roots and 5 to face, because it must finish assigning what it sees as lethal damage.
Now, after damage assignments have been chosen, damage is dealt, all simultaneously. The damage redirection will occur, and you will have an unharmed Outrider, a Wall of Roots with 10 damage on it, and 3 trample getting to face. Then State Based checks, the Wall dies.
So it would not have a deleterous effect to Outrider en Kor the Wall of Roots in the face of a Trampler.
I might be stupid but when the insect tokens die from blocking at 46:00 why does it get rid of the two bridge from below?
great video, thanks for going through the arcane loops
Just wondering did you explain how you get to infinite recycle your endurance to keep bringing back your lands to your deck?
I love a good best deck in history ladder type of event, or better yet, some no ban list content to show off just how nuts they could be.
What I've always wanted to see is comparison of these decks across formats. Its just interesting to me how with all the extra tools in legacy and vintage these decks are way more busted compared to each other but also just fine to even bad compared to the rest of that format.
how do you get the loop after the initial endurance play without more copies of endurance? You need to be making copies of endurance for this to do anything no?
19:25 this is the second time richard sacrifices hogaak to the altar but places hogaak in exile.. thats why a bit earlier he had to "find his hogaak" his first was wrongly placed in exile as well
also missed to make 3 zombies
buts its ver complicated yes
36:00 you would have to bestow the Nantuko on Endurance in order to loop. Otherwise you would not be able to recycle your lands infinity.
i am quite curious what seth hand looked like in game 2, since he apparently kept a starting hand with no turn 1 or turn 2 plays. against a deck that can win on turn 2 or 3 (which is what happened)