Why has Hammer Time fallen off the radar?
Modern forum
Posted on March 16, 2022, 7:18 p.m. by wallisface
Looking at mtgGoldfish, Hammer Time as an archetype has gone from being at the tippy-top, to being non-existent since the Lurrus ban. I’m trying to figure out why this is.
Having only played against Hammer Time (and not played the deck myself), it never felt like it was a required component. Indeed, most of the time it felt like the deck was trying to win between turns 2-4, before Lurrus was even remotely relevant. I get the cat can help with games that go long, but is thar really enough of a difference in strength to see it go from top-tier to not seeing play at all?
My current thoughts are that the meta shakeup from the Lurrus ban has just pushed too many other decks up, that compete-with and/or counter what Hammer Time’s doing. But I don’t have anything to back this up.
I also see Deaths-Shadow drop completely off the list - and that used to be top-3. Was Lurrus really all that was holding these decks together? Or is there more going on here?
What say you, fine community? How do we explain such a massive shift in the meta? Have I completely undervalued Lurrus’s strength?
My eyes-shut guess is that it's temporary, as people mess around with their decks. The decks that were in like 4-8 place have all shifted up (Murktide, Yorion Blink, Crashing Footfalls) to take the Hammer Time and Shadow spots, at about the same proportions as the Lurrus decks had. I wouldn't be surprised to see Shadow and Hammer Time return to the list in a couple of weeks in lower spots, as people experiment and decks get posted.
When Lurrus got banned, if enough people simply netdecked the next deck on the list instead of modifying their Hammer or Shadow decks, I think that would account for most of the change. They'll be content to use a different established deck and wait for someone else to optimize the old decks. (I don't want this to come across as perjorative toward netdecking. It's a valid and successful strategy. It does require piggybacking on someone else's work, though.)
March 16, 2022 8:24 p.m.
It is human nature to have knee-jerk reactions, and something like this is no different.
They may come back, but they probably won’t be as meta defining as they once were as the inevitability is now gone. The ban will probably help to shift the meta from an aggro dominated format to something more equally spread between combo, control, and aggro (midrange and tempo are in there somewhere as well, sort of subcategories of the main 3).
The decks definitely didn’t rely completely on the card, but it is something that gave them a lot of consistency, since it was a way to make threats out of nothing late game. Now control decks may actually stand a chance against aggro, so we may just see a slight shift towards control from aggro, leading to a more evenly spread meta.
March 16, 2022 10:31 p.m.
SeekerofSecrets says... #5
I think it’s an error in Mtggold fishes algorithm. Both hammer and shadow where still represented in all of the tournaments this past weekend. You have to take Mtg goldfishes data with a grain of salt typically, they don’t have perfect data. I think after a few weeks we’ll see them both climb back up but not necessarily to where they once where
March 18, 2022 8:48 a.m.
wallisface says... #6
Yeah, we can now see that Hammer Time is still a strong force in the meta - changing the view to the last 7 days, we can see it sitting in the #2 spot, at 6.8%. As time tracks on, we should see this propagate to the longer-spanning views also, so crisis averted.
Thanks heaps to everyone here that posted up their own thoughts on the topic! It’s been pretty insightful to see how we all think/react to these scenarios
SynergyBuild says... #2
Lurrus meant these decks could go all-in on their fast-paced, high risk/high reward gameplans because lurrus gave them a level of inevitability if things went longer. It meant the reason you could afford that risk being gone, it's smarter to take a less risky strategy.
The difference isn't that a competitive sprinter can't sprint the same if you take away their shoes and light them on fire, it means they can't really try to win another race if they don't win this one.
March 16, 2022 7:47 p.m.