Uh... No... I laughed a bit when I read "Tier 1.5", sorry :/

You're mistaken, It was not good enough to win a GP... ZAC ELSIK was good enough to win a GP with it. The deck isn't that good when compared to other Tier Decks. It just happened to be good at a precise moment in time, that's it.

It's like saying that Modern Slivers is competitive because someone topped with it at a major event. (FYI: it's not). If we had to guess the Tiers with the Top8s alone, Living End would have been Tier 1 (or at least 1.5) by now... The fact is, Tiers aren't decided by how many times a deck Tops 8/16, but rather what is the percentage of people running this deck at Day 2 of a major event: you can have incredibly skilled players that feel comfortable with a certain deck and that keep playing it with a lot of success (Top 32/16/8), but we must not forget the many other people that play the same deck and fail miserably due to its lack of power.

Let it Day 2 more than 2% at other GPs/PTs/SCG Open/"[insert name of big tournament here]" with a good Top8 ratio and a variety of different players, and only then we will talk about a possible Tier 2 for this deck, not before.

Maybe you're right and we have a new Top Tier deck, but for now, the results aren't the ones you would expect from one of these.

I disagree. I run the tier system on how competitive the deck is, and not on meta share. I dislike the meta share method because it tells you less about the deck itself, and more about its price and other factors we dont care about. Many people use the competitive function to decide tier, instead of popularity.

Regardless though lantern control is not above tier 2.

But by ignoring the meta share you have the risk of rating the deck on how powerful it CAN be when run by a very good pilot and not by how powerful the deck really is (see my Slivoid rant above).

It's another way of seing the Tier system though, and I respect it.

For me, Lantern is still some weird rogue deck that appears from time to time in Tops. That fits perfectly my definition of a Tier 3.

You might want to put Kolaghan's Command into the tempo section, given how popular it is, especially in decks like delver (which btw is more commonly played in temur or grixis colors now, not straight UR)

Marenkai, you misunderstand me. I said the deck can be tier 1.5 " if the meta is right." I will stand by this statement. Of course if the current meta is right, lantern control could, even for a short while, have the consistency and power of a tier 1.5 modern deck. If the meta is right, any deck can shine. I did not say that the deck is tier 1.5, only that if the conditions are right it could be. About the deck being tier 2, according to this primer, UB fairies is a tier 2 deck. Lantern control is easily as good as UB fairies, and therefore a tier 2 deck.

This definition of Tiers is a bit odd to me... Because then you could include some decks like U/W Control in the Tiers... (by Yuuya Watanabe)

And I would also put Faeries in Tier 3... The fact is, while reading the Tiers again on this post, I realised that I don't agree with them at all for some Tier 2 decks...

Some decks like UB Faeries or Ad Nauseam lost their right to be in Tier 2 long time ago.

But like I said the powerlevel of a deck is tricky to measure... So I prefer to use objective data to classify them: stats :)

Because if everyone keeps giving their own subjective opinion on which deck is Tier or not, the debate will never end ! x)

I don't put tiers below T2 because at the moment even T1 decks make up under 5% representation each. T1.5 is like 1% each. Anything around T2 has merged into negligible.

There's no point taking the tier system beyond 2.

There's also no point changing like 25 deck tiers every few weeks.

Yes, by your definition of tiers, that decision totally makes sense.

But Affinity, Twin, Junk and RDW are each around 10% of the top16 / top8 meta in 2015 (Damn Siege Rhino making everyone leave Jund for Junk...).

With affinity re-gaining a lot of popularity recently.

Yeah, there certainly was a time when the tier system as decided by meta share was quite clear cut. These days however we have an incredibly varied meta with lots of decks all having small shares. This makes my job very difficult, but the upside is obviously that modern is very interesting to play!

I don't think you added my Grixis Delver update yet... :(

No I didn't. I need to change it because we want both Grixis delver AND Izzet delver.