> Power creep is real. If you remember the days when Savannah Lions was highly efficient, you're in for quite a shock.

Creatures have steadily grown in power while non-creature spells have fallen in power quite a bit. The designers of the game concluded that making the game more creature-centric lead to more interesting gameplay decisions. Power level overall has been trending downwards if anything.

It's led to the recent trend of stapling the effect you actually want onto a creature with appropriate-stats-for-effect-level. Crucible of Worlds is a 3 mana effect. As a creature, it should be green. It should therefore cost 2G. A 2G creature is reasonable at 2/3. Therefore, Ramunap Excavator is appropriate.

My modern deck plays entirely creatures, and entirely humans. It has duress, thorn of amethyst, nevermore, and into the roil main, with the option of getting disenchant, rule of law, and electroylze out of the side... as humans. It's effectively made spells obsolete, since the spell you want is probably a creature now.

Along with the radical power creep of creatures, Wizards has

- increased the cost of blue spells that counter creatures, because new players get sad when their monsters get countered

- started giving evasion abilities to many more creatures, since new players get sad when their monsters get blocked

Standard currently has Essence Scatter, Divest, and Wizard's Retort. It's not that counterspells have gotten cheaper, but graveyard recursion is fairly prevalant and "Can't be countered" clauses are on some pretty beefy finishers right now.

Time to dust off the shadow deck. :-)

Do you happen to have a deck list anywhere?

This article follows the evolution of the deck. The last one sounds close to what OP is running: https://www.mtggoldfish.com/articles/deck-evolutions-modern-...