Would the format be more interesting without Tendrils of Agony?

[JeroenC]

So I'm too tired and lazy to read everything that has been posted so far. But some things I picked up:
1. Tendrils is keeping a lot of decks from being played decently, decks need to have a combo matchup: Zoo, Landstill, Vial Goblins, Aggro Loam, Survival. All of these are decks I'd love to play against with a combo deck. Still, they're in the DTB. How many Tendrils decks? None.
2. CB is played because it is good against Legacy. This is true. CB is played because it is good against a metagame that has come to be because of Tendrils. False, CB will still be around in the same numbers after banning Tendrils(which won't happen). It will take a couple of more beatings from the people who are suddenly less afraid and take different decks, but CBTop is still going to be around.
3. Something I think I've already mentioned: removing Storm from Legacy will remove combo from Legacy. Other combos aren't played. Because of Storm? No. Because they're too weak? Yes.

[caiomarcos]

3. Something I think I've already mentioned: removing Storm from Legacy will remove combo from Legacy. Other combos aren't played. Because of Storm? No. Because they're too weak? Yes.

I can't stand those arguments that try to analyze a different situation taking today's meta into consideration. Other combos are too weak because every other deck is prepared to deal with Tendrils combo. If Tendrils are out of the game, the splash hate agains Cephalid, Belcher etc is reduced, making them viable.
Just like people say today that Dryad is a terrible finisher. Yeah, compaerd to goyf, Dradnought seems clunky, but before goyf came up, Dryad, Tog, Morphling and a hundred of other options were viable and played.
That's how Tendrils and Goyf warp the metagame - not being completely dominant, but completely ruling out other options.

[Otter]

If Tendrils are out of the game, the splash hate agains Cephalid, Belcher etc is reduced, making them viable.

Metagames don't work like that. If a deck becomes viable due to a lack of hate, people will just start packing hate for it again.

[Fuzzy]

That's how Tendrils and Goyf warp the metagame - not being completely dominant, but completely ruling out other options.

For god's sake, why ONLY NOW, when people abandon Storm Baseds for Counterbalance, people are thinking it's warping the format? Scourge's release was in 2003, why you guys don't had cryed before?

This thread smells like a troll.

[Jak]

For god's sake, why ONLY NOW, when people abandon Storm Baseds for Counterbalance, people are thinking it's warping the format? Scourge's release was in 2003, why you guys don't had cryed before?

This thread smells like a troll.

As much as I dislike this discussion, this post is so wrong. There have been other sets since 2003 that had cards to aid the Storm decks.

[Fuzzy]

As much as I dislike this discussion, this post is so wrong. There have been other sets since 2003 that had cards to aid the Storm decks.

Infernal Tutor in 2006 and Ad Nauseam at the end of last year.

So, what really fucked up Legacy? A LED+Tutor engine or Dark Confidant+Mind's Desire bastard son?

Or PONDER?

[Ch@os]

A metagame without Tendrils would be an german meta :D

[GreenOne]

A metagame without Tendrils would be an german meta :D

If this is true, I'd like to know how much blue is played in such a meta. This would finally solve the puzzle and we can lock this thread.

[jjjoness']

If this is true, I'd like to know how much blue is played in such a meta. This would finally solve the puzzle and we can lock this thread.

As far as I'm concerned, my meta is a lot of aggro (like 35%) white Staxx (20%), the rest of the field mostly consists of Landstill, some Cbalance Decks (Thresh, Dreadstill) and other cool stuff like Quinn and Enchantress. Combo isn't played a lot, actually it's just me.

BTW: Sign me in for the Tendrilsless Source Tournament.

[SpatulaOfTheAges]

For god's sake, why ONLY NOW, when people abandon Storm Baseds for Counterbalance, people are thinking it's warping the format? Scourge's release was in 2003, why you guys don't had cryed before?

This thread smells like a troll.

----

Infernal Tutor in 2006 and Ad Nauseam at the end of last year.

So, what really fucked up Legacy? A LED+Tutor engine or Dark Confidant+Mind's Desire bastard son?

Or PONDER?

Normally I ignore the horrible grammar of ESL people, as my Portugese, for instance, is much worse.

When that bad grammar is accompanied by hostility and condescension, it's tempting to not make an exception.


Artifact mana was not legal in the old 1.5. The banned lists split in late 2004, and at the time, people were exremely concerned with the fact that they had banned comparatively weak cards, but unbanned Moxen, Lotus Petal, and LED, as well as Mystical Tutor and Burning Wish.

It took a couple years for people to truly break Storm though. That didn't happen until 2007 or so, and yes, Empty the Warrens certainly helped.

And to be fair, any discussion on banning Storm-combo pieces has taken a back seat to the discussion on whether or not Tarmogoyf should be banned.

[TheDarkshineKnight]

I'll go one futher:

Tarmogoyf, Counterbalance, AND Tendrils should all be banned. Blue would be considerably less dominant, though still powerful, and pure aggro would actually be playable since it's greatest counter would no longer be playable. The diversity of decks in the metagame would increase dramatically, and I'd actually play Legacy again.

Then, unban other combo engines that are considerably easier to disrupt such as Dragon and whatnot. And Land Tax. Why the fuck is that still on the list? >_>

[Aggro_zombies]

Lightly skimming through this thread, a few things stand out:

Blue is not dominant because of Storm combo. Blue is dominant because it has a two card, three mana soft lock that completely seals the game against 75% of the decks in the format. Blue is dominant because it has access to cards that have been, both historically and in the modern meta, ahead of the power curve: Force, Brainstorm, etc. If you really wanted to make blue on even footing with the other colors, you would need to ban Counterbalance, Force, and Brainstorm. I know that sounds severe, and it would cripple blue beyond all hope, but that's just how strong that color is compared to the other colors.

Storm combo shows up in just high enough concentrations that it acts as a boogey man, but not high enough concentrations that it's actually relevant. A deck, like Aggro Loam, with a 30% or worse match against Tendrils game one can still be a viable contender in the format because Tendrils shows up as a single-digit percentage of the field, if it shows up at all. Furthermore, even without Counterbalance around, it takes more hours of practice and more skill to successfully pilot a Tendrils deck than it takes to successfully pilot something like Goblins or Threshold. Those latter decks are fairly forgiving of one or two screw-ups, but making a mistake while you're setting up or going off with a Storm deck can be game ending.

The alternatives to Tendrils, decks like Breakfast or whatever, are obviously much weaker than Tendrils. This is not just because Tendrils is very strong and relatively resistant to disruption; it is also because the alternatives keel over and die to a certain types of hate cards available to every color. Let's say that Tendrils were banned tomorrow and Cephalid Breakfast suddenly became all the rage. Breakfast loses to any and all kinds of graveyard hate, which every color has access to in the form of on-color cards (Morningtide, Loaming Shaman, Ground Seal, Withered Wretch, Leyline, etc.) or artifacts (Crypt, Relic). Furthermore, these cards are relevant against a variety of decks - say, anything with Life from the Loam - so having them in your sideboard would be a generally good idea anyway. The fact that Breakfast is so weak to hate available to every color would effectively hate it to death - and that's what happened the last time it reared its head. Removing Tendrils would effectively remove combo from the format. The closest things you would have would be Ichorid and probably something else, possibly Enchantress or F.C. Goblins.

Tendrils is not a problem card, and wouldn't be unless blue got shafted big-time. Tendrils isn't responsible for blue's dominance; blue's dominance is responsible for Tendrils' relative absence.

[SilverGreen]

I don't think storm warps the metagame so much as it hurts deck design. Metagames are a living thing that's always evolving and adjusting, so no problem here. But the creativity and variety of viable combo strategies are very limited by the existence of storm. As stated here before, no one plays "true" combination decks anymore, decks in the fashion of Salvagers Game, Aluren, Cephalid Breakfast or - discounting the storm-kill part - Solidarity, simple because they're all overshadowed by a single-minded bunch of rituals.

But if Tendrils - or storm as a whole - is healthy for the format or not, is solely a matter of taste, IMHO. Nowadays I'm a player that plays much more for the joy of the game than for top8 and get some booster packs, so I'm much more interested in find a field plenty of diferent decks to defy and amuse me. If my goal would be aim a perfect score and get all the glory, girls, fame and fortune provided by the tournament title, then I would prefer storm. I know it's much more flexible, resilient, efficient than old combo, for sure. But, for me, this predatory nature over other strategies is what makes storm's greater problem.


P.S: It's always a funny thing when someone that hardly speaks a foreign word other than "pepperoni" blames other people - non-English speaking people - for not being James Joyce, even when their communication is perfectly affordable. So please, forgive all of us, poor South American, European, Asian and my neighbor's trained monkey - all perfectly able to communicate in English - for not being so good in YOUR mother language as you are, caríssimos cabeças de vento anglo-saxônicos.

[sunshine]

The reality is that there will always be dominant strategies that, to a degree, invalidate others. Legacy has Combo (Tendrils Combo if you want to call it that), Aggro, Control, and Aggro-Control decks that are all viable - at the moment it seems that there is no one strategy that completely pushes out any other. Sure some decks have a rough Tendrils matuchup but currently Zoo, Aggro Loam, Goblins, and Survival are all DTBs. If our definition of interesting is somthing along the lines of "diversity of viable stategies" then I would argue that removing Tendrils from Legacy would make it less interesting if anything.

Combo is an important part of legacy, Tendrils Combo may be one of the least interactive iterations of combo but it's still not that heavily played and this isn't just due to Blue beating it back. Even mono_green.dec has the ability to play a turn one Thorn of Amethyst, and a small white spash for Teeg, Canonist, and/or Chant is not that bad if it is really needed.

[jazzykat]

If by making the format more interesting you mean allowing decks that are currently unviable to come back then I'd say no because getting rid of tendrils will just create another status quo/metagame.

I've said it a million times, if you want to potentially make the format more interesting start unbanning cards... Land Tax, Worldgorger Drago, Metalworker, Hermit Druid, etc. Storm decks are already faster than most of the old combo decks anyway so let's see if they may shake things up.

[pi4meterftw]

Prove that blue should not be played more then. You claim that banning tendrils would decrease the power of blue. Okay? Why is that a good thing? Afterall, the point of a game isn't for everything to be all communist and equal. Otherwise, choices aren't interesting. Why not just make every card a 1/1 for 0? Also, it's better to play lands than to not play lands. But even if you forget that, still: provide a reason blue should not be dominant. But I even have more reasons it should. It's dominance isn't stifling. Existing strategies can just run blue, and then keep doing what they were doing. It's not like suddenly countermagic became so powerful that there were too many powerful blue spells to run and then every deck became mono blue because blue spells were so disproportionately powerful that splashing a color simply wasn't worth it. If it got to that point, then you could argue that it's actually unhealthy. But people still play nonblue spells, en masse in fact. In fact, some decks don't even have blue in it.

Also, what's with "Tendrils of Agony stifles the existence of some decks, which could exist otherwise?"

"Dear wizards. I'd like to play my snakes tribal deck. Unfortunately, the existence of the following decks makes this impractical:

Nogoyf
Counterbalance threshold
Stax
Merfolk
Goblins
Slivers
Elves
....
Aggro Loam
Everything in type 2
...
...

Therefore, please ban those decks otherwise you will have stifled the existence of snakes."

Why is it some kind of an alarm that not everything is equal? Snakes is simply a bad strategy. So is kithkins. Not playing blue is simply a bad strategy. Not being able to handle Tendrils is a bad strategy. The answer isn't to cry for the ban-hammer. You just change decks, or splash blue (seriously). Or even just run thorn of amethyst, which by the way is something any color can access. It might be that tendrils is unhealthy (But I only say that because it might be, a priori, that anything is truly unhealthy, but it's clearly not the case for Tendrils) but to simply state that Tendrils has stifled the existence of pet deck X doesn't actually prove anything.

As a side note, I don't see how not playing blue is still seen to be practical. I think that playing blue, just as playing land, is necessary. It's a fact of the format, not something to be seen as terrible imbalance. It's just because Wizards called it one of the 5 colors that made it appear unintuitive that actually blue is not on equal footing with the "other" 4 colors. What if wizards called lands "Pink?" Then OMG EVERYBODY PLAYS PINK.

[FoolofaTook]

I would think that we'd all like to see Tendrils based decks like dominate the meta or something before we thought about banning the kill condition in most of them.

I take crappy homebrews to almost every small tourney I attend because I want to look at something else for a change instead of blue control. Every time I run into one of these Storm based decks they have trouble. I either beat them or lose narrowly, and I'm playing decks that are largely uncompetitive and would profit greatly if blue was removed as a factor in the meta.

Storm combo may look great but it's consistency level is in the vicinity of Dragon Stompy and it loses just as quickly when anything goes wrong, goes wrong, goes wrong...

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

Prove that blue should not be played more then. You claim that banning tendrils would decrease the power of blue. Okay? Why is that a good thing? Afterall, the point of a game isn't for everything to be all communist and equal. Otherwise, choices aren't interesting. Why not just make every card a 1/1 for 0? Also, it's better to play lands than to not play lands. But even if you forget that, still: provide a reason blue should not be dominant. But I even have more reasons it should. It's dominance isn't stifling. Existing strategies can just run blue, and then keep doing what they were doing. It's not like suddenly countermagic became so powerful that there were too many powerful blue spells to run and then every deck became mono blue because blue spells were so disproportionately powerful that splashing a color simply wasn't worth it. If it got to that point, then you could argue that it's actually unhealthy. But people still play nonblue spells, en masse in fact. In fact, some decks don't even have blue in it.

Also, what's with "Tendrils of Agony stifles the existence of some decks, which could exist otherwise?"

"Dear wizards. I'd like to play my snakes tribal deck. Unfortunately, the existence of the following decks makes this impractical:

Nogoyf
Counterbalance threshold
Stax
Merfolk
Goblins
Slivers
Elves
....
Aggro Loam
Everything in type 2
...
...

Therefore, please ban those decks otherwise you will have stifled the existence of snakes."

Why is it some kind of an alarm that not everything is equal? Snakes is simply a bad strategy. So is kithkins. Not playing blue is simply a bad strategy. Not being able to handle Tendrils is a bad strategy. The answer isn't to cry for the ban-hammer. You just change decks, or splash blue (seriously). Or even just run thorn of amethyst, which by the way is something any color can access. It might be that tendrils is unhealthy (But I only say that because it might be, a priori, that anything is truly unhealthy, but it's clearly not the case for Tendrils) but to simply state that Tendrils has stifled the existence of pet deck X doesn't actually prove anything.

As a side note, I don't see how not playing blue is still seen to be practical. I think that playing blue, just as playing land, is necessary. It's a fact of the format, not something to be seen as terrible imbalance. It's just because Wizards called it one of the 5 colors that made it appear unintuitive that actually blue is not on equal footing with the "other" 4 colors. What if wizards called lands "Pink?" Then OMG EVERYBODY PLAYS PINK.

You have an atrocious sense of game balance and design.

Five colors create a more interesting series of choices than one color.

Fortunately blue is not nearly as dominant as you believe, even though it is unhealthily dominant. There are still viable decks outside of blue, although most do have problems with Tendrils-combo.

Also, be careful about Snakes and Kithkin. We used to say the same thing about Elves and Faeries.