All B/R update speculation.

[Bed Decks Palyer]

I especially liked how TNN and VClique are expensive, while "every goblin you like from tribal deck" are cheap. I guess some MtG patch went out while I was sleeping, because last time I checked, neither Chieftain, Matron, Ringleader nor SCG were below cmc3. Oh yeah, Vial and Warchief... But then again why twiddle with a long dead tribe to play 2/2 for 3R, when you may simply SnT into 15/15 omnomnom6 spaghettazi?

[FoolofaTook]

This post started good and then gave it sadly away. I beg to differ on Vintage. During Gifts-/2nd Gush-era you ran Mystical, Vampiric, Demonic Tutor, Imperial seal (2nd Gush era mainly) and 4 Merchant scroll to grab all your restricted stuff like Ancestral Recall, Tinker, Y.Will, etc. whenever you need it. I can not remember a blue mirror i played in all the years without Ancestral Recall being cast. Period

That's because I wasn't talking about Vintage.

I was talking about the single format before WotC split into type I and type II. That format ran for a year from January 1994 to February 1995.

Vintage has been broken from shortly after it's inception due to the accumulation of power cards and the strategy of using card restrictions instead of bannings to limit their effect on the format in most cases.

Note that when type I and type II were split the biggest difference was not the loss of blue power, which was essentially a random element in most games. It was the loss of most of the fast mana and loss of the ability to easily color fix without true dual-lands.

A much wiser approach to the competitive Magic environment would have been to stay one format for constructed, get rid of restricted cards entirely - which the DCI did not do even after the formats split, and then make periodic bans based on which cards were consistently appearing as a 3 or 4-of in more than half the lists at the top tables.

[Bed Decks Palyer]

A much wiser approach to the competitive Magic environment would have been to stay one format for constructed, get rid of restricted cards entirely - which the DCI did not do even after the formats split, and then make periodic bans based on which cards were consistently appearing as a 3 or 4-of in more than half the lists at the top tables.

I don't like that. So do you really want to have Solomox, LoA, Strip Mine or w/e completely banned from Magic? Even Shahrazad banned makes some ppl cry, but if you'll cut the whole P9+stuff... idk, it seems bad.
http://archive.wizards.com/Magic/Mag...m/daily/af160b

[DragoFireheart]

About blue not having protection: TRUE NAME NEMESIS! Let that one sink in while thinking about "counterspells" in terms of "protection". Embarrassing

TNN is a fair and balanced card. Not sure what the fuss is about.

[FoolofaTook]

I don't like that. So do you really want to have Solomox, LoA, Strip Mine or w/e completely banned from Magic? Even Shahrazad banned makes some ppl cry, but if you'll cut the whole P9+stuff... idk, it seems bad.
http://archive.wizards.com/Magic/Mag...m/daily/af160b

Yeah, I'd have liked to see Magic with 25K cards available and about 5x as many of them actually playable. That's where the meta would have been interesting. Then if you get a card or archetype that just squats all over the meta for a prolonged time period you make it go away and everything is good again.

I was against the Survival of the Fittest ban when it happened because I thought WotC hadn't allowed the meta to clearly demonstrate that there were no good answers against the lists being developed. Just printing Rest in Peace earlier would have given some archetypes an edge on SotF.

My take on that ban is that SotF threatened the blue shell in a way that nothing before had really come close to in Legacy and WotC went into a fetal curl with a reflexive ban. Bad business that.

[rufus]

TNN is a fair and balanced card. Not sure what the fuss is about.

Both of those are readily abused words. It's fair, in the sense that it's beatable, but unfair in that it breaks a lot of conventions and rules. Similarly it's balanced in the sense that it's beatable, but unbalanced in the sense that there aren't many reasonable ways to deal with it.

[Bed Decks Palyer]

Yeah, I'd have liked to see Magic with 25K cards available and about 5x as many of them actually playable. That's where the meta would have been interesting. Then if you get a card or archetype that just squats all over the meta for a prolonged time period you make it go away and everything is good again.

It's so much different from what we're used to that I don't even have an opinion, esp. when I'm not sure if I get the bold part right.
It's like forgetting the whole history of tournament MtG and speaking about a completely different game. I cannot even imagine the price of P9 and such being those cards banned some time back in early/mid 1990's.
Definitely not a bad idea per se, just that it's absolutely distinct from what situation we got today and what MtG was about in last two decades. I wouldn't mind if you'll start a different thread on this matter, somethng like say "Alternative Magic history", or w/e, it may spark some interesting discussion.

...Survival of the Fittest...

Yeah.
If my thirteenth salary won't suck, I'll purchase the set just in case.

[DLifshitz]

I think Delver, Terminus, and Show and Tell are the 3 most constraining cards in the format honestly.

Looking at the current metagame (http://tcdecks.net/metagame.php?format=Legacy), I would say that Terminus and Treasure Cruise are the constraining cards in the format. Delver (the card) is widely played but I wouldn't say it places heavy constraints on the way other decks behave. A range of different decks (Jund, D&T, Pox, Nic Fit, ...) used to have a good matchup against Delver until recently. On the other hand, Treasure Cruise addresses the biggest weakness of Delver decks - that they run out of gas very fast. Terminus obviously does have a very heavy influence on the format. Show and Tell... not so much.

Also, the metagame is very inbred. You have Miracles going toe-to-toe with the various iterations of Treasure Cruise-fueled tempo, and everything else is marginalized.

[Gheizen64]

Tbh i'd be sad to see Cruise gone before BS. At least cruise you can sort of prepare against, with grave hate, spheres effects and chain effects. The card is also extremely susceptible to counters because then your next one cost 1 billion mana. It would also be extremely hypocritical if they banned it after like 4-5 months in the format, leaving it little time to adapt to it.
I would've liked it a lot more if it was misdirectable, but i don't feel like the card is oppressive, not anymore than the blue-cantrip shell at least. Yes counterburn is an archetype again and RUG ******** isn't the top dog anymore but really, it's been what, 5-6 years of green-blue tempo decks being T1? I can live with it. D&T just need Kor Firewalker, and maybe some Rest in peace, to hate UR delver, and in general there are some absurd hate cards against red in almost all colors (lifegainers, chill, beb etc..).

EDIT: ahahahah ******** is still censored :D

[FoolofaTook]

Treasure Cruise and Dig Through Time smell like cards that were printed for one of two reasons, either to allow WotC to ban something they printed in blue without everybody getting upset or to enable WotC banning an old staple that had created a stale format without everybody getting upset.

DTT actually is an extremely powerful card but it's not clear that it's any more powerful than Intuition. I expect it to stick around and I wish I had bought the playset at $3 instead of just buying 2 of them.

Treasure Cruise or Brainstorm. That's how I see things going down.

[Ellomdian]

...Vintage has been broken from shortly after it's inception due to the accumulation of power cards and the strategy of using card restrictions instead of bannings to limit their effect on the format in most cases...

...and then make periodic bans based on which cards were consistently appearing as a 3 or 4-of in more than half the lists at the top tables....

...Yeah, I'd have liked to see Magic with 25K cards available and about 5x as many of them actually playable. That's where the meta would have been interesting. Then if you get a card or archetype that just squats all over the meta for a prolonged time period you make it go away and everything is good again...

...My take on that ban is that SotF threatened the blue shell in a way that nothing before had really come close to in Legacy and WotC went into a fetal curl with a reflexive ban. Bad business that...

Just quoting a few choice lines for posterity.

I don't really understand why you hate vintage, and want to see it ruined. The point of Vintage is that EVERYTHING is legal (excepting cards that affect tournament function in some way.) Don't like that Vintage is defined by the same core of 15 cards, which happen to be the most powerful effects ever printed in the game? Don't play it! It's funny that you are tossing these complaints out now, when Vintage is easily the healthiest it's ever been (Thanks MODO!) Just watch the Vintage League streams - good players playing good Magic, with a variety of strategies. Bitching that more cards aren't viable is bitching that there have been half a dozen different ideas for game design over the history of the game. Your suggestion is to turn Magic into the gaming equivalent of Harrison Bergeron - everyone is artificially handicapped until everyone is 'equal.'

That you cling to the old chestnut of WotC somehow prefering/requireing Blue strategies is just icing on the foul cake of your logical lunacy. Why can't anyone sane and rational make arguments for bringing SotF back - everyone seems to sound like a complete idiot when they mention it.

[Star|Scream]

That you cling to the old chestnut of WotC somehow prefering/requireing Blue strategies is just icing on the foul cake of your logical lunacy.

Anyone else picture Jon Lovitz dressed as Hamlet speaking these words?

[btm10]

That you cling to the old chestnut of WotC somehow prefering/requireing Blue strategies is just icing on the foul cake of your logical lunacy. Why can't anyone sane and rational make arguments for bringing SotF back - everyone seems to sound like a complete idiot when they mention it.

I agree that it really sounds like people are in the tinfoil hat club when they suggest that the DCI has some interest in engineering the format to keep blue good, but I digress...

I don't think that most Survival discussons start out as problematic, though I'll grant that his post did. I think that Vengevine/Survival actually presents a lot of interesting counterplay to Terminus and would help quell people complaining about aggro not being good enough without doing anything banworthy.

Looking at the current metagame (http://tcdecks.net/metagame.php?format=Legacy), I would say that Terminus and Treasure Cruise are the constraining cards in the format. Delver (the card) is widely played but I wouldn't say it places heavy constraints on the way other decks behave. A range of different decks (Jund, D&T, Pox, Nic Fit, ...) used to have a good matchup against Delver until recently. On the other hand, Treasure Cruise addresses the biggest weakness of Delver decks - that they run out of gas very fast. Terminus obviously does have a very heavy influence on the format. Show and Tell... not so much.

Show and Tell dictates certian deckbuilding decisions (for instance, running Karakas in a deck that wouldn't want it without Emrakul and Griselbrand running around) and probably makes D&T better positioned than it might be otherwise.

I'm going to restate my point from earlier because no one addressed it: why is Terminus the card people single out rather than Counterbalance or Top? Terminus resets the board, but most creature-based decks have ways of refilling their hands and shuffling the guys back into their decks. The issue in my experience seems to be that creature decks facing Miracles can't reassemble a meaningful board through CB/Top post-Terminus rather than Terminus itaelf being the thing that beats them. Sweepers have existed as long as the game and aggro has been fine; Terminus is obviously the best one, but between a highly mana efficient sweeper and a soft lock that shuts down a lot of noncreature strategies as well, the lock seems to be the more oppressive element.

[uncletiggy]

The one mana instant speed sweeper is unparralled and is oppressive. Before its printing counter top was fragile and almost non existent. Zoo and goblins were still players terminus warped the format in the same sense misstep did. There is a clear best deck that has invalidated an entire archetype (aggro). Brainstorm is an enabler its not actually doing anything other then filtering. It may be the best filter ever period, but it doesnt single handedly invalidate entire deckbuilding options. Cruise is fresh and the meta hasnt adapted to fight it its new and powerful so everyones playing it cards exsist to keep it in check they just arent being implemented.

[Gheizen64]

The one mana instant speed sweeper is unparralled and is oppressive. Before its printing counter top was fragile and almost non existent. Zoo and goblins were still players terminus warped the format in the same sense misstep did. There is a clear best deck that has invalidated an entire archetype (aggro). Brainstorm is an enabler its not actually doing anything other then filtering. It may be the best filter ever period, but it doesnt single handedly invalidate entire deckbuilding options. Cruise is fresh and the meta hasnt adapted to fight it its new and powerful so everyones playing it cards exsist to keep it in check they just arent being implemented.

If you ban terminus -> deck die, control probably too.

If you ban BS -> Terminus become a lot less consistent, but stay alive, and aggro get more viable too.

Why would u want to ban Terminus really? The card saw no play in standard (Bonfire did) it should be clear why that is. Because legacy has a lot of enablers, the best of them being Brainstorm that not only can give you instant wraths from T2 onward but is also the best Draw engine in the format with fetchlands.

[Dice_Box]

If you ban terminus -> deck die, control probably too.

Lands would live on untouched.

[uncletiggy]

If you ban terminus -> deck die, control probably too.

If you ban BS -> Terminus become a lot less consistent, but stay alive, and aggro get more viable too.

Why would u want to ban Terminus really? The card saw no play in standard (Bonfire did) it should be clear why that is. Because legacy has a lot of enablers, the best of them being Brainstorm not only can give you instant wraths from T2 onward but is also the best Draw engine in the format with fetchlands.

The deck would not die without terminus it would require less efficient sweepers like supreme verdict and possibly even devastation tide. Banning brainstorm is never going to happen it doesnt do anything on its own its been the corner stone of the entire format since its conception and realistically is probably the entire reason the format even still exsists. brainstorm makes the format tick period. If brainstorm was banned i seriously doubt something like terminus would still see play its only good with the threshold of ways to set it up which is precisely why it wasnt played in standard not that standard should have any refelection on legacy.

[DLifshitz]

Show and Tell dictates certian deckbuilding decisions (for instance, running Karakas in a deck that wouldn't want it without Emrakul and Griselbrand running around) and probably makes D&T better positioned than it might be otherwise.

I'm going to restate my point from earlier because no one addressed it: why is Terminus the card people single out rather than Counterbalance or Top? Terminus resets the board, but most creature-based decks have ways of refilling their hands and shuffling the guys back into their decks. The issue in my experience seems to be that creature decks facing Miracles can't reassemble a meaningful board through CB/Top post-Terminus rather than Terminus itaelf being the thing that beats them. Sweepers have existed as long as the game and aggro has been fine; Terminus is obviously the best one, but between a highly mana efficient sweeper and a soft lock that shuts down a lot of noncreature strategies as well, the lock seems to be the more oppressive element.

The occasional 1 Karakas is just a minor concession to the existence of S&T and Reanimator. I really wouldn't say that these decks are currently shaping the format to any great extent, their metagame presence is too low.

Regarding Miracles, IMVHO it's the other way round. For many creature-based decks (Jund, Nic Fit, D&T, Maverick, MUD), CB/Top on an empty board is not yet game over, for various reasons (Abrupt Decay, Vial, Cavern of Souls, GSZ, very high CMC cards). But these decks usually can't prevent Terminus from resolving, and they struggle to generate enough card advantage to stay in the game after Terminus backed up by StP.

I do not believe that anything from Miracles should be banned, just saying Terminus controls the format to a much greater extent than Counterbalance.

Anyway, cards aren't played individually, if you attribute the success of Miracles to CB/Top more than Terminus, so be it, the point remains, the only deck that plays all of these cards has a very strong influence on the metagame.

[Gheizen64]

The deck would not die without terminus it would require less efficient sweepers like supreme verdict and possibly even devastation tide. Banning brainstorm is never going to happen it doesnt do anything on its own its been the corner stone of the entire format since its conception and realistically is probably the entire reason the format even still exsists. brainstorm makes the format tick period. If brainstorm was banned i seriously doubt something like terminus would still see play its only good with the threshold of ways to set it up which is precisely why it wasnt played in standard not that standard should have any refelection on legacy.

Survival, Workshop, Goblin and Dragon want a word with you

Even after the list separation from Vintage, Goblin was the best deck for a while.

Also the famous the sole reason the format exist [cit.], repeating this ad nauseam doesn't make it true. Nowadays i'm just imagining magic players repeating this as a mantra 100 times every night before going to bed

[Zombie]

My pile of little pointy-eared gits clearly exists because of Brainstorm.