Brainstorm
Force of Will
Lion's Eye Diamond
Counterbalance
Sensei's Divining Top
Tarmogoyf
Phyrexian Dreadnaught
Goblin Lackey
Standstill
Natural Order
I'm begining to think this is the premise which motivates most of the noise made in this thread!Originally Posted by Barook
I'm deeply saddened that you cannot see me sitting by my desk, drinking a glass of porto although it's Wednesday and reading the thread having a pretty good laugh.
So apparently all those blue decks that are allowed only thanks to Brainstorm's existence - "feed the many different strategies" © - happened to become a mesh of the very same decks that "differ only in their win conditions" somehow and some time in the last two months. Wow, what an unexpected turn of events! I'm surprised to read that "it's all about a shell with 4 BS, 4 Ponder, 4 FoW, 4 DTT" while even back in May or w/e it was the other way around "brainstrom decks dont exist, your idiot kthxbye", all the while the most obvious culprit is still defended with religious vigor "fromat would die, inevitably die!" or How'd We Play the 28Cantrips.dec to Omnishit on Turn2 telenovelle.
Whatwe'reyou're at is a metagame that's blue like a smurf and where the only non-Brainstorm pile that can compete are Elves, a deck that looks like a Who's Who of Broken and Retarded list. (Oh yes, the RG Lands. I know they exist. So what?)
So not only the decks converged - yet they are neither Brainstrom nor blue decks, don't you know that colour means nothing, you can't judge cards by color of their skin - turning the Legacy tournaments into dull and painful experience. The said shell of 16 (or is it 20?) same blue cards stifles the metagame, yet there's still no one in R&D who'd have balls to point at the main reason why this condition persists and then simply chop Brainstorm.
With a gameplay as predictable as nedleeds' posts, there's no point of going to the events, as 85% of games feel the same and there's only one question about a turn1 play: will the Ponder be of Lorwyn?
Thank you very much, Wizards, you ruined my penultimate hobby. Time to sell the Volcs.
Well, that definition says without firm evidence. It doesn't mean no evidence, just not firm evidence. For example, there is evidence that there is at least one planet orbiting Alpha Centauri so the idea that there's one isn't baseless, but there isn't firm evidence of it, so it isn't certain.No.
Speculation may or may not involve evidence, it just means there isn't definite evidence.
Blame it on Heisenbergian Uncertainty or postmodern relativism or Image Over Substance or the ubiquity of advertising and P.R. or the rise of Identity Politics or whatever you will — we live in an era of terrible preoccupation with presentation and interpretation. In rhetorical terms, certain long-held distinctions between the Ethical Appeal, Logical Appeal (= an argument's plausibility or soundness), and Pathetic Appeal (= an argument's emotional impact) have now pretty much collapsed — or rather the different sorts of Appeals now affect and are affected by one another in ways that make it almost impossible to advance an argument on "reason" alone.
The dilemma has nothing to do with whether the arguments themselves are plausible or right or even sane, because the debate rarely gets that far — any opponent with sufficiently strong feelings or a dogmatic bent can discredit the arguments and pretty much foreclose all further discussion with a single, terribly familiar rejoinder: "Of course you'd say that"; "Easy for you to say"; "What right do you have ...?"
The brainstorm/SDT/[any card]debate ultimately devolves into this sort of emotional back and forth, and literally nothing (aside from perhaps near-100% format saturation and undeniable broken-ness) is going to advance the debate and lead to consensus.
@Bed Decks Palyer You drop one of these every couple of months. When's the next one?
At some point he'll run out of cards/decks to sell
He has yet to say he is selling his Brainstorms...
It is better to ask and look stupid then keep your mouth shut and remain so.
I hope your afterlife is filled with eternal torment.
Fuck. Which one of my quotes do I drop for this?
Of course you'd say that.
While I don't think that it's anything new or even uniquely modern, your basic point is correct. That being said, whike I understand the frustration that a lot of peole feel toward this thread, a lot of the strife here is because you can't have a serious B/R discussion without agreeing on what to do with Brainstorm - oherwise people are discussing fundamentally different formats. My only gripe with the thread then, is that the most ardent anti-Brainstorm people won't acknowlege that WotC made a decision (probably around the time Mental Misstep was banned) that Brainstorm was either completely untouchable or that there was an incredibly high bar to clear for its banning. Why this happened is debatable, but that it (or a similar decision with the same effect) happened is pretty obvious. Endlessly repeating the same arguments - and there are reasonable arguments for both positions - isn't productive because a Brainstorm ban is clearly not going to happen under the current B/R paradigm and whether it ahould or shouldn't happen is irrelevant. Regardless of how you feel about Brainstorm, it's important to accept that it's legal as 4-of for any discussion of banning or unbanning another card.
Easy for you to say.
What right do you have...
Sorry to double post, but Patrick Sullivan makes largely the same point I made above, starting at about 14:20, though he comes closer to what I actually think should happen (banning Ponder, Preordain, and Serum Visions) than I've stated previously:
http://www.starcitygames.com/article...-Sullivan.html
TL;DW
Summarize for us.
The main B/R issue in Legacy isn't Dig Through Time, and it's a little unreasonable to ban every good Blue card that comes along if the real issue is the large number of cantrips, but Brainstorm itself might be enough of an essential feature of the format to be untouchable. Because of those competing dyanmics, we should be talking seriously about banning the tier 2 cantrips before banning anything else in that shell.
Before the Khans cards were printed, Death and Taxes -the best of the fair non-blue decks- (no arguments please) was still a viable choice for those interested in playing creatures and not cantrips.
That was probably the only "good" deck that you could play, but there were a tonne of other decks that you could semi-successfully play at any of the local game store weekly events. Even with a deck as outdated and slow as Goblins I would routinely go 2-2/3-1 in the usual local events.
Now the meta is essentially Dig Decks, Miracles and Anti-Dig Decks (loam). All the others have been pushed out and are just unplayable.
The Dig decks are virtually one in the same with their only difference being the win-cons, miracles whether they're pondercles or legend are still the same deck and the loam/chalice decks are pretty obviously much the same.
If you're really enjoying this format because you're doing really well, well done! But that isn't a justification for saying that the format is wide open, because it's quite clearly not.
Hats off to WOTC though on a job well done of making Magic formats across the board well and truly lame.
If that's the base of his article, then I'm lost, becasue banning weak cards before the broken ones is weird It's like bullying a weaker schoolmate instead of kicking the ass of the older boy who's stealing your snacks. Honestly, what he proposes makes absolutely no sense, it's just an evidence of Brainstorm-junkies' troubles.
What's next in line? Banning Accumulated Knowledge because Ancestral Recall exists? I can't understand what the guy speaks for.
I don't own cards, I own decks.
But when a card like Brainstorm is a pillar of a format, banning it would reset the format overnight. Ponder, Preordain, Serum ban would hurt the Brainstorm decks, but not kill them. If they were going to do something about Brainstorm, it should've happened 6-8 years ago or whenever they restricted the cantrips in Vintage.
Workshops are still totally legal in Vintage, while Trinisphere is restricted. If Wizards always banned the strongest card, Shops wouldn't be a deck anymore. Counterbalance is a shitty card, but works amazingly with Top. Top is a great utility card that's powerful but not game-restricting without CB. I think banning CB would be a legitimate fix. Banning Vengevine might have kept Survival decks at a level Wizards were comfortable with. Whether you ban the better card or the worse card is a case-by-case basis.
And if it comes to the point where every card you print that goes into the graveyard breaks Survival, or whatever for the other cards, then so be it. Make the ban/unban switch. I think Chapin's idea is worth considering to at least shake up the format and make more decks viable, without destroying half of the blue decks.
...that are actually made of... uhm... painted paper things?
TEAM MtG Berlin
"Dredge isn't a deck, it's public masturbation with graveyard triggers."
There's nothing about the card brainstorm that makes it essential to the format. The suggestion of banning ponder, preordain, serum visions, and whatever else just to keep it around is ridiculous. The only reason people suggest such asinine things is that all of the people that whine about how they will quit if it's banned. A pillar of the format would suggest that it promotes a certain style of deck, like shops or bazaar in vintage. Brainstorm doesn't do this. It is simply an overpowered card selection tool that at this point you either need to run or hate out, or simply out CA to beat. Everyone suggesting that we ban 3+ incredibly weaker cantrips all in the name of keeping a non essential card to the format sound retarded
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