Brainstorm
Force of Will
Lion's Eye Diamond
Counterbalance
Sensei's Divining Top
Tarmogoyf
Phyrexian Dreadnaught
Goblin Lackey
Standstill
Natural Order
I don't much care to continue to entertain this absurd notion that the use of good stuff was somehow the point worth debating. Standard and modern don't have a meta dictated by cores, they have collections of essentially random insular strategies/decks [you can agree or disagree]. Their deck development is wincon driven, which binds how a deck achieves competitiveness with specific types of wincons/strategies that deck must employ [you can agree or disagree]. By corollary, the development of and banlist in these two formats is on some level designed to prevent interchangeable cores from existing; which further differentiates the meaningfulness of the term "deck" as a way to monitor a metagame [you can agree or disagree].
You have misidentified the key point I initially made which is in response to this sentiment:
Playing Ponder/BS/FoW or Cavern/Vial or Mox/Loam or Tomb/City/Chalice is why a legacy deck can matter, because employing a core is the easiest [though not the only, see Elves/NicFit/BR Reanimator/Maverick/Burn & others] path to competitiveness. When a core is behind it, the deck name doesn't really matter; all that tells us is how it wins, not why it is viable.The reason Legacy isn't a 2 deck formats is because almost everyone plays decks that are strictly worse 75s than the top decks - which most people could sleeve up if they wanted to, they just elected not to.
It is not unfair to say that standard and modern decks examined only as how they work, without preconceived notions, still generally telegraph the wincon type and what their (usually) single playstyle can be.
With the Faithless Looting core stuff, you go on a tangential attack about Faithless Looting the card vs the 'core' idea of critical mass draw&discard. By itself Faithless Looting is the greatest offender, but you can't really make reliable GY-combo [dredge] or discount from hand-combo without other cards beside it doing the same-ish thing. When you have a collection of cards doing the draw&discard thing *and* an opponent no longer has a RiP-type singular SB card which works (because Faithless decks could enact credible strategies without their yard at all; this isn't the case yet in modern, see Reveler), you would have a core in modern because draw&discard expresses itself in varied ways. That doesn't suddenly make the Looting core the next Eye of Ugin/Eldrazi epidemic; it just means a core group of draw&discard effects can enable differing strategies that attack from different zones...and modern [and standard] ban shared tools simply b/c they are shareable.
To bring this back to legacy, many arguments in this thread are tied to cards being too prevalent as they are shared across multiple archetypes (DRS most recently, shared b/c it is a powerful card). These viewpoints are generally limited to card 'x' at 'y' percentage of the meta, which doesn't really mean much without additional reasoning.
Most of your points seem to be debating the semantics of terms that you define and then redefine yourself. If "Ponder/BS/FoW" is a "core" how is "Cryptic/Snap/Serum visions" not a "core?" Because at least 2 variants of UWx control, blue moon, grixis control, all of which are established but also distinctively different modern decks, use that "core." How about Eldrazi Tron, RG tron, and G tron? They all use the "core" of tronlands and a similar suite of colorless bigstuff.
There are plenty of tools shared across very powerful modern decks that haven't been banned. People have been asking for a tronland ban for years but wizards seems content letting in stay in the format. Wizards has been pretty open that their modern ban philosophy has been to keep the format relatively slow and limit turn 3 combo decks. They allow plenty of powerful, archetype-defining cards to stick around though.
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With respect, a lot of the older Legacy players (The ones with larger collections) choose to play weird shit to keep the game entertaining.
Not trying to be overly harsh here, but those cards aren't good enough to care about. They're certainly reasonable but they can't dictate a format.
If everyone in legacy collectively decided to never play Cavern/Vial, Loam/Mox, nor Tomb/City/Chalice then you'd have a very short list of best decks all on the Ponder/BS/FoW core. The format would look like Delver (mostly grixis), Czech/Blade-type decks, miracles, SnS [pretty sure I haven't missed one]. Right after that list you'd have ANT as a major player. In that meta you could certainly compete with similar decks like Standstill, Aluren, TES, Shardless, OmniTell, Infect, and others that all mostly play by the established norms of Ponder/BS/FoW. From the outside you might find success if you string together a series of good matchups playing as Elves, B/R Reanimator, or Burn (it's gonna be a really short list here). Past this though, you wouldn't really be able to innovate in legacy until a new anti-cantrip core appeared because the pressure of unchecked consistency spanning aggro, midrange, combo, and control will push out most dissimilar, wincon-based strategies. The exception to that rule would be one specific deck strategy in the blue stew core proving to be clearly better than any other (i.e. SDT + Counterbalance) allowing essentially random, wincon-based deck development to resume as they only have to attack one specific deck to find a niche with competitive win percentage.
Modern and standard don't have any consistency-based cores to force everyone else to react to them or else be pushed out of the format. That combination [Serum Vis./SCM/Cryptic] does not unite a credible list of decks such that wincon-based development basically stops being viable. Decks that employ that combination join the field of essentially random, insular decks which is then called a metagame. Now if you were to unban the cards like DRS, SFM, and Ponder (you could go further and unban Preordain and JTMS), then that format would have to develop very focused cores to oppose that kind of consistency. Those cores would likely have to be dominated by other banned cards like P-Fire and Dark Depths*.
Vintage had a different comparison to legacy than modern/standard. The main point was that legacy's current four cores allow for too many specific decks to infer that our metagame is determined by people not playing the best 'x' decks. It's not just that each core is so different, but also the added effect of each deck within the same core operating in such varied ways, that makes diversity [within a very real and definable framework] inevitable. For some reason people have honed in on the term "good stuff" instead of the inference that in legacy we don't really spend that much time predicting/reacting to/developing towards specific wincons so much as a general sense of comparative levels of competitive fitness.
*Modern is pretty lacking when it comes to the interactive axis of mana denial, but I think the with those kinds of unbans would still lead to the exclusion of Urza-tron based deck construction. That's not really the point though; no matter how you color Urza-tron decks, they're all trying to do the same thing and 'go big' with an otherwise uncastable bomb. In other words, a one-dimensional strategy preventing the assembly of Urza-tron translates to winning the game as the opponent. In the case of Dark Depths being hypothetically legal, a more efficient 'go big' alternative would likely be more responsible for pushing out Urza-tron than an enhanced ability for a consistency core-using deck to efficiently and reliably produce correct interaction.
@DiceBox true, but there's a loose baseline where quality of wincon meets "and how does DRS let me get away with this consistently."
The closest to a "Core" Modern had for a very long time was a purely reactive set of cards that you could see as their Force of Will. Thoughtseize, Inquisition and Lili. Around that built up a few heavy hitters and then a few less prominent builds. (Obliterator Rock being my personal favourite)
These days that has been somewhat ripped asunder, not because the cards are not all there but because shit like Tron make playing those decks a pain. But Thoughtseize and Inquisition still hold their place. Everyone wants interaction. Well, most people.
This is circular reasoning:
"Modern doesn't have any deck cores, because wizards bans them"
"What about these legal sets of cards that are common to different decks?"
"No, they don't count as cores"
"Why not?"
"They're not good enough to count as cores because wotc hasn't banned them"
A huge problem with the 'discussion' going on here is that you are trying to argue 2 completely different points at once. My understanding of your arguments are:
1) It's impossible for Legacy to truly be a 2 deck format because if 1-2 decks somehow became the entire metagame, the cards exist to build another style of deck that could effectively attack that situation. (The way that you choose to phrase this is "one 'core' cannot ever became too dominant, because it inherently has a poor matchup vs these other 'cores')
2) Legacy is somehow the only special snowflake format that has this quality
From what I can tell most people have a problem with 'point 2'. People don't necessarily disagree (or even outright agree, cf Crimhead) with 'point 1'. (I guess Steve disagrees with point 1).
This paragraph is only relevant to point 1 (it's only talking about legacy).If everyone in legacy collectively decided to never play Cavern/Vial, Loam/Mox, nor Tomb/City/Chalice then you'd have a very short list of best decks all on the Ponder/BS/FoW core. The format would look like Delver (mostly grixis), Czech/Blade-type decks, miracles, SnS [pretty sure I haven't missed one]. Right after that list you'd have ANT as a major player. In that meta you could certainly compete with similar decks like Standstill, Aluren, TES, Shardless, OmniTell, Infect, and others that all mostly play by the established norms of Ponder/BS/FoW. From the outside you might find success if you string together a series of good matchups playing as Elves, B/R Reanimator, or Burn (it's gonna be a really short list here). Past this though, you wouldn't really be able to innovate in legacy until a new anti-cantrip core appeared because the pressure of unchecked consistency spanning aggro, midrange, combo, and control will push out most dissimilar, wincon-based strategies. The exception to that rule would be one specific deck strategy in the blue stew core proving to be clearly better than any other (i.e. SDT + Counterbalance) allowing essentially random, wincon-based deck development to resume as they only have to attack one specific deck to find a niche with competitive win percentage.
You say that if you ban all the good decks not playing BS/Ponder/FoW, then the only good decks become ones playing Brainstorm/Ponder/FoW. This is not an interesting idea and I think most people would agree with you (how can they not, it's essentially tautological).
By the last part, I assume you mean that if (for example) everybody played Miracles, then some kind of Cloudpost deck could become popular in response. I think most people would agree with this as well (although I don't see how this is 'random').
Now we're onto point 2: You are comparing legacy to other things.Modern and standard don't have any consistency-based cores to force everyone else to react to them or else be pushed out of the format. That combination [Serum Vis./SCM/Cryptic] does not unite a credible list of decks such that wincon-based development basically stops being viable. Decks that employ that combination join the field of essentially random, insular decks which is then called a metagame. Now if you were to unban the cards like DRS, SFM, and Ponder (you could go further and unban Preordain and JTMS), then that format would have to develop very focused cores to oppose that kind of consistency. Those cores would likely have to be dominated by other banned cards like P-Fire and Dark Depths*.
Standard absolutely had this core until the most recent ban: Rogue Refiner and Attune (and by extension Cub and Virtuoso and particularly Servant of the Conduit). These cards were certainly consistency based. When people refer to consistency they generally refer to fixing your draws or your mana. Refiner and Attune are cantrips after all, like Ponder and Brainstorm, and Servant helps to accelerate out your other cards, like DRS. If you couldn't beat the deck with these cards in it then you had a very low chance of winning a standard tournament during the period that they were legal. Therefore, they seem to have pushed other cards out of the format, so the attune shell also seems to meet this criteria for being a 'core' (although I think this is a pointless distinction because you could say this about any top-tier deck in any format)
You say that SFM would warp modern by providing too much 'consistency'. But by this definition of 'core' how does SFM qualify?
It doesn't stabilize your mana, and it doesn't help fix your draws. It's a tutor, but only in a very narrow fashion (and Steelshaper's Gift already exists in modern to emulate the tutor effect for less mana, and that card is unplayable). Why does this count as part of a 'consistency core' then? Is it actually just because it's a really good card? And things like Cryptic/Snap or Mine/Tower/Plant don't count, despite being cantrips and enabling mana and appearing alongside each other in different decks, simply because they are not as good? If this is the case then essentially all you must be saying is that:
1) SFM is really good
2) If you unbanned SFM it would probably be really good in modern and a lot of people would play it
3) People would try to adjust their decks to try to beat the large number of people that are playing SFM
Again, most people would probably accept this argument. But it has nothing to do with the suggestion that modern does or does not feature 'cores' of cards. Your original post laying out legacy 'cores' of BSto/Po/Fo and Mox/Loam and Vial/Cavern makes it sound like your definition of core is "set of cards that work well together in competitive decks". When people identify similar sets of cards in current modern, you say they don't count, and your only argument you have given for why these modern cards aren't cores is that those cards aren't good (compared to the cores that exist in legacy) or that they aren't banned. It doesn't make any sense.
This paragraph is so hard to parse it literally gave me a migraine. Let me try and rephrase it.Vintage had a different comparison to legacy than modern/standard. The main point was that legacy's current four cores allow for too many specific decks to infer that our metagame is determined by people not playing the best 'x' decks. It's not just that each core is so different, but also the added effect of each deck within the same core operating in such varied ways, that makes diversity [within a very real and definable framework] inevitable. For some reason people have honed in on the term "good stuff" instead of the inference that in legacy we don't really spend that much time predicting/reacting to/developing towards specific wincons so much as a general sense of comparative levels of competitive fitness.
"The legacy metagame is balanced because there are multiple different viable decks that can be built in different ways. [People have honed in on the term "good stuff" because the way you used it was moronic]. In legacy people don't spend time thinking about specific wincons, rather they just think about how good a deck is."
Ok. That first sentence is reasonable. The second sentence is absolute nonsense. I shouldn't even have to address it.
All of the following can be observed on this board:
- People discussing whether TNN the wincon is too good for legacy or is acceptable
- People tailoring their removal to kill TNN the wincon (-1/-1 effects and edicts)
- People tailoring their creature suite (the wincons) to consider the creature suite (the wincons) that the opponents use, e.g. a big part of the discussion on Mandrills vs Goyf in RUG is the benefit vs TNN and Angler respectively
- People tailoring their removal to kill Marit Lage the wincon specifically (e.g. Delver decks playing Dead//Gone)
- Nyx Fit seriously considering playing Sandwurm Convergence partly because all the Show and Tell wincons have flying
- People highly value having access to Karakas because the wincons for SNT/Reanimator are legendary and so is Marit Lage
etc
The problem with a statement like this ("general sense of comparative levels of competitive fitness" [retch]) is that it's so vague and meaningless that it can't be attacked. I anticipate a response like:
"What I actually meant was that people think about the meta in general terms, e.g. 'DNT isn't very good against Czech Pile because it's weak to Kolaghans Command"
"So DNT players are trying to find a different WINCON for the main or the side that isn't artifact based?"
"Wrong again, what I meant was hurdurdur"
- A hypothetical mondo-consistency deck based around JTMS and Ponder would probably one of the best matchups for Tron, see Miracles vs Cloudpost. Or did you mean unbanning Punishing Fire and Dark Depths would kill tron? That is going to take some explaining seeing as Punishing Fire doesn't interact with Tron at all, and Tron is possibly one of the decks most well equipped to fight Depths considering 1.) It has a lot of land tutors to find Field of Ruin or Ghost Quarter 2.) As a more extreme answer Tron can play Blood Sun and not be affected by it 3.) People would probably respond to the threat of Marit Lage by playing Path to Exile decks which Tron is favoured against*Modern is pretty lacking when it comes to the interactive axis of mana denial, but I think the with those kinds of unbans would still lead to the exclusion of Urza-tron based deck construction. That's not really the point though; no matter how you color Urza-tron decks, they're all trying to do the same thing and 'go big' with an otherwise uncastable bomb. In other words, a one-dimensional strategy preventing the assembly of Urza-tron translates to winning the game as the opponent. In the case of Dark Depths being hypothetically legal, a more efficient 'go big' alternative would likely be more responsible for pushing out Urza-tron than an enhanced ability for a consistency core-using deck to efficiently and reliably produce correct interaction.
- "No matter how you color Delver decks, they're all trying to do the same thing and go small with a bunch of 1 mana spells. In other words, a one dimensional strategy preventing the casting of 1 mana spells translates to winning the game as the opponent" Actually I don't even understand what your point is here. Are you just trying to say that Tron decks are bad? They obviously aren't, just like Delver isn't.
- If I'm reading this last sentence correctly it seems you do recognise that Jace sucks vs Karn. However, I'm not sure what the 'more efficient go big alternative' is. If it already existed then wouldn't people play it already? Does it somehow need Dark Depths in it to work? It seems like you're reaching for something like "tron is BAD, bad means NOT CORE, so NO cores in modern", but I've already gone over this
I can't imagine anyone who actually reads these essays of an argument...
Modern cannot be used as a measure for legacy and vice versa...
#unban mind twist, Earth craft, yawgmoth bargain
oi m8s hell is other magic players
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Good thing the "debate" is over. That's also not a strawman, but whatever; can't expect people to know everything.
EDIT: Also, clearly Lightning Bolt is the "core" of Modern because it's played in an entire 28 percent of decks. Ban Lightning Bolt. It's stifling the metagame.
(Fox, I'm on your side in this one.)
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A 2-deck format is possible in theory. It would require:
Obviously it's a bold claim to suggest there are two such decks (and carries a heavy burden of proof). But anybody who thinks the format is solvable in this manner is invited to name the 2 decks and thoroughly embarrass themselves.
- 2 decks with a precisely 50:50 match-up (otherwise it's a 1-deck format)
- No possible deck that preys on both (or even a deck that is unfavoured vs one, but even more favoured vs the other).
In other news, another good show for Tempo/Stompy:
http://mtgtop8.com/event?e=18145&d=312501&f=LE
I wonder if that is one of the only 2 truly viable decks in this format?
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Grixis Delver has proven to be the best deck in the format right now. It is 4% higher represented than any other deck. Imagine if every Canadian, BURG, BUG Delver player just played the best Delver 75 instead of playing delver variants they liked?
What, is it so hard to imagine that the best performing deck with even across the board matchups is actually... the best deck in the format? Lmao. Czech Pile I am told is the next best performing deck and I would happily rate it as the 2nd best deck in the format.
Do you really think it's so absurd that people would voluntarily choose to play fun decks over good decks in casual card games?
Imagine getting this worked up debating someone on the other side of the world about a children's card game. Have you never had someone disagree with you?
The best engine is glimpse/heritage druid/nettle sentinel. No other deck can you play 4 Drs, 4 ancestral recall, and 4 tinker.
Jace and Bloodbraid Elf have been unbanned for Modern today. Looks like JMS is going to skyrocket in price, the reprinting in M25 nonewithstanding.
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