Brainstorm
Force of Will
Lion's Eye Diamond
Counterbalance
Sensei's Divining Top
Tarmogoyf
Phyrexian Dreadnaught
Goblin Lackey
Standstill
Natural Order
I don't think the people active in the B&R discussion hate legacy, I think they love it. At least I do. That is a huge difference. Why would you care to discuss a format that you hate... You don't hate it, you may hate (or rather dislike) the small details that make it much worse than it could be, with a very small change.
I will draw an analogy to explain the situation in my perception, it's not a very good one but it will do. Say Ferrari produced only cars without audio system (they probably don't, but let's say). You love your Ferrari car, you love driving it, you love its speed and how cool it is. But you hate that it won't play your favorite music, for some reason. You really want it with an audio system. So you suggest they produce a Ferrari with an included audio system, as you and many of your friends would love to have it. Without audio works, you'll continue driving Ferrari even if it stays without it, but you would enjoy it more if you could play your favorite music from a good in car audio system while driving. So you contact the car salesman and ask if he could help you get a Ferrari with an audio system. The car salesman replies to you - why do you want a Ferrari with an audio system? There are other cars with audio systems, for example Volvo produces cars with audio sytsems. Why don't you buy a Volvo instead? It seems like it has everything you ask for: it's a car, and it has an audio system. Obviously, in this situation you are not interested in driving a Volvo, it doesn't offer you the experience that you are interested in, you are very happy with your Ferrari and just found a very small thing to change to make it more enjoyable for you. You have considered driving a Volvo before, as well as many other car brands, so it is not a new idea to your mind, it is just one that you long ago chose to not pursue.
Similarly, legacy players know about the format Modern, they know about Standard and Vintage too, but they chose to play Legacy for some reason. They probably invested thousands of hours and dollars into the format and they are happy with it. They just know that with a minimum change the enjoyment of the format could increase by say 30%. At it's current statust they still think it's like 200% more enjoyable than the other options. Just from my perspective..
LOL do you even watch his videos? So often he just scoops on turn 2-3 because he encounters some impossible matchup or sb card
You can argue about the extent to which this statement is true (i.e. I wouldn't say that modern is entirely 'skill-less') but I don't think any sane person would outright disagree with the above statementSo if you enjoy nuanced, skilled play, and don't care that most of the decks are built to fit certain "pillars" of the format, then you should play Legacy or Standard. If you just want to jam all kinds of random decks against each other and don't really want to focus on leveraging your play skill to amass a winning record, then Modern is more your jam.
Edit
@Pettdan the car analogy is ABSOLUTE GARBAGE TIER because the changes that an individual person wants for the format affects everybody else that plays it.
The reality is more like if nobody's Ferrari had a stereo, you want a stereo in your Ferrari, so you go to the manufacturer and insist they recall EVERYONES FERRARI and put a stereo in all Ferraris
Of course most Ferrari owners would say "I prefer the aesthetic of no stereo" or "I would rather not have excess weight of a speaker system, leave my car alone, go find your own car with a stereo"
Thoose scoops are mainly because either he is playing a brew and is playing against a tier 1 deck or he just doesn't want to produce boring gameplay for the audience because he doesn't play to win but to entertain.
Alos it never happens in legacy that you have to scoop becaue of some impossible to beat card (have your heard of Chalice, Blood Moon and Show and Tell?)
@Kombatkiwi: the analogy relates to the advice to play another format and not how format changes affect everyone playing the format, an irrelevant aspect for the point I was making. You'll have to think just a little bit too, I don't write out obvious things all the time.
Modern blowouts = boring gameplay? QED
The point is that it happens far less frequently (and reliably) when your deck has access to FoW, Brainstorm, Daze, etc, not that it never happens at allAlos it never happens in legacy that you have to scoop becaue of some impossible to beat card (have your heard of Chalice, Blood Moon and Show and Tell?)
@Pettdan No, your analogy is shit. The recommendation to play a different format is ABSOLUTELY relevant because any changes you make to the format don't only affect you. They affect everyone else that plays it. Of course people that enjoy the status quo are going recommend looking elsewhere for alternatives that already appear to offer what you want, because accommodating your wishes would require EVERYBODY ELSE to modify the experience they currently enjoy. (An aspect which doesn't exist in your Ferrari story at all)
Sorry for this slightly off topic conversation, this will be irrelevant for most of you..
I'll repeat why I think you're wrong here. The purpose of the analogy was to explain why someone who wants to make a change to X may not be interested in Y. In more general terms, the purpose of the analogy is to illustrate another situation where the same relation between X and Y appears.
If you want to find a suitable analogy for explaining why someone should not make a change to X, because it will also affect other people's relation to X, you then need to come up with an analogy yourself. I am not interested in explaining this phenomenon, and I assume anyone will understand this very easily anyway. I think it is wrong for you to assume that my analogy should be able to explain the relationships or characteristics that you are interested in debating.
I have noticed it is common that people believe that an analogy should be able to explain all characteristics and relationships of a given situation, but I think that is wrong. You're most welcome to correct me if you know better, I haven't studied the topic of analogies in detail. Edit: actually I have been interested in the topic of analogies for a long time but not until today I needed to actually start looking into it (and I may be completely wrong). ;)
I don't totally agree.
Legacy is not a static beast and it has been better than it is in the past. People can say that's rose tinted glasses, but we actually have past data to back it up.
I am not sure I love current Legacy, I am sure I loved Legacy in the past and what I argue for is a path to mesh current trends onto a path that takes us back to such a format. I guess that's more a political argument than a realistic one though and it's why I have become dissatisfied.
It's also why I am enjoying Modern. Sure, it lacks Force, but it also lacks many of the issues I have with Legacy. The hegemonic nature, the join them or fight them feel of the shells. People can say 'Don't let the door hit you on the way out' but really what does the deminishment of the playerbase help them or me? I really loved this once and I wish I could take us back to that time, it's not "I want to tear it down" as much as "Oh God look at what we lost".
This basically. I love the format. I've played it almost exclusively (with a small hiatus in the past few months before the DRS ban to #GoPlayModern) for almost 8 years now. It's not a lack of success that frustrated me with the format. I've top 8'd opens in the past. It's just a frustration that the format feels stagnant and while legacy is a slow shifting format it feels to me that the format only gets smaller and smaller in terms of diversity which is what drew me and many others to it in the first place. I remember reading Durwards Nic Fit articles and loving the deck. I remember seeing really cool painter decks and a maverick deck with multiple tool boxes built in and a 4 color lands deck that has a million different tools to fight any situation. Even the tempo decks were cool because they got to use a card like stifle to pair with wasteland to mana screw people. I'm just disappointed that the format has moved away from cool innovation and interesting deck building choices to being "if you want to win 12 of your cards have already been chosen for you now just go figure out what cards you want to kill with".
And yes we can just go play modern, and have. But there is something different about Ancient Tombs, and Dual Lands, and Mox Diamonds and Cabal Therapies that make legacy a little bit different. I'm sad to see legacy go the way that it is. Our locals are dwindling down to dangerous numbers again. I don't know if the format is stale or if it's prices that are doing it, but it seems like the death knell is on its way at some point.
i think for the weeklies it's mostly a cost barrier that's keeping new players from joining in. i think this format has such a big draw due to it being an environment where people can really find a deck that best suits their personality, and the variance of 3-4 rounds allows for the randomness to win with anything.
there's a ton of players that would still play the top tier decks, but there really is just so many options in legacy. unfortunately the cost barrier is a real issue.
-rob
i know for me Ive played for 20+ years but in the last few I havent gone to events weeklies or bigger ones because of location / adulting. Additionally I havent sold any of my collection so the cards have just been taken out of the supply. I have enough dual lands / staples to probably fuel an 8 person legacy event competitively. This drives the prices up, prevents people from joining because cards are scarce, and it removes people from the tournament scene. I imagine I am not the only person this has happened to. On a larger scale this is a lot of people.
Play 4 Card Blind!
Currently Playing
Legacy: Dark Depths
EDH: 5-Color Hermit Druid
Currently Brewing: [Deck] Sadistic Sacrament / Chalice NO Eldrazi
why cards are so expensive...hoarders
(Note: I do not chide your notion of dissatisfaction, it's real and valid. However, it's much like being sad when your baby grows to a messy toddler and then a sassy teenager, then a rebellious one. We can want what we once had, we can desire to go back. But we can't.)
The issue then is that this sort of regression is almost certainly an impossibility, without very heavy action taken to ban (almost all) newer cards than your desired nostalgia dictated era. The very nature of Legacy, by virtue of being a true Eternal format, is constrictive, rather than inclusive. The threshold of playability gets higher and higher with every playable card made, by virtue of the fact that the latent power of several key cards is necessarily format defining, if not in name than certainly in practice, set the threshold criteria of subsequent playability.
This is less prevalent in a non-roting format, like Modern, because things simply not legal (and the banned list too, of course) sets a far more stringent (and demonstrably lower) power level of even that format's more "defining cards." What this means, as people have alluded to, is, in general, a less defined format. People have a sense that "anything goes" in Modern, because the power level of most decks is within the normative limit of variance to determine the outcome of a given game. Of course, this supposition presumes you compare two decks of at least minimally competitive power level (what that is and how to define it is rather beyond the scope here, but we can presume such a concept exists, even if we can't define it off the top of our heads). In other words, the cards in your deck are unlikely to be so sufficiently powerful that, in general, variance would not still have a factor in the outcome of the game. So, a poor draw from most Modern decks will probably not beat a good draw from most Modern decks, regardless of which strategy either employs (this, again, is in general, exceptions exist).
This is not exactly the case we have in Legacy (or Vintage, but we can leave that aside), because Legacy decks, in order to compete, are hyper-consistant and specifically made to be so, while also featuring a number of high powered cards. This means that any strategy, regardless of axis it operates on, must be able to compete at, or very near to a minimum level of consistency, while also maintaining a competitive power level. So, this is a very hard balance to strike, as many powerful cards do not lend themselves to consistency and (newer) ones that do lend themselves to consistency are not powerful. (We, of course, as Legacy players naturally consider both power and consistency in evaluation cards as a matter of course, but for the sake of drawing conclusions about broad aspects of the format, it's more necessary to separate them.) Consider Tron decks in Modern. The power level of their payoff cards is sufficiently high that the payoff outweighs, in general, the inconsistent nature of their draws and mana-base. Such decks have a harder time in Legacy and so have to adopt different techniques to increase their internal constancy and/or induce inconsistency in their opponent's (Chalice of the Void, Wasteland, et. al.)
What the hell does all this mean? Well, it means that the threshold criterion of "playable" for Legacy is high. Very, very high. And so, that means that while the format encompasses more cards than Modern, that fact leads directly and inescapably to less cards passing muster as competitive. You can evaluate it statistically as well. The bell-curve of Modern playability is tall with short tails, while Legacy's is necessarily shorter with longer tails. What that means in that less can transgress the mean playabilty level and move toward the right wall of highest competitive playability (or power-level, if you will). So, if you want a more diverse format, you'd have to cut off essentially everything that comes near the right wall. Which is necessarily what defines Legacy, since those more powerful cards are, in general, not legal or Banned in Modern.
So, I've said before, the ship has sailed on what Legacy was in the past. They days where anyone could win a tournament with River Boa is gone. It isn't coming back. Legacy is defined by a dominance hierarchy of excellence, not inclusivity, not diversity. In fact, the reason why you and others are drawn to the format is exactly that excellence, which is by it's very nature antithetical to diversity. You just lament the fact excellence pushes out diversity. And that is true. The question then, is what do you value more? And so then, we need to ask ourselves, as I have in the past and never gotten a good answer, "What should define Legacy?" I'd go on more to explain how such a post-Modernist ideal to be against excellence is, in the long term, garbage, but no one would listen anyway. It's doubtful anyone has made it this far into this post as it is.
TL;DR: Banning Deathrite didn't work, banning Fetchlands won't work, even banning Brainstorm won't actually work, because poeple's post-Modernist ideals cannot be achieved with Legacy.
"The Ancients teach us that if we can but last, we shall prevail."
—Kaysa, Elder Druid of the Juniper Order
I agee with H. Legacy is not the format for all the cards printed. Its the format for the best cards printed. For new cards to be played they need to be best, thus sending the old best cards to tier 2. I also believe deck-building has improved immensely lately, which means bad decks had a bigger chance back in the days.
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See my long-winded post above.
Ha, good, maybe it will trick someone else into reading the whole thing. If not, well, who cares? You guys can just return to this endless cyclical "discussion" that gets no where, because everyone is entrenched in ideals they can't or won't acknowledge.
Yes, this too, but my post was already long enough. Deck-building theory is now nearly a science, the margins outside of it's proscriptions are small, if they even exist at all.
"The Ancients teach us that if we can but last, we shall prevail."
—Kaysa, Elder Druid of the Juniper Order
It's an interesting and well-writen post and I'll read it again, but the whole point of all my discussions ever in this thread, I believe, is that banning Brainstorm would be a giant leap in the direction of flattening out the dense concentration of decks that build their consistency mainly on Brainstorm. It is by far the most powerful consistency tool. This is very hard to say for sure though, but unless we test it I don't think we can say whether it would make the format more like what H, and others, want or not. And for me, to comment on that, a more diverse format is not necessarily related to a historic status of the game, I have played many interesting and varied decks lately and I'm pretty sure I could get away with much more in that direction if certain small changes were made.
Btw I think it's a really interesting discussion to follow..
Well, I threw my TL;DR in there specifically to be controversial, in the hopes that people would actually read the whole post. In reality it is very hard to know how "flattening" banning Brainstorm would be. It could be very much so, or it could be more akin to what we are watching happen post-Deathrite, where people just slide directly to the next best option and so in general have engendered very little change by way of the meta (except to made Red clearly the better splash color than Green). In reality, it probably is somewhere in between, where consistency flattens, but not to the level people imagine, where suddenly the benefits of the rest of the Blue cantrips don't dictate that running them can, and will be, the most consistent and so, often, the most "powerful" thing you can do. That's when the never ending protesting of excellence just targets the next victim to be on the chopping block. Just like our comrades here joyfully targeted Fetches while Deathrite's body was still warm on guillotine. Brainstorm would die and people would have Ponder and Preordain ready for the next execution, no doubt.
"The Ancients teach us that if we can but last, we shall prevail."
—Kaysa, Elder Druid of the Juniper Order
I am not sure an anything goes feeling is truly existent in Modern but I do agree the power level is all relative. There are honesty best things you should be doing and their are best cards, but yes, the power level is flatten out by the removal of cards that would take over the format. (Post Lands, Ponder, Eye) I feel this is not totally to its benefit, some cards are unlikely to do anything and sit on the ban list looking stupid because of the curated nature of the format. Wild Nacatl was oh so threating it needed to be excommunicated from the format right? Right? Oh. Never mind.
But that said look at the top decks, Affinity, UW, Dredge, Hollow One, Humans, Burn, Storm, Shadow... Not one of these shares a true "Core" with any of the other and all are decks you could take to any large event and not be seen to be out of place. Now let's try that with Legacy...
I guess I just agree with your views, including that Legacy is not going back (something I admit, that's why I am conversing over abstractions not cards) to what I remember. What I think would help is not going to happen and I accept that. It's why it takes a post from someone looking for trouble to start it, because I think we have all come to accept what the format is now. None of us really have any fight left. The battle is over and continuity has won.
That and we lack a certain Obrian to push the topic like some kind of single minded comic drone.
Well, this is why I put it in quotes, because the sentiment exists. Does the reality bore it out as a fact? Not really. There are still things that are demonstrably better than others. However, all I was trying to point out is that the relative level of those things compared to some others simply is not as disparate as it can (and often is) in Legacy. So, people are right that Modern is a "more" anything goes format than Legacy. But is Modern a true "anything goes" format? Demonstrably (statistically) not.
Well, I'm not good for the pastiche. But I'll try to beat the drum against post-Modernist anti-exceptionalism as much as I can, even though it fails the comic ideal...
What many people here want is a nostalgia format, much like Old School. I think those are good. You should make one and promote one that captures what you feel is the "quintessential" time when Legacy was "best" for you. Then go have fun. What Legacy has become is exactly what Legacy should be (for the most part), but that doesn't preclude that everyone will like it. Deathrite should still be in, but that's an unfortunate dead horse.
I pour one out for our dead brother Deathrite who died for our post-Modernist sins. I proudly keep my foil copies in remembrance.
"The Ancients teach us that if we can but last, we shall prevail."
—Kaysa, Elder Druid of the Juniper Order
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