Brainstorm
Force of Will
Lion's Eye Diamond
Counterbalance
Sensei's Divining Top
Tarmogoyf
Phyrexian Dreadnaught
Goblin Lackey
Standstill
Natural Order
So, brainstorms restriction was not, as you said essentially at the cost of having gush unrestricted. Which is a false statement seeing as both were axed at the same time. It is, if anything, the other way around and the gush unrestriction was at the cost of having brainstorm restricted. The minor difference being that brainstorm was not unrestricted because of gush as your claim would lead on, but that gush could come off the list as brainstorm wouldnt.Originally Posted by btm10
Funny that they would consider gushbond safer than just brainstorm.
Balance would be completely broken in Legacy for the same reason it was broken in the single fomat. It's a card that you either play 4x or you construct a list that won't auto-lose to it, which if you're not playing it is hard to do.
When it was last legal as a 4-of targeted discard was just a glimmer in R&D's eye.
You do realize how different is Library from BS? Also, those Ponders and Preordains, I thought they're blue.Apparently Brainstorm is now the only tool of library manipulation not only in blue, but in all of magic.
Top give any deck much more consistency than any Brainstorm do, with a difference, it require more initial investment and don't cycle any bad card in your hand. Ponder and Preordain both give you access to the top 3 cards of your library to see and put 1 in your hand, with a difference: they don't automatically cycle bad cards in your hand. Most looting spells do pretty much what BS do, but usually at 3 mana (TFK, catalog etc...). Sylvan Library is essentially a Brainstorm every turn that cost 1G but 4 life for each card you want to cycle.
Why would anyone assume that brainstorm is the only possible card manipulation tool blue have and if it's gone suddendly we get modern and topdeck wars?
Also with TC existing now (and Jace not going anywhere), i really doubt blue decks would ever go to topdeck wars, with or without BS. That and we got Dig throught time too. Late-midgame blue card draw/manipulation is the strongest it has ever been.
The difference between blue and non-blue shells is that for the most part the latter ones rely on topdecks and good hands, at least in the opening turns. It seems like WotC dislike any kind of consistency tools in non-blue (please, Sylvan Library works no later than turn3), while blue has an abundance of hand fixing cards. This leads to a disbalance in color representation which is not a good idea for a game that has five colors and for an Eternal formats that rely on 20+ years old RL dual lands.
I don't get why you think this is about Brainstrom, in fact it's about zero Ponders in non-blue. And I'm not even saying we need them, I'm just curious why in a game of five colors where hand/draw fixation and CA is very important aspect (as anybody playing MtG for more than a few weeks must grasp), some of the colors simply lack those tools, or have less of them, or got a clunky set of wanna-be CQ/CA cardboard like Looting and such.
Anyone trying to out-CQ, out-CA blue with anything as slow as Sylvan Library or whatever non-Symbiote else, is simply doing it wrong and should have really good reasons to why not simply play blue. I find it strange (MtG has five colors), annoying (the convergent decks all over the meta) and stifling (high pricetags on all blue fetch/dual lands). Would it be so bad to print TC in green? Would it be so bad to make reasonable looting? And no, cmc2 permanents that work on turn3 are not comparable to cantrips. If they'd be, you'll see far more Sylvan Libraries than Ponders.
Until WotC change their policy on non-blue CQ+CA tools, nothing will change, at least not for the better... of non-blue.
[insert thine "but, but, but color balance doesn't matter!" arguments below]
I clearly need a break from this thread if people are actually discussing Balance. WTF. It's not played in Vintage as much because you can't build your deck around it anymore as a one of (Vintage has a restricted list, Legacy has a banned list). I played vintage regularly in the 4 Balance era, it makes Terminus look like Kirtar's Wrath.
Balance is insane with artifacts / enchantments and now planeswalkers. Enjoy getting wrathed, geddoned and mind twisted for 1W.
On the bright side it would be a non-bo with Jace and Elspeth due to every list playing 8 targeted discard to try to win the Balance and counter wars. That and 4 mana being seen about as often in blue or white as 8 is seen now.
Liliana can be ritualed out. That would be the play people would be looking to make.
My concern is purely a power level one. I'm fine with other color best option being SdT, i'm not fine with blue best option being Braincestral. If Braincestral were gone, the relative power level of blue filtering/draw compared to other colors wouldn't be so absurd, and you'd see more decks not centered around blue. More importantly, without brainstorm, discard would become much stronger and a viable anti-combo option, whereas now it's still too unreliable cause thoughtseize into brainstorm, let you see 3 land is fucking game. And that would make black a possible core color for a deck, much more than it is now because of both the weakening of blue and the increase in relative power level of targeted discard.
Also, while card advantage/filtering is pretty much blue and little else, black still has cards like liliana and recurring graveyard cards that do pretty much the same thing, + bob and various drawcardforlife spells and tutors, green has GSZ, it had Survival, it has library, it has glimpse. Red and white are the worst in that department but they still have way to generate a lot of virtual card advantage like Thalia, Pyromancer, Lavamancer, Brimaz, SoL, mom, Monastery swiftspear etc...
If wotc thinks library manipulation is primary ability of the blue slice of the pie, it's a design decision. But giving the better cards to a single color isn't a design decision, is a power level issue, because if for absurd you costed all blue cards 1 mana more, blue would sucks shit except for ancestral at 1U, time walk at 2U and maybe tinker at 3U. It's purely a power level matter.
Consider it like this, in a game where colored mana is hardly an issue, the power level of a card is a function of how much a card is under/overcosted. Ancestral at 3UU is fair, probably at 1UUU too. Brainstorm would be still a good card at 1U. Timewalk is fair at 3UU, maybe even 1UUU. And so on. Moxen are fair at 3 mana. Lotus would be fair at 4, probably even 3. Sol ring is broken at 1, sucks at 4, is a good card at 3. And so on.
If wotc thinks that a card can be present in basically all the top placing deck in the format, then why it has to be brainstorm? Why not Survival? It's skill intensive! It reduces randomness! It doesn't win games by itself, only the rest of the deck do! You can say the same shit about ten other cards currently banned now, but only brainstorm apparently can have an higher penetration than Survival, Misstep, and whatever else you can think of but not get banned.
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Ok, so you agree with me that the other colors could get some CQ tools? It isn't even anything that "blue" like cantrips, although they are the most obvious (and being cmc1, also flexible), but lets say unban SotF, bring some more draw/filtering in green, reasonable draw in black, reasonable looting in red and in white... idk what could be done in white, but nvm.
Again, if I have to choose between a game where there is too much variance and decks crumble every other game, I'd either play Old School or don't play at all. While variance is an important and inherent part of Magic, it's really frustrating to lose to consistency issues. And that brings us back to non-blue consistency tools (they mostly suck), the reason why color balance might be important (image of game, blue duals' price and their chokehold of format), etc.
@Lemnear
That reply format is infuriating, can't quote it at all. It's a bit more work, but would you mind using the standard format for other people's sake?
On the topic of post-Brainstorm combo, Elves and Reanimator seem like they'd both probably be fine. As far as Storm decks with the least possible dead draws go, aren't modern ANT builds already very close to that? Or are you thinking about needing to cut IT/LED?
I'm very sorry about the format, but for one who's mainly writing on his iPhone 4 on his ways from A to B to C, the whole formating of quotes is a pain in the ass, especially as I tend to comment after 2-6 sentences of the quoted Poster to make clear which part my comment adresses. Over the last two years it therefore became a lazy habit of mine to just hit the "quote"-button within a quote and start writing. :/
Reanimator won't be fine as they have a one more cardtype to Balance than S+T which are the Entombs if we consider the Reanimation/S&Ts the enablers. Modern ANT will have to reconsider it's manabase and disruption suit as discard isn't welcome to race decks like Burn, Dredge or D&T. Aside from this they can get rid of most spells Stuck in their hand by simply casting them for cheap (cantrips) or cycle them (IT). the only 3 exceptions are PIF/ToA/AN with only 1 not being a fine Spell to cast for value instead of full combo. So yeah, ANT should be fine, but TES with the damn Moxen and possibly plenty of Business spells in hand will have a serious Problem
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Other colors getting CQ tools would be nice but won't happen with WotC policy. And even if happened, it would take years, and it'd never reach the level of old blue CQ options simply because WotC is nerfing spells a lot, even if red is getting some nice tools (Tormenting Voice, Faithless looting etc...). Meanwhile we get a format dominated by blue for years, which could use seeing some more diversity and color representation without killing any deck straight with just banning brainstorm and possibly unbanning 5-6 cards (twist, Vise, SotF, Desire, frantic search, jar).
And combo isn't going anywhere with TC in the format, the card is just absurd for combination decks, even if not in straight AdN storm. There are also other combo decks like TES, Jeskai ascendancy , Reanimator , Elves!, Enchantress, TimeSpiral, SnT, Sneakattack, Omnitell etc... No but honestly TC in combo is absurdly good, i've played some modern games of Jeskai ascendancy to see if it was good as modern players were saying (omg dude it's busted it win T2 ERRY GAME!), and the card is just ancestral in that deck, so pretty good. But at least that mean i can play Dryad militant or Thalia and win the format
I think this is actually a productive discussion, so I'll join in. I agree with Delver and Show and Tell being major constraints on the format, but I'm less sold on Terminus. It may be how Miracles shuts aggro down in most cases, but Counterbalance/Top is what stops aggro from getting back into the game post-Terminus in most cases, isn't it? Deadguy and Dega both run Bob, and he's also in some builds of Junk Maverick, as is Sylvan Library. So unless these matchups usually play out differently than I've observed from watching other people play them, the Counterbalance/Top lock is probably more constraining than Terminus. The fact that Abrupt Decay answers CB/Top is probably a big part of what makes BUG the best positioned Delver variant right now.
An interesting corollary of this is that if Brainstorm were banned, the number of viable tier 1/1.5 decks would almost surely decrease, especially at the lower end, because without Brainstorm, decks like Food Chain wouldn't be consistent enough to slog through even a medium-length event.
The thing that makes most tier 1 lists tier 1 is the consistency with which they find good cards early in a game and their ability to persevere through mediocre opening lines by changing the draw line that would otherwise defeat them.
In the process those tier 1 lists invalidate most other lists in the meta which are not capable of that type of card selection early on, this regardless of the card power available to them.
I played in a meta in which blue card advantage essentially consisted of 2 cards in every list: Ancestral Recall and Timewalk, which produces a second draw in the TW turn alongside all the tempo of being able to untap with that draw. People played one each of these because that's what the format rules were. They won a large percentage of the games in which they resolved Ancestral Recall and the opponent didn't. They won many of the games where they resolved Time Walk and the opponent didn't.
There was room however for many other archetypes than blue aggro-control and control in that meta and the people sitting at the final tables in the old single elimination format were by and large playing 8 different lists and trying to do 3 or 4 different things among them.
The format was not Channel-Fireball format and it wasn't Fastbond-Timetwister-Time Walk format and it wasn't T1 Juzam Djinn, T2 Serendib Efreet, T3 Sengir Vampire format, although all of those things were playable and did get played. It wasn't Burn format and Millstone format and Winter Orb format although all of those things were also playable and did get played. It wasn't White Weenie format and it wasn't Mono-black Aggro Control format and it wasn't Red Green Aggro format although all of those things would be at the top tables from time to time and were definitely playable.
The thing that kept the format from being dominated by big blue was that you only had 2 or 3 ways (Demonic Tutor) to go get that blue card advantage and while the advantage was really big when you got it you just didn't see it every game the way you do in Brainstorm-Ponder-Force of Will format. That left room for a lot of powerful cards to make an impact on the format and the meta was extremely varied with good homebrews often sitting at the last tables at the end.
If Brainstorm were banned you'd wind up with more opportunity for non-blue lists to become tier 1, because their biggest flaw - which is that they're not extremely consistent the way Brainstorm-Ponder lists are would become much less of a flaw. Yeah, the blue lists would still benefit a lot from Ponder when they saw it and they'd certainly start playing Preordain in some numbers to make up the difference. However Preordain doesn't do what Brainstorm does in terms of helping fix a weak situation and turning it into a strong one. Blue consistency would still be there but it wouldn't be the only show in town.
You know why Elves is so strong right now? Because it's one of the few non-blue lists that has the kind of consistency available that blue does. It has this because it has Glimpse of Nature to give it a lot of card draw and multiple ways to create mana from creatures and essentially break the summoning sickness paradigm that almost all other lists labor under. It has an amazing set of tutors in Green Sun's Zenith and Natural Order. It has built-in ramp with all the creatures that give ways to produce mana from themselves and other creatures on the turn they are cast.
That kind of consistency shouldn't be limited to lists that play blue and the one creature list that WotC has chosen to favor at this point. It really shouldn't be in any lists, since that kind of consistency essentially drives 90% of other competitive lists into the ground.
We're playing in one of the most boring formats possible at this point. It isn't going to get better any time soon. Not unless blue becomes less consistent and other things that it is suppressing with its consistency that are really hostile to Elves become playable.
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
Elves is a tier 1 atm not because of Glimpse alone, but because of running the green versions of Ancestral Recall, Tinker and Tolarian Academy, paired with a total of 2 different draw engines (Symbiote+Visionary/Glimpse) and up to 8 Tutors (NO/GSZ). There is not much to say in addition to that redundancy available (unless you want to mention the cream topping of machinegun DRS activations possible in that deck).
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Please, you are crying because blue has the cantrip spells???
- Black has the discard and the spot removal
- White the protection and the mass removal
- Red has 'fire' and good small creatures
- Green has mana accelerators and big mosters
I love this game because you have to deal with these limitations instead of crying like babies
PS: And stop comparing Brainstorm with Balance or I will compare Ponder with Yawgmoth's Will :D
Let me fix that post.
PS: No one compared Brainstorm to Balance. Balance was brought up seperately.
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Really S&T is mana acceleration???
Please name TWO blue small good creatures (please, they have to be top creatures)
Are you serious about Blue having the protection??? It's white!!!
Blue has better small creatures. Delver, Snapcaster, TNN, even Clique are more played than red's best little guy Youngpyro.
Funny, that. The format's top two premier big mosters decks play blue and not any green mosters in sight. Or any green mana accelerators. No mosters in green are even worth playing unless youre on elves or cloudposts.
If taking the best spells in any colors and accessing them through card filtering is what you mean by limitations then I take pity upon your abuse of definitions of words on a daily basis. They must get progressively worse as the day wears on.
This thread makes me hate the MtG community even more.
Ok, so there's some interesting and serious discussion on interesting and serious MtG theme and every ten posts someone jumps in with "stop crying, babies"? Then what's the point of discussion? Even more: what's the point of joining a discussion forum when you cannot stand other people's opinions?
Lemnear (and many others) sorted the reasons why blue is OP, and I will repeat myself that one color being clearly above the others is not good for marketing/image/gameplay, moreover it brings the extreme pressure on some RL cards like blue duals, etc., all those aspects limit the deck design, turned this game into golden youth hobby, etc.
Now when blue has efficient threats (Delver, TNN, Clique, JTMS), hand disruption (Clique, but also that 1/1 discard dude I'd love to play against combo and Piracy Charm or w/e), stack control, CA+CQ, mana acceleration, cheat spells, theft effects and protection, the last hole to fill is land destru... oh wait, Stifle... ok, blue lacks real removal. But wait no longer than year or two and we'll get our blue Bolt.
Yeah, Show & Tell enables you for 3 mana to drop your 8-mana Griselbrand or 15-mana Emrakul from hand into the battlefield. Ergo it is basically a ritual-like effect to ramp you from 3 mana to 8/15 if you think about it.
The precious poster gave you enough examples ranging from Delver to TNN over the whole batch of 2cc meerfolk lords, while red has Young Pyromancer, Goblin Guide, Goblin Lackey and now, Swiftspear. Render me not impressed especially if you keep the years in mind these red creatures saw print.
About blue not having protection: TRUE NAME NEMESIS! Let that one sink in while thinking about "counterspells" in terms of "protection". Embarrassing
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