All B/R update speculation.

[chunderbucket]

Chalice decks are terrible for magic and the card leads to more stupid games than any card in the format other than maybe SnT. The card is already restricted in Vintage, which sets a precedent its eventual legacy banning. The card isn't banned already because existing Chalice decks are inconsistent (you can only play 4 Chalice...), and thus pretty bad at winning bigger tournaments - you have to get really lucky. But one day there will be something that pushes Eldrazi or Steel Stompy or whatever else over the line. For the moment Chalice decks just troll around and snipe random blue players in a tournament before falling to their own variance.

I think legacy players broadly fall into two camps, the first being people who want the format to be some libertarian carnival where anything goes and as few cards as possible should be banned. For those players Chalice archetypes are just another wacky family member. The most important thing to strive for is 'as many playable decks as possible' and Chalice increases that number. The second camp includes players who are more competitive and/or more interested in magic being about technical gameplay. For those players, stuff like Chalice leads to fewer interesting games and increases the % of games won by bad players. These players aren't gonna shed tears about losing Chalice decks or SnT because those decks don't lead to competitive or technically interesting Magic games.

The important thing to remember is that these two groups want very different things out of the format.

Also - people like Dice Box who think that this just comes down to 'lol just play answers n00b' can't grasp that these cards are still boring whether or not people play answers as they lead to games where someone either finds their highly targeted answer (shatter effect for Chalice, edict for TNN etc.) and wins, or doesn't and loses. Choosing to increase the number of answers you have to inherently uninteractive cards helps your win % vs them, but they're still boring and linear games where you either got that answer or didn't.

Yeah, how dare players wish to invest time and money into a collecting cardboard game for 13 years and older to play with their preferred strategies instead of what Serious Competitive Players think is interesting. We should only ever allow cards from a limited pool that's extensively vetted by pro players in order to make sure nothing potentially unfun or degenerate makes it through. If only there were formats curated this way.

[non-inflammable]

if you want to make chalice less relevant, just ban brainstorm; i know i would stop playing chalice (currently sleeving up unplayable chunderbucket pile)...

#dice_box for pres

[iatee]

Yeah, how dare players wish to invest time and money into a collecting cardboard game for 13 years and older to play with their preferred strategies instead of what Serious Competitive Players think is interesting. We should only ever allow cards from a limited pool that's extensively vetted by pro players in order to make sure nothing potentially unfun or degenerate makes it through. If only there were formats curated this way.

There's also a format where people can play even more cards and decks than they can play in legacy, and they can do all kinds of wild and crazy things with one-of copies of the cards they've been collecting for 13 years.

And I think a lot legacy players probably would be happier they were playing it instead of pretending like they want to play competitive magic and then turn 1 Chalicing people.

[Alfy]

Exactly! That's the point! Magic should be about matchup variance. There should be a real thought process about which deck to pick, which strengths and weaknesses to choose, which cards to be vulnerable to and which cards to beat. You know, metagaming. If there's a deck that's 50% against the field what's the point of playing something else? And if you dislike variance so much and want it to be solely about skill why not just cut through the chase and go play chess or something? That's not a summary dismissal, I used to play chess competitively. It's crazy fun. But when sit across my opponent to jam some Magic, I don't want to feel like a mastermind trying to outwit everyone or something. I want to feel like a gladiator, where everyone has different weapons, where the constant imbalance of the game keeps shaking up the field to the point nobody is certain of anything anymore, where the simple process of pairing up become a thrill in itself, where every matchup is a completely different game and requires completely different skills, where making to the top8 is not solely due to intellectual superiority but a mix of astuteness, boldness and being favored by the gods.

Please don't try to shoehorn Magic into something that it is not. Variance and matchup diversity are what makes every game unique and the whole game infinitely replayable. Meanwhile, chess is slowly growing out of fashion because 70% of games at top level end up in draws and there are like three established best openings that have been set in stone up to the 20th move. You may have fun this way, but it's not fun the way Garfield intended ;-)

What the heck are you even talking about? I'm talking about printing more cards to make more archetypes viable, and you tell me I'm against variance??

Let's talk about what Garfield intended and the difference between a toss-up and variance. I don't think Magic was meant to be a series of matchups between decks that go 95-5 against each other, where meeting the wrong deck just means "oops, I lost unless I'm incredibly lucky". I don't think the entirety of the set of skills required to play the game is supposed to be reading the metagame. I don't believe in turning Magic into something where players have no control over their games, so I guess basically Yahtzee. Which doesn't mean Magic should be chess. There's still a lot of space left between Yahtzee and chess, right?

Your previous arguments went something like "good piles of cards are so good that unfair decks have to do something broken turn 1 or 2, which stifles brewing, so let's print a bunch of cheap prison cards". Which would achieve what? Unfair decks are not going away whether the current good piles of cards are in the format or not, the reanimated cat is out of the graveyard. And printing more prison cards can't possibly be good for brewing as a whole, except of course for brewing prison decks, and that seems incredibly restricted.

Legacy already has a metagame that has to be read (at least online, where people don't just bring "whatever they can afford to own"). It has top decks, but they are not over-oppressive and certainly not 50% against everything else, and their representation in results has much to do with the fact that, as always, the best players prefer control decks to anything else. But take any archetype under the Legacy sun, and it has had it's top-8 or 5-0 in the past few months. The meta is still dynamic, with older archetypes, or new takes on them, posting good results, whether it's UW Helm, Shortcake, Mono Blue Painter (and some much weirder stuff at times)... Heck, even though the list is not as exciting as something fundamentally novel, having what still amounts to a new archetype like UB Shadow imposing itself in 2018 is rather incredible for a format as old as Legacy.

It's clearly not enough for you, and I have heard the same sort of thing from other quarters, including recently from newcomers discovering Standard in Arena. To put it bluntly: a format where everyone comes with something new, where every matchup is different, where every list is unknown and where just discovering the opponent's plan is part of the journey is a pipe dream outside of the kitchen table. I'd also point out that in such a theoretical environment, a pile of good cards is ironically the right answer: with so many unknowns, discard + counters + removals + some aggression is the way to go... But more to the point, from a competitive point of view, it wouldn't even be interesting. There is skill in managing hidden information specifically because prior knowledge allows one to make deductions. Without that, you're just playing in the dark, so basically Yahtzee.

[chunderbucket]

There's also a format where people can play even more cards and decks than they can play in legacy, and they can do all kinds of wild and crazy things with one-of copies of the cards they've been collecting for 13 years.

And I think a lot legacy players probably would be happier they were playing it instead of pretending like they want to play competitive magic and then turn 1 Chalicing people.

Oh, but I do play it. I play EDH, Legacy, and even a little bit of Vintage. And you're sorely misguided about EDH, as people bitch and moan even more about lockpieces, combos and prison strategies than they do in Legacy and Vintage. And let's not speak about Modern where people keep crying to get Blood Moon or the Tron Lands banned.

Look, I just want to do my thing without people getting mad at me, calling me names or being condescending over pieces of cardboard with children cartoon art on it. As much as it lost diversity over the years, Legacy is still the one format that lets me do that. Also, thankfully, most players don't pretend the format is a Spike country club for chess wannabes and are more than happy to let me land my lockpiece or t1 them. When I was still new to playing on paper, I t2'd my Elves opponent but took a bit of time to go off. I apologized for being slow and not letting him make a single relevant play. He just shrugged, said "That's Legacy" and proceeded to t3 me in the next two games, and we had a bit of a laugh over it. That's Legacy. Yes, I like my libertarian carnival where anything goes, my gladiatoral arena, my hodge-podge of chunderbuckets, my pile of piles, my mish-mash of trash, because it's the only one I have. And even now it's endangered by blue grinders and very serious players like you who would turn it into 'expensive standard'.

[chunderbucket]

What the heck are you even talking about? I'm talking about printing more cards to make more archetypes viable, and you tell me I'm against variance??

Let's talk about what Garfield intended and the difference between a toss-up and variance. I don't think Magic was meant to be a series of matchups between decks that go 95-5 against each other, where meeting the wrong deck just means "oops, I lost unless I'm incredibly lucky". I don't think the entirety of the set of skills required to play the game is supposed to be reading the metagame. I don't believe in turning Magic into something where players have no control over their games, so I guess basically Yahtzee. Which doesn't mean Magic should be chess. There's still a lot of space left between Yahtzee and chess, right?

Your previous arguments went something like "good piles of cards are so good that unfair decks have to do something broken turn 1 or 2, which stifles brewing, so let's print a bunch of cheap prison cards". Which would achieve what? Unfair decks are not going away whether the current good piles of cards are in the format or not, the reanimated cat is out of the graveyard. And printing more prison cards can't possibly be good for brewing as a whole, except of course for brewing prison decks, and that seems incredibly restricted.

Legacy already has a metagame that has to be read (at least online, where people don't just bring "whatever they can afford to own"). It has top decks, but they are not over-oppressive and certainly not 50% against everything else, and their representation in results has much to do with the fact that, as always, the best players prefer control decks to anything else. But take any archetype under the Legacy sun, and it has had it's top-8 or 5-0 in the past few months. The meta is still dynamic, with older archetypes, or new takes on them, posting good results, whether it's UW Helm, Shortcake, Mono Blue Painter (and some much weirder stuff at times)... Heck, even though the list is not as exciting as something fundamentally novel, having what still amounts to a new archetype like UB Shadow imposing itself in 2018 is rather incredible for a format as old as Legacy.

It's clearly not enough for you, and I have heard the same sort of thing from other quarters, including recently from newcomers discovering Standard in Arena. To put it bluntly: a format where everyone comes with something new, where every matchup is different, where every list is unknown and where just discovering the opponent's plan is part of the journey is a pipe dream outside of the kitchen table. I'd also point out that in such a theoretical environment, a pile of good cards is ironically the right answer: with so many unknowns, discard + counters + removals + some aggression is the way to go... But more to the point, from a competitive point of view, it wouldn't even be interesting. There is skill in managing hidden information specifically because prior knowledge allows one to make deductions. Without that, you're just playing in the dark, so basically Yahtzee.

Your argument is basically 'what you want is impossible because reasons, also you want everything to be a cointoss'. I just pointed out that what I wanted was more or less the case 10-odd years ago, and is also more or less the case in Modern. It wasn't all cointosses. Don't put words into my mouth.

On Prison cards: I believe they are good for the format because they usually attack one angle of the metagame: chalice -> low curves, blood moon -> shaky nonred manabases, thorn -> spell based strategies. Prison pieces on legs (thalia, gaddock) are also good because it usually makes them maindeckable in many lists, but they're also vulnerable, so there's plenty of tension and back-and-forth. They're also not likely to saturate the format since they suck against each other, so there's a real ebb-and-flow. But more to the point, each prison card enables a whole new nonblue deck or archetype and allows it to survive in this world of combos and blue goodstuff piles. Eldrazi and Steel would not exist without Chalice. Death and Taxes would not exist without Thalia. Burn would not be a thing without Eidolon. Why are Goblins players clamoring for an Akki of the Great Revel or a Grenzo, Guardian of Thraben? Because, you guessed it, they're prison cards that would prop them up. Prison cards are the only way to be competitive if you're not playing blue or looking to kill your opponent very quickly. More prison cards->more ways to be competitive, simple as that.

[Alfy]

Your argument is basically 'what you want is impossible because reasons, also you want everything to be a cointoss'. I just pointed out that what I wanted was more or less the case 10-odd years ago, and is also more or less the case in Modern. It wasn't all cointosses. Don't put words into my mouth.

On Prison cards: I believe they are good for the format because they usually attack one angle of the metagame: chalice -> low curves, blood moon -> shaky nonred manabases, thorn -> spell based strategies. Prison pieces on legs (thalia, gaddock) are also good because it usually makes them maindeckable in many lists, but they're also vulnerable, so there's plenty of tension and back-and-forth. They're also not likely to saturate the format since they suck against each other, so there's a real ebb-and-flow. But more to the point, each prison card enables a whole new nonblue deck or archetype and allows it to survive in this world of combos and blue goodstuff piles. Eldrazi and Steel would not exist without Chalice. Death and Taxes would not exist without Thalia. Burn would not be a thing without Eidolon. Why are Goblins players clamoring for an Akki of the Great Revel or a Grenzo, Guardian of Thraben? Because, you guessed it, they're prison cards that would prop them up. Prison cards are the only way to be competitive if you're not playing blue or looking to kill your opponent very quickly. More prison cards->more ways to be competitive, simple as that.

I won't put words in your mouth if you don't put anymore in mine: fair enough?

Concerning the decks you mention: prison cards give them an edge, but I don't agree they're abolsutely necessary, nor that they make them particularly more interesting. Burn can do well without Eidolon, and Goblins absolutely does not need a prison card, it'd be the most linear, boring addition that deck could receive. I'm not well-versed with Eldrazi to say how much Chalice contributes to its victories, but I wouldn't find it a particularly compelling exemple: having more "dumb creature" decks is not what I'd be looking for if I wanted more diversity in the format. DnT, as its name implies, is much more than a Thalia deck, and actually a good reason not to add more prison pieces: having a format that already has DnT, and Stax, and Red Prison, and Workshops, I'm sure you can see how dangerous adding more efficient prison pieces can be to the diversity of the format.

Look, you want more ways to be competitive, then adding more cards that do essentially the same thing - stopping or taxing your opponent - is not going to achieve that. You simply can't create diversity by creating variations of exactly the same cards for every colour but blue. It's even worst with cards like Eidolon or Thalia, that tax pretty much 80% of the field: "play the most efficient cards or pay the tax" cannot possibly encourage diversity, it just encourages those specific decks that play them, and narrows the rest of the field to the best of the best. It might promote an archetype, but it kills ten in the process.

To really see new decks emerge, we need a body of new cards to emerge, and not cards that simply answer existing threats, because that's too narrow. I'm not sure we'll ever see much of that, because I don't believe Design spends much time thinking about Legacy, and actually, some of the weird interactions you mentioned earlier came up through serendipity: cards just came up that happened to have weird interactions with forgotten older cards. With EDH being the main source of new Legacy-focused cards, I'm not sure we'll ever see enough aggressively costed stuff to truly matter, but that's exactly what could shake things up for the best.

[Lemnear]

But more to the point, each prison card enables a whole new nonblue deck or archetype and allows it to survive in this world of combos and blue goodstuff piles. Eldrazi and Steel would not exist without Chalice. Death and Taxes would not exist without Thalia. Burn would not be a thing without Eidolon.

That's very thin ice. You legitimize potentially uninteractive blowout plays because they put certain nonblue decks on the map which otherwise would not be viable.

The "but blue!" argument aside, does that mean that Flash should have remained in Legacy or Trinisphere+Workshop in Vintage, because it was the backbone of Trinistaxx?

[chunderbucket]

"Interactive" is a buzzword and I wish people stop using it to justify whatever they think is good for the format. Besides, even if I were to adopt your strawmannest definition of the word, I don't want to interact. I want to t1 you. I want to lock you out of the game. I want to shrug off your threats and answers and go for the kill. I want to prevent you from playing because if I let you do your thing you'll kill me. Cards that don't contribute to any of these things aren't interactive, they're just bad.

But really, it's a buzzword. If a card disrupts your gameplan it is interactive in a sense, right? Unless by 'interactive' you actually mean 'vulnerable', aka bad? I mean, why should be certain forms of 'interaction' (on the stack, on the hand, on the battlefield) be more taken into account when coming up with a definition? And seriously, are we really arguing that hatebears and chalice decks are terrorizing the format and a danger for the metagame and that adding more of them would make the format collapse? Oh no I may have to play *gasp* inefficient removal for the 30% or so decks that dare disrupt me with permanents instead of counterspells, the horror. It's like Vintage players showing up with flusterstorm and pyroblast knowing full well they're dead against the top deck of the format, then complaining when said deck steamrolls them.

On the viability of decks without hatebears: Burn was on the brink of death before Theros and even now it's only Tier 2. D&T without Thalia is just a shitty weenie white deck that folds to every combo under the sun as well as a fair chunk of cantrip fair decks. Steel Stompy without Chalice is really just Modern Affinity, try showing up with that on a Legacy event.

[Alfy]

I disagree that "interaction" is a buzzword, and however much it can be difficult to define, I recognise it when I see it. Locking out your opponent turn 1 is pretty much the opposite: there's not game of Magic when only one player gets to play a card. Again, I'm not for banning Chalice, but making more of these cards can't possibly make for more interesting games.

[chunderbucket]

There's no such thing as truly 'locked out' in Magic. Until they print a Leyline that makes you win the game, there's always an answer to whatever permanent hate your opponent drops. That you didn't deign to put such an answer to your deck because it's too inefficient to your tastes is on you. That you can't put every kind of answer to every lockpiece, combo or threat your opponent might throw at you into your deck is a feature of the game, and the ability to successfully gauge which answers are the most relevant and worth including in a given tournament is an essential skill called metagaming. It's simple really: if you don't want to get locked out by Chalice, don't fill your deck with one drops, and you'll have plenty of interesting games. "But then I'd get beaten by decks filled with one drops", you'd retort. Ah yes, that's the point of metagaming: you can't just choose to be immune to every lockpiece, combo or threat under the sun. Otherwise there would be no metagame and everyone would just play your deck.

But really, the fact that you're having binary games against Chalice opponents is your own doing. I've had plenty of interesting games against Chalice opponents, because I don't play decks that completely fold to it. It takes two to tango, as they say.

[taconaut]

Oh I understand, I just think that it is hypocritical to play all the cheapest and most powerful shit then bitch when someone takes advantage of it. You are building in a way that makes you a known entity and leaves you with a exploitable weakness.

Adapt or die. Because those who want to play Chalice are going to kill you and are not going to care that you have all the best one drops.

I think Chalice rubs people the wrong way because it runs contrary to every rule about deck building: low mana curve, play the most efficient threats and answers that are good on their own, minimize variance. Instead, Chalice decks have a very high curve, you can get away with playing garbage piles like Popeye Stompy and still win games, and the deciding factor is all about the variance of opening hands.
And just like with Chalice, people are often reluctant to play appropriate hate because come on, I'm not playing bad cards just to beat that matchup, that would break the cardinal rules of deck building.

Run answers to your issues. Everyone else has to.

Bloodmoon does this to me. Oh and I never have Brainstorm, Ponder or other such shit to find my answers at the best of times. Sometimes I cant even cast my answers because I have no Green.

Having Grizzlebees land turn one is boring, watching TNN do it's thing is boring, watching someome B2B another player out of the game is boring, watching someone masterbate with Cantrips is boring...

Seriously, I can bitch about Bloodmoon, Reanimator, B2B Miracles, Enchantment Nic Fit (Shocking hard for me to beat) or just about anything else and people will say "You play Lands, you have to expect bad matches". It cuts both ways. Chalice just eats you like Reanimator or Bloodmoon eat me.

Bolded emphasis mine.
This is the key distinction the chalice detractors are trying to make, I think – with respect to the bombs you discuss, Dice, the answers feel like legitimate, well-considered tradeoffs.

To wit:

- Blood Moon? Oh, I can run more basics, trading consistency in my manabase for resiliency.
- TNN? Oh, I can run some non-targeted removal, some edicts, or try to find a way to go over the top of TNN (can my deck support a combo win, like Aluren/Food Chain/Depths Combo/etc?)
- Reanimator? Well, graveyard strategies are powerful if you lack interaction; maybe my sideboard can include some Extractions/Rest in Peace/Faerie Macabre/Leyline/Grafdigger’s Cage/etc if I expect a lot of graveyard strategies.

By contrast:

- Chalice? I guess I can…play bad versions of cards I already want to be playing?

Then, on top of that, when you bust out your two-mana removal for chalice, you get sphered/resistored, and now you need three mana…and it just feels like you made bad deckbuilding decisions to account for random kamikaze decks that are as likely to lose to variance in a later round when they don’t get the Tomb > Chalice draw they got on you twice in a row.

I do think cantrips should have an exploitable weakness, but I agree with the other poster that there are other cards that do it in a more reasonable way than chalice in particular (though I personally find resistors boring, too). Also, totally agree that Griselbrand and TNN are boring.

Again, I am not complaining about the powerlevel of chalice but about the binary boring games it creates. I never thought the game was over after t1 ponder.

This quote also elegantly encapsulates the difference.

If you’re a fan of martial arts, chalice decks are like a fighter that tries to open every fight with a backflip bicycle kick to their opponent’s head. Sure, sometimes they just immediately get the KO, but plenty of times they just miss and eat it. Some people really like that dynamic, and would love to watch that fighter, but their matches wouldn’t have any of the interesting nuance that comes with making jabs for spacing, feinting with punches and going for takedowns, the small incremental advantages that come with wrestling on the ground, etc. The latter strategy makes for better fights, and generally is higher EV for the fighters that employ it.

There is no cost to playing Brainstorm apart from having to be Blue (Check for most decks) and having access to Fetches (Check again). Sit that next to "I can't play one drops" for running Chalice or "My mana base has to be red and I am limited to all the effects that come with that" if you plan to build around Moon. These are real costs. 'Shit I have to play Blue and Fetches' is not a cost.

I actually agree that there might be a bit too little cost to running cantrips, so this is a fair criticism. I have felt like my deck had too much air occasionally, though – those games where it feels like all of your ponders are “land, ponder, land” and you shuffle and draw a land, and then die to whatever selesnya gremlin the other guy cast.

In my opinion Chalice is not punishing enough for grinders. There should be a Magus of the Chalice (0/1 with X +1/+1 counters or something), a Magus of the Trinisphere, as well as a Duosphere and a Unisphere costing 2 and 1 (to punish free alternate costs), and Maguses thereof. Magus of the Smokestack. Magus of the Sun. Alpine Magus. Bring it on Wizards, just stop printing goodstuff blue toys.

What would this improve?

In a good meta the top decks ebb and flow and it is never clear what is the best thing to play. It is sort of like that in Modern.

Exactly! That's the point! Magic should be about matchup variance. There should be a real thought process about which deck to pick, which strengths and weaknesses to choose, which cards to be vulnerable to and which cards to beat. You know, metagaming. But when sit across my opponent to jam some Magic, I don't want to feel like a mastermind trying to outwit everyone or something. I want to feel like a gladiator, where everyone has different weapons, where the constant imbalance of the game keeps shaking up the field to the point nobody is certain of anything anymore, where the simple process of pairing up become a thrill in itself, where every matchup is a completely different game and requires completely different skills, where making to the top8 is not solely due to intellectual superiority but a mix of astuteness, boldness and being favored by the gods.

Please don't try to shoehorn Magic into something that it is not. Variance and matchup diversity are what makes every game unique and the whole game infinitely replayable.

I actually love your description of what you want your magic tournaments to be, it was very evocative.

It makes me wonder though, like I have so many times before – why not play Modern, and let legacy be the low-variance, high power format cantrip fans want? Modern sounds like exactly what you want.

Modern already banned all the good cantrips, so it can’t be what cantrip fans want. Why do we have to make Legacy more like Modern, when we already have Modern?

And please, not every game has to be a mental masturbation fest with two masterminds interacting on the stack like true intellectuals or something. Sometimes I just want to mindlessly jam Chalice, TKS, Blood Moon, Show and Tell, whatever, and turn things sideways until you die. Let us have that too.

I also applaud this for being intellectually honest – that “slam it and jam it” mentality is what many of us would like to avoid in our games, and it sometimes feels like people who play chalice don’t acknowledge that it’s pretty “set it and forget it.” It is definitely less demanding than trying to pick your spots.

I disagree that "interaction" is a buzzword, and however much it can be difficult to define, I recognise it when I see it. Locking out your opponent turn 1 is pretty much the opposite: there's not game of Magic when only one player gets to play a card. Again, I'm not for banning Chalice, but making more of these cards can't possibly make for more interesting games.

I think I mostly agree with you, but Chalice is definitely interactive, it’s just really, really boring. It forces you to interact, because typically you must remove it, which necessitates a card that cares about what your opponent is doing. It just does it in a way that feels like it demands almost nothing from its pilot (outside of deckbuilding restrictions, which I acknowledge).

[talpa]

There's no such thing as truly 'locked out' in Magic. Until they print a Leyline that makes you win the game, there's always an answer to whatever permanent hate your opponent drops. That you didn't deign to put such an answer to your deck because it's too inefficient to your tastes is on you. That you can't put every kind of answer to every lockpiece, combo or threat your opponent might throw at you into your deck is a feature of the game, and the ability to successfully gauge which answers are the most relevant and worth including in a given tournament is an essential skill called metagaming

LOL
Rarely read so many false claims all together.
"Truly locked out" It doesn't matter if "technically" you could have had a 0,001% chance of casually drawing your (bad) out (that you put in your deck because, you know, you are the king of metagame) when you IN PRACTICE are locked out.

But most importantly, according to you the "skill" should be to forecast the unpredictable, setting your answers against what you could RANDOMLY encounter during the tournament.
Except, if we follow your reasoning, the conclusion would be very different: just ignore the matchups that you are very unlikely to play against, because they are bad and not much played. So, ignore chalice.decks. So, just hope to avoid the landmine; and this means that all people that you say are "complaining" are actually following the best metagaming strategy.

Maybe, that's exactly what you are trying to achieve. Not a real discussion, but trick the opponents in ignoring your pet deck.

Except again, the better way to put the best answer is to not consider your opponent at all and just play a fast linear deck that can combo out before they can play a lock piece. And all calice.players would start complaining against dredge, belcher, all spells, reanimator, show and tell...

You chose to support that conclusion, have fun!

[Bithlord]

Let's talk about what Garfield intended

If we're going to do that, then we should all limit ourselves to a randomized starter deck and 5 to 10 boosters. rarity was intended as a balancing factor, because players were not intended to buy as much as they did.

[Mad Mat]

Bolded emphasis mine.
This is the key distinction the chalice detractors are trying to make, I think – with respect to the bombs you discuss, Dice, the answers feel like legitimate, well-considered tradeoffs.

To wit:

- Blood Moon? Oh, I can run more basics, trading consistency in my manabase for resiliency.
- TNN? Oh, I can run some non-targeted removal, some edicts, or try to find a way to go over the top of TNN (can my deck support a combo win, like Aluren/Food Chain/Depths Combo/etc?)
- Reanimator? Well, graveyard strategies are powerful if you lack interaction; maybe my sideboard can include some Extractions/Rest in Peace/Faerie Macabre/Leyline/Grafdigger’s Cage/etc if I expect a lot of graveyard strategies.

By contrast:

- Chalice? I guess I can…play bad versions of cards I already want to be playing?

I don't see the contrast. Building around chalice either forces you to modify your mana curve or play cards that can remove it. Similarly, building around blood moon forces you to modify your mana base (i.e. pack more basics) or play cards that can remove it. Building around TNN forces you to modify your winning strategy (e.g. not creatures, go wide, go big, evasion) or play cards that can remove it. Building around reanimator forces you to modify your winning strategy (race them) or play cards that interact with the graveyard on turn 0 or 1. In all cases, these latter cards are otherwise suboptimal inclusions. They are narrow or inefficient answers to a card or strategy which otherwise ruins most of what you want to do.

Then, on top of that, when you bust out your two-mana removal for chalice, you get sphered/resistored, and now you need three mana…and it just feels like you made bad deckbuilding decisions to account for random kamikaze decks that are as likely to lose to variance in a later round when they don’t get the Tomb > Chalice draw they got on you twice in a row.

I think you're contradicting yourself here. You can't complain about losing to variance because of how key that turn 1 chalice is, if these decks are packing that much redundancy. What they're going to lose against, is archetypes which are not very vulnerable to chalice and thorn. If they're not facing those decks, they're either lucky or made a good meta call.

I do think cantrips should have an exploitable weakness, but I agree with the other poster that there are other cards that do it in a more reasonable way than chalice in particular (though I personally find resistors boring, too). Also, totally agree that Griselbrand and TNN are boring.

The only issue I've always had with chalice is that it warps play/draw even more than already is the case in most competitive formats. Other than this frustrating tempo inbalance, much like tangle wire used to cause, the card is very fair and easy to play or build around. Just diversify your CMC's and/or pack a few answers. If anything, there should be more effects penalizing the ridiculous power inherent to one mana spells.

This is particularly important because massive hosers exist in magic. A few have been mentioned above, like Blood Moon, True-Name Nemesis, Chalice, but there's also Rest in Peace, Sanctum Prelate, Bitterblossom, Choke, Humility, Dread of Night, Winter Orb... It is critical for decks vulnerable to them that they can have a way to address them. This will always promote decks with cantrips more strongly, because cantrips are almost the only source of consistency in the game which does not force constraints on the answers which can be found. Actually, the opposite is true: they increase the number of potential answers, because they facilitate splashing for other colors as they do not discriminate on any card trait, including lands. Decks can be made more consistent with other engines, like green sun's zenith, recruiter, goblin matron, enlightened tutor, crop rotation, entomb... But all of these constrain what outs you could possibly use - often being vulnerable themselves to the hosers you'd want to address.

With chalice being one of the few effective tools to counter cantrip strategies, it plays a critical role in playing down this dynamic.

If you’re a fan of martial arts, chalice decks are like a fighter that tries to open every fight with a backflip bicycle kick to their opponent’s head. Sure, sometimes they just immediately get the KO, but plenty of times they just miss and eat it. Some people really like that dynamic, and would love to watch that fighter, but their matches wouldn’t have any of the interesting nuance that comes with making jabs for spacing, feinting with punches and going for takedowns, the small incremental advantages that come with wrestling on the ground, etc. The latter strategy makes for better fights, and generally is higher EV for the fighters that employ it.

I'd like to make another metaphore. Decks vulnerable to chalice on 1 are like those fighters who have an impressive résumé, but tend to always use the same type of moves (to great effect). Chalice is the low jab exposing the big weakness in those moves.

I think I mostly agree with you, but Chalice is definitely interactive, it’s just really, really boring. It forces you to interact, because typically you must remove it, which necessitates a card that cares about what your opponent is doing. It just does it in a way that feels like it demands almost nothing from its pilot (outside of deckbuilding restrictions, which I acknowledge).

Jace feels like a very similar card, then. Or Liliana TLH or most other playable planeswalkers. It forces you to interact, because typically you must remove it. It does it in a way that feels like it demands almost nothing from its pilot. I know, Jace provides you with options and the most powerful one requires you to choose what to put back. But this choice is rarely very hard, due to the ridiculous advantage a resolved jace awards you on any board that is not highly out of your favor. Board wipe into jace is almost as unbeatable as a resolved griselbrand.

On the other hand, playing chalice often forces you to make hard decisions on how to run out your fragile manabase and facilitates a game that is not based on whether your opponent cantripped into the right answer, but who made the right choices in combat math. It tends to shift the flow of the game from stack interaction to battlefield interactions, because few permanents that see play cost 1 mana.

[iatee]

Jace feels like a very similar card, then. Or Liliana TLH or most other playable planeswalkers. It forces you to interact, because typically you must remove it. It does it in a way that feels like it demands almost nothing from its pilot. I know, Jace provides you with options and the most powerful one requires you to choose what to put back. But this choice is rarely very hard, due to the ridiculous advantage a resolved jace awards you on any board that is not highly out of your favor. Board wipe into jace is almost as unbeatable as a resolved griselbrand.

Yeah, and if people were reliably casting planeswalkers on turn 1, there would be a problem.

A fine alternative to banning Chalice is to just ban the Sol lands. Chalice is a much more reasonable card if the opponent has at least one turn to find a response. I feel like they have more of a grandfathered place in the format than Chalice does, however.

[taconaut]

I don't see the contrast. Building around chalice either forces you to modify your mana curve or play cards that can remove it. Similarly, building around blood moon forces you to modify your mana base (i.e. pack more basics) or play cards that can remove it. Building around TNN forces you to modify your winning strategy (e.g. not creatures, go wide, go big, evasion) or play cards that can remove it. Building around reanimator forces you to modify your winning strategy (race them) or play cards that interact with the graveyard on turn 0 or 1. In all cases, these latter cards are otherwise suboptimal inclusions. They are narrow or inefficient answers to a card or strategy which otherwise ruins most of what you want to do.

All of those changes you cited are not as strictly suboptimal as the way many Stompy players are suggesting building against chalice. The things you mentioned are tradeoffs: how much of my manabase can I modify to be both flexible and resilient? What answers can I include that both deal with generic threats, but also address cases that are specific challenges to my deck, like TNN for creature based strategies? What cards can I employ to force my opponent to play the game on my terms, rather than their linear strategy (for instance, the graveyard)?

Instead, for chalice, the question is, "Should I play gray ogre instead of grizzly bear because once in a while I'm going to get randomly spell snared for the entire game?" Making the choice to arbitrarily "diversify your mana curve" is nonsensical, inasmuch as it disadvantages you against everyone building efficiently, i.e., everyone not playing stompy.

I do think, though, that the "how do I force my opponent to play on my terms" consideration, is a reasonable argument for continuing to have chalice decks in legacy - there should be some sort of check on cantrips, in this case. However, Chalice is less about a calculated design or shrewd play approach, and more about matchup and opening hand lotteries, which I personally (and several others, it seems) find unsatisfying.

I think you're contradicting yourself here. You can't complain about losing to variance because of how key that turn 1 chalice is, if these decks are packing that much redundancy. What they're going to lose against, is archetypes which are not very vulnerable to chalice and thorn. If they're not facing those decks, they're either lucky or made a good meta call.

I think stompy decks will lose to those decks as well, but I don't think you'll have any difficulty finding plenty of discussion about how one of stompy's chief drawbacks is "losing to itself;" that is, figuring out to do with hand that don't have a binary lockpiece followed by a threat. Plenty of players better than me have discussed the many reasons people chose Grixis and Miracles over stompy decks in the past, despite the ostensible power of sol land strategies, and one of the chief concerns is that they allow relatively little "play," or ability for the pilot to leverage experience and calculation to change the outcome of games.

The only issue I've always had with chalice is that it warps play/draw even more than already is the case in most competitive formats.

This is particularly important because massive hosers exist in magic. This will always promote decks with cantrips more strongly, because cantrips are almost the only source of consistency in the game which does not force constraints on the answers which can be found. Actually, the opposite is true: they increase the number of potential answers, because they facilitate splashing for other colors as they do not discriminate on any card trait, including lands. Decks can be made more consistent with other engines, like green sun's zenith, recruiter, goblin matron, enlightened tutor, crop rotation, entomb... But all of these constrain what outs you could possibly use - often being vulnerable themselves to the hosers you'd want to address.

With chalice being one of the few effective tools to counter cantrip strategies, it plays a critical role in playing down this dynamic.

I agree with much of this. I think the conventional answer is that the more specific engines are more powerful in exchange (when they work), but I think it's definitely fair to argue that cantrips are better even when you include those specific circumstances that make loam/GSZ/Entomb/etc better. It's unfortunate that wizards rarely prints additional interesting, nonblue consistency engines, as I think a lot of the posters here would enjoy it (and I'd rather them not ban cantrips).

I'd like to make another metaphore. Decks vulnerable to chalice on 1 are like those fighters who have an impressive résumé, but tend to always use the same type of moves (to great effect). Chalice is the low jab exposing the big weakness in those moves.

I don't think this counter-metaphor is adequately developed - are you trying to say that cantrip decks end up playing out the same, game after game, as a consequence of their consistency?

As I understand it, the similarity between any given delver match and any other is one of the things that most irks cantrip detractors, so if you're in that camp, it makes sense.

Jace feels like a very similar card, then. It does it in a way that feels like it demands almost nothing from its pilot. I know, Jace provides you with options and the most powerful one requires you to choose what to put back. But this choice is rarely very hard, due to the ridiculous advantage a resolved jace awards you on any board that is not highly out of your favor.

On the other hand, playing chalice often forces you to make hard decisions on how to run out your fragile manabase and facilitates a game that is not based on whether your opponent cantripped into the right answer, but who made the right choices in combat math. It tends to shift the flow of the game from stack interaction to battlefield interactions, because few permanents that see play cost 1 mana.

Yeah, and if people were reliably casting planeswalkers on turn 1, there would be a problem.

Iatee made one distinction that I think is very relevant, but on top of that, I think you are heavily mischaracterizing the demands of chalice and Jace.

I'm not saying all the decisions with Jace are hard, but with Chalice, there just aren't any. I acknowledge that combat math and sequencing are important skills in magic, but you have to make those decisions with Jace on top of the decisions you make about what to do with him:

- Do you brainstorm, fateseal, or bounce?
- If you want to brainstorm, can you protect him? What if your opponent has a bolt? Will the fateseal +2 still be good enough if they do?
- If you do fateseal, do you look at your opponent's top card or your own? If you or they have fetches or other means to shuffle, does that change your decision?
- If you want to bounce, which creature do you bounce? What if it has an ETB ability? Would it be better to bounce your own creature?

On top of all that, you have to evaluate the combat math between your creatures and theirs, and how much you value your jace versus your life total, and figure out if you opponent has made the same evaluation.

For Chalice, 95% of the decision is, more or less:

- Is it in my opening hand with a Sol Land?

and the play, if the answer is yes, is "jam it."

Certainly, the points many posters have made about metagaming, drawbacks of not including 1 cmc cards, accepting a higher variance deck, etc, are very relevant, but for intra-match considerations, chalice asks considerably less of its pilot than Jace, or other comparable cards. I do agree with you on Griselbrand, though; if he gets onto the battlefield, it's pretty much lights out, and it's not going to be interesting.

[Dice_Box]

- Chalice? I guess I can…play bad versions of cards I already want to be playing?

It's a choice made in other formats. Vintage was quick to embrace Abrade, as was Modern. I don't accept people can't afford to adapt, I will accept they don't want to.

If you don't think that something is played enough to warrant adapting to it that's a fine reason not to, but then your making a choice and you will have to pay for it if you face it.

Then, on top of that, when you bust out your two-mana removal for chalice, you get sphered/resistored, and now you need three mana…and it just feels like you made bad deckbuilding decisions to account for random kamikaze decks that are as likely to lose to variance in a later round when they don’t get the Tomb > Chalice draw they got on you twice in a row.

So your complaint here is sometimes they just have it all? Been there, that's a bitch but it's how the game works. Sometimes your playing Stompy and they have Force and Wasteland and you don't play a game either. That's life.

For the record the deck I don't want to see when playing Stax is Goblins. Trashmaster just fucking destroys me. No joke. I have run as hot as the sun against Goblins and still lost. Card is good.

[taconaut]

It's a choice made in other formats. Vintage was quick to embrace Abrade, as was Modern. I don't accept people can't afford to adapt, I will accept they don't want to.

So your complaint here is sometimes they just have it all? Been there, that's a bitch but it's how the game works. Sometimes your playing Stompy and they have Force and Wasteland and you don't play a game either. That's life.

For the record the deck I don't want to see when playing Stax is Goblins. Trashmaster just fucking destroys me. No joke. I have run as hot as the sun against Goblins and still lost. Card is good.

Abrade is different than some of your previous argument, though - playing abrade is taking measured steps to adapt to potential matchups, which I think is fine. The other argument for chalice was based around varying CMCs, which is not a reasonable proposition in the context of the greater metagame:

Just diversify your CMC's.

It's simple really: if you don't want to get locked out by Chalice, don't fill your deck with one drops, and you'll have plenty of interesting games. "But then I'd get beaten by decks filled with one drops", you'd retort.

Which, to be fair to you, I did not see you say explicitly (I did look; the closest you came was saying, "don't build your deck in a way that is cold to it," which could be charitably interpreted to mean "build your deck in a way that includes removal for chalice" or something similar).

I certainly include cards to beat chalice in the decks that I make, and love it when I beat a chalice player; I just think there would be way fewer non-games if it weren't in Legacy, and that games that don't involve chalice are vastly more interesting and considerably less random.

[Mad Mat]

All of those changes you cited are not as strictly suboptimal as the way many Stompy players are suggesting building against chalice. The things you mentioned are tradeoffs: how much of my manabase can I modify to be both flexible and resilient? What answers can I include that both deal with generic threats, but also address cases that are specific challenges to my deck, like TNN for creature based strategies? What cards can I employ to force my opponent to play the game on my terms, rather than their linear strategy (for instance, the graveyard)?

Instead, for chalice, the question is, "Should I play gray ogre instead of grizzly bear because once in a while I'm going to get randomly spell snared for the entire game?" Making the choice to arbitrarily "diversify your mana curve" is nonsensical, inasmuch as it disadvantages you against everyone building efficiently, i.e., everyone not playing stompy.

Is that ever the question? Do people ever consider Incinerate above Lightning Bolt if they expect a lot of chalices?

People adopt two strategies: they pack answers to chalice, which are at the same time a bit more versatile than that. Cards like Abrade, Abrupt Decay or Kolaghan's Command. Or they pack cards which allow them to play around or through a chalice, like delve creatures, planeswalkers or young pyromancer.

I do think, though, that the "how do I force my opponent to play on my terms" consideration, is a reasonable argument for continuing to have chalice decks in legacy - there should be some sort of check on cantrips, in this case. However, Chalice is less about a calculated design or shrewd play approach, and more about matchup and opening hand lotteries, which I personally (and several others, it seems) find unsatisfying.

I agree partially. The big problem with chalice is its play/draw sensitivity. Any card abusing this dynamic reinforces the importance of the die roll, which is an unsatisfying aspect of the game. This is a big problem in legacy in general, with chalice partially to blame.

But I also think that this massive impact of chalice is due to decks too often banking on cantrip-reliant hands. In this sense, chalice is an effective hoser disrupting this very powerful deck-building mechanic, which allows players to cut back on lands and threat/answer density. It's just too bad that the impact is a bit too play/draw dependent.

I don't want to attach this problem too much to chalice only though. Cards like deathrite shaman (rip), daze, thoughtseize, hymn to tourach, delver... all abuse(d) the play/draw mechanic signficantly to achieve their current power level.

I think stompy decks will lose to those decks as well, but I don't think you'll have any difficulty finding plenty of discussion about how one of stompy's chief drawbacks is "losing to itself;" that is, figuring out to do with hand that don't have a binary lockpiece followed by a threat. Plenty of players better than me have discussed the many reasons people chose Grixis and Miracles over stompy decks in the past, despite the ostensible power of sol land strategies, and one of the chief concerns is that they allow relatively little "play," or ability for the pilot to leverage experience and calculation to change the outcome of games.

That is because the most popular stompy decks, eldrazi and moon, bank on either chalice + more hose or chalice + big cheaty threats to win the game. But these are not the only decks which can utilize chalice. At a fairly similar power level you have steel stompy and 4c loam. These decks pack chalice and have a lot of room for pilot skill to impact the match result. I would say this consideration of chalice being an easy card is more because of R&D screwing up the development of eldrazi tribal and the format's vulnerability to blood moon (pre drs ban).

I agree with much of this. I think the conventional answer is that the more specific engines are more powerful in exchange (when they work), but I think it's definitely fair to argue that cantrips are better even when you include those specific circumstances that make loam/GSZ/Entomb/etc better. It's unfortunate that wizards rarely prints additional interesting, nonblue consistency engines, as I think a lot of the posters here would enjoy it (and I'd rather them not ban cantrips).

The problem will be that, if they print something powerful and generic enough, it will be better in cantrip shells, because it is improved consistency on top of them. You'd need engines which work poorly with cantrips, yet still provide sufficient power. Survival is a good example, but with the power creep of the last years, it'd become too format-warping. Or engines at a similar power level as cantrips, but available to other strategies. Faithless looting is a good example of that.

I don't think this counter-metaphor is adequately developed - are you trying to say that cantrip decks end up playing out the same, game after game, as a consequence of their consistency?

As I understand it, the similarity between any given delver match and any other is one of the things that most irks cantrip detractors, so if you're in that camp, it makes sense.

The metaphor is supposed to highlight that the main "problem" with chalice is that it addresses an inbred metagame, based on a mechanic in the game with very few tools interacting with it.

Iatee made one distinction that I think is very relevant, but on top of that, I think you are heavily mischaracterizing the demands of chalice and Jace.

We were talking about how chalice is boring, not its turn 1 impact. I gave jace as another example of cards which are boring, because they warp match-ups around their resolution and timing. It's no more interesting or skill-intensive to face a resolved turn 1 chalice as rug delver than it is to face terminus/k-command/snap-plow into jace as a creature deck. At both points, your only out typically becomes hoping your opponent messes up. Which I guess is more likely with jace, as it has more options, but that is some pretty poor consolation.

I'm not saying all the decisions with Jace are hard, but with Chalice, there just aren't any. I acknowledge that combat math and sequencing are important skills in magic, but you have to make those decisions with Jace on top of the decisions you make about what to do with him:

In all my years of magic, I can remember maybe one instance of combat math having any impact with jace on the battlefield. Jace player needs to keep him alive, other player needs to get him dead. Combat is just about that, nothing more.