Brainstorm
Force of Will
Lion's Eye Diamond
Counterbalance
Sensei's Divining Top
Tarmogoyf
Phyrexian Dreadnaught
Goblin Lackey
Standstill
Natural Order
We have been bitching about it since almost the beginning (And the issue predates Legacy). Does that count?Originally Posted by Barook
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This is total BS, the shares of those decks were not that high. Threshold made up a larger single percentage than any one deck does now. People raved about the health of the meta before TNN and it was 40% RUG and Jund.
People complain about the penetration of blue in the format, but the difference now is that blue decks have enough easily-accessible hate to fight anti-blue decks like Dredge, Goblins, or Merfolk. I don't think it'd be too hard to bring decks like that back up to par. Even if they do make it there, however, blue decks with fetches for half their landbase with Brainstorm and Dig/Boat are practically running 50-card decks. Giving off-blue consistency is hard, and the only way to make up for it is threat density.
Or maybe Gobs should start running 8blast?
*tips fedora* We can be best friends, m'lady.
I honestly think the two biggest offenders in the current metagame are TNN and treasure cruise (both happen to be recent blue cards) because both fundamentally break two of the pillars of the game: combat interaction and the fact that card advantage has to come at a reasonable cost (this is why ancestrall recall is fundamentally broken). I will admit that Delver and deathrite shaman might be in the same category because they are too cost effecient but they are are answered by almost every 1 cmc removal spells as well so Im ok with them.
TNN is just a horrible design: I would be surprised to find someone on the Source that actually enjoys playing with the card. TNN single handidly killed goblins and most midrange decks. TNN+ equipment is just womp..
Treasure cruise- the fact that I can sit down and watch one of the best miracles players in the world in Joe Losett lose back to back to U/R delver decks is just wrong. Miracles, A hard control deck with a card which normally destroys fast aggro decks in counterbalance, where ideally control > aggro, losing to U/R delver, which is one of the fastest aggro decks, shows me how overpowered treasure recall is...
I would gladly ban TNN and cruise.
Actually, there are people who genuinely like TNN. But then again, there are also people in the world who enjoy sex with donkeys...
Completely agree on TNN.
I'd argue having to run so much air in your deck and forcing yourself to cantrip poorly is a real cost to Cruise. Instead of casting ponders and brainstorms for optimization on their own, people are firing them off ASAP just to draw more of the same in hopes that cruise will get them above what a more patient cantripping deck can manipulate towards. Cantripping in Canadian Threshold or Storm is vastly different from UR delver.
Hell, most decks that are running 4x brainstorm/ponder/probe/cruise are forced to run most of the remaining slots as removal/reach + creatures. This leads them exceedingly vulnerable to combo decks or chalice archetypes. Whether or not this is enough of a cost depends on the format but I think this is fine for Legacy. I think we'll see the UR delver inbred forked bolt meta get taken advantage of so they have to start respecting combo to the point creature based strategies can't be easily bowled over.
It's a game of variance: Lossett didn't have it and his opponents both did. That doesn't mean Lossett didn't play worse overall or is a worse player or miracles is bad in the matchup or UR is overpowered for going against your preconceived notions of how the matchup usually unfolds. If you want a deterministic game where the better player always wins, magic isn't what you are looking for.Treasure cruise- the fact that I can sit down and watch one of the best miracles players in the world in Joe Losett lose back to back to U/R delver decks is just wrong. Miracles, A hard control deck with a card which normally destroys fast aggro decks in counterbalance, where ideally control > aggro, losing to U/R delver, which is one of the fastest aggro decks, shows me how overpowered treasure recall is...
And enough of this rock, paper, scissors justifications, they aren't useful. Oversimplifying every possible collection of 75 into 3 neat boxes and saying everything in box A beats box B will only leave you frustrated. And anyway control lost to aggro, which lost to combo, which lost to control. Not aggro loses to control.
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While I agree with you that TNN is bad card design, and Cruise is too strong, you are wrong. Gobs has been dead for a while, even though it seems every new card kills it. Mid range still exists, and is still good. Why should miracles get to just roll ur delver? Even if we simply magic to rock paper, scissors, aggro was always scissors to control's paper.
Ok fair enough, I may have oversimplified the last argument by using the Joe Lossett example and the incoming criticism is due- My point is that treasure cruise alone makes aggressive strategies resilient to most control strategies, the ability to refill your hand for one U, undermines the whole idea of control slowly establishing incremental card advantage. I have now seen many instances where lands struggles and loses more often then not to delver strategies. I am not advocating some hard rock paper scissors lock, but the whole beauty behind magic and metagaming is that there has to be some weakness or downside to most strategies; treasure cruise really makes delver decks universally good by giving the most aggressive decks the most effective form of card advantage. The major downside to combo decks is hate, but now the major downside to aggressive decks is no longer running out of gas or reach: they are almost perfectly suited to fight every deck in the field G1, even maverick. I do agree with combo decks being able to handle U/R to some extent, but in SB matches these delver strategies easily can side in cards to make them favorited with flusterstorms and more counter magic to goldfish even harder.
p.s. My point is that treasure cruise seems too inherently powerful because it makes many decks too resilient-
Last edited by Emo; 12-17-2014 at 03:43 PM. Reason: typo
Fetches, Brainstorm and Cruise are probably not okay to all be in the same format.
other than the fact that TNN has the complete wrong color identity he's a good creature for the format. He should really be green imo or at the very least white. Green is the AGRO color... and yet all of its creatures are practically outclassed by TNN...
people will just start running relic of progenitus main and not only will it kill cruise decks but it'll kill DRS, reanimator, and lands. Best part is that when you aren't playing against those decks it cantrips! so while treasure cruise is good, its really only good in decks that plan to cast it late game, or built to cast it early game because of fast spells. You can't just stick it anywhere. The cost of building your deck to be compatible with it is the reasonable cost. you can't really compare it to ancestral because its conditional. although its not a difficult condition its still conditional.
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Legacy 2006 World Championships
http://archive.wizards.com/Magic/Mag...gacy06/welcome
183 lists
35 Goblins
20 Threshold
16 High Tide
12 White Weenie
12 Burninator
8 Deadguy
5 Survival
5 Aluren
4 Faerie Stompy
4 Iggy Pop
4 Affinity
4 Landstill
3 White Rock
3 R/G Beats
3 Salvager Games
29 Rogue lists undefined
Somewhere between 49 and 57 of the non-Rogue lists included a playset of Brainstorm, depending on whether Affinity and Faerie Stompy were playing the set or not. 20 Threshold, 16 High Tide, 5 Aluren, 4 Iggy Pop and 4 Landstill.
The final 4 included 8 Brainstorm in Threshold and High Tide. The other two who made it were Goblins and Deadguy.
Then Tarmogoyf was printed and by the Gen Con 2007 Championships Threshold was about half the field in the final 32. Why? Because Goblins couldn't get around Tarmogoyf reliably. The blue shell scooped him up and became half of the top 32. Why? Because the predictability of the blue shell made a cheap big beast with no other attributes one of the best cards in the game. The cheap big beast with no other attribures gave the blue shell it's spearhead.
Essentially every other development in Legacy since then has been an offshoot of that basic arrangement.
Or maybe this shows how insane was the printing of tarmogoyf at the time.
I don't know why, but people seems ok with insanely strong creature cards and always complain about enchantments or instants. Back in 2006 we could still play Survival, but after the printing of Vengevine people preferred to complain about the enchantment instead of the creature. As a result they killed the deck.
Today we have the same problem with Delver and Emrakul. People keep saying that Show and Tell shoud be banned because of Emrakul, but nobody have considered the ban of a 15/15 that also makes coffe for you... same could be said for Delver that is dominating the fields. I can't really see how bannig cards like brainstorm that actually gives many 1.5 decks a chance to survive would give more variety to the format.
Legacy dose not have broken cards like necropotence or yawgmoth bargain that need to be banned in order to made the format playabe. No, legacy needs a rebalance for his low cost/hig permforming creatures.
So, ban Emrakul, Vengevine, Delver, True-Name Nemesis and many other insane and cheap creatures that made so much relevant drawing a single stupid card in this format. And give us back cards like survival that without those insane creatures is just ok.
The big creatures that reanimator and SnT use wouldn't be much of a problem if it weren't so easy to circumvent the casting cost. And there's a whole library of big creatures that pay off with SnT like Grisselbrand, Progenitus, Darksteel Colossus, or Jin-Gitaxias.
No, they won't. Never. People could have played Spell Snare, Pithing Needle or all forms of graveyard removal against Survival of the Fittest as well, but refused to run obvious metagame answers because of them being "narrow". They prefer ranting and bitching in forums so WotC removes their need for metagaming and bans cards in question.
In other words Brainstorm is 50% of the metagame since 2006/2007 despite people claiming that in 2006/2007 the metagame was sooooooo healthy and diverse .... laughable as I mentioned many times before.
You don't get the reasoning for the SotF ban, don't you? It's totally pointless if you ban Emrakul or Griselbrand if WotC keeps going with their creature power creep and the next absurd creature is right around the corner. We saw SFM replacing Tarmogoyf which replaced Werbear. We saw Griselbrand and Emrakul replacing Akroma and Spirit of the Night as the best cheat-into-plays. All you can do at this point is cutting the enablers, but banning S&T which is at least symmetric is kinda pointless if you have Sneak Attack, Through the Breach and Quicksilver Amulet as possible substitutes. We have the same problem with the blue cantrip shell. Bannings are pointless if you can only marginally weaken the broken archetype. All WotC can do is powering up the broken shells opponents ... and they suck doing so
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Brainstorm hinders the 1.5 lists in competition because it makes the tier 1 lists so strong and consistent that the 1.5 lists become either slow disruption, mid-range or 1-trick ponies by comparison.
Extreme consistency helps the strongest mix the most because it increases the chance the strong mix will jell and roll the field. The problem is that there's only one real method of achieving extreme consistency in Legacy and that is card draw and selection and with a few corner cases excepted the blue shell has the monopoly on card draw and selection.
In a blue meta do we want to somewhat enable 1.5 lists that are blue at the expense of preventing all but a few non-blue lists from joining the competition? Especially given that the tier 1.5 blue lists aren't really that good?
Deadguy is extremely consistent at disrupting and trying to manage the opponent's ability to play the game early on. It has a few consistency issues related to its disruption mechanisms often not being good in multiples in the opening hand and the need to play 4-of's to achieve its effect anyway. It has issues with Brainstorm being an overmaster spell against most of the best hand disruption effects it runs. This on top of the normal disruption of it's game plan that counters, in particular Daze and Force of Will, present.
In a meta dominated by the blue shell Deadguy's consistency is much less valuable because the blue shell basically overmasters it as a concept. RUG Canadian, which incorporates the blue shell, is superior in almost every way to Deadguy which does not.
Burn is extremely consistent at dealing damage early on in the game state. It has a few consistency issues related to land distribution and a few cards that represent the potential for damage (Price of Progress and Fireblast) but that can actually be problematic to get effective damage off of depending on the draw and what the opponent is playing. It has no draw or card selection to speak of because in order to get its effect into play consistently it needs damage spells that get cast each turn. There's no time for durdling around if you want to win on turn 4. Again, it has issues with Brainstorm in particular because the ability to dig deep for a counter on turn 3 or 4 when you're about to lose prevents some losses that would otherwise occur. It has issues with counters in general but those issues are aggravated by the ease with which the blue shell finds its answers. It has real issues after sideboarding because the blue shell always has a couple of cards to bring in to manage the damage. It's not much better than a 50/50 matchup game 1 because it really depends on the initial draw given that Burn has no good way to sort out bad draws whereas the blue shell is all about that.
Against combo Burn will often have issues and lose but in the absence of the blue shell the combo lists would have less consistency and Burn would win some off of the combo players inability to find his combo fast enough, a state of affairs that just doesn't exist right now with Brainstorm and Ponder helping out.
In a meta dominated by the blue shell Burn's consistency is much less valuable because the blue shell will turn almost every bad Burn draw into a loss and will occasionally pull out a win from it's own bad draws.
Aggro creature shells are a time-honored part of the meta. In this Legacy meta there is no R/G Beats list. Why? Because the blue shell has driven them all out of business. Combo has become too efficient at finding their wins early. Unlike Deadguy and Burn, Zoo has no really effective way to interact with very fast combo lists, summoning sickness prevents that and makes them a turn slow most of the time. RG Beats competed just fine with combo, although it wasn't a favorable matchup, until Brainstorm became part of almost every combo list, joined by Ponder and often Preordain also. Reanimator was a hellish matchup for Zoo, but again this was the blue shell gluing everything together to make it so fast that a simple aggro theme could not compete. Mystical Tutor got banned to try to fix part of the problem and Ponder just slid into the Reanimator lists as the replacement.
What were the targets for Reanimator that overmaster R/G Beats as concept? Blazing Archon, Empyrial Archangel, Inkwell Leviathan, Iona, Shield of Emeria and Sphinx of the Steel Wind. Not an Emrakul or Griselband in sight yet and R/G Beats was already dead courtesy of the blue shell.
Blue shell = OP against 90% of lists not running it.
Did you even read that post?
32-37% of the non-rogue decks, with a worst case of 47% of the deck lists if 100% of Rogue decks played a set of Bs (which is extremly unlikely) if no where near BS being 50% of the field, the #'s suggest 40% or less, and in a format with that much mana fixing, ~40% is right where it should be if 2 color decks are the average.
Wouldn't that be like running MD RiPs right now? Or running MD SotLs? etc..? People *are* trying; the top 8's don't show it (much) because it doesn't matter if you have a 1-mana answer to said-thing if you could just run the thing yourself. The best way to counter something that's too powerful is to play something on the same power level; if the only things that are on the same tier are the same cards then you "have to" play that card. The Principle of Least Effort applies here. Why fight the uphill battle of trying to answer 1 mana cards with conditional 2-mana cards when you can simply play the same shell?
Further, these kinds of answer cards can't support your own deck's plan; rather they're simply trying to "gotcha" the opponent, but if you draw them at the wrong time they were not only weak against your previous opponents but they didn't do anything now either. If you simply run a coherent shell it works better. It's like running -1/-1 effects in the main. It's not terrible, but there are a number of decks and situations that just don't care. So you strengthen some subset of MUs while weakening every other.
What's more, the card in question is a card that allows you to get rid of dead cards; so if you see someone Chains-ing you; you may just BS in response to drop your garbage. It is easier (and more reliable) to simply copy the opponent at that point.
As an anecdote; I was trying 2 Chains for a while. Of course Murphy's Law applies and you fight D&T, D&T, Merfolk; or you don't draw it, or it just gets countered, or they already brainstormed, or you lose tempo, or you were already winning. The cards you suggest people play don't push you towards winning; they help keep your from losing; which means you still have to not only have the less consistent deck, but you have to draw better now that you're sporting do-nothing cards.
Except that BS is worlds more powerful than the other cantrips. That's the crux of the argument. No one is calling for a ban on Opt, Preordain, or Ponder; people are saying that the:
-instant speed (there are no other U-cost dig 3s at instant speed)
-tuck effect (there are no other efficient tuck effects in the game)
are the problems. Digging three for U isn't the issue (in legacy) and never has been (in legacy.) The other cantrips don't do what BS does; because BS functions in several ways. You're playing ignorant of this fact and focusing on the part of the card that no one gives two hoots about.
The changes in the meta were brought by the printing of newer cards namely SFM, Terminus, Abrupt Decay, DRS, etc. The older aggro, aggro-control, and control strategies were simply outdated. Terminus rendered non-blue aggro obsolete. Miracles almost made ANT, Reanimator and Elves obsolete. Abrupt Decay made Dreadnought obsolete, Painter decks soon. People crying about Show and Tell being dumb do not understand why a few even choose to play the card at all, the CMC 3 means less vulnerability to being hit by Counterbalance. Reanimator needed Show and Tell against DRS by the way. Storm and Reanimator splashing green for Abrupt Decay just goes to show the impact Counterbalance has made. Ban Counterbalance?
Those saying Vengevine should have been banned are forgetting Recurring Nightmare and the Survival + Loyal Retainers combo. One card versus a dozen creatures added to the banned list seems more logical. Same reasoning why Mystical Tutor alone was banned. Show and Tell is bannable, but only if it consistently dominate majority of the top 8, like Survival did. Only then DCI will take a course of action. You will see more UR Delver/Jeskai Ascendancy in the following months in the top 8. Treasure Cruise is Ancestral Recall 2.0, courtesy of fetchlands and 0-1cc spells. It's that stupid.
I'll add that Treasure Cruise invalidates Hymn to Tourach, Liliana's discard ability, Jace's fateseal and Bob's draw engine.
Last edited by death; 12-22-2014 at 01:48 PM.
You know what else RUG has that Deadguy doesn't? Nimble Mongoose (which is more resilient to spot removal than anything in Deadguy) and Tarmogoyf (which is better at being a beater than anything in Deadguy). Deadguy actually has great consistency tools in being a redundant deck, having Bob, and having SFM. The reason it's not widely run is that it can't run countermagic, and the discard from Deadguy is worse than D&T's better hatebear package against combo and is both less consistent and lower power than reducing the black to a splash and adding green for Goyf/KotR and playing Maverick.
You're seriously complaining that Burn has consistency issues? Burn is the most consistent deck in the format. Even UR Delver or 4-Ponder Miracles can wind up with a do-nothing cantrip hand that takes a turn or two to straighten out. Burn just runs 40-41 almost-identical cards and 19-20 lands, and builds splashing blue for Treasure Cruise don't seem to be outperforming the mono-red versions. Brainstorm isn't what stops Burn from being a better deck (and it's already pretty good) - the inherent limitation of being minimally interactive is what hurts burn the most.Burn is extremely consistent at dealing damage early on in the game state. It has a few consistency issues related to land distribution and a few cards that represent the potential for damage (Price of Progress and Fireblast) but that can actually be problematic to get effective damage off of depending on the draw and what the opponent is playing. It has no draw or card selection to speak of because in order to get its effect into play consistently it needs damage spells that get cast each turn. There's no time for durdling around if you want to win on turn 4. Again, it has issues with Brainstorm in particular because the ability to dig deep for a counter on turn 3 or 4 when you're about to lose prevents some losses that would otherwise occur. It has issues with counters in general but those issues are aggravated by the ease with which the blue shell finds its answers. It has real issues after sideboarding because the blue shell always has a couple of cards to bring in to manage the damage. It's not much better than a 50/50 matchup game 1 because it really depends on the initial draw given that Burn has no good way to sort out bad draws whereas the blue shell is all about that.
Against combo Burn will often have issues and lose but in the absence of the blue shell the combo lists would have less consistency and Burn would win some off of the combo players inability to find his combo fast enough, a state of affairs that just doesn't exist right now with Brainstorm and Ponder helping out.
In a meta dominated by the blue shell Burn's consistency is much less valuable because the blue shell will turn almost every bad Burn draw into a loss and will occasionally pull out a win from it's own bad draws.
You realize that mono-black or some Bxy Reanimator would kick the shit out of R/G Beats or Zoo just as well as UB Reanimator does, right? It would just run different consistency tools like Buried Alive, Read the Bones/Night's Whisper, Life from the Loam, or Gamble alongside things like Unburial Rites/LED or Dark Ritual and then have easy access to Abrupt Decay to fight DRS and Cage postboard. The blue cards make Reanimator better able to fight opposing countermagic and graveyard hate, but the difference between how well UB Reanimator and BX or Bxy Reanimator would beat even the most tuned dedicated beatdown deck is marginal at best.Aggro creature shells are a time-honored part of the meta. In this Legacy meta there is no R/G Beats list. Why? Because the blue shell has driven them all out of business. Combo has become too efficient at finding their wins early. Unlike Deadguy and Burn, Zoo has no really effective way to interact with very fast combo lists, summoning sickness prevents that and makes them a turn slow most of the time. RG Beats competed just fine with combo, although it wasn't a favorable matchup, until Brainstorm became part of almost every combo list, joined by Ponder and often Preordain also. Reanimator was a hellish matchup for Zoo, but again this was the blue shell gluing everything together to make it so fast that a simple aggro theme could not compete. Mystical Tutor got banned to try to fix part of the problem and Ponder just slid into the Reanimator lists as the replacement.
What were the targets for Reanimator that overmaster R/G Beats as concept? Blazing Archon, Empyrial Archangel, Inkwell Leviathan, Iona, Shield of Emeria and Sphinx of the Steel Wind. Not an Emrakul or Griselband in sight yet and R/G Beats was already dead courtesy of the blue shell.
I think of everyone here, Lemnear is the least likely to feign ignorance of what Brainstorm can do that other cantrips can't. Even putting aside his (compelling) argument that the collateral damage to a Brainstorm ban is unacceptable, the fact that it won't even accomplish its desired goal of improving the relative positioning of nonblue decks pretty much invalidates arguments for a ban. The other factors that drive people to favor blue - not simply rolling over to combo most prominent among them - are still going to be present without Brainstorm, and decks running cantrips+Treasure Cruise are still going to be the most consistent decks. Brainstorm isn't the sine qua non or blue being the best color in Eternal formats; blue being at the top of the pile is an unavoidable consequence of the game's history.
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