Brainstorm
Force of Will
Lion's Eye Diamond
Counterbalance
Sensei's Divining Top
Tarmogoyf
Phyrexian Dreadnaught
Goblin Lackey
Standstill
Natural Order
If they fuck up and make new decks that's cool. If they fuck up and just outclass a whole lot of cards then please don't.
There's a difference between printing shit like Shardless Agent, Scavenging Ooze, Flusterstorm, Past in Flames and DRS and printing shit like TNN, Griseltard, Omnidrool or Terminus. You have to make cards both strong and interesting or I'd rather not have them.
Originally Posted by Lemnear
You are not! You make a really good point.
Legacy players will be dissatisfied every time a set comes out with nothing impactful. Also, Legacy players will be dissatisfied every time a set comes out with something impactful.
It just takes longer in the latter case to hear the complaints. But in the meantime, there are a lot of great innovations happening. In the former...nothing.
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funny how all those cards you mentioned get busted when paired with BS, especially terminus which is innocuous without BS.
Would you rather have shaman, probe, top, earthcraft, mindtwist, dig through time, treasure cruise, fastbond and even mana drain instead of BS?
Yes, please...
Last edited by non-inflammable; 02-03-2019 at 11:30 AM.
If they ever banned Terminus, they'd have to ban Vial. It's not really acceptable to have DnT making wraths cost 6 [Port/Thalia] +/- Wastelands. Otherwise you'd need an unconditional 3 mana sorc speed wrath, or a 4 mana unconditional instant speed one. As always, ban CB and unban SDT - combo can make miracles stop playing so many white cards, aggro has comprehensively failed to make miracles stop playing Counterbalance.
I also like his post; mistakes mean they are at least trying to push boundaries. Until recently cards that have jumped to legacy have only supported mid-range or control strategies (kcommand, asstrophy, most notably.) When cards break through, but aren't oppressive, they tend to be good stuff cards, which pushes the metagame fair (which it overwhelmingly is atm.) Then they printed goblins that broke into legacy. Hell, Goblins just won a local 1K yesterday i played in, and there was another copy in the top 8. They recently got trashmaster and cratermaker. I hope this trend continues because having legitimate non-delver aggressive decks is great for the format.
Brainstorm Realist
I close my eyes and sink within myself, relive the gift of precious memories, in need of a fix called innocence. - Chuck Shuldiner
Not really about DnT’s position in the meta; you have a mana-cheating artifact that makes a creature-feature deck pretty much immune to [not-Terminus] wrath effects. Denying the mana is fine, but not when a 1-drop = never a window where you have to stop powering up Ports and chucking Wastelands to develop a board state that can kill before ~6 land drops from an opponent.
I don't think there is a need to spoil people with powercreeped unconditional boardwipes if there is just so much room to give to fantastic narrower cards which have fallen from grace like Dread Of Night or Pyroclam to battle weenie armies.
If you ask me the game desperately needs reasons to sleeve narrow silverbullets and tradeoffs instead of just getting to rely on the ever same catch-all cards like Terminus, Decay and such in every deck running the respective colors, just for us to complain about everyone playing with the same tools
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Isn't there a modern deck that is playing terminus? I'm pretty sure that format doesn't have Brainstorm in it.
I also don't think that banning brainstorm would make it possible to unban DTT, Cruise, Fastbond, or Mana Drain. The rest they could totally unban right now, would be fine (though I personally think Mind Twist is just kinda dumb - like, what good games are going to come of that?).
I mean, DnT is a DTB and has been regularly for the past few months, it's not like it's some subversive underdog. It certainly takes skill to play, but it's also unambiguously miserable to experience as their opponent.
If you want this dynamic, I don't think eternal formats are what you want - the nature of non-rotating formats is that only the best tools will be useful because of the high bar for powerlevel. They specifically design standard to have these choices, by contrast: they don't print counterspell, but instead print Negate, Essence Scatter, and Cancel, so you have to pick which one you think will be most useful, and have moments where the one you picked is garbage and doesn't do anything.
I personally hate that feeling, and like it more when the interesting choices in interaction have more to do with evaluating intra-game threats rather than having to guess which weapons to bring.
EDIT: Goblins is on the rise again as well, it took 1st at a local tournament (The other 'Goblins' player was a Moon Stompy deck playing Rabblemaster.) You know what card Goblins isn't afraid of? Terminus. I'm not saying Goblins vs. Miracles is a bye, but it's overwhelmingly favored.
I like your comment about narrower cards like Dread of Night and Pyroclasm. I would slam Pyroclasms in every deck I own if it was good enough, and in most case I think it is. What holds it back is True-Name Nemesis, everyone is in a panic to make sure their wiper deals with TNN. By artificially changing the metagame around that card people are going to lose a lot of games to swarms of small dudes.
Just to throw some other good wipers out there:
Zealous Persecution
Electrickery
Volcanic Fallout
Virtue's Ruin
Nature's Ruin
Perish
Engineered Plague
Pyrokinesis
Cave-In
Settle the Wreckage
Last edited by Mr. Safety; 02-04-2019 at 12:47 PM.
Brainstorm Realist
I close my eyes and sink within myself, relive the gift of precious memories, in need of a fix called innocence. - Chuck Shuldiner
Without a doubt the best overall tools will float atop of other options as staple cards, but it would not hurt to leave some space for more narrow answers rather than immediately removing that space with some new uncontested powerhouses like proposed. The format is fine without Terminus or a hypothetical 3cc unconditional boardwipe and DnT isn't a real argument in favor of Terminus being fair and mandatory
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I would add old but gold Wing Shards good mostly uncounterable.
It's what they do though, and once you start printing linear uninteractive effects (like Vial and TNN in recent conversation), you need fairly perfect answers. You don't have much time to draw imperfect cards, and in the case of UW there is pretty much no wrath effect (other than Terminus) that you can cast against DnT before you'd be dead. Just from a design/balance standpoint, there's kind of a problem when the Wrath of God color can't wrath a creature deck - Aether Vial is the reason for this. There are 3rd color answers to DnT, but there is no playable answer to DnT in UW without Terminus - you're getting into Planar Collapse territory.
You talk about diversity of imperfect tools, which is an agreeable point, but you'd probably need to roll back a number of cards (things like Vial, Terminus, Thoughtseize, TNN, and probably also Snapcaster & Goyf & maybe even Griselbrand). Without a sweeping amount of bans, you'd start losing 2c viability; so as dumb as a 3 mana instant unconditional white wrath would be it would have to exist to keep playing strict-UW. I don't think fixing the problem is a positive move if it just means more deck similarity with heavier reliance on Fetchlands to add a 3rd color tool that everyone ends up sharing.
Edit: add Surgical to that list as well.
Banning Terminus will not make D&T unbeatable. I don't think that it is kept in check by this card. It has a harder time vs grixis control and all the answers that are available to black and red mages (Deluge and Kolaghan's command. Dread of night in the sideboard).
Also D&T doesn't have any built in CA. Aether vial does nothing alone and it has no Library manipulation. That's the doom of the deck (I still play it because it's fun) and that is the main reason why it's not the top dog. It's a meta deck, that is hard to pilot well (you have to know perfectly what your opponent wants to do). Banning terminus will make it better vs UW control for sure. However, it will not asses any of the problems D&T has vs other decks. And banning terminus will free some decks from the tier 2 zone as an added bonus.
Also, I don't think it is more miserable to play vs D&T and being unable to cast a spell than for example a blue tempo deck that drops a delver on T1 and counters every spell you play or play vs mono red prison and have all of your spells cost 3 on first turn of the game.
SFM, Flickerwisp + Recruiter, Palace Jailer. This accounts for at least 1 in 6 cards of their deck.
To finish your thoughts on strict-UW:
-That color will become unplayable without Terminus
-It will die specifically to DnT because of Vial making every attempt to wrath cost 6 land drops.
-DnT will be the best creature deck in the format.
-DnT will be the only played creature deck b/c it’s the only one that can stop any attempt to wrath out of team Tundra.
-DnT also has Mother of Runes which goes from Duress target counterspell -> Duress target spot removal -> transforms into Chalice x=spot removal.
There is nothing healthy about Grixis “control.” That deck is an absolute diversity killer because no matter what you’re doing in fair magic (other than Delver), you’re just playing something that loses to Hymn/SCM/Kcomm. Take away any need to play around Snapcaster/Plow (aka team Tundra) and DnT will find itself with plenty of space to beat Grixis Jammy Jams - space that no other creature deck will have, because they still have to play around team Tundra.
Touch Terminus and Vial has to get banned immediately. You don’t screw around with unchecked free mana in legacy, that’s even more concerning than Fetchlands.
I find tempo much more fun to play against than DnT personally, but yes, Red Prison has many similar qualities to DnT that make them both miserable. I would say that DnT is more like stubbing all ten of your toes at once every time you try to do something, whereas Red Stompy/Spaghetti Stompy is more like Russian Roulette.
One point for you about CA in D&T :) Maybe it's now just missing the fetch + brainstorm Library manipulation that the blue shell offers :)
About terminus, isn't it specifically this card that has made other creature decks tier 3?
I don't think that goblins for example really feared wraths before terminus. Remember that terminus is a one mana wrath that denies death triggers and graveyard manipulations... this is way powerfull than for example a 4 mana color intensive supreme verdict or a 4 mana counterable wrath of god :)
D&T was there before Terminus and it has never been a top dog before...
They also didn’t have Recruiter back then. The key card at work is Snapcaster Mage turning every spot removal into a mini-wrath (this happened Sep. 2011 vs Terminus in 2012). People like to focus on Terminus, but the Plow recursion is the real killer of Zoo/Maverick/Goyf. On the non-white side you have 1-2 mana kill spells, the same SCM recursion, and also 1/1 cantrip flying removal (Strix).
These obstacles are good enough by themselves to defeat an aggro deck (particularly if SCM also trades in combat), but more importantly they buy time on turns 1-3 such that the aggro deck is going to get locked out. After SCM/kill spell does its damage, there is little functional difference between Strix and Terminus - both should pretty much kill you as they allow safe resolution of JTMS vs hellbent topdecking.
It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that the value-Vial dude plan is far better positioned to combat Strix and Terminus than tap out and jam no-value, dies top StP/Snap-StP dude plan. Take Terminus out of the format and UW is still going to have all the time in the world with SCM/Plow to build up to a Supreme Verdict vs the latter dude plan; but that wrath will never be castable vs DnT specifically. It wouldn’t take DnT that long to figure out a way to beat SCM/kill spell by itself (UW), nor would it be too hard to find cards to beat SCM/kill spell + Strix since that style of magic has exactly one best presentation - and Grixis can’t touch resolved, not-blue enchantments.
So you don’t care about UW, Grixis Jammy Jams is solveable, you already smash Delver, you troll decks like SnS & Depths & Reanimator, and have insta-win bears [and their tutors] against other combo. Other than Elves! there isn’t much left over for DnT to care about, so why play any other creature deck?
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