Brainstorm
Force of Will
Lion's Eye Diamond
Counterbalance
Sensei's Divining Top
Tarmogoyf
Phyrexian Dreadnaught
Goblin Lackey
Standstill
Natural Order
Right and for all we know, that "mentality" could have changed yesterday. Or today. Nor not at all. This points me toward the idea that there never was, nor ever will be, stringent objective criteria for banning. From our persepctive there is probabilistic criteria, seeming criteria, but we will always be missing some large portion of the critical subjective criteria they use to make the decisions.
Were we Laplace's demon, we would know what would and would not be banned. We aren't. We could actually know every objective fact about a given card and the subjective feeling about every player of the game and still not know what will be banned or not, because we don't know the subjective valuation criteria of the people who actually decide.
When I asked, years ago, about what defined Legacy, that was the foundational issue. What is it? What is it's current state? Where should it be going and how should it get there? That's what would be productive to discuss. Not tossing facts at each other when those fundamental issues are not even loosely defined.
"The Ancients teach us that if we can but last, we shall prevail."
—Kaysa, Elder Druid of the Juniper Order
I hate to be That Guy, but it's "criterion," everybody. "Criteria" is plural.
EDIT: Again, really sorry; I just started getting itchy while I was reading the thread.
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Probe is a busted card not because of one thing it does, but of everything that it adds up to being for little cost. +1 Storm, +1 Mana, card neutral, information is far too much before you even make a land drop. The power subtle, yet noticeable. If it weren't extremely powerful it wouldn't be banned/restricted in every format. Say what you want about Wizards, but not many cards have the distinction of being banned AND restricted in Modern, Legacy, and Vintage. And most of which that are have very good reason.
Color aside, no. Color factored, yes, because the fuck up the format. If you don't have to leave blue to get the best creatures, then you don't have to leave blue at all, and given the power of filtering and counters, why would you?
Most non-blue threads on here are slowly coming to the realization that whatever it is they're doing is simply worse than what the blue/x decks are doing. It's sad but it's been inevitable since Delver got printed.
Chalice and probably DnT will keep some stuff hanging on for forever probably, but that's not really a great format "blue shell" vs. white or artifact anti-blue shell + 10 guys playing pet decks just isn't that interesting, and without sunk costs, that's probably where we'd be now.
None of this is bullshit or against form. Wizards likes to ban cards that enable issues, not the issues themselves. Hoping to leave the most cards untouched. From their point of view they can take out two cards (CB and Term) or one, Top. They picked the one. As you look back you see this again and again. Taking out Eye and not creatures it was casting in modern, even though the card was important to Tron, taking out Probe as the card that caused issues around it and not hitting the cards that feed off it.
Top was always going to be the card that got hit once the choice was made to target the deck, because that is the way things work. The did not ban the three cards Twin could abuse, they banned Twin. You do not have to like it but it is calculated and it is on brand. If you think that Miracles needed to be weakened then you have to face the fact that Top was always going to be the card. It is one AND the other, not one OR the other.
So your thinking next is Snapcaster. What does it enable that needs to be stopped? Thats the question to ask. Right now the answer is nothing, so it is safe.
To be fair, I don't think Miracles necessarily needed both Terminus and Counterbalance to be banned, I was simply stating that those were the busted cards. I think banning Terminus would have been sufficient to knock down Miracles enough without outright killing it.
As far as Snapcaster Mage is concerned, it is fueling the best decks in the format right now. Almost every blue midrange and control deck is playing multiple copies, and the cards power level is typically higher than everything else, cantrips aside. Specifically, it is an integral part of Miracles and Grixis Control, which appear to be the new best decks in the format right now. I'm not saying that I think Snapcaster should be banned, mind you. I'm simply stating that I believe it will be the next card on the chopping block if those decks remain the best for a long enough period of time.
This might seem weird, but I can’t find a breakdown of how prevalent individual cards are in legacy.
I found it previously, but I can’t remember where to find it right now.
Thing is, I was trying to find a list of most prevalent cards and whether or not they are warping the meta.
Also, with the printing of tonnes of gy hate, could survival come off the list soon?
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Legacy decks: mono U painter, strawberry shortcake, imperial painter, solidarity, burn
EDH decks: zedruu voltron, rakdos the defiler, persistent petitioners, blind seer
If this kind of reasoning was true, then since not every deck has use and space for brainstorm, the card must have its drawbacks. Get this brainstorm haters! We have the final demonstration you should shut up.
You cannot seriously compare Gitaxian Probe with Seize, Peek, Duress, Unmask etc. Because gitaxian is mana free, which both helps storm count (twice under past in flames) and lets you play it even before your first land (which can be very useful if you'd like to know if you should play around wasteland, stifle, etc).
Is it ban worthy? I don't know, to me Deathrite wasn't (after all it dies to everything right? ^_^), it killed just the deck I played (BUG) because the others (elves, grixis) remained just as Miracle remained after the Top banning. But I get why they killed the shaman. The same holds for Gitaxian. The threshold for "TOO" powered is subjective, Gitaxian can be considered ban worthy (or not). I like the fact that it's gone. Doesn't matter what I or you like.
For sure, what is flawed is your rhetorical way of arguing: you say that each of Gitaxian Probe strong point isn't enough by itself to warrant a ban. Please google for Ship of Theseus Paradox, it's the sum that is ban worthy.
I suspect people who hate Gitaxian love Deathrite and people who hate Deathrite love Gitaxian for the most part. If so, Wizard made a clever move to address both in the same moment.
I know that. Nothing presupposes that there is a sole criterion as opposed to multiple criteria in what I was discussing though. But I might have made an error in one place or another though, I sure as shit am not perfect. However, part of my entire point is that nothing is isolation from subjective valuation, so even a single objective criterion is in turn only able to be viewed under the auspices of multiple subjective criteria.
Hope your rash clears up,
"The Ancients teach us that if we can but last, we shall prevail."
—Kaysa, Elder Druid of the Juniper Order
On one hand, WotC was not so foolish to ban Counterbalance or Terminus. On the other hand, banning Top is not as smart, and they had to follow with Probe and Shaman bans, and the format did not get any major improvement. The reason is simple by applying the same logic: Top, Probe, Shaman are the lesser problems compared to the hyper efficient Brainstorm. Until the day WotC realizes this, the ban list will only get longer.
Note I am not saying Brainstorm is super powerful as an effect. Impulse is arguably better. Costing U and 1U is a huge difference, and I thought most long time MtG players acknowledge that. Nevertheless, watching the debate on Probe makes me chuckle, where people argued how look at a hand and draw a card as an effect is innocuous. Yes, Peek is a card and rarely gets played beyond Solidarity. Costing 0 and U is a huge difference. So again, the hyper efficiency of Brainstorm is one major issue of Legacy. It is ridiculous to ban enough good cards to make Brainstorm less powerful, so better say bye to Brainstorm.
Or we let the format have really powerful cards, and enjoy getting to play powerful decks. You could argue that Vintage is the format for that, but Vintage is considerably more busted, the cost of entry is beyond the means of most, and the format is mostly unsupported.
I've always been in the camp of removing cards off of the list vs adding more cards to it, though... so I'm pretty biased.
We are in the same camp. Would you prefer playing with Brainstorm or Top + Probe + Shaman + etc. ? The etc. also include fetchlands and future candidates to sacrifice in favor of Brainstorm.
Edit: by the way, Legacy is the new Vintage with the RL cards cost as much as P9s back then.
I still dispute that any of this is too much, per previous arguments.
This is tautological - "it should be banned/restricted because it's banned/restricted." Wizards being willing to double down on mistakes doesn't make them not mistakes...
I mean, MTGO has considerably less sunk costs; does its meta look radically different from paper? (Honest question, I don't really play online).
If it doesn't, is it possible that those other decks are actually fine?
I don't think all of this tracks - they did hit the cards that feed off Probe, in the sense that they got rid of Dig Through Time and Treasure Cruise. And in most cases, I think banning the "Twin" instead of the "three random three mana flash duders with untap effects" makes a lot of sense - the modern banlist is obviously a complete mess, but at least it doesn't have Wild Nacatl on there anymore, and it certainly doesn't need horned turtle with flash on there as well.
I agree that these might be the cards to pick if you thought a nerf were necessary; I generally think they were not (Dig Through Time and Treasure Cruise probably did need to go, though).
I think Survival could come off the list today, and it would do stone cold nothing. I say unban it.
I mean, yes. I unironically agree with this.
Obviously, the drawbacks of Brainstorm are very, very small relative to its power level, so a lot of decks do run it. I'm on the record as saying a Brainstorm ban would be disappointing but defensible.
I have specifically acknowledged and refuted these considerations, with examples, several times. They are all true; they still don't make Probe banworthy. They are vastly overstated.
I actually thought Deathrite Shaman was mostly fine, too. I understand why they did it, but I also felt the card was pretty sweet and didn't seem like it was that broken compared to other things you could be doing in the format (reanimating or showing griselbrand, marit lage, all kinds of things).
I actually think it does matter what you and I like, because I think the reason they banned Gitaxian Probe is because a lot of people didn't like it. Like I've shown before, it certainly doesn't have to do with power level or format penetration.
I am familiar with the Ship of Theseus. I am not disputing that Gitaxian Probe is the sum of its parts; I am disputing that the sum is banworthy. I have acknowledged each of the "strong points," and I'm saying, even when taken all together, they are not worth a ban.
Everyone I have ever argued with about Probe, on here or in person, talks about it as though it's completely free and totally busted, but none of them put it in their decks - why? If I ever saw a single person put their money where their mouth was and play whatever deck they were already playing, but just replace four "obviously less busted cards" with four Probes, maybe I'd start to believe them. But no one does! And no one did. Yet, it got banned, because people just don't like it.
Well, I feel that Top is a flat out turd. A pox and a blight on Design, so I'd take on all those cards, minus that one. Well, maybe not Hermit Druid, not really sure.
Again, if the criterion for banning is being "the best card," Legacy is doomed in the long run. Consider Brainstorm's power-level Legacy's Transcendental Ideal.
"The Ancients teach us that if we can but last, we shall prevail."
—Kaysa, Elder Druid of the Juniper Order
I think you make some good points, in that Probe was probably the 3rd most powerful cantrip in legacy, and only currently abusable by a few shells. But you overreach when you say it's just 'because people just don't like it' - or at least you refuse to acknowledge that they don't like it for pretty good reasons. Perfect information makes Magic less interesting and less challenging. I always found Probe more frustrating out of Pyromancer or UR Delver than Storm, because those decks aren't built in a way that they *needed* perfect information to do their thing. But a certain amount of the time they just got it for 0 mana, with value attached, and the game that ensued was less interesting since my opponent got to play color by numbers Magic. And while Probe was only enabling a few tier 1 decks when it got banned, the card's awful design ensures that it would enable broken stuff in the future.
Overall:
1. Legacy is a more interesting and challenging format with the card gone.
2. Many people found the card super annoying
You can claim people are irrational for #2, and maybe they are, but who cares, this is a forum where adults pay thousands of dollars to play with cardboard dragons, any sort of definition of rationality is a bit fuzzy in that context.
But if you disagree with #1 - which is itself a great case for the banning - then the burden is on you to explain why Magic is better in any sense with Probe around.
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