Brainstorm
Force of Will
Lion's Eye Diamond
Counterbalance
Sensei's Divining Top
Tarmogoyf
Phyrexian Dreadnaught
Goblin Lackey
Standstill
Natural Order
I still think Counterbalance was the real offender (and a much more obnoxious card to deal with); arguments about going to time revolved around the specific combination of Top and CB, so axing either should've solved the problem for the other. Plus, Top helped other decks function; nobody but Miracles had been using Counterbalance to much effect for some time.
With that said, it's worth pointing out that Miracles no longer constitutes a fifth of format top-8s, so I think the argument can be made that the Top ban solved the problem. I just hate the collateral damage.
Busted though Terminus obviously is, I think people are giving it a bit too much credit in comparison to CounterTop. Terminus is devastating against creature-based decks, but CounterTop was devastating against pretty much everything. And Counterbalance is still doing pretty well at what it used to do.
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Which one limits design space more? I would argue that Top limits design space for future cards much more than Counterbalance. I'm fine with Counterbalance 'gotcha' moments a few times a game, I mean they have to work for it. With Top it didn't even cost a card. How many spells did you need to counter with CB to make it worthwhile with Top? Probably a handful before the game was over. I think Miracles slots in Counterspell in the CB slots, keeps playing Top/Terminus/Entreat, and you still feel bad.
Again, I feel like just adding in the remaining Snapcaster Mages makes the difference as well. If CounterTop would counter 5-6 spells a game, doesn't Snapcaster/Counterspell do the same, just for a little more mana? I know this has been discussed to death, I was really just ruminating.
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
Ron, we both know that this would have required WotC to actually pay attention to the format and find out if the removal of Terminus would make Miracles soft enough to aggro to have predators like DnT or Maverick to get under or over Counterbalance, but we have more than enough evidence that they are utterly ignoring the format to the point of being unable to proper judge or care what's best for the format.
They just axed the safe bet after 4y of obvious dominance because a sign on their parking lot told them to, reminding them of a format the usually give a fuck about.
I still wonder if that shit works for unbannings too...
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I feel confident saying that verdict is close to unplayable, both denial + thalia (gaddock) and delver's disruption are too hard to handle with a cc4 sweeper.
Even if you manage to get the mana to run a sweeper, 4 mana for a simple 1x1 / 2x1 is way too much.
Deluge, on the other hand, is decent but more often than not the life loss is a big deal, one hit from gurmag + toxic puts you at 10 by itself, and yet again you are likely to spend 3 mana + 3/4/5 hp just for a 1x1 / 2x1.
I think a decent sweeper for legacy should either be instant (at 4 mana, pretty much an instant wrath) or be at 3 mana and sorcery and unconditional, terminus is too busted when it lands properly at 1 mana and instant, and with top it was almost a given.
Playing more snapcasters would just mean goint towards a grixis control style, it would make no sense to play miracles(less) and grind with 1 for 1 while you can run grixis and have access to both strix and kcommand.
Before terminus, every single CTop deck had a problem dealing with aggressive decks, and needed to have some board presence in order to have a change against aggro decks such as zoo.I still think Counterbalance was the real offender (and a much more obnoxious card to deal with); arguments about going to time revolved around the specific combination of Top and CB, so axing either should've solved the problem for the other. Plus, Top helped other decks function; nobody but Miracles had been using Counterbalance to much effect for some time.
With that said, it's worth pointing out that Miracles no longer constitutes a fifth of format top-8s, so I think the argument can be made that the Top ban solved the problem. I just hate the collateral damage.
Busted though Terminus obviously is, I think people are giving it a bit too much credit in comparison to CounterTop. Terminus is devastating against creature-based decks, but CounterTop was devastating against pretty much everything. And Counterbalance is still doing pretty well at what it used to do.
Terminus alone was enough to remove maverik from legacy entirely, and before its printing it was a tier 1 deck.
With terminus not in the game it could be possible for board heavy decks to be relevant, they could easily play a fair game against delver and the only downside would be combo.
On the other hand CTop is surely a pain to deal with, the combination is way too busted given how good the cards are by themselves but in my opinion miracle would be a much stronger deck w/o CB and with top/terminus, you would have to play some other kind of card advantage (as miracle does now) but you would still have mentor in its prime, entreat and terminus fully enabled, which means smashing every fair deck still.
PS: I had been playing doomsday in every format for years, then Gush, Top and Probe (in two formats) got axed, so I know how shitty it is to get banned into oblivion, but WOTC can't consider fringe tier 2 decks while doing bans, the miracle ban was needed for at least 5 years, so thank god they did something
"You either die a Onesto-Player, or live long enough to see yourself become a Dredger"
N.B.: Wizards doesn't care about Legacy. But assuming they did in good faith...
It's time to switch the strategy for banning from "the enabler" to "the over the top and ridiculous payoff." Mystical and Survival bans were about hitting enablers. That may have been OK for those cards at those times. But attempting to do the same with SDT and DRS has not worked.
First of all, look at the key argument for each card:
Sensei's Top - "The consistency makes CB/Terminus too hard to beat!" This has been proven untrue. The CB/Terminus deck is still very strong even without Top. Dominant, no. But that has to do with the next card.
Deathrite Shaman - "Splashing is free/color wheel meaningless!" While 4c control hasn't been as widespread, it never really had to be. Those decks have always been UB core with some splash or another. We are working on 4c Arclight Phoenix decks glued together by cantrips and fetches, UB at the core with very light W and R splashes. And guess what? It's fine because the payoff is so intensely strong and hard to beat that it brute forces its way through the consistency loss.
Whether or not these cards should remain banned is probably still debatable. But what the loss of these cards has yielded is a hyper fast, hyper linear format. Without these cards to slow down and incentivize playing a third turn, the consistency of brute forcing out a Griselbrand or Marit Lage is just putting the same kind of pressure on the format from a different angle.
Then, the only cards outside the "cheaty" cards that are played are cards that do a zillion things at once. Cards have to provide real or virtual CA immediately and in perpetuity. Baleful Strix is like 5 mana worth of effects for 2. Kolaghan's Command, Snapcaster, Gurmag Angler, Delver, Mentor, TNN do so much for very little deckbuilding investment. Chalice, Thalia, TKS just smash you with virtual CA.
You can say "That's how legacy always is/was" and maybe that's right. But over the years these effects have been sped up by at least a full turn. Dark Confidant, Stoneforge Mystic and Tarmogoyf have been supplanted by Baleful Strix, TNN/Mentor, and Angler. None of the latter cards are quite as powerful in a vacuum, but contextually, they are, simply by doing about 80%, but cheaper and sooner. (For example: Gurmag Angler will never be a 6/7. But it doesn't need to be to close fast and pay off all the tempo/cantripping plays that have been made up to its casting)
Obligatory: I still like Legacy, I still would rather play it than other formats, I like some of these new cards and decks and things that are possible since Top and DRS aren't in the format. But there's still enough worrying stuff out there imo.
Pretty much every banning in the past few years has just been a sacrifice lamb to Brainstorm. Terminus without 1 Mana instant speed ways to put it back is much worse, same with the delve cards. 4c Mana bases are less feasible when you can't effortlessly dig for lands or put excess ones back, and griselbrands and combo decks are worse when they can't seamlessly find the right combo pieces while putting back excess of the others. But I guess we can continue complaining about how other cards bannings were unjust even though at least a few of them probably would still be around if the ultimate 1 Mana instant speed enabler didn't exist
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100% agreed, and more emphatically if you consider other eternal formats. Still see no Imperial Seal reprint forthcoming.
I really appreciate this perspective, but I still don't think it's necessarily true that Terminus is/was the only (or principal) card keeping non-Blue value/aggro decks down. Hell, after the Top ban, I thought Miracles was a great matchup for Burn, however many 1-cmc cards I'd be bringing to the table. With that said, I'm interested in more discussion about this, not least because Burn doesn't rely on creatures that much, though the decks you mentioned do.
I agree almost totally with this. Ever since Tarmogoyf, new creatures have become patently ridiculous. (I took roughly 2008–2012 off from Magic, but I remember looking at the MtG website just to look around—only to see the spoiled Emrakul and think, "are they for real?") I can understand the argument that stronger creatures could be needed in an environment with such strong noncreature spells but only because noncreature spells got their race to the bottom back in the '90s. It's reaching a point at which creatures have already hit bottom during a similar nosedive, yet they still see print at more and more ridiculous ratios of cost to efficiency—even in Blue, which traditionally was supposed to have weaker creatures to compensate for the color's inherent card advantage and spell power.
The one enabler that I think defies this—to a point—is Show and Tell. Personally, I think the card is fine because there are plenty of answers in plenty of decks that cost literally zero when dropped off an opponent's Show and Tell (cf. Hypergenesis and why nobody plays that anymore). But I do think that if an enabler card is worthy of scrutiny, that's the one.
Brainstorm into Ponder, Ponder, Brainstorm is still a thing. Brainstorm's like a box of chocolates; you only sometimes know what you're going to get.
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https://magic.wizards.com/en/article...d-announcement
Next B&R Announcement: January 21, 2019
I'd bet maybe changes (both bans and unbans possible) in Modern, no changes in other formats.
Sure, but that applies to every engine in the game. Sometimes you Dredge 6 into no dredgers. Sometimes you can't afford to Zenith for the answer. Sometimes you Gamble away what you need and can't get it back. Sometimes you draw your 1-of and can't put it in at instant speed with Knight of the Reliquary anymore. Considering the inherit randomness of the game and the proven consistency of the engine in question I find it silly to even bring that angle up. Yes it happens, but I'm willing to put money down that you get randomly screwed by cantrips a hell of a lot less often than any other option.
The question that immediately springs to mind is "what is the strongest thing that Show and Tell is allowed to do, and how many things do we have to ban to enforce that limit?" If you want to prevent the card from immediately ending the game you'd probably have to remove Omniscience, Grizzelbrand, Emrakul, Sire of Insanity, Jin-Gitaxis, maybe even Dream Halls from the format. Elesh Norn, Elderscale Wurm, Iona, and Tidespout Tyrant pretty much read "you win the game" in certain matchups as well.
I feel this, but I also feel like you can't prevent it from happening naturally without putting some form of rotation in place.
Yea, but is there any point having this debate again?
Modern to me is more interesting to watch, not only is there action that could be taken but there is a willingness to partake. Legacy is left much to its own devices. Recruiter for example is a silly card on the list, but so what. I mean which of the most recent unbannings did anything? But we don't care, we just plod along. Legacy is slow, it moves at the speed of, well, blue chips these days.
I agree on the first part. I think Griselbrand is the main offender. I mean even emrakul is "fine" in the sense that at least it has answers in edicts, orings, karakas and the like. Griselbrand however is just a dumb fucking card. It's a joke that Bargain is banned while this exists. Can be show and telled or reanimated (something emrakul can't do outside of shallow Grave type crap). And because it can just draw a pile of cards even if you have the immediate answer it either forces a second answer or still just ends the game by enabling you to just go off again. The card is a fucking blight. Omniscience is pretty fucking stupid too, but at least there's basically only show and tell as an "easy" way to cheat it out. And it basically requires a third card to really go off. Fuck Griselbrand and Brainstorm.
#FreeNedleeds even though he doesn't give a shit about legacy anymore.
Edit: at least the other things you mentioned require specific match ups or situations to be "game ending". Griselbrand is a one stop shop game ender on turn 2 in a majority of situations as long as your deck doesn't completely suck. The best answers to it are narrow and shitty and even if you turn off its ability it's still a fucking 7/7 flier that you will always lose the race to.
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What a brainstorm do? Draw card and activate on draw effects fix hand, removing woods
#FreeNedleeds
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