Brainstorm
Force of Will
Lion's Eye Diamond
Counterbalance
Sensei's Divining Top
Tarmogoyf
Phyrexian Dreadnaught
Goblin Lackey
Standstill
Natural Order
This is actually one of my favorite source posts in a long time. I very much agree with all of this. Storm can be a fun match up even if I'm a non blue player because my SB decisions, and my first few turns decisions can matter so much. EVen if the game effectively ends early (either through them killing me or me locking them out) it's a fun game of thought and skill. One of my most memorable games with 4 color loam was against Hyper Genesis and it was because of my mulligan decisions and the decision trees that I made in the first couple of turns. I went turn 1 Mox diamond, chalice on 0, play land and cast thalia. Then opponent played lands for a couple of turns and she cast a show and tell putting in Sphinx of the Steel Wind which I thought was unbeatable, but because of deckbuilding decisions I was able to burning wish for a chainers edict to answer it and effectively win. The game only lasted a few turns, but it felt good because all of the micro decisions I made before and during the game.
Isn't there a difference between what makes a "fun" game in the abstract if magic, insofar as to current R&D teams and the state of the game going forward, and the "fun" game as it relates specifically to Legacy: the format?
I feel to those that say fun games are those that are overflowing with interactions and decision trees as wide as possible, yeah I've been there, they're pretty enjoyable. But further, I've enjoyed such games in almost every format I've played. It's a good point, but not key to Legacy.
With Legacy, more than any other format, is the one where you can construct crazy sorts of decks that still somehow work. Decks without lands? OK. Decks without creatures? OK. Decks without colors? OK. Yeah, not all are great, most aren't competitive, but the nature of the card pool means obscure fringe printings one day become format staples the next day. Nonsense (in a good way) like Aluren is what makes Legacy, in my opinion. Yeah it may be "unfun" to lose to Oops, All Spells turn 1, but the fact that it even exists is why I play Legacy and not more purposefully curated formats.
Through that point of view, I'm wary to those that point a whole lot of ire at Veil of Summer. As a competitive player, I've accepted the Delver/TNN as the new normal. Blue has everything you need to build a deck, splashes are just flavors of the month. I kind of hate it, but I also hate my commute to work, any my feelings on both have the same relevance to the situation. Here is the first card in a long while that makes players think twice about blindly firing of that Hymn turn 2, since before it was a win/win for you. What are they going to do, Force it? Hah. Wait you get to draw a card? Not cool, man.
It's a design space I am excited to explore. Yes it is good. Yes that means it will be widely adopted. But that's also the world we live in.
If I wanted something else I'd play Standard.
Thanks for the support! I actually feel like drawing an image to illustrate how these decks compete on different axes, I think it would provide a useful understanding and maybe even introduction to Legacy as a format. Anyway. It's funny, I was procrastinating when posting here, (supposed to be) working intensely on a deadline, and as I finished my deadline on Friday night I basically stopped looking here for a few days, expecting to come back to a whole bunch of new counter-arguments. Which would be fine too of course.
My most memorable play is something similar I think, not sure if it's obvious and just memorable for being in an important game or not.. Anyway, I was in the local legacy league's finals a few years back and I was playing Maverick vs Br Reanimator. I was on the play in the final game, iirc, and have in my starting hand fetch land, Karakas, Swords to Plowshares, Pithing Needle and probably a Thalia I think, and maybe some other card. I spent a while considering how to start that game, I found it far from obvious, but I made a decision and I think I made the correct decision and won the game eventually... I don't think it's an obvious decision though. I'll save the play in case someone wants to guess or contribute with their opinion, or I'll later update the post with the play and how the game evolved from there..
This recent MTGO 5-0 is a great example of a green creature deck that can do well against blue control:
https://magic.wizards.com/en/article...15#darkwonyx_-
Aether Vial
Rishadan Port
Wastelock
Anti-blue creatures
Redundant threats
1-card army in a cans
Look at this anti-blue spice!
Arasta of the Endless Web
Great Sable Stag
Heartwood Storyteller
Hexdrinker
Scryb Ranger
Thrun, the Last Troll
Even Runic Armasaur gets free cards from fetchlands.
More precisely, it's the Snapcaster that recasts the white card (which can't ever go away, b/c we all know what happens with Goyf when SCM doesn't exist). 4x StP and 3x SCM is fairly skill-less, and regardless of whatever else your deck does, those seven cards are enough to win an amount of games by themselves.
It probably does. That was my whole argument 1-2 pages back. You can build green beatdown to beat blue. It will just scoop to combo.
GSZ into Collector Ouphe is good against the popular Breach and Emry decks though, that might have been enough to 5-0 the current online meta.
StP + Snapcaster is a problem but still only answers 7 creatures. It keeps the low-threat-density decks in check (can't just rely on 4x Tarmogoyf to win games). But if you just jam around 30 threats, you can play more threats than they have answers. That's basically how Goblins and D&T fight UW. This deck has fewer creatures though it has GSZ and OUAT to find more gas.
In all fairness, it's really impossible to even say that! If you persist for long enough you can find a league where you just don't meet a combo deck and achieve your 5-0. What that does not tell you is how long it took.
Example, at the apex of black and blue/black decks in pauper I managed a 5-0 with bogles. I remember a couple of guys asking me how on earth I did that, well, simples, I did something like 20+ leagues until it happened...
The leagues are odd, it's impossible to draw any conclusion from the results, most of all in these days of 'curated results'. Example, is the deck below good or bad? Judging from the results, really good, but does that tell the whole story?
https://www.mtggoldfish.com/archetyp...en-post#online
Ultimately, like you say, without blue you cannot really beat blue and combos consistently.
True, Deafening Silence is an encouraging step, Legacy would benefit from more quality hates at or .
Definitely a good deck list: focused game plan, built in redundancy/consistency, no budget card choice. Are you bothered by the randomness of Boompile?
Well, one 5-0 is, of course, just one result out of many possible ones. I don't think any "conclusions" should ever be draw from any, single, particular 5-0 result. But I don't think that is what we really should even be considering in perusing particular 5-0 results.
Of course, since the lists are curated, there isn't much value in a meta-League analysis either. So, what should we realistically take from 5-0 results?
To me, it is only a speculative invitation on hypothetically plausible avenues of exploration. 5-0 proposes the notion that a path through the meta-game exists with the list in question, so, in other words, a 5-0 list is a sort of hypothesis. Now, that is not really true, because someone actually did the "experiment" in actually 5-0-ing, but that is only a single data point. We can't know how likely that particular result is, or would be, going forward.
So, another way to think about it would be a 5-0 list as a sort of pilot study, or test case. What remains to be seen is the reproducibility.
For example, in the same league, EWLandon 5-0'd with a Pox list. He won several games that, if played again, do not likely end up the same way. So, we don't know, but the test case shows that, if things go relative right, it can win. Of course, that could be said of anything. So, we need to reproduce the list and rerun the experiment, if we are going to think the result has any actual predictive power.
So, a 5-0 list is simply, to me, a speculative hypothesis. An invitation to run more tests, really. We can't (read: likely should not) draw much more than that, I would tend to think.
"The Ancients teach us that if we can but last, we shall prevail."
—Kaysa, Elder Druid of the Juniper Order
I think there's definitely credibility in a 5-0 list. However, one could make the assumption that anyone who goes 5-0 with any deck that is questionable from a higher-level competitive standpoint should look more at the player and their situational mechanics rather than the cards themselves.
Well, in general I'd agree, but there are always exceptions. For example, Phil went 5-0 with this list but if you watch the VOD (and just generally know the rules pretty well) you realize that Ashiok and Maralen don't even interact at all.
That being said, in the VOD you'll see the cards that actually did do work. So, a 5-0 result is likely almost always a decent place to start. But just that, start.
"The Ancients teach us that if we can but last, we shall prevail."
—Kaysa, Elder Druid of the Juniper Order
No, the interaction literally never came up at all. Games were won by just direct Ashiok milling, or by early Lilianas resolving doing lots of work for the most part.
There was one moment where an attempt could be made at the combo, but everyone (including Phil) was fairly certain the combo didn't even work, so Maralen was discarded to a Lili plus.
The 3 Maralen could have been literally any legal Magic cards and the result would have been identical, haha. Since he won all 5 matches, it is hard to say what would be better, per se, but almost anything vaguely castable and/or useful would have been better in the abstracted sense of "ever being something wanted to be drawn." The fact that he won with three flat-out bricks in the deck shows how not every card is necessarily determinate of results, especially in these small sample size cases.
"The Ancients teach us that if we can but last, we shall prevail."
—Kaysa, Elder Druid of the Juniper Order
Oh okay that's a bit less scandalous but much more realistic.
The only information we can gather is that these lists guarantee a non-zero chance of going 5-0. But that number could be very small.
I mean, a Storm player dying to their own Ad Nauseam loses to a pile of 60 Forests. If it can happened once, it could happen twice. It could happen 10 times in a row.
60 Forests: 5-0 record.
I mean, people win the lottery every day. No different here I guess.
Statistics are dangerous
Indeed, that is why we should look at single data points, but also do more research. In the case of Phil's list, we can look at the games and see that the pairs of Lilianas, early Lilis and Ashiok can be game winning cards. Which hypothetically means that Dark Ritual might be underplayed as a "fair" card. Of course, that is not to say it should be widely played as such, but it's metagame position might well be something under-explored.
Of course, by the same measure, it might be the case that it was extremely aberrant result and is essentially no real viability aside simply getting the better end of variance from time to time. I mean, I have lost games with a highly tuned, well positioned Delver deck to literally Grizzly.Bears.With.A.Few.Removal.Spells.dec before, but as it were, crushed them in 2 of the 3 games. Because expensive cards are generally just better ones (i.e. just better suited to winning games).
Either way, as a fan of Dark Ritual and very much not a fan of Storm, I really want to believe the former but I won't pretend it couldn't more likely be the latter. I don't know that Phil's result was akin to winning the lottery, but I follow your line of thought. Unlikely things will happen, just not often. That is why meta-analysis is key, but Leagues just don't give us that. We get the possible, but no exact sense of it's plausibility. Like you say, 60 basics could win, possibly, but is so far fetched as to be highly implausible.
In the end, we need to check ourselves and always be weary of confirmation bias, and the like, when we evaluate things.
"The Ancients teach us that if we can but last, we shall prevail."
—Kaysa, Elder Druid of the Juniper Order
Oh I didn't mean to imply that their success wasn't deserved, the list genuinely caught my eye as a neat deck to follow until I myself saw the non-combo interaction which made no sense. Which is what drew out my reply in the first place because the list you happened to reference was fresh on my mind.
My backhanded comment was and old punchline relating to any of those local news articles when the reporter stops people in line filling out lotto tickets because the jackpot is some gargantuan amount to tell them their odds are less that if they got stuck by lighting 10 times in a row or some other garbage statistic. People win the lottery every day.
Right, yeah, I probably considered that off-hand statement more seriously that necessary. Unlikely things happen all the time, unlikely doesn't mean shouldn't happen, just shouldn't happen often. But like you say, statistics are dangerous, because they lead us to believe that cases are "equal" (or comparable) when they are only seemingly so. Were one to, say, run that same list through a League, you aren't going to (in all likelihood) see the same cards, in the same order, play the same people and have them see the same cards in the same order on their end. Which means, lets say, this new League goes 0-5. Do we have a 5-5 list?
In one sense, yes, but we also don't know the particulars of this new case. Perhaps this new player of the deck made play errors. Or bad mulligan decisions. Or got nut-drawn by every opponent.
If we have a large enough sample size we can more seriously pretend these variance considerations aren't "causing" the record, but that will always be something of a pretending. The whole notion of causality is a serious philosophical mess, honestly, but let me not get into that right now.
"The Ancients teach us that if we can but last, we shall prevail."
—Kaysa, Elder Druid of the Juniper Order
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