Brainstorm
Force of Will
Lion's Eye Diamond
Counterbalance
Sensei's Divining Top
Tarmogoyf
Phyrexian Dreadnaught
Goblin Lackey
Standstill
Natural Order
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We are talking the same block which dropped Delver, Terminus and Griselbrand among other nasty stuff. The first major metagame hit for Zoo still occured after delvers release. Its fair to discuss, what follow up printing drove the final nail into Zoos coffin.
I personally dont care if "turn-sideways" vanished as a viable archetype, as effort/results should be in a certain relation, but i mourn that the pretty new/renewed non-blue midrange archetypes got invalidated by blue options thanks to SCM & TNN
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You are all forgetting that first blow to Zoo was after Batterskull got printed. Final nail in the coffin was the Innistrad brokeness but it was Batterskull that was first.
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..you can't just drop this and not explain it. Is dragon stumpy an effort deck? What about ub deaths shadow? Death and taxes?
Personally I don't understand the logic. If you want to win a big tournament you want a deck with a very high win percentage rate that is very easy to pilot. If you have two decks with the same win % vs. the field, the one that requires more decisions (meaning the one where you can make more mistakes) is the worse deck...not the better one.
Edit: Jim Davis has a wonderful article on the topic: http://www.starcitygames.com/article...-Chuckler.html .
Sure, i can elaborate. For me its about tradeoffs and weaknesses you accept for running decks. Many stompy decks suffer from high variance draws/plays as a natural balance to their powerlevel and linear aggro decks like Zoo are soft to combo decks. Zoo lost the balance and had too many weaknesses at some point.
The problem is that one can't expect to be in a great position with a one-trick-pony, which can't interact with any combo or control deck. Even Burn adapted to the metagame with Eidolon, Pyrostatic Pillar & Co, but Zoo even refused to run Thalia and Teeg.
We are not talking about two decks with similar win% and the easy choice to take the one which is easier to pilot, but a deck which has pretty much no game against anything dropping a Tendrils, Griselbrand, Pyromancer, TNN, SFM and more. I don't think we need to be surprised that such a deck vanishes if its unable/-willing to adapt. I double-down: It has no right to remain viable without adaption to a changing metagame
I'll give it a read later. Thanks for the link.
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I agree with all of your points . I should have clarified that my second paragraph/rant had nothing to do with zoo in particular (I didnt even think it was a good choice back in 2009), just that I find the effort/skill arguments perplexing. Either someone is trying to win a big tournament and they should be playing the deck that gives them the best chance to win regardless of how simple it is, or they're not and I don't understand any deck choice decision that is more complicated than 'this is what I feel like playing'. Sometimes the best deck is complicated and will reward practice/understanding...but sometimes it's a simple deck that's just good and eliminating it as an option on principle just seems absurd to me. Deck selection is a huge part of this game...
Edit: point is I think b/r decisions should be based on eliminating overly dominant cards regardless of if they are "skill" intensive.
The Big Zoo offshoot did, in fact, run these cards. I seem to recall IBA running a small/classic Zoo list with Teegs, too, so it had nothing to do with willingness to think outside the box. Big Zoo was one of my highest-winning decks in the era before True-Name. The problem was that Zoo became pulled in too many different directions by powerful strategies that couldn't elegantly be answered without countermagic. Teeg is great against Storm, but it's terrible against True-Name. Ditto for Thalia and Ethersworn Canonist. But counterspells can cover almost anything. This is, in my opinion, the biggest reason why people play the blue shell to begin with. Brainstorm is a busted card, but the flexibility of countermagic is what allows those decks to have so few bad matchups. WOTC's refusal to bleed countermagic or similar stack interaction into other colors is why decks like Zoo are naturally weaker than Delver decks. Consider how this could be different with something like a red or green Stubborn Denial with Ferocious at 3 power.
This is true.
Is also true that me and other zoo lovers tried Dark zoo for thoughtseize\duress\
Or Maverick for thalia and other
then jund to maximize card advantage
But this deck sucks because poor card selection and no all around replies to multiple direction threat (like counterspell you say)
in the end with blue is easier especially now that you can be
Blue red aggro UR delver
Blue black aggro UB shadow
blue white black esper stoneblade midrange
Blue / Blue black combo Omnitell
Blue / Red combo Sneak and Show
Blue white control Miracle
Blue red black control Grixis.
Y
This contention makes sense from a strictly competitive perspective, but I (and many others) would like it if, in general, the "EV scaling with skill" versus the "EV scaling with inherent power" were related in such a way that the former dominates the latter at the highest levels of competition.
That is to say, we hope that learning a deck that requires a lot of decisions is more rewarding than playing a "slam-it-and-forget-it" deck. That's why I didn't mind when Miracles and Grixis were on top, because sure, they were the best deck, but you couldn't just sit down and play them the way you could Eldrazi or something. You actually had to understand matchups/the metagame/individual card interactions/etc.
To answer your questions directly - stompy is not an effort deck, shadow is more of an effort deck, and DnT is the hardest of the three you mentioned. The point is, high-level Magic should involve decision making, because that's what makes games and matchups interesting - if every game is, "slam a lock piece, slam a dude, get in that red zone" there isn't really a lot of nuanced differentiation that can occur.
[Aside: there are formats that can use the "hump dudes into one another" as a basis for the interaction that can be competitive and skill-testing, but they are typically lower power level, so the combat/trades/etc are more involved and there aren't things like combo or prison to complicate the relationships. For me at least, Legacy is the coolest format because strategies that don't revolve around crunchy combat are available, so I would prefer Legacy bannings target low-skill, high-power cards that obviate the need to learn anything.]
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Stompy requires more decision making than you give it credit for. And these decisions can be hugely rewarding or devastating to the outcome of the game. I'll give that the effort is skewed towards pregame decisions and the initial turn, but that doesn't mean the deck is mindless.
In a hand with Blood Moon and Chalice, and the ability to play both, which do you choose? The correct answer won't always result in a game win. A hand with Vial and 1-drops makes that first turn Blood Moon look pretty stupid. Meanwhile letting Elves crack that basic in favor of a Chalice @ 1 opens them up to GSZ their way out of anything you do.
Lead with a Trinisphere? Better hope your opponent doesn't have a Wasteland for that single Sol Land you're banking on. Got a winning Blood Moon, but your Chrome Mox has to imprint either a Simian Spirit Guide or a Goblin Rabblemaster? If you choose the Guide, you'd better hope your opponent doesn't have Daze. If you choose the Goblin, it might take 10 turns for the Ape to get there.
You say my deck is a mindless pile. I say my pile gives you a break from thinking so hard. Enjoy the 40 minutes til the next round and grab yourself a Coke.
Look clearly Sneak//Show is the most skill intensive ancient tomb deck in the format, there is no amount of mental gymnastics that will change that. The nuance of playing show and tell dwarfs your blood moon and chalice deck.
Agreed. I tried many zoo lists with main board Thalia/Teeg/ Eidolon/ Scab Clan Berserker. The problem was the blue creature decks outclassed the green creature decks. When your combo opponent could just kill you before the hate bear came down, or you drew the wrong bear or your True Name opponent played a turn 3 Blue Abyss that can attack and carry a jitte or their snapcaster got to trade with a dude and plow another, or delver opponent simply races you. Blue creature power creep has beenbeen pretty fucking stupid
So, I actually don't necessarily disagree with this, and did put an aside that I noted at the bottom of my post.
The difference is that in legacy, most of the combats don't really have that complexity because of the nature of the threats - if you're getting attacked by marit lage or griselbrand or TNN or a delver backed up by hyperefficient spells, it's typically more about finding the correct answer than it is about creative and risky attacks and blocks. You do get it sometimes; for instance, DnT and other equipment decks can have cool fights and tricks with other fair decks, but it isn't the norm. I'm specifically calling out the decks that use the attack step but only because it's the simplest way to go from "my chalice stops my opponent from doing anything relevant, how do I get them from 20 to zero" and things like Thought Knot Seer just have a whole bunch of things tacked onto it without asking anything of you as a player (which is also what people hate about TNN).
Also, I don't think of myself as being some savant because I play ANT - in fact, I think the deck is easier than a lot of people claim - but I do think the deck has a lot of nuances that lead to interesting games.
I feel bad that you felt you had to defend it Ace, because I really like your contributions to these threads and didn't mean to attack you on it. Also, I totally acknowledge that there are choices to make playing stompy, and you have some good examples of forks; sometimes I exaggerate it for effect in these kinds of threads (because some days it does just feel like the guy goes tomb > chalice twice in a row and then you get sea draked or hanweir watchkeeped or whatever and you wish you never registered for the tournament).
I don't think the deck is mindless, but the distinction I'm trying to make is how much experience and knowledge tracks with success with various archetypes. For instance, at various times, both Eldrazi and Grixis Delver could be considered to have a good matchup against Storm, but if you took two guys whose first event was the Dominaria prerelease and handed each of them one of those two decks and sat them down across an ANT player, the dude who ended up with spaghetti would fare much better in a much shorter amount of time. The Grixis player could get better, and eventually have a good matchup there and against the field, but he would have to learn more to get there, and I think that sort of trajectory is good for legacy, and makes for more interesting games.
It's not that there's no value in having some decks that are more straightforward and binary, or that those decks are somehow lesser, but that it's ultimately better for the game overall if the decks that offer the best possible rewards demand more investment and rely on multiple marginal decisions rather than singular make-or-break calls. It makes the game more like chess than rock, paper, scissors, which I think is good. Obviously we don't want it to be exactly chess, variance is good for player retention/replayability/accessibility/excitement/etc, but feeling like decisions matter, even many small ones, is good.
I can't tell if this is satirical or not - personally, I find Sneak//Show to be approximately as demanding as other tomb decks, including stompy, and perhaps even more forgiving because it has cantrips and Force of Will to bail you out. At least the Red/Ramen Stompy players have to commit to their line and the top of their deck
We don't agree about much, but I'm absolutely with you about this. Blue's pushed creatures are what's pushed a lot of conventional strategies out of Legacy. I doubt it's the only thing, and I still hate clamoring for a ban, but that's where my money is on "constructive bans" at this juncture.
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