Brainstorm
Force of Will
Lion's Eye Diamond
Counterbalance
Sensei's Divining Top
Tarmogoyf
Phyrexian Dreadnaught
Goblin Lackey
Standstill
Natural Order
Well, this was part of why banning Deathrite was not really ideal. We saw it happen in Modern too, where Deathrite was what held Snapcaster back from being obviously the best Creature in Modern (at the time). While Deathrite was likely a mistake in being as powerful as it was, I still think it was over-all better for the format than it was a detriment.
This is exactly the type of sentiment that I decried when Deathrite got banned. This war against excellence, which ends up a war against whatever emerges as the "next best thing." There will always be a next best thing. If the aim is to always just cull from the top simply because it's the top, we are working our way toward a format where all we have a ETBF Tapped lands and Great Wall. Am I being dramatic? Of course, but I'm illustrating how absurd the general principle is/was in banning Deathrite and now this subsequent idea that Snapcaster should be banned. Or even considered for banning.
Hierarchy is the entire point of Legacy. The format is absolutely predicated on the very notion that some things are demonstrably better than others. Leave your Post-Modernist notions in the realm where they belong: ideas that seems reasonable but don't actually work in or pertain to the realistic world.
"The Ancients teach us that if we can but last, we shall prevail."
—Kaysa, Elder Druid of the Juniper Order
All Spells Primer under construction: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e...Tl7utWpLo0/pub
PM me if you want to contribute!
@taconaught putting responses to blocks of your post:
1) The game-ending (before it began) is the weakest point in the argument against Probe; however an amount of games did end on turn 0 [effectively] because Probe was legal - the failure of Probe to cost any mana made that possible. It's not about how often people feel like that happened; the point is that objectively speaking, that Probe's zero mana cost is the underlying mechanic that made it possible.
There are a lot of cards on the banlist [particularly ones without mana engine aspects] which are banned b/c they are kinda just bullcrap. Now bullcrap comes in two [non-mana engine] flavors: "this is overpowered, and the only way to beat it is to play it" [ ex. Ancestral Recall/Mental Misstep, subset diversity killer] and "this is just plain stupid" [ex. Yawg Will, Time Vault, etc.]. There is a precedent for banning cards just on the basis of "this is bullcrap," and turn zero Probe-Sea-Therapy, take 2 cards-gg is something that qualifies as sufficiently stupid play pattern. An argument of "Probe is to powerful, it should be banned" is inherently subjective, but it's not necessarily wrong [nor is it necessarily right].
2) There is a very large difference between needing to play a land and use its mana to cast a discard spell, and needing zero mana and getting a new card. An opponent cannot interact with something as non-committal as Probe [unless life total is a meaningful axis of interaction from the onset of a game, which is to say specifically Burn].
3) It's not about the info quality in a dynamic game state, nor about how people play in-game. I'm just looking at the raw mechanics of Probe and stating that the purpose of the card is to move a game of magic away from interactive, precisely because no meaningful axis of interaction was exposed to an opponent.
4) Treasure Cruise would have gotten itself banned post-theoretical Probe ban. DTT probably also, but we'll never really know. What we can say though is that any card with keyword delve is castable at least 1 turn quicker in the presence of Probe. This can currently be appreciated in legacy by watching Death's Shadow [with Street Wraith] and any other non-Wraith deck with Gurmag. That increase in velocity is objectively noteworthy.
5) Chalice requires extreme concessions in deckbuilding. The cost of Chalice's power is that you're at the mercy of an opponent's strategy because Chalice decks are exceedingly easy to predict possible plays (and if Chalice didn't stop their plans, your deck is going to offer very little dynamic resistance). Also notable: most Chalice decks do not get the benefit of increasing the EV of their topdecks by thinning via Fetchlands.
@Ronald Deuce some of the above post relates to your post. Building on that I'll just talk about what it all means when I apply it to Grixis Delver.
The entire deck of Grixis Delver [pre-DRS/Probe ban] is built upon the premise of abusing Fetchlands in an amount of ways no other decks could. There are of course the cantrips and DRS mana implications; then apart from Fetchlands was the notable ability to shred opponent's hands on the back of Probe/Therapy. That hyper-consistent, hyper-efficient, hyper-disruptive, and high-velocity strategy then got the delve mechanic - and suddenly Probe/Therapy is now also buffing the Fetchland abuse because both feed into the DTT/Gurmag reward pathway. It was not challenging to capitalize on that payoff by turn 3. While it wasn't unbeatable, the chances were the opponent never really got to play magic/make meaningful decisions before they died.
Probe being legal meant an opponent would die at least ~1 turn quicker. Another way of stating this: with delve, Probe is mana positive.
The hidden oracle text on Probe is: Pay 2 life, your opponents' ability to interact is diminished and the amount of time they have to interact will be diminished. Results may vary [deck construction + variance], and don't reassess as long as Fetchlands are legal.
BAN:
Brainstorm
Ponder
Show and Tell
Dark Depths
possibly Griselbrand
format would be way more fun
I don't really mind Show and Tell quite as such - I mind Show and Tell into abject braindeath. Cleaning the "if this lands the game is over then and there with basically 0 requirements" type of cards from the payoff list would make the card more interesting. Show and Tell is broken, but it's S&T->Griseltard/Emralolol/Omnidrool, maybe S&T->Jin-Git that are the issue.
Originally Posted by Lemnear
For all the hate SnT gets, it really only punishes small-minded magic grinding out their little incremental advantages. The balance is that things go horribly wrong when you cast SnT into decks that are going big. There's no doubt SnT is stupid and generally uninteresting, but it's still symmetrical.
The card SnT operates to hurt SCM/SFM/Strix/etc ETB-value scumming into [insert planeswalker]. As bad as the SnT matchup is for the non-blue fair deck, the fact of the matter is that said fair deck is relying on ETB value scum precisely because they can't go big vs cheap removal spell into Snapcaster. Losing to SnT might feel awful, but SnT isn't taking deck-building freedom away from the non-blue fair deck.
Hopefully WotC learns to print less miserable cards [preferably lands] that hate on ETB-value magic than SnT. Even if a fair deck [given tools to hate ETB without going out of their way] is gonna stop at Goyf, the quality of card they could dump in off SnT would have improved significantly.
I think there are two reason we have these bans: Wizards silence on what cards are sacrosanct and there inability to stop printing dumb blue cards. Outside of a Tweet by Aaron Forsythe on Brainstorm (a Tweet, really?) we don't know what cards will never be banned and by extension will be banned around. I can't play Top but I can play Brainstorm and Ponder in all of my Blue decks and I don't think I need to mention the stupidity of Griseltard. This feels really similar to how they manage the Banned List in Modern, very heavy-handed. It would be nice if we were told if they had a vision for the format because looking at the cards that are banned and the ones I can play is kinda confusing.
"We are goblinkind, heirs to the mountain empires of chieftains past. Rest is death to us, and arson is our call to war."
Griselbrand should go and has needed to for awhile. It would be great if the combo decks didn't just instantly win when their big fatty resolved 90% of the time. Especially for non blue decks that can't fight on the stack it might give fair non prison non blue decks some sort of game against combo.
You do understand that wizards doesn't give a shit about legacy? These cards are decent in standard an bg is a very strong deck also because of good the recursion tools it has.
That deck would be?
SOunds like a salty storm player?
I am salty about the ban, and I am a Storm player, but those two aren't directly connected. Again, Storm's actually in a better place now precisely because it's not vulnerable to Probe-Therapy-Therapy plays; even though Storm used Probe-Therapy, it suffered against it more than it benefited from having the option around. It's the apparent lack of reasoning, testing, and logic in the ban announcement that makes me angry, especially when the community largely just goes, "Huh, ok," without holding the arbiters to a standard of logic or transparency. I've left Modern forever because I'm tired of watching anything and everything powerful that's not an ETB creature get sniped, and I think that in a format like Legacy, which has such a steep financial barrier to entry, there'd better be pretty good reasoning and transparency in the banning process if decks are going to get hammered. Sure, there's a lot of versatility in Legacy's expensive staples, but it's infuriating to see the higher-ups just go, "Well, we're banning Probe because we banned it in other formats." At least they gave some kind of coherent reasoning behind the Deathrite ban, sad though I was to see it.
Fox, sorry I missed your post. I guess we'll have to agree to disagree about Probe specifically, because I'm with you about most of your arguments and I think you've got an interesting perspective; I just don't think the card warranted a ban.
A thousand times this. It's a card with a built-in out to itself. (Won me some games by flopping my own Griselbrand in Dredge, flopping a Charbelcher and firing away, or flopping Stingscourger in Burn.) Eureka and Hypergenesis have the same feature, and I suspect that's the reason they're fringy these days. Sure, Show and Tell is a bit dumb, but isn't it dumber that there are 15/15 Annihilators and 7/7 Bargaintown creatures running around?
All Spells Primer under construction: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e...Tl7utWpLo0/pub
PM me if you want to contribute!
Ban: True-Name, Terminus, Counterbalance, Mentor, Griselbrand
Unban: Top, Earthcraft
Format solved
Strawberry Shortcake
http://www.mtgthesource.com/forums/s...erry-Shortcake
What a brainstorm do? Draw card and activate on draw effects fix hand, removing woods
#FreeNedleeds
i like where you're going but i've got a detour: unban probe, top, deathrite, earthcraft, mindtwist and ban brainstorm.
no more shaky keeps just 'cause you have a BS and a fetch
you wouldn't HAVE TO play blue "cause i'm a spike nonsense"...
EDIT: i'd even campaign to get DTT and treasure cruise back if it meant BS gets the ban hammer.
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