Brainstorm
Force of Will
Lion's Eye Diamond
Counterbalance
Sensei's Divining Top
Tarmogoyf
Phyrexian Dreadnaught
Goblin Lackey
Standstill
Natural Order
Just going to go on record and say that I don't care what color of mana is being tapped to do things, so long as cool things are being done. When I look at that top 16 and see a bunch of decks doing a bunch of different things, I really don't care if they're all accomplishing that with Islands.
Those decks are all radically different, and strategic diversity is more important to me than worrying about how many plains were tapped in a top 16.
Right, so exactly as I said then. You can have Spaceballs-the Lunchbox, Spaceballs-the...as long as you start with blue. Do you not see where this is a problem? I was too hard on you, but I liked this conversation better when at least the opinions expressed had been thought-out before being typed. Way back then (a few days ago), we could at least agree that there was a problem and disagree about what to do about it.
Whatever the case, wizards had better get on the ball and fix this Vintage-in-the-making mess they have created. They can't ban the real culprit, Brainstorm because it is a holy fucking cow. So they are going to have to figure out new cards to print that curb its power, and that of similar cantrips better than Spirit of the Labyrinth. And they will need lots of them, like an entire cycle of cards specifically designed with that goal in mind from the outset. Yes, it is a lot. But every time they print another broke-ass blue card it just makes Brainstorm even more ensconced as the king of the format.
Honestly, what they need is a Fix Legacy set. In addition to the anti-cantrip cycle, they need a cycle of lands that make people feel less dependent upon duals - fetchable lands that are better or worse depending on gamestate. In the grand scheme of things, this is not a hard task, really. It seems like a hassle, but for those of us who can see this from the long view, it is becoming increasingly necessary. And once it is done, it is done. The format will be forever freed from its shackles.
But for any of this to happen, wotc has to give a shit. I can't imagine how it is possible that they could not give a shit about their own product. But they have demonstrated many times in recent years that they prefer Legacy to take a back seat.
"Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."
"Politicians are like diapers. They should be changed often and for the same reason."
"Governing is too important to be left to people as silly as politicians."
"Politicians were mostly people who'd had too little morals and ethics to stay lawyers."
There seems to be a disconnect. Their own product isn't the 20 years of cards everyone else has developed. It is solely Modern, Limited and most importantly Standard. Anything else is gravy.
They certainly give a shit, just not in the way you want them to. Their focus is clearly elsewhere and it shows in their set design
Matt Bevenour in real life
Jund, Mono-White, and Mono-Red are all very powerful decks. Saying the format is all Blue is a little silly, but when you have a game designed around the luck of the draw, being able to have as many shots at that draw as possible is always going to be better than not. These other decks all play a strategy where every card in the deck seems to do something, mainly attack.
I think what you're doing wrong is spending too much time on the forum and getting too involved in the "discussions". I did that briefly before and it certainly didn't do any favors for my love of the game. Just ignore people and love/play/collect/bitch about the game anyway you enjoy.
Legacy: Rituals
Vintage: Drains
You know what that shows? That BS/Ponder/Probe/FoW is so much better than anything else you can be doing right now that you can literally play Kird Ape as a threat and it doesn't matter at all.
Just like last week, where you take that same crap and swap out the creatures for terrible combo pieces.
Ok, so basics here. I began with 3/4 of the decks are blue and feature the same card filtering mechanic as the primary engine of the deck. These include combo, control, and aggro decks.
Being able to augment the draw step with cantrips is NOT always better than other ways to design a deck or else every format would have our issues. The opportunity cost of that is mana spent, extra card in the graveyard, etc. Yet of all the thousands of different ways you could conceivably construct a magic deck, this particular method continues to occupy majority of top 8 spots. It was not always thus.
How is this hard to understand?
"Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."
"Politicians are like diapers. They should be changed often and for the same reason."
"Governing is too important to be left to people as silly as politicians."
"Politicians were mostly people who'd had too little morals and ethics to stay lawyers."
It feels a bit superfluous to write anything in this thread as everything seems to have been stated a multitude of times already, but here goes.
I’m of the same opinion as Julian, while the blue cantrip shell is nearly ubiquitous, it isn’t necessarily the most powerful, or at least not overpowered.
It’s just that it fits into the widest range of decks/archetypes, by a immense margin.
My, perhaps unenlightened, view is that a “real” deck needs either massive card draw/advantage (Glimpse, Loam, CB, Chalice etc.), tutors (GSZ, IT, Intuition, etc.), top manipulation (cantrips, Sylvan, Top, etc.) or at the very least extreme redundancy (Burn, D&T).
You need a lot of these effects, preferably from different categories, i.e cantrips+TC, Loam+tutors, Glimpse+GSZ.
The less a deck fulfills these criteria, the less chance it has of winning a large tournament.
Loam, Infernal Tutor and Glimpse can only go into very specific kinds of decks, cantrips on the other hand fit right into most decks.
What does this mean? Well playing a deck with 1/3 lands, 1/3 threats and 1/3 answers with top decking as the way to get the cards you want isn’t really what you want to be doing. I hear that’s how it works in some others formats though, so if that’s your thing.. :)
I actually like the meta as it is right now, but I’m in europe and not the US of A, so there isn’t a 40%+ concentration of delver/blade/pyro here, however if I just cared about winning I would kind of wish that there was..
With all that said, Brainstorm is by far the most powerful card in legacy and it’s not because it’s a cantrip, but because it can do a million different other things that no other card can do.
And I don’t like that BS+Ponder is becoming (has become) the P9 of legacy, but there are (a few) viable alternatives.
As Finn points out, Wizards could EASILY fix this with new printings (alternatives and answers in commander sets), but currently, for some inexplicable reason, this seems completely beyond the capabilities or will of Wizards.
tl;dr+ps: I usually don't play BS decks. I don’t think that the blue shell is overpowered but it's a bit monotonous when 3/4 decks play it. I hope wizards prints fun and powerful cards in other colors/for other archetypes but nothing leads me to believe that they will.
Yet those plans are still overall worse than the "blue shell" plan in terms of consistency, aside from Burn.
I would love to read an article about somebody sifting through the numbers, looking how each deck type performed against various other decks and so on, while drawing conclusions from that.
So, in the end, Brainstorm didn't over- or underperform in this tournament as far as Day 2 was concerned, but roughly kept the 70% share, which in itself is a rather questionable number.
And I really want to see the maindeckable Brainstorm hate that is actually powerful enough to dent Brainstorm & consorts without the Brainstorm faction whining about how OP it is. Edit: Made a post in the shitty card creation thread to see what people can come up with.
Holy shit, SCG released lists down to 120th place. I am sure now you will all have plenty of information to discet, twist, ignore or otherwise just disregard as you all see fit but for me, that's dam exciting.
35 decks non blue decks from 120 presented (85 are blue'ish) SCG mostly:
- D&T
- Lands
- MUD
- Dredge
- Burn
- Maverick
- Junk
Last edited by Fatal; 01-12-2015 at 11:25 AM.
Quoted for truth.
That said, a big part of the 'no other card can do' aspect is that Brainstorm is a low cc instant.
Last edited by rufus; 01-12-2015 at 11:20 AM.
yeap - fixed thx for pointing.
2 of the 3 Burn decks splashed for Treasure Cruise.
Sound like the right Idea. Splashing Cruise into a deck which can empty his hand so fast is great. Btw this does not make the deck blue.
Also evaluating the sturation of a color on the basis of only 1 event is not the best thing to do. I think we can start to talk about this when we get
more tournement lists like this. But for the moment all you can do is wild guessing because even 120 decks are not enough to draw conclusions about the
whole legacy metagame out of them.
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