Brainstorm
Force of Will
Lion's Eye Diamond
Counterbalance
Sensei's Divining Top
Tarmogoyf
Phyrexian Dreadnaught
Goblin Lackey
Standstill
Natural Order
"Playing the best, most overpowered card proves how skilled I am at this game."Originally Posted by Barook
skill-intensity isn't be-all and end-all of Magic teh gathering. Also, what Barook wrote about BS is in fact exactly what the cards does. Unless you play blindfolded, you should notice that it's exactly how BS is played.
Speaking of winning archetypes, not some fringe piles of cardboard crap, there are what, seven main decks? All of them play blue which is not only bad due to the associated troubles like blue duals' price, but also because the whole of the Legacy play the same. You may close the eyes during any and each of your matches and simply pretend that it's a game of thimblerig.Most of the Brainstorm hatred seems to stem from some irrational desire for cards and colors to be equally represented in Legacy rather than a variety of different archetypes.
Not to mention that if the diversity is that important, it should be available in other colors/archetypes, too, unless you find the #bluedualsprices or #dullgameplay a defining trait of Legacy.
They don't play differently. Their main difference is in what they do during the fundamental/ultimate turn, but other than that, they play the same. You cantrip into cantrip into cantrip with some fetches involved and then you either fire thine A+B combo, or fire thine accumulated combo, or make tons of tokens or w/e. The very process of winning is just a routine ending of a cantrip shift, a finish of working process that offers and brings little climax and in fact is pretty boring. The very few games I played in last year or so were on the brink of agony, as they felt the same, they ended the same and they were dull the same.
I'm not saying that "return Zoo into major archetypes again" (or w/e is the usual phrase), would be the necessary improvement of Legacy. Just don't make the mistake to think that the different wincons of Miracles, Storm and Delver make the gaming experience that different. Or thrilling.
In any properly constructed 2015 legacy deck, Brainstorm is really not all that skill intensive. You are choosing from the most powerful cards ever printed. I honestly think if you put the two cards back at random and were forced to shuffle on resolution, the difference would be negligible.
Going from playing non-blue to playing blue has only confirmed my view that Brainstorm is overpowered. Some formerly cakewalk matchups I had on a non-blue deck got way worse when I switched to a blue deck too, because there are entire decks built simply to beat decks that play 12+ cantrips. I don't think that's such a great thing. I'd like there to be some risk in playing a narrow hate deck. But with 76% of top decks playing Brainstorm, playing a cantrip-hate deck like D&T or Painter is better everyday.
There are more decks playing Brainstorm in Legacy than Ancestral Recall in Vintage. That is insane.
Did your God smite down Elves, Lands, and Death & Taxes while I wasn't looking?
If anyone is interested in seeing just how diverse legacy is, please check out the latest update in the DTB section.
I'm with Maharis. I've gone from playing a non blue deck (and I think I did well for a long time considering the deck) to storm and brainstorm is completely insane
Same.
Wizards basically said when the banned TC that they will never ban BS. So, now understanding the rules, I'm ok with it. Legacy is fine if you accept that BS is never going anywhere.
If it were simply a matter of choosing the best cards in your hand, Miracles win percentage would be through the roof in the US given the popularity of delver and RUG would be actually the easiest deck in the format to play.
Something about your statement doesn't jive, if you play a deck that is in the meta, expect people to have things prepared for it and beat it, just the same, if you pick a deck that is designed to be good against the meta (such as painter), then you are going to have a rough time beating off the wall decks that try to attack you from a different angle.
It also is a huge disservice to D&T to say it's simply a "cantrip hate" deck given that it's primary way of beating you is leaving you unable to cast spells via a soft lock of rishadan ports and Thalia (plus other taxing effects, such as wasteland).
To be frank, you can make a lot of ridiculous statements that, outside of context, sound much worse than they are, sure brainstorm in legacy is played more than in vintage, but you also have to consider that MUD has access to probably one of the most broken lands in the game that enable them to power out cards that leave you enable to actually play magic, and Dredge can simply ignore your brainstorm (barring graveyard hate) thanks to Bazaar of Baghdad letting them flip their deck over.
I suggest you check out the DTB section and the EE podcast. Besides being empirically the winningest deck in the format, Miracles is described as eschewing variance completely.
RUG's card quality is actually quite low. Deathblade is a better example: every Brainstorm is a wealth of riches. Even then, the presence of Bolt gives RUG plenty of Brainstorm-into-oops-I-wins. So much skill!
We don't really disagree here, we just disagree on whether it's good or bad.
I don't think it's insulting or anything to call D&T a cantrip hate deck. Its strategy hurts xerox-strategy decks that skimp on land in favor of cantrips and want to cast more than one spell a turn. Beating both D&T and Painter boils down to having basic lands in your deck. But drawing a basic land when the blue deck looks at 3 cards per the is the worst.
I totally understand why this is the case, what I'm saying is that the anti-decks are better against actual Ancestral Recall than Brainstorm. 76% brainstorm decks means D&T should clean up, right? Also Painter? But it turns out only letting one color reduce variance in a meaningful way gives it surprising resilience.
Good golly, you're right. That is... troubling. Though to be fair, the same is true for Force of Will.
Where do you get the Vintage numbers? Brainstorm is currently at 70%, the 76% figure was true during the TC meta.
They did? Can you quote that part?
I was looking at MTG Top 8, though upon further examination the Vintage percentages (Ancestral Recall at 71%) was for the last year, while the Legacy numbers (Brainstorm at 76%, Force of Will at 72%) were for the last two months, so that's not really a fair comparison. No idea why the default setting for Legacy is 2 months but is 12 months for Vintage, but I should've looked more carefully and seen that. If we set Vintage to 2 months, then Ancestral Recall is at 80%, above Brainstorm.
- I would argue RUG plays plenty of good cards, the problem is none of the them do anything to an opponent that has stabilized on mana, and the point was brainstorm letting you just simply pick the best cards and putting the rest back, Miracles win rate in the hands of your average player (which everyone on here, barring a few exceptions, really is) is much closer to 50-50, sure some run hot, but if you look at the data presented on Reddit/Here from SCG IQs in the US, miracles win rate is nothing spectacular as the deck, in the hands of an average pilot, miracles actually isn't that good.
- Fair on the first point, but I still feel the second is missing the point, D&T seeks to exploit flaws in Legacy decks, which is greedy manabases, not a reliance on cantrips, D&T beats miracles with Rishadan port, Thalia, Karakas and Sword of Fire and Ice not hating on Brainstorm for example. Painter is just actual an awful deck (that statement is mostly my own personal distaste for the deck honestly) so it hardly counts :P
- I don't think it's personally a bad thing that Blue is the color of consistency, Brainstorm is probably the most blue card in the game, it simply cantrips (albeit in a very powerful way), the problem is giving Blue things it shouldn't do, Blue being able to counterspells and draw cards is what it's supposed to do, having highly efficient creatures and oops I win spells is not what it should do, if you consider, Ponder Miracles exemplifies what any Blue control deck in magic wants to do, be consistent, control the game and have a finisher that ends the game quickly, sure it sometimes wins it's bad MUs, but usually that requires incredible variance and skill, beating jund requires you to cast entreat the angels as quick as possible for as large as possible and sometimes thats not enough, beating 12 post requires the same thing, beating goblins requires your opponent to have never played a game of magic in their life and to mulligan to 2, now lets look at Delver, how does delver beat it's bad MUs, play delver, flip delver naturally, daze the first spell your opponent plays (effectively time walking them), cast a disruption spell (be it Hymn to tourach, stifle, it doesn't matter) and win the game because your opponent is so far behind, that even if they kill delver, they can't deal with the next threat, or how about show & tell that lets you put in a griselbrand for U2, you know how it wins it's bad MU's, show and telling in a griselbrand.
The point being that for Miracles to win, it has to forgo controlling the game and instead tempo it's way into a large entreat the angels in it's bad MUs, Delver and Show & Tell simply have to do what they were made to do.
When we look at the history of games we see a history in which games evolve from being more variance driven to less. So we have to ask the question how do we reduce variance in a game. The answer is that we see more cards.
In my opinion the problem with the game is not blue. It’s the color pie entirely. We have given blue most of the card draw and filter and given the rest of the colors nothing but good creatures. It is true that blue has the least amount of the color pie but the problem is that we have given the color the two best ways of reducing variance. This is the overall problem with the game and our slavish devotion to the color pie is the problem. We can debate withier or not we want to ban brainstorm or not but we need to see that there is a root problem that needs to be addressed at some point or we will get to this same point once more.
While getting on the question of which card to ban we need to think more about dig through time more than brainstorm. Dtt encourages cheap spells and what is better and cheaper than cards like ponder. Who reduces variance all by itself? What we are seeing in the format is that card filter (which is more powerful than drawing cards) has begun to snowball into something that may be unhealthy. Even though I love brainstorm (and don’t believe it should be banned) I do see that it could get banned. But before we rush to action we need a long-term plan to fix this imbalance by looking closely at the color pie.
When we look at the history of games we see a history in which games evolve from being more variance driven to less. So we have to ask the question how do we reduce variance in a game. The answer is that we see more cards.
In my opinion the problem with the game is not blue. It’s the color pie entirely. We have given blue most of the card draw and filter and given the rest of the colors nothing but good creatures. It is true that blue has the least amount of the color pie but the problem is that we have given the color the two best ways of reducing variance. This is the overall problem with the game and our slavish devotion to the color pie is the problem. We can debate whether or not we want to ban brainstorm or not but we need to see that there is a root problem that needs to be addressed at some point or we will get to this same point once more.
While getting on the question of which card to ban we need to think more about dig through time more than brainstorm. Dtt encourages cheap spells and what is better and cheaper than cards like ponder. Who reduces variance all by itself? What we are seeing in the format is that card filter (which is more powerful than drawing cards) has begun to snowball into something that may be unhealthy. Even though I love brainstorm (and don’t believe it should be banned) I do see that it could get banned. But before we rush to action we need a long-term plan to fix this imbalance by looking closely at the color pie.
This.
No card is too powerfull on it's own. The problem Blue gets it all, which is huge... And also a mistake. It also kills diverisity, no matter how you look at it. Thank you for pointing this out.
I've never played Blue, and I will always try to play non-Blue decks, but it's getting harder.
"Be it ever so crumbled, there's no place like home."
RGCL (GQ)
Youtube-playlist dedicated to RGCL
Regarding "blue gets everything":
That's simply not true:
Blue got Delver, which is undercosted and an efficient beater - Even though it's directly related to the sciency stuff - Spells.
Blue got True Name, which was simply a mistake from the get-go.
Blue has easier ACCESS to all the stuff, the other colours get, due to the function of the colour.
Oh yeah, the joy of nitpicking...
But in fact... yep, you're right. I haven't played a physical game of Magic since August 2014, so I forgot about the three decks. I apologize. Maybe I should leave at all.
Exactly. It was a big mistake to arrange the color pie as they did it back in 1991-93, but considering we're talking about antediluvian times of MtG, there's hardly anything to discuss. There were other, more deeper and stupid flaws in the basic design and structure of the game, but lets not dig through time.
I think that for any game to properly function, there should be far less Deathlaces (especially in rare slot) and far more efficient removal, card selection AND creatures in all colors. Play some ABUR sealed, if you're lucky or rich enough, to understand what I mean. There's something tragicomic in the moment you'll open your booster of Revised to realize that there are actually three creatures in it - additionally one of them being a mere 0/3 wall -, while the rest of your cards is completely useless chaff like 80% of Revised is.
and you have gone to a deck which brainstorm is by far best in
Ugh, so many things in this thread irk me something terrible. There’s this whole (false) dichotomy of either you’re with us or against us in regards to blue. Like, either people see themselves as inherently non-blue mages because they detest that blue is the supposed best color (it certainly has been at points in the game) and they don’t want to play what the mainstream plays or people see themselves as Spikes and choose – rather thoughtlessly – to play blue because they believe it is the best color and so offers them the best chance to win.
What I don’t like is this notion of “reducing variance” as something that blue is just better at because of cantrips. I’d like to quote Julian Knab from one of the earlier EE podcasts where he said that, effectively, what we are all trying to do is reduce variance. I mean look at Elves. The deck is insanely consistant. It will hardly ever fail to kill by turn 3 or 4 if unopposed. And it can even power through disruption many times in the same time frame. It achieves this without any cantrips whatsoever. It has some tutor-esque cards in Green Sun and Natural Order but mostly, it gets to be this consistent because it is playing SO many cards that all work towards the same game plan.
Then look at Death and Taxes, it also manages to do quite well and also isn’t particularly fucked over by variance because it employs so many more or less interchangeable threats in revoker, thalia, stoneforge mystic combined with its land-package.
These two decks run a lot of 4-ofs and nearly all of their cards are good nearly all of the time (this is an exaggeration of course, but you get my point). Will they be screwed by variance from time to time? Absolutely. Will decks running Brainstorm be screwed by variance from time to time? Yes, absolutely. Can we say which type will be screwed the most often? I don’t know. But it is an illusion to think that running 8-12 cantrips will eliminate variance or even reduce it to an insignificant level compared to something like Elves and Death and Taxes.
I also cringe when I hear people go on about Miracles as if it’s this deck that completely gets to cut out variance in a game of magic. Yes, it has many effective tools to help reduce variance but it also desperately needs them because it is susceptible to drawing complete bricks in it’s opening 7 or off the top of its library during each draw step. Yes, Sensei’s Diving Top is exceptionally good at reducing variance in that you basically get to choose each turn between 3 cards instead of being forced to draw the top card. That is a massive difference, but even that doesn’t eliminate variance.
And people seem to forget about the opportunity cost of playing 12 cantrips. Instead of cards that impact the board or your hand you are drawing cards that let you look at other cards. In some scenarios that is awesome and a lot of the time you will get rewarded but sometimes you won’t as your cantrips will show more cantrips and as you are spending mana doing this and not really getting anywhere your opponent is untapping and wastelanding you or deploying a must-answer threat.
Finally, people quote these numbers, 76 % of the meta is playing Brainstorm. Well, what can we do about that… Brainstorm is the brand of Legacy. Look at when SCG did their marketing leading up to GP Jersey. It was all about Brainstorm-swag and whatnot. When someone is standing on the outside looking in and trying to decide where they want to start with Legacy, a lot of the time they are going to look at Brainstorm, Force of Will and so on because these cards have so much hype surrounding them and they are played a lot. And so it becomes like a (vicious) circle. Yes, 76% of winning lists might play brainstorm, but if that reflects the amount of players bringing brainstorm decks to tournaments then there’s nothing conspicuous about it. If the percentages line up between winning decks and decks represented all told at a tournament then where is the problem? We cannot surmise that because 76 % of players choose to play a deck with brainstorm, that it is at the same time the correct decision.
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