Brainstorm
Force of Will
Lion's Eye Diamond
Counterbalance
Sensei's Divining Top
Tarmogoyf
Phyrexian Dreadnaught
Goblin Lackey
Standstill
Natural Order
The problem with the "just wait a couple years" is that legacy isn't dead right now, but it's not on an upward trend and whether that be because of prices or lack of support or whatever. A stale format that has seen miracles at the top for 3 years now with no end in sight is not something you want to see to keep players interested. I know in the Atlanta area we go through ups and downs and right now we are trending down and quickly. It's not like the other times though it was players moving in mass though. The players are still here. The interest is dwindling because the format hasn't really changed in so long and people are kind of getting sick of it.
I agree with all the recently written things here and just wanted to add : most people enjoy playing creature based decks and miracles takes any Joy out of those decks. Sure being unfun is no reason for a ban, but i just wanted to mention this when we talk about a stale Format. Personally I hate playing against miracles, you simply feel used afterwards, even if you win because He didnt flip Terminus after 5 fetch, cantrip, top Actions.
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I actually think the format has been solved, and I wholeheartedly agree with you. It took longer than I would have thought for the community to actually figure out the numbers in Miracles before Delver slowly faded away into the back of the bus.
Honestly the downswing could just be the fact that Legacy is the most hobby-like format (therefore least lifestyle-like and less committed community in that region), card prices being fairly expensive and our population of our previous Legacy players moved on due to life reasons. It's at a point where the best Legact communities in a city shades in comparison to the MTGO Legacy community (which I believe is also the best flatform for the format).
I have seen players from my LGS leave Legacy altogether because of the influx of Miracles, DnT and myriad of BUG variants. A lot of RUG Delver players I have met gave up on playing the format despite the financial investment. After building a RUG Delver deck and playing it for a long time, somehow in my mind I believe that just getting 2-3 Underground Seas just to adapt isnt stopping them, but having to learn a new play pattern.
Interestingly, a lot of the usual suspects for unbanning fit into decks that are good against Miracles (even if it might turn out that the cards aren't good enough for inclusion, or the decks are still lower tier with its inclusion).
I don't know enough about these decks to know
- would Goblins, or a new competitive variant, play Goblin Recruiter?
- would U/B Tezz, or some other deck that's good against Miracles (or not), play Mind Twist?
- I assume some Enchantress builds would play Earthcraft but I wonder how much it would help
- I'm not qualified to know if 2017 Survival of the Fittest decks would dent Miracles, but I feel like SotF unbanning talk is wishful thinking anyway
It would be interesting to see which of the safe ones would do the most, if anything.
I have said before that one of the issue for (not with) Miracles is its conventional axis of play. This means that you can't print something to easily attack it. For an example of what I mean, Storm, Lands, Dredge or Reanimator all play on a different axis than what is expected. Because of this, each one if able to attacked by cutting off its victory path.
When printing something, say Wear//Tear that could attack Miracles, the deck can because of its style of play, absorb either these attacks because of the wide range of options available or use the new tools itself. I feel this actually works in the decks overall Disfavour. At one point Dredge was hated, RIP comes along, issue deminishes and we stop complaining.
While I know that Miracles is far from the only deck playing on this axis, it's the most efficient at what it does. And it's resistance to being dethroned makes life hard for Wizards. Wizards is obviously aware of the issues, because they blantently stated Decay was made to deal with the issue. But that comes down to another of my previous comments. Wizards has a scalpel, it's time they used it.
Entreat is just a killcondition and in no way responsible for Miracles' position towards Aggro & Combo. In my eyes, its pretty irrelevant how the deck wins after creating massive cardadvantage and tempo swings with Countertop and Terminus. Banning the 1-2 off which Entreat is, does not fix anything other than Miracles picking the next best option. Does this make the tempo-/cardadvantage of casting Terminus any less devastating?
With Vial & Caverns and via cmc I see creature decks having options to get around CounterTop, so I don't view the issue as that dramatic as Terminus is towards the Miracles vs aggro matchup.
I consider it positive, that aggro decks get more and more options to fight against combo decks, but I would wish that kind of softening the aggro/control/combo triangle would happen on an equal base. Flipping the Aggro vs Control matchup upside down with Terminus is ridiculous.
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Mhh what about being forced to decide if you want a better MU against taxes or eldrazi or delver (or all three of them, running more spot removals and losing some % against combo)?
The entire metagame has to choose between having better chances against some deck or some other, miracles is the only deck that can reliably stomp any creature based deck, have a positive mu against 99% of blue non combo, having a fairly good mu against any non SnT combo.
No simple answer can beat miracles by itself, and this is true basicly only for miracles in the current metagame, and the counterplay the deck offers is basicly limited to "I either have a counterspell ready or my board is going to get removed, so I either play into terminus and instalose if my opponent has it or a play slowly and I let my control opponent go into the late game when I will get smashed even harder", pretty cool
And I dont even want a miracle ban in the first place, all I want is a blue - non combo deck that is clearly favourite against miracle, and which does not suck major dicks against the rest of the metagame.
Nah, that's untrue, miracles is able to beat BGx midrange decks mainly because they are going to go into lategame and entreat is lights out.
Banning entreat would make miracles worse against BGx, at least.
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Mainly the fair side of the bgx, shardless, bug leovold and jund are not so easy, and in most of the games you tend to be losing for the most part, but managing the resources just to slow your opponent down until you hit angels is what makes those mu affordable for miracles.
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For the sake of proper history:
Before Miracles, Legacy had been without a pure control deck for many years. Wrath of God fell out of favor quickly when people discovered that Goblins could delay it some games and vial out a recovery plan in others. Once Tarmogoyf was printed you often had to spend four as a sorcery for this one threat that cost 2 (backed up by free counter magic). It was spectacular to see the control players of the day lament how poorly this icon of pure control was faring in the young Legacy format. Once Wrath was not able to reliably reset the board, Landstill slowly faded away. By the end of 2008, zoo was on the scene and that was that. Lavafrogg tried to get Landstill to work with cheaper sweepers, but the players' imagination was unable to work with that. There was a brief period when there was a deck called CounterTop, but it's control was dubious, and it was occasionally went aggro when it went turn 1 Thoughtseize, turn 2 Tarmo.
I recall being refreshed when we finally had a viable control deck again.
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Miracles often has to operate from a position of parity (or from behind) in terms of tempo and card quantity against some midrange and most other control decks, making EOT Entreats a big part of the strategy for those matchups, and a major source of 'free' wins, especially preboard. If Miracles is forced to use Mentor or Jace to win games against BGxy decks that it can't reliably bury under CA from Predict or lock out with Counterbalance, then people playing those decks can both know (or reasonably anticipate) what they're playing against rather than sideboarding at least partially in the dark and being forced to hedge against what is essentially a combo backup plan that doubles as a normal win condition. The whole point is that hitting Entreat does the absolute minimum to the deck and to the format while hopefully weakening Miracles enough that it's not as oppressive as it is now. It doesn't make aggro or combo better against Miracles, but the point is precisely that Entreat is the least intrusive option, and that's something that a lot of people favor.
I think you're oversimplifying metagame structure and matchup trends here, and drawing the wrong conclusion as a result. The traditional post-ProsBloom (and grossly oversimplified) order is either:With Vial & Caverns and via cmc I see creature decks having options to get around CounterTop, so I don't view the issue as that dramatic as Terminus is towards the Miracles vs aggro matchup.
I consider it positive, that aggro decks get more and more options to fight against combo decks, but I would wish that kind of softening the aggro/control/combo triangle would happen on an equal base. Flipping the Aggro vs Control matchup upside down with Terminus is ridiculous.
Aggro beats Combo
Combo beats Control
Control beats Aggro
OR
Aggro beats Control
Control beats Combo
Combo beats Aggro
Essentially, the deck construction choices the control players in a given meta make drive the matchup dynamics for that meta. Expanding that to a more realistic metagame composition (though it ignores the distinction between fast and slow combo as well as Prison) gives:
Aggro beats Aggro-Control, loses to Midrange and Combo, and is roughly at parity with Control
Midrange beats Aggro and Aggro-Control and loses to Combo and Control
Aggro-Control beats Combo, loses to Aggro and Midrange, and beats Control
Combo beats Aggro and Midrange, loses to Aggro-Control, and is roughly at parity with Control
Control beats Midrange, chooses the split on Aggro and Combo, and loses to Aggro-Control
More recent developments have shifted the balances a bit, with Aggro-Control adopting a more tempo-focused game plan and giving giving up points against Control to be better against Midrange and Combo, Aggro essentially dieing off, Combo shifting the Control matchup (without Prison elements) decisively in its favor, and blue Midrange hybridizing extensively with Control. These are largely intuitive outcomes resulting from creature power creep, and are broadly healthy for the format.
Miracles is unusual in that it's a Control deck without Midrange elements, but its able to succeed because gains access to the most powerful (but conditional) sweeper in Magic's history as a direct result of having a Prison element be a key component of the deck. Because it can now both lock combo out without overloading on anti-aggro cards and minimize the number of dead cards game 1 against combo, it no longer has to choose one side of the split (which we both agree on), and Entreat (alongside the game's most viscious Nonbasic land hate) lets it steal games in midrange matchups and control mirrors where the opposing decks have successfully leveraged traditional strategies of one-for-one trades into substantial 'true' card advantage plays to exhaust Miracles' resources, meaning that conventional win conditions would likely be unable to pull Miracles back into games that Entreat wins on the spot.
I'm fine with either banning Entreat to expose Miracles to bad Control mirrors (and some bad nonblue midrange matchups) or banning Counterbalance to force Control players back into having to balance their combo and aggro matchups. Terminus is insanely powerful, but requires setup and is the closest sweeper to the power level of the format's creature strategies. Counterbalance creates all he misery that Chalice does with none of the deckbuilding costs.
And that's why I advocate for either a Mentor or ETA ban. ETA would probably be better because it takes away Miracles' ability to EOT draw untap win, which forces the deck to run more Mentors which are a non-bo with Terminus and can't stop Insectile Aberrations, and force the Miracles player to be more proactive with their spells in order to build a board presence.
The purpose of any moat is to impede attack. Some are filled with water, some with thistles. Some are filled with things best left unseen.
That's pre Delver though.
Landstill was not a very strong deck between the rise of Delver & Maverick and the rise of Miracles
I think it's a bad thing if they have to supplement their sweepers with beaters like Batterskull and Goyf.
Yes. In SFM grindy control-ish midrange decks, not as foursomes, and as a back up "fail safe".
Exactly.
That's the trick. We have plenty of good-stuff midrange in this format already. We have had so for years now.
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Even the Weissman decks of the old had Prison elements (Disrupting Scepter). Fast forward to 2002, Landstill had the Crucible/Wasteland/Dust Bowl/Academy Ruins/EE lock. Of course, like how healthy metagames tend to be, nothing comes for free.
In short, I think Counterbalance is to blame. The cost is far too low and is actually just a freeroll for Miracles. Deck is actually very ok as just a UW Control without Counterbalance.
In this current meta CB does very little outside of keep fringe decks without an answer to that card from doing well; not that they'd do well with the card out of the format anyway. The rest of the actual meta is playing cards that are very tough for CB to answer: Cavern, Vial, Decay, and 3-drops.
I think if you ban CB, Miracles becomes Mentor Midrange. Not that the deck would be bad, but then there really is no more true control in the format (no, Shardless "Control" is very much a midrange deck first.) I guess you could try to replace it with Standstill, but I haven't tested that nor seen others test it (aside from that one guy a couple weeks ago) to make a comment on how that would affect the meta.
The purpose of any moat is to impede attack. Some are filled with water, some with thistles. Some are filled with things best left unseen.
But isn't a big part of that simply the fact Counterbalance (with Top) is so good that you have to be playing cards that are tough for it to answer?
Without Counterbalance, I'd expect Miracles would essentially cease to exist and be replaced by Stone-Blade.I think if you ban CB, Miracles becomes Mentor Midrange. Not that the deck would be bad, but then there really is no more true control in the format (no, Shardless "Control" is very much a midrange deck first.) I guess you could try to replace it with Standstill, but I haven't tested that nor seen others test it (aside from that one guy a couple weeks ago) to make a comment on how that would affect the meta.
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