http://www.starcitygames.com/magic/l..._Examined.html
By Hi-Val
Top 16 decklists with commentary.
Going through these lists reminds me of why Legacy is so freaking awesome.
BFE.
Because apparently people who write articles without compensation and immediately following a major tournament are mentally deficient!Originally Posted by MMogg
Like the article, even though there wasn't much to it (not much to say yet, really). Vines of the Vastwood is an interesting choice in Zoo, but I'm not sure why it's better than another burn spell. The burn spell doesn't require combat, and saving a creature from something like Swords seems mostly irrelevant when you've got that creature base. I guess it could save a guy from Firespout, but it doesn't save anything from EE or Wrath.
In the end, it just seems like a green burn spell. Then again, I wasn't there, and the guy obviously did something right to place as well as he did. Zoo isn't my style of deck, but it would be interesting to hear thoughts on that card from people who actually played it.
I was wrong on the Ghasts. Go figure. It will be interesting to see which of those two designs proves to be superior in the long run.
Belcher is pretty fuckin' lulzy. I have to hand it to him, that was a hellavu choice.
I continue to be unimpressed with Countertop-Progenitus, but the black list is certainly interesting. That something similar has done well in the past is just icing on the cake.
I'm surprised to see only one Merfolk in the Top 16. Were there not enough Islands at Philly? Either that, or the continuing popularity of Zoo makes Merfolk less attractive. I'd like to see an article looking at the matchup between those two in-depth, since I don't have the time to test it myself and dislike playing Zoo-style decks anyway.
That Grixis list is...a fluke? I'm honestly not sure how it gets there without Tombstalker. It can play the tempo game really well, but Bitterblossom isn't a tempo card at all and Tombstalker is the deck's only realistic clock, short of a Jitted-out Faerie removing both counters to become a 5/5 every turn. Tempo decks really need fast clocks to capitalize on their disruption, but...I'm just not feeling it here.
The HexDepths deck is cute. Probably not really viable in the long run if people come expecting it, but cute nevertheless.
Intuition-Loam in 42land! Nice. It looks somewhat similar to what I did with Aggro Loam a while back, so that makes me happy.
Canadian Thresh lists have barely changed for, like, forever. Moving on...
Stax? Stax? Jesus Christ.
I still contend it's a bad deck, so that just makes the first place finish Mr. Peters got with it that much better. Congrats!
Really nice to see some LED-less Ichorid, as well as some innovative decks, up there. I don't really "get" the Hexmage deck though - I can't figure out how the Pox-style disruption (Sinkhole, Smallpox) fits into the deck as it doesn't protect the combo or help with Goyf beatdown. Also, is Bloodgast really that good in a deck that can't sac it for Zombie tokens or Dread Return ? It would seem that a 2/1 attacker would repeatedly run its head into a Mongoose, Goyf, or just be ignored because it's too slow to be a real threat. He obviously must be on to something, maybe someone can explain it better...
georgjorgeGeistreich sind schon die anderen.
I haven't proxied up this list and tested it, but it looks like Bloodghast turns the normally semi-disadvantageous spells of Smallpox and Cabal Therapy into much less fair versions. You barely think twice about sacrificing/discarding Bloodghast to Smallpox, and similar with Therapy.
I think the list is kind of rough still, but I think the positive Bloodghast/Therapy/Smallpox interactions are pretty viable on their own.
It works very similar to old nether spirit for pox, but it can return to play much faster. and can lead to really broken plays. Imagine: play smallpox, discard 'ghast, play fetch, 'ghast comes back, play cabal therapy, sac 'ghast to therapy, crack fetch, 'ghast is back => swing (maybe).
The guy playing dark depths-hexmage combo won atleast 1 match on Sunday by winning game 1 and than stalling game 2 (which he would have lost if it was finished).
And as far as Doug Linn...I've said the same thing to him over on SCG and in private messages without a warning over there. The guy thinks Mogg Flunkies should be in Goblins and doesn't know the difference between Goyf Sligh and Zoo.
I enjoyed the article, it gave a decent breakdown and enough detail to get newcomers interested. It doesn't matter how in depth an article is going to be written, people here will bitch about it, but as long as it keeps the Legacy interest up it's definitely a good thing.
"He doesn't know the difference between Goyf Sligh and Zoo" -- oh who gives a shit, the people who don't know the difference will still get a good overview of that archtype, even if like 8 cards are different. They're almost the same thing anyway, and if he actually broke it down into that specific of deck types he would have to give us 15 different kinds that made it to top 16...
Wrong. Not to mention he gave matchup analysis that was completely inaccurate. All I'm saying is he shouldn't be one of the very few writers starcity has for legacy when he doesn't have a clue what he is talking about.
Sigh. I'm sure Doug was given a very short amount of time to turn-around a hand-off of lists into an article (only a day or two). Also, we don't know if SCG added the deck titles or Doug (about the Zoo / GS thing). All of the decklists get fed into a back-end database -- and they have to get a name. If the author doesn't provide one, TF or Craig will do it (any maybe not to the author's liking) and I've seen it do things to my articles that were not intended.
As for Doug being one of the few SCG writers -- I encourage you to give it a shot. It's a huge pain in the ass. He's the only one still left after a couple of years. You may remember:
Initial line-up:
* Me
* Anusien
* Machinus
* Hi-Val
Quit: Me
Replaced by: Nightmare
Quit: Machinus
Replaced by: No one
Quit: Nightmare
Replaced by: Anwar (sorta)
Quit: Anusien
Replaced by: No one
Quit: Anwar (sorta)
Replaced by: No one
Last man standing: Hi-Val
Keep up the good work, man. They can't all be golden.
Anwar doesn't write for them anymore? I've always liked everything Anwar wrote and that goes for the rest of you guys as well. Sometimes though I feel like it's better if nothing is written than to give bad advice like this, "Zoo decks have another pounder in the form of Mold Adder" or "maybe the deck wants Tattermunge Fanatic alongside its Mogg Flunkies." There isn't a card named Tattermunge Fanatic in the game although I can assume he meant Tattermunge Maniac.
Some of that is less his fault and more of an editor thing. If the author is referencing nonexistent cards, it's usually the editor's job to clarify, or at least point it out to the author. People slip up from time to time, but someone else should catch that.
Let's face it: the biggest difference between Goyf Sligh and Zoo is the addition of white to the latter. Would you rather we just lump them together as "Base Red-Green Fast Aggro"? There aren't many fundamental differences between the two of them.
Give the guy a break for espousing weird cards. morgan_coke still exists on these boards FFS, and everyone mis-evaluates something at some point (a lot of people didn't think Bloodghast would be that great, for example).
Doug's writing is awesome. Keep it up. I miss the whole cast of writers and wish it would come back. I can't stand people knocking the writers who haven't tried it themselves and I'm not talking about writing two or three articles; try a year of weekly articles and see how your opinion changes.
This was in reference to the Zoo list that sorta isn't Zoo.
Doug, I commonly end up with 3-ofs for a different reason. The card taxes some sort of resource heavily.
In this case, I look at
Goblin Guide
Figure of Destiny
Grim Lavamancer
and I really don't want to see the third copy of any of these in most games. In a deck with little to no library manipulation, I would have done the same thing as this guy given these cards.
"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."
I've written for a number of financial websites and newsletters. It's not that I think it is easy to be a writer, I know it isn't. He should do something else if he isn't going to do it well.
Right.
(See? I can be a moron trying to argue a point too!)
He had a short time to say a little about a lot, try to comment on each of the decks while pointing out the interesting changes that people made with them. Obviously he didn't have time to playtest each, so you can't trust everything he says or look too deep into it, it's just a glance at each of the decks, trying to break it down for those less informed.Not to mention he gave matchup analysis that was completely inaccurate. All I'm saying is he shouldn't be one of the very few writers starcity has for legacy when he doesn't have a clue what he is talking about.
Do you really think this article was meant for top end players? Hell no, you can break the decks down yourself... it's written for the newcomers so stop whining about everything you see...
EDIT:
Why do I even feed the http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bMLrA_0O5I
Phoenix if you're gonna quote me please do it in its entirety. There are several differences between zoo and goyf sligh with the addition of white being a small one. The amount of burn coming from goyf sligh is probally one of the biggest ones. Late game playing Vexing Shusher followed by PoP simply can't be answered by decks like Landstill without them having more counters than you have lands where Zoo never main decks shusher and a late game PoP from them would usually end in a draw anyway since they run so many non-basics.
I did, your entire post is quoted. Not to mention the post you happened to just delete was your amazing opener again, "Wrong."
Obviously there are differences between goyf sligh and zoo, but to say they each need their in-depth differences analyzed is just plain stupid, this article isn't supposed to completey say what each deck did, or it would be 20 pages long and no one would read it.
Again, if you think this writeup is meant for people who know all of the differences between the two decks then you're flat out wrong, no one at a high level needs someone to tell them what each deck is. This is written for people of lower understanding of legacy.
And the differences between goyf sligh and zoo are so very small compared to the differences between any of the other decks here and zoo/goyf sligh that grouping them together frankly makes sense.
Troll on though...
Thanks for the replies. I had one of the craziest schedules I've had in a long time - I had two legal briefs due in 8 days, and I only got the necessary info to write one four days before it was due, and it had a major constitutional error that I had to figure out a way around for. I'm very pleased that folks liked this article; I thought about just telling Craig that I couldn't write this week, but I really wanted to talk about the Philly tournament and get the info out. The decklists went up Sunday night after my deadline (which was extended) had passed, and I wrote the last of my legal brief at 6:30am on Monday morning, got an hour of sleep, went to class and then wrote this to get it in to the editor so there would be something to read on Monday night at midnight : ) The deck titles were provided by SCG and to be honest, I think Zoo and Goyfsligh are pretty similar decks, enough so to group them together like I did with the Dredge decks or have done with Threshold in the past (see my GenCon analysis).
I'm also pretty pumped about LED-less Dredge; like I mentioned, look for next week's article for more on it. I am excited especially because it's another inexpensive deck for the format, and while I can't say that it's exactly fun, I'm glad to see it getting better! Bloodghast has me thinking of all sorts of other (awful) ideas, like different Pox decks or even ones with Smokestack tricks. Could this be the card Blax needed to makes Braids and Stax really shine?
Also, what boggles me is that people who consistently kvetch about my articles still read them and decide that their opinion is valuable enough to other people that they need to share. For example, I have a friend here at school who is very bright and also happens to really like Twilight books. I don't care for them, and I especially don't care for them to the point where I still read every one anyway and then tell her why I think they're stupid, because my time is more valuable than that and I know her time is too.
First off, I thought the article was well done enough to hopefully draw in more legacy support and players.
Second,
But... it's the internet. Aside from porn and bitching, what else is there?
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