[Free Article] Dazed and Confused

[mchainmail]

I’m not sure what category the 43 Land decks fall into, but it probably has to be combo, since it is a Life from the Loam engine deck. As a somewhat obvious side note, I believe this is one of the very few decks in the format that plays enough lands.

43 is still tight on the mana base... 5 lands that tap for colored mana on turn 1, total?

[frogboy]

The fact that people are like "oh, all of the aggro decks could beat Iona" is pretty telling considering that you basically never got Iona against beatdown decks.

Birklid is flagrantly correct that people are cheating their land counts and losing games to Wasteland. For New Horizons not to have a basic Island is pretty inexcusable, and any sort of strong anti-beatdown plan probably wants four Paths, so basic Plains is also pretty key.

[frogboy]

43 is still tight on the mana base... 5 lands that tap for colored mana on turn 1, total?

Lands plays more green sources than it plays green one-drops.

[Aggro_zombies]

The fact that people are like "oh, all of the aggro decks could beat Iona" is pretty telling considering that you basically never got Iona against beatdown decks.

Birklid is flagrantly correct that people are cheating their land counts and losing games to Wasteland. For New Horizons not to have a basic Island is pretty inexcusable, and any sort of strong anti-beatdown plan probably wants four Paths, so basic Plains is also pretty key.

Max, please don't defend the Generic Mid-Level PTQ-Grinding Pro who conflates "playing a non-interactive goldfish deck" with "being better at Magic than other people."

I mean, yeah, people are loose with mana base construction. Yeah, decks in Standard usually run more than 20 lands, even the decks with relatively low curves. And why do you suppose that is? Why do Legacy decks run so few lands?

Maybe because your average Legacy deck curves out at two.

When you're running bunches of cantrips and the top of your curve is a 3cc card you've got at most four copies of, why do you need more than twenty lands? Remember the old Dryad decks in Extended, back around the time Odyssey was around? They ran, what, 16 lands? But they chained that mana base together with 1cc cantrips, which let the deck find more lands AND have more spell slots.

Similarly, the low curves in Legacy mean you run a very high risk of getting mana flooded if you go above the high teens in the land department. That would be an argument for one of two things: running fewer lands, or running lands that actually do stuff, like turn into creatures and attack. Doing either of those opens you up to attack by tempo decks, though.

I mean, really, he's arguing less for better mana and more for not walking into the Daze. People who play decks with tons of tempo cards in them make some sort of weird sore loser argument like, "Well, when my opponent blanks half my cards by just adjusting how he plays, it actually helps me because he's playing right into my clever plan!" Suuuure. So when you really need to counter the Swords on your guy but your opponent has up and you only have Daze, that's a real victory for you.

Most of the Daze decks are pretty terrible in one way or another, but they still exist because people try to be greedy and because they can sometimes roll slow control decks. That much I agree with...but the rest of the article is pretty terrible. What you learned in Standard doesn't cross over to a format where the average CMC in most decks is ~1.5.

[Goaswerfraiejen]

He does have a point tho, Legacy decks tend to be fragile to mana disruption due to excessive usage of cantrips to smooth out the gameplan. This is partial one of the reason I think MUD is a slumbering beast...

But yeah, he does come off too condensending(sp?).

He does have a point, but making it with Daze is bad. Daze works not so much because people don't play enough lands (although that helps), but rather because so much of the game depends on those first two or three three opening turns that you can't afford to keep one mana back.

Anyway. Not sure if I'll bother with the rest of the article, given the comments here.

[ramanujan]

This article is one of the worst I have ever read. I would love to see this person try to do well in Columbus. The grouping of decks in to categories is silly. It sounds good. But there are many other cycles of decktypes that can be chosen to represent an arbitrary partition of the decks which the auther finds relevent.

Saying that Merfolk is a bad deck is ignorant. Try doing something cute in a tournament and watch merfolk beat you. Believe me, it looks bad. It doesen't play brainstorm or enough blue sources. It only has 4 hard counters, ect. Trust the results of a variety of tournaments over the past year. Merfolk is a really good deck that looks like crap. And yes, it loses to aggro. Every deck, regardless of how "Good" or "Bad" you decide it is has bad matchups.

To the author. I am glad that you are so interested in legacy. Use that desire to read and play more and talk less.

-Peace

[MMogg]

I don't think it's playing loose with manabases, I think it's being optimal. Optimizing play is one of the hallmarks of Legacy and it just so happens that some decks (Tempo decks) run disruption packages focused on exploiting that configuration. It's not loose to play with fetches and duals, it's optimal. For example, if I'm playing some kind of Bant control and have an opening 7 with Noble Hierarch, a blue fetch land and a Swords to Plowshares, what will I fetch for and play first? Tropical Island into Hierarch or Tundra into Swords? What if you're on the draw and your opponent plays Lackey? Legacy manabases allow flexibility and make the proverbial decision tree larger. That's not playing loose.

Same with the inclusion of library manipulation, like cantrips and Sensei's Divining Top. Those also help smooth out one's mana base as well as optimize one's draws. Again, it's about optimizing, not playing loose. The land counts are just right for the decks. If I can draw an analogy, it's like the "Just in time" style of Japanese manufacturing. Some factories have a process so streamlined that assembly parts and things needed arrive where they are required just before they are required. This style of manufacturing made Japanese factories a marvel of optimization, but didn't mean they were playing loose with manufacturing, and indeed, that style gave them a competitive advantage in the global market. Similarly, Legacy decks are streamlined to use each resource as efficiently as possible.

That said, I'm definitely going to add more basics to my Belcher deck. I'm always light on land in my opening draws.

[Vacrix]

Saying that Merfolk is a bad deck is ignorant. Try doing something cute in a tournament and watch merfolk beat you. Believe me, it looks bad. It doesen't play brainstorm or enough blue sources. It only has 4 hard counters, ect. Trust the results of a variety of tournaments over the past year. Merfolk is a really good deck that looks like crap. And yes, it loses to aggro. Every deck, regardless of how "Good" or "Bad" you decide it is has bad matchups.

HAHA
Thats like the only thing he got right. Merfolk is a piece of shit. It has great results because of bad players, not because fundamentally its a good deck. Try reading this article or even thread. http://www.mtgthesource.com/forums/s...e-about-Legacy
Then you will see.

[SpikeyMikey]

I actually agree with the author to a certain degree. He foolishly thinks he understands something that he does not have the background to see clearly. But there is actually an angle there. Legacy deck builders and the players who pilot those decks are constantly overstepping their safety zone to access better spells.

1. 4 color Landstill - was great for awhile. Nick Trudeau was tearing up the place over and over despite the paper thin manabase. Oh, then someone figured out he had been cheating to get proper lands all along.
2. Team America - played some really powerful spells, no basics, and was so thin on everything that it actually made Extirpate look attractive
3. New Horizons - I know it is all the rage. But it is a house of cards and will not last - for all the same reasons.

What the author does not have the familiarity to understand is that this is cyclical. It happens over and over in this format until the people playing the deck eventually abandon it due to inconsistency and hate. It is good to push the boundaries of what you can get away with. That is intelligent deck design. Good decks play good cards. The holes in your design (manabase is easy to spot and easy to take advantage of) only come to bite you in the balls when someone else calls you on it with a deck designed specifically to exploit this weakness. But until they sit across from it, the over-reaching decks will continue to pursue their Plan A successfully.

Want a deck that will be a perennial performer? Figure out a way to make it strong with as few colors as possible. It opens up doors.

I T4'd 6 40+ man tournies in a row with 4C Landstill months before Nick picked the deck up. This is not to say that I'm awesome, because I'm a horrifyingly bad player, but just to point out that regardless of Nick's cheating, the deck was incredibly strong and well-positioned in the metagame.

Also, saying that playing Lord of Atlantis is bad when you could be playing combo made me laugh. I thought we discovered that Fish is nuts against combo all the way back in '98 in Rome... Like someone else said, newbies are so loud and arrogant. They've got it all figured out.

[DukeDemonKn1ght]

Sure, Merfolk is not like, the best deck in the format, but this author is a flagrant moron, and seems to pretty much personify the "wanna-be semi-pro douchebag who thinks he knows everything."

For all you confused parties out there, here is what I would call the "Merfolk gameplan": Play a blue aggro(/control) deck. Not because blue is the best color at being aggro, but because it's the best overall color. Gain tempo on your opponent, and then exploit that tempo with cheap, "parasitic" creatures that tend to be weak on their own, but get bonkers quickly (due to the 16 available on-type "lords"). And yeah, usually get raped by other aggro decks that are more aggressive. Can't win 'em all, as the saying goes.

And also, because some of us, you know, actually enjoy playing this game, rather than using it as a masturbatory exercise through which to attain (rather small) amounts of prize money, boost our (ultimately meaningless) player ratings, or travel (almost always at our own expense) to (not very) exotic locales. I seriously wish someone would just smack the fucking guy who wrote this article.

[Vacrix]

And also, because some of us, you know, actually enjoy playing this game, rather than using it as a masturbatory exercise through which to attain (rather small) amounts of prize money, boost our (ultimately meaningless) player ratings, or travel (almost always at our own expense) to (not very) exotic locales. I seriously wish someone would just smack the fucking guy who wrote this article.

I'm actually convinced that we don't need to smack him. Since combo players apparently don't know how to build a deck, we should just let Bryant Cook Grapeshot the FUCK out of him until he cries.

[troopatroop]

This article is shockingly bad. It's been said already but goddamn! Such failure.

[Vacrix]

@ Rico

Why did you post this in the first place? To make us laugh? It worked.

[edgewalker]

@Merfolk being a bad deck: Umm it's put 28 people into the top16 over the whole starcitygames series. I mean either it's a good deck, or everyone who plays legacy at these things are completely retarded. I think it's the latter, I mean just look the evidence he used in his article put 3 merfolk lists into the top16.

[DragoFireheart]

The other argument is that Merfolk preys on bad decks.

[Vacrix]

Shit puts up results all the time. In fact, Merfolk is actually a great example. It has a very specific niche; beat blue. It has decent matchups against a few other decks but what does it do that Zoo doesn't? Beat combo? It really doesn't. It beats bad players on combo. And it has a unspeakably bad Zoo matchup.

[Nidd]

Merfolk beating Combo is a moot point, I'm like 14-6 against Merfolk and while that record isn't that spectacular, I'm only a mediocre pilot and people like Bryant Cook or emidln should've put up much better results against this deck.
Beating Merfolk isn't hard as long as you're not completely retarded, their deck doesn't give them the nuts or your deck dicdes to shit on you and let you draw all your lands, or flip Ad Nauseam, IGG and Tendrils in a row.

[edgewalker]

Saying merfolk is bad is like saying RDW in T2 is bad. No one gives it credit, and when it wins or they get rolled by it they make up some excuse. I mean it's a metagame deck, that's it. Remember fish decks in vintage way back when? God they were awful. Manta Riders? Who plays that shit. You know what though the deck one.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that at the end of the day it puts up results. What more do you want? I mean are you going to argue that the top16 of the scg tournaments are ALL bad decks? I mean it's like track and field. Christian Cabtwell has the ugliest form I've ever seen. He's 6'6" with a 650 bench so he just muscles the shot put out there. However, as ugly as his form his, he throws 22+ meters and thats enough to win most major meets (Worlds, Olympics) So you can hate all you want, but he gets the job done. Merfolk does the same, make up whatever excuse you want, it puts up results.


@Nidd, their deck doesn't give them the shits, or your deck decides to shit on you? Isn't that how you beat every deck?

[Nidd]

@Nidd, their deck doesn't give them the shits, or your deck decides to shit on you? Isn't that how you beat every deck?

No, I win by shitting on my opponent.

[edgewalker]

No, I win by shitting on my opponent.

I didn't mean you specifically, or the deck you play. I mean any deck, it's not just merfolk that loses under those conditions. I would wager that almost all decks lose under those conditions.

EDIT: Also, I don't play Merfolk anymore, I don't really play much legacy at all anymore. It just bothers me when a deck puts up consistent results whether it be a metagame deck or a "good" deck and people still talk trash about it.