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Thread: No more blue stabbing please

  1. #1
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    No more blue stabbing please

    Open rant:

    So, what's wrong with people? Every week I see at least 1 thread about "blue is so overpowered, let's ban it".

    Why do people complain about blue, but don't care when goblins kills on it's turn 3 or GW goodstuff starts messing with combat math and uses GSZ just to hose you once again?

    I'll tell you what's wrong: people don't want to innovate anymore. I play friggin TES, do you think I'm happy with MM? Just think of something new, damnit.

    DISCLAIMER: (revealing the future here, so don't read if you don't want to know what's going to happen)

    Over the next few months, the same people will post following threads:
    a) let's ban fow (again)
    b) let's discuss 'fair' cards that'll keep blue in check ("what about: I hate blue: split second, target player loses the game if he has a blue card in his deck. gnargl gnargl")
    c) let's kick blue out the game, 4 colors is much more fun. ("wouldn't it be nice if everybody played aggro and we just could slap creatures at each other? RAAWR")
    d) All of the above

    The funniest thing about this: everytime it are the same people who bring these things up.

    So who are you? What's with all the hatred against blue mages?
    I don't understand it.

    Or do I...
    This... can't be true... I should have known it all the time...
    It all makes sense to me know. You're all using alter egos. In real life you're all the same person and the only one who can have such a hatred against blue mages...

    ...










    Gargamel!!! You're back!

    end rant

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    Re: No more blue stabbing please

    lol

    Yeah.
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    Since playing against Spiral Tide provides a lot fun for both players is something only someone who's not had sex for quite a while could enjoy, I pull out GW Maverick.
    Quote Originally Posted by Brainstorm Ape View Post
    Spikes are supposed to enjoy winning by leveraging their talents, but this card can't fetch the most SKILL INTENSIVE card in all of Magic?

    Clearly aimed at Modern plebs, not gonna be a pillar of our format.
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    Re: No more blue stabbing please

    There should be a format named "Only Blue" where it was only allowed every blue card in the game, xD

    On a more serious note, let's ban blue, it's too overpowered.

    On a less serious note, I would be really really happy if WotC, once in a while, favored monocolor decks, like, building cards that function only if you control certain-basic and stuff like Blood Moons and Back to Basics and Price of progresss, but more diverse, useful against Basiclands.dec, as for Magus of the Moones, that at least are 2/2 bears... That said, let's ban non-basic Islands, they are too overpowered.
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    Re: No more blue stabbing please

    This thread is awesome, because watch a few hours from now, it'll degrade to yet another OMGBANBLUE. Calling it before it happens!
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    Quote Originally Posted by Gheizen64 View Post
    REB is a fantastic sideboard card against blue... in blue decks :/

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    Re: No more blue stabbing please

    The Source: Your Source for the Same Old Shit That's Been Argued to Death Since 1993.
    Quote Originally Posted by TheInfamousBearAssassin View Post
    This isn't the game of holding hands and friendship. This is a competitive game, and if we all sit around singing kumbaya and sucking each other's dicks, then a lot of people are going to go to a tournament and lose because their pile of 61 jank isn't the special unique snowflake that everyone on the Source says it was.

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    Re: No more blue stabbing please

    I agree with you that people need to innovate. The current meta is really easy to hate out right now. Merfolk is considered to be the best deck and there are so many cards that just tear that deck to threads. Play Lavamncer, Lightning Bolts, extra copies of REB/Pyroblasts in the board, Mother of Runes, Stoneforge Mystic, Jitte, Sofi, etc. You could even play them all in the same deck...

    Against the Landstill control decks cards such as Blood Moon and Back to Basics just absolutely wreck them. Innovating is not that hard, people just want to play their pet decks. I play TES too, but in some metas it just isn't the right call. People need to learn to adapt; either change your favorite deck a little bit to deal with your bad matchups, or create a new deck that is good against your own personal meta

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    Re: No more blue stabbing please

    I actually started out this post thinking the numbers supported the idea that blue isn't particularly overly-dominant. Its number in SCG Open top 8s were not drastically out of whack with other colors; most decks played blue, but most also played green and black. White wasn't too far behind. Red is the only color that really sucked.

    Then I actually narrowed my focus to the winners and 11 out of 13 were blue decks. And the other two were Goblins decks from the first few post-Survival tournaments.

    If blue is winning every major tournament there's undoubtedly a problem, and accusing people of whining for pointing it out is just churlish.

    On the other hand, the dust indeed has yet to settle at all over Mental Misstep. So we'll see.

    Alternately, if they want to restore red they could just unban Goblin Recruiter and Worldgorger Dragon
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    Re: No more blue stabbing please

    Quote Originally Posted by Gui View Post
    On a less serious note, I would be really really happy if WotC, once in a while, favored monocolor decks, like, building cards that function only if you control certain-basic and stuff like Blood Moons and Back to Basics and Price of progresss, but more diverse, useful against Basiclands.dec, as for Magus of the Moones, that at least are 2/2 bears... That said, let's ban non-basic Islands, they are too overpowered.
    Completely disagree. Having splashes enables more variety in the format. If there were a critical mass of effective non-basic hosers, more people would opt to run only mono-color decks, within which are only a handful of basic strategies. I think wasteland and the other various tempest/saga era hosers are plenty enough to make people concerned with the stability of their manabases, and yet limited enough that the danger of playing two or three colors is outweighed by its strategic benefit.

    What they should print first are good cards in the other four colors that make using blue as the splash not always the best option.

    Summoning creatures is only one aspect of the game. I don't understand why newer players (this isn't directed at anyone here) can't grasp the idea that a game called Magic is heavily based around casting spells from a flavor perspective. Aggro players should rejoice that force of will exists -- sure, maybe the blue mage will 2-for-1 himself when he forces your turn 1 nacatl, but that same FoW stopped you from seeing storm, reanimator, hive mind, grind stone and other various combo decks every single round.

  9. #9
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    Re: No more blue stabbing please

    Blue is so weak. When are we going to see more love for blue. It's like all Wizards cares about lately is combo and aggro. Help a brotha blue mage out. Blue needs a better finisher (and don't give me that Tarmogoyf is the best blue creature ever printed nonsense). MUC 4eva!!!

    <- I was reading this not 1 year ago on this very same board.

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    Re: No more blue stabbing please

    Quote Originally Posted by TheInfamousBearAssassin View Post

    Alternately, if they want to restore red they could just unban Goblin Recruiter and Worldgorger Dragon
    I think they would have no issue unbanning Dragon if the deck didn't cause inordinate amounts of draws in tournaments. It's a pity, because I really want to play that deck, and it seems fair/disruptable enough.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Julian23 View Post
    Since playing against Spiral Tide provides a lot fun for both players is something only someone who's not had sex for quite a while could enjoy, I pull out GW Maverick.
    Quote Originally Posted by Brainstorm Ape View Post
    Spikes are supposed to enjoy winning by leveraging their talents, but this card can't fetch the most SKILL INTENSIVE card in all of Magic?

    Clearly aimed at Modern plebs, not gonna be a pillar of our format.
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  11. #11
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    Re: No more blue stabbing please

    Quote Originally Posted by TheInfamousBearAssassin View Post
    Alternately, if they want to restore red they could just unban Goblin Recruiter and Worldgorger Dragon
    Yes, Worldgorger Dragon would certainly bring more Mountains into the format.
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    Re: No more blue stabbing please

    Quote Originally Posted by Nihil Credo View Post
    Yes, Worldgorger Dragon would certainly bring more Mountains into the format.
    Although ideally you could dump Sliver Queen or Ambastard into your yard through some other method, without Bazaar, you pretty much would have to run Ghitu Fire.

    I could be wrong, but I'm not sure how else you'd build the deck. Mainly Goblin Recruiter though, I don't know how good Dragon would be in this meta without Bazaars.
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    Re: No more blue stabbing please

    Honestly I can't stand this garbage. Speed Zoo is and has been a top competitive deck for years. It is favored against Merfolk and a lot of other blue decks. At no time in the last 3 years has casting creatures and winning through the attack phase been impossible in Legacy. The real reason blue is so strong is because many (though certainly not all) good players enjoy playing blue decks. Counterspells and card selection give you more intellectual control over this game of chance called Magic that we all play. If you don't like "thinking" in this fashion then just play mono-red Burn or Dredge or something. The rest of us will continue to enjoy our Islands.

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    Re: No more blue stabbing please

    Quote Originally Posted by Lord_Cyrus View Post
    The real reason blue is so strong is because many (though certainly not all) good players enjoy playing blue decks. Counterspells and card selection give you more intellectual control over this game of chance called Magic that we all play. If you don't like "thinking" in this fashion then just play mono-red Burn or Dredge or something. The rest of us will continue to enjoy our Islands.
    I think there's a lot of truth to this. Good players enjoy winning most, but if there's not an overwhelming reason to play <Deck X>, players will play what they enjoy and decks that give them the ability to outmaneuver weaker players. Usually, that involves Islands, whether they be tropical or volcanic, or seas under the ground or "biomes where the tree growth is hindered by low temperatures and short growing seasons" (according to Wikipedia).

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    Re: No more blue stabbing please

    Quote Originally Posted by Lord_Cyrus View Post
    Honestly I can't stand this garbage. Speed Zoo is and has been a top competitive deck for years. It is favored against Merfolk and a lot of other blue decks. At no time in the last 3 years has casting creatures and winning through the attack phase been impossible in Legacy. The real reason blue is so strong is because many (though certainly not all) good players enjoy playing blue decks. Counterspells and card selection give you more intellectual control over this game of chance called Magic that we all play. If you don't like "thinking" in this fashion then just play mono-red Burn or Dredge or something. The rest of us will continue to enjoy our Islands.
    There isn't a significant difference in the mental challenge of playing combo, control, aggro, aggro-control, combo-aggro, or whatever.

    Some decks are more forgiving of misplays than others, but this isn't true of archetypes.
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    Re: No more blue stabbing please

    Quote Originally Posted by TheInfamousBearAssassin View Post
    There isn't a significant difference in the mental challenge of playing combo, control, aggro, aggro-control, combo-aggro, or whatever.

    Some decks are more forgiving of misplays than others, but this isn't true of archetypes.
    Not mental challenge, that's not what I said. The difference is in the level of information, control, and intellectual stimulation. For a lot of players I know, the little mini-game that goes on whenever one casts brainstorm is immensely appealing on an intellectual level. Other colors don't offer this variety of choice on a consistent basis.

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    Re: No more blue stabbing please

    Quote Originally Posted by Lord_Cyrus View Post
    Not mental challenge, that's not what I said. The difference is in the level of information, control, and intellectual stimulation. For a lot of players I know, the little mini-game that goes on whenever one casts brainstorm is immensely appealing on an intellectual level. Other colors don't offer this variety of choice on a consistent basis.
    So Jace 2.0 is just mental masturbation then?

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    Re: No more blue stabbing please

    Quote Originally Posted by Richard Cheese View Post
    So Jace 2.0 is just mental masturbation then?
    Pretty much!! You can either play with yourself, or you can play with your opponent's drawstep for extra lulz. It also helps that it wins games.

  19. #19
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    Re: No more blue stabbing please

    It's not that I hate blue, in fact, blue is one of my favourite colors.

    It's that I hate games that can be resumed as "No items, fox only, final destination" and "Akuma is fair, your a n00b for not playing it", and I know that Force of Will breaks the format because I PLAY WITH IT, which is why I can say with first-hand knowledge what's wrong with it, why the decks that play it have so much advantage against all the others, that it fuels combo instead of fighting it, and that due to its existence, the game is much worse and far less fun than what it could be.

    So, I hope that FoW gets axed this year thanks to the arrival of Mental Misstep, which fixes a lot of things that are wrong about FoW. If that happened, the people that enjoy blue-centric formats will still be able to play it in Vintage, but the format will be a whole lot better, a whole more fun, and a whole more popular. In fact, it would look like "Overextended" (Mercadian Masques onward) which is right now a more diverse format than this one due to the lack of cards like FOW, Show and Tell and LED.

    One of the advantages of bringing back balance among colors, is that blue staples will become far cheaper. Players that love blue will be able to play blue without paying five times more for their cards.

    Another advantage is that it will increase variance between games. Game design theory says that variance is what keeps players interested in a game. That principle explains one of the reasons why Vintage isn't played even with proxies or on MWS: most of the decks are a carbon copy of each other, minus a few cards.

    Also, because each color is tied to a player psychographic and specific playstyles, a more balanced format would attract more players. Currently, it attracts mostly players of one single psychographic, which is why forums like this one shows the false consensus that the format is perfect as is, and that it shouldn't change. But that's true only for players within that psychographic.

    So in sum, I can both enjoy blue and NOT ENJOY the way the format is going. And if I spend time developing nonblue decks is not because I hate blue, but because the more competitive nonblue decks in the format, the better for everyone.
    Please stop talking about whether Force of Will is broken or not. It obviously is, and rather than "the glue that holds vintage together" it would be better to call it "the rug under which you hide the filth until there's so much that you can no longer conceal it".

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    Re: No more blue stabbing please

    And the problem with your analysis, sir, is you overlook the fact that this FoW-loving, blue-centric "psychographic" substantially overlaps with the psychographic of Magic players as a whole. In my experience people who love Magic cards often tend to be drawn to the intellectual/pyschological profile of the Blue mage. Just look at how often players try to "find the best blue deck" in any given format. Caw-Blade is symptomatic of this. So is the current push towards hard-control like Landstill in Legacy.

    If you truly believe differently, I challenge you contest my viewpoint and back it up with hard data!

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