A big rant (bring the asbestos suit), some ideas on the philosophy behind Eternal formats, an exploration why blue is performing this well lately and advice how to adapt to the new meta without going blue.
Check it out:
http://www.starcitygames.com/magic/l..._New_Blue.html
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Nice article, good read.
Originally Posted by everythingitouchdies
Maybe a bit much ranting Carsten ;D
Have you considered running 4x Stoneforge, 2x batterskull (+ sb Jitte, Basilisk Collar, Sword of Body and mind, etc.) instead of preordain, Clique and moat? Could help vs. Zoo and aggro in general 'cause I've seen lots of those decks here.
I tried a controlish approach of Team America an got fisted by Affinity and Sligh-burn the fist rounds so I was a bit pissed that day (missed my tombstalkers) :p
P.S. My last round opponent told me he knows a group of people (including himself) still playing Vintage in Berlin ... chance for me to sleeve up power again \o/
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It's way too easy to react on people whining. Devoting an article to just that seems poor in my opinion.
Anyway, I liked your decklist + report at the end. Especially the match against Big Zoo seemed like a close one that couldve gone either way. Retaining priority with Clique was pretty clutch.
Great article Carsten, your first paragraph is spot on!
Goblins with Mental Misstep!?!? My god, did a certain Bear assassin think of such an ingenious combo?
Great article dude. Hits a lot of topics that I already knew and grasped but was unable to deliver it to the IMPS that float around.
Also, I really enjoy how the better Legacy SCG articles are free (I enjoy yours, Matt's and Hatfield's TMIs), and those premium ones are really not about the format, but about the authors themselves (I remember reading Levine's article and I think he uses the word 'I' more than any other noun. Keeping that in mind and reading yours, I really enjoyed how I keep seeing the word 'Legacy' pop in and out, and tons of decks/strategies approached from various perspectives).
This is very very very very true. Goblins is one of the aggro decks, along with Merfolks that control decks can't afford to drag games out. Against Bant/Zoo/other decks, you can drag games out and win, but Gobs/Merfolks recover very fast (Gobs with matron/ringleader and incremental little dudes that deserve little attention that still add up damage, while Merfolk builds up fast again with Lords/Coralhelm/manlands/adepts). Thanks for pointing this out to everyone!A well-built control deck rarely lost to the enablers even before Misstep. It lost to Goblins in the late, late game, and that part has only gotten better for Goblins because the last thing you want to hold against them on turn 20 is a Mental Misstep.
Decks that I care about:
Steel Stompy
UWx Landstill
Dreadstalker
DDFT (10% practice)
Mangara on MWS? You must be masochistic. -kiblast
So let me get this straight. You say that blue isn't as powerful as people are crying. You say that there are ways to deal with these new blue decks. You say that people need to innovate and adapt to mental misstep. You hen proceed to put together a deck whose archetype that has been around forever, packs 12 counters md (with 3 more post-board), 10 cantrips, 4 JACE, 3 $200+ anti-aggro cards, and then proceed to destroy your entire metagame with it. And somehow this is innovative, adaptive, and skill-intensive? You should probably find some better players in your area because either draw-go is totally busted or you are one of the best players ever!!!
You seem to have a disdain for people who like to turn creatures sideways, but it really seems like you don't like you just really don't want your opponent to be able to do anything. Winning is winning, though, I guess.
I actually really liked your article, until it got to your tournament report. I really think it completely negated everything you said prior to it.
Not really, because I'm sure that his list still has some problems with Merfolks, or occasional aggro decks e.g. Goblins that answer Moat, or BG decks/loam/discard, all of which he's mentioned above. I'm pretty sure Mon knows his list is good, but isn't unstoppable, just like any blue-based control deck is. You're probably reading a little too much with his friendly end paragraph on a personal deck doing well in a tourney. I see this as no different as a personal zoo deck with Punishing Fires doing well in a tourney.
Decks that I care about:
Steel Stompy
UWx Landstill
Dreadstalker
DDFT (10% practice)
Mangara on MWS? You must be masochistic. -kiblast
Really liked this one.
But I'll blame you if everyone starts using Engineered Plague on their SB again...
Super Bizarros Team. Beating everything with small green dudes and big waves.
No, he's saying "Do as I say, not as I do." "If you don't, my blue deck goes 10-1" "and even if you do, I've got $700 in 3 cards that will stop that plan as well" "So quit whining and get to it"
And then the next guy goes "needs MOAR Stoneforge." Great. Just what we need, caw-blade dominating 2 formats.
REAL innovative
Also bear in mind I play u/w tempo with missteps, and merfolks so i'm definitely not anti-blue. I'm just anti-not letting your opponent play ANYTHING.
Good article I guess, seems to be what every one else is saying. Sure you can still play zoo and goblins, but why would you when you can play blue? Goblins/Zoo might even do well in 1 tourney... Someone should write an article that explains why you should play anything but blue, that would be a good article.
I pretty much immediately stop taking someone seriously when they refer to opinions they don't like as "whining", but what the Hey.
You're kidding right? People complain about Force. People complained about Vial and Lackey too.Why is it that Magic players can't ever seem to stop complaining? More specifically, why is it always the aggro and midrange players? Ever heard a control player moan how Aether Vial is the br0kenZ and needs to be banned because Legacy is basically unplayable with it legal? How about all those combo players who call for the banning of Force of Will because it's unbeatable? Don't know any? Strange coincidence, me neither.
Not everyone thinks that the status quo is God. You may not agree with their opinion of the optimal format configuration, but presuming that you do think that some cards should be banned/restricted, it's nonsensical to go into big angry rants that someone wants this one particular card you like banned.
Midrange decks gained the most from Misstep so I honestly have no idea what in the Hell you're talking about.So why the hell is there a storm of people clamoring for the banning of some card or other whenever the metagame changes and non-creature decks get a boost? Every. Single. Time.
There's two possibilities here. Either you want to unban Black Lotus, Bargain, Time Walk et. al., in which case you're dumb, or you're just a hypocritical douchebag.You—the people who claim you want to play “real Magic,” Magic the way it's “meant to be”—are lying to yourselves. You're asking to play a one-dimensional, watered down, reduced version of a game with infinite possibilities. The reason you ask for bans is that you just don't understand what an Eternal format is about.
Magic is about more than turning creatures sideways and looking at the board state to figure out what is going to happen. There are about a million other things the cards allow you to do and have from the very beginning of the game. The "older" formats simply are generally the only place where you still get to do them, where you get to use the less obvious strategies. That's a major part of their reason to exist and the draw they have for a large number of players. The general attitude of people like you has pushed WotC to make them unavailable in Standard for years now* and there is no reason to frustrate all those players who like things other than "I play a guy. Okay, turn this other guy sideways" by trying to make Eternal about the same crap.
This is an Eternal format. If all you want to do is play creatures and turn them sideways, you have draft and Standard for that. Eternal formats are about playing all the strategies that this sweet game enables, not just the most fundamental. If you don't like strategies other than basic creature beats against removal control, you're in the wrong type of format.
Your pick.
Get back to me.
Lemme know which.
I've been over these numbers before. It is not true that blue has always dominated the top tables.First, this has been the case for years, and still everybody insists Legacy is the sweetest thing since sliced bread
The rest of the article was actually fairly competent and had some insightful comments, but this rancid shit on top just kills, my opinion.
Oh, the decklist at the end also annoyed me. As long as we're all ranting I'm really tired of people packing Legacy nuts&bolts cards into whatever the hottest Standard deck of the moment is and calling it a brilliant invention that's going to destroy the meta.
For my confessions, they burned me with fire/
And found I was for endurance made
Very good read.
great read, thanks for that.
@StarScream
2 post from you and 2 times I feel flamed by you. At least have the class to adress me by my nickname not as "the next guy"; get it? Carstens meta is very aggro heavy so I suggested the lifegaining stoneforge package to battle Zoo, Goblins and Co.
Moreover you don't get that his meta-based deckchoice has nothing to do with Zoo and Goblins doing well in the metagame as he proved. Is Pat Chapin a douche if he don't win a Pro Tour with one of his brews? Step down from your tree, pal...
@IBA
Unban Bargain, Walk, Lotus ... I don't know where you read that but "hypocritcal douchebag" and "dumb" must be checkpoints of your daily insult-List Xp
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@Lemnear:
The very use of the term "whining" makes an a priori assumption that the complaint in question is invalid without feeling the need to first offer proof of such. If the assumption is made categorically that merely asking a card be banned is an invalid complaint, then surely this would apply retroactively to any card that's currently banned. I mean some people thought Flash shouldn't have been banned, but they were obviously wrong as Hell.
For my confessions, they burned me with fire/
And found I was for endurance made
To be fair, IBA is actually 100% correct. Take a debate class, and call your teacher a whiner. It will not end well.
But it ends well if you win the debate against your teacher whether he/she is a whiner.
Decks that I care about:
Steel Stompy
UWx Landstill
Dreadstalker
DDFT (10% practice)
Mangara on MWS? You must be masochistic. -kiblast
Carsten, you have to remember that Legacy has been pretty much without a control strategy that worked reliably for most of the past four years. There have been plenty of folks complaining about it over that time period. Your first paragraph will certainly make some folks smile and nod, but there are also others who really know their stuff, and have been banging their heads on a wall to make control work for a long time. Before you go responding to IBA, keep in mind that he is of a peculiar mindset on this.
He loves control. He hates blue. He will not stop attacking you in this thread until you concede his point, the thread is closed, or one of you gets banned.
I have to also mention that Mental Misstep is not a card that you simply adapt to. If there is a format that can manage it, it is Legacy. But for the entire lifespan of the game, blue has had trouble with the first turn play of its opponent. Force of Will helped. Daze, helped a bit more. But Mental Misstep, does so with neither card disadvantage nor returning that land to your hand. It enables blue to do something it has never been able to before in the history of the game.
Legacy has a deep pool of cards giving it plenty of resilience against the sorts of problems that turn Standard into endless cycles of Fairies versus the world until they rotate out, followed by Birds, Mystics, and Jace, and so on. But there is a limit. Vintage has been shackled with that limit since its inception, and has never broken free. When Wizards gave blue this shiny new tool, it filled in one of the few gaps in blue's arsenal for the first time ever. It is on par with printing Swords to Plowshares in blue, Brainstorm in white, or Qasali Pridemage for black. It steps completely over the line, disinclining players from using other colors because this one is now closer to "doing it all" than ever.
Jack, you may still think that other colors can simply use this card and be done with it, but you are wrong. It does something for other colors that they could, by and large, already do - just in other ways. Adding this to their arsenals is nothing special. It is not overpowered because of either its cost or its effect. It is overpowered because it is available to blue without splashing a color. That is why there is not just one deck packing blue that is kicking ass - it is all of them.
The printing of Mental Misstep was a mistake, and they should have known better.
Last edited by Finn; 06-09-2011 at 03:07 PM. Reason: clarity
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