[Let's Bitch About] Show and Tell

[Phoenix Ignition]

Also Show and Tell -> Emrakul is a 2 card combo. For 3 mana. That probably wins 90% of the games it lands in.

[Rizso]

You dont 2 for 1 your self if show and tell get countered unlike natural order.

The others arent even close to what Show and Tell does. Every show and tell has to be countered and they dont even lose either hive mind or emrakul and there isnt much you can do really to interact with the combo. And if you arent blue you dont have flusterstorm or daze to interact either. White Leyline also cuts of Discard and Clique to screw up their hand and delay them a couple of turns.

Sideboard cards that are ok vs Hivemind dont really do anything else in other matchups.

Its very possible to print good board cards against hive mind but they should do it soon. The longer they wait the higher chance its got Hive Mind to grow into unstoppable monster.

An enabler as well as a accelerator and protection, dangerous combination on a cheap CC cost spell that is as well being blue same color as blue pact, cantrips, fow, intuition, etc.

Show and Tell might could be something liek this crazy.
2U sorcery, Each player may play a permanent card from their hand without paying its manacost. Cards played with **** cant be countered and gain splitsecond.

[Gui]

Show and Tell has been doing crazy stuff for some time now...

What prevented Show and Tell from being as hyped as Survival of the Fittest is that you actually have to play a deck designed to cast Show and Tell, not just a good deck that also packs the Show and Tell suite. This way, not everyone is willing to leave their UGx or UWx or UBx decks in order to play the combo. Still, it's been nuts with Emrakul or Progenitus and now it's nuts with Hive Mind... And it's amazing how blue fuels it so well, FoW, Brainstorm, all the good cards to fetch the combo...

[dontbiteitholmes]

The funny thing is that Hive Mind has been out since Magic 2010. Almost a full 2 years...I'm surprised it took this long for someone to break it with Show and Tell. The tech has been unchanged for the most part since it was printed (and even had Mystical Tutor available to it at one point...)

The format has changed a lot in those 2 years though. Pre-Misstep we saw a lot more Daze, Stifle, ect. that were bad for Hive Mind. One thing that surely changed the game was Leyline of Sanctity + Mental Mistep coming out now post board the Hive Mind player 8 outs to turn 1 Thoughtsieze that could otherwise ruin their day.

Stifle turns Hive Mind into a 4 card combo if they try to drop it off Show and Tell because they are going to need 2 Pacts to go off or a Flusterstorm if they are lucky. Once Hive Mind is on the table their Missteps are good for nothing because you can just make your copy target the original.

I think a lot of beating Hive Mind is people putting those Stifles and Dazes back in their decks and even though the answers to Hive Mind are narrow in basically Angel's Grace or Sundial being the best 2, those answers are pretty solid. I mean if you have Sundial in hand and they Show and Tell you drop it for free and it's uncounterable on their end. Yes it's a terrible card vs. every other deck in the format, but what other combo deck is worth playing when the combo mirror starts out with G2 possible Leyline of Sanctity a fistful of counters increasing including one that has Storm and 2 ways to kill you easily starting on basically turn 2.

I think Bant has huge game against Hive Mind if they put the MD Stifles back (which are seldom a dead card, I mean Stifling Stoneforge often turns him into a Squire and Stifling Fetches is often gamebreaking). I mean as I said Stifle beats Hive Mind most of the time and if they Show/Tell Emrakul it lets you drop uncounterable Knight who can fetch a Karakas, blow out. How bad can Bant be? I mean Stoneforge makes Merfolk winnable and we're talking about a deck type that has basically been a deck to beat since the format was a year old.

[crovakiet]

All I know is switching from U/W Stoneblade to Hivemind is that the Hivemind deck is pretty piss easy to play. You can't really make a mistake and if you do, well sucks to be you! You can race aggro and don't really care. You have too much stuff as 'must counters' for control. Either they try to counter your 'casted' ramp like Grim Monolith, or they try to waste your 2 mana lands(setting them also back a turn) and you can still eventually cast a Show and Tell or hardcast a Hivemind. 8 'free' 'hard' counters splooges all over just 4 Force of Will. I'm maindecking Hivemind for now and putting stoneblade, landstill/counterthopter on the backburner until something gets done about it. As long as Zoo/NoRUG is keeping merfolk down, its all good. *Leyline of Sanctity' is just the nuts as well...and you get to screw Burn even if its not a part of the metagame!*

Show and Tell is probably on the watch list though for a possible ban hammer but if its not banned...people should just join the Hivemind/Show party. Might as well show people how degenerate legacy can get!

[Koby]

/me has a deja vu of last summer's unstoppable monster...

Except, this time, it's well established that Show and Tell is broken. That said, there's a huge amount of tension in the format right now, between beating fair decks with hard counters like Mental Misstep and Spell Snare, and beating Show and Tell, which ignores both of those counters.

It doesn't help that most of the decks traditionally running Force of Will have abandoned it for Misstep, and now are ill equipped to beating Show and Tell.

[dontbiteitholmes]

Once again we have a classic overreaction.

Every damn time a deck does well people want to burn down the world to stop it.

Granted Show & Tell might be ban worthy but let's at least give it a couple months to see what happens. Like I said Stifle makes it a 4 card combo, Daze is good against it, Cursecatcher, Spellstutter Sprite, Vendillion Clique is good against the deck, discard G1 when it's a sure thing. There are plenty of decks that could be a terrible matchup for Hive Mind at the end of the day.

Any deck with Knight can drop him off S/T and fetch Karakas which completely stops Emrakul and same decks can run Angel's Grace if they choose. Yes Angel's Grace is a terrible card so is Sundial, they are just awful outside of this one matchup. However, if this one matchup is as broken as you guys say it is why would you not sideboard 4x cards that almost 10x your chances of winning the match. I mean did you guys not SB Faerie Macabre against Reanimator? That card was pretty marginal in other matchups, I mean it still came in vs GY decks but it was no Crypt or Relic.

Don't get me wrong, Show and Tell could be ban worth and may end up getting banned. On the other hand this could just be another false alarm from the usual bunch. As bad as some of the SB options are vs this deck the ones that are available just completely ruin it's day and most decks already run some way to deal with Emrakul in the SB or they should. Don't forget that one NO-RUG deck still ran through 4 Hive Minds in a row at SCG with little more than Daze, FoW, and some SB Surgical Extraction, and REBs before finally losing in the finals.


TL;DR
If we banned cards every time the community overreacted we would currently be without Tarmogoyf, Counterbalance, Corralhelm Commander, Goblin Lackey, Survival would have been banned around 2003ish, Brain Freeze, Top, probably a stack of cards I don't even remember. SCG Seattle was Hive Mind's break out performance, let's at least wait until the end of next month before we start jumping to conclusions. When the cards I mentioned were top'8ing all over the place no one ever saw the light at the end of the tunnel, but the only time that never came was with Flash which was instabanned for being completely stupid and Survival which just proved too strong in the end (though who knows if Surgical extraction came out a year earlier if we would be in the same boat, I mean Pithing Needle stopped survival the first time).

[Koby]

TL;DR

For the record, I do play GW/x with both Angel's Grace and KotR; and I've played the matchup, and I've lost a good amount of games because you really need both answers to NOT LOSE.

Moreover, all the better answers are strictly in Blue. Neat, we're back to propping blue back on the pedestal of "makes the format fair".

Or we could ban Show and Tell, and continue trying to make the format better, rather than hemorrhage more players because of this brainless combo.

In the span between June 21 to July 19th, Hive Mind made up ~11% of the MTGO metagame. This puts it at the 2nd most winning deck online, only second to Stoneblade. Hive Mind has been putting up solid results since about May on MTGO, before everybody started to talk about it seriously.
[Source: http://www.mtgoacademy.com/forcing-the-will-hive-mind/]

TCdecks shows this as the 6th most popular deck, with 14 T8 appearances, compared to 1st place's Stoneblade with 26 finishes.
[Source: http://thecouncil.es/tcdecks/metagam...format=Legacy]

[crovakiet]

You say that as if Hive Mind/Show couldn't adapt as well...Show and Tell into Iona? Progenitus? They don't need to run just Emrakul even though all of them do currently. You state specific situations to counter an Emrakul such as KOTR but what can KOTR do against Progenitus? You are going to have to work to make KOTR be able to race Progenitus thats for sure. If the S&T/Hive Mind deck is playing against a deck known for using daze, they will just wait until they have the mana to pay for it easily. Easily done, when you monolith first turn with an ancient tomb and then island next turn into show and tell. What's daze going to do? Like seriously?

But maybe it is an overreaction...all I know is playing Hivemind/Show is a much easier combo deck to play than your standard storm deck that has the chance to fizzle and it is very consistent, much more so than Belcher.

Or it could just very well be pact of negation. A combo deck packing more free hard counters than a control deck is pretty imba I hear.

Granted I am invested in Show and Tell so a ban would suck balls...but hey those are the breaks. I own Mana Drains and they were banned when Wizards redid the B/R lists from type 1.5 to legacy. At least I can use them in Vintage...I owned Survivals from when they were first printed only to see them banned Now they are only good for EDH. So yeah...those are the breaks...I just hope Jace TMS is never banned. I love that card haha...

[ESG]

Yeah, Pact of Negation is what makes the deck a powerhouse, IMO. It's virtually impossible for a nonblue deck to pay for, whereas a Birds of Paradise or Mox Diamond can pay the red for Pact of the Titan. It's also the most expensive to pay, requiring 5 CMC, of which 2 must be blue (whereas you have only 1 colored requirement for Pact of the Titan). And then there's the fact that it wins counter wars.

[bondfan]

I would much rather them ban mental misstep as it preys on the nature of the format. Format was pretty good before misstep became legal.

[dsck]

If the S&T/Hive Mind deck is playing against a deck known for using daze, they will just wait until they have the mana to pay for it easily. Easily done, when you monolith first turn with an ancient tomb and then island next turn into show and tell. What's daze going to do? Like seriously?

You counter your hive mind copy of the pact with daze and hope the hive mind player doesnt have 2nd pact.

[Cthuloo]

This honestly remembers me of the Time Spiral hysteria we had a few months ago (a combo deck, with counters, so hard to hate...).

What frankly puzzles me is this: if Hive Mind was such a bad deck in the old faster meta, wouldn't it be sufficient to return to some of the old decks? I'm not quite sure that Hive Mind can always beat a lackey into warchief draw for gobbo, a multiple nacatl + lynx + burn draw from Zoo, or any of the tempo decks we used to have (dark/canadian threshold, old TA playing stifles). Mental Misstep slowed down the format, and a slow but resilient combo deck is the natural metagame predator. If the meta shifts back to faster decks, and Hive Mind is still the deck to beat, then we will need to worry.

[dontbiteitholmes]

This honestly remembers me of the Time Spiral hysteria we had a few months ago (a combo deck, with counters, so hard to hate...).

What frankly puzzles me is this: if Hive Mind was such a bad deck in the old faster meta, wouldn't it be sufficient to return to some of the old decks? I'm not quite sure that Hive Mind can always beat a lackey into warchief draw for gobbo, a multiple nacatl + lynx + burn draw from Zoo, or any of the tempo decks we used to have (dark/canadian threshold, old TA playing stifles). Mental Misstep slowed down the format, and a slow but resilient combo deck is the natural metagame predator. If the meta shifts back to faster decks, and Hive Mind is still the deck to beat, then we will need to worry.

Yeah, this is what people seem to be overlooking. I mean it's easy to say "OMG they play first turn Brainstorm into second turn Tomb->Show and Tell and if you counter that they play Grim Monolith and hardcast Hive Mind and win" or whatever, but just like with any other deck it seldom works out completely perfect especially when your opponent is playing disruption and you are playing combo. As bad as Hive Mind looks on paper it is surely beatable. Hell quite a few people have beaten it recently in tournaments. People say it is immune to Mental Misstep which it isn't as it hits their Brainstorms and Ponders they usually need to find part of the combo. There are plenty of decks a Hive Mind player does not want to play against and coincidentally some of those are decks that were/are considered top contenders post Misstep. Merfolk, Team America, NO-RUG, Bant all seem to have game vs the combo deck so far and with a couple tweaks you could probably add a couple more to that list. The rough part is that Hive Mind has one of the best SB plans available to combo in 4x Leyline 4x Misstep which tend to shut off the discard spells that usually give combo decks fits. That said I would still much rather play against Hive Mind than ANT pre Mystical banning. Now that was a terrible time all around. A tutor to get your win-con or whatever singleton card in your sideboard you needed to blowout a deck forget that.

[ryO!]

The Legacy community as well as known as the Kindergarten Of Magic (yeah breaking news it s not Type 2).

Welcome to a world where, if something dare (i mean damn i have to rethink my deck build or even worse play another deck this is obnoxious !) to change your habbits, everyone will be crying Wolf to undo this (errr i mean Momy Wizzard) !

[Fsk]

The deck is really strong since it is very hard to hate. But i dont think Show and Tell is the real culprit here. The trully problematic cards of the deck are :

&

[Mr. Safety]

Yeah, this isn't going to help. Here's what happens.

1. Show and Tell Resolves. Hive Mind and Oblivion Ring are simultaneously put onto the battlefield. Oblivion Ring's trigger is put on the stack.

2. The active player gets priority at this point. As he is first to act, he can announce a Pact of the Whatever, put it on the stack, and put Hive Mind's copy trigger on the stack as well. All before you ever get priority to do anything.

3. Presumably, unless you've got something else, your Pact copy will resolve. Then his Pact will resolve. Then Oblivion Ring's trigger will resolve and eat Hive Mind. Or itself. Either one's equally productive at this point.

Thanks for the rundown. I was thinking on it last night and remembered: oh yeah...the Pacts are instants, and he doesn't even have to pass priority after casting Hive Mind!!!

Oh well...just brainstorming how to potentially hate this thing out. It appears a lot of experienced players (like yourself) have already been there, done that, doesn't work, lol.

[Gheizen64]

I remember seeing the deck the first time and saying "this deck sucks, it autoscoop to CotV at 0". Then you realize in reality the answer to this aren't so cheap, the only option you have barring extremely narrow hate shit cards like angel grace is to run a lot of discard/counters and hope they don't out-permission you.
Ethersworn canonist slow this down by a turn, however. Not the best thing ever, but when he combo out on T4.5 you can race it often enough.

[Tacosnape]

This thread is pretty much the moment of clarity where everyone gets it. The deck is nuts hard to hate out, for the following reasons:

1. Once Hive Mind resolves, you can't stop the Pacts from happening.
2. Due to its exact mana cost, Show and Tell is very difficult to stop from resolving.
3. The deck gets four free counters usable only to protect its combo.
4. Every card that could hate out this deck in a reasonable time can be answered.

Counters? Probably the best option. Don't think Hive Mind can't sometimes win a counterwar though.
Angel's Grace, Sundial of the Infinite? Meet Emrakul, the Aeons Torn.
Karakas, Oblivion Ring, Phyrexian Metamorph? Meet Hive Mind.
Meddling Mage on Show and Tell? Meet either Slaughter Pact or Grim Monolith into hardcast Hive Mind.
Discard? Meet Brainstorm, Intuition and Leyline of Sanctity in board.
Stifle? Meet two Pacts.
Iona, Shield of Emeria? Meet Slaughter Pact and/or possibly graveyard hate.

You're all slowly getting the point. I play Maverick, Deadguy Ale, Landstill, and Merfolk, and I can't get better than 50/50 against this deck with anything. If you aren't playing Hive Mind right now, you're making the wrong deck decision. Show and Tell makes this deck insane.

[(nameless one)]

What about CounterTop?

Counterbalance revealing 0cc stops Pacts right? And Hive Mind doesn't copy it since its an ability?

But yes, CounterTop decks still won't be enough to stop these decks since Show and Tell into an Emrakul would be hard for them to stop.