Standard top 16 more diverse than legacy...?

[Redshift]

Everytime I see a thread anymore, it's about people whining and crying, and it's getting REALLY OLD. I'm almost getting to the point of where I'm just tired of reading about the damn shit.

First it was Survival. I still don't believe it needed to be banned, but I do agree that Survival in and of itself was a very powerful card. Let's assume for arguments sakes that all the whining for banning Survival was accurate. I'm willing to concede this one.

But then it was Time Spiral was wayyyy to overpowered, and they need to start banning Candelabra's and shit. Then it was Show and Tell... ZOMG Hivemind is raping my shitty Aggro deck please halp!! Now it's "Natural Order can fit into any green aggro deck and just wins out of nowhere and needs banned," or "Mental Misstep is way too good against me because I built my deck around critical 1cc spells."

Get. Over. It.

The biggest problem is not about the current flavor of the month, but the fact that 95% of the players netdeck what they think are the best decks. Innovation is mostly gone, and for those of us that are still innovating monster brews, no one is playing them because they aren't what's hot right now.

I'm done with all the negativity for the night though, I think I'm gonna go watch a movie and call it a night.

I wasn't feeling a whole lot of negativity before that post...

Anyway, part of the problem here may be the existence of Progenitus and Emrakul. Without Prog, NO isn't too bad, kind of like Survival w/o Vengevine. The same goes for SnT without Emrakul. However, both NO and SnT (like Survival) will continue to get better and better with every new set. They are on the verge of brokenness now and at some point in the future will probably be unmistakably so.

[DrHealex]

I wasn't feeling a whole lot of negativity before that post...
Without Prog, NO isn't too bad, kind of like Survival w/o Vengevine. The same goes for SnT without Emrakul. However, both NO and SnT (like Survival) will continue to get better and better with every new set.

I feel that this statement is completely fallacious.
First, Natural Order is garbage without Progenitus. It saw roughly 0 play (and was like a $5 card) until the printing of Progenitus.
Secondly, NO and SnT don't get better with each set. You don't ADD giant creature targets to it, at most you could replace them, which seems highly unlikely.
People are quite capable of handling progenitus. They have been doing it for awhile. People are also quite capable of handling emrakul, and it didn't take them long to do so. Why? Because creatures are the easiest permanents in this game to deal with.

I am going to have to agree with Hanni. The general complaining has gotten VERY old. Perhaps those players will just move to modern where all the players seem to do is complain and what IS on their banned list and what ISN'T... lol

Why do people always have to compare XXX broken card to Survival anyways? Rarely are their effects even similar. The only thing natural order has in common with survival is that they are both green, and shuffle your library. Why not compare natural order to a self induced green bribery, Or a selective green polymorph? Or compare show and tell to an expensive hypergenesis and a quarter of the power.

[(nameless one)]

Back to the title,

I think the reason why Legacy has been less diverse as of late is because SCG grinders are too lazy to try to learn/develop other decks. Everyone plays RUG or U/W Stoneforge because it's what everyone is using. It's a vicious cycle. Pros look at the current decks to beat and find these decks. They play it and given their skill and practice, do well with these decks. The next deck to beat update shows up and you have the same decks. Then pros just pick them up again.

I miss the days when Legacy was about the pet deck of your choice. It's fun to Rolfstomping local metas with fringe decks such as Armageddon Staxx, Four Horseman, MUD, Belcher.

[GGoober]

NO is very easily answerable with Phyrexian Metamorph (in conjunction with Swords)

Not. That. Difficult.

This pile of shit has a good matchup against NORUG and Blade.decks (replace the Crucible with the 2nd Batterskull for my latest list).

http://www.mtgthesource.com/forums/s...l=1#post576280

Not trying to advertise anything, but to mchainmail's point, if you want a card that beats both SFM and NORUG, it's Metamorph, and my pile so happens to run 4 of them.

It's incredibly funny against SFM because you end up getting way more Batterskulls than they do, but most of the time, I just copy an SFM instead of the Batterskull and grab a Jitte/Batterskull myself. Metamorph is also great against NORUG against Progenitus, or random Show-Emrakul matchups. My list can be further tweaked to improve my NORUG matchup, but I'm fairly sure that I crush most SFM mirrors in testing (especially the UW Blade control decks but less so for the BW SFM decks packing discard and Hymns). Everytime I draw my own SFM or Metamorph against a SFM deck, you feel like you're going to win. They tutor Batterskull, you tutor Jitte, they resolve Batterskull, you Metamorph it, slap a Jitte and beat them to death when they have no more Mystics in play. You also play some StP and Champion with any equipment makes it impossible for them to deal with the deck since Champion negates the lifelink of Batterskull until they draw Elspeth or Clique (depending on the build).

I did pretty well with the list again last week at my local tourney, so I'll continue to play the decks that have a shot at crushing the best decks out there (since I never play the best deck in the format unless it's Landstill which rarely comes up these days :P)

[Jonathan Alexander]

No offense, but you can't really blame people for actually playing competitively in a competitive game. And as for NO RUG and Stoneblade, these actually are the strongest decks in Legacy right now. They both have a strong proactive gameplan against fringe decks as well as a very strong reactive disruption package against the top tier decks. Also, both of them have much stronger manabases than most decks in Legacy had a few months ago and thus they are way more consistent than these decks. Further, both of them are very good against random aggro decks, which has traditionally been very important in Legacy.
I really wonder if it's time to play a splashed version of Merfolk again. Other than that, I've been playing a few games with a Blue Zoo list and I have to say, it looks promising. The manabase works much better than expected (i.e. you don't lose to a single Wasteland) plus it can support cards like Vendilion Clique and Jace in a fast aggro shell. I think there's a lot of room for innovation in this deck.

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

People are quite capable of handling progenitus. They have been doing it for awhile. People are also quite capable of handling emrakul, and it didn't take them long to do so. Why? Because creatures are the easiest permanents in this game to deal with.

The cards that handle Emrakul are mostly very borderline playable otherwise. Like this is the only reason that Karakas is a $50 card.

The cards that handle Progenitus are... pretty damned rare, and mostly countered by a Wooded Foothills.

I think you're being somewhat delusional here, the whole reason these cards are seeing a lot of play is because they're not easy to deal with.

I am going to have to agree with Hanni. The general complaining has gotten VERY old. Perhaps those players will just move to modern where all the players seem to do is complain and what IS on their banned list and what ISN'T... lol

This verges on the nonsensical.

Also

Why do people always have to compare XXX broken card to Survival anyways? Rarely are their effects even similar.

Because Vengevine made Survival tutor+cost evasion. And generally Tinker effects are overpowered. Natural Order is a Tinker effect. I mean this isn't really a complex formula.

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

A properly built Control deck (w/ blue) doesn't roll to Hive Mind. I've yet to punt a best 2 out of 3 set vs Hive Mind with both my U/W Control deck and my U/B/g Control deck.

Control is a pretty loose term, so I'll be a little more specific. The U/W runs Missteps, Counterspells, FoW's, and Counterbalance w/ SFM/Batterskull and Planeswalker's as the win cons. The U/B/g deck runs Counterspells, FoW's, and either discard or Missteps, along with Intuition/Raven's Crime for the midgame blowout, with Jace and Worm Harvest as the win cons.

The both have tools a-plenty to bring in postboard to fight SNT Hivemind.

And yes, they both have an adequate board control gameplan in addition to stack control.

EDIT: If these decks are good, why does nobody play them? Because they aren't the flavor of the month.

To be blunt, neither of those sound really off the radar. I've seen and I'm sure everyone else has seen iterations of the decks you describe, and they don't stock up well against the field as a whole. I assumed you meant something like board control or at least old u/w Landstill with a million counters/kill spells.

As it is you're basically describing a deck that has as many counters and card advantage elemnts as BladeControl or NO Rug and a much slower clock.

(Actually your u/w deck just sounds like BladeControl only for some reason you added CounterTop to it.)

[dontbiteitholmes]

Let me finish this thread title for you.

Standard top 16 more diverse than legacy... but not for long.

Let me be the latest but not first person to point out that the same people in this thread wanted to ban Show and Tell a month ago. I said the metagame would adjust to quote myself from 25 days ago...

Still I think the deck is very beatable. First off you have to understand that EVERYONE loses to this deck the first time they play it if they have never playtested it. Even in the SCG live matches a couple of the wins were based off people just not knowing how to play against the deck. I think the deck is solid, but I don't think we're going to be seeing Hulk-Flash or Vengvine-Survival levels of dominance anytime soon.

Well this is the adjustment all the complainers wanted, and now it came and Hive Mind is once again the terrible metagame choice it deserves to be and all we have to show is the same people complaining. Go ahead ban S&T, Natural Order, Misstep, Stoneforge, and then let everyone complain about Merfolk being too good again, then we can ban Aether Vial and everyone can complain about combo being too good, then we can ban Lion's Eye Diamond. Here's a better idea, if you want to complain because whatever deck you want to play isn't winning or can't win go play Modern where everything fun is banned. Just make sure you sell all your Legacy stuff on the way out so the format can stay viable. See you at Modern GP 2012.

I'll say it again, these decks are beatable. Enchantress looks pretty good right now as about 1/5 of your deck says Progenitus and germ tokens can't attack and enchantment hate is officially at the lowest levels I've seen since the day Legacy became a format. If you kids put half the time into deck building or testing that you put into complaining you would be winning more events.


TL;DR
Unless you really think there is no deck that can beat UW Mystic and NO RUG at the same time and still be viable vs. the rest of the meta you should have your work cut out for you. Those decks will have huge targets on them next SCG and will probably be your most played matchups. So if you play a deck that is good vs. both of them not only will you get many favorable pairings but many of your opponents will be overcompensating for those matchups giving you an edge vs. non RUG/mystic matchups.

The only thing I'm mad about looking at that top 8 is that the next SCG event isn't close enough to me, because all the planets just aligned in the world of Legacy and the top 2 contenders both have similar strengths and weaknesses.

[Bahamuth]

The American metagame seems so much more driven by what the flavor of the month is. Seriously, a while ago, people were crying that Hive Mind is way too good. The cards in the format haven't even changed, but the American meta has completely. There are so many decks that would perform well in this sort of meta.

[SpikeyMikey]

NO/Prog has been seeing play for a long time now. Switching from Bant to RUG doesn't all of a sudden make the NO plan unstoppable. The red splash improves its Merfolk matchup, but there are still plenty of tools for dealing with NO/Prog, whether through preventing NO from resolving, by keeping the board clear of guys to sac to NO, solid mana denial, or by destroying Prog altogether.

Maybe it's time we see a shift back towards Control decks, which happens to be a fantastic answer to both NO RUG and the aggro/control variations of Stoneblade. Also, I think a control heavy Rock/Junk deck would also be a good answer to that sort of metagame.

The switch from Bant to RUG to improve the Fish matchup isn't the problem. I've been thinking a lot about this over the past few days, as part of the reason that I quit playing Legacy again was that my pet deck is terrible against NO RUG and NO RUG is the best in the format and very prolific.

The real reason that NO RUG is so strong is Green Sun's Zenith. If it were just Natural Order, you could overload on cheap removal, run Lavamancers of your own or pack EE. But the problem is that you're not just fighting Natural Order. You're fighting 8 Tarmogoyfs. It's similar to how the Hive Mind plan puts you in a position to have to fight two wildly different win conditions. If you overload on Angel's Grace or Stifle or whatever other narrow bullshit you run to stop Hive Mind, they'll drop an Emrakul in your face and those bullshit answers are useless. You need to be able to stop both consistently and early. NO RUG does the same thing except it's two plans are Progenitus and 'goyf overload. Without GSZ, the Tarmogoyf backup plan is significantly less scary. Basically, GSZ gives NO RUG the upside of NOPro Bant (a real aggro backup plan) without forcing it to give up its superior removal suite.

I think the best answer right now is to be packing 4 Spell Pierce. When Fish was packing Spell Pierce, it was the best deck against NO decks because NO is actually rather slow, when you think about it. Misstep is good, but people are overusing it and suffering because of it. Right now, Misstep isn't where I want to be, Spell Pierce is. The earliest NO is coming down is turn 3. The earliest Progenitus is going to kill you is turn 5. The combination of Lavamancer and Lightning Bolts does help NO RUG control the early game, but a turn 5 kill is still an appreciably slow kill.

[Admiral_Arzar]

As has been stated time and time again, people love their pet decks or the newest craze that just popped up/the zenith rebirth flashless hulk deck.

ZOMG THAT DECK IS AMAZING.

Ahem. There are two problems here. One is the SCG-driven "flavor of the month" thing that people have been describing. The other is Mental Misstep, but I'm not going to bring that argument into this thread. These decks should be answered if people actually spend time to think about how (rather than just playing them themselves).

[Deady]

And next month it will be ''Legacy top 16 more diverse than Standard...?''.

We're playing Legacy, not Standard, nor Modern, PERIOD!

People that complain about the format right now, shouldn't have been born. Seriously, those are the people that might find their place in Standard or Modern perfectly.

My advice: stop complaining and take it like a Goblin!

[Amon Amarth]

The switch from Bant to RUG to improve the Fish matchup isn't the problem. I've been thinking a lot about this over the past few days, as part of the reason that I quit playing Legacy again was that my pet deck is terrible against NO RUG and NO RUG is the best in the format and very prolific.

The real reason that NO RUG is so strong is Green Sun's Zenith. If it were just Natural Order, you could overload on cheap removal, run Lavamancers of your own or pack EE. But the problem is that you're not just fighting Natural Order. You're fighting 8 Tarmogoyfs. It's similar to how the Hive Mind plan puts you in a position to have to fight two wildly different win conditions. If you overload on Angel's Grace or Stifle or whatever other narrow bullshit you run to stop Hive Mind, they'll drop an Emrakul in your face and those bullshit answers are useless. You need to be able to stop both consistently and early. NO RUG does the same thing except it's two plans are Progenitus and 'goyf overload. Without GSZ, the Tarmogoyf backup plan is significantly less scary. Basically, GSZ gives NO RUG the upside of NOPro Bant (a real aggro backup plan) without forcing it to give up its superior removal suite.

I think the best answer right now is to be packing 4 Spell Pierce. When Fish was packing Spell Pierce, it was the best deck against NO decks because NO is actually rather slow, when you think about it. Misstep is good, but people are overusing it and suffering because of it. Right now, Misstep isn't where I want to be, Spell Pierce is. The earliest NO is coming down is turn 3. The earliest Progenitus is going to kill you is turn 5. The combination of Lavamancer and Lightning Bolts does help NO RUG control the early game, but a turn 5 kill is still an appreciably slow kill.

Bolded for emphasis. This really needed to be said. Misstep is great but... wait, what is this! Decks that are naturally resistant to MM (NO, Show and Tell, Hive Mind, etc) are doing really well. I wonder if there is a correlation? Against many of the bombs in the format most decks only have 1 set of versatile hard counters and that's it. It's much easier to resolve Natural Order when you only have to care about 1 card they have and you have your own Forces too. A lot of my NO RUG wins have have came from Turbo Hydra on turn 3. If anyone had Spell Pierce I woulda been blown out.

[Star|Scream]

Bolded for emphasis. This really needed to be said. Misstep is great but... wait, what is this! Decks that are naturally resistant to MM (NO, Show and Tell, Hive Mind, etc) are doing really well. I wonder if there is a correlation? Against many of the bombs in the format most decks only have 1 set of versatile hard counters and that's it. It's much easier to resolve Natural Order when you only have to care about 1 card they have and you have your own Forces too. A lot of my NO RUG wins have have came from Turbo Hydra on turn 3. If anyone had Spell Pierce I woulda been blown out.

Keeping mana open to pay for counters is straight up noobery.

[SMR0079]

Be a man and exploit the opportunity of having a defined meta game. I think a Team America Variant could do well right now.

[Koby]

Team America can't reliably beat Stoneforge Mystic. This has been known for quite some time now. At least the versions that run Goyf/Tombstalker can't beat the Sword of Feast & Famine.

Sneak Attack decks with 12 cantrips are looking more tempting, especially considering they can/do run Blood Moon.

[Whit3 Ghost]

Team America's problem with Stoneforge was never really Sword of Feast and Famine. It was not having a reliable answer to Mystic cause you only ran four removal spells, and also outright losing to them topdecking Crucible and Waste-locking you.

I think that a Tempo variant could be very successful in the current metagame, but I think that it would require a somewhat significant overhaul. Or maybe just cutting a couple things for more removal, haha.

[Tacosnape]

Anyone know the Jace, The Mind Sculptor count of that top 16? Just curious. And can't get the decklists to load for some reason.

[Koby]

Anyone know the Jace, The Mind Sculptor count of that top 16? Just curious. And can't get the decklists to load for some reason.

Link to Top 16 of Boston

The Jace TMS count is 37 / 64.
13 out of 16 decks played the card in their 75.
Median Jaces played - 3 copies.
Only decks not playing Jace were Reanimator, Aggro Loam, and Zoo.

All the NO RUG decks played 2-3 copies in their sideboard.
All the U/W Stoneblade decks played 3-4 in the maindeck.

[Whit3 Ghost]

To be blunt, neither of those sound really off the radar. I've seen and I'm sure everyone else has seen iterations of the decks you describe, and they don't stock up well against the field as a whole. I assumed you meant something like board control or at least old u/w Landstill with a million counters/kill spells.

As it is you're basically describing a deck that has as many counters and card advantage elemnts as BladeControl or NO Rug and a much slower clock.

(Actually your u/w deck just sounds like BladeControl only for some reason you added CounterTop to it.)

I actually don't see how what you're thinking of wouldn't be competitive. You might have a pretty terrible game one against Hivemind, but it's not like you can't pack sideboard hate for it. If you're beating NORUG and UW Mystic, you're probably beating Maverick and Zoo as well, and that's an overwhelmingly positive matchup against at least 60% of the meta.