Looking at the results from the Star City Open this last weekend I couldn't help but notice how 13 of the top 16 decks were either NO RUG or Stoneblade variants. The Standard top 16 of the same event was much more diverse.
This event was the first time in recent history the legacy field has been so homogeneous. Am I wrong in my observation? This doesn't necessarily look like a good thing to me. The one card combo that is Natural Order may be hitting critical mass...pushing other decks that would be viable into obscurity. Show and tell is probably in the same boat.
It is getting to the point that every legacy deck needs to either be playing, or be able to consistently deal with, NO, Show and Tell, Progenitas and Emrakul to even have the slightest chance of victory.
SFM also seems to be everywhere but at least when it resolves it doesn't invalidate nearly all possible interaction for the rest of the (probably short) game. I think legacy as a whole might be better off without the four aforementioned cards.
Maybe I'm overreacting, but do my concerns here make sense to anyone else?
If it's not NO, it'll be Stoneblade. Blue decks will be good regardless of which victory condition they use.
SnT does well because it dodges Mental Misstep.
NO RUG and Stoneblade represent the majority of the Top 16 because they are the flavor of the month. While they are definitely good decks, there are plenty of other decks which can easily make Top 16, they just aren't the flavor of the month right now. Neither Natural Order nor Stoneforge Mystic needs banned, and the same goes for Show and Tell and Emrakul. If players were smart, they'd play a deck that boasts a favorable matchup to both NO RUG and SFM.dec and finish in the Top 8.
I definitely agree with SFM being the flavor of the month. I don't think there is anything inherently broken about the card or the deck. SFM provides an inexpensive reliable win condition for control decks and aggro control decks but is by no means an 'I win' button. Once people adapt a little bit, the strategy will become a lot less prevalent.Originally Posted by Hanni
The problem with NO on the other hand is that it is a one card combo that wins otherwise close games in 2 turns. It can be thrown into any deck that runs green creatures and provides a consistent "combo" finish in 4-5 slots that is really hard to deal with. All this can be done regardless of and completely independent from the rest of the deck's game plan.
What I am describing actually sounds very similar to Survival of the fittest after the printing of Vengevine. I think NO is on the same level as Survival right now, it has just taken a little while to catch on.
In terms of deckbuilding consideration, NO -> Prog (and to a lesser extent SnT -> Emrakul) means you can't even think about building a legacy deck without answers to a 10/10 pro everything (not an easy thing to answer) unless you want to drop most of your games to anything running green. Even then you have to have your answers at the time NO goes off or lose within 2 turns. It's just too much.
Not even close.
Top 16 of the Legacy portion looks alot like the Top 16 from Standard 3 months ago.
I don't think that's a coincident. (UW SFM decks, RUG decks)
R&D, or the SCG tournament-going crowd aren't creative enough. Also see, Mental Misstep. Moreover, Legacy is the only format where SFM is legal and playable, and that's a large cause as to why everyone is playing Standard decks in Legacy.
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How is this not even close?
NO is a green card one-card combo that wins the game in 2 turns, is very hard to answer, and doesn't detract from the rest of the game plan of whatever deck it is in.
If I took that description out of context and said the exact same thing a year ago, there would have been no doubt that Survival was the card in question.
RUG wasn't seeing serious play in Standard a few months ago, it was way worse than Cawblade. Also the cards in NO Rug in Legacy aren't at all the same cards from Standard.
I agree with Redshift, SFM-Batterskull is flavor of the month; it's fine in control decks, I guess, but it's not as good as its numbers indicate.
NO Rug on the other hand seems to be a legitimate problem for the metagame at the moment.
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And found I was for endurance made
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.
Board control's okay right now, the problem is the autoloss to SnT.
For my confessions, they burned me with fire/
And found I was for endurance made
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.
Yes, they both can win the game in 2 turns, however Survival doesn't cost 2GG and a green creature to resolve, and it doesn't go cold when a Vengevine gets stuck in its hand.
The red splash (almost exclusively for red blast) improves a huge chunk of matchups in just about any legacy metagame, due to the high concentration of blue. Everything from control, to aggro-control, to combo.
NO decks don't need much more than a little extra game against control/combo due to the already strong aggro/aggro-control strategies they can run free of charge.
The methods you mentioned for dealing with NO decks are good for dealing with just about any deck. If you could be guaranteed to be able to keep the board clear and an opponent's mana low, then you win against anything... The real problem is that it doesn't require anything special to run NO. You can build a strong aggro or aggro-control deck, with a perfectly viable game plan, and just toss in NO to randomly pull unstoppable wins out of nowhere.
Interestingly enough, something like the Rock style deck you mentioned could almost certainly be made much stronger by the addition of NO. Anyone who's serious about winning and is playing green should probably be running NO.
NO RUG has been doing so well BECAUSE of the meta. When SCG is going all gogo-gaga over Hive Mind, mystic decks, merfolk, etc decks that the lemmings in mass pick-up (ie, GOOD MATCHUPS) you might as well be shooting fish in a barrel.
It is nowhere near the power of survival. I NEVER sided survivals out, whereas there are several matchups where the natural order plan takes the bench. Also, it costs FOUR MANA, practically the ceiling curve of game breaking cards and practically a "lob" for a counter (well it would be if blue mages weren't playing such narrow counters these days). The best argument you have would be that natural order was good at cmc4, and now that mental misstep slowed the format down a turn natural order at 4cmc is now GOOD.
I would think the answers that apply to prog are better than those that apply to emrakul.
Perish, nature's ruin, or retribution of the meek (cheap one-sided sweepers? sign me up)
ACTUAL sweepers like wog/etc, clones of most flavors, sac effects, tariff, wing shards
ensnaring bridge, glacial chasm, blazing archon, peacekeeper, moat (owns rug hardcore)
o-ring/journey for emrakul, gaddock teeg for natural order, DEATH GRIP for NO.. muwhahaha, COP:color,
A batterskull can race a prog, not so with emrakul. Karakas easily deals with emrakul but not prog.
Aven Mindcensor, EXTRACT, grinning totem, jesters cap, sadistic sacrament, cranial extraction, memorcide, bribery, praetor's grip, the list goes on and on.
This is legacy, the home of the cheating big stuff into play. If you can't deal with it main, then you sb an answer. If you don't have a sb for it, well... then lose to that strategy if you can't win before they do.
Also, my memory is failing me, but what is that white instant (cmc 2w or 3w) card that deals dmg to the attacking player equal to dmg you have taken this turn? i think it was a portal card but also in a regular set....
NO is very easily answerable with Phyrexian Metamorph (in conjunction with Swords)
Not. That. Difficult.
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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.
Phyrexian Metamorph is my favorite card in recent history, mostly because it helps shore up the NO/SnT matchups in a manner that is accessible to almost any deck. The problem is that Metamorph doesn't just win you games if it goes unanswered. Playing your own NO is a much better answer to opposing NOs because if you don't need it to kill opposing Progenitus you can just cast it and win...
If you played a Stoneblade list of the U/W variety, you would know that it pretty much folds to a dedicated U/W Control list that isn't running all conditional counterspells...such as a U/W Landstill list or Counterbalance list(even though this deck is out of favor now). Just resolving a 3cc or 4cc bomb vs Stoneblade can be a blowout (Elspeth, Knight Errant or Crucible of Worlds) as the Stoneblade list very often only has Force of Will to counter such bombs due to the 'overusage' of conditional counterspells like Spell Snare. A BUG control list can also win pretty easily vs a U/W Stoneblade list as well. Both dedicated control decks also do very well vs NO RUG. The problem with both of these particular control decks in my opinion (BUG or U/W) however is that they can sometimes just lose to rogue/jank decks, merfolk/goblins or just straight up burn.
NO RUG is just preying on hive mind.dec. If you want to beat NO RUG you can. Whereas against survival, even if you wanted to try to beat it with a non survival strategy, you could get maybe a 55/45 MU against them because survival was literally THE best deck. Anyone who didn't take survival to a tournament pre banning was playing the wrong deck. Natural order is the definition of fair. And FYI, it's a 2 card combo. You need a green creature to sack to it, which is kind of hard to do if all of your creatures get countered or killed or wastelanded in the case of dryad arbor.
People love playing the flavor of the month decks. 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.
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I think Phantsmal Image is actually better than Metamorph. But still, there's a shitload of card that are very strong against NO RUG and for NO RUG the best plan is most of the time to just try to race stuff like Perish or Wrath Of God. Especially Perish is very much underplayed right now. But also cards like Fire // Ice, Darkblast and Punishing Fire are really strong against NO RUG. Wasteland with softcounters is not, it's only a slight hindrance for the NO RUG player. You can definitely overcome that. Vendilion Clique is also very strong against NO RUG, as is Knight Of The Reliquary getting multiple Wastelands early.
To be honest, I'm most likely not going to play NO RUG in Amsterdam. I'm pretty sure there is something that is more reliable for beating both the mirror and Stoneblade (especially the German lists) while also having game against the other strong decks in the format.
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