Pox can still be pretty beast. Dark Ritual is a monster since it allows you to cast 3cc stuff with one land after you've been Poxing, Small Poxing, Wastelands, etc.Originally Posted by Hardcore
Thats probably the first deck I'd expect to see come back since it already has most of what it needs. It would probably benefit nicely from a creature it can bring play from the graveyard thats stronger than a mere Nether Spirit. That, or perhaps a nice 3cc creature to go with Dark Ritual.
Also, that Merfolk example is completely wrong... look at Death Mark to compare. Is it used to hate a strategy? Or a color?
Folk used Perish because it sucked dick at removing creatures not primarily because green was a problem; was that an elf heavy metagame? I think not. Hell, take a look at COP Red and its applications. Is it useful against any deck that plays red? Not really. Against UR Delver or RUG it doesn't shut down the deck and you can always run into Tempo countermagic that gives you a choice between keeping your spell or giving the opponent the freedom to play all the bolts in his hand.. or they just counter it before it comes down. Against Burn, its the shit because of the strategy, not the color. Take a look at Choke against Faerie Stompy. Chrome Mox and Ancient Tomb play Sea Drake, bounce two Islands.
Hating colors is usually a byproduct of hating strategies. A narrow card that only hates one color is probably shutting down something fundamental to the deck, or it doesn't come in post-board. I can't tell you how many times I wished post-board Dread of Night was good against Maverick; I don't even board it in anymore when I play BUG control.
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If my deck is bad at destroying creatures I'm surely going to splash black to get from among all removal available to that color the one that only destroys green ones, yeah, suuuuuuure.
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".
When Saito won GP Columbus, Zoo and Bant variants were the DTB. I don't think he opted for Perish by chance.
People don't play the likes of Perish or Choke because they have a raging hatred for certain colours but because some decks packing these colours are widely played and probably a bad matchup and hence such seemingly narrow cards can even or tilt these matchups in their favour. The downside is obviously that there's a higher chance that those sideboard slots are wasted in other matchups. Sometimes the trade-off is worth it.
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I made a gatherer search for cards that might be useful against the blue decks in the deck to beat section, excluding cards that have been already mentioned on this thread.
White
Ethersworn Canonist
Black
Oppression
Liliana of the Veil
Raven's Crime
Chains of Mephistopheles
Red
Jaya Ballard, Task Mage
Sirocco
Ricochet Trap
Green
Hidden Gibbons
Nature's Wrath
Guttural Response
Artifact/Others
Thorn of Amethyst
Chalice of the Void
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".
You know this one costs six mana.
How do plan on getting it into play?
Show and Tell?
raven's crime is nice, but not amazing. It is no threat after all.
Liliana of the veil is OK, in control decks only.
Oppression and chains of mephistofeles
are cute, but wrong answer.
Speaking about raven's crime; syphon life is threat that get around blue's counters.
Against blue control, of course.
The usual way is generating six mana. Easiest method is Gaea's Cradle, but Rofellos, Llanowar Emissary, Priest of Titania, Orcish Lumberjack or Lotus Cobra would also work.
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".
Show and Tell is consistently faster and not reliant on a fragile creature. I would stick with that.
Wouldn't backfire playing Nature's Wrath in a blue deck? At least Eureka is on color and conveniently activates for each permanent the opponent puts into play.
In any case, I think there are better uses for Show and Tell and Eureka.
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".
Please ...
Best Lord : oh yea, everybody knows how "the best lord award" is a sign of unfairness in legacy.
Best 1-drop : noble hierarch, grim lavamancer, mother of rune or even putrid imp could all be "the best 1-drop creature" in the right deck
Best planeswalker : at the moment planewalker are mostly used as control tool, nothing unlogical to see the blue one being the best one. Elspeth, tezz and liliana 2 have also some interesting plays
One of the best creature of all time : let say clique at random. ok, let's play : stoneforge mystic, drak confidant, tarmogoyf, knhight of reliquary, ichorid ... is there enough examples to definitly neuter this (non) argument ?
Strongest card supporting of fighting : not sure of what you're speaking about ... is it enablers such as dark rituals/IGG/past in flame/duress ... or hate such as thalia, spheres, canonist etc ?
best card for cheating overcosted things in play : oh well. Natural Order is totaly useless although being played a ton of time during last year. And as there is an engine providing a full deck ans because this engine is blue, this is scandalous. As this is scandalous that aluren is the best one to freedrop lil'creatures. Something has to be done here, for sure ...
Best lock ever printed : you already experimented 3spheres in stax i guess ...
the best storm engine beside Ad Nauseam : maybe you should give to Past in Flame a run...
Oh, and eventualy you forgot the most scandalous category and probably the reason people are whinning on blue for centuries :
Best counterspell ever print ? Definitly scandalous, it should be blue.
At a point, the power level of an eternal format is beginning so uncontrolable, unfair and unfun that players needs to run some control to avoid a simple flip a coin game which is interesting for nobody. Blue was, is and will be the color of spell control. Thank this color to give us the format instead of arguing that it should be hated more by WotC. I'm not the kind of player that would like to see mirrors of mono green rampdrazi consistently in the final tier of an eternal format... (no offense to rampdrazi pilot though).
Some comments towards the last two pages:
I agree that Delver should not have been printed, at least not in blue. Blue is not supposed to be the color of the best aggressive one-drops. It also would probably have been better for the game if Snapcaster had been red instead of blue. Having CC2 Lords in other colors than blue would also be a nice development to see.
The Perish thing: The reason Saito ran Perish was that the creatures he was actually going to have trouble with just happened to all be green (Knight of the Relinquary, Tarmogoyf and Wild Nacatl), not because the color green itself was a problem.
MonoBlack: There are viable or even top tier mono color decks in green (Elves, effectively though often splashing white), black (Pox), red (burn, Goblins) and white (Death and Taxes) as well as in blue (Merfolk). The fact that this is even the case is astonishing enough given dual-fetch manabases. Complaining that most mono-colored decks aren't on the same level as multi-splash good stuff decks and strategically focused multi-color decks is a sign you should reevaluate your understanding of the format.
The best Storm engine in Legacy is Past in Flames, not close. With GP Ghent in the books I think people will finally start to realize this. Honestly, it was only a matter of time until people realized reprinting Yawgmoth Will meant you should try to play that in your Dark Ritual deck.
I agree with LOurs on the necessity of a strong blue countermagic presence in Legacy - otherwise the format would rapidly need bannings that would turn it into Modern with dual lands.
As for blue dominance, looking for cards that are good against "blue" and looking at decks through the lens of "blue decks" and "non-blue decks" is a faulty approach to tournament level Magic. There isn't one "blue deck", there is a multitude of decks that use blue either as a main color (hard control and tempo, S&T) or as a support color (combo) and all of those need to be addressed by hate/gameplans aimed at what their trying to do, not what colors they run. Looking for a card that "beats blue" is like looking for a card that "beats green" and boarding it against Lands as well as Elves and Maverick. That's just not how things work. Perish is a good sideboard card because the decks you're trying to hit actually are focused on abusing green creatures, not because they're green (see Lands).
Beating blue decks: You don't need particular cards or color hosers to beat flexible decks, you need to figure out what it is they're trying to do and attack that. The answer to what this threat is really asking (or should be) can be found here:
http://www.starcitygames.com/magic/l...trategies.html
This was written shortly after the Misstep era but the fundamental point is still as true as it was back then.
The reason blue is so powerful in Legacy is that you can easily splash blue even if you don't plan on being base blue, the fact that combo is a factor (making countermagic a good thing to have) and the fact that what blue does better than everybody else by design (library manipulation) is something most strategies will want to have access to. Printing something like Green Sun's Zenith was a great step in the right direction by WotC, now we only need consistency-enabling cards in other colors that are on a similar level to that. Give them some time and they'll hopefully come up with something.
Looking at the results of the latest GPs and SCG tournaments, the format is definitely healthy, varied and far less blue dominated than it has been for a while. Honestly speaking even the perceived dominance of RUG is much more of a scg echo chamber effect on the American metagame than anything else. If you plan on performing well in a tournament, just looking at results you can reasonably choose among a ton of different strategies, to wit:
MonoG Aggro-Combo (Elves)
RedsplashX AggroBoardcontrol (Goblins)
UB or UR two card combo: Reanimator/Show and Tell
UBr or 4c storm combo: PiFAnt/TES
5 color graveyard combo: Dredge
RUG aggrocontrol/tempo: Canadian Thresh
UR Aggro: UR Delver
U tribal tempo: Merfolk
UW(b) aggro-control: the different Blade decks
UW(x) hard control: MiracleCounterTop
RG combo: Belcher
GW Midrange/Prison: Maverick
GWB Midrange: Junk
not to mention a ton of decks that perform once in a while and may or may not be good enough to be considered top tier but that simply aren't played by enough players to actually tell how good they are such as Sam Black's Zombies, Lands, Pox, Death and Taxes, MUD, Deadguy Ale, Bant and a host of others I'm forgetting.
In short, yes, chances are your pet deck isn't beating all the decks with some blue cards in them. The same is true for all the decks with some white, green, black or red cards in them. That shouldn't come as much of a surprise given the strategic diversity among all those archetypes and the fact that most Legacy decks run somewhere between two and three colors. Pet decks need a lot of tuning, exceptional playskill and the discovery of some synergy that is strong enough to crack Legacy's power level threshold but that nobody else has found yet. Obviously that doesn't happen all that often.
Last edited by Mon,Goblin Chief; 07-24-2012 at 10:50 AM.
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Carsten, I agree with you 100% but some of us said the exact same things on page 1-2 and got blown off by ignorant stff headedness and claims of blue player masturbations. I even gave the example of trying to hate out Spiral Tide by boarding in Chokes and even if such simple, glaring, real life examples don't make some people think "yeah, that's kind of dumb..." I don't think it's worth your time to try to explain the fundemental flaws in that perception.
Well, if at least one player listens and learns, my words have done some good. No need to succumb to and accept ignorance just because it is persistent. Gotta keep fighting the good fight :p
As for hating Spiral Tide with Choke, believe it or not that can work extremely well. Sure, if you board Choke in any random deck with Forests and think that fixes your High Tide matchup, you're probably dead. Out of Maverick with its Thalias and Thorn of Amethysts, Choke is the perfect nail in the coffin because it complements the prison approach Maverick has in that matchup. I should know, I nearly despaired testing a modified High Tide build against that set up postboard ;)
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First they need to catch me tapped out on my own turn
And I think this is the problem. To need a heavy influence on one color (actually one card: FoW) so the format doesn't colapse feels just wrong. MM proved that WotC knew this, but they made a mistake with the execution. W has counters, so why don't they print MD counters for white, that can be played on T0? And why shouldn't B have a way to fight cantrips outside of simply bad cards, when every strategy has anti cards?
Running FoW automatically means you aren't "splashing" blue, it's generally your main color. Even if you aren't, running a set of 8 blue cantrips + 8-10 other blue spells isn't a "splash". When you look at these decks on SCGs helpful pie chart, the majority of the chart tends to be blue in the decks that run blue, barring a few corner cases like Dredge. Blue plays well with blue. You generally want the full package, not a "splash".The reason blue is so powerful in Legacy is that you can easily splash blue
The main color in RUG isn't R or G. Those are both support colors. Remove them, and you can transplant the shell into another deck. Remove blue, and you have the skeleton of a shitty Sligh deck.
The reason blue is so strong is simple. The package of 8 cantrips, including the best cantrip ever, + 4 FOW + cheap counters is an amazing, consistent thing to build around. You then add assorted other great blue spells to fuel FoW and forward your strategy (Jace, Clique, S&T, whatever). And end up with by far the strongest, best performing core in Legacy.
Pretending that the dominance of such a package is the result of "echo chamber" or "people don't get it" is just so much handwaving. This isn't just SCG either. Every single Legacy Grand Prix in the past 4 years has been won by a deck packing a blue core with 4x Brainstorm, bar one. The one deck that didn't was... Merfolk.
Bardo, Site AdminNowhere do you see: Efficient Answers to Other Cards. Force and MMS will never be banned. Deal.
could please explain what do you consider as a blue core in a deck ?
because if we only take as example the most recent GP, your argument is not correct : the winner storm deck is clearly a black core (+45% of the non lands cards) splashing blue, far from a "blue core" definition to me. Exagerating and amalgamating are the basis of incorrect analysis.
Blue brings to the format a technical & skilly way of play. Counters are blue because it always has been so since the beginning, a bit like discard is black, huge trample beast are green, best removal ever are white or burn are red. We could also provide to any effect to any colors and totaly twist what mtg is. But at this point, I'm really not sure that's what competitive players wants. And if not, what about to let the meta to belcher kind of deck, and let's see how is it fun (no offense to belcher pilot though, it is a deck that deserve respect but a moderated quantity is better imo)
This is a fantastic argument, I agree with it 100%. I was thinking that, in general, decks that use Life from the Loam are great against blue decks. It isn't strictly anti-blue, it just has a way of making blue spells less relevant.
Maverick plays such a consistent game plan that disrupting one part of it doesn't hose the deck. 'Good stuff', in general, is a good plan against blue. When all of the parts are good by themselves but get incrementally better together it becomes a difficult situation for traditional blue decks to handle. Force of Will is after all card disadvantage, strictly speaking. I would say that one of the best blue strategies right now is the use of Jace. He creates so much advantage that using Force is offset.
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