I'm trying to think of a home for Humility in a different way, and thinking of creatures that "work"/can "work" even with it out. So far I've got Painter's Servant, Magus of the Moon, and things like Batterskull and Mishra's Factory. Am I missing any Legacy-playable cards?
It's a hard card to justify. Terminus and Rest in Peace both more-or-less do everything it does, and both cost much less mana. I have a singleton in my side in Enchantress to deal with Sneak and Show decks -- the only place it really shines, in my opinion, since it turns off Grizzlebees -- but every other creature-based problem I run into either is better solved by other cards (DRS and goyf are solved by RIP, which is also a combo piece; "things that attack" is better solved by Sphere / Confinement / Elephant Grass; annoying hate-bears are better handled by judicious O-Rings, etc.)
Even in something like landstill, Humility's awful close to the "too cute" line; Terminus is still a thing, and it's not like you won't be running some form of Scroll Rack / SDT / Brainstorm, etc., in that deck.
I suspect that, if there was a deck that could really abuse it, it'd probably a) feature a lot of token generation, and b) would likely use Intangible Virtue at some point in its development. Some form of BW tokens comes to mind; a midrange deck that generates small, disposable dudes in which Humility would lock down a game, rather than stall. (... speaking of too cute and BW, I kinda like the interaction with Tidehollow Sculler and Humility.)
The proper plural must be "hall of fames." You wouldn't say Halls & Oate, now, would you?
Originally Posted by Mewens
I feel like most people itt have never actually seen Humility enter play.
For my confessions, they burned me with fire/
And found I was for endurance made
To answer the question:
Because card and deck building decisions are not made in a vacuum of pure reason, but respond to trends of what's popular or what's won recently for the most part, and Humility is simply one of the potentially powerful cards that isn't heavily tested, of which there are many (and this is true especially of cards with higher mana costs.)
It might also not be very good in the current meta, but this is not the primary reason why it doesn't see play, the primary reason is no one is interested in trying.
For my confessions, they burned me with fire/
And found I was for endurance made
Sounds like you want to run the Layer 7B deck
Ha, classic deck.
C'mon, IBA, you can do better than to sidestep the issue like that. Of course most players aren't pushing the bleeding edge; that's always been true, for every format. But you've been here long enough to know that there's plenty of bright and inquisitive minds who test out all kinds of crazy brews in Legacy. And, isn't Humility exactly the kind of card that draws those types in? A unique effect that breaks all kinds of rules?
In any case, I'll stand by my assertion that control generally wants Terminus instead of Humility -- in miracles, the only real white-heavy long-term control deck in the format that can afford to turn off critter abilities, W to wipe the board now is generally better than 4: Forcefield the board except equipment. Similarly, RIP is a better generic hate card; it's far cheaper, hits many of the same notes that Humility does ('goyf, mongoose and DRS, right?) while having more general utility. (I'll grant that green is waning in the format, which makes RIP a less-powerful anti-dude option.)
But the real problem, imo, is Stoneforge Mystic. (And, yeah, I get this is all theorycrafting. I haven't seriously tested Humility in at least three years; RIP has almost completely replaced it in my enchantress decks.) SFM is 2 mana cheaper and ignores most of Humility's effects (Batterskull's a 5/5 vigilance lifelinker under Humility, Jitte wrecks all the dudes under Humility, Sword of x and y is a 3/3 protection-from-you dork w/ bennies, etc.), and she's in heavy rotation at the moment.
Anyway, I can imagine that there's a deck where Humility will be face-wrecking. And we're in a weird place -- as creatures continue their upward climb, Humility will only become more potent. It's just that, at 4 mana, it's more of an end-game card, rather than the kind of stall-the-board card we're used to thinking of it as.
The proper plural must be "hall of fames." You wouldn't say Halls & Oate, now, would you?
With a little commitment you might be able to drop it on T2 quite often. Think of sol-lands and Chrome Moxes. And with that kind of manabase, you might also want to run Chalice of the Void in the maindeck. Either you drop CotV on T1 to slow your opponent down until you can drop Humility or you just drop Humility anyway on T2.
Also, to further your mana development you might want to splash green for Crop Rotation. Rotate a Flagstones of Trokair and you're up an extra land (perhaps find a next Flagstone + a sol-land), speeding up your mana development quite nicely.
I play it in control and it's absurd. It's good against TNN amd Show and Tell especially, alongside Reanimator etc. It's also a tutorable 4-drop, and it's even good against little Creatures decks like DnT, Goblins, and Elves, as 1-mana 1/1's aren't as scary as 1-mana actual guys.
I have also had it in a Bant build with Shardless Agent, Stoneforge Mystic, and Thoptor Sword. In a world of 1/1's, the person with the most wins.
The conspiracy goes deeper than you might think.Can I pay you for not posting in this thread?
Uh.
I think you are presuming an awful lot about what I know.
There's actually very few people that are committed long-term to rigorously testing and pushing viable decks outside of the bounds of currently popular archetypes. And fewer who are good at it.
I mean like there was this crazy moment when I was watching an SCG Open the other week because Bob Huang was in the top 8, and the commentors were talking about like Team America or Canadian Thresh or something as a "generic" Legacy deck.
Of course back in 2005, you had people calling the decks that would become the u/g tempo decks "Miracle Gro." I remember Adam, who was relatively positive, still talking about it like, "Portent? Daze? Nimble Mongoose? It's no joke, folks!"
People pretty routinely underestimate the amount of dedication it takes to actually break ground in Legacy, including learning how to play against multiple decks and actually piloting the deck through numerous tournaments, getting others on board to help test and develop strategies.
That's why you don't see much actual movement in archetypes over time, and most people drift to the same circle-jerky echo chamber SCG grinder decks with 1x Vendilion Clique etc..
The two cards aren't actually at all in the same role.In any case, I'll stand by my assertion that control generally wants Terminus instead of Humility
You know you can play the two in the same deck, right?But the real problem, imo, is Stoneforge Mystic. (And, yeah, I get this is all theorycrafting. I haven't seriously tested Humility in at least three years; RIP has almost completely replaced it in my enchantress decks.) SFM is 2 mana cheaper and ignores most of Humility's effects (Batterskull's a 5/5 vigilance lifelinker under Humility, Jitte wrecks all the dudes under Humility, Sword of x and y is a 3/3 protection-from-you dork w/ bennies, etc.), and she's in heavy rotation at the moment.
I don't know what you mean by this. Humility has always been and been viewed as a back-breaker.Anyway, I can imagine that there's a deck where Humility will be face-wrecking. And we're in a weird place -- as creatures continue their upward climb, Humility will only become more potent. It's just that, at 4 mana, it's more of an end-game card, rather than the kind of stall-the-board card we're used to thinking of it as.
For my confessions, they burned me with fire/
And found I was for endurance made
And is incredibly synergistic as well!
Are you into Jazz? Have a look at the Lp's I have for sale on Discogs!
When I first read the thread title, I thought to myself "The Source is no place for Humility"
Depends when the equip was in relation to when humility entered the battlefield. The creature doesn't automatically have those abilities.
Humility should see more play, the card is ridiculously strong and creates games states a lot of decks aren't prepared to deal with. There are several circumstances where it functions completely different from terminus, and with those in mind I'm going to agree with IBA here.
Matt Bevenour in real life
The abilities depend on the order in case of batterskull and sword of x and y, but the p/t is always correct. It also doesn't affect jitte.
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The only abilities on the three big equipment groups hit by Humility are vigilance, lifelink and protection. Everything else on swords and Jitte are always on, and I think we can all agree that, if everyone's pegged you to Humility, they'll try to engineer a situation in which their equipment is doing what they need it to do (ie, if they need protection: x, they'll re-equip it after the Humility if at all possible.)
@IBA -- My point wasn't that everyone's breaking the format every week; my point is that there are people out there who are constantly tinkering and attacking the format at new angles. It doesn't matter that most of us are schlubs; you only need a few players to champion a strong idea before it becomes canon. (I mean, didn't The Source's own Finn champion D+T and pioneer Chalice aggro? Even if you think new printings are what made D+T viable, don't you think 5ish years of pushing Karakas and Mangara provided a fertile ground for its evolution?)
And yeah, you're right -- when Miracle-Gro was rocking Quirion Dryad and Werebear, it looked like a pile, but it was amazing. And here's the funny thing that underlines my point -- it wasn't playing Daze! That came along much later; I was an early adopter on Gro, and the early arguments were much more about Mystic Enforcer vs. Fledgling Dragon and whether a red splash was better than Meddling Mage. Without someone digging into (what seemed like) obviously terrible counterspells, I might still be playing 4-mana conditional threats.
Re: SFM in the same deck as Humility: You certainly can do that, and it's probably a natural place to begin brewing. It's still worth noting that you'll be seeing a ton of other SFMs, and that they directly undermine your plan. I mean, what's Humility supposed to be battling, exactly? Opposing duders, right? And if many duder decks are running SFM ... it just seems like we're jumping through a lot of hoops to get everyone back to parity, doesn't it?
Quick edit: And it seems I'm misunderstood here re: Terminus and Humility. My point is that, in the existing classic control deck – Miracles – Humility and Terminus would be doing the same thing: directly nixing existing dudes. Terminus suits that deck's needs _much_ better than Humility; while both cards give you a cushion of time, Humility doesn't protect Jace 2.0 and it puts you off the powerful creature plan of Venser / Clique. Of course Humility can be more than a stall tactic when it's in the right shell, but existing control archetypes simply can't use it that way.
The proper plural must be "hall of fames." You wouldn't say Halls & Oate, now, would you?
No. Haven't almost all the lists cut Mangara by now? I think that was an accident. And no, Faerie Stompy was like the third iteration of Chalice Aggro. Also, it is not a good deck and probably never was. If it was it was for a very brief window of time. Chalice aggro is probably a good example of a niche archetype that needed people really dedicated to pushing and developing it, but given that it's never quite panned out that just highlights how difficult this is.
Oh my fucking God you better not try to lecture me on the history of Threshold.And yeah, you're right -- when Miracle-Gro was rocking Quirion Dryad and Werebear, it looked like a pile, but it was amazing. And here's the funny thing that underlines my point -- it wasn't playing Daze!
No. The first good lists of UGx Thresh lists were running Daze. Not Quirion Dryad though.
Right, it wasn't good until the Hatfields and Ian MacInnes tinkered around and found cards like Daze and Portent. People still thought it was just Miracle Gro for a while though.That came along much later; I was an early adopter on Gro, and the early arguments were much more about Mystic Enforcer vs. Fledgling Dragon and whether a red splash was better than Meddling Mage. Without someone digging into (what seemed like) obviously terrible counterspells, I might still be playing 4-mana conditional threats.
I guess if you're also running a bunch of TNNs and Snapcaster Mages.Re: SFM in the same deck as Humility: You certainly can do that, and it's probably a natural place to begin brewing. It's still worth noting that you'll be seeing a ton of other SFMs, and that they directly undermine your plan. I mean, what's Humility supposed to be battling, exactly? Opposing duders, right? And if many duder decks are running SFM ... it just seems like we're jumping through a lot of hoops to get everyone back to parity, doesn't it?
I am pretty sure Humility is more powerful as a plan than Clique. It's not a direct answer to particular creatures though, you still need other cards to deal with them, it just means creatures can no longer break the balance of power effectively.Quick edit: And it seems I'm misunderstood here re: Terminus and Humility. My point is that, in the existing classic control deck – Miracles – Humility and Terminus would be doing the same thing: directly nixing existing dudes. Terminus suits that deck's needs _much_ better than Humility; while both cards give you a cushion of time, Humility doesn't protect Jace 2.0 and it puts you off the powerful creature plan of Venser / Clique. Of course Humility can be more than a stall tactic when it's in the right shell, but existing control archetypes simply can't use it that way.
For my confessions, they burned me with fire/
And found I was for endurance made
Excellent, so we can agree that there are people who play around in the format. That's all I was trying to say -- that there are a few dedicated people who play constantly AND try new things out. You're 100% right that metagames aren't completely efficient, that they don't happen in a purely logical vacuum, but that doesn't mean that metagames are completely devoid of new ideas. That's all I was trying to say (on that front, at least). People are innovating, even if it's an uphill climb, so "It's because of the sheeples!" simply doesn't hold that much water for me.
On the original topic -- if you were to start somewhere with Humility, where would it go? I'm still pretty sure that Humility doesn't have a natural home in any of the current decks -- I still don't see it operating well in a deck like Miracles, and I'm confident it's subpar (or niche) in any deck that wants to run Energy Field or Solitary Confinement. So where does that leave us? I've already volunteered some kind of BW tokens shell for it, where you're minimally affected; others have suggested some kind of neo-Landstill. Where would you start?
The proper plural must be "hall of fames." You wouldn't say Halls & Oate, now, would you?
I just thought of something that sounds fun, sort of a lovechild between a prison shell--Dutch Stax with Humility/Moat--and a token deck like this.
Token Stompy
// 4-ofs
Humility
Intangible Virtue
Chalice of the Void
Lingering Souls
Ancient Tomb
// ~3-ofs
Trinisphere
Batterskull
Chrome Mox
City of Traitors
Spectral Procession
// ~2-ofs
Umezawa's Jitte
Elspeth, Knight-Errant
Zealous Persecution
// ~1-ofs
Bitterblossom
Scrublands, Marsh Flats, blah blah blah
// Possibilities and/or Stupid Ideas
Idyllic Tutor
Ratchet Bomb
Vault of the Archangel
Eldrazi Monument
Sorin, Lord of Innistrad
The Abyss
Wasteland
Elspeth Tirel
Gideon Jura
Timely Reinforcements
Kinda wish I had a way to attack their mana base to complement CotV/3sphere...Contamination would be so bad. Wasteland might be OK.
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