[Article] Eternal Europe – Get Back Into The Helvault Already

[Megadeus]

My buddy plays the deck. He has 4-0'd FNM twice in a row

[Smmenen]

I already addressed you, don't be facetious.

You addressed me? How?

I enjoy playing in a format with Griselbrand. I think it makes games more fun, not less. And games more strategically interesting, not less.

[Koby]

I enjoy playing in a format with Griselbrand. I think it makes games more fun, not less. And games more strategically interesting, not less.

I'm not really understanding how turn one or two kills makes games strategic. Care to elaborate how the non-FoW decks can strategically interact with a Griselbrand deck that packs discard, countermagic, or bounce? (some cases all three: see Reanimator)

[Smmenen]

What does turns have to do with strategy? I don't see a relationship between the number of turns per game and how strategically interesting they are.

I'm not a turn fetishist.

[Koby]

What does turns have to do with strategy? I don't see a relationship between the number of turns per game and how strategically interesting they are.

I'm not a turn fetishist.

More to the point:
What strategy is there if you don't have a turn to take?
Please tell me how playing against Belcher, Rogue hermit, et al shows any semblance of strategy.

[AEnesidem]

What does turns have to do with strategy? I don't see a relationship between the number of turns per game and how strategically interesting they are.

I'm not a turn fetishist.

I agree with Koby. There is a clear relation between the number of turns and the strategical content of a game. The decks in question are looking to reduce interaction that automaticly implies reduction of strategy. You have only one plan against combo: keeping a hand full of disruption and try to set up a clock. If you fail at that you'll probably lose. That's not something i'd call strategically interesting. Don't get me wrong i don't hate combo in general, i just feel the griselbrand decks are easier to pilot than most combo decks and their raw power makes up for the player's lack of skill. I don't see anything beneficial for the format in that.

[Smmenen]

More to the point:
What strategy is there if you don't have a turn to take?

Well, you have to survive first. Which means that every deck's strategy should have ways to interact either before the game or on turn one. Most decks do:

Leylines of the Void, Leyline of Sanctity, Leyline of Singularity, Force, Duress, Misd, Mindbreak Trap, Faerie Macabre, Disrupting Shoal, Mental Misstep (before it was banned), Inquisition of Kozilek, Thoughtseize, etc, etc. On the draw you can use things like Gemstone Caverns as well.

Please tell me how playing against Belcher, Rogue hermit, et al shows any semblance of strategy.

Each of those decks have a game plan. That game plan is, by definition, a strategy. That plan involves accomplishing a set of strategic objectives while implementing methods to slow or stop the opponent from interfering with them.

[Smmenen]

I agree with Koby. There is a clear relation between the number of turns and the strategical content of a game. The decks in question are looking to reduce interaction that automaticly implies reduction of strategy. You have only one plan against combo: keeping a hand full of disruption and try to set up a clock. If you fail at that you'll probably lose. That's not something i'd call strategically interesting.

The problem is that that's a generalization. Your lumping all combo decks together. Each of these combo decks can be attaced in different ways. Leyline of the Void is pretty devastating against Rogue Hermit. Not so against other combo decks.

Take it from the other way: adding more turns to the game does not increase strategic diversity. in fact, it has the same potential to reverse it - which is why i think there is no clear correlation. If you were to mandate 10 turn games, that's a bias in favor of control decks.

One other point: turns per game aren't the proper metric. That's because turns per game don't matter. What matter is matches.

If a player has no opportunity to interact during a match, that's a problem. During a game? That doesn't matter. You'll always have an opportunity to have at least one turn per match, even if you lose the die roll.

[Lemnear]

The moment Legacy seriously needs Gemstone Caverns to interact with a strategy, even I would jump on the Ban-Wagon. Thankfully it's not the case

[Smmenen]

There are plenty of ways to interact right now. People in this format need to play more Flusterstorm, for starters. that helps tremendously against Show and Tell.

I just don't think that turns per game has any relation to anything relevant in this discussion. It's not the speed of griselbrand decks people don't like, -- it's the ease with which it seems like they can be accomplished.

[ESG]

Don't fix what ain't broke.

Finn, the problem is defining what constitutes a problem. Plenty of people took the win-rate data and SCG dominance of Survival as an indication of a problem, and more people agreed over time as Survival decks continued to dominate. Mental Misstep totally warped the format to the point where it was basically an auto-include in any deck, which a lot of people saw as a problem. Regardless of how powerful or format-warping a strategy is, there will always be defenders who claim there is no problem. I'm curious: What would you like WOTC's banning standard to be, and have you ever advocated a ban in Legacy?

I don't see how we are talking about banning a creature that has to be cheated into play.

The discussion of brokenness concerns Griselbrand because it's the constant "I win" button across many decks, not just Tin Fins, and there are a number of ways to cheat it into play, which makes the card inherently difficult to fight. (Grave hate obviously doesn't work against Sneak Attack, etc.) As Carsten outlined, even having an answer to Griselbrand often doesn't change the result, which is that Griselbrand hits the board and you lose. Obviously, this is not a 100 percent certainty, but it's safe to say that the majority of the time Griselbrand enters play, the game is effectively over, either because you die immediately or because the controller gets to free-roll Force of Wills to stop whatever your response is, or because it sets up the lethal combo next turn regardless of whether Griselbrand is still on the board.

Show and Tell is a card that scales in power with the ridiculousness it's cheating into play. Before Omniscience, Griselbrand, and Emrakul, this was probably Progenitus and Dream Halls, which obviously had a lower power level. A good argument could be made that Show and Tell deserves banning more than Griselbrand does, much as people argued that Vengevine should have gotten the ax instead of Survival.

Don't forget the obvious point that he dies to Swords to Plowshares. What a chump. I mean, assuming you have all 4 of your Swords to Plowshares.

And the mana to cast all of them.

I disagree with the premise of the article that Griselbrand makes games unfun. I think it makes games more fun and the format more fun.

Not the most surprising of opinions. Griselbrand belongs in Vintage.

[AEnesidem]

The problem is that that's a generalization. Your lumping all combo decks together. Each of these combo decks can be attacked in different ways. Leyline of the Void is pretty devastating against Rogue Hermit. Not so against other combo decks.

Take it from the other way: adding more turns to the game does not increase strategic diversity. in fact, it has the same potential to reverse it - which is why i think there is no clear correlation. If you were to mandate 10 turn games, that's a bias in favor of control decks.

One other point: turns per game aren't the proper metric. That's because turns per game don't matter. What matter is matches.

If a player has no opportunity to interact during a match, that's a problem. During a game? That doesn't matter. You'll always have an opportunity to have at least one turn per match, even if you lose the die roll.

You are using different cards but the strategy is still just mulliganing to the cards you need to stop them. LotV is another one of those stupid cards that i dislike. There's nothing strategical about that apart from making mulligan decisions. You are right it's maybe not the turns, but the interactions. These decks evade as much interaction as possible, blanking most cards of your deck. This reduces strategical value. From all the options you would normally have and al the decisions you could normally make, only a handful remain. You have 1 plan, you search for 1 or 2 kind of cards and if it fails you lose. Sure there's strategy in knowing which card you take away with your thoughtseize and which one you counter with force but that's about it.
I'm not saying all combo decks are bad for the game and should be banned, but your point of griselbrand bringing more depth to the format is just unacceptable. Griselbrand opens up very simple 2 card strategies with lots of protection which can win from anyone no matter how skilled he/she is. It's not the first time i hear someone complain (and i see it at my local meta) that unskilled players who always ended at the bottom suddenly reach top 8 every friday since they play SnT. Ofcourse you'll notice the difference between a skilled SnT player and one without any skill but the strategy just walks over a lot of decks and walks over any opponent who drew less than 2 discard spells or less than 2 counterspells. Games where you opponent goes: SnT, i pierce, they force, i force and they misdirect aren't strategical. Games where they get a sneak attack in play and wait till they topdeck a fatty aren't skillful and they don't add any value to the legacy metagame.

Ultimately Griselbrand decks push other combo decks to the back of the format. They are easier to pilot than storm, elves, dredge etc... and have more raw power. Combo has alwasy traded safety for power. Combo decks are fragile, require precision and are easy to hate out but are extremely powerful and trample anything that doesn't have enough answers. With griselbrand/emrakul we have created an archetype that isn't easily hated out, has enough protection to answer any possible hate and breaks that skill/fragility barier that kept combo decks acceptable. I don't say griselbrand absolutely needs to be banned as it's not warping the format to the point that everyone is playing griselbrand but i wouldn't mind seeing it go. To me Griselbrand has just dumbed down combo and reduced the fun of the format because i know that no matter how well i play i'll possibly lose to some random guy with SnT who just drew a counter more than me.

[phazonmutant]

It seems like there's a lot of butthurt in this thread from people who refuse to pilot Griselbrand decks and then claim there's no skill.
How about this: I think that a trained monkey can pilot Jund. Esper Stoneblade hasalmost no capacity to punish mistakes. RUG Delver rewards exactly 1 skill - cantripping. Look, there's a bunch of punishing decks in legacy that can lock you out or kill you turn 1, and a lot of them don't require a lot of skill to play unopposed.

I've played most every variety of U deck in tournaments and most every non-U deck in testing. I think there's value in almost every deck, and claiming that Storm is skillful while "Griselbrand" (whatever archetype that is) is not is just closed-minded.

AEnesidem - if you think the "Griselbrand archetype" is skill-less, I challenge you to play Griselbrand in a tournament, and you tell me what deck you play so I can try it out. I bet you I'll do better with your archetype than you do with mine just because you don't have experience with it and it requires a different skillset than most other magic.
Games where Thresh gets Delver -> flip -> Waste + Stifle aren't strategic for the majority of decks either. Games where Counterbalance gets BS -> CB -> Top with Force backup aren't strategic for a majority of decks. See also MUD, Dragon Stompy, Belcher, etc. There's plenty of Legacy matchups and draws that aren't very strategic, but the overwhelming majority have a number of decision points that will influence the outcome of the game.

It sounds like you need to learn to make better sideboarding and mulliganing decisions.

So it sounds like the debate is really the same as the eternal Dredge vs. "real magic" debate. Sure, Dredge is easy to pilot, but only if you don't face hate. I think it's very interesting that the rules of magic are deep enough to allow such a fundamentally different deck to exist. It punishes people who haven't learned or aren't smart enough to think on that axis of interaction. Griselbrand decks are similar (but less extreme).

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

Except for manual dexterity and ante cards, there really isn't a card that "absolutely needs" to be banned though. You could unban every other card on the banned list tomorrow and there would still be different decklists I suppose.

The problem in these discussions is that there seems to be taken as a given that some card needs to be absolutely unanswerable in order to be banned, and that's obviously not the case. Of course when a card's already banned, peoples' status quo bias kicks in and they can justify it, but like, people were arguing about how Hulk-Flash was a fair deck. If a card is played someone will want to ban it, but some people will also never agree that a card should be banned, no matter how it affects the metagame.

So really, if you say a card should or shouldn't be banned that ought to come from a place of knowing what you think the Legacy metagame should look like in terms of diversity and power level, roughly speaking. Like Smennen, I'm assuming, would be perfectly okay with a Legacy with lots of combo and few if any non-blue decks. Maybe others would prefer to go back to 2005, 2006 when combo was just unplayable.

Personally? Survival of the Fittest was a really cool card that created whole new viable archetypes and supported an entire ecosystem of cards that otherwise have seen no play, but were viable in that archetype. It led to a lot of interesting games and situations. Contrariwise, I find the Show and Tell decks boring as fuck, dumb-easy to play and can't imagine shedding a tear if the card were banned tomorrow.

[AEnesidem]

It seems like there's a lot of butthurt in this thread from people who refuse to pilot Griselbrand decks and then claim there's no skill.
How about this: I think that a trained monkey can pilot Jund. Esper Stoneblade hasalmost no capacity to punish mistakes. RUG Delver rewards exactly 1 skill - cantripping. Look, there's a bunch of punishing decks in legacy that can lock you out or kill you turn 1, and a lot of them don't require a lot of skill to play unopposed.

I've played most every variety of U deck in tournaments and most every non-U deck in testing. I think there's value in almost every deck, and claiming that Storm is skillful while "Griselbrand" (whatever archetype that is) is not is just closed-minded.

AEnesidem - if you think the "Griselbrand archetype" is skill-less, I challenge you to play Griselbrand in a tournament, and you tell me what deck you play so I can try it out. I bet you I'll do better with your archetype than you do with mine just because you don't have experience with it and it requires a different skillset than most other magic.
Games where Thresh gets Delver -> flip -> Waste + Stifle aren't strategic for the majority of decks either. Games where Counterbalance gets BS -> CB -> Top with Force backup aren't strategic for a majority of decks. See also MUD, Dragon Stompy, Belcher, etc. There's plenty of Legacy matchups and draws that aren't very strategic, but the overwhelming majority have a number of decision points that will influence the outcome of the game.

It sounds like you need to learn to make better sideboarding and mulliganing decisions.

So it sounds like the debate is really the same as the eternal Dredge vs. "real magic" debate. Sure, Dredge is easy to pilot, but only if you don't face hate. I think it's very interesting that the rules of magic are deep enough to allow such a fundamentally different deck to exist. It punishes people who haven't learned or aren't smart enough to think on that axis of interaction. Griselbrand decks are similar (but less extreme).

i don't think you read my whole post. I clearly said that a skilled player piloting SnT makes a difference, and other griselbrand players seem to take my post personally. I'm not saying YO are unskilled. I'm saying that SnT has so much raw power that even bad players can win with it and that makes it unfun. Im' not someone who easily whines about cards and i really dislike the thought of banning cards. However, i just shared my own opinion here and my opinion is that i'd like to see griselbrand be banned becaue I think that he is unfun and can cause unskillful games.
You know what let me rephrase something. Saying SnT is skilless is indeed wrong. I'll say it like this: The deck enables wins where skill wasn't needed and therefore causes mediocre players to walk over better players which i find unfair and unfun. I never said it was the only deck. Some guy who just entered legacy and has only been playing casually for about 2 years frequently goes 3-1 at the LGS with his GB infect deck. He plays the format for about a month now and while he isn't bad he knows nothing of the format and has no experience whatsoever. His deck just enables some free wins because when the opponent doesnt find an answer he simply wins. That doesn't mean all infect players are skilless. That means infect enables some stupid wins where no skill was involved. SnT is the same but bigger badder and stronger.

I wasn't saying Griselbrand absiolutely needs to be banned. I was explaining why I find that Griselbrand makes the format Less interesting and not more interesting. You don't have to agree, just don't get hostile about it.

P.S.: yes i'm an average player at best. I certainly make a lot of mistakes, but i know when i lose because of my own decisions. I'm not stupid either. And no i'm not butthurt, I have only played against SnT twice with my own deck when i just started out in legacy, and my record against tin fins is currently 4-2 in matches.

[Malchar]

The moment Legacy seriously needs Gemstone Caverns to interact with a strategy, even I would jump on the Ban-Wagon.

Yea, god forbid that people actually try playing different cards or adapt their strategy at all.

[menace13]

An article on 2 out of 3 of the most hated cards on this site....

Yeah, because infi threads are never enough.

Also, obligatory Brainstorm. Discuss.

[Malchar]

I just read over Finn's article on the mystical tutor ban, and I got to thinking. Does anyone have any insight as to whether or not SCG or another non-Wizards organization might create a separate banlist for a series of unsanctioned tournaments? It seems like at some point people will get sufficiently upset with the DCI banlist that these unsanctioned events would become profitable.

For any given card, people seem to have pretty strong opinions one way or another on whether or not it should be banned. With the legacy player base booming, why not break it off into multiple different formats so everyone can get what they want? You could have a "season" worth of tournaments with a particular banlist, and then change it up for the next season, or have multiple lists active at once. It might be a little chaotic, but you'd still have the consistency of the DCI banlist at all the sanctioned events. Besides, the meta seems to get ruffled with every new standard expansion anyway, so it wouldn't be changing much faster than normal.

Lacking that, you can still have banlists or "house rules" with respect to your local playgroup. With the rise of cube and edh, local casual groups are probably the future of the game rather than these large expensive tournaments which aren't necessarily much more fun than playing with your local group.

[damionblackgear]

Lacking that, you can still have banlists or "house rules" with respect to your local playgroup. With the rise of cube and edh, local casual groups are probably the future of the game rather than these large expensive tournaments which aren't necessarily much more fun than playing with your local group.

I'm against this mainly because I wouldn't be able to meet as many drinking buddies as I have since the SCG thing began. If there were more for legacy, I'd be all for that. If they want to make their own B&R lists, that's fine too (provided they leave my fair deck alone) but don't take my large tournaments.

[Rune]

@Carsten

First of all, thanks for not mentioning TinFins. Secondly, I hated the article. I don't really care if Griselbrand gets banned, but I thought a number of your arguments were just bad.

#1 This is the strongest argument. The fact is that Griselbrand is just a functionally better Bargain. You don't need anything other than this to build a case for banning him. I guess the question then becomes if Bargain should be on the banned list in the first place. If Griselbrand has been around for this long without well and truly messing everything up, I think you might as well unban Bargain. Banned cards often tend to be written off as "fuckbusted", but then when most of them are unbanned they end up doing absolutely nothing (Metalworker, Land Tax, Grim Monolith, Dream Halls..)

#2 I wish you hadn't said this, since I think it's just stupid and ignorant. This kind of “holier than thou” nonsense is typically something that lesser players have to resort to in order to not feel shitty about themselves when they lose. Yes, Griselbrand decks are generally less complicated to play than storm decks, but you're grossly exaggerating. If it was as easy as you seem to think, I can guarantee you that A LOT more people would be doing it. The truth is that the room for error is still very, very small and there are hard decisions to be made. Just like you, I'm also kinda sad that storm isn't the best combo archetype anymore. When Survival was legal I thought it was unfair that the “dumber” combo deck also happened to be the best one, but in hindsight that really shouldn't be a reason to ban it.

#3 Agree, Griselbrand has increased S&T's power level by a lot and made it harder to interact with, but clearly it is not unbeatable by any stretch of the imagination. There hasn't even been a single copy of Griselbrand in any Legacy GP top 8 to date. I think part of the reason is that the card is just underplayed and perhaps that many people punt in deck building, but the other reason is that it CAN be hated out and interacted with to a large extent. Reanimator had a huge target on its head going into GP Atlanta, but people came prepared by jamming Gilded Drakes, Humilities, Surgical Extractions and Angel of Despairs into their sideboards. Overall the hate cards against S&T could be a bit better, but in the end it's really just up to you to decide whether or not you want to be steam-rolled by Griselbrand.

Also, in your old article on Mental Misstep your take-home message is literally, “Until next time don't whine. Just figure out how to beat them." This seems hypocritical in light of this new article. I'm guessing this only applies to the cards you like playing with, or how should this be interpreted? We don't all think that countering every spell the opponent plays and then casting a Jace is some kind of intellectual pinnacle.

#4 Really? Seems like you don't have anything to back this up with. I find it kind of funny that you argued defiantly against the ban on Mental Misstep when there was widespread agreement that it made the format miserable, but now you use this “public opinion" argument (for which you have no evidence) on a card where opinions seem to be much more divided.