[Article]Eternal Europe: Legacy's Nemesis

[TsumiBand]

Great article as always, pretty much sums up my thoughts on TNN. My only nitpick is on your reasoning for it being printed - from MARO's comments I picked up more of a "we printed this for commander and didn't think about any other formats because #YOLO" vibe rather than any kind of well-thought-out reasoning.

Well here's the thing about all the lingo surrounding the printing of the card -- and to an extent, other cards which look and feel like pretty obvious 'plants' in product like EDH sets, Planechase sets, and others -- is that they'll edge right up against saying, "We printed this for Legacy and stuffed it in a secondary product." Like, they say things like, "When we printed Baleful Strix, we did it with the knowledge that it might just end up in Legacy, and we weren't disappointed at what we saw!" There's no definite statement there; maybe might kind of end up somewhere, and however things are going now isn't disappointing, hooray! But it doesn't MEAN anything.

This article goes into how they know that Legacy and Vintage deserve to be kicked a bone every once in a while, and so it goes into the way they "aim at" Eternal, and "hope" that their cards will show up, and so on.

http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazin...g/daily/ld/269

They never actually just say, "This was made for Legacy", but they lean right up against it. And how fortunate; by being clearly uncertain, they can take a variety of stances once the chips fall and the format either absorbs or rejects a card.

"You guys like it? We *totally* made it for Legacy!"
"Oh, don't like it? Well, it wasn't really *for* Legacy."

So it's Schrodinger's card; no matter the result, they just change the nature of their answer today, which retcons their previous statements because they didn't actually make any definite statements, just a lot of wishing and hoping and praying that things might happen and now that we're 'here', no one back at HQ is the least bit surprised or disappointed, because clearly they called it in the air just a couple of articles back.

[Guest2511]

Agree here. It seems to "kill" a lot of decks that are more or less dead already.

Well, Zoo was not Tier 1 anymore. But I'm sure it was playable, Tier 1.5. You went to a tournament and there would be 1-2 guys playing zoo. And they could win with some luck/favourable opposition.

TNN completely kills zoo, as they have no viable (in their strategy) way of dealing with it and the matchup with Delver (and other blue decks) suddenly becomes very bad. I can understand decks fading during a period of time (as was happening with zoo), but a deck being killed because of stupid design is too much. Legacy prides itself on its diversity and should try to maintain some of it. Unfortunately, TNN is not format warping enough for a ban I think.

[Ellomdian]

It's easy to complain about TNN. Obviously there is a lot of noise about this card, and it disappoints me that it seems to have taken some of the hot-seat focus off SnT.

It's hard for many, MANY players to tweak and tune decks when the available card pool is literally... everything. I feel that, in the last 18-24 mos especially, Legacy has been getting a LOT of love from new Standard cards. This means that most of the cards you are building with are modern (or close to it) legal, and many new players have gotten comfortable with it. Most of the best answers to TNN aren't in that comfort zone - Massacre is a BEATING against most of the TNN decks - but because they aren't Decay (given the amount of furor with design around TNN, why didn't this card make more noise...) people don't know how to make them work.

You can have very elegant answers that require a high degree of skill and understanding of match-ups and game flow, or you can have Swords and Decay that require neither.

[dontbiteitholmes]

Well, Zoo was not Tier 1 anymore. But I'm sure it was playable, Tier 1.5. You went to a tournament and there would be 1-2 guys playing zoo. And they could win with some luck/favourable opposition.

TNN completely kills zoo, as they have no viable (in their strategy) way of dealing with it and the matchup with Delver (and other blue decks) suddenly becomes very bad. I can understand decks fading during a period of time (as was happening with zoo), but a deck being killed because of stupid design is too much. Legacy prides itself on its diversity and should try to maintain some of it. Unfortunately, TNN is not format warping enough for a ban I think.

Zoo was NOT Tier 1.5 anytime in the last 12 months. 1-800-CALLING-BS

[Mon,Goblin Chief]

Thanks for reading and sharing everybody, even though I only get around to answering now!

@Lord Seth/Hardcore: The no-testing for Eternal is true and makes a lot of sense. I'd appreciate if they took maybe ten minutes to think about this kind of stuff at least, though. I don't think it should take longer to figure out Nemesis is going to make fair deck games horrible in Legacy if you know how MtG works - which I'm pretty sure RnD does.

The whole it killed Zoo thing: I think Zoo has been pretty dead for a while already (amusingly enough, roughly since they banned Misstep...) but TNN doesn't just hit Zoo. It makes it very likely that any non-UW midrange strategy is suddenly just inferior to Nemesis + Blade, which doesn't sound like the best thing to happen to the format.