[Article] Hard Decks by PVDR

[Koby]

Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa talks about difficult decks, and when you may want to play a simple or difficult deck. He also rates a few sample Legacy decks as examples.

Click here to read the article.

Do you agree with PVDR on his rankings for the decks he chose?
How would you rank deck difficulty?

[bkemke]

I disagree on Death and Taxes, take for example the complexity plays that become open when you have Aether Vial with Flickerwisp as opposed to without vial. When to activate port or cast a spell isn't obvious either.

I do agree about Elves and Storm but I think what's hardest on these decks is sideboarding. You don't want to give up nut draws or dilute to potency of these decks with too much sideboarding.

Great article.

[Vicar in a tutu]

Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa talks about difficult decks, and when you may want to play a simple or difficult deck. He also rates a few sample Legacy decks as examples.

Click here to read the article.

Do you agree with PVDR on his rankings for the decks he chose?
How would you rank deck difficulty?

I have never played Death & Taxes, but it does not strike me as an easy deck to play. I would rate it above Sneak & Show. Watching Tomas Enevoldsen play the deck gave me a lot of respect for it, not just in terms of power, but also complexity.

[TheArchitect]

Death and taxes easier than show and tell. What?

Other than that it was a good article, most of which I find myself agreeing with.

[JPoJohnson]

Good article for sure. I would agree with switching D&T and Sneak/Show's ratings though. I would not agree with saying that Sneak/Show is as difficult to play in Legacy as UWR is in modern (scores fairly similar).

[Technics]

Good article for sure. I would agree with switching D&T and Sneak/Show's ratings though. I would not agree with saying that Sneak/Show is as difficult to play in Legacy as UWR is in modern (scores fairly similar).

I think you can't compare cross format. Part of the score is how well do you need to know the format to play. Thus because Legacy is a much harder format to learn a deck that needs a "5" in format knowledge in Legacy is much harder than a deck that needs a "5" in Standard/Modern. Thus I don't think you can really cross compare.

[ukyo_rulz]

For Legacy decks in particular, I felt that the article focused too much on the first two aspects (decisions, complexity) and not enough on the third (unforgiving). Most Legacy decks are extremely forgiving, just because the cards are so powerful. Sure, it may not be easy to play a tempo deck to perfection, but anyone can play an early threat then use mana denial and countermagic to ensure the opponent never does anything relevant for the rest of the game. Anyone can cast Show & Tell, Natural Order for the win. Anyone can play Putrid Imp turn one and end turn two with his board full of creatures the opponent's hand stripped of anything relevant. Because of this, I think decks like DnT were rated too low and decks like Elves were rated too high.

Basically I wouldn't rate any deck with four or more "I win" cards costing three or less as more than a 2.5 in difficulty rating.

[JPoJohnson]

I think you can't compare cross format. Part of the score is how well do you need to know the format to play. Thus because Legacy is a much harder format to learn a deck that needs a "5" in format knowledge in Legacy is much harder than a deck that needs a "5" in Standard/Modern. Thus I don't think you can really cross compare.

I figured it was a standardized system across formats. Otherwise you couldn't say that standard is a more simple format because the ratings were lower (which is what he did in his article). Since he did that, I figured it was fair to compare.

[joemauer]

I think the ratings are all out of wack.

Elves is not as difficult as Storm. I don't think elves is difficult at all. I would rank elves around Death n Taxes. Like a 3. Death and Taxes has to play tight games to win. Somewhat straightforward but requiring a lot of tight plays.

Sneak n Show should be given a 1. This is the easiest deck in Legacy next to Burn. Oh so many decisions: Should I Show and Tell in Grizzlebrand or Emmy? Hmmm. I have a Force of Will in hand should I use it on my opponent's Fow targeting my Show and Tell? Hmmm. So difficult.

I find Miracles to be an easier deck due to its power level. It is somewhat forgiving when you can topdeck the win. I would rank it around 3 as well.

And Bug is very difficult. I find this to be the toughest tempo deck to play in Legacy. With discard+counters and brainstorm+shuffle effects to choose between the two it can be easy to mess up with. Also, the deck doesn't run a lot of creatures limiting your win conditions. I would give it a 4 at least.

[Lord Seth]

Sneak n Show should be given a 1. This is the easiest deck in Legacy next to Burn. Oh so many decisions: Should I Show and Tell in Grizzlebrand or Emmy? Hmmm. I have a Force of Will in hand should I use it on my opponent's Fow targeting my Show and Tell? Hmmm. So difficult.

Interesting you mention that, considering a friend of mine recently tried out Show and Tell after playing mostly Jund, and they said they thought that Show and Tell required a lot more thinking than Jund.

[lordofthepit]

Death and Taxes is much more difficult to play than Sneak Attack. There might be a lot of decisions to make when you cast cantrips, but as far as Legacy decks go, Sneak Attack is relatively straight forward with fewer decision trees than other decks.

I do agree that Elves and Miracles are very complicated decks, and I actually think Elves makes the most decisions in the course of a game than any other commonly played deck in the format (i.e. not counting the likes of Doomsday, Lands, and Turbo Eldrazi). In addition to what PV described with the "combo" vs. "aggro" plan, the sequencing of creatures/spells matters much more in that deck than in almost any other. You frequently need to do counterintuitive things like wait on your land drop for as long as possible (juggling that with the risk of playing into taxing counters) and hold creatures in your hand. In addition to all that, the board states can get pretty complicated. I don't think I need to elaborate on Miracles.

That being said, unlike something like Storm, if you mess up with Elves or Miracles, your deck is resilient enough to recover. If you screw up with ANT or TES, you might have just gone from a guaranteed win to hellbent with no board. I'd argue that Elves and Miracles are extremely difficult to play optimally, but significantly easier to play "well enough to win".

[sdematt]

After reading the title of the article in a New Zealand accent, I was totally surprised at the content PV included.

Moving along.


In general, I think the article is fine, but the numbers seem a tad weird - I can get behind whole and half integers, but .1? Like what the hell is the difference between a 4.3 and a 4.2? Is it just that teeny percent harder? Does that tiny bit matter?

-Matt

[aahz]

After reading the title of the article in a New Zealand accent, I was totally surprised at the content PV included.

Moving along.


In general, I think the article is fine, but the numbers seem a tad weird - I can get behind whole and half integers, but .1? Like what the hell is the difference between a 4.3 and a 4.2? Is it just that teeny percent harder? Does that tiny bit matter?

-Matt

The graders were Shahar, Matt Nass, Josh Utter-Leyton, LSV, EFro, Reid, Owen, and myself. Then I averaged the grade and this is the order we came up with:

Also, needs more Enchantress.

Interestingly, the actual text of his descriptions of D&T and S&S are very much in line with the the criticism posted here (and in contrast to the number grades).

[Lemnear]

Rating a handful of decks with a 0.1 scale is ridiculous. If he rated 60 Legacy decks this might have made any sense but not for that selection.

If confused about some sentence early in the article that decks like Elves and Storm don't need format knowledge. You don't need format Knowledge piloting decks with full playsets of Cabal Therapy?! You don't need format Knowledge if you have to decide between going all-in against a possible FoW or being hit by discard if you wait in every game on the draw?

[JPoJohnson]

Rating a handful of decks with a 0.1 scale is ridiculous. If he rated 60 Legacy decks this might have made any sense but not for that selection.

If confused about some sentence early in the article that decks like Elves and Storm don't need format knowledge. You don't need format Knowledge piloting decks with full playsets of Cabal Therapy?! You don't need format Knowledge if you have to decide between going all-in against a possible FoW or being hit by discard if you wait in every game on the draw?

Good job guys, you poked the guy that happens to play both elves and storm.

[Lemnear]

Good job guys, you poked the guy that happens to play both elves and storm.

I know and therefore I'm confused about the statement and the shallow analysis overall in this article and still making such a differentiate ranking

P.S. I doubt anything is harder than piloting elves though a field of Miracles and BUG control

[Echelon]

I wonder what the writer wants to accomplish with his article.

His general consensus seems to be "Sometimes playing Magic is hard and sometimes it isn't" and is by definition subjective.

The article is kinda pointless.

[Dark Ritual]

Sneak and show hard to play? Yeah, so difficult. Here's the deck's ENTIRE GAMEPLAN in one sentence:

Get emrakul or griselbrand into play via show and tell or sneak attack.

The end.

As for therapy making elves so hard to play, that is not true. Therapy is a very difficult card to master. But when you have training wheels/access to flashback it's a lot easier. In storm you don't get to flashback it short of PiF or having a creature in play...sure probe is training wheels but you don't always draw them together otherwise every deck would be running gitaxian probe and therapy as 4 ofs as gitaxian therapy is insanely good.

If you think there's nothing harder than X doomsday fetchland tendrils is always ready to prove you wrong. Nothing is harder, end of story. I kind of wanted to jokingly write in the comments that doomsday would probably weigh in at 50 on the scale or something absurd like that as doomsday in comparison to everything else is like comparing calculus to basic math.

[HammafistRoob]

Doomsday isn't that bad, I don't understand where this consensus even comes from.

[Barook]

Rating a handful of decks with a 0.1 scale is ridiculous.

This

Easy, easy-average, average, average-hard, hard would work way better than random numbers he pulled out of his ass.

A trained monkey can execute S&T's game plan. Considering the scale goes from 1.0 to 5.0, with 3.0 being the midpoint, stating that D&T takes below average skill/format knowledge and S&T above average skill/format knowledge is downright ridiculous.

All I see is a pointless article with some ludicrous statements.