Right, in order to beat Storm, you have to play either black, blue or white, or the red/green deck that plays chalice on 1 and can make a 20/20 out of nowhere.Originally Posted by Bed Decks Palyer
Storm is not the problem. Dice Box is right about Delver, TNN, and I would add S&T (because every new fattie breaks that thing again and again).
I am hopeful that there will be action taken by WotC at some point to improve this format. I know, don't hold your breath...
I play almost exclusively legacy. Although I have the cardpool to build anything, at tournaments I play mostly Jund and Imperial Painter (for casual play I occasionally bring out Pox, my pet deck). Especially Jund I think is a strong deck, although it can be weak to fast combo. My sideboard is in many ways built to destroy blue decks:
1 Red Elemental Blast
2 Pyroblast
2 Surgical Extraction
1 Ancient Grudge
1 Engineered Plague
1 Toxic Deluge
2 Golgari Charm
2 Chains of Mephistopheles
3 Choke
Choke single-handedly wins me games, especially against opponents who are not prepared for it. Chains is good against Brainstorm, sure, but it's mainly in the SB to deal with degenerate draw-engines, like Griselbrand, Glimpse of Nature, Time Spiral, etc. Game 1 Sneak & Show usually wins, but my sideboard games are not bad. I side in blasts, surgicals, golgari charms, toxic deluge, chains and choke. I side out bloodbraid, lightning bolt, abrupt decay and sylvan library.
tl;dr I enjoy playing Jund in the current meta.
Definitely. From what little I know about the format, I think he'll be quite disappointed. It's not like his KotR deck will be any less awful than in Legacy, esp. as he'll lose Wasteland, cycling lands and whatnot.However it's the second point that really bugs me:
2) Modern is more diverse and open than Legacy. This is not true. Modern has been dominated by 4 strategies since its outset: BGx, URx, Affinity, and Pod. All the data shows that.
Yeah, I also think that the worst offender is Delver, followed closely by TNN. The thing with SnT is that it breaks not every new fatty (and we all know that WotC cannot print anything else than big fat dudes), but every permanent, see Omniscience. But maybe it's somehow good, at least it forces control decks to split forces between stack and creature control, thus leaving place for aggro... oh well, like that Boros, Gruul and Selesnya decks that everybody speaks about?
I don't know about any mysterious 20/20 RG deck that has access to turn1 CotV@1, but I guess it's some build of lands with Depth/Stage combo and Chalice to give Marit Lage a virtual Pro:StP. I don't consider it important enough, but maybe I'm wrong and it places quite often. I guess it runs over the usual Your Best Choice of Internet Delver Decklist, as those have troubles beating CotV, LftL and such, but I don't believe it's powerful enough to stop combo, as non-Tezzeret Chalice decks have troubles with some real consistency. But then again I played Fae Stompy years ago when the world was young, so maybe it's different today; I can't tell, I quit playing FS when Wasteland became the second most played land after a generic blue fetch, which was not long before Abrupt Decay was printed.
It's a bit painful to notice that the best way how to beat Brainstorm, an € 0,02 card, one must incorporate two Chains of Meph. But ok, I do understand it has other applications; you listed them.
I’m a bit perplexed.
Complaining that your deck of choice is not competitive when it won the last BoM, beating Miracles, Elves and Shardless in the top8?
It would make sense if this came from, let’s say, a Goblins or Enchantress pilot.
With that said, many of his opinions are perfectly valid.
Of course blue is the “best” color in legacy, everyone knows that, even people not playing legacy knows that.
It is however not (too) oppressive and objectively more powerful than everything else the format has to offer.
As several here have already stated, DnT, Elves, Jund/Junk, Imperial Painter, 4-Color Loam are perfectly viable and able to win the largest of events.
Compare this to modern where Pod, BGx, Twin, Affinity and UWR win approximately 99% of all large events.
They won't ban S&T no matter how absurd and dumb it gets as WotC don't give a fuck. It's Legacy's autopilot equivalent to Vintage's Lodestone Golem (kinda).
If you wanna rant about combo as a concept in Legacy, test my perspective: WotC prints storm- & graveyard-hate in every fucking expansion like they feed S&T/Sneak Attack with every dumb I-win-fatty they print. Ergo: chaining spells and navigate your mana-development through softcounters towards either a 4cc or 5cc card is not fine for Legacy; tapping 3-4 mana for a single I-win-card (which you can run in a full blue shell) is.
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Yes. Which brings us back to the article: a guy decided to let this sandpit where cats shit for the others. Why so much flak?
Otoh, I guess he'll be pretty disappointed with Modern and its meta of four decks, but w/e.
Bye.
To post this here in addition to Reddit: "Yet what if the colors amount to a few cards, overall? You don't need terribly large changes for the deck to feel dramatically different - Patriot and RUG feel very different, yet the core changes are Tarmogoyf to Stoneforge and the inclusion of Stifle, little else. Yet those differences create a profound change in the feel of the deck.
Same with decks like ANT and TES - a couple cards change, and the feel of the deck is altered dramatically.
The character of Elves changed dramatically with the inclusion of Natural Order.
Sometimes it is as simple as Overseer or Thoughtcast.
But really, though? The arguments of Legacy vs. Modern diversity are always the same: Take your format, look at the high-level shell game, then compare that to the nuance of my own format down to a tactical level and proclaim my format superior.
It's hilarious how people conjure up a world of difference between two Delver tempo decks and broadly complain about Pod or BG/x midrange goodstuff or do the opposite and list Pod variations out while complaining about Mystic or the aforementioned Delver.
Internet dickwaving, hooray!"
I think one of the biggest things that can be done to format health is paying attention to possible axes of play. It's why Dredge feels so bad usually - it plays along axes basically no other deck does with mechanisms most cards don't interact well with (a massive amount of abilities and a shitton of action in the graveyard instead of a couple key cards) which leaves you feeling helpless. If the opposing deck plays along axes you can actually do anything at all about, the game is suddenly much more interesting - hell, playing against an active Jitte with Elves is fine, even interesting. Add TNN to remove a fundamental axis of interaction (the red zone) and the game immediately goes to shit.
I think that's one thing that's kind of good about Modern - stuff happens on the battlefield, which all colors are able to interact with at least. It's why I think Elves is a healthier example of an engine combo deck than say Storm or the like - it's still delicious engine combo but it doesn't blank half the opponent's deck. Instant frustration reduction. How to get a variety of onboard engine combo decks is another matter entirely though, but I think it's one thing that should be seriously looked at.
In that way I don't feel that Delver is a problem despite it basically being a 1-mana TNN against me game 1. It doesn't remove axes of interaction and I know basic, generalized tools from the board help me deal with one. Whereas against TNN or Dredge or dumb shit from S&T I have to bring in quite narrow hate to be able to do anything meaningful or just play past them and kill them first.
A full blue shell capable of easily integrating Leyline of Fuck You which immunizes your two/three-card combo deck to discard, the natural form of hate, for no mana investment leaving you to cantrip your little mouthbreathing heart out and the opponent to play lottery with his mulligans. Is this three hate piece hand gonna be great or just complete shit? The joy, right?
I die a little inside every time SCG commentary goes "Ooh" over a S&T being cast like something brilliant was just done. Yay, you cast a single card that dodges basically every traditional "broken shit afoot" indicator used to build hate cards. You don't even have to expose your second piece. Now you won. Skill(tm).
I have the opinion that the majority of non blue decks are just built wrong. The best card selection spell is not blue, it's an artifact called SDT.
Once upon a time i enjoyed playing a Jund Control list with SDT, Xenagos and zero BBE. Well it was really consistent and good. I also played a Jund list with 3 Sylvan Libraries in the MD, because why not? Card is super powerful and if you have multiples in your hand... yeah guess what? card is still amazing.
Modern more diverse than Legacy? good joke. Well good luck winning with Mono W against Pod, Affinity, Splinter Twin, BGx. Oh and good luck with a KotR deck. You will need it.
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Laying aside Legacy's faults (still my #1 boo), it's worth noting that Modern is not an inherently "healthy" format like it's purported to be. All of the broken cards that people are complaining about are now. All of these "non-interactive" and-other-such-descriptors aren't being pumped into Legacy only. Modern is "saved" only by its extensive ban list, which creates immense havoc in the grand scheme of things. Certain bannings had to and have to happen in order to maintain the status quo. Things like Bloodbraid Elf. How can a format that has to ban Bloodbraid Elf possibly be considered "healthy"? What if this September Wizards comes along and announces that Glimpse of Nature, Green Sun's Zenith, and Natural Order are banned in Legacy? As well as Deathrite Shaman. There would be utter outrage in the Legacy community. But this is the day-to-day of Modern.
I don't see how a format that has to live like that is optimal. The only solution, in both formats, is to prevent further pieces like those from being printed. On a long enough timescale, as it always has been, the formats would heal themselves. Unfortunately, for the purposes of "growth" and other business related nonsense that I really don't care about, Wizards is hellbent on more planeswalkers and more mythics which can only mean we'll be having more of these threads representing this format or another some time very soon.
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From TNN till now using the TC database for 33+ player tournaments the top 12 decks in the format are 50% of all top 8 decks over that time period. Two decks are at 7% and the other 10 are between 2.6% and 4%. Modern isn't even close in terms of diversity.
It's funny because all his arguments also apply to Fetchlands.
I am convinced that WotC is "dumbing" the game because of all the stupid posts they come across on MTG-related forums
I am just going to repost what I think are some of the strongest counter-arguments on the Reddit thread, for those that don't feel like slogging through it:
Same guy, in response to 'but less consistency = more variance = more diversity':Modern has the same fucking problem in reverse.
Card selection is the defining attribute of Legacy that Modern lacks - Modern decks are forced to be redundant to consistently execute their plans. That's why B/Gx continues to be the best deck in Modern and the popular choice of pro players; it specifically attacks decks on the axis of consistency with discard and has the likes of Tarmogoyf to end the game before the second copy of X or a critical mass of Y and Z can be drawn.
Thoughtseize (and to a lesser extent, Inquisition) is the reason Black shells are consistently good in Modern - and variants of the black discard suite with a clock (it's called B/G/x because Tarmogoyf is the best clock) will ALWAYS be the best deck until something to the effect of Ponder or Brainstorm is allowed. They can ban Deathrite and Bloodbraid until they're blue in the face; these are inessential cards. As long as you have Thoughtseize, cheap removal, and a clock the deck is simply more consistently good than the linear strategies in other decks.
The problem with the argument that Legacy isn't diverse is that the only really difference between a Brainstorm format and a non-Brainstorm format is the consistency with which you can draw the other 56 cards. Modern isn't more "diverse" - the decks are simply less consistent, so the format has enough variance to allow for more types of decks containing super-powered cards to mise. That doesn't make the decks good and it drastically decreases the competitive value of Modern.
(Two exceptions to the discard / high-VAR strategy are Twin and your U/R Delver deck, which just try to do their best Legacy impression with Serum Visions. Grats on playing inferior versions of Legacy decks that are only good for all the reasons you supposedly hate that format.)
Yes, in Legacy you really want to be playing Brainstorm because it reduces the variance of your deck. And in Modern, you really want to be playing Thoughtseize to increase the variance of your opponent's deck. What you do besides that in either format is pretty irrelevant.
Edit: Also, Hoogland is on the Source, and at least in the past has been pretty good about responding to questions/comments, so maybe ease off on the pitchforks a bit. I agree with Dice_Box that he may have some valid points, but went about making it in an unnecessarily contentious way.You're entitled to your opinion wrt B/Gx. I would contend it's the best deck, but there's room for debate. I'd also accept Twin strictly because it does everything it can to counter the fundamental strategy of B/Gx.
As for whether or not less consistency leads to more diversity, I would argue that Modern's diversity is pretty overstated - especially if we're contending it's greater than Legacy's and thus means Modern is a better format.
Modern decks have the benefit of occasionally spiking an event because of the lack of consistency inherent to the format. This creates perceived diversity, but the reality is that Legacy has a variety of viable non-Brainstorm strategies too. They just don't win very often given how consistently the Brainstorm decks perform - but every Legacy tournament is full of Burn, Belcher, Oops!, Jund, Elves, Death and Taxes, Loam / Depths decks, and the like.
The inherent lack of consistency in Modern due to the lack of cantrips and prevalence of hand disruption means that VAR is playing a bigger factor. If we're going to write an article all about how Brainstorm is bad for a format in terms of competitive characteristics, I'm going to point right to all the Thoughtseize decks in Modern and ask why we're taking a format characterized (rightly or wrongly) by an anti-consistency spell and choosing more VAR over less VAR.
VAR is fine in Magic - in fact it's the feature that makes the game great. But Brainstorm is amazing for competitive play because it reduces the impact of VAR in the hands of skilled players and emphasizes other aspects of the game - like the other 56 cards and how they're deployed. I have seen too many pro players lose their cool over the river card or the topdeck or the Miracle mechanic to think that a higher-variance format is superior in their minds, and personally I came away from this article pretty unconvinced.
The best format isn't the one that's friendliest to the biggest deckbuilding iconoclast. It's the one that rewards skill. And a skilled player always chooses Brainstorm over his topdeck.
I think the biggest thing is the deep seeded emotional understanding that the right play is the right play regardless of outcomes. The ability to make a decision 5 straight times, lose 5 times because of it, and still make it the 6th time if it's the right play. - Jon Finkel
"Notions of chance and fate are the preoccupation of men engaged in rash undertakings."
This is a very valid point I think people need to pay attention to.
Actually, Soul Sisters (a monowhite deck) was able to go undefeated on Day 1 of the last Grand Prix. Then again, it looks like it only won a single match on Day 2, as it ended up at 10-5.
Kudos on reposting those high quality posts Richard Cheese. I saw them yesterday scouring through the reddit thread and loved them. Not to stir the discussion away from the topic of my original post, but I've always been of the opinion that Thoughtseize is massively overpowered in modern because of the lack of quality card selection.
In regards to Legacy:
Preach it, brother!
- - - - -
Like everyone with a head on their shoulders has mentioned, his article reeks of saltiness. He has backed himself into a corner by refusing to change strategies. He is called 'The Loam Guy' for a reason. I'm all for pet decks, and having fun, but you have to step back an examine your strategy from time to time.
I see a big problem in his approach to play Legacy.
1.) He wants to win, and if he doesn't feel like he can win, he quits the format.
2.) He wants to play the same strategy, no matter what.
1 and 2 do not mix.
He has to either change his strategy (abandon Loam and start playing Brainstorm so that he feels he can win), or he has to accept that running Loam will not always put him in Top 8.
That said, I agree that Brainstorm is absurdly powerful, and ubiquitous. In all fairness, it deserves a ban (honestly, you feel that way too, but we all know it won't be).
I add my thanks here Richard. This repost added a new POV to our discussion here and I salute the writer of the reddit response for using the big word "iconoclasm" in his post.
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I read this article yesterday. I chuckled.
As other mentioned, the article is not about Legacy, or Modern; at least not on a deeper reading.
The article is about one man, whom has difficulty playing to win because he constructs rules and modes for which he intends to win with. He is a scrub, not a spike. It's oddly amusing that Mr Hoogland refers to reducing variance from playing Brainstorm, all the meanwhile ranting on his twitter about being a victim to the same variance.
He has selected to play Legacy in a very scruby way, picked a pet-deck, found that he can beat medium skilled players on skill alone, and concluded it was his deck selection. Anyone playing Aggro Loam for more than a few weeks finds that the deck is soft to decks such as Merfolk, RUG, and Counterbalance. Welcome to the Legacy Format, Mr Hoogland.
I don't think the Legacy community needs the voice of this player. His is whiny and damaging to the appeals of the format.
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Everything I wanted to say about this is right here, and said far better than I could.
Modern is dominated by the 3 netdecks because the average SCG barnacle can't build a deck. It's a PT/GP format and people just buy 75s off TCG. You can crush modern with any well crafted deck ... but you may not every week, or over a long evnt because the card quality in modern is suspect, the tutoring is suspect. That turns many people off from the format, e.g. I can hedge my board vs. Pod but simply never draw any of those cards and die.
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