Aside from this being out of place in a thread dedicated to how much people like/dislike certian cards, no one was making the argument that Show and Tell decks are bad (in a competitive sense) because they're simple, nor have I noticed anyone call for a ban. People are saying that they don't like the card because it presents basically no interaction aside from 'do you have a counter?'. I'm well over 0.500 against Show and Tell strategies, and when you win you're usually goldfishing them while holding up countermagic.
Just wanted to point out that the question was not what cards are bad design, no fun, etc. The question was what do you love and hate, which frequently results in answers that maybe aren't so easy to rationalize. There's no need to get upset that someone dislikes the thing you like or vice versa.
Agreed. I beat show and tell with dead guy regularly. It's just not an interesting or complicated deck in any way. I just disagree with the deck being a skill testing deck. It's fine to play a simple 2 card combo deck if you just want to win. Whatever. I just think it's a dull card that is slightly, but not overly, oppressive.
Great article. I feel like it's hard to write a fair-sounding, opinion-oriented article about a game with an objectively-focused community. My only gripe is that you don't like Hymn for its variance. The real thing that makes Hymn awesome is the kind of shells that usually play it. Granted, it's been approached with a less-obtuse design before with cards like Gerrard's Verdict and Blightning, but Ritual-Hymn-Duress is probably my favorite turn 1 play outside of Christmasland grips for Ad Nauseam decks.
This bullshit is totally misleading in terms of identifying why people hate S&T. It's not because of losses, as the fact that the deck is really vulnerable to discard, but because the deck(s) don't interact with anything other than counters and even Dodge stuff like Thalia/Teeg/Chalice/Thorn/etc., a luxury position decks like Belcher or Storm do not have and neither can rely on a ridiculous redundancy S&T decks offer or the protection via FoW.
I think it's legitim to question the relation of difficult and power in modern MTG design.
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As an intermittent player of Patriot, I play four of the most hated cards in Legacy: Delver, TNN, Gitaxian Probe (who knew?), and, of course, Brainstorm. Maybe we should redub it 'Hatriot'?
On the other hand, as someone who learned Legacy (insofar as I know it at all) playing Merfolk, I would propose we give the most infamous merfolk of all some, er, 'silvergills': "As an additional cost to cast True-Name Nemesis, reveal a Merfolk card from your hand or pay {3}." Merfolk would still be Tier 1.8 (if that?) and everyone else would be spared the least interactive fish of all.
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I love two-for-ones, engines, high-value cards and breakable symmetric effects. Cabal Therapy, Zealous Persecution, Innocent Blood, Lightning Helix, Lingering Souls, Bloodghast, Veteran Explorer, Gatekeeper of Malakir, Green Sun's Zenith, Young Pyromancer and Thalia are some of my favorites. I'm a sucker for most Charms.
Hitting on both sides of a Therapy is an incomparable feeling in Magic. Actually, my ideal play is dredging a Darkblast into Souls and Therapy with a Pyro in play.
I love deceptively underpowered cards that are in fact total hellions. Mother of Runes, Siege Rhino, Repeal, Courser of Kruphix. I'm also obsessed with buildarounds. Would love to build a deck that can cast Mystical Teachings to find Notion Thief, or abuse Ion Storm.
Despite my B&R rantings, I'm ambivalent towards Brainstorm, Delver, Ponder, Treasure Cruise. In fact I play Delver in Modern and love flipping the little guy. Cards I really hate are:
Tarmogoyf — I am more than comfortable admitting that this is partially related to its price. But I also hate how it dominates other 2cmc and 3cmc creatures and pushes more interesting cards to the fringes.
True-Name Nemesis — Similar to Goyf, but even more annoying at times. Takes all the interaction and gamesmanship out of combat.
Counterbalance — Compare to Chalice of the Void. This is way undercosted, overpowered, and unfun. Even without SDT it's a nightmare because sometimes they just have it.
Jace, the Mind Sculptor — It's a brainless I win button.
I think Natural Order is perfectly fine. Requires two colored mana, that you have a creature with certain characteristics on board, as well as one with certain characteristics in your library. I loathe Wirewood Symbiote though, but for no reason other than Elves is annoying to play against.
He is right though. Except for the part about it being a downside. It's neither good nor bad.
Especially for a deck like Doomsday, you get relatively little out of your mastery of the deck these days. It used to be different but the deck just doesn't provide as much relative value for mastering as it was the case 5-10 years ago. One could say that a person who thinks he/she is a good competitive player because he/she has mastered Doomsday and brought it to an important tournament...has actually actually shown to be a rather weak competitive player because he/she selected an underpowered deck.
The seven cardinal sins of Legacy:
1. Discuss the unbanning ofLand TaxEarthcraft.
2. Argue that banning Force of Will would make the format healthier.
3. Play Brainstorm without Fetchlands.
4. Stifle Standstill.
5. Think that Gaea's Blessing will make you Solidarity-proof.
6. Pass priority after playing Infernal Tutor.
7. Fail to playtest against Nourishing Lich (coZ iT wIlL gEt U!).
Love:
- Life from the Loam
- Intuition
- Goblin Welder
- Thalia
Hate:
- Counterbalance
- Griselbrand
- Show and Tell (I go back and forth on this)
Hm.. I think I love:
-Cabal Therapy
-GB staples: Bob, Lily, TS, Abrupt Decay, DRS
in general because of the ways the shell interacts with itself.
I also love:
-Sensei's Divining Top
-Thopter Foundry/Pyro (all the tokens!)
-Life from the Loam (good luck playing Nerd!)
I hate:
-TNN. It's just an obnoxious design. TNN just makes the game so "Who can get double-beaters faster and race" or "who can equip and race first"
-BSK. This was the derpiest card designed before TNN. What a pile of derp.
-Terminus..
-Counterbalance..
-TC. I don't think it's ban-worthy; but it helped get rid of Tombstalker (who is cool as hell) and makes Bob much worse.
-Thalia. I use her a lot in the side, but what a pile of obnoxious.
-Griselbrand
You can probably tell I'm really really tired of miracles. Also, I think Sneak Attack is meaner than S&T. SA allows top-deck wins and is the real "problem" in S&T that is difficult to solve. You can't Karakas your way through it, you can't Lily it, you can't decay it, you can't counter the dudes. I think it's a weaker card in general, but the real reason SneakShow wins so much is that black decks can strip their entire hand and still lose to a single topdeck if they squirted a SA out.
While not all Legacy playable anymore...
Love:
Nevinyrral's Disk
Counterspell
Meekstone
Icy Manipulator
Winter Orb
Serra Angel
Stasis
Mana Barbs
Armageddon
Rishadan Port
Wrath of God
Aether Vial
Mangara of Corondor
Hymn to Tourach
Hypnotic Specter
Terminus
Sensei's Divining Top
Birthing Pod
Green Sun's Zenith
Thalia, Guardian of Thraben
Mother of Runes
Back to Basics
Blood Moon
Wasteland
Eidolon of the Great Revel
I enjoy playing cards that allow for complex choices, toolboxing, cards that lock up the game, or that punish particular strategies or greedy manabases. While I miss the days of yore sometimes, I also appreciate that one can now play control decks with creatures in them, which can be fun. Really I hate very few individual cards, but would rather play against (or with) a prison deck any day of the week than against solitaire playing combo decks. But people can play those decks, as long as other decks have the tools to deal with them I have no complaints. Based on the above, it's probably pretty easy to guess what decks I currently play :)
Which makes me think...I don't actually dislike stoneforge mystic, in fact the card is cool and has the design potential to allow for a lot of different options and is a pretty useful tutor effect.
I like cards that allow for this sort of decision making in game...cards that allow you to say "which card to I need to get out of my deck to deal with this board state and what I predict as the future board state" and then make that play.
The problem is when they print these cards like batterskull...griselbrand...legendary eldrazi...that are head and shoulders better than anything else that could fill their role and that pander to the lowest common denominator of magic player.
Now, instead of stoneforge being a nifty tutor effect that allows the player to make a decision, you know exactly what they are going to pull out of their deck 99% of the time...batterskull. Nothing else even compares.
Just like with reanimator or show and tell...you know everytime...here comes griselbrand...here comes emrakul...here we go again. There are lots of other examples of this type of card design and power creep recently with all types of cards, not just creatures, but I would say this is a clear design path that I "hate". It makes for such stale and repetitive game play.
The funnest type of decks to play and play against are the toolboxes, the synergistic decks, and the decks where the games are won through incremental advantage in my opinion. Not the "does this spell resolve? OK I probably win" experience or the generic goodstuff decks.
I've gotten to the point where I'm running 2 Batterskull and tutoring them up when I combo out on turn 2/3 with Modern Relic Quest because it's near-impossible to race and a BS'd Skyfisher shuts down 90% of my meta. Granted my meta's almost all aggro, but it's insane that I'm getting more consistent wins with BS than Argentum.
Stonehewer Giant is nice. It'll be bett... I mean interesting, if SFM worked similarly to Giant. Well, but there are 20k bad cards already so maybe SFM is good as it is.
I'd add "boring" somewhere into the last sentence, but yeah...
Cards I like:
Mystic Enforcer
Knight of the Reliquary
Green Sun's Zenith
Windswept Heath
Swords to Plowshares
I think we can play any interactive games in other format, but only legacy or vintage allows people to do such crazy things, which may be appealing to some playeres like me...
love: Daze, Nimble Mongoose, Dark Confidant, Hymn to Tourarch, Goblin Matron, Imperial Recruiter, Rishadan Port, Blood Moon, Sinkhole, Cursed Scroll
As for hate, I can make a list that I used to hate:
Tarmogoyf (stupid design)
Wild Nacatl (I really hated this card in the past, but when zoo was gone I really miss it now)
Deathrite Shaman (too strong for one mana)
Griselbrand (stupid but when I began to play SNT I get used to it)
TNN ( cannot describe how stupid it is)
Any planeswalkers ( cannot get used to this kind of thing when I was back to mtg in 2010 after a 4 years break)
And I don't hate delver, although it is stupid enough, it revived gro archetype like Canadian Thresh in 2011...but now it is over flooded in the meta...
Team Blood, Beijing.
Currently play: Sneaky Show/ Lands
I love the article, Carsten, and it inspired me to similarly reflect. In the process, it brought to the foreground what kind of player I am.
I'm a Johnny-Spike. I like to win, but I prefer to win on my own terms. I like build-around-me cards and multi-card combos. I like to have a lot of freedom and creativity in designing a deck, and sometimes my stubborn Johnny impulses lead me to play brews that are less competitive. My favorite color in Magic is green. My least-favorite color in Magic is probably white, although the color that irks me most often is blue. I love the tools that blue gets to wield, but it has always struck me as tragically unfair that other colors don't come close in terms of the power level of their mechanics. Healing Salve vs. Ancestral Recall is the classic comparison. As far as my personal favorites, well, if you designed a card at 1G, you'd likely be part of the way there.
LOVE
Survival of the Fittest
This is my favorite card in all of Magic. It incentivizes playing with lots of creatures rather than lots of spells, and it allows you lots of room for customization, to the point that you can run lots of 1-of creatures. This adds a lot of variety to the games, even though your primary gameplan is going to revolve around locating and resolving your Survival. It plays well with enter-the-battlefield abilities, which are my favorite kinds of creatures in Magic, and the graveyard, which is my beloved sandbox.
Cabal Therapy
Cabal Therapy is a gem. Its power level scales with your ability as a player, and I adore the Brainstorm-Therapy dance where each player can try to next-level the other. The card also interacts with the graveyard, which is icing on the cake.
Fact or Fiction
One great feature of Fact or Fiction is how it involves the opponent, allowing him or her to split the piles. Magic needs more cards like this: ones that involve both players.
Argothian Enchantress, Life from the Loam, and Dark Confidant
Card-drawing effects, or a reasonable substitute, that aren't blue. When card advantage means so much in the outcome of a game, it's prudent to bleed that effect into other colors unless you want blue to be the dominant color in a format.
Krosan Grip, Abrupt Decay, and Slaughter Games
Hard counterspells have been overpowered for much of Magic's history due to their efficiency at answering any type of spell, and they have long been miscosted -- Force of Will laughably so -- which is why there is no Counterspell or even Mana Leak in modern-day Standard. Split second is a clever way to circumvent countermagic. Uncounterability is a little ham-fisted, but it opens up new opportunity. In Legacy, the tempo plan of sticking a threat and protecting it with soft permission was a lot more bedeviling before the existence of Abrupt Decay. Ditto for the way-overpowered combination of Sensei's Divining Top plus Counterbalance. Slaughter Games is the card that Cranial Extraction always should have been, and Slaughter Games is still barely played in this format.
Maze of Ith
Amazingly flavorful: Your creature gets lost in the maze. Not being able to produce mana is a reasonable drawback.
Smokestack
Plotting ahead and judging when to tick up the Smokestack can be a nice skill-tester. Plus, I love blowing up permanents. I'm not a huge fan of prison archetypes -- I like both players to be able to play Magic -- so I hope I can carve out a new and different home for this card in the future.
Wall of Roots and Shield Sphere
I like Walls. I often wish Walls were better, but these are excellent. Wall of Roots is ramp and a formidable blocker. It plays well with Survival of the Fittest and effectively has haste and vigilance. Shield Sphere requires zero investment, saves your hide for many turns, and has been an unassuming combo piece in the past. All in all, if a creature doesn't have the ability to attack, it can be pushed a bit.
The Sword cycle
Equipment is a good thing. Enchantments were frustrating because they let you get 2-for-1'd all the time. Having a piece of weaponry remaining on the battlefield to be picked up by another creature is a very flavorful game mechanic. I do think Batterskull is considerably overpowered and definitely should not have a bounce ability, and there's no way Jitte needs three abilities. I like the Sword cycle due to the rich mythology of swords (Excalibur, The Sword in the Stone, etc.). Sword of the Ages and Runesword were cool-looking but lacked the power befitting a legend. The Sword cycle has just the right power level, I feel: epic but not busted.
Ball Lightning
More amazing flavor from maybe the most flavorful set in Magic: The Dark. The trample was perfect, leaving your opponent with a jolt even when blocking. All right, I'm getting all nostalgic now. Let's move on to the cards I loathe and my arguments for why they detract from the game.
HATE
True-Name Nemesis
This creature has my vote for the most uninteractive, feel-bad creature in all of Magic. It takes combat out of the equation and renders the majority of removal spells irrelevant. Most offensively, there is no real cost or drawback attached to it, meaning that it outclasses other creatures in virtually every situation. True-Name face-offs are typified by playing more True-Names than the other guy or by equipping yours first. There's also the disgusting display of both players equipping True-Names with a Batterskull and often a Sword and/or a Jitte: Life totals swing back and forth, hardly mattering, and the game comes down to whichever player dies of boredom first -- or, OK, who draws a way to destroy the equipment.
Council's Judgment
Council's Judgment is the patch for the virus that is True-Name Nemesis, and the way it contorts the rules to target without targeting is embarrassing. Two wrongs don't make a right, WOTC. Just ban True-Name in one-on-one formats and move on.
Rishadan Port
This card is an abomination, and I say that as someone who loves, loves, loves land destruction. It often functions as an uncounterable, replayable Silence and results in one player tapping lands (and not otherwise playing spells) to prevent the other player from doing anything. I like that Rishadan Port can cut someone off a color or coax someone to crack a fetchland, but I strongly dislike how multiple Ports lock someone out of playing Magic. Basic lands already harbor the disadvantage of producing only one color of mana, so they really ought to be exempt from the Port. Rishadan Port also slows the game down, adding lots of extra repetitive and irritating actions.
Iona, Shield of Emeria
Now we're on the big, dumb, overpowered creatures category. Part of an enjoyable game of Magic involves both players being able to cast spells. Iona prevents the opponent from casting most, or all, of their spells. See the problem? Due to WOTC's obstinacy/obliviousness, Iona was one in a string of ridiculously overpowered fatties that had the minor drawback of being legendary. This left people scrounging for answers, and Karakas was the best one. Unfortunately, that has been the case with almost all of these big, dumb, overpowered creatures, which is why Karakas is a $150 card now. Creating problems that need to be fixed with a card printed a decade and a half earlier and which can't be reprinted is just poor game management. Containment Priest is a step in the right direction.
Jin-Gitaxias, Core Augur
So Necropotence and Mind Twist are banned, but this card does both? Hmmm. Oh, wait, it's legendary: Must be safe! The fact that this card was in the same environment as Mental Misstep and Force of Will was extremely problematic.
Mental Misstep
Thank goodness this spell goosed the format for only three months. Misstep battles were insipid and immediate, and part of the joy of deck building is variety. Having to automatically include Missteps, or really go out of your way to blank opposing Missteps, was perverse.
Griselbrand
Once upon a time, there was a card called Necropotence. It was awesome but OP. It got banned. Yawgmoth's Bargain was the fixed version. It was similarly awesome but similarly OP. It also got banned. Time went by and WOTC again ventured into the buncha-cards-for-life design space with Griselbrand. A killable Yawgmoth's Bargain seems OK in theory, but wires must've gotten crossed, because Griselbrand came out with the stats a regular fatty would have at such a mana cost. 7/7 flying and lifelink for 4BBBB is the kind of monster made for a core set. And then somehow Yawgmoth's Bargain found itself reincarnated within. Also, no one seemed to realize that if paying life to draw a bunch of cards is too powerful, then gaining the life right back afterward ... would obviously be even more -- nah, let's just print a ridiculously broken demon.
Progenitus
"Protection from everything" is an extremely lazy wording and a blatantly excessive ability. Progenitus is like an Unglued card that somehow was made legal. I'm OK with Emrakul and like the flavor of the annihilator ability, but annihilator six is too excessive. Four would have been plenty. I also don't feel it needs the protection from colored spells ability.
Enter the Infinite
From those who brought you big, dumb, overpowered creatures, this is the big, dumb, overpowered spell. Once again, this reads like an Unglued card. The fact that this was printed so soon after Omniscience was inexcusable.
Terminus
A one-mana Wrath of God. It's conditional, sure, but it happens to fit perfectly with cards you're playing already: stuff like Brainstorm and Ponder and Sensei's Divining Top. WOTC can be so exasperating. They say that creatures got a raw deal and need to be powered up on par with spells, and then they print a nuke for creatures that even hits cards that used to prey on control decks, like Ichorid and Bloodghast and Thrun, the Last Troll. The Miracle mechanic is a lousy one in itself, making topdecks even more impactful, and the "in hand but not obviously in hand" aspect adds unnecessary confusion. At least the mechanic is leagues better than flip cards.
Jace, the Mind Sculptor
I don't find Jace heinous like the other cards on this list, but fate-sealing is overpowered, and it's BS that he has four abilities. Killing a Jace is one of the most gratifying things for me. I personally think that Jace either should not have had the Brainstorm ability or should not have had a win-the-game ultimate, because if you are Brainstorming every turn, you are probably winning the game anyway.
Some things I like:
LED
Dark Ritual
High Tide (& Time Spiral, of course)
Aluren
AEther Vial
Life from the Loam
Cabal Therapy
Smokestack
Moat
Misthollow Griffin
Hymn
And plenty more. I like a lot of things in Legacy, which is why I keep coming back despite the obvious flaws in the format. As for things I hate:
Delver of Secrets
Counterbalance
Griselbrand/Emrakul/Omniscience
Gitaxian Probe
Terminus
True-Name Nemesis
Jace
Delver is the most overpowered offensive one-drop ever, and it's blue. Enough said. I have always hated Counterbalance, the lock is too easy to assemble and unlike Chalice/Trinisphere it doesn't force you to abstain from playing the best cards the format offers. Griselbrand and the other dumb high-cost bullshit printed lately turned a fun and interesting card (Show and Tell) into a boring, derpy combo deck that dodges most of the hate traditional combo decks have issues with while being far easier to pilot. IMO it is better for the format if strong combo decks are difficult to pilot. Gitaxian Probe has removed the mystery from Legacy. As someone who likes to play fringe decks, it's pretty difficult to surprise your opponent when they often have perfect information for next to no cost on turn one. Terminus and TNN together put the final nails in aggro's coffin. Aggressive decks need intense amounts of disruption and usually blue to have a shot against this nonsense, not to mention color pie arguments for TNN. While I have played plenty of Jace in my day, I hate that he has functionally pushed non-blue control decks out of the meta. Most such strategies are very good at killing creatures but have very few answers to Jace and thus fold to him.
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