I recently started a new blog with the intention of posting format attendance figures there, but a surprisingly eventful January B&R update prompted me to commit my first thoughts elsewhere: http://lordofthepit23.blogspot.com/2...-b-update.html
Some comments about Vintage and Modern as well, the latter of which I will never return to again with the loss of Birthing Pod.
The thing I'm most surprised about is how people thought Pod was fair or not worthy of a ban. Not getting to play your pet deck I understand, but there was no world where Birthing Pod existed in Modern and didn't take over its entire branch of aggro/aggro-control. Phyrexian Mana just doesn't produce well balanced cards.Originally Posted by lordofthepit
I feel for you, Pod was a deck I'd always wanted to try, even if I probably couldn't master the very many lines of play with its namesake card.
On the other hand, for a long time WotC has been very uncompromising, ruthless even, about Modern and its predecessor formats - remember how they replaced Old Extended with Double Standard, and then replaced the latter with Modern? And the very beginning, they banned a bunch of cards because they felt like it. I don't mean it like 'You should have seen this coming,' more like Modern has been one drastic change after another, and the best thing is to take it stoically even when they ban something from your favourite deck.
I'm also sad to see Pod go, never felt like it was totally dominant, especially since Twin was a pretty bad MU, and I share your feelings that BGx is just going to dominate now. Hopefully there will be some silver lining to all this... I personally haven't given up hope for Modern... yet.
I like your thoughts about how Pod actually kept an interesting and non-comparable "engine" deck alive in at least one of the Eternal Formats... now everything does sort of seem a little bit more like Legacy Lite :P
@ Pheonix - I think the fact that both Pod and BGw Midrange existed together, in exactly the same colours, is pretty good evidence that there were multiple viable midrange choices available at the same time. Now I feel like there is only one: quad-Goyf/Rhino/Decay/Liliana.dec
This B&R Update was really disappointing in terms of Modern imo. Feels like a wasted opportunity by Wizards to craft a powerful diverse format without the shackles of the Reserved List via unbanning cards. Call this hypothetical format Legacy lite if you want, but I think a higher powered format drawing on the Modern card pool would still be a different, though similar in some ways, to Legacy. I think I've given up most hope for Modern. By that I mean I'll probably still work towards getting a playset of Shocks for when I do feel like playing Modern again, but at this rate I'm probably not playing the format for at least two years. It's just one ban of the best deck(s) after the other. Thank God I still have Legacy. Otherwise I would have quit Magic a long time ago.
As for the matter of Treasure Cruise in Legacy, I have mixed feelings about it. I think there's valid arguments to be made for and against keeping the card legal, but whatever. Just glad I can continue casting Brainstorm. Long live legacy and Brainstorm.
In regards to Legacy:
Moderns problems are housemade and will never go away because of the fact that the formats complete card-history is identical with MaRos creature powercreep focus and the ban-list crafted to keep control & Combo in check. What remained is inevitably the BGx goodstuff we got in the last 10 years and the bannings of Deathrite, P.Fire, Bloodbraid and Pod are just a sign that the BGx midrange core is just miles better than the rest.
But instead of giving control more options to keep these decks and combo in check, they keep banning the greatest offender time and time again and narrow the format. It's totally pointless, as Thoughtseize, Tarmogoyf and Liliana are still the colors backbones. It doesn't matter if they get backed up by Rhino or Bloodbraid at this point.
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My division of the format may be arbitrary, but a pile of goodstuff isn't as good as a pile of goodstuff + Pod. Pod was broken, it allowed 2 card combos, endless recursion, and worst of all there was no real answer to it to make people think about not playing it. You could easily play it on turn 2 and the only card that could answer it that early is something like Naturalize (terrible). If they were afraid of a removal they could just wait for an extra mana and play it slightly later to get their value out of it anyway. You can't punish the life loss without an extremely aggressive deck (burn only?), and usually the life loss was made back by kitchen finks-> Rhino. Counterspells aren't good enough in the format to really punish it (Spell Pierce isn't good overall and that's about the only way you'd hope to answer it).
Abzan's pretty good in every format, but it doesn't have the unanswerability + isntakills of Pod.
why are you guys discussing modern on a legacy forum?
i think it was a pretty stupid move to ban tc in legacy. it was just another powerful card. And why unban WGD and nothing else?
I participate in a Facebook chat with a group of local players, mostly about Magic, but often other off-topic stuff. One guy loves to read Bitcoin threads after a big crash and copy and paste sob stories about people who have become financially ruined through poor decisions to commit to Bitcoin. Bitcoin isn't anything that ever interests me or really anyone else in the thread, but humans are naturally fascinated by train wrecks and want to see how they play out.
Modern is Bitcoin in this story, and after years of swearing never to play it, I made a bad decision to do so last month. I guess discussing the Modern B&R change is more interesting than discussing Legacy, just like discussing Bitcoin was more interesting than discussing the dollar or the Euro, because of how hard the format got wrecked.
Thanks for response Lemenear. I find many of your posts more erudite than most, and this one is a great example of that as I think you hit this subject on the nail. This trend is you refer to is something I've also noticed, even if only intuitively. I abandoned Modern a while ago because of it. When Treasure Cruise and Dig Through Time came out I was excited at the prospect of Modern going a different direction. But looks like Wizards is continuing the same bull shit. Good riddance. Can't understand how people can continue to support this format. I bet either at the next announcement or within a year Liliana of the Veil gets banned if BGx proves to be "too dominating".
Because the OP's blog post had some comments about modern? Even if this is primarily a legacy forum, I don't see why we can't generally talk about modern. I think the occasional discussion of it allows for us to engage in eternal format comparison, a topic I find can sometimes be really interesting.
In regards to Legacy:
@dragonslayer_90
More to the Point, what happened in the past of legacy can inform the future of modern, or the difference between the way WOTC handles them can be used to project what at least WON'T happen in modern.
I don't think this is likely to be true though. WotC only has one eternal format that they really care about at this point and that's Modern. That's the format that makes them a lot of money as well as allowing their partners to make a lot of money as well.
They're in custodian mode with both Vintage and Legacy at this point. They might fix outrageous breaks in either format but they won't do anything else. Modern they have a firm hand on and they'll keep banning things that constrict the metagame too heavily. Vintage and Legacy are on their own, at least that's the message I take from the last 5 years or so of bans.
Pardon? You mean that we see blue, powerful cards legal to fuel control or combo? The color distribution within the Modern banlist is horribly one-sided and most cards had never the Chance to be played in the format.
I could create an extreme example and look at SFM+Jitte+Jace, cards which obviously got preemptively banned because of the previous Domination in STANDARD, but WotC ignored the fact that the deck had to deal with significantly more powerful enemies in MODERN.
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As for legacy, I am ambivalent on the TC banning. It was, in my estimate, a 50/50 proposition. It was only with us briefly, and it was a common. Basically, like mental misstep, it was best to do something quickly, even if the merits were just debatable (although I feel misstep was basically a slam dunk). I'm not even sure why they bothered with worldgorger. My guess is that they will roll back a card or two each announcement to slowly prune down the ban list.
For modern, this really well sums it up:
"While I have the cards available to play these decks, the GBx-dominated midrange derp-fest that put 6 copies into the top 8 of GP Detroit was a miserable one that I wanted no part of back in 2013, and it's one that I want no part of anymore."
This has been pretty obvious since the earliest days of modern. I think that there will be a lot of gbx midrange mirrors with the occassional combo sprinkled in. The former will be like glorified standard, and the latter will be an abrupt decay check or simple, non-interactive race. Yum. Maybe pod was too good, but it definitely represented a truly modern archetype. I think the main problem is the lack of a decent counterspell that is good against combo, but worse at protecting it. Remand, leak, pierce, and definitely pact are all just as good, if not better, in combo decks than control or tempo. I hate to get all card creation forum, but something like UU counter target spell, split second, this spell can not be played on your turn. That's probably what it would take, but as that's nearly better than counterspell, it would never happen.
Alas, there's always legacy.
Cheers,
Backseat Critic
I agree on the problem with no Modern counterspells better at defending against midrange combo than protecting it. They just need to reprint Counterspell and they'll put Blue non-combo midrange on the map and probably Blue aggro control into midrange as well. It's the fact that an early breakout with aggro control can't be sustained into the midgame that's the problem. You don't want perfect options to sustain but just a hard no for 2 mana would do wonders in making midrange combo unpredictable enough that it wasn't the clear best choice in the meta.
Good thing we can learn from our mistakes, eh?
A local RUG player (who had played with several variants of Delver and Storm throughout TC) was nearly insulted when Kird Ape started being used in the last couple weeks. His explanation of the situation was poignant:
"When a card is so good it that it's better to run sub-optimal cards next to it; there's a problem"
I used to play modern when the format was first being introduced. Then no one played it and I sacked up and purchased a Legacy deck. Best decision ever. I can't understand why someone would play a format where the best cards printed are banned. Then instead of fixing that issue, they keep expanding the gap of what is classified as "one of the best cards". Pod for example is not very good/too slow in legacy, so here is a great card that will never see true competitive play. This is criminal to me. Especially since this is the "eternal format" that wizards is jamming down the player's throats when there is a perfectly great and superior format in Legacy. They would just have to go back on their promise by eliminating the reserve list and reprint the duals and some other cards. Release a set called "Legacy Masters" and embrace the format for what it is. The best magic constructed format. It not like very many decks are that much more expensive than modern decks anyways. Boggles my mind. Also, this is a card game, not the stock exchange. They shouldn't be worried about functional reprints. Just don't reprint Power 9 as those cards aren't even legacy playable. Everyone wins, we get a better format as well as better tournament support and coverage (as the pros would be playing it at GPs and PTs).
Regarding Treasure Cruise ban in legacy. I'm on the fence about it. At first I was clamoring to see it banned. However, after the meta shift you saw more fringe and lower tier decks make a comeback. Storm was better positioned, same with Maverick. MUD and Landstill got top 8 at GP NJ. The only issue was that half of the room is/was playing UR/UWR. I can see how they would like delver players to be evenly spread between BUG/RUG/UWR/UR. However, I'm not too excited that Miracles will possibly become the number 1 deck again. We will have to see the Meta shift and go from there.
I'm actually about $100 (Not counting my refusal to spend $30 for Stone Rain on legs) worth of cards short to get into BGw in Modern, but I'm worried that they'll just ban Lilly or Goyf or something
I wouldn't worry about Lili or Goyf ever getting banned. Historically they go after combo-enablers or cards with too many functions for too cheap a price (DRS for example.) I don't think Goyf or Lili are close to meeting either of those criteria; Lili is maybe the closer of the two but it's still a very "fair" card.
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