http://www.channelfireball.com/home/...ned-in-legacy/
Thanks all who have chimed in on this topic. Not really sure how this article should be treated as it is essentially a B/R discussion.
Mods, feel free to lock this thread and encourage all discussion on that thread. I just wanted to make sure folks saw it.
- Bob
That's a nice summary of the pros and cons. I enjoy Legacy right now but I wouldn't mind seeing Brainstorm go. If you've the choice between banning Brainstorm or Show and Tell, Dig Through Time and Delver of Secrets, I would get rid of Brainstorm instead of Necropotence-cuddling it.
Brainstorm is even higher by now on MODO, aka 80+%
Pretty much all of this has been discussed to death in the B&R thread over the years in hundreds of pages, but I want to comment on one thing in the article:
The Belcher boogeyman argument was always stupid. Belcher wasn't even a thing in the pre-Delver era when BS was still floating around 50%. The chance to find a FoW with BS on the play is extremely low and matters in about 2% of games total (play + draw) IIRC.
Another one of these?
Aren't there a billion posts under the ban/unban thread
"Diversity" is not synonymous with "fun." seems to be implying that the format in its current state is not diverse but merely "fun".
I think Legacy is diverse.
Not only is it diverse, Brainstorm is partly responsible for this diversity by allowing a lot of different strategies and combos to be executed with an acceptable degree of consistency.
Good summary article. [sarcasm] Since no one these days ever advances an argument for or against Brainstorm that wasn't listed in the article, we can now put this one to bed and go home. [/sarcasm]
A couple of thoughts:
RE: People Quitting Legacy: Depending on when you bought in, this is actually an attractive option if your heart would be broken by a Brainstorm ban. I bought in around 2005 and I've since sold some of my duals individually for what I paid for their playsets back then. Cashing out now is pure gas for veteran players.
On the other hand, people who cashed in since prices started rising are in much worse shape if they cash out now. It reminds me of Games Workshop and people who play Warhammer 40K/Fantasy: despite loud and continuous grousing by players about what GW has done to the game, plenty of people still play because of all the sunk costs they have. No one wants to take a 50%+ loss on their models by selling them second-hand, but no one wants to just have all these models lying around that they'll never use - so people keep playing.
RE: Skill-Testing: Leaving aside whether Brainstorm is actually skill-testing (something I think is debatable), how skill-testing a card is should have no bearing on whether it remains legal. Indeed, there's precedent in Magic for skill-testing cards to receive the banhammer: look at Jace TMS in Standard, for example, where he was an important component of a deck that was widely acknowledged to scale well with skill.
I still don't understand this argument. Most of the people I know who've been playing legacy for 5+ years certainly wouldn't suddenly Rage-Quit because of a BS ban. If your heart and soul is in casting that Instant, enough so that you would just stop playing if it was gone, you should probably just GTFO already. I've been doing it since Ice Age, and it doesn't mean THAT much to me.Originally Posted by Aggro_zombies
I'd imagine this argument applies predominantly to the more Spike-y players who have started playing more recently as SCG upped their support of the format, and many of them don't even play with their own cards.
It's also hard to imagine the market as a whole taking a large (20%?) hit over a short term, even in light of a major banning.
Check out my Legacy UBTezz Primer. Chalice of the Void: Keeping Magic Fair.
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Playing since '96. Brief forced break '02-04. Former/Idle Judge since '05. Told Smmenen to play faster at Vintage Worlds.
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Most of the 'Ban brainstorm!' arguments are based on the logic that 'more different cards should get played in Legacy', as though the success or health of the format can be measured by the portion of cards that are available and see play. This is an idiotic metric.
Like everyone else has said, good summary. I've become increasingly ambivalent about Brainstorm as the debate has gone on, but that's mostly due to me being bored with the tier 1 metagame. I think your suggested compromise bans are pretty reasonable if the goal is to make the format less blue, but I don't think any of them will go very far on their own. I think that Ponder is a better target than Delver, but banning Show and Tell doesn't make many relevant decks better. Not that I'd mind seeing the card banned as it's easily ten times as obnoxious as it is powerful.
EDIT: On the topic of running a league with Brainstorm (or any other card) banned or unbanned, I think you'd need to at least run two leagues in different locations so that it didn't get too inbred.
Last edited by btm10; 05-26-2015 at 07:45 PM.
I don't think banning brainstorm will encourage diversity. Blue will still be legacy's color regardless of it's banning or not. Blue decks will still be the most consistent decks.
Cheers
This...
Legacy is a very successful format that Wizards can profit from via modern masters and friends. Banning brainstorm will dramatically alter the format...and at least in the short term (possibly long term)...will do some damage to the player base. As long as the format is thriving and legacy players are still a source of revenue for wizards there is no reason to do something dramatic...like ban the most popular card in the format.
With that being said...I'm all for banning it. However, my vote to ban the card doesnt put my job at wizards on the line.
Legacy is not supported by wizard because it does not earn them anything.
Or, to be more precise, much much less than Standard, or limited.
No more banning. They need to unban cards like Survival and earthcraft.
brainstorm is fair. If WotC does not like it, then they should print cards that limit it's power.
Brainstorm is one of the few cards that can effectively fight discard. Without it discard will become more prevalent
This foolish argument has been used time and time again. Not in cards but all places. Konami doesn't want to make games on console anymore because it only makes a little bit of money and not all of it. (RIP Silent Hills) Everyone wants to be Call of Duty because it is the big boy but I want to play a RTS game. So many others do to. XCOM made as a shooter? That sold nothing compared to Enemy unknown. A smaller well made game made good money for a smaller but dedicated crowd.
You give a smaller crowd what they want and get some of the money. Makes no sense to get none of the money all of the time. It costs Wizards very little to throw a ball to Legacy and it makes them more than nothing. I see people playing Karns fetches, tell me that made Wizards nothing. They can support and supply Legacy new toys and tools and make money doing it. To think they can't is foolish and akin to Konami moving to Mobile games.
(I am unsure how much of this post will make sense, sorry about that.)
It is better to ask and look stupid then keep your mouth shut and remain so.
I hope your afterlife is filled with eternal torment.
Fuck. Which one of my quotes do I drop for this?
If they gave us what we wanted, then we would have an alternative to the dual lands by now. Make a set of dual lands for the two-colored Commander decks that somehow references your Commander in the text (aka functionally different from the classic duals on the RL), charge 39.99$ for the packs and Wizards would swim in money from Eternal players while still staying true to the Reserve List.
We wouldn't even have this discussion if Erik Lauer did his job as head developer. Don't want to ban Brainstorm because it's popular? Then print at least hate that is on a par with it (symmetrical, cheap, maindeckable permanents instead of going full retard with stuff like Mental Misstep). If you add in development time for New Phyrexia, then Brainstorm is recognized by R&D as a problem for at least five fucking years. And all we got is a lousy Spirit of the Labyrinth.
What limits discard effectiveness is much more the fact that it's usually useless in lategame than brainstorm.
They do not even have to make it in commander sets. As long as there is no fetch in the format, adding to any dual-lands the basic land types (making them fetch-able I mean) will do the job: if the scrylands where printed with these, we would probably have replaced roughly a fourth of the bilands in most of the lists, while giving a huge consistency boost in every colour. If the come into play tapped trilands had the basic types, they would have replaced some bilands too.
Spirit of the Labyrinth is not a bad card at all, unfortunately for the same CCM there is Thalia and Cannonist, which are both better. I believe a functional reprint of SotL in G would have been quite interesting (GSZ-able). As far as "symmetrical, cheap, maindeckable permanents" goes, there is the recent print of eidolon which was really good, especially with a RR cost making it hard to splash.
idk about other players, but i enjoy the posibility of select what cards i draw in magic. brainstorm is awesome. if brainstorm leaves, something would take it place in popularity and the what, ban that too?
Preordain / serum visions / Sleight of hand do not work at all like brainstorm... One of them would replace it to remake the holy trinity of cantrips (Brainstorm / Ponder / Gitaxian probe), however you'd loose a lot... Brainstorm is instant speed, can be used to protect yourself from discard and can shuffle shaff that's already in your hand back in the library... I don't think Preordain / serum visions / sleight of hand have the same power level :)
They can't print "actual" duals in Standard-legal sets because they would also enter Modern (where they lack decent nonbasic hate). Commander product would be an elegant solution to get around that. They also stated that they don't want fetchable duals and fetchlands in the same Standard.
All those cards are plagued by sorcery speed and a CC higher than Brainstorm. And that's the reason why they don't really work. The hate would need to be instant speed and have a CC of one maximum (or an alternate casting cost) to prevent a repetition of the mistakes from the past. A land with a draw jam effect might get away with the lack of instant speed since it doesn't enter the stack, but that would be highly likely to be absurdly powerful if not crippled into unplayability.
Debates over Brainstorm are pretty much the same as debates over Gun laws in America.
1 side says "this is ridiculous, why does it still exist" and the other side says "no, we need it for X reasons, because... safety".
The reality is that Brainstorm is OP as fuck and the people that want to keep Brainstorm legal just like playing with Brainstorm and enjoy how powerful it is.
Obviously if you're pro brainstorm that's not a very good argument as to why it should stay legal in the format, so you have to come up with pretty lame reasons like "without it, discard becomes OP" and "without instant speed filtering, how will we find FOW against belcher decks!"
That doesn't stay true to the spirit of the Reserved List, though, which apparently is something they're being obligated to follow. It's why there's no gold-bordered dual lands despite them not violating the letter, and apparently the slightly-different-from-Fork Reverberate is seen as a mistake in that regard.
I mean, heck, this idea goes back to when they did double down on the Reserved List. Because at one point the wording explicitly allowed them to print promo foil versions of cards on the list, but they took that away. I don't think they cited the spirit at that point, but that would seem to be the rationale to actually take away a loophole they had.
Now I do think this "in spirit" thing is stupid, but someone or something is pretty obviously leaning really strongly on R&D to stick to the Reserved List as hard as possible, even avoiding things that technically don't break it.
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