Mark Rosewater thinks Legacy builders aren't as talented as Modern builders?

[Begle1]

From Rosewater's Tumblr blog:

barooky asked:
Wouldn't Modern regulate itself much better if it had more powerful police cards like Legacy does?

Response: The thing that helps Legacy is not “police cards”. It’s that we don’t shine a major spotlight on it and get some of the best deck builders in the world to try to break it once a year.

I feel slightly insulted as a Legacy fan, and incredulous regarding the sort of logic employed here. I guess it's insightful, they feel once they drop format support nobody really tries any more...

[Sloshthedark]

I'd ask Mark Rosewater how many legacy matches has he played or even seen last year... I'm glad that absence of spotlight means Wotc doesn't try to break it once a year...

[CorwinB]

I think it's not so much a matter of individual deck builders talent that a matter of sheer manpower. For each PT, you get those large teams comprised of the game's best players (many of whom are also excellent Legacy/Vintage players) who gather for weeks in order to try to break the format (which happened at the last PT). Preparing for a Legacy GP (the biggest Legacy events left, I think) can not bring the same amount of dedicated people together.

Not having a Legacy PT also means that WotC won't play fast and loose with the Ban List like they do with Modern in order to "shake the format". As Patrick Chapin (IIRC) once said, "If there was a Legacy PT, Brainstorm would have been banned already.".

Where I don't agree with Maro is that the "police cards" (I suppose FoW, Wasteland, Stifle, StP, Flusterstorm, DRS... plus good cantrips/tutors to find them) play a big role into making it much less likely that some deck will all of a sudden appear from nowhere and trust 75% of the Top 8 of a major Legacy tournament like the travesty that was PT OGW. Without powerful universal answers, Modern games can often end in "Did I find room in my sideboard for this specific matchup ? Did I draw my SB hate ?". In Legacy, even if someone (or a team) finds a new nutty combo that can kill T1 or T2 very often, he's likely to get thrown of his plan by FoW at least a couple times over the tournament (see Belcher).

Because of the lack of good universal answers in Modern, the DCI had to ban some hilarious stuff (Blazing Shoal anyone ?) as well as any cantrip more powerful than Serum Visions so that combos don't get assembled too easily (since disrupting combos is so unreliable).

Since WotC seem to insist on making spells even more expensive and more specialized with each expansion (and the only way to get new cards for Modern is through the Standard pool), my guess is that they will be forced to ban more and more clunky stuff in Modern over the years because of unforeseen interactions.

[Lemnear]

The way I interpret the said is that MaRo considers Legacy "underdeveloped" because it's no PT format and therefore Pros don't invest much time to develop decks.

Edit: this pretty much implies that he denies the existance of broken strategies and the need for "Police cards", which makes me wonder if he has any freaking idea about what's going on in the format

[Varal]

There's a big difference between 2000 people going to a tournament mostly to have fun and the 400 best players going to a tournament to "work" and earn money. You don't see teams of 10 players testing relentlessly for a month before a Legacy GP. This means the decks in average will be less focused, there will be a lot of noise in the results since the "best" decks will play less often against each other and it's going to be harder to determine what is the best deck. The average opposition makes less optimal play muddling the importance of the deck to win. The more a player can leverage his playing skills, the less his decklist has importance; the player and not the deck will win the match.

I'm not sure the format could be as broken as it was in Modern but the metagame could be clearly more defined than is right now. It could be argued that the format is already broken with decks following either a Brainstorm shell, a Wasteland shell or both.

[Barook]

His answer kinda ignores that quite a few of the pros that play the PT also play Legacy at times, e.g. Tom Ross or Reid Duke.

Right now, the only decks that are really underdeveloped for Legacy imho are the new Eldrazi lists. Everything else has been pretty much static over the years with minor changes.

[Stevestamopz]

I wouldn't take it personally, everyone already knows that Legacy is the superior format but can't get into it due to pricing issues or whatever.

WOTC employees on the other hand have to talk shit on it otherwise they won't be lead designers of Modern Masters 301347.

[DLifshitz]

Edit: this pretty much implies that he denies the existance of broken strategies and the need for "Police cards"

To be fair, he can't be seen to criticize Modern, or the lack of the kind of "police cards" that are the linchpin of Legacy in recent card design. At least he sort of admits that as of today, Modern is, in fact, broken.

[Zombie]

The way I interpret the said is that MaRo considers Legacy "underdeveloped" because it's no PT format and therefore Pros don't invest much time to develop decks.

Edit: this pretty much implies that he denies the existance of broken strategies and the need for "Police cards", which makes me wonder if he has any freaking idea about what's going on in the format

I don't even know if it's about the format. It's like, competitive game development 101. If you add power, you add failsafes, and things will likely work out. You neglect failsafes but have a high power level, things will likely go to shit. Too much defensive options for aggression, and things turn into a complicated muck fest that can be dull, but will entertain a small handful of people.

[Barook]

https://twitter.com/Barook1985/statu...96608550178816

I've put up the discussion on Twitter. Let's see if some Pros actually bite.

[Mr.C]

I think he's right. If we had all the major pros actively trying to break the format, we'd see a lot of unconventional (and possibly broken) strategies pop up.

[Quasim0ff]

I don't think so. If you play some random combo deck, chances are it's either super soft to efter delver decks or miracles or storm.

I don't think there's infinite possibility out there to break the format, like MaRo apparently thinks, but then again, he wanted a modern shake-up so he banned a turn 4 combo deck for "format diversity".

[twndomn]

Regardless if the pros have the ability to break a format or not, the Legacy format itself has shown again and again, it is resilient enough to stabilize. People were freaking out when True Name was released; now..., not so much. I am willing to say that Wizards will have to swing the ban hammer on Modern for Eldrazi, and Legacy will once again, absorb Eldrazi like everything else that has been printed. This has nothing to do with the creativity of PT/GP competitors, bad format is just bad format, don't shift the blame onto the players, take it as it is, Maro. he is giving way too much credit to the PT competitors. That's like giving the GP competitors the middle finger.

[Quasim0ff]

I do agree that we would see much better decklists of the top decks in Legacy, if it was a pro tour format.

Having someone like, say, Sam Black (incredible deckbuilder) or Brad Nelson (who are exceptionally good at tuning decks for a metagame) trying to "solve" a metagame does make for some serious propelling forwards wrt. decks.

However, there's a huge difference from a PT where you know there will be a slight bias towards certain decks (from the top teams, I might add), it's an entirely different beast than say, GPs where you might meet needless playing something like Enchantressstorm.

[Barook]

I do agree that we would see much better decklists of the top decks in Legacy, if it was a pro tour format.

Having someone like, say, Sam Black (incredible deckbuilder) or Brad Nelson (who are exceptionally good at tuning decks for a metagame) trying to "solve" a metagame does make for some serious propelling forwards wrt. decks.

However, there's a huge difference from a PT where you know there will be a slight bias towards certain decks (from the top teams, I might add), it's an entirely different beast than say, GPs where you might meet needless playing something like Enchantressstorm.

What about the yearly SCG Championship? I don't see anyone breaking the format anywhere. The best we get is inbred shit like D&T with multiple Spirit of the Labyrinths because you can expect everybody else to be on Brainstorm.

Can anybody see the innovation and format breaking? Because I don't.

[Quasim0ff]

What about the yearly SCG Championship? I don't see anyone breaking the format anywhere. The best we get is inbred shit like D&T with multiple Spirit of the Labyrinths because you can expect everybody else to be on Brainstorm.

Can anybody see the innovation and format breaking? Because I don't.

I'm arguing that the format won't be broken, but we would see much more lean decklists. NOT new decks.

[Dice_Box]

The Speed it took U/R Delver to be discovered and break the format, then following that Omnishow leads me to think he is a little bit... um... Wrong.

[Lord_Mcdonalds]

I think he's right. If we had all the major pros actively trying to break the format, we'd see a lot of unconventional (and possibly broken) strategies pop up.

I doubt it, Legacy is largely pretty devoid of new things you could be doing, maybe there are some old forgotten strategies that could be rebuilt to be better, but the most powerful things you can be doing have been found.

Even with modern, it wasn't like pros were actively breaking the format over and over again ever year, they tend to take old ideas, explore and refine them further but rarely did we see them outright break or redefine the format (that I am aware of anyways)

[apple713]

Legacy is a format that has been solved. It can only be broken on the release of new cards. Thus every three-four months when new cards are released the legacy community analyzes the new set for the 1-2 cards that might see some play in legacy. On the rare occasion that a card is good enough to see play it's likely to be found quickly because for something to be good enough to be played in legacy it would be clearly a great card.

I am certain that no matter what great minds he thinks legacy is missing, the format would not change at all with the addition of more great minds. Legacy has a very high standard for cards to meet before they are ver considered for a slot in a deck. A new creature would more likely fit into an already existing deck than demand to have a deck built around it. A new combo piece is extremely unlikely to see play because of the incredibly high bar that Show and tell and ANT set. On the control front, it is highly unlikely there will ever really be a control deck that comes close to the power level of miracles. Miracles has gotten to the point where people have discussed ban's on SDT because of it.

So F you rosewater for being ignorant and having such great control over a game you clearly know so little about.

[iatee]

Modern is only more unsolved than legacy right now because:
- They just printed a bunch of busted cards for the format.
- They regularly ban key cards.

If you banned Brainstorm or Top and had a legacy Pro Tour the next week, I think things would be pretty interesting, and I don't think anyone here could reasonably predict the T8. The modern tour a year ago didn't have crazy new brews in the t8 despite the Pod banning, and this one only did because they suddenly let people play 8 Ancient Tombs in a format with no Wasteland.