Another option is to just ban Belcher and Oops, as they don't actually bring anything of value to the format and just punish non-blue decks across the board.Originally Posted by Crimhead
Ban what exactly? Goblin Charbelcher? Laboratory Maniac?
"Everything is better topless"
Maybe just all the Spirit Guides.
I meant an opponents turn 1 delver making Standstill not very good. What do you think pushed it out/kept it down?
Or all the 0cc creatures.
More seriously, petal is the card.
LED is an interesting and unique effect with Infernal tutor, petal just fuel all T1 decks and SnT on top of it.
Are you guys being serious right now? or everyone is collectively joking about stupid bans right?
This isn't modern, bans should be the last option in legacy and only for cards that actually oppressive and prevalent and distort the entire meta.
Right now they should be looking at and we should be pushing for unbans
Yeah, Lotus Petal is almost always better than a Spirit Guide, which makes it harder to justify just banning them while letting a more powerful version of that effect stick around. There would be a lot more backlash to that because 'real decks' play Lotus Petal whereas the only 'real deck' that plays Spirit Guides is Painter, which doesn't absolutely need them.
Except if your deck wants to play around dazes? If your deck is Red/Green/Colorless (and with no need for infinity/metalcraft) how is petal better?
Storm-count. Plus if you're casting something that turn, the Daze is gonna be there regardless.
Wondering that myself, Greatwhale. I hope the talk of banning components of fringe combo decks is idle chatter.
Spirit Guides are better in decks that use Trinisphere, Eidolon of the Great Revel, Thalia, and who knows what else down the road. Casting a spell versus activating an ability has side effects. You can't just go banning a card just...because. There is nothing inherently overpowering about the Spirit Guide ability or even Lotus Petal. They have been in Legacy since its inception without issue. And why mess with decks that are such a small part of the meta? We want as many decks on the fringes as possible. That facet is, or ancestrally was the beauty of Legacy. Man, if anything, we want to nudge the percentages of those decks up a few points.
Agreeing completely with Barook here. Eldrazi promise to be awesome for Legacy. We now have in this format a real control deck, a real aggro deck, several real combo decks, and everything in between. I, for one, have been clamoring for a bonafide aggro deck in Legacy since the demise of Zoo circa 2009. It is natural for players to complain about a new powerful deck. But the chorus of complaints I hear from people complaining about Chalice of the Void are music to my ears. It hoses the cantrip cartel? OMG great! Get a new engine. They only play Chalice because it hoses decks that durdle. The lack of effective hate is an interesting issue though. I have to cackle at the fact that the current best hate (mooning their land *TM) also hits many Brainstorm-fueled decks hard.
-Dethrones Miracles and hopefully drowns out the complaints of Terminus. Check
-Beats the cantrip cartel engine. Check
-Opens up design space for other decks. Dunno. This is my hope.
These are absolutely the droids you have been looking for.
"Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."
"Politicians are like diapers. They should be changed often and for the same reason."
"Governing is too important to be left to people as silly as politicians."
"Politicians were mostly people who'd had too little morals and ethics to stay lawyers."
In no way is glass cannon combo oppressive (or even played) enough to warrant a ban, and anyone who plays those decks is taking substantially bigger risks than any other non-blue player. If you happen to get paired against Belcher or Oops, just congratulate your opponent on the size of his balls and then move on with your life.
And yeah, like Finn and Crimhead said, format diversity is nice. Legacy is slightly more fun knowing there's the possibility someone shows up with a turn 1 combo deck (or whatever other ridiculous deck you want to insert here).
The question is whether legacy should be a well-maintained and competitive format or an anything-goes festival where people get to have fun and do broken things. From a competitive point of view, I don't think free mana adds anything but variance to the format and higher variance is bad for competitive Magic. But it also lets people play the do-broken-things decks and it even lets fringe decks win more often than they do in other formats. I accept that that's something of real value for a lot of people.
But the fact that non-blue decks in legacy will always be open to T1 kills is among the reasons why competitive players rarely look at decklists that don't start with 4 Brainstorm 4 Force of Will. I play D+T and I like to think myself good at the deck, but if I had to play a large tournament and my life depended on winning it, of course I would play a Force of Will deck. I don't think T1 decks are as serious a problem as Eldrazi, but their existence does permanently warp the format in a certain direction.
Similar to free mana, t1 Chalice is a high variance effect and Eldrazi is an inherently super high variance deck. I have seen a lot of simply terrible players wrecking house with the deck. Its most powerful starts are almost unbeatable. It also has a lot of terrible hands and no card selection and sometimes you don't have to do anything at all to beat the deck.
So just like how non-blue decks randomly suffer t1/t2 combo losses, blue decks get to randomly suffer t1 Chalice, t2 Thought Knot style losses. This doesn't actually mean the decks will be built differently - nobody's gonna stop playing Brainstorm - they just have to suck up a larger number of not-games-of-Magic, similar to Vintage.
This is an assertion with no evidence. Were you correct then they wouldn't have:
* implemented the 4-of rule
* the 60-card minimum rule
* Land cards wouldn't be part of the game, or similar.
Most popular format? Standard. The one with the highest variance (least card selection, most land screw)
The game is literally popular because of variance because it gives you an excuse to blame losses on variance; which may or may not be true.
While it obviously depends on the era, standard is generally among the lowest variance formats around. That's why pros prefer to play it competitively and why they win GPs left and right. Similarly they generally hate modern because it's so high variance, higher than legacy even, despite the lack of t1 decks. (Modern's t1 losses are 'I got paired vs an unwinnable matchup or I couldn't mull to my sideboard card...so it's still often a t1 format.)
You have some peculiar notions here. But I have been in this conversation plenty of times before with other people before you.
Players are going to respond to losing lots of games to the same card by...just accepting the losses and continuing to play the same poorly positioned cards? Really? Perhaps some players will. And they will lose while others adapt. But this is exactly what it means to be playing cards that are not clearly the best in the format - a hitherto unknown position for Brainstorm-driven decks to be in. There is now this tension between which cards to play, which is THE hallmark of a healthy format....blue decks get to randomly suffer t1 Chalice, t2 Thought Knot style losses. This doesn't actually mean the decks will be built differently - nobody's gonna stop playing Brainstorm - they just have to suck up a larger number of not-games-of-Magic, similar to Vintage.
OK. No argument here. The difference might be that I recognize this as excellent. You go ahead and play your blue. You will beat the T1 decks that you fear. You will then lose to the Eldrazi decks. Or, you play D+T or Lands and you drop an occasional game to Belcher while doing much better against Eldrazi. Again, tension. (Control should defeat combo and lose to aggro, after all.) Tension where previously there was none. Thank you, Eldrazi!But the fact that non-blue decks in legacy will always be open to T1 kills is among the reasons why competitive players rarely look at decklists that don't start with 4 Brainstorm 4 Force of Will. I play D+T and I like to think myself good at the deck, but if I had to play a large tournament and my life depended on winning it, of course I would play a Force of Will deck. I don't think T1 decks are as serious a problem as Eldrazi, but their existence does permanently warp the format in a certain direction.
This is all kinds of wrong, I scarcely know where to start. But I do think that you are using the word "variance" differently from the meaning most people around here would attach to it. The word has quite a lot of baggage, and I would not take it to mean the number of decks in a format. Though, I suspect that is what you mean by it, and this would account for much of the disagreement.The question is whether legacy should be a well-maintained and competitive format or an anything-goes festival where people get to have fun and do broken things. From a competitive point of view, I don't think free mana adds anything but variance to the format and higher variance is bad for competitive Magic. But it also lets people play the do-broken-things decks and it even lets fringe decks win more often than they do in other formats. I accept that that's something of real value for a lot of people.
"Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."
"Politicians are like diapers. They should be changed often and for the same reason."
"Governing is too important to be left to people as silly as politicians."
"Politicians were mostly people who'd had too little morals and ethics to stay lawyers."
It was a lot of things. Purely reactive (non-CounterTop) control decks had already been in decline when Delver was printed, and many top players (PVDDR comes to mind) had switched to Ancestral Vision in the BUGw Control decks that grew out of DeedStill. Stoneforge Mystic and Jace the Mind Sculptor played big parts in hurting the traditional Landstill deck by giving control a ways to generate card advantage while playing to the board and threatening to end the game quickly. Liliana souped up black midrange and control decks that want to play discard and tap out every turn, and those decks either didn't want Standstill or just overwhelmed their draw with Hymn, Liliana, and value threats like Baleful Strix and Shardless Agent. Combo increasingly demanded that it be locked out or beaten quickly, and Landstill couldn't reliably do either of those. Delver (and Deathrite) didn't help, but it was a lot of factors that came together at once.
This isn't true. We now live in a meta where all-one-drops.dec simply doesn't cut it, and there's nothing intrinsically bad (or anti-competitive) about that. People can't just jam the cheapest card that does the thing they want without penalty anymore, but there are plenty of 2 CMC options for variance reduction or creature removal, and there are plenty of answers to respectable beaters on turn 2 that don't cost 1 mana and don't cause you to get run over by Delvers. There are even maindeckable answers to Chalice if you just can't accept losses to it. I have a hard time believing that Eldrazi creates any more non-games of Magic than D&T, Lands, Delver, fast combo, and Miracles do, and since it's getting its meta share largely at the expense of the latter two my guess is that the number of non-games has stayed roughly the same.
Players who play decks with a high density of 1 drops are doing so for a reason - the rest of the format is built around cards that punish you for *not* playing a super tight curve. You're now pressed from both sides - Wasteland/Daze/Stifle/Thalia etc. punish you for playing a 2 drop, Eldrazi randomly punishes you for playing a 1 drop. This "tension" is obviously going to resolve in one direction. Nobody is or should be swapping their Swords to Plowshares for Journey to Nowheres. Nobody is going to build a Storm deck that can ever beat a game 1 Chalice. Unless Eldrazi becomes an overwhelming % of the format (might happen via hobo Modern players after the ban, who knows), most people are going to continue to play otherwise optimal decks that lose to t1 Chalice and are going to suck up a certain amount of losses as the cost of doing business. The end result is a little less Magic ends up getting played at any given legacy tournament.
No, that's not what I meant by variance, you're misreading me. A wider number of decks in the format does add variance, but I am referring to the ratio of luck vs skill in a given game of Magic.
At a recent local tournament for his charity, I beat Jon Finkel, the best Magic player of all time. I beat him because he was playing Storm, I won the die roll, and I cast Thalia. We had a high variance matchup where the die roll swings your expected win % drastically and the two games were entirely without meaningful interaction. It didn't matter at all who was better at Magic, all I had to do was not forget to cast Thalia. Obviously there is built-in variance in the game and I could, in theory, beat the best player of all time in any format if he never draws a single land. But there are some formats and some decks where the die roll, the deck you're paired against and your opening hand determine fairly little and there are others where they determine almost everything. If I'm trying to beat Jon Finkel, I want to play him in a high variance format where I can win on T2.
Eldrazi is a high variance deck by that definition of variance. The good hands are incredible, the bad hands give the Eldrazi player no ability to do anything meaningful, maybe cast a small vanilla creature. The closest thing the deck has to card selection is mulliganing. Play a sphere effect, cast some Eldrazi, turn them sideways, hope you draw well. I have seen some god-awful Eldrazi players crush very good players again and again when they have the right hands, making absurdist misplays along the way. Watching an Eldrazi player is like watching a 5 year old with a gun. Sure they shoot themselves in the face eventually, but they can do a lot of damage along the way.
Eldrazi causes more non-games (defined as 'games where at least one player made zero real decisions post-mulligan') because the deck creates non-games even when it isn't locking someone out and even when it loses.
Chalice becomes 17% of the meta and it's an issue. Brainstorm hits 80% and we have a healthy diverse format. Eldrazi is miserable at times, but it's not unbeatable, and doesn't warrant a ban. So many good 2 mana options that are playable and yet don't see play. Hell even simply dismember is very good against the deck. We finally get to the point where there really isn't a clear best deck or best shell to play and people don't know what to do
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