Disregarding the relative changes before/after OGW for a second, can someone please explain to me as if I am a child how Miracles is not dominant and format warping? People on here seem to be predominantly in the "one of many top decks, completely okay" camp, while all I see with my own eyes is that it has a 20% meta share online with 2.5x the prevalence of the runner-up, and that it takes down almost every local Legacy tournament where I live. Some form of UWx Counter-Top has been the best deck in Legacy for years, is that not correct? I'm not saying everyone's wrong obviously, I'm just saying that there must be something that I'm not getting here. Is it such a necessary police deck that the meta would be worse off without it? Would it be hit by a ban if Wizards cared more about Legacy? Please enlighten me.
It's not necessarily about "enlightening" you, as it is somewhat of a subjective matter. Data is what it is, but how to interpret that data definitely calls opinion into play. All I can say is that in my opinion, the data doesn't support your claims. If you look at the thread at the top of the decks to beat forum, you can see all the TC decks data for the last several years in legacy. And you can see that, while Miracles is usually the top dog, it's not always leagues ahead of other decks and in fact was eclipsed twice in the last year, once by Grixis (fueled by Dig) and more recently by Eldrazi. You say that Magic online and your local events are dominated by it, but TCDecks specifically excludes small events (most of MTGO qualifies outside of the MOCS) for the reason that small events tend to have outliers and aren't subject to the rigors of high competition. If you go back and look at the SCG Open and Classic results they don't seem to support the idea that miracles is too dominant; plenty of other decks compete and win events, just at a lesser rate, which is fine. In Legacy especially, I think that it's important to recognize that with such a card pool, there will always be a "best deck." The best we can hope for is that the best deck is not too far above the others, not dominating the format into endless mirrors, interactive to play with and against, and most of all, serves a purpose in making the overall format more fun, and I think that with Miracles all of those things are true. (I say this as someone who only ever plays decks that fold to CounterTop :P)
Your point about "would there have been a warning if Wizards cared about legacy," on the other hand, is completely true. If Legacy was a PT or PPTQ or even more than 2 GPs a year format, I think we would've lost Brainstorm years ago, probably would've lost Show and Tell when all the "Sky is falling" rhetoric was around, probably would have lost Delver at some point, and yes, I agree with you that the CounterTop core would have seen some banning. That doesn't mean it's right: wizards continually shows they are unable to manage formats outside of Standard and I think all of those bans would be unequivicolly bad for Legacy.
Any MTGO data has to be taken with a grain of salt. It's not just a different meta, it's a totally different game.
And TCDecks is not really representative either. It will list hundreds of 12 man tournaments, while not showing tournaments held every month that have 100+ players. Not their fault if the TO doesn't report decklists, but still not a realistic report on what's playing and placing.
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As long as the "best deck" has (tier one) matches which are unfavourable, it's arguably not really the best deck. In a healthy environment, every tier one deck is a dog to at least one other tier one deck. This way the "best deck" is always meta dependant.
Miracles has been (probably) the best deck for large metas with lots of rogue and established decks alike; and where you can't really predict what you are likely to face. I'm hoping recent meta stats are a pointer to more wide open meta. I don't put much stock in the online meta because from what I see these are almost entirely small events (~5 rounds).
If WotC cared about making money from selling Legacy staples, they would ban first and ask questions later - like Modern. If they cared only about Legacy being healthy as a game, one could argue they would keep a minimal banned list and a "hands off" approach.
Modern's turn four rule is a perfect example. WotC will ban out a deck even if the meta is balanced in order to better market the format. Modern is literally not allowed to self regulate.
Last edited by Crimhead; 05-09-2016 at 11:55 AM.
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I think part of the reason miracles is represented so highly on MTGO is because the results that are shown are "who can beat 5 random decks in a row". The deck that it most capable of doing this is Miracles. In a more structured tournament setting, you hit winners instead of random decks, and this also means better pilots. I am curious to see the final tournament data for April.
Wizards of the Coast: HUUUMMM, Wrath of God costs 4, but 4 turns in Legacy is too much. I KNOW! Let's make it cost 1 mana! YAY, GREAT IDEA!
Let your Dredge 6 be: Narco, Narco, Narco, Bridge, Bridge, Dread Return
And lets make it interact really favorably with the durdliest control artifact of all time.
It's not just the mana cost - it's also the possibility to fire it off at instant speed AND being a sweeper effect where essentially zero protection exists outside of counters or spell blockers like Teeg/Pikula.
If it was just destroy, giving indestructible would at least be an outlet, but nope, the designers of the card had to be maximum dicks.
A bit late to the punch here, but I certainly don't agree with this statement at all. Granted, I'm running an exceptionally anti-Miracles shell of Burn, with maindeck Barbarian Ring/Sensei's Divining Top, and Exquisite Firecraft+Vexing Shusher in the sideboard.
As long as Miracles doesn't get absolutely silly hands, I feel like I'm ahead in the match-up.
Your also running pretty terrible cards just to have a good Miracles matchup...
Barbarian Ring is an uncounterable source of damage late against any deck not running Stifle. Sensei's Divining Top is a pretty strong card, and gives a deck with otherwise no consistency tools much needed card selection. Exquisite Firecraft is an uncounterable finisher spell against fair Blue decks. Vexing Shusher forces through Burn spells against fair Blue decks, as well as decks with Chalice of the Void.
Not exactly sure how any of these cards are pretty terrible.
Ever notice how everyone in the whole world will tell you all about how their Miracles matchup is 60-40 in their favour?
They can't all be right.
They should rename Legacy to Confirmation Bias: The Format.
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This is part of the problem - a lot of people think that Terminus is the imbalanced part about miracles. These are the same people who also probably sideboard in discard, knowing full well it doesn't work vs SDT. Then you have the camp that says ban SDT; this is fine but it also hits a ton of other decks.
The issue with miracles and the time-wasting of SDT is entirely due to the card Counterbalance. Miracles can't actually compete with fair tempo decks & unfair decks when they are forced to lose cards [or life] to counter spells - lets put this in context: SDT + Counterbalance is effectively Time Vault + Voltaic Key (except unlike this combo, SDT is actually good by itself) vs decks that have healthy mana curves...and you're concerned with Terminus. While Terminus is certainly annoying, it doesn't say "opponents basically can't resolve spells below 3 mana (not called Abrupt Decay), but every time they try SDT will waste 10-30 seconds of clock...and every time before miracles goes to draw there will be another SDT activation."
You can't run 8 creature killer [only] spells [StP+Terminus] in legacy and have a good combo matchup, unless you have a way of countering spells without any real use of resources. Without Counterbalance, miracles would have to self-correct away from such heavy dedicated creature hate.
Haha this is a good point. I talk to lands players, aggro loam players, death and taxes players, even some uwr/bug/rug delver players and merfolk players that think Miracles is 60% in their favor. When I played Miracles, I felt at most 45% vs the bad matchups, and if you get an early Mentor/Entreat you can overcome these "bad" matchups. Pretty much any brainstorm deck felt like a great matchup.
As far as data goes, I play shardless and my current win % vs Miracles is 59.6 in matches (28-19) and 63.3 % in games (62-36) since I started playing MODO competitively in February. I don't know if others have kept track of their matches to show their percentages, but there are always developments that skew things, and there are actually a surprising number of approaches one can take to the Miracles archetype.
It depends on the opening of both players and the Lands players skill in playing around and active CB. Being able to place your Combo down though a CB is useful, but if you do not have it when that card lands your in for a rough ride. I do not know where I would say the percentages sits, I will say that the more Non basics that Miracles play the better the scale tips in our favour and the more Basics they play the more it tips in theirs.
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Fuck. Which one of my quotes do I drop for this?
There's Painter and Nic Fit. Outside of that, there are only fringe uses in combo decks, mainly even SB, and only sub-30% of said combo decks use it. That's hardly "a ton of other decks", given that roughly 8% non-Miracle decks have it in their 75 "somewhere" and not even a full playset, but rather 2 copies per deck on average. (numbers taken from the Online meta)
Yes, but none of those decks use Counterbalance - and it is only the combination of SDT and Counterbalance where wasting time is the issue. SDT sees fringe use as the non-blue Ponder, which is a good thing since non-blue decks should have access to deck manipulation. SDT also sees 1x play in combo decks using blue, which again is a good thing since it punishes people for going all-out discard vs them past a certain point. Outside of miracles (and non-Terminus miracles aka countertop mentor) SDT isn't format-warping, a 4x build-around, an excessive time waster, or in any way worthy of banning.
The point of mentioning SDT is that there are 3 cards people want banned from miracles, if they think something needs a ban: Terminus, SDT, and Counterbalance. Banning SDT would probably kill the deck rather effectively, but it doesn't address the problem of Counterbalance. In terms of game design, you can knock out a known problem card (Counterbalance) or you can try and avoid any card that turns it on down the line (limiting creative space).
I can't imagine anyone bothering with Counterbalance in combination with Sylvan Library, Soothsaying, or Elemental Augury. Those cards are just too expensive to operate to make the engine work. But more importantly, if something needs to go from Miracles, I've argued since Dig was banned that the right card to kill is Entreat. Terminus is probably necessary to allow a purely reactive control deck to exist, as is Counterbalance. By forcing Miracles players to shift to Mentor, Nahiri, and Jace as their primary win conditions, the grindy BGx decks like Shardless and Loam go from being slightly favored to being significantly ahead in the matchup when Miracles is forced to win on board over multiple turns. It gives the deck enough bad matchups that it's no longer the obviously best deck if you're going into an unknown meta. I'm not convinced that anything should be banned from the deck, or even if Miracles is the best open meta deck anymore, but Entreat is the least intrusive way to hurt its meta position without killing it.
I've been playing a fair amount of Burn with my playtest group lately, and our testing showed that matchup to be better than 60/40 (Burn took 13/20 preboard and 29/40 postboard games) unless fairly extreme sideboarding was involved on the Miracles player's side: Stoneforge/Batterskull and an Enlightened Tutor package including CoP: Red were able to make the postboard games close to even: 21/40 and 18/40 for Burn, respectively.
We haven't done the Miracles/Shardless matchup sets yet, but from just having played a lot of Shardless in general I'd have guessed that the numbers were actually more favorable to Miracles. The win condition they're on matters a lot in my experience, with Mentor being much easier to beat than Entreat.As far as data goes, I play shardless and my current win % vs Miracles is 59.6 in matches (28-19) and 63.3 % in games (62-36) since I started playing MODO competitively in February. I don't know if others have kept track of their matches to show their percentages, but there are always developments that skew things, and there are actually a surprising number of approaches one can take to the Miracles archetype.
Dig actually sped-up games that were already over in miracles. While I think Counterbalance is a terribly designed card that shouldn't be legal, that's also an opinion - the issue with miracles is wasting everyone's time. Your call to ban Entreat, not Counterbalance, is good for Abrupt Decay decks and high-cmc (grindy) decks - and that just means even more wasted time, which is the problem in the first place. Rewarding a player for constantly spinning SDT 2-3 times between draw steps is entirely due to Counterbalance.
This thread isn't really about ban/restrict cards in miracles, but it is in part about the length of games. When people start chaining posts about Terminus, it's important to remember that it could be any other removal spell/board wipe/more snapcasters and the whole length of game issue didn't go anywhere.
Miracles doesn't pose the time issue that it did a year ago since it's more poorly positioned, which drove a lot of the bandwagon players who Topped inefficiently off of it. Control mirrors and control/midrange matchups frequently go to time in every format, and Top only contributes slightly to this. I don't think I've gone to time with or against Miracles since Dig was banned. Round turnover times haven't been long at any tournaments I've been to recently, and Miracles has been at healthy levels.
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