Who's talking about banning Chalice? I'm not personally all about brainstorm but seeing people on day 2 at Prague with Eldrazi picking up and reading swords to plowshares was tilting... It feels like a tier 1 autopilot deck.Originally Posted by nedleeds
The #skillintensive card, shocking.
The winner of the Prague GP was on Twitter complaining about Chalice.
... and losing to the delver go daze wrong spell, stifle all the wrong things, waste you is fucking matrix calculus, or cascading into hymn, into visions, into whatever is astrophysics. Finding a Show and Tell and a moronic thing to dump is also truly mind wrenching.
Agree 100%. If 75% of the field and 90% of the people with 3 round byes are on Brainstorm.format.dec it's a fait accompli.
Nedleeds moaning about brainstorm... Shocking.
Agree about Show and Tell. If show and tell was 15% of day two that'd be pretty depressing too.
The other examples you mention... Sure, pretty much every deck can win games in the hands of a trained monkey, but muuuch less frequently than Eldrazi (and SnT/reanimator) imo.
Eldrazi seriously feels like a limited deck except with a coked up mana base and bombs on every step of the curve on top of their stompy traits of lock piece on turn 1-2.
I agree with this.
This really wasn't a great showing of the diversity of Legacy. A GP is probably going to bring out the spikiness in most players but it's hard to look at the results and say that Legacy's "any given sunday" reputation is deserved.
I mean it just shows that in a 16 round event your just hurting yourself by not playing brainstorm. In like a 100 man event you can get away with it, but over 16 rounds you're either playing BS or you're resigned to not winning
GP Columbus:
Of the 100 decks that made day two, Grixis Delver had the most showings, at 16. There were a total of 22 different decks. Control, aggro-control, aggro-combo, aggro-prison (or whatever we want to call Death and Taxes and Eldrazi), midrange, and combo are all present. The Top 8 was Infect, GR Lands, Grixis Delver, Reanimator, Miracles x4. That's still 5 different decks in the Top 8, including aggro-control, combo, and control archetypes.
GP Prague:
Of the 100 decks that made day two, Eldrazi had the most showings at 15. There were a total of 17 different decks and 7 labeled as "other". Again, control, aggro-control, aggro-prison, aggro-combo, midrange, and combo decks all make a showing. The Top 8 was Sneak and Show, Death and Taxes, Shardless BUG, Miracles, Grixis Delver x2, RUG Delver, and Storm. That's 7 different decks, and even if you combine Grixis and RUG Delver, 5 different archetypes.
Legacy looks incredibly diverse right now, with a few clear Tier 1 decks, a handful of Tier 1.5 decks, and a ton of Tier 2 decks that reward playskill, practice, and preparedness. What more could you ask for in a format?
Edit: Inevitable Brainstorm debate over the "What more could you ask for?" comment:
The Top 8s are full of decks running Brainstorm (7/8 in both cases). They are also full of different archetypes: 5 different decks in the Top 8 at Columbus, and 5 or 6 at Prague, depending on if you want to split it as "Delver" or "Grixis Delver" and "RUG delver." I understand that people fall on both sides of the "Legacy Diversity" debate: 7/8 Brainstorm decks vs 5 Different Decks. There's an ~700 page thread full of this exact debate-is there any way to discuss these results without it boiling down to this argument again?
Edit again: Sorry, looks like I wasn't fast enough to get this up before Finn started his reply. I don't mean to start that argument again, but it's hard to avoid pointing out the two different ways to look at the Top 8 results.
InfoNinjas
Are you seriously taking us back there? The age old disagreement about if decks powered by Brainstorm dominating the field constitutes a bad thing is going bring this discussion to a bad place.That's still 5 different decks in the Top 8, including aggro-control, combo, and control archetypes.
After facing Eldrazi a LOT of times, I really thought it had enough power to balance out the bad draws. I guess my entire perspective on that is rather win-more. Brainstorm lets you eke out a slight victory, but it is still a "w".
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There's two ways to interpret the Top 100 and Top 8 results from the two Legacy GPs: incredible diversity or incredible lack of diversity. I don't think it's unreasonable to acknowledge these two views, but you're right, it'd be great to avoid turning this thread into a "Ban Brainstorm" thread; there's already a 700-page thread for that topic.
InfoNinjas
Remember when Legacy was diverse because you could play any kind of Survival of the Fittest deck you wanted?
Well, looks like you could play any kind of Miracles you wanted at GP Columbus. One Ponder, one Legends, one aggressive Mentor list, one hybrid Ponder/Legends.
"I'm willing to imagine a TES where Past in Flames replaces Ill-Gotten Gains entirely, and we just don't play Diminishing Returns." - me, 29/09/2011
Founding member of Team Scrubbad: Legacy Legends
Blind flipping Counterbalance like
I think the biggest thing is the deep seeded emotional understanding that the right play is the right play regardless of outcomes. The ability to make a decision 5 straight times, lose 5 times because of it, and still make it the 6th time if it's the right play. - Jon Finkel
"Notions of chance and fate are the preoccupation of men engaged in rash undertakings."
Sure you can play any archetype you want to win. But you start your deck with 4 Brainstorm and some non zero number of ponder.
And that (wrong) assumption is likely one of the main reasons why Eldrazi underperformed. Yes, it gets stupid monkey-level auto-pilot hands from time to time. Yes, sometimes games turn out extremely linear where either side of the table is just FUBAR. But other than that, there are alot of nuances to screw up that you might only recognize after a few hundred games/matches.
The finals of GP Prague involved a very complex few turns where the Storm player outplayed someone with a huge grip of counterspells. Nobody would want to watch a finals decided by a t1 Chalice. The potential for interesting games with Eldrazi is just not that high, the cards are very brute force and the most important decision is your mulligan.
Show and Tell is also pretty dumb and is the blue equivalent of brute force and I am not sure how many people would actually be sad if it were banned.
Super solid day 2 representation by Eldrazi, and still bitching about Brainstorm? Jeeeez.
I hope you understand that Brainstorm is the reason why Eldrazi is even a deck in Legacy.
So no top 8... Keep in mind that Eldrazi was introduced YESTERDAY on the Legacy timeline, and probably not anywhere near optimized yet, and no player has been playing it for years, or become a true master with the deck yet, like some Storm or Miracles players.
This isn't Standard. Changes takes time. So go out and play some Legacy, the format of OPTIONS like 3.301 players did this weekend. Don't sit around at home, complaining about no Eldrazi in the top 8. Do something about it. I know, it's hard work.
And have the format look like Modern before Modern went to shit (circa pre-KTK)? No thanks.
The purpose of any moat is to impede attack. Some are filled with water, some with thistles. Some are filled with things best left unseen.
You mean to tell me modern was good?
I like legacy the way it is, I don't have a meta of the same 8 decks so it's all gravy to me.
Modern I find to be very dull, more than 50% is aggro and the rest is a mix of combo and control.
Not to mention most of the better control decks are a combo win.
Wotc hates combo and blue decks, that why any deck that gets some help to beat the better blue decks they ban it.
Even though them weaker decks ran more numbers of said card and the top ones only used 1&2 copies and it didn't help them anymore than the card they replaced with.
Once upon a time the metagame was like Legacy's: 3-5 pillars, 15+ tier 1.5/2 decks. Then everything changed when Ancestral Cruise and Lightning Helix Rhino were printed.
But my comment was trying to highlight the fact that the format had no real control deck–Scapeshift is the closest to a "hard control" deck but even then it's not a great one, Twin is tempo–and it still doesn't. Back then and everything was bumping midrange against combo against combo against midrange against aggro against aggro. It was diverse (as Legacy will still be diverse even after a Terminus ban) but it won't have control. I could have highlighted that better, but here it is.
Agreed.I like legacy the way it is, I don't have a meta of the same 8 decks so it's all gravy to me.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here.Wotc hates combo and blue decks, that why any deck that gets some help to beat the better blue decks they ban it.
Even though them weaker decks ran more numbers of said card and the top ones only used 1&2 copies and it didn't help them anymore than the card they replaced with.
The purpose of any moat is to impede attack. Some are filled with water, some with thistles. Some are filled with things best left unseen.
You could make that argument with delver, moreso then miracles (which comes down to a difference of a handful of cards and even then, the decks still play basically the same), you can play midrange delver (BUG Delver), tempo delver (RUG Delver), Aggro Delver (UR Delver), or Control Delver (Grixis or UWR).
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