Angelo was talking about Friedman Delver although he said the 4C Goyf Control deck was very good, but he felt like people didn't know what it was. Maybe that's why he didn't include it and put Friedman Delver instead, which is very similar.
The fact that that four color monstrosity can consistently do well despite the format having the ability to play turn 1 blood moons and half the decks packing 4 wasteland is pretty miserable.
Originally Posted by Richard Cheese
Why? It's not like the manabase never gets punished, you lose games because of Wasteland but people think the reward is there to play 4c. Something isn't immediately considered miserable just because you don't like it.
What strikes me, is that of the 5 top decks, 4 of them have 5% or more metagame share, with Miracles peaking at 17%, delver variants at 9% (combining Grixis RUG and UR), D&T at 6% and S&T at 5% (according to mtgtop8).
Lands however sits at a metagame share of 2%, which seems very low for a deck that belongs to the top5.
Lands being at a 2% metagame share is a factor of the Reserved List, due to the high as balls price of Tabernacle. If Tabernacle weren't Reserved, Lands would be a top-tier DTB and the metagame would be completely warped due to its higher presence.
Actually I think that's only partially the story, because players I know just trade/buy anything they need, regardless of price (as they'll always be able to trade/sell it again as long it's T1 cards). I suspect the difference in playstyle compared to brainstorm decks, or vulnerability to combo has more to do with it, than the pricetag.
To an extent, I agree. But also If you look at the cost of the deck as a whole it is close to in line with most other legacy decks. Yes I know tabernacle isn't as versatile as the 6 blue duals you could otherwise have gotten. But Lands isn't for everyone anyways
I find Lands to be similar to Modern Lantern. It plays completely different from other decks. I've found most people trying the deck for the first time to be pretty bad with it. When I come back to it after long breaks, I also have a tough time to put my mind back into it.
Some parts of the decks aren't that fun either, looping Rishadan Port, Punishing Fire or Glacial Chasm every turns are both long and boring. I dread every times I have to kill my opponent with Punishing Fire or complete lockdown + decking.
I have been saying it for over 2 years now. Terminus needs to be banned!
Best ≠ OP
Eldrazi in Modern was both the best and OP (because nothing in the format could interact with it.)
In Legacy, Miracles is the best deck but it's not OP considering it's very beatable if you know what you're doing.
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.
Not only that, but some lists have Miracles in their Top 5 twice for the different versions of the deck.
I think BBD has a pretty solid view on it, not that miracles is really overpowered but that it's gotten really damn boring to see, play, and play against the deck for so long. For the sake of making legacy interesting again, do something to it.
This argument kinda rubs me the wrong way. Just because a deck is somehow beatable (either by good draws, excellent players or fringe Tier 2 decks), doesn't quite "even out" having a (highly) favored position against like the remaining 85% of the metagame and average players. It doesn't need to be blatant overpowered, it just needs to create and maintain the mentioned favorable position against the metagame to reach/maintain the status the deck has since 3 years
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Thank you, TsumiBand for the great post about escalation.
TNN is the most egregious but there are others that might be playable if Terminus didn't exist (Vengevine and Thrun were mentioned. Both uncounterable and difficult to permanently remove). You're right that they'd use other angles like graveyard persistence and that at least could give an avenue to interrupt them. Of course creatures that get wrecked by Terminus are not dominating the metagame while Terminus is all over the place but if it weren't for Terminus we'd almost certainly see more of them.
We might be in a better place if Supreme Verdict tucked and Terminus was a simple wrath but the power has already escalated and we're at a place where creatures can get tucked.
It's my opinion that players have preferences between creature and instants/sorceries and I still don't see why you say that's ridiculous. All of your examples of instants and sorceries there were still extremely creature-based. Yeah they interact with the stack and that's good because they can interact with non-creature-based decks but they are still instant-speed effects that require you to have creatures to cast them on. On the flipside, instant/sorcery decks play creatures like Snapcaster Mage who are totally tied to those card types just like Boros Charm is tied to creature-based decks.
Standard is the rotating format. We don't need to artificially rotate eternal formats with yugioh-style bans. Eternal formats have massive amounts of legal cards and each year that cardpool only increases by a small percentage so it would be unhealthy for the format to rapidly change; it would be a sign of runaway power-creep. Banning cards because a deck has been good for a long time is anathema to the spirit of eternal formats and it's an excuse to ask for cards to be banned just because someone dislikes them. An objective argument for banning a card to weaken Miracles would be data showing that no viable deck has a good matchup against Miracles.
Don't really understand this - what creatures DON'T get wrecked by terminus? Thrun is also a legendary 4 drop, btw. And I can at least block it if I want. And when I'm playing against it at least I can make my opponent choose between dedicating 2 mana to regenerate it or take the damage. Quite simply TNN is in a completely different stratosphere than TNN. Oh, and lets not forget the biggest drawback...GG casting cost
Because somehow you justified Terminus' existence because "some people don't like casting creatures". Cool, thats fine, they don't have to. They can spend 4 mana like a regular board wipe should cost...at sorcery speed.
In the example I gave, both players get to play magic. you get your board wipe, the creature guy gets a fighting chance. Instead, we get this derpy control deck that will bone you for over extending via terminus (literally no way for instants or sorceries to combat this card unless of course you counter it), and bone you for slowly deploying your threats lest you get locked out by the ever so skill intensive SDT + Counterbalance lock.
The argument in favor of banning a card from Miracles (though let's be honest, the card in question will be Top) is precisely that Miracles has been too good for too long. In fact, it's been so good for so long that we've gone through several metagame cycles of anti-Miracles technology being invented/printed/discovered, widely adopted, and Miracles evolving to incorporate reliable answers to whatever tech cropped up. The problem is not that no deck can reliably beat Miracles, it's that the decks that can reliably beat it are constantly changing. In effect, Legacy rotates, it just rotates around Miracles.
I understand the argument and am saying that it's against the spirit of the format and a completely subjective argument based on what an individual's opinion of "long time" is. It reeks of an excuse to avoid saying "I don't like control decks and want them to be weaker". If there is winrate data that shows an unbalance that would be something we could discuss without it being totally charged by our biases of what decks we enjoy.
Going through cycles of technology is what's beautiful about eternal formats and if wotc just banned cards more often it would rob players of the chance to innovate and be creative. This is what real natural metagame evolution looks like.
Creatures with comes-into-play abilities (ie Baleful Strix) and creatures that don't rely on going to the graveyard or indestructability (ie Deathrite Shamn, Delver, and eldrazi creatures) are not wrecked by Terminus any more than they are by other wipes. Tucking is particularly effective against some creatures though and that was my point. Terminus is a very (very) efficient board wipe that comes with splash damage against graveyards and "durable" or hard to kill creatures.Don't really understand this - what creatures DON'T get wrecked by terminus? Thrun is also a legendary 4 drop, btw. And I can at least block it if I want. And when I'm playing against it at least I can make my opponent choose between dedicating 2 mana to regenerate it or take the damage. Quite simply TNN is in a completely different stratosphere than TNN. Oh, and lets not forget the biggest drawback...GG casting cost
I wasn't mentioning that division of players to justify Terminus. I mentioned it because I think that's what this whole conversation boils down to and creature-lovers hate wraths just like they always have. If the data proves that Miracles has favorable matchups against all the other viable decks then I'm not going to defend the deck but when the arguments against it are nebulous I will.Because somehow you justified Terminus' existence because "some people don't like casting creatures". Cool, thats fine, they don't have to. They can spend 4 mana like a regular board wipe should cost...at sorcery speed.
In the example I gave, both players get to play magic. you get your board wipe, the creature guy gets a fighting chance. Instead, we get this derpy control deck that will bone you for over extending via terminus (literally no way for instants or sorceries to combat this card unless of course you counter it), and bone you for slowly deploying your threats lest you get locked out by the ever so skill intensive SDT + Counterbalance lock.
Being the most widely-played deck or existing for a long time does not make a deck overpowered. Consider that hard counterspell-based control decks do not exist in any other format but Vintage and even there they are very fringe. That inflates the number of Miracles players in Legacy because if you like this kind of deck then this is almost the only format you can play it in. If you like something like midrange and hate being wrathed then other formats provide that and midrange players are distributed throughout all formats. I'm not trying to be a total douchebag and say "go play another format" by saying this. My point is that Legacy is literally the last bastion of hard control so the players that enjoy it will be drawn to the format to play this deck. As Ingo said about Lands, players don't exclusively choose their decks based on what is good or else we'd expect to see some more Lands players. Lands is a strange beast and it has its fans but isn't widely popular and a contributing factor is that not a lot of players want to play that deck. Miracles' share of the format is inflated by the same phenomenon but in the opposite direction.
I didn't see anything that even indicated he wanted control decks to be weaker in the format. Having a playable control deck in a format is usually a good thing but the problem with miracles is how much better it is than any other control deck you can play in the format. It gets the best selection between top and the obvious blue cantrips, it has arguably one of the best CA/prison pieces in counterbalance, has the ability to combo out or win games out of nowhere with entreat or angels, has a 1 mana instant speed wrath which constantly requires playing around and has the ability to easily adapt to any hate that is being played without changing major cards in the deck. Blade decks had to choose what they wanted to build their sideboard again but even with that didn't feel so oppressive.
I remembered back when Pod was still a deck in Modern I brought a week old list of UWR Control to my LGS to play in our Modern weeklies after PT Born of the Gods had ended. I remembered my opponent following up his Kitchen Finks with a Pod which resolved, which got him a Thrun.
I cast Hallowed Burial and he proceeded to drop a Kitchen Finks while I only had a single Bolt in hand and proceeded to make another Thrun.
I think this anecdote is revelant.
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