Yes.
No.
Something else.
Lands, MUD, Stax, and Miracles.
Man the rose-colored glasses are thick with this one. Aside from Dark Bant Blade and Grixis Delver/Control (all decks already currently seeing play), none of the decks you think are coming back will come back. BUGr's meta share just gets wider. News flash: bad decks are still bad. Lands wasn't being pushed out by Miracles; Storm was killed by Leovold; SnS was already making a comeback but that deck barely cares about the metagame.
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.
Feelings are so confused today. My beloved Maple Leafs lost and are out of the play offs, but then they Ban top today.
I haven't played a major legacy event since the debacle that was GPNJ. Having an event run 3 hours over time each day was really put off.
Future looks bright!
RiP Doomsday :'(
And also just as I was planning on building Painter or Bomberman next!
Should have been Terminus that went.
The Doomsday Codex
We're catching bullets in our teeth,
Its hard to do but they're so sweet.
And if they take a couple out,
We try to work things out.....
Meow.
I'm going to try really hard not to step on toes with this.
So Aaron's point is twofold: Miracles is too powerful; and Top, which is integral to the deck, gums up the game.In Legacy, Miracles—a deck that is focused on combining Counterbalance and Sensei's Divining Top to control what opponents can or (mostly) cannot resolve—has been the best deck in the format for some time. We were hopeful that this would change over time, but it has not. That alone is not necessarily enough to move to ban a card from the deck, but Sensei's Divining Top comes with its own host of issues that center around the timely conclusion of matches in a tournament setting. The necessity of repeated Top activations to play the card slows down match play and leads to tournament delays. Coupled with the power of the Miracles deck, this is reason enough for us to take action on Top. Therefore, Sensei's Divining Top is banned in Legacy.
Both of these may be correct, but he did a poor job of making the argument that both of those factors when taken together warrant a ban for Top yet that neither factor on its own—least of all the indisputable (yes, indisputable) dominance of a deck that relies on the card—is a good enough reason for the ban. I get the impression that his explanation might as well read, "Top slows down the game to an inordinate degree, which makes the card bad for competitive Magic. Also, Miracles exists."
I hold an opposing view that, largely, is colored by my experience. I have never had match-length trouble against Miracles, perhaps because I typically play decks that win or lose decisively—often in a single turn—and I rarely play tournaments of more than four rounds, where fatigue really sets in. I have never even heard of people's having match-length trouble against other decks that run Top unless those decks were both as complex as Doomsday and piloted by inexperienced players.
[EDIT: It strikes me that, if match-length was the problem they wanted to address, it was the top-flight deck running Top that was causing problems, not the Top in and of itself.]
All of that is anecdotal, but I feel like the length of matches involving Top is really much less problematic than the other factor Aaron mentioned, which is the elephant in the room. (This doesn't mean that cards shouldn't be banned for slowing down the game; I just haven't found that to be a problem with Top.)
Frankly, one has to do some pretty extreme logical gymnastics to avoid the conclusion that Miracles is/was the best deck in Legacy by a very wide margin for an inordinately long time. Not unbeatable, not the only viable choice, but definitely the best for the longest. I'm still almost never a proponent of bans, but when a deck is doing what Miracles has been doing, I can understand and accept a ban.
Personally, I'm glad I won't have to keep slotting a playset of off-color cards into three-color decks to make a matchup even. I'm glad I won't need to 'board nine cards into Storm for the same matchup. I'm glad that attrition battles will take a downward turn—I fatigue quickly, and I like big upsets and crazy swings more than I like grindy games. But I don't think Top was the best card to ban, and I don't think Aaron's reasoning makes sense.
If a deck had become oppressive and homogenizing because of deck-specific busted cards, the busted cards specific to the deck (like Terminus, Entreat, or, y'know, COUNTERBALANCE) should have been banned rather than the cards other decks were using, too. If, as he emphasizes, the time spent spinning Top was such a big problem, it should have been banned a long time before Miracles even came into existence. Aaron's conflated those two arguments, which masks the fact that Wizards failed both to keep Miracles viable without hamstringing it and to tread lightly enough not to axe other decks in the format.
So if I were a voting man, I'd vote "no," but I'm not sorry to see Miracles take the hit.
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PM me if you want to contribute!
I suppose this is the end of an era in Legacy. It's been a long time coming. I'll treasure mine forever, just like my Skullclamps. Good times and sweet memories.
peace,
4eak
This is the best decision Wizards has made in a long time!
FINALLY THEY DID the 100% RIGHT THING.
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I know soooo many players who expressed a renewed interested in Legacy. They are all excited to play again and explore this new, open format.
All the Miracles players I know were fully aware that their deck was busted. They have other decks lined up and ready to play.
Everything is gonna be great!
I'LL SEE Y'ALL AT GP VEGAS!
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Terminus/Counterbalance would have been a better ban. RIP card selection for janky non-blue tier 2-3 decks
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