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Thread: Is 23% of the top spot too much for one deck? How about two?

  1. #1
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    Is 23% of the top spot too much for one deck? How about two?

    We need to do some soul searching on this one. Are Czech Pile and Tempo Grix the same deck? Of course there are a variety of reasons why the answer can be both YES and NO at the same time. But it is not exactly an exercise in academics at this point. I just did a quick calculation from TCDecks raw data. 23.7% of all winning decks are one of those two. The next closest is Miracles at 5.9%.

    For comparison, before the April 2017 banning of Sensei's Divining Top, Miracles was the undisputed king of the format, and had been for quite awhile. In Mar 2017, it was 14.8% of winning decks. Historically, 14.8% really was a very high percentage. In the past, the best several decks hovered somewhere around 10% each for a few months before being beaten back by competition and improved tech. Miracles was the most dominating deck the format had seen up until that point, and players certainly took note. There was a lot of complaining about it's dominance on this site. And yet, it topped out well below what we are seeing from these decks. If they are in fact the same deck, we should be clamoring for a change.

    I am sure there are many opinions, but primarily it would be great to start off with trying to reach a consensus on the question at the center. What does it feel like to face these two decks? How is the experience different/same for other decks tactically?

    And if there is actually a problem here, what would you do to fix it?
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  2. #2
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    Re: Is 23% of the top spot too much for one deck? How about two?

    It's interresting that you picked up the topic of Page 971 in the B&R thread, questioning if all these decks are actually different entities. Good luck. Looking forward to a civil discussion.
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  3. #3
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    Re: Is 23% of the top spot too much for one deck? How about two?

    Lemnear, I am with you on that sentiment. I still think it is important enough to warrant airing out the topic given the startlingly high numbers. Frankly, even if they are two entirely separate decks, it constitutes a very big concentration of the same cards across the table round after round. Individual cards may be to blame. Maybe not. It is hard for me to pinpoint one.
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  4. #4
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    Re: Is 23% of the top spot too much for one deck? How about two?

    July 2: Make Goblins Weld Again

    #FreeTop
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  5. #5

    Re: Is 23% of the top spot too much for one deck? How about two?

    Wouldn't a poll or two be more helpful? There is plenty of discussion on this topic in the b/r thread. A wizards referendum would be fun.

  6. #6

    Re: Is 23% of the top spot too much for one deck? How about two?

    They are two different decks that share the same core. Their initial game plans vs decks are very different; however, because they share so many cards, they can occassionally shift strategies depending on game state/cards they see.

    That being said, I'm unsure if it is as big of a problem as everyone is making it out to be. Maybe it's just my local meta (SoCal, which has a relatively healthy legacy scence), but it doesn't feel like grixis/pile are that heavily represented and they aren't consistently dominating t8's.

    I would be interested to see if the numbers dip once you remove all of the mtgo placements for grixis/pile, because I believe that that metagame is extremely inbred and people love to play grixis/pile a lot more there than in paper.

  7. #7
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    Re: Is 23% of the top spot too much for one deck? How about two?

    Data pulled from the MTGO Legacy Challenge of June 25th off of TCDecks.
    This is my best attempt to make an 'average' deck from the lists in that pool of data.
    I had to exclude the sideboard because it proved difficult to come of up with a consensus.

    4C Control
    • 2 Leovold, Emissary of Trest
    • 3 Snapcaster Mage
    • 4 Baleful Strix
    • 4 Deathrite Shaman
    • 1 Abrupt Decay
    • 2 Fatal Push
    • 2 Kolaghan's Command
    • 3 Lightning Bolt
    • 4 Brainstorm
    • 3 Force of Will
    • 1 Thoughtseize
    • 1 Toxic Deluge
    • 3 Hymn to Tourach
    • 4 Ponder
    • 3 Jace, the Mind Sculptor

    • 1 Bayou
    • 1 Island
    • 1 Swamp
    • 1 Tropical Island
    • 1 Verdant Catacombs
    • 1 Volcanic Island
    • 2 Badlands
    • 2 Bloodstained Mire
    • 3 Scalding Tarn
    • 3 Underground Sea
    • 4 Polluted Delta
    Grixis Pyromancer
    • 1 True-Name Nemesis
    • 3 Young Pyromancer
    • 2 Gurmag Angler
    • 4 Deathrite Shaman
    • 4 Delver of Secrets
    • 1 Spell Pierce
    • 1 Wild Slash
    • 4 Brainstorm
    • 4 Daze
    • 4 Force of Will
    • 4 Lightning Bolt
    • 1 Cabal Therapy
    • 4 Gitaxian Probe
    • 4 Ponder
    • 1 Bitterblossom

    • 1 Tropical Island
    • 2 Volcanic Island
    • 3 Underground Sea
    • 4 Polluted Delta
    • 4 Scalding Tarn
    • 4 Wasteland

    The blue cards show the significant overlapping items. Doing a search in TCDecks for 'decks containing in maindeck' pulls up a list of only 4C Control and Grixis Pyromancer. If you cut DRS from the search, a few UR Burn lists are added. If you cut Lightning Bolt the list expands to include BUG Control, Food Chain, and Aluren. If you remove DRS and Lightning Bolt it includes just about every deck with blue in it...

    Based on this information, 4C Control and Grixis Pyromancer are two separate decks with several overlapping cards (with the overlapping cards being fairly ubiquitous in the format).

  8. #8

    Re: Is 23% of the top spot too much for one deck? How about two?

    I'm not exactly sure which question to answer, so I'll just take a stab at all of them.

    Is 23% too much for one deck? -probably, though I'm sure worlds exist where even this number is fine.

    Is 23% too much for two decks? - Here I assume a similar meta share of each of the two decks, because not doing so leads us back towards the first answer. My answer here is no, 23% is not too much for a pair of decks. If the top decks are of order 10%, and the meta shares go down from there, one would expect a fairly diverse metagame.

    Are Grixis Delver and 4c control the same deck? - I'm not really sure where this claim comes from. Admittedly the deck I've played for the last year and a half or so is Punishing Dack, Czech Pile's grindier cousin, and so my point of view is from the blue side of the meta. When I play against these decks I play a vastly different game, I have to because strategies and cards that are effective against one deck are not necessarily effective against the other. Certainly the decks can be built to have similar problem cards, but standard builds are very much different.

    As the control player in basically every matchup, I have to pick my battles carefully in any matchup, but it's important to note that playing against delver decks feels fundamentally different as far as what's important and how I have to play from most other decks in the format, and this certainly includes Pile. Playing against Pile is sort of like playing against Jund, which I think is a fairly obvious comparison, though Leovold is far more annoying to play against than almost anything out of Jund.

    I am very curious in what sense people believe these decks to be the same. Is it just that both have a "core" of cantrips and DRS? To me this seems like comparing elves to maverick, since both have a "core" of mana dorks and GSZ. If the question changes to: "Is DRS + cantrips too good?" The answer still remains unclear to me, but at least I can agree that many of the top decks are using DRS + cantrips, even though they play fundamentally differently.


    Even though I don't really view what's going on right now as a problem, I'll answer my "solution" to the perceived problem of: DRS + cantrips is too good. Tackling this problem is hard, because I think both DRS and cantrips lead to interesting gameplay by making non-games where one player doesn't play magic occur less frequently. Say what you will about 4c manabases having inherent instability, having played a 4c mana base for a long time now, I can tell you in no uncertain terms, I still lose plenty to wasteland and stifle. The thing is, if we try to axe DRS and one or more cantrips, this likely starts happening a lot more, and this is simply not enjoyable for many (most?) players. I understand that from a standpoint of decks who make this a plan, maybe people enjoy mana screwing the opponent, but even in the current environment, this is a very real strategy. I also don't have much experience with making new cards, so I won't suggest any new cards be printed, even though this could turn into a reasonable solution, just not one I am equipped to put forth.

    So what would my solution be? I'd try to be a little more surgical with my B&R choices. If we identify the best two decks as Czech Pile and Grixis Delver, we can identify the best non-cantrip non-DRS cards that don't destroy other decks should they get the axe. I think out of Czech Pile the best cards fitting this criteria are probably Leovold and Kolaghan's command, both of these cards put a huge amount of pressure on the format, one is a permanent based hate piece for a wide variety of decks, that almost never trades unfavorably and provides a reasonable clock, while the other makes strategies that would generally be competing for meta share with Pile, like blade decks, much much worse. I don't think banning kolaghan's command is the way to go because of how insanely fair the card is, though I point it out as an option because I believe it is more meta-warping than people give it credit for. I believe rather strongly that Leovold was a mistake, in the decks built to trade quickly and drop him, the games that result are largely unfun. He's too easy to cast independently of DRS, and if you don't have an immediate answer, he snowballs games. His absence also makes several common combo decks, like reanimator and storm (important for my next point) a little better.


    From Grixis Delver, the cards I identify as satisfying my initial criteria are: Gitaxian Probe, TNN, and Gurmag Angler. I think that Gurmag Angler is the least problematic of these cards, but I include it here because it is very powerful and no other decks really play it with any frequency. As far as TNN is concerned, if a creature were to go, this is definitely my choice, this card isn't great against combo, but it leads to some of the most unfun fair-fair games in magic, and I think that many people who see the current top decks as a problem are coming at it from a fair perspective. ANT, for example, doesn't have too much of a problem with either pile or delver (at least this is what my expert friends tell me). Finally, Gitaxian Probe, this card has been frustrating me from the beginning, giving free information, free spells, and free cards in graveyard is really fantastic for grixis delver. They get to play the game nearly perfectly for a few turns and get free cards in the yard for the zombie fish and free tokens from pyromancer, this is a really powerful effect for the deck which I think sometimes gets overlooked. A Probe banning would also hurt storm, which is a problem, but I think that it would be fine if we also take cards like Leovold out of the format, take the blue hatebear away from the deck that's also playing counters and hymn to tourach, and I don't think storm loses too much overall.

    To summarize: My personally preferred bannings for removing some power from the top two decks are: Ban Probe and Leovold. This cuts power from both Delver and Pile in a way that doesn't do too much to other decks. The other cards I mentioned could in principle be banned as well, but I don't think that they are as problematic from as many angles as either Leovold or Probe. I can't think of any unbannings as being a solution (not that cards shouldn't be unbanned, just that the ones that are safe won't solve the problem and the ones that aren't will make an even bigger mess).

    Sorry for that wall of text, but I don't usually post here and I wanted to put my thoughts down for once.

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    Re: Is 23% of the top spot too much for one deck? How about two?

    There's a significant difference between Grixis Delver and Czech: Delver allows strategies like Maverick/Jund/Shardless/Blade/AggroLoam. Czech's Snapcaster recursion pretty much says all those strategies are either worse versions of itself (good stuff pile) or completely unable to compete with the value. The main reason for this difference though is probably getting derp'd out by Hymn. Sea -> DRS -> you can't avoid Hymn...so you get Hymn'd -> draw your card, can't quite recover, your thing gets killed......and Snapcaster Hymn....fun game.

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    Re: Is 23% of the top spot too much for one deck? How about two?

    Quote Originally Posted by somethingdotdotdot View Post
    They are two different decks that share the same core. Their initial game plans vs decks are very different; however, because they share so many cards, they can occassionally shift strategies depending on game state/cards they see.

    That being said, I'm unsure if it is as big of a problem as everyone is making it out to be. Maybe it's just my local meta (SoCal, which has a relatively healthy legacy scence), but it doesn't feel like grixis/pile are that heavily represented and they aren't consistently dominating t8's.

    I would be interested to see if the numbers dip once you remove all of the mtgo placements for grixis/pile, because I believe that that metagame is extremely inbred and people love to play grixis/pile a lot more there than in paper.
    I don't know if that's a function of the MTGO meta bring inbred or the SoCal meta's hostility to Grixis Delver and Pile. The last Knightware Staples event was full of Red Prison and Lands, and most of the other fringe decks in the room likewise dunked on them.

    My chief concern is that new tech isn't dislodging these one and a half decks from their Tier 1 position.
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  11. #11

    Re: Is 23% of the top spot too much for one deck? How about two?

    I don't have much to add other than I disagree with banning Gitaxian Probe and think Grixis and Czech are definitely different decks, but I wanted to commend Ace and Stryfo for excellent posts.

  12. #12
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    Re: Is 23% of the top spot too much for one deck? How about two?

    Quote Originally Posted by Finn View Post
    Lemnear, I am with you on that sentiment. I still think it is important enough to warrant airing out the topic given the startlingly high numbers. Frankly, even if they are two entirely separate decks, it constitutes a very big concentration of the same cards across the table round after round. Individual cards may be to blame. Maybe not. It is hard for me to pinpoint one.
    I agree. It's a bit too easy to just point fingers at DRS due to its numbers, as it would by hypocritical with Brainstorm/Ponder putting up higher ones.

    What I however blame the card for, is bluring the borders between the subtypes of tempo/midrange/control and somewhat invalidating most of the common hate for greedy manabases. It has removed the usual need to make tradeoffs for running certain color combinations, cards and to some extend even higher cmc cards. It's one core supporting the whole range from Delver+Daze to JTM+Leovold if needed, making it a very appealing option to invest into and maybe explains some of the numbers it puts up.

    It's up to debate for the thread and community on a larger scale to decide, if its really a problem, if the whole, classic array of UR, UW, UWR, BUG, RUG, etc Brainstorm+Ponder+FoW decks is narrowed down to BUGx DRS+BlueShell, or if its just a natural development like as when Delver was released, which retired many, many cards as well.
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  13. #13

    Re: Is 23% of the top spot too much for one deck? How about two?

    Every person I talk to seems to agree on two points: brainstorm should have been banned long ago and if brainstorm is ever banned they'll quit. The format represents this, and the best decks are homogenizing themselves around it.
    That and card availability.

  14. #14

    Re: Is 23% of the top spot too much for one deck? How about two?

    1. Is 23% meta share too much for one deck? I wouldn't make blanket statements since every case is different, but I think if one deck starts to approach a quarter of the meta, it would probably be time to look long and hard about whether this prevalence is a good thing for the format or how much damage it's doing.

    2. Is 23% too much for two decks? It depends on the distribution. I'm assuming that in the instant case, Grixis Delver and Czech Pile see roughly equivalent play. If you consider them to be two distinct decks (which I do, more below) then no, I don't think two decks of 12-ish% meta at the top is too much. This also depends on what the meta share is of the decks below it. If there's a 78 decks each with a 1% meta share, that would be bad. If there's a bunch of decks that are all between 3-8%, I think that's good. I think this latter scenario is where legacy presently is at FWIW.

    3. Do I think Grixis Delver and Czech Pile are the same deck? I do not. I'll preface with saying that the deck I have primarily played over the last year (several years really) is Sneak and Show, so I'm coming at it from the perspective of a combo player. In my experience, the matchups play out extremely differently, in a way that makes Delver a far less favorable matchup than Pile. The difference really is in the card Delver of Secrets. Games that feature a turn one delver and any sort of backup via counterspell are extremely difficult for all but the most broken of hands to defeat. Delver just closes games out too quickly. Pile is much slower and grindier, they don't have many draws that present a fast clock. The result of this is that Delver dictates the speed the game is played at, whereas against Pile I know that I've usually got time to sit back and sculpt a hand and then pick my spot. Delver frequently puts me in a position where I have to go for it a lot sooner than I would want to.

    Pile is, I think, sort of the successor to Shardless in that it's a literal pile of card advantage and the most efficient 1 for 1 spells offered in legacy. That's why even within Pile you see people playing different arrays of cards. In a general sense, it doesn't matter if you're getting your 2 for 1 from Baleful Strix, Snapcaster Mage, K Command, or Hymn to Tourach. All that matters is that the wheels of the deck keep churning every turn and all that value just kinda adds up at the end of the game into something your opponent has no way of handling. That's what I think separates it from Grixis Delver. Even though Grixis plays a lot of the same cards, it has a much more unified deck theory holding it together. Cheap creatures put on pressure while wasteland and the pressure forces you to play into soft counters. Tempo 101. Grixis doesn't do it in as exaggerated of a manner as RUG Delver does it, but at least against combo, the core philosophy is still there and it's still real good.

    This contrast is only exacerbated in sideboard games. I expect Grixis Delver players to cut the more grindy cards (TNN for example) for more counters. Grixis becomes even more tempo oriented in sideboard games and the games play out much differently than against pile. I don't rigorously keep track of my match stats like some people here do, but I'm sure that for 2018, I'm sub 50% against Grixis Delver and probably around 60% against Pile.

    4. What (if anything) should be done about this? Probably nothing, objectively looking at the meta I think things look pretty good right now. If you accept that Grixis and Pile are two very different strategies that just happen to share the same powerful core of cards, then I'm not sure where the ban DRS argument comes in. If instead of pile, it was Shardless or just a straight BUG midrange deck as the undisputed #2 deck, would people still have a problem? I suspect not.
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    I really don't know why you're complaining about top being banned since you seem to be very good at Soothsaying.

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    Re: Is 23% of the top spot too much for one deck? How about two?

    Yeah I wouldn't say that they're the same deck at all. Delver is like a bicycle that is quickly falling apart where as Czech is like a Model S, you don't know if your deck is going work, is going to catch on fire or the autopilot feature is going to crash the car. I think that both decks feel the same because they both can approach the metagame the same way. You can easily adjust a handful of cards in the main and the sideboard and become favored against any number of archetypes ontop of still being well positioned against the rest field. I think the only other deck in the format that feels somewhat similar is miracles.

    Quote Originally Posted by bakofried View Post
    I don't know if that's a function of the MTGO meta bring inbred or the SoCal meta's hostility to Grixis Delver and Pile. The last Knightware Staples event was full of Red Prison and Lands, and most of the other fringe decks in the room likewise dunked on them.

    My chief concern is that new tech isn't dislodging these one and a half decks from their Tier 1 position.
    The mtgo metagame is so disgusting inbred, way more than it was in the miracles era. I have run into Czech players running maindeck blast effects. BEB/Hydoblast should not be a playable legacy card. There is basically no point on playing on MTGO unless you want to figure out how your deck is vs Czech or Grixis Delver.
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    Re: Is 23% of the top spot too much for one deck? How about two?

    Are they the same deck? No. Do they feel like much the same deck when your plan is to put speed bumps in front of them and grind them down to nothing? Yes.
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    Re: Is 23% of the top spot too much for one deck? How about two?

    Quote Originally Posted by FourDogsinaHorseSuit View Post
    if brainstorm is ever banned they'll quit.
    The mass flooding of legacy staples should solve the reserve list problem nicely; sounds like a win/win...

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    Re: Is 23% of the top spot too much for one deck? How about two?

    Quote Originally Posted by non-inflammable View Post
    The mass flooding of legacy staples should solve the reserve list problem nicely; sounds like a win/win...
    Good idea. I say we can brainstorm just to make all the clowns who claim they would quit sell their shit and let people who actually want to play legacy and not just cast brainstorm play
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    Re: Is 23% of the top spot too much for one deck? How about two?

    Agree with everything Stryfo wrote except I would be more than happy to hurl TNN and Angler into a volcano. A 5/5 for B with no drawback or opportunity cost is just as outside the color pie as anything else; the fact that it has less synergy with traditional B strategies and more with the U soup is just icing on the cake.

    Quote Originally Posted by Lemnear View Post
    What I however blame the card for, is bluring the borders between the subtypes of tempo/midrange/control and somewhat invalidating most of the common hate for greedy manabases. It has removed the usual need to make tradeoffs for running certain color combinations, cards and to some extend even higher cmc cards. It's one core supporting the whole range from Delver+Daze to JTM+Leovold if needed, making it a very appealing option to invest into and maybe explains some of the numbers it puts up.

    It's up to debate for the thread and community on a larger scale to decide, if its really a problem, if the whole, classic array of UR, UW, UWR, BUG, RUG, etc Brainstorm+Ponder+FoW decks is narrowed down to BUGx DRS+BlueShell, or if its just a natural development like as when Delver was released, which retired many, many cards as well.
    This is a natural consequence of allowing a broken tactical engine to exist while handwaving away the lack of card, color and tactical diversity with "BUT THERE'S STRATEGIC DIVERSITY!" Eventually, with only one truly viable tactic, enough cards will be printed to narrow the range of playable strategies around that tactic. And, there is coupled a heavy incentive to play very narrowly focused strategies that attack that particular tactic.

    Enter the UBxx fair stew vs. chalice/moon stompy vs. super-fast-combo-that-can-beat-a-chalice-to-the-table metagame.

    Since it doesn't seem that the cantrip engine is going anywhere soon, I suggest it's time to stop griping about the "enablers" and go after the busted cards. Get rid of TNN and Leovold and suddenly there is a reason to not play blue in your DRS deck to get access to powerful 3-drops. Get rid of Griselbrand and Probe to put some of the guesswork and opportunity cost back into playing combo. More non-blue decks, with higher basic land counts and diversity of mana costs, will emerge to prey on the narrowly focused hate decks.

  20. #20

    Re: Is 23% of the top spot too much for one deck? How about two?

    Grixis and Czech Pile are so different that I dont even see how this is a question. One is looking to keep you on the backfoot and dominat the early game through one drops, but have fairly weak cards as the game goes on, one is looking to survive the early game and grind opponents down through value cards and powerful 3-4 drops

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