That's part of my issue voiced earlier: It has never been easier for the blue shell to absorb newly printed haymakers, due to a certain 1 mana blocker who happens to have no restriction on your manabase while providing rainbow manaacceleration.
We wouldn't have such problem if DRS was outright green and demands you to fetch a Tropical Island, locking you more into green. Shit like turn 2 Hymn or Therapy + Pyromancer would be notable harder to be put together and more restrictive than getting to play 90% of your decks cards off Seas and one DRS.
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Unban top and sotf, give other decks stupidly broken engines as well. Miracle may still be the best deck in the format, but sotf would be a decent predator for It.
Also unban recruiter, earthcraft, search and maybe bargain as well
Largely, I'd just reiterate what Bithlord said in his second point. Without fetchlands, the difference between Tundra and Mystic Gate drops dramatically. There are, I would argue, decks that would actually prefer the latter. Miracles, playing a suite of cards at UU and WW, might actually run more Gates than Tundras - or maybe they'd run Celestial Colonnade more often, or maybe the relative weaknesses of mana-bases would make Landstill more viable as the premier control deck and we'd see a general increase in man-lands. I'm not sure exactly what would happen, but I do know that it would significantly complicate how you go about building your mana-base, and how many colors you can actually support.
So although I'm also not convinced it's reasonable to use Grixis Delver as an example - that type of deck simply wouldn't exist, not in its current state, and not as a top competitor, in a fetch-less meta-game, it is true that a blue-based aggro-control deck, especially one running Daze, will always want the blue dual-lands. But if such a deck is forced to cut down to 2 colors to support Wasteland in its arsenal, they're likely to only run 3-4 dual-lands, instead of 7, as the list you linked is. If the demand for dual-lands was thus cut in half, there would most likely be a decrease in price.
The main point here is that the fair decks will go from 3-4 colors to 2-3 colors. That alone will dramatically decrease the demand on dual-lands. And if the power level gap between dual-lands and their imitations falls, it lowers the practical cost of entry for new legacy players. Maybe they'll be reducing their odds of winning the next GP by not buying Underground Seas, but they'll probably do just fine at local tournaments.
Early one morning while making the round,
I took a shot of cocaine and I shot my woman down;
I went right home and I went to bed,
I stuck that lovin' .44 beneath my head.
With respect to this, cantrips are probably a similar case to movement abilities in other games - the LoL developers are on record as saying they have to tune eg. movement auras to be brokenly good before people perceive them as doing anything and feel good about picking them. Meanwhile at the highest level of play the pros keep grinding and typically end up noticing even rather weak-feeling movement abilities end up winning games. Cantrips are pretty much in the same camp: They have to feel clunky on the eye test to keep Xerox from taking over completely like it has in Legacy, and even in Modern they ended up playing Death's Shadow as a Delver analogue for a good while running on stuff like Thought Scour, Serum Visions and Street Wraith. Those cards got run because they won games.
I used to be of the opinion to just ban BS and be done with it, but over time it just looks like Xerox is a law of nature in this game and it really needs to be fought actively lest it take over a format.
Originally Posted by Lemnear
I think legacy, and in particular the understanding on legacy magic, have evolved the last year immensely to the degree that a bunch of strategies have become obsolete. I think this change is so vast that a banning of DRS will not change anything.
The future of legacy is the hyper-effective good in a vakuum cards that doesnt rely on each other, or on opponent, or on boardstate, or on which other cards are in the deck.
Think of the cards that constitutes delver or check pile. There is synergies, yes, but not at the expense of good-on-it's-own effects. No card is a dead card or imposes heavy deck building restrictions. I dont believe more synergestic decks ever can compete with good stuff piles ever again. Sure, in a single tournament with variance on it's side, bur not over the course of many tournaments.
Last edited by JackaBo; 06-28-2018 at 12:18 PM.
I have serious doubts that this is a matter of people getting smarter, rather than the price spiral making it rather unlikely that people invest/build/toy/evolve anything that isn't a top dog already. Nobody drops a grand or two for SneakShow or whatever, just to find out that it's not quite the hot stuff im the current metagame. People play it save if they invest such an ridiculous amount of money.
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MTGGoldfish currently has Grixis Delver and Czech Pile each as Grixis Delver. So there's your answer.
I think you're way off base here on filter lands, not being able to cast 1cmc cards is a huge, huge negative and is the reason they wouldn't be played as more than 1 or 2 of, at best. And ETB lands are just too weak vs Wasteland strategies too, sure a lot would change, but not how you're describing I think.
It doesn't mean anything other than that their website is wrong currently. 4c has had a bunch of name changes.
I was pointing out the irony of that mistake happening while we have this discussion. It's clearly not meant to be taken as an actual argument for any sort of similarities between Delver and Pile.
Personally, if nothing changes by the post-pro tour ban update I'm probably just going to jump ship to Modern. It's unfortunate for my local scene since I usually loan out two-three decks every week, but I can only tolerate effectively dying to turn two TNN or actually dying to turn 1-2 Griselbrand or cast Probe into Therapy so much.
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Last edited by NeckBird; 06-28-2018 at 04:45 PM.
I think that that is the actual matter. During miracle's reign legacy wasn't evolving for two reasons. First: Miracle, even if badly tuned, could beat a bunch if good decks. There was no reason, or preassure, to evolve. Think of how long it manager without ponders and that mentors only were adapted by some players.
Secondly you could beat miracle with a bad deck with a bunch of clunky cards, actually you had better chance doing so. After tops ban i think competition increased which sparked tuning, brewing and creativity. You can practically only go toe to toe with the best decks if you play similarly efficient deck.
@JackaBo: I think everyone knows Counterbalance creates insurmountable one-sided advantage, it was only a matter of time before people rediscovered that simple truth. The issue is that the months where CB was almost non-existent people realized they could get away with SCM and cheap interactive spells not called Abrupt Decay; but it was Hymn's monolithic adoption by that strategy that is the real cause for pushing out every other non-Vial or non-Delver fair deck. Grixis Delver is always going to get rolled by Terminus & SCM/StP, and when the only other fair strategy left to care about (Czech), it doesn't take a genius to figure out you have to stay off-board with non-enchantments and concentrate value in the top card of the deck - and suddenly miracles with Counterbalance is tier one again. Now your non-competitive fair deck [again b/c of Czech] has to slow down and run Decay again [for CB] and Hymn is now even better against you, as you're that much slower at putting cards from hand onto the table.
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This cycle really doesn't have anything to do with Grixis Delver, even though Git. Probe is a load of bull-crap. Even though CB is the most bannable card in legacy, that ban doesn't stop the above cycle (UW Standstill is just as effective at steamrolling either member of this 23% of the meta, and that status quo wouldn't really change). Like most issues, we're describing problems that arose from fetchlands, which won't be banned (b/c they won't reprint duals). If you want to tackle this over-representation issue, Hymn is probably the safest target. You could hit DRS of course, but I don't know how much you really want to try and make new fair decks against Stifle/Wasteland and Loam/Strip Mine - and even in that setting you're just asking for Counterbalance to be an even greater problem, so good luck brewing around a deck that pretty much has to run Decay without DRS mana fixing....I mean, there's not even a legacy playable, generically usable 1-drop creature for in the runner up slot.
Have to account for power creep on the cmc, the 3/1 you're looking for is Rainbow Efreet. Also what decks are left over that really have to care about TNN anymore? I don't think it's seeing as much play since Blade decks converted to the better good stuff pile (Czech), and TNN sees much less play there. The only other difference is that the Delver decks were faced with targeted-removal pile and had to incorporate the untargetable 3/1 as a 2-of. The idiocy of 6-8 mana dork Turbo-TNN decks has diminished significantly as a viable strategy.
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