So what are everyone’s thoughts on the Columbus metagame? Below are some random thoughts I had about the format. Feel free to disagree, but please tell me why you disagree instead of just, “you’re a noob who doesn’t know what he is talking about.”
Here are some points to analyze.
COMBO:
Decks:
Solidarity, TES, Simian belcher (not sure how good it is), Salvagers game, Iggy pop.
General Thoughts:
1. Out of these combo decks it seems like TES and solidarity are the best because they seem to be the most consistent and resilient to hate.
2. Combo has been on the rise lately as TES and solidarity have been making more noise than usual.
Good:
1. All the new loam decks running around are almost byes for you.
2. Pikula, probably the worst matchup is almost dead.
3. The goblins matchup is probably about 60/40 for most combo decks.
4. You will probably destroy any midrange deck like the rock or survival.
5. You will destroy any jank deck.
6. Unless you play against one of the decks listed in the bad section you should win game 1.
7. The storm decks are surprisingly resilient, unless facing multiple pieces of hate you will probably still win at least one of the next two games.
Bad:
1. Combo may not be the best deck for a large tournament because of their inherent ability to lose to themselves. I know people will disagree, but combo usually can’t recover from a bad draw nearly as well as the other archetypes because so many things in the deck are dead on their own.
2. For many of these combo decks it is difficult to play 16 rounds over two days while fighting through hate.
3. So many decks in this format have main deck cards that hate you. Faire stompy, stax, hannifish, pikula, and thresh all are bad matchups.
4. Unless you are very familiar with these decks they are generally pretty hard to play.
AGGRO:
Decks: Goblins, Affinity.
General Thoughts:
1. Goblins and affinity are the only real popular aggro decks in the format.
2. They are probably going to be the most played because they are very cheap compared to the other decks in legacy.
Good:
1. There is very little splash damage from each other; engineered plague and pyroclasm are not the tech against giant ravagers and enforcers.
2. These decks are usually the easiest to play when compared to the rest of Legacy.
3. There is no hate that effectively stops goblins dead, especially if they have disenchant effects.
4. There is very little hate for affinity in any sideboards, outside the wrecking ball of serenity in some hanni fish.
5. A lot of people delude themselves into thinking they have a better matchup than they do.
Bad:
1. People are gunning for goblins. You will play against very few decks that don’t have a specific plan against you.
2. Almost all of the loam decks ruin aggro.
3. Most combo has an equal or better clock against you game 1.
AGGRO CONTROL:
Decks: Thresh, Hanni Fish, Fairy Stompy, Pikula, Red death
Note: This part is pretty biased of fish type decks because I have not played Pikula, Fairy stompy, or Red death.
General Thoughts:
1. These decks
Good:
1. Aggro control decks are not really blown out by any particular archetype.
2. You can customize the decks to do better against certain archetypes fairly easily so if you notice a lot of combo or goblins or whatever you can adjust accordingly.
3. There is no real good hate against these decks. Thresh is the easiest to hate with graveyard removal, but even that, unless its recurring doesn’t really stop them.
Bad:
1. Since these decks are metagame decks you really need to know the matchups they face. This has many aspects to it, but in general you have to know what to counter/ name with Meddling mage/ brainstorm away. Since there is no way to gain card advantage with these decks failing to disrupt the other deck correctly usually means game over.
2. Goblins are a bad matchup game 1 unless you have tuned your deck to beat them. (really, red thresh is the only one I know that has done this.)
3. Unless you can protect a mage on LFTL
LOAM/Land Recursion:
Decks: 43 lands, eternal garden, terrageddon, aggro loam
General Thoughts:
1. These decks are fairly new to legacy, but the loam engine is totally ridiculous. These decks and variations have placed at competitive tournaments and seem like they could be tuned to be top competitors.
Good:
1. If the game goes long you have the best card draw engine.
2. Recurring wastelands will win you many games by itself.
3. Most of these totally crush aggro and aggro control.
4. Few legacy SB cards really dent the loam engine.
Bad:
1. You cannot beat combo game 1.
2. Combo game 2 and 3 you better have a damn good plan because these decks are not the quickest at winning.
3. If a deck has hate for LFTL the battle becomes much harder. Make sure if they chalice for 2 you don’t auto lose. (does not apply to eternal garden.)
OTHERS
Stax, Survival, Landstill
General Thoughts:
1. Unless I’m missing something, it seems like playing landstill is just a bad idea.
a. Landstill is not that good against storm combo.
b. Not that good against aggro control.
c. Bad against goblins.
d. Bad against loam.
2. Survival just keeps getting worse and worse.
a. Most survival builds are terrible if they don’t get survival.
b. Combo ruins survival about as much as it ruins loam.
c. Pithing needle is played main deck.
d. Goblins still ruins you most of the time unless you’re playing R/G.
3. I love stax. I played the deck for the longest time and it was good to me… sometimes.
a. You absolutely ruin combo.
b. Good against Aggro control.
c. Bad against goblins.
d. Maybe even with loam.
e. Much worse on the draw.
f. Will time out too many matches at a large tourney.
g. If you lose game 1 I can’t imagine being able to pull out games 2+3 in time.
h. The lock pieces and mana have to fall right into place or you probably lose.
I am getting tired of writing this. I’m sure I will add to it later, but for now tell me what you think.
You forgot Enchantress, Boros, and the three color agro decks. Its a good start and certainly a good topic for discussion.
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This is a good thread to have. I totally disagree about Survival, however.
Survival has done better recently, not worse. Needle isn't really in to many maindecks, and you should be running plenty of artifact killers anyways. Goblins and Combo are both winnable. I think RGBSA is the best of the Survival builds, and it should definitely be considered one of the top decks to watch out for at GP Columbus.2. Survival just keeps getting worse and worse.
a. Most survival builds are terrible if they don’t get survival.
b. Combo ruins survival about as much as it ruins loam.
c. Pithing needle is played main deck.
d. Goblins still ruins you most of the time unless you’re playing R/G.
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I disagree that Landstill is bad against Storm combo, I think it's bad against Solidarity, but surprisingly solid against TES, IGGy Pop, and Golden Grahams. Counterspells + Stifle are a bit of a problem for decks that use Ill-Gotten Gains. Golden Grahams is susceptible to Instant speed creature removal and even Stifle. I cannot say with any degree of certainty how Landstill fares against Aluren.
I disagree that Landstill is bad against aggro control, I'm not exaggerating when I say that pure-control decks (especially board control) are heavily favored against aggro control decks like Fish, Gro, U/G Madness, and probably CounterSliver. Typical aggro-control deck are tempo-based decks running 10-14 efficient creatures and 8-10 counterspells. Landstill and other pure control decks run way more creature removal and sometimes way more counterspells which makes it difficult for aggro control with win with their critters.
Red Death and even Deadguy Ale (if you can call this aggro-control) may be exceptions because a fast, disruptive opening hand backed by efficient creatures can take control out the game before it even gets started. Landstill is still favored, but it's not by much.
Goblin decks are the reason Landstill fell out of favor. Landstill just sucks against Goblins. They'll run you out of removal, they'll run you out of Counterspells, and they'll chip, chip, chip away at your life total until a Siege-Gang Commander attacks and throws 1 or 2 Goblins at your head. Landstill has tinkered with answers to the Goblins problem by running Humility, butisn't always easy to come by against a decks that runs Wasteland and Rishadan Port. Speaking of which, Black builds (Duck Hunt) have experimented with Decree of Pain and Tsabo's Decree, which essentially cost
and
.
If you're going to play Landstill at the GP, make sure you've a way to beat/avoid Goblins. The same goes for Loam-based decks.
I disagree with this. The reason that Landstill fell out of favor was that after the Summer '05 metagame was defined as Goblins and Landstill, people began playing Solidarity and Rabid Wombat, as both had matchups against both decks that were overall amazingly positive (with Wombat having a somewhat stronger matchup against Goblins, but losing horrendously to Solidarity).Goblin decks are the reason Landstill fell out of favor. Landstill just sucks against Goblins. They'll run you out of removal, they'll run you out of Counterspells, and they'll chip, chip, chip away at your life total until a Siege-Gang Commander attacks and throws 1 or 2 Goblins at your head. Landstill has tinkered with answers to the Goblins problem by running Humility, but
I never had much trouble beating Goblins with Blue/White Landstill, running maindeck Disenchant and DoJ. The matchup wasn't amazing, but a competent Landstill player was definitely favored. I remember Matt insisting that Port gave Goblins the matchup, and my beating him 6-0 to counter the point.
With mono-color Virginia decks named after bad cards on the decline in popularity, I think now is a great time to bring UW Landstill back.
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Aw man I gotta go to work so I can't give a long-winded rant like I want to, but I just want to mention how incredibly wrong you are on most of your points. The LMF is evidence of this. Solidarity going uphill? The deck hasn't made a top8 since 2006! Survival keeps getting worse, yet somehow it manages to top8 every single event? And also if you ever got around the looking at those lists, you'll realize how good their game without SotF on the table can be. Pithing Needle isn't that big of a deal if the pilot isn't a moron. You also basically assert Landstill as being bad against every single deck in the format, which is a blatant lie. The deck puts up results, and can compete against pretty much every deck.
Tonight I'll finish this rant, depending on how the other responses go.
Hey Jack -
How about we play 100 games, Goblins vs. Landstill. Whoever loses gets banned forever. Deal?
I didn't think so.
Enjoy losing your combo and loam-deck match ups.
-Steve
How come it needs to be a holiday to bang noobslayer's sister?
Landstill beats pretty much every combo deck that isn't Solidarity.
Seriously, dude, are you in 7th grade? Don't answer your own pretentious questions. Given Jack's blatant willingness to get himself banned from everything, I don't think you actually want to make that offer to him.
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I say this as someone who tried really hard to make Life from the Loam work:
Loam decks can't actually win games 2 and 3 if the opponent brings in any kind of graveyard hate. It doesn't matter how good game 1 is. At best they can try to go to time. This is why Life looks amazing in testing but tends not to do that well in actual tournaments.
For my confessions, they burned me with fire/
And found I was for endurance made
Landstill is good against storm combo, it has a good game one against TES and game two it boards into Meddling Mage and Duress and has the advantage against High Tide if it can get off its ass and attack. It's unfavorable against Goblins and bad against Loam, but I've seen good pilots salvage the Goblins match up. If the metagame ever becomes Combo vs Aggro-Control, then Landstill will come back with a vengeance while Goblins flounder.
I agree with the assessment of Loam to an extent, but I think adding Duress and Cabal Therapy or Orim's Chant, Abeyance and Gilded Light to the MD and Leyline of the Void, Null Rod and Chalice of the Void to the SB do not make it as clear cut as it seems. I've seen Extended pros discuss Null Rod and Chalice of the Void MD in Aggro-Loam for the GP, so I think it's going to be one of the strongest contenders there, along with AfFOWnity which is also easy for Extended players to port. We could also see Extended people with Ichorid, but I'm not certain how well it would do.
Null Rod should be all over GP Columbus, it shuts down Aether Vial, it shuts down Tormod's Crypt, it shuts down Umezawa's Jitte, it shuts down Engineered Explosives, it shuts down Affinity and it's the best possible bomb in the SB for TES.
I also imagine High Tide will do well and Survival will do poorly despite their contradictory results so far.
I'll bet 2/1 that a rogue deck wins the whole thing.
Moved to the LMF for what I hope are obvious reasons.
Simian/Cret Belcher is solid. It's simpler to play than TES or Solidarity as it only has two main gameplans, and it executes those gameplans pretty well.
Stifles have started to see much more use since TES has taken off. TES can work around Stifles, of course, but they become very deadly in decks running FoW, Daze, counterspell and Meddling mage(only relevant if they see a turn two, but with the free countermagic it happens).
If I was going to play combo at the GP, it would be Solidarity. I really wanted to play belcherstorm, but it deals with the addition of stifles in the metagame much worse than TES does.
Pikula could a bad matchup for Solidarity, depending on the pilots, but TES and Belcher can cope with discard surprisingly well.
I think any combo player worth the cards he's using will be able to beat gobblins more than 60% of the time. If I was going to name a general statistic it would probably be 70-30 or even 80-20, depending on what hate the gobbo player is running.
For me the question is what the pros think will be format defining and the metagame will evolve around that. There are 3 points you have to look at:
1. Day one will see a lot of aggro but day two will have a lot of control/aggro-control. Most pros like to outplay their opponent and will therefore not play aggro unless it is the best deck in the format and even then it is more likely that they will simply play decks with strong hate for the aggromatchup (see PT Yokohama right now).
2. Combo is really really good. Although many Stormcombo decks will ocassionally lose to themselves and random hate many pros will play them because they are simply the most powerful decks out there (see Dragonstorm at Worlds 2006).
3. Because of the huge presence of Combo and Control/Aggro-Control there will be almost no glasscannon decks to hate on aggro like Rifter however there will be some Disruptiondecks (Red Death and Deadguy) who will get lucky and get into day two.
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I concur that Empty the Warrens will *definitely* make combo much more relevant in the format, and I believe Columbus will likely show it.
Back in the Stone Age when Solidarity was the only viable combination deck (since Belcher fizzled 50% of the time), in order to have game against combo you needed either 1) to consistently win by turn 4 or 2) to be able to cast at least 3 disruption spells within your first 5 turns while keeping decent pressure on board.
Now you need to be able to: answer 10 Goblin tokens on turn one *and* play disruption spells on turn 1-2 (or else die to Tendrils) *and* provide a good clock (or else die to a topdecked Infernal Tutor).
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Bringing Goblins and Threshold seem like a big risk to me, assuming that TES is the most powerful deck in the format, the Pros are going to be using it, and that leaves Goblins with an auto loss, and while Threshold seem like a good idea with TES being the most powerful deck in the format, TES is designed to beat it, and people are going to react to TES with control and prison, which are bad for aggro-control.
I think Goblins and Aggro-Loam are going to be the "Glass Cannons" that deal with control, prison and aggro-control while avoiding TES as much as possible, and Aggro-Loam can prepare a MD and SB to have a chance against combo.
Affinity seems like the real wild card, that deck morphs between aggro, aggro-combo, aggro-control and aggro-prison depending on the build, and there's a lot of innovation to be done here.
I'm sorry WHAT?!?!? TES is a strong deck but not the best deck in the format. Pros will mostly be playing their own designed decks, and very few would be playing TES.
Goblins isn't a bye for TES. Game 1 goblins has to race a tendrils which is very unfavorable. Games 2 and 3 with chalices and pillars are very difficult to deal with.. Especially if Goblin players are aggressively mulliganing like they're supposed to.
TES has a bad matchup against NQG variants as well as most other aggro control decks.
In case you didn't know, TES is going to be an extremely small portion of the meta, and it isn't anywhere near unwinnable. It's not nearly enough to stop goblins from making the top 8. When i play Goblins, I'm more worried about solidarity with 4 BEB than TES.
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Not the best deck, the most powerful deck, and I believe there are going to be a lot of the Vintage Long crowd and the Extended TEPS crowd that are going to be picking up the deck.
I have never lost a match against Goblins in a tournament with TES, and I'm about 40/60 with Threshold. If High Tide is more intimidating to Goblins then TES, that most be one awesome High Tide pilot and one terrible TES pilot.
Goblins can beat TES, although it is not a favorable matchup. Yes, TES goes off on goblin's face on turn 2, and game one shouldn't be bad for TES, but That's about it. I've seen lots of Goblin players using Chalice and Pillar to their advantage to win the game. TES is a good deck, but it cannot keep goblins out of the picture just by itself. It is not the most powerful deck by any means.
I agree that vintage and extended players who are familar with the tendrils storm combo will pick the deck up, but that is not the major factor, because most of those players tend to be prey for the true legacy players who really knows their format.
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Here's the problem, a good TES player can go off through Chalice or Pillar. However, if the Goblins player has both it becomes more difficult; which is why we play Hull Breach. Goblins has to have both to do anything effective and it has to happen two games in a row. I've never lost to goblins in an event and I don't plan on it.
How is it not the most powerful? It plays more broken cards than any other deck in the format.
Have you ever played Vintage? The difference in skill is unbelieveable and took me by surprise in my first major Vintage event. Vintage players can certainly out play the average Legacy player any day of the week.
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