Do you enjoy the current state of legacy?

[Gheizen64]

I'd take a real close look at that graph on the previous page and look at the Abrupt Decay graph; there's no way a Survival unban results in more diverse fair decks, and every Survival deck is going to run Decay. This card isn't an effective policeman of the format, nor does it lead to intellectually interesting matchups. I wonder if the OP could create a graph highlighting decks which lack Brainstorm but have Decay vs no BS and no Decay?

Removal-based magic is fine, but you can generally scratch that itch by playing Modern/Standard/Limited, so it's always a bit hard to understand why people want legacy (or vintage) to feel like those. Board removal is small-minded/narrow and by itself pretty much an admission that you're not willing to compete on the stack. Legacy is incredibly varied and the cantrip cartel decks generally point their removal stack-ward letting them interact with both fair and unfair approaches. Sure you have to be in blue to have the most diverse interactive scope (i.e. countermagic)...and that warps color representation of the format but still you hear all this outrage from the crowd that conveniently forgets that they gave up on multi-dimensional interaction. I don't really hear discard enthusiasts (like Pox) going around claiming that their one-dimensional hand attack should be without inherent weakness. Imperfect, unconventional solutions are what make legacy/vintage fun, and [for instance] I'd rather watch or play these formats with/against solutions like Tabernacle than a mindless piece of spot removal.

I voted for the current state of legacy being okay, and a large part of that is this more represented mindset that players only want to play 'their' type of magic - and many new border cards are absolving such [fair] mindsets from needing to have holistic approaches to interaction.

I have literally no idea what this wall of text has anything to do with what i said. Literally the weirdest tangent i've seen in a while lol.

[Fox]

I have literally no idea what this wall of text has anything to do with what i said. Literally the weirdest tangent i've seen in a while lol.

It's more directed at the angle you were discussing with cantrip cartel. It's important to point out that a decrease in cantrip cartel dominance would correlate with an ever higher spike in Abrupt Decay overuse. There's an underlying unhealthiness in legacy which cantrip cartel is disguising. As far as your post's sentiment would have legacy go, the end result is blue combo severely diminishing and a meta of Counterbalance vs Decay+Survival. Newer cards keep steering vintage/legacy in a less diverse direction, and fair deck mentalities seem to think this is progress b/c they get to play more removal based magic. Why is moving the focus as far away from the stack as possible creating a more enjoyable state of legacy?

[Crimhead]

Removal-based magic is fine, but you can generally scratch that itch by playing Modern/Standard/Limited, so it's always a bit hard to understand why people want legacy (or vintage) to feel like those.

Some people want to play Modern style magic without the fear of bans and/or with the more powerful "fair" cards not available in Modern (DRS, BS, SFM, GSZ, etc). Other people might want a format like Modern but with RL cards so their decks will rise in value.

Other people I think just want a tier-one fair deck that doesn't run blue and doesn't run prison elements. I have limited sympathy for this - I am a prison enthusiast (non-aggro prison) and have had times when there is no tier one prison deck at all. I am glad I have a prison deck I can play (Lands), and I'm certainly not going to complain about my colour options!

Of course there are some people who want all the best decks to be fair and anything else to be fringy jank (note that very few people complained about CotV when the best Chalice deck was MUD). I guess these are the people who want a super-charged Modern format. WotC has always respected Legacy as a refuge for old-school players who enjoy strategies that WotC frowns upon in their more mainstream formats, and I hope it remains so.

[Phoenix Ignition]

This is awesome, thanks!

Also basically reaffirms my beliefs about cards that need bannings, but I won't say more since it's been beaten to death already.

[Lemnear]

This is awesome, thanks!

Also basically reaffirms my beliefs about cards that need bannings, but I won't say more since it's been beaten to death already.

...or you actually try to balance it out with powerful cards printed in other colors which can't be easily splashed. Instead WotC goes the opposite road and prints Shardless Agent, Delver, Treasure Cruise, Dig Through Time, True Name Nemesis, Gitaxian Probe, etc

[Phoenix Ignition]

...or you actually try to balance it out with powerful cards printed in other colors which can't be easily splashed. Instead WotC goes the opposite road and prints Shardless Agent, Delver, Treasure Cruise, Dig Through Time, True Name Nemesis, Gitaxian Probe, etc

I actually agree with you here, which is rare. But as we've seen they have no idea how to do that.

[Lord_Mcdonalds]

Well, how is the question. thanks to Cantrips, ABUR duels + fetches and DRS, the blue decks have a lot of options to fix their mana at low cost, so even Abrupt Decay (one of the most color intensive staples in the format) is easily playable turn 2 for the blue decks.

[Megadeus]

Well, how is the question. thanks to Cantrips, ABUR duels + fetches and DRS, the blue decks have a lot of options to fix their mana at low cost, so even Abrupt Decay (one of the most color intensive staples in the format) is easily playable then 2 for the blue decks.

Agreed with this. With the power of deathrite plus 8-12 cantrips it's very easy to play some fairly color intensive things. You just have to look at the 4 color deck playing decays and kcommand and painful truths and such. Also a card needs to be not only incredibly powerful, but incredibly color intensive for you to say "this card is worth losing the incredibly consistency and flexibility of the cantrip cartel" and devote to it. Chalice isn't color intensive, but it's restrictive in the way you need to build a deck around it and it's powerful enough when it lands that people are willing to go that route. I guess Thalia is a similar thing, but even then I'm not sure that in a world where card availability wasn't an issue that people would choose DnT over Cantrips.

[thecrav]

Our legacy (and vintage!) community has exploded in the last several months. Between myself and the other players, I never worry about being able to play whatever deck I want. In fact, I borrowed ~75% of my legacy deck and all-but-the-power of my vintage deck for Eternal weekend with <24 hours notice. After most of our twice-weekly tournaments people get together for anything ranging from a couple drinks to hours of intense board gaming.

Last night's Legacy tournament brought all these things back. I enjoyed the time spent much more than the Magic.

I showed up without a deck because I was being lazy and someone handed me Death and Taxes. Another player showed up just to hang out and was handed Sneak and Show. I went 2-2 with a deck I've never played, losing to the guy who borrowed (and had never played) Sneak and Show and to a player new to our community (and a little bit of communication issues).

After Magic, five of us went out for margaritas and tacos and Tim very loudly and animatedly explained why Aliens is the best action movie of all time.

[Dice_Box]

I have a large card pool, I still tend not to play Blue by choice. The sad fact is that you really have to choose to handicap yourself if you have the duals to play Blue. You have to willingly play a deck you know is substandard against other things in your collection.

I have posted in the Stax thread before that "If you take Stax into a room you have to admit your playing the deck because you want to, not because it is in any way the best choice." I stand by this. I will play Bomberman soon, again choosing to play something I think is enjoyable over what I think is best. But fuck it, I am there for fun, not to win. If I wanted to win I would be playing Lands.

[Stuart]

On topic: if Miracles gave a few percantage points of meta share to ANT, I'd probably like Legacy a lot more.

After Magic, five of us went out for margaritas and tacos and Tim very loudly and animatedly explained why Aliens is the best action movie of all time.

Was he also loudly proclaiming that Merfolk is Tier 1? BTW I'll be up in Houston next weekend to meet Ben's new dog, so yeah.

[Lord_Mcdonalds]

Psh, not even the best alien movie.

[ESG]

I have a large card pool, I still tend not to play Blue by choice. The sad fact is that you really have to choose to handicap yourself if you have the duals to play Blue. You have to willingly play a deck you know is substandard against other things in your collection.

I also default to non-blue, but I don't feel it's a handicap. My consistent results over the years suggest that it's not a handicap. For me, wins and losses have had more to do with playing decks that are natural predators of whatever the top decks are in my area. Even in periods of brokenness immediately preceding bans, I've been successful in creating meta decks that attack those top performers.

I have posted in the Stax thread before that "If you take Stax into a room you have to admit your playing the deck because you want to, not because it is in any way the best choice." I stand by this. I will play Bomberman soon, again choosing to play something I think is enjoyable over what I think is best. But fuck it, I am there for fun, not to win. If I wanted to win I would be playing Lands.

In fairness, Stax is not every non-blue deck. Stax has struggled to reach Tier 2 since about 2010. Sometimes the deck is well-positioned, but usually it isn't. Lands is a Tier 1 deck, as is Death & Taxes. Elves is great in an environment low on Miracles, and other non-blue decks can be good foils to blue decks.

[ESG]

Thanks for the response. Are you one of the admins of the account? If so, I'd suggest renaming the videos such that the matchups are in the title. That also helps a bunch on youtube.

I'm not an admin, but I can pass along your suggestion.

[thecrav]

Was he also loudly proclaiming that Merfolk is Tier 1?

He insisted that Merfolk is the best deck in legacy. Then he refused my bet that there would be no Merfolk in the top 64 of Vegas. Then he accepted a bet that he wouldn't day 2 with it but only after I gave him 2:1 odds.

[btm10]

It's more directed at the angle you were discussing with cantrip cartel. It's important to point out that a decrease in cantrip cartel dominance would correlate with an ever higher spike in Abrupt Decay overuse. There's an underlying unhealthiness in legacy which cantrip cartel is disguising. As far as your post's sentiment would have legacy go, the end result is blue combo severely diminishing and a meta of Counterbalance vs Decay+Survival. Newer cards keep steering vintage/legacy in a less diverse direction, and fair deck mentalities seem to think this is progress b/c they get to play more removal based magic. Why is moving the focus as far away from the stack as possible creating a more enjoyable state of legacy?

I have to admit that I find your distaste for Decay odd. In the pre-Khans meta (where Shardless, BUG Delver, and briefly Jund all saw significant play at the same time) it was pretty common to see cards like Divert and Misdirection in sidebaords, especially in Delver decks. Unlike the other two major creators of uninteractive exchanges (Cavern of Souls and, to a lesser extent, Counterbalance), there are a lot of ways to answer Decay, and Decay hardly warps the game around it the way a permanent does.

As for the "fair" cards hurting the diversity of Legacy and Vintage, I really don't see that being the case. Mentor is essentially a better 1-card combo than Oath, but it's probably the biggest culprit when it comes to homogenizimg Vintage (and has largely eliminated my interest in that format). Following on my point about Decay, I'm not sure why Eternal should uniquely privilege stack-based interaction over its actually unique feature, which is broad-based interaction. I think I'm pretty well known an someone who prefers BUG and bUrg decks, and the reason for that is that those color combinations give you the ability to interact on basically every axis. Saying that stack-based interaction(and really, what you mean is countermagic) ought to be priveleged is just as detrememtal to the format as a lack of instant-speed interaction was to the previous Standard.

[Dice_Box]

In fairness, Stax is not every non-blue deck. Stax has struggled to reach Tier 2 since about 2010. Sometimes the deck is well-positioned, but usually it isn't. Lands is a Tier 1 deck, as is Death & Taxes. Elves is great in an environment low on Miracles, and other non-blue decks can be good foils to blue decks.

Oh I do understand. The argument is though that if you do not wish to play Blue and you want to be in the running to win an event (I know this is slightly hyperbolic) your option are limited to "Redundancy.dec" (DnT, Eldrazi) or "Four Demonic, Four Tinker and Four Recall" (Lands or Elves) to be relevant.

The flip side of "Do you want to play Blue?" means you have what, Miracles, Delver in 3 stripes, SnT, BUG Control, Shardless, Infect, Omni science... So on. I guess there is the new Reanimator deck. That's something.

It bothers me that a buch of people have to activately choose to hamstring themselves so the illusion that Blue is not a white wash in this format can continue. Then those who are on the Blue side bitch about Thorn, Chalice or whatever else is "Not fun" and just dance down hypocrite lane. You don't get to play the most powerful cards in the format and then bitch when someone finally says no. You also don't get to bitch that it's not fun when someone finally tells you no instead of voyeuristicly watching you masturbate with Cantrips.

//end rant

[Mr.C]

Metagame is fine. Not having people to play with due to cost is not.

[Megadeus]

There's plenty of decks that can be built for less than the price of the average tier modern deck. That aren't blue brainstorm decks which inherently means they're basically unplayable, but they can be built.

[Ronald Deuce]

I also default to non-blue, but I don't feel it's a handicap. My consistent results over the years suggest that it's not a handicap.

A thousand times this.

Decks run Brainstorm because they have to. Decks that rely on combo pieces and specific (perhaps hideously) undercosted attackers and counterspells can't survive without cantripping. Take it out and watch half the decks in the format collapse and everything that remains become "Modern at -50% off!"

Again, how is specific cards' supposed saturation worse than a single gameplan's saturation, across colors and (as the times would suggest) across formats?

And when did this turn into the B/R thread?

Also, this:

Metagame is fine. Not having people to play with due to cost is not.