[Discussion] Legacy: Red's Format?

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

First of all, I'd like to thank Frogboy for doing the actual number crunching on this. I think this is worth a thread of discussion all on it's own.

Certain... "experts" have recently asserted that Blue and Black are naturally dominant in Legacy because they have the most broken cards printed over a period of years. Certainly, looking at the banned list, this is true. However, as Spatula pointed out, the difference between Vintage and Legacy is that, well, you can't play those cards. At all. Not as one ofs. You cannot play them on a train. You cannot play them in the rain. So does the theory hold up to inspection? Here's some numbers from six recent, large size Legacy tournaments, four American and two German:

White cards in the top 8- 365 (16%)
Blue cards in the top 8- 569 (24%)
Black cards in the top 8- 332 (14%)
Red cards in the top 8- 650 (28%)
Green cards in the top 8- 503 (22%)

(For Comparison, GP Columbus)

White cards in the top 8- 29 (7%)
Blue cards in the top 8- 135 (33%)
Black cards in the top 8- 161 (39%)
Red cards in the top 8- 63 (15%)
Green cards in the top 8- 35 (8%)

Blue stands up fairly well; many decks used cantrip base to draw reliably into the cards they won with, and used counters to stall, but few decks actually used Blue for their kill beyond Meddling Mage. Black was the weakest performer. And with the highest number is Red, with almost twice as many cards in six top 8's as Black. Goblins obviously takes a lot of the credit for this, but going over the actual results, what surprised me was how much of it wasn't Goblins. Every deck that took 1st place in a major Legacy tournament this year (before Columbus) had red in it- including Threshold, Zoo, TES, and Belcher. Red was heavily played across every archetype- in Red Death, in Survival, in Life from the Loam.

Burning Wish and Devastating Dreams make a lot of sense in Life from the Loam, red for Anger, B. Wish, and Flametongues makes sense in Survival, and obviously cheap mana is good for storm decks. I guess the thing that surprises me most is the heavy concentration of burn being used. When two of the most common and dangerous threats in the format are Werebear and Nimble Mongoose, you wouldn't expect to see Lightning Bolts, Fire/Ice, Chain Lightning, Lightning Helix, and Magma Jet all over the place; is Goblins just so dominant that it's threats are more important than Threshold? Is the inherent strength of burn, being both an answer and a threat in itself, simply powerful enough to negate not being able to kill a Werebear? Is Lightning Bolt actually more powerful than StP?

[kabal]

... simply powerful enough to negate not being able to kill a Werebear and Tarmogoyf? Is Lightning Bolt actually more powerful than StP?

Corrected.

As for StP question… yes the ability to remove a creature from play out weights removal that can also damage your opponent.

[thefreakaccident]

your just bringing up a long lived debate over again...
they both have their strong points, stp can hit larger dudes & burn can go strait to the dome.. the stp is better creature removal, but the burn is never a dead card in any game (you cannot effectively use stp against most combo decks, but the burn just speeds up your kill).

there will never be a difinitive answer, because they are equally good.

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

But that's rather the point. Empirical evidence suggests that they're not equally good, and that Lightning Bolt is rather better.

[FoolofaTook]

Maybe it's the companion questions that make Lightning Bolt better than StP.

Are Pyroclasm and Earthquake better sweepers against weenies than Wrath of God?

Does Red have better options early on to deal with a Meddling Mage, Dark Confidant or Goblin Lackey?

Do Red-based decks typically win or lose in a time frame in which the difference between Lightning Bolt and StP is somewhat irrelevant?

One thing that has always been true about Red and White is that Lightning Bolts are just one solution in a Red-based deck and they don't lose relevancy if the opponent is playing few or no critters. Swords to Plowshares frequently are the only fast critter solution in a deck not playing Red or Black and they are completely irrelevant against some archetypes.

[kabal]

There are a significant amount of creatures, which are revenant to the format that StP can always dispatch.

Exalted Angel
Gamekeeper
Auriok Salvager
Werebear
Tarmogoyf
Mystic Enforcer
Myr Enforcer
Serendib Efreet
Ravenous Baloth
Jotun Grunt
Silver Knight
Soltari Priest
Arrogant Wurm

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

Kabal, I'm going to ask you to stop de-railing the thread. Yeah, StP can do things Lightning Bolt can't. I'm not sure why you think this issue was in contention, but it wasn't.

What's relevant is that decks running White have consistently been doing worse than decks running Red. There is enough evidence to suggest that being able to kill a player is more important in this format than being able to kill a Myr Enforcer. Even a number of the top 8 decks that had the option of running StP opted for more burn instead, or ran the StPs in the board. StP wasn't an under played card, by any means, but the results put Lightning Bolt ahead. Although I think the greater topic of note was how abysmally Black is performing compared to any other color.

[FoolofaTook]

The format is so fast now that White's strengths don't seem all that strong.

80% of the decks seem to be either trying to win outright in the first few turns with a concerted attack that never relents or alternately they're fishing desperately for their fast kill.

Swords to Plowshares doesn't really fit well into that kind of environment, although it still has it uses.

I don't understand things well enough yet to know why Black has fallen from favor. Dark Rituals and fast big critters should be viable in a non-Flash meta and yet they obviously are not exploited much, if at all.

The thing that's funny is that Swords to Plowshares value would go back up compared to Lightning Bolt if people were regularly trying to get up a turn 1 4/4 or 5/5. They're not so the bolt is better.

[Nihil Credo]

Red's cards, in addition to their sheer power, are almost all synergistic with each other. Every burn spell you draw adds up to either kill faster or take down bigger creatures. Every fast mana card you add to a deck makes it more consistent (SSG+Rite+Song). Burning Wish is the best friend of every Red sorcery ever printed, and Red's most powerful cards are often sorceries. Goblins deserve a chapter of their own.

Blue has a different quality. Blue basically does two things very well - smooth your draw and counter spells - but what's important is that it can do this practically everywhere. How many decks start with 4 FoW/3 Daze/4 Brainstorm/4 Other Cantrip or Counterspell To Hit FoW Count? Those cards do not determine a strategy on their own: they can be added to aggro, combo, and control decks with the same ease, but everywhere they go, they smooth mana, protect you from Goblins and Iggy Pop's most broken openings, and give you an edge in the tempo war. Blue is the other colours' bitch, but being their bitch means that it is nearly guaranteed to see play.

Let us call Red's quality introversion, and Blue's quality extroversion (Grabbing random words on the spot is fun). Do the other colours have them?

W) White has a very unfocused identity, and as such is definitely not introverted. The closest thing to that are White Weenie (including Rebels), which just aren't powerful enough to get to Tier 1. On the other side, it has a few extroverted cards: Swords to Plowshares, Orim's Chant, Armageddon, and Wrath of God. A playset of any of those cards represents a game plan on its own; but unlike Blue's extroverted cards, which ask you to devote a fair bit of room to the colour (FoW and Daze, and Brainstorm is best on turn 1), a deck can just pick what it needs to shore up its weakness (usually StP or Chant). Thus, less cards.

(Crap - gotta go now, but I'm not going to let this post go to waste. I've made my point anyway - it's not hard to take a look at Black and Green and complete my post)

[kabal]

Kabal, I'm going to ask you to stop de-railing the thread. Yeah, StP can do things Lightning Bolt can't. I'm not sure why you think this issue was in contention, but it wasn't.

Really?? ... I could have sworn you asked the following:

Is Lightning Bolt actually more powerful than StP?

Was this question rhetorical?

When two of the most common and dangerous threats in the format are Werebear and Nimble Mongoose, you wouldn't expect to see Lightning Bolts, Fire/Ice, Chain Lightning, Lightning Helix, and Magma Jet all over the place; is Goblins just so dominant that it's threats are more important than Threshold?

Yes, Goblins threats are more important. Lightning bolt is a side effect of why they choose red; the true intent is to have pyroclasm boardable.

[Silverdragon]

You can't really compare StP to Bolt based on how good they remove a creature because in that regard Swords will be better almost 100% of the time.
However thanks to the ability to reduce a player's life total Lightning Bolt (or most other red burn spells) seem to be a bit higher on the overall powercurve and the numbers IBA shows support this.
The fundamental question is not whether the card Swords to Plowshares is stronger than Lightning Bolt or whether Wrath of God is stronger than Pyroclasm but whether the white cards (or cards in any non-red color) are better in this (tempo-driven) format.
Consider the most-played Counter after the obviously broken Force of Will is Daze not Counterspell because there are simply too many threats that can be played turn 1. I won't debate the lack of the "broken" Fact or Fiction compared to the lowly Brainstorm.

the true intent is to have pyroclasm boardable.

Why wouldn't they just splash white to get Tivadar's Crusade or Wrath of God? Wrath of God can even remove multiple threshed Enforcers, Baloths, Hierarchs etc.
With a white splash they could even play the superior Swords and not have to play Bolt just to get Pyroclasm ^^
Oh and that question above was rhetorical incase anyone didn't get it.

edit: I forgot to talk about another point: "Threat versus Answer"
Imho the threats Legacy has to offer are superior to the answers deckbuilders have at their disposal and it's not a question of when the decks will shift to the "stronger" colors but when the decks will shift to a more agressive approach to winning.
We have already seen this trend with storm combo of various flavors and Controldecks not actually being control anymore but aggro-control (for example Landstill playing Nantuko Monastery because it kills faster). Steven Menendian wrote an interesting article for his Vintage Gifts deck where he tried Dark Rituals instead of Mana Drains and slowly shifted the deck into a more combo oriented position.
When every card you have in your deck is either a bomb (anything from engine card to win condition) or an answer what would you prefer, keeping the old mantra in your head "there are no wrong threats only wrong answers"?
Maybe that's a bit extreme but I think that given red's nature and the identity given to it by the color pie it tends to have the most and perhaps the best short term aggressive cards so, unless you are allowed to play with the earlier "mistakes" and cards that are "off-pie" under current standards, decks will be more inclined to play red as opposed to the other colors.
Of course every color has its good cards in that category I'm just trying to find a reason for the way the numbers turned out to be.

[MattH]

I don't know how valid it is to analyze colors in a vacuum like this, without taking into account their specifics. How important a factor do you think it is that many cards pressure you into using more cards of that same color (even when ignoring the mana issues of monocolor vs multicolor decks)? A FoW deck wants wants more blue cards, goblins are known for their 'tribal' nature, a lot of black spells want you to play nothing but swamps, etc.

The pressure that says that there will be either a lot of goblins in a deck, or very few (basically Fanatic and Kiki-Jiki are the only ones that aren't terrible without the others) could mess with the 'counting argument'. The goblin cards, as the most prominent example, are a package deal, and aren't really liquid the same way Lightning Bolt and STP are.

To the extent a color's best cards are 'tribal', that color is going to be over-represented compared to colors which do not have strong 'tribal' themes. (I use the term 'tribal' loosely here)

[Brief aside: There are other ways in which the color-counting argument could be misleading (such as Vedalken Shackles, which is 'really' a blue card, or Squee, whose red nature is incidental, or the tendency for a Loam deck to run more lands, and therefore fewer total colored cards) but they are pretty minor in this format and can be safely glossed over.]

I think the raw card count is too primitive, too blunt to be a useful statistic. A more profitable metric might be looking at the variance of the domination of a deck by color (red is usually almost all of a deck's colored mana or only lightly splashed, black is the same way), or redoing the raw card count after accounting for the 'tribal effect' by some method.

[MattH]

(Double-posting because this post is addressing an entirely different subject than the first. Mods, feel free to combine them if you think they need to be.)

is Goblins just so dominant that it's threats are more important than Threshold? Is the inherent strength of burn, being both an answer and a threat in itself, simply powerful enough to negate not being able to kill a Werebear? Is Lightning Bolt actually more powerful than StP?

I see at least two possible alternative explanation for this phenomenon. One, it could be the case that a threshold deck is not beaten by answering its threats, but by neutering some other aspect of the deck (for example, playing an early Chalice at X=1, or a Jotun Grunt/Leyline of the Void results in a situation where you can almost ignore their creatures completely).

Two, even if STP is the better card in a goblins-and-threshold metagame, those two decks don't seem to comprise more than 25-30% of any given field. It might be the case that STP is better against those two decks but worse against the expected wider field in which one has to contend with decks which have few or no targets for the STP. This is the view the UGR Threshold advocates have always given.

I suppose there also could be some decks which need to remove goblins from the board but can ignore threshold's creatures, though I doubt this is the case since the only such decks that come to mind are ones using Ensnaring Bridge shenanigans.

Also, are you comparing the burn cards only to StP or to all other creature control methods (Massacre, uh Moat I guess, Wrath effects)? It's not clear from your post.

[FoolofaTook]

The other thing about Red and White in general is that Red is always germane to the situation at hand. There is no point in which taking the opponent's life total down is not relevant, unless you win by some method other than reducing your opponent's life total to zero. There are times when it would be wiser to do something else with the damage, but there are no times in which you have not materially advanced your cause, even if unwisely, by reducing the opponent's life total.

With White and Blue you frequently find yourself with resources not in temporal or contextual connection to the situation at hand. As in the counter staring at something already on the board or the StP staring at a Prot White critter. There's nothing else for that StP or counter to do at that point if the critter is going to win the game. Even a Lightning Bolt in hand when a Prot Red critter lands on the board is not a wasted resource, it can always go on the opponent.

The thing that I find amazing about the meta in place in Legacy right now is that it is much faster than the old meta before the different formats were defined. It's true that people won games in the first few turns back then but the average game had a 7 to 10 turn span before it swung one way or the other and there was a real give and take. There were no free counters flying out of people's hands back then but W/U control with splashes of other colors was as fundamentally sound a deck as you would find.

Lightning Bolts have retained at least as much of the value as they used to have back then, because they can contribute fully to the faster wins in vogue right now. Swords to Plowshares are still valuable in terms of surviving an early rush, but defense in and of itself is flawed in a meta in which the best defense is to be doing something offensive and fast to your opponent before they can kill you. Force of Will is hugely valuable because it can be the only defense against a killer combo on turn 1 but it too is fundamentally flawed and dies to the decks that just want to nibble you to death fast.

For Control to re-establish itself they're going to need to ban Duress and Extirpate and all the cheap ways to get into the hand and library and pith a deck.

[Machinus]

Black is 5th out of 5. Blue is first or second.

[FoolofaTook]

Black is 5th out of 5. Blue is first or second.

But many decks splash enough Black to use Duress, which is a control killer. Extirpate in the sideboard primarily allows a deck to handily defeat a narrow control concept that takes time to develop, particularly in combination with Duress.

There's too much effective looking at hands and libraries, along with removal, for any control concept that needs some time to flourish. There were 20 Duress in the final 8 at Columbus and only 1 deck that could have used then did not have them. Duress, Brainstorm and Force of Will were the defining cards of the decks in the final 8.

[Eldariel]

But many decks splash enough Black to use Duress, which is a control killer. Extirpate in the sideboard primarily allows a deck to handily defeat a narrow control concept that takes time to develop, particularly in combination with Duress.

There's too much effective looking at hands and libraries, along with removal, for any control concept that needs some time to flourish. There were 20 Duress in the final 8 at Columbus and only 1 deck that could have used then did not have them. Duress, Brainstorm and Force of Will were the defining cards of the decks in the final 8.

Black is splashed mostly for 3 cards:
Duress
Cabal Therapy
Engineered Plague

Those are the cards, black splash really has to offer the metagame. Duress and Therapy are some of the best answers to combo in any given deck as long as the deck has a decent clock of its own (and in Therapy's case, preferably something to sacrifice) and Engineered Plague is still, with all the tech against it, the best answer to Goblins and great against many other creature-decks. Pernicious Deed counts, but only if your other colours include green, obviously. Dark Confidant in few specifically engineered decks (they just tend to be mono-black so he's out of the list) and that's about it. Those 3 cards are the biggest reason to go black, but since discard doesn't stop people from topdecking (for example, Ill-Gotten Gains-combo can just topdeck its namesake or any tutor to go off on the spot once its graveyard is stacked), people prefer cards like Chalice of the Void, Force of Will and Glowrider if applicable. Black's value obviously rocketed with Flash in the meta as Duress is the #1 answer to that deck, as well as the #1 combo protection in that deck, but outside the highly distorted metagame of the GP, Engineered Plague and discard aren't usually enough of an incentive to go black. That explains the low number of black in the meta, since those cards don't fit into most decks, black is usually left into the sidelines unless it's the main colour in your deck.

[FoolofaTook]

The thing that's interesting is that Black basically used to be a damage color and nobody uses it for damage any more. It used to be a speed color that enabled many very twisted things (pun intended) early on in a multi-color deck and yet nobody uses it for it's speed except for nearly mono-black themes.

What it has survived as is hand disruption, and at that it is so good that W/U control is basically a thing of the past.

Being able to look at your opponent's hand on turn 1 or force him to blow either 2 cards including a precious counter or mana advantage + a counter is just a devastating blow. No surprises left for him and no way to conceal what the real counter situation is unless he wants to effectively turn that Duress into a Hymn for two of his best cards including a counter.

[Galroth]

What it has survived as is hand disruption, and at that it is so good that W/U control is basically a thing of the past.

If you're suggesting that black hand disruption is the primary reason U/W control no longer sees significant play, then I think you are sorely mistaken. I do not disagree that hand disruption is excellent against control (and combo). However, if I may offer my observations over the past couple of years with regard to the Legacy metagame, hand disruption did not lead to the fall of U/W control.

The latest and most successful rendation of U/W control was Landstill. Shortly after the last ban and restricted change Landstill became a very popular deck and once a pillar of the Decks to Beat here on The Source. Landstill didn't fall from favor because of hand disruption or any black related deck like Red Death or Deadguy. It fell because of Goblins of all things. The premier aggro deck was simply too strong and resilient for U/W control to have a positive match-up against.

Accepting this past GP where decks were basically forced to run Duress and Therapy if they wanted a chance against Flash (oh, and because Flash was so broken it could afford the space to include its own disruption/counter suite), black has been the least played color in legacy since the last b/r changes.

If anything, black's hand disruption is primarily used as an answer to combo... yet combo is thriving quite well. That last point may be in contention; regardless I'll submit that hand disruption is better against combo than control.

Nobody doubts the power of Duress and Therapy. And they are effective tools for splashing, just as blue splashes in many decks for counters and cantrips. But black's hand disruption did not cause the fall of control, much less do I think it was even a minute factor.

-
On another note, one of the reasons I appreciated Legacy was because of the diversity of colors in the metagame. Prior to GP Columbus, even if Red as the most played color sees twice as much play than Black, the least played color. The split of colors played is remarkably even in comparison to every other format.

[Phantom]

I'd like to revisit this, because I find it interesting, but I'm not sure how many conclusions we can draw for it without some more information. The one thing we can clearly see is the insanity that was GP: Flash.

I'm not sure how much else we can draw from this data. I would be interested in a count of how often the colors popped up total (like a UGw Thresh deck would count as a green deck, a white deck, and a blue deck). If red won that total, I would be shocked. Also, I think white would place better as a lot of decks are splashing white for swords to plow and little else. (If someone gives me the tourneys that were used for the above stats, I would be more than happy to try to compile these stats). I think combined, the two statistics could really show which colors are dominating Legacy, and which are lagging.

With only these statistics, I'm not sure how much we can say. Aren't these numbers inherently skewed by the fact that the best deck in the format is mono red, and one of, if not the best combo deck is mono blue? I mean, if one Goblins deck makes the top 8, and the other 7 decks are UGw Thresh decks, the number of red cards run is still higher than the number of white cards run (mainboard at least) but it would be misleading to say that red was more of a factor than white in the top eight. It would be downright wrong to say that Lightning Bolt was a bigger factor Swords to Plow in the top 8.

Anyway, thoughts?