DCI how does the sand taste ... ???

[nedleeds]

10 of top 12 with 4 Brainstorm ...
7 of top 8 with 4 Brainstorm ...
Some absurd number in top 64 ...

When will you pull your dome out of the sand, and recognize a problem card? Hopefully we'll see some unbannings in June and give people *some* reason *not* to play 4 x Brainstorm ... every other non land card that has seen this level of ubiquity has been banned.

[Gui]

There'll always be a best card, people will always want to play it. They just have to set the line somewhere. Brainstorm is fine on being that line.

[nedleeds]

Survival of the Fittest
Black Vise
Mind Twist
Land Tax
Earthcraft

better or worse than Brainstorm? Clearly worse. Even worse Brainstorm holds other interesting cards back and breaks them landing them on the list, it also hinders / breaks new mechanics, it also breaks mana bases by allowing for the absurd 18 land / 4 wasteland setups in decks like RUG Delver ...

Unban the above cards. Period.

[Tacosnape]

Funny how nobody bitched about Brainstorm when Maverick 7/8ths'd a Top 8.

I mean, look. I think Brainstorm is in contention for the best card in Legacy, sure. But it's not singlehandedly warping the format. I would argue that Show and Tell is doing that far more than Brainstorm right now, and that Brainstorm's just along for the ride. Legacy is a format about two things right now: Cheating giant creatures into play, or stopping your opponent from winning by doing so.

Know why RUG Delver's the best deck in Legacy right now? Because it can beat all the Show and Tell variants better than most of the other options. This isn't a new thing, either. UGR Threshold decks have been around forever, and they keep showing up again because they're the recipe to beat unfair combo decks - a cheap clock or two backed up with cheap counters, cheap draw, cheap removal, all done with extreme consistency. RUG decks thrive on this. They're always going to play a pile of the biggest bang cards that cost a little less mana than they should to be fair.

Brainstorm doesn't make RUG Delver the best deck in Legacy. Brainstorm, backed up with Daze, Mongoose, Delver, Goyf, Bolt, Forked Bolt, and combinations of other 1CC draw/removal/counters are what get it there.

If I have a single knock against Brainstorm, it's this: The card, along with Force and Daze, push 1CC Black discard (Aside from Therapy, which is usually a 0CC discard) to the back burners. Counters are already a faster form of disruption than discard - Making your opponent pay the mana to have a null end result is way better than paying the mana yourself for the same result. Discard has only a couple advantages - Giving yourself information about what's coming your way, and being on a color that's better at some things than blue.

To make matters worse, Brainstorm lets you hide your good cards from the discard effects without your opponent getting to even know what they are. In this regard, Brainstorm's the equivalent of an olympic gold medalist pushing an olympic silver medalist off the stand, kicking sand in his face, and laughing at him.

Aside from this, though, I don't view it as a problem. Just a reality to live with.

[Nihil Credo]

Yeah if you want to keep a banlist thread open other than the official one you'll have to make it less shit than this