[Article] The History of Legacy Part 8: Modernism

[Griselpuff]

http://www.channelfireball.com/articles/the-history-of-legacy-modernism/

[ESG]

http://www.channelfireball.com/articles/the-history-of-legacy-modernism/

I was wondering when these were going to resume. Adam's series was such a nostalgia trip. Thanks for taking up the mantle, Bob! Since you wondered about Infect, someone in the locals here was playing the deck near the end of the Misstep era and was doing quite well with it, but losing Misstep hurt the deck immensely, and people almost immediately shifted back to running more 1cc removal spells. I'd like to add a supplement to this period of history and link to a group of Too Much Information articles that the Hatfields wrote for SCG. I'm sure you, as a lover of data, recall them with fondness, but these articles would predate newer Legacy players here, so they might find them interesting: http://www.starcitygames.com/magic/legacy/22734_Too_Much_Information_Seattle_Pittsburgh_Richmond_And_Boston_Legacy_Opens.html
I played in that Seattle Open, running Aggro Loam, and Hive Mind was everywhere. I immediately regretted not packing my case of random playables, which had Angel's Grace in it. SCG had no copies left on site, and I couldn't find anyone with the card, so I ended up scrapping my graveyard hate and running red blasts and Ethersworn Canonist, if memory serves. I was doing well until I ran into that deck twice, and then it downhill from there.

[jrsthethird]

I hadn't seen this series before, so I haven't gotten all the way through it yet. When discussing GP Madrid, the Reanimator/ANT finals, and the Mystical ban 4 months later, Adam writes this:


In reality, it was none of these things, and yet the format was still better off without Mystical Tutor than with it. I can honestly empathize with the position that the card put the DCI into – it wasn’t doing anything particularly wrong, but the card was never going to get more fair, and things could only get worse, not better. It certainly wasn’t to the point of requiring banning at the time it was banned, but what it did do was bottleneck the creativity and variety of decks in the format – as long as Mystical was around, it would be the first card in a list full of broken things. It’s hard to capture this feeling of foreboding into succinct language, which is why the discussion of the justification behind the banning floundered.

I've been kinda apathetic about the Brainstorm debate, but Ctrl+F and replace Mystical with Brainstorm and this paragraph really nails it.

(That said, I'm posting this same thing in the B&R thread. Fight with me there.)