Hey, they try and kill us, not the other way around.Quote:
Originally Posted by ahg113
Printable View
Hey, they try and kill us, not the other way around.Quote:
Originally Posted by ahg113
So you guys aren’t trying to weaponize your plant and wild life?
It's a trade off, we have less strategic diversity, but the decks are much more distinct from one another. They don't have deathrite to enable the extreme flexibility they once had to play seemingly any role they needed to. Sure Grixis Control/Delver/etc are going to have flexibility with cantrips but they won't have the mana flexibility to be able to play anything they need/want. I'd argue for as much that was loss strategically (basically all the creature-combo decks), the decks have become far more distinct. The format can be as strategically diverse as you want, but it means little if the games themselves all play out the same regardless of what the deck wants to do overall.Quote:
Originally Posted by H
I also suspect there is likely a food chain/aluren shell out there that is decent but the relative obscurity of those decks means they are going to be developed much more slowly.
Why would we need to, come here they will kill you for us.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lord_Mcdonalds
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNEeq5qGh8I
Good news, after about 3 years of consistently firing every week I heard the local event this week has dwindled to 4 people. Format is alive and skill intensive thanks to brainstorm!
OH no! What happened once in Kennesaw (less than 30k people?) is surely representative of a worldwide tendency that will last forever!Quote:
Originally Posted by Megadeus
Please continue with the USA vs Australia I was having fun (as for my ancestors I am simply happy they weren't British at all)
@dice sorry if I misunderstood, still thinking you were attributing an effect (less people) to the wrong cause (metagame instead of card costs and people aging). Which seems awfully like whining just because every occasion is good to complain about blue (even when the metagame is not stale)
Double posting: since everyone likes to share his own personal statistic, I'll write down mine.
In my city we have a weekly saturday afternoon event in a local shop with numbers ranging from 15 to 30 players. Every thursday evening a group of 15 people (only partially overlapping with the first one) goes to a pub for beer and legacy testing.
We have two cities in the range of an hour car drive who helds "leagues" of monthly legacy tournaments.
Last sunday we had an event with legacy and modern tournaments on a span of two days. Legacy main event reached higher numbers than modern; even if the timing of the tournament wasn't optimal (plenty of people still on holidays here) and there was some fear of failure, more than 140 people showed up for legacy.
I couldn't go there but a friends of mine shared (via whatsapp) the whole collection of each player, deck and their results.
Metagame considerations: the first in the swiss portion of the tournament was a Lands deck (they split in top8, I suppose in order to go have a beer).
My friend also calculated the "average tournament points" for each archetype (in order to have an idea of "the deck" strength in the metagame, trying to separate it for the single player performance). You know what the best deck was? Lands. The two worst? Miracle and Grixis Control. So much for the blue dominance.
The second best positioned deck? UB Death Shadow. Ok, this one plays blue: but it's a relatively new deck (so much for the metagame being stale) and a cheap one in comparison to others (so much for the format cost entry barrier). We also saw on coverage a budget turbo depths deck (no abu duals) who was on 5-0 at the moment (and depths on the average resulted the best performing combo deck, again so much for the blue dominance).
Finally I can't understand how you can complain when you have a circuit like SCG, which I'd love to have in Europe. Here we have MKM Series but they hold way fewer events... and personally, from my place in Italy, I think it's more difficult to fly to those locations.
Let's have a bit more optimism, please.
LEGACY
IS
NOT
"THE" (NOR "A")
DEAD
FORMAT
(at least not until it encounters some of the australian flora and fauna :tongue:)
PS:
Quote:
I went into Grand Prix Richmond believing that Legacy was a diverse and balanced format. The tournament results bore that out, with seven distinct archetypes appearing in the Top 8
Reid Duke, today on CFB
And the issue, of course, is that I don't really value "distinction" as a realistic achievable goal. Consider how many decks begin with 4 Force, 4 Brainstorm, 4 Ponder and go from there. The singled out issue though is that many also had 4 Deathrite. That is where the line was somehow passed? To me, the answer is no. You are free to disagree, but I'll still say that nothing of Deathrite moved it from simply exceptionally good to degenerate and ban-worthy.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lord_Mcdonalds
Well brainstorm and ponder are "pillars of the format" and no one wants fow banned. So yes, drs in 40% of placing decks (per mtgtop8) was the line. Numbers that high suggest the card is objectively better than the rest of the cards in the format, as people are prepared for it but still can't beat it consistently. The same logic is used to break up monopolies or stop mergers in order to maintain acceptable levels of competition.Quote:
Originally Posted by H
My perspective is that the format is currently less healthy than it was before the bans. Diversity seems to be down even further. We used to play unlimited proxy Legacy since only a couple of us had the cards. It just doesn't fire anymore. So I don't think it's a format cost issue, and instead has to do with the format itself... it's just not something people want to play, while they're happy to play proxy Modern all day long.
I think the judgement of either case is tied to the question of what they wanted to achieve. If neutering Miracles and breaking the BUG control/aggro-control/tempo circlejerk was the idea ans they just wanted to "reset" the cantrip shell like they did with the banning of DTT/TC, then they succeeded. However if anyone thought it's going to weed out the cantrip shells dominance, then he/she is plain naive.Quote:
Originally Posted by H
P.S.
It might me only loosely related to the current topics here, but it's quite interresting to see how the shares within the blue shell moved around among supertypes since '11. The amount of combo and control supertypes seems to constantly get lower compared to aggro-control (aside from the outliners within these years like Miracles or Omnitell)
DRS enabled unquestionably degenerate and colour-greedy manabases (I've seen 4C Deathblade with Wasteland, and seen Deathrite Shaman make it work), and made one of the format's safeguards against such abominations (Wasteland and Moon effects) much, much less effective. All while making x/1 attackers useless, and providing late-game inevitability, and casually pissing over graveyard-base strategies. If that little ugly fucker wasn't to eventually get the axe, I wasn't sure what would.
Plausible, but my feeling is still that such a breaking up was unnecessary. Mainly because it now puts most decks in the position of simply having no reason to run Green at all. In other words, if you were running UBX before, Green was a reasonable consideration. Now, the default choice is clearly Red. I'd rather have a more homogeneous format where more choices are viable, than a less homogeneous format where less choices are viable. Obviously some other people disagree. They aren't wrong, but neither am I.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemnear
A result of creatures simply getting better and better?Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemnear
I don't think is a problem of aggro\control tempo control control\combo nomenclature and percentage.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemnear
Is a problem of how big is the pool of cards and why people chose always the same shell of 8 blue cards in multiple copies.
Is pretty obvious that a shell that is dominating the format since '11 is overpowered compare to others, infact the others shell are build to restrain the blue one.
And also most of the deck, combo control or aggro control, use the same shell: brainstorm + ponder + fow + finisher (jace, show and tell, delver and tnn etc) + eventualy creatures. (Yes because good blue creatures now exists)
This is obvious because everyone wants to control what they draw (brainstorm+ponder) and prefer to have a counter against fast threat (fow)
To play fow 12 blue cards (minimum) are needed.
12 blue cards are 4 brainstorm + 4 ponder + or 4 creature that remove other creature (snapcaster or baleful strix) + finisher.
Those are the best all around cards in the pool.
So if Hasbro wants to hit the diffusion of blue shell have to hit the blue shell, not the other cards.
By the way:
Mtg, and legacy in particulare are like sports-
In American Sports (i have in mind NFL) there are some dinasty, but things changes quickly and everyone can find the right way to win.
In European SOccer there are always the same 2 team winning in their own nationals competition (Juventus\ Milan in italy, Barcelona\Real Madrid in spain, PSg in France, Bayer in Germany...)
At the moment the Legacy is more like European soccer than like NFL- The blue shell is the dominant team since years.
No doubt about that point. I just took a quick look at the data and wondered if the cantrip shell getting more and more of a synonym of aggro-control rather than fueling a wider range of supertypes, is another integral factor of peoples "fatigue" im regards to the metagame.Quote:
Originally Posted by H
Well, I actually think it has less to do with cantrips, that has been the "best" shell pretty much forever, but it's the result of them actually printing more playable cards in general. Which in turn, of course, get naturally adopted by cantrip shells. This isn't "ideal" but it is better than the opposite, where they print nothing but garbage and Legacy is truly stagnant. There is an alternative, where they print things that are playable, but antisynergistic with cantrips, but that is much more difficult and resultantly far less common.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemnear
I actually don't think the "average" Legacy player is fatigued by cantrips. In fact, I think it's plausibly just the opposite, the very reason for Legacy is to have a high-power, low-variance Eternal Format (where Vintage is a high-powered, high-variance and Pauper is low-power, low-variance (all relatively speaking, of course)). Cantrips actually fuel innovation, from enabling Tempo, to facilitating various Midrange combinations, to making many Combo decks viable. Again, it's a feature that Legacy is homogenous, not a bug. How homogenous it should be though is a qualitative subjective measure to which there isn't going to be a quantitative magical number though.
It is interesting indeed. Where does the data come from? Care to share?Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemnear
Not to say I disagree, I actually have a similar impression: I think both pure control and pure aggro are in bad shape, and then midrange aggro-controls arise. I don't see a combo decline (except maybe for the here and now, since a couple of months at most).
YES! We can start again with the misperception and the misrepresentation of what diversity is. Apparently people will never realise that the strategy a deck implements is NOT the same thing as the cards it plays (example, you can have different kind of prisons, different kind of control elements like discard, permission, board control, ecc) and quite obviously the opposite is also true: just because two decks play a certain card doesn't mean they are doing the same thing.Quote:
Originally Posted by Zulabnar
Let's warm up our polemic skills and our weapons.
(Oh, and "my team" is Juventus -even though I don't care so much for FOOTBALL- so I don't have any problem with some teams or decks being superior to others :laugh:)
I think the words "misperception" and "misrepresentation" suggest that one person is wrong and another person is right, but this seems like too narrow a viewpoint. Imagine if the following decks reached the top spots in a tournament:Quote:
We can start again with the misperception and the misrepresentation of what diversity is. Apparently people will never realise that the strategy a deck implements is NOT the same thing as the cards it plays (example, you can have different kind of prisons, different kind of control elements like discard, permission, board control, ecc)
UBR Control
UB Death's Shadow
Omnitell
Miracles
RUG Delver
UWb Stoneblade
Person A could feel that this is diverse because combo, tempo (more than one kind), and control (more than one kind) are all represented. Person B could feel that this is not diverse because of the substantial overlap in the cards used between all the decks. To me it seems that neither person is incorrect, since these are both reasonable ways of measuring diversity,* but that the two people have different tastes. (Person B may understand Person A's preference, and understand the difference between these two ways of considering diversity, while still disagreeing with Person A.) If you'll entertain an analogy, the reason the discussion has gone in circles many times is the same reason it is difficult for a large family to order pizza. People have different ideas of what they want, but the solution that must be arrived at (a fixed number of pizzas with various specific toppings on them) is one that will apply to everyone equally. Last time, my dad surreptitiously left the room and ordered some pizzas while everyone was still deeply engaged in discussing toppings. You could say that in this analogy, my dad is Wizards of the Coast. It's not about whether my uncle or grandmother had incorrect preferences; my dad was simply the one holding the phone.
*From your posts, I gather that you feel Person B's way of measuring diversity is not reasonable. To me, agreeing with (what I interpret to be) your opinion would carry the implication that for any value of X, it is not inherently undiverse if all top decks share X cards, as long as they have different strategic aims. If this is truly your position (or a fair logical result of your position), I have to disagree. As X increases, I expect that more and more people will feel that diversity is low. If X became 30 overnight, I think the meta would not be very diverse, even if there were still Delver decks and Emrakul decks and control decks with light splashes of different colors. I am not saying that X is 30 at present, but merely speculating that a majority of players would find X to be a relevant measure in extreme cases, and that deciding whether the present real-life case is extreme is a matter of personal preference.
Side note: From a perspective of game theory, I think that X (number of cards shared across all top decks) or format penetration (however it should best be defined) is a useful quantity to consider. A lot of the fun of Magic is in deckbuilding. If you decrease the number of card slots that can plausibly be varied, along a path from 60 variable card slots to 0 variable cards slots, the fun of deckbuilding begins to suffer somewhere along that path. However, I agree that this is not the only useful way to measure diversity. Person A in my example above also has a good point. You could in theory have great diversity among cards, with 10+ tier-one, equally competitive decks that share no cards between them, and have every one of those decks be a linear aggro deck once format equilibrium was reached. At present Legacy is the reverse of that, with quite a lot of cards in common between most top decks but a respectable diversity among strategies in the top decks --- especially considering that, although we use artificial examples for argument, nonblue decks such as Lands and Death & Taxes do compete and can have very interesting methods of play. I don't think anybody wants to go straight from real-life Legacy to the linear aggro example I gave.
I just looked over the usual suspects like MtgTop8 & Co (thus only going back to 2011) and threw a quick glance at the shares in the respective years as well as over certain known combo keycards like SnT, Infernal Tutor and the likes. It's just an impression I got and wonder if I should really crunch the numbers. I also need to specify that i don't list all the BUG control stuff & Co over all these years as "control" but "aggro-control" as they imo should.Quote:
Originally Posted by talpa
LookLook at it from a modern perspective. If the format were Eldrazi Tron, Mono U Tron, and RG tron as the top decks and there were no good ways to fight them (no ghost quarter, stone rainrain, field of ruin) then the format would be fucking miserable despite the being an aggro, control, and ramp deck as different styles being the top decks. Without a good way to fight the cantrips then you're either forced to resort to playing it or getting fucked. Chalice and Thalia are the two best ways to fight the cards. Both create miserable experiences for people (though I enjoy both personally). The format looks like the family tree of the average Crimson Tide fan. It's warped around either play thesethese cards or hate them out. I just hate when the retarded power level of cantrips is under stated because they aren't blatantly powerful to the layman. Whatever though. Format is fucking miserable. Attendance is going down while prices go up. Enjoy the shitfest while you can