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You are saying Astrolabe is a meaningful card in legacy, but it actually isn't by itself. If it was, we would see any tier deck at all with an Astrolabe playset and no Oko. This deck does not exist b/c it isn't a thing that competes. The mechanism by which it does not compete is that Astrolabe must double as a PW killer to compete in this format (if it doesn't do this, such a deck dies to any PW ever).Quote:
Originally Posted by pettdan
Can't agree with that. You won't know until Oko is gone if Astrolabe is playable without Oko. Why would someone ankleshoot themselves and not play Oko when they can, that's irrelevant as a measure of the value of Astrolabe. And I just explained why I think it is playable without Oko.Quote:
Originally Posted by Fox
That Astrolabe is tier-playable by itself is pure conjecture. That Astrolabe (or any future 1cmc cantrip without sacrifice trinket) doubles as free PW kills with Oko is demonstrable. The correct ban is the demonstrable problem (Oko).Quote:
Originally Posted by pettdan
While Astrolabe *might* be tier-playable by itself, there is no evidence that a ban targeting Astrolabe would be necessary to control your supposed deck.
Anyone who thinks Astrolabe is the ban has missed many fundamental steps.
Of course. But what is the justification to be a UG deck at all? Since DRS was banned, green did not offer much to blue decks. RUG Delver was less popular than Grixis Delver. Waterfalls was a meme deck. The dominant control decks were Miracles (UWx) and Grixis Control. There was little reason to BE a green deck at all vs playing a different blue deck.Quote:
Originally Posted by pettdan
W6 did, but then it was banned. Oko gave blue decks a reason to be green again. The UWx control shell wants to have green, becoming 4c or 5c. RUG Delver is now better than Grixis Delver, because of Oko. Oko is the reason for green in blue decks. Then, once your deck generates green mana, Veil is a natural inclusion. You do not include Veil in the 75 if your deck does not generate green mana. Oko is why blue decks want to generate green mana. That was my point.
If Oko is banned, will RUG Delver still be the best Delver? I doubt it. Will control still want green? Maybe only because Astrolabe enables 5c at low cost, but there will be much less pull into green.
You seem to have missed that I too want Oko banned. I never argued that Oko shouldn't be banned.Quote:
Originally Posted by Fox
Edit: I think Astrolabe needs to go, for reasons mentioned above, but I think Oko was always the real problem on a higher level, invalidating too many permanent-based strategies. Astrolabe merely lets control decks merge into 5c control.
You're looking at it too narrowly, I explained a few posts back the advantages of Astrolabe for a 5c deck. I mean, if a control deck can get away with cherry-picking the best cards regardless of color and still run blood moon, why wouldn't they? Their ability to do this doesn't seem to depend on Oko. But naturally, if there's no good card in a color then I suppose they cut that color.. It's just that there's very little cost for being greedy and running a 5c list.Quote:
Originally Posted by FTW
Whoa. I'm late to this conversation having just stumbled onto this so called "containment thread." But I find it intriguing. If you go back and look at the "Questing Thrun not of Legends" mentioned before, it is so obvious that that card is overpowered. Yet I agree that it probably would not be enough to unseat Delver and would be a worse card.Quote:
Originally Posted by FTW
And, this Catsectile Apurration is... a very unexplored design space.
I think Oko was printed with the intent of boosting aggro (zoo) type strategies. Or, at least, with the idea that it cripples zoo strategies not-at-all. If the premier (most ban-calling at least) answer turns everything into Watchwolf, then, you know, the answer is just, play zoo. But I don't think it is enough incentive to do so.
I appreciate (Oko's place in) the incentive to make (non-blue) aggro good again; but maybe printing a premier blue answer to the format doesn't work that way.
How exactly does a maindeck lifegain/elk generator being played by not-zoo help zoo win. Rogue Elephant-type cards are synonymous with zoo, and Oko + Astrolabe makes hasted Rogue Elephants. Oko renders zoo unplayable??
I totally agree and that's kind of my point. On one axis, just turning everything into a 3/3 is 'not' an answer to a deck full of cheap creatures smaller than 3/3 who only turn sideways. So, on that axis there might be a presumption somewhere (in development?) that a card like that helps zoo by fighting everything but zoo. But in practice I don't think it has played out that way.
Edit: also, zoo was unplayable before Oko of course. I mean, Maverick is like, the current version of zoo. The difference is that true zoo attacked on the straight up "aggro" axis while Maverick works because of the "hate" axis. I'm interested in seeing true aggro make a resurgence but I'm not sure it's actually possible/reasonable.
Given most recent card designs and bannings, I would severely question is any though at all has been put into Oko at all, yet one relating to eternal which they don't care about at all.
The problem of aggro never has been control anyway.
Aggro almost always loses to any deck that opens with Dark Ritual or takes a storm count for other reasons.
You will lose G1 so you have to win both post board games.
Then you have to hope to have enough hate to prevent them from winning too fast while not gimping yourself too hard.
Most effective hate bears start at 2 cmc which is also to late for G3 if you manage to win G2.
In an eternal format this is bound to happen at some point because one better new card for combo is much more relevant than one more good card for aggro.
Probably the first nail in the coffin was Ad Nauseam which technically gave you a chance to bolt people to death in response.
I would assume the last straw was Past in Flames which gives so much consistency to storm that there is no point to try disrupting.
Unless you introduce a metric like in modern for combo decks, which would lead to the banning of probably 5+ cards, aggro will stay dead in legacy forever.
This is flagrantly inaccurate. Go back ten years or so, and you'd find Zoo, Goblins, Merfolk, and at times even Affinity as decks to beat, alongside Storm and Reanimator. This was even true during the Mystical Tutor period where those two combo decks were supercharged. Heck, I was undefeated against Storm (piloting Zoo) for years since the deck was fast and you could pack serious sideboard hate. Aggro losing to combo didn't matter all that much because your matchup against everything else was excellent (and both Storm and graveyard decks can be battled with several strong sideboard bullets). People forget that there was a time where there was no Terminus, no Batterskull, no Scapcaster Mage. Aggro ran over most fair blue decks, to the extent where you'd see cards like Rhox War Monk in the maindeck of blue midrange decks. Tarmogoyf was everywhere partially because it was such a good blocker against aggro.Quote:
Originally Posted by Zoid
All that started to change for two factors. One was combo related - but it wasn't related to Storm or graveyard decks. The rise of a third combo pillar (Show and Tell) made it pretty difficult to sideboard enough hate to cover the relevant combo matchups. This didn't become a huge issue until Griselbrand, which doubled as an oversized Baneslayer against decks trying to win by attacking. Show and Tell was also much harder to hate out via sideboard bullets (Containment Priest wouldn't be printed for a while) and most of the hate didn't overlap with hate for the other two decks. However, the primary factor that led to aggro's demise was the power creep of fair blue decks. Batterskull and Snapcaster Mage made blue midrange a bad matchup for most aggro decks. The printing of Terminus and True-Name Nemesis a few sets later put the nails in the coffin. As if that wasn't enough, the printing of Delver of Secrets made tempo nearly as aggressive as aggro (Delver >> Wild Nacatl). Power-creeped tempo *replaced* aggro at the same time that power-creeped blue midrange and control made it unplayable.
To address the Past in Flames example - I don't think it really mattered. Ill-Gotten Gains is just as good against decks without stack interaction. It might even be better, considering it makes your mana easier. I do agree with the last part - but I think we're probably thinking of different cards. Aggro coming back would require the complete knee-capping of the busted blue midrange shell, and I think it would be more than five cards. Delver, Snapcaster, Terminus, TNN and Oko at the very least would have to go. Taking out Show and Tell as a strategy might also be necessary. In the meantime, if you want to turn dudes sideways your choices are basically (a) Delver and (b) Chalice.
I'm pretty much with you on everything you wrote. Combo isn't really the problem. Maybe the high Meta percentage of it but not combo in itself. What killed most aggro strategies is, that the once "Bread and Butter" strategies to face with true aggro either all have become way to efficient, or are doing the same thing as aggro while also supporting cantrip cartel and FoWs. Namely Delver.Quote:
Originally Posted by Admiral_Arzar
But I think there is more to be successfully turned sideways then delver and chalice. So I'd like to add c)Thalias and d) Gobbos and Elves.
Rhox War Monk is my fav card of all time.. pitches to Force and Natural Order and stopped Nacatls, Apes and Bolts for days. What not to love about that one.
This isn't intended to take things off track, and I've trumpeted my views on Chalice plenty of times, but I had a discussion recently that I thought was fruitful and interesting, so I thought I'd pose a question.
Is "not being able to play one-drops" (be that true or false) really a weakness for Chalice decks when you can run eight to twelve Sol lands? If so, is it not outweighed by the advantage of getting double the mana most other decks/manabases yield over time?
This might not be the best place to discuss this, so I'm happy to take this discussion elsewhere if this isn't the venue.
Yes, and if you're in any of the post servers there's serious discussions about Keys (manifold voltalic, and candelabra) which would otherwise be auto includes in decks where they're effectively sol rings, and Manavaults.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ronald Deuce
Some, myself included, do it anyways and just accept as a way of life that sometimes you're going to strand your own one-drops.
I don't play chalice because i want to, i play chalice to stop the cantrip cartel.
ban brainstorm and chalice will go away...
I think that unless you ban ponder also, this simply won't be true, and even then there is value in Chalice @ 1 from nonblue decks - vials, lackeys, bolts, moms, storm, remember preordain will then be played - Chalice would drop in price and see a downtick, but I can't see it going away.Quote:
Originally Posted by non-inflammable
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Ronald Deuce
Turbo Forge runs (well, ran, it's not seeing much play now) 4-5 maindeck keys alongside the chalices, very successfully.Quote:
Originally Posted by FourDogsinaHorseSuit
Personally, my experience is that whenever I play a blue sol land + chalice deck, I draw the conclusion that it would be much better with brainstorms over chalices. That deck has often been Tezzerator, and most decks can ignore and win through a chalice, probably they can also answer it in play and many can answer it on the stack. Chalice is a card that promotes deck diversity and deck building diversity, I personally always found Counterbalance to be its evil sibling since very few cards can answer it, it can stop any of your cards, and it brings a feeling of "I'm probably going to lose this but I don't know so I have to play it out" and every countered spell is such a disappointment. And it is, opposite to chalice, one-sided. If it affected both players then ok, but it's a one-sided chalice on variable numbers. It furthermore got Top banned, one can argue, although time-management was a thing too.
Edit:
The above was mostly about the trade-off between one-drops and chalice. To answer your question though, Ronald Deuce, is the mana advantage outweighing the deck-building restrictions for chalice? Eldrazi seems to be doing fairly well, the monsters are good enough vs the Oko decks and the chalice + TKS are good enough vs the combo decks, or that's what I think the deck's popularity indicates. While the Moon Stompy deck lacks the pressure that Eldrazi has, for beating control and fair decks in general, while the moons don't quite seem to cut it as a lock piece, not enough to make the deck chosen by a significant amount of players. Both the deck's lock pieces, the moon and the chalice, are handled by current control decks. So, it would seem that the answer to your question is that the mana acceleration from sol lands compensates for the deck building restriction from chalice IF you're using the mana to ramp out monsters but not if you're using it to play blood moons.
If we leave the topic a little bit and consider Imperial Painter, which has been running well in MTGO leagues (this is a bit anecdotal as I haven't seen it top any events, but Daize and Zaracias have been doing really well with it, I think, while streaming in the Painter Discord), it neglects to play the chalice in favor of redblasts and grindstone. I think the careful observation from that is that running redblasts is better than running chalice, and that's because it lines up better against the preferred threats in the format than chalice, threats being (among others) Oko, Show and Tell and Thassa's Oracle. Chalice is certainly good, but I think redblast is a little better. At least if you're coupling it with blood moons.. It's a complicated discussion but making sense of it seems to require that you consider how your threats and answers line up vs Oko and Astrolabe rather than some internal synergy aspect of the deck. Maybe some other cards should be considered current format defining cards too, I make it simple for myself by just considering the cards that seem to be most influential vs the decks that I play (or well, rather, I don't have time to go through everything), but probably Dreadhorde Arcanist, Force of Negation and Uro should be considered too. They define what your deck needs to line up favorably against if your deck wants to be relevant in the competition.
So, I think if the above discussion is meaningful, then that indicates that the question of what works isn't really about the deck building restrictions coming from chalice, it's about if the cards you are accelerating into line up well against the fair decks.
Edit2: sorry for the long post, didn't have time to shorten it today, unfortunately. I'll make the relevant sentences stand out with bold text.
So, is legacy pretty stable right now? I can't think of anything that needs a banning. Annoying cards for sure (Oko, Astrolabe, Uro, Veil of Summer, the usual bullshit) but nothing ban-worthy. It looks like we might actually get a set (Zendikar Rising) without rotating the format, too.
Literally half of what you mentioned is ban worthy.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr. Safety