All B/R update speculation.

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You would cry about any card which met Goyf criteria with power creep. We could ban Murktide and we don't even need the next Goyf iteration to exist yet to know your response would be "ban it."

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I started playing legacy a long time ago, and the only ban i asked for was a miracle ban, never thought of banning tarmogoyf and such.
I do think murktide is bannable mainly because it not only power creeps the beatstick category, it literally turns half of legacy mediocre (mostly because it's blue, which is a major upside despite the pyroblast claims, and because of flying)

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I cast a card I already run; it's called Pyroblast. Actual Goyf lived, Goyf 2.0 died. See how arguing minor differences is subjective and pointless?
Murktide is better than Tarmogoyf vs Murktide dies easier = no winner.

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Being targeted by pyroblast has never been a concern, having to rely on that as a downside just means that there are almost no real downsides.
Also, no winner what? Murktide clearly do wins by a mile

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Again, explain how Murktide is not 2 mana, over-stat'd, non-trample, summoning sick.

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I never claimed it isnt, tarmo and murktide are almost in the same category, you are not the one which draws the line tho.
Explain to me how tarmogoyf is an evasive blue beater please

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Oof man, I just talked about how flying mono-crops into targetable keyword flying.

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And it is bullshit man :laugh:
By this logic giving flying to ragavan would make it worse because the hell knows who i running 4 run afoul?

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That flying matters is subjective, meaning it might be harder for *you* to deal with.

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No man, it is exactly the definition of objective, having the keywork flying printed on a card makes it strickly better literally because fewer cards can interact with it

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I for one have always targeted the concept of Goyf and I haven't noticed a lick of difference between Goyf or Murktide (well other than it's way easier to deal with). Do you see how subjective arguments are meaningless currency in ban discussions?

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Your argument IS subjective, saying that flying do not strictly buffs a card is objectively false tho

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Some decks had their Goyf-free happy days...until reality caught up with them with the closed fist 2 mana, over-stat'd, non-trample, summoning sick. Welcome back to real legacy - I suggest you immediately revise your deck to pass the "don't die to Goyf" test.
Yeah the Goyf concept should not exist, I agree...but it does, and it's here to stay. That the concept of Goyf exists is exactly why a diverse range 3+ mana threats will always be teetering on unplayable. This really shouldn't surprise anyone who plays legacy.

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I really dont get why you try to pull of this strange ad hominem on my as if I want to play some deck which got power crept, i honestly do not care at all, it's just boring to play any deck at the moment, and UR delver is one of the big reasons why

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Plays into REB, Wasteland, green interaction, loses access to 3 color Prismatic Endings...There are pluses and minuses to 2c vs 3c; this is a pointless subjective tangent.

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And has a 23% play rate with a 56% win rate, which means that your entire argument is pointless, despite answers existing, the deck is just that much better than the competition

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You seem to really like to live in the moment with your assessments. But like why would you even try to make a point out of color amounts? The UR Delver deck has zero say over whether or not it is relevant; one Wrenn or Oko or Lurrus printing and your 4x Volc is gonna look trashy af.

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The deck is currently by far the strongest in the format, that's it.
Being by far the strongest deck in the format while being bicolor despite how free splashing is in legacy matters quite a lot, this shell can alost freely splash a third color if needed

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Yeah 20% of the format mono-cropping on Saga - definitely can't ever compete in colors that can support Pernicious Deed. Definitely can't possibly play the colors that can cast Plague Engineer vs Allosaurus Shepherd. Definitely can't play BUG when they just got the newest 3cmc PW you can't FoN. Murktide is not keeping BUG from being played; what you are describing is the mixture a Ragavan still being legal phenomenon + the failure to ever replace DRS (black has zero 1-drop dude replacements, unless their deck is called Hogaak or Madness).

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Bug is not played at all, bugW is played, the difference is swords to plowshares, which happens to make your deck not instalosing to murktide regent

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No, Ancestral drawing extra cards is closer to "pay 1 mana, take three extra turns." Also it breaks mulligan equity rules, which among other things is a huge color pie problem. As far as mono-U decks are concerned adding Murktide to their list is first and foremost "UU5 with delve that says: kill target opposing 8/8 Murktide," the backup mode is that it can win the game.

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Andestral recall says: go even with your opponent who have played ancestral recall, the backup mode is that it can win the game

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You have a list of netdecks,

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Untrue, you probably just checked the last list there and called the day

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which would explain why you've missed the importance of passing the "don't die to Goyf" test at deck construction.

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Everybody but you must be missing it because delver has the best playrate and winrate at the moment

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If your range of decks is struggling with Murktide, I suggest you go back and reformat them to answer 2 mana, over-stat'd, non-trample, summoning sick - this is a super important part of building a resilient legacy deck.

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I have currently sleeved doomsday (which is a pet deck i refined since it had to win with tendrils 10 years ago, as you can see), which does not care at all about murktide

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Since you want to cite your accomplishments, I think you should know that your most recent deck literally comes from my UR Dreadstill list handed to Ark4n with instructions about the problems of playing Ragavan with Standstill and Dreadnought. As far as copying me goes, you need to acknowledge that Allosaurus Shepherd and DnT exist with Grim Lavamancer and your SB is skinny on 2x Alpine Moon. :cool:

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I literally made that list the day before the event because i was coming off a pause (getting a master deg in physics is not a joke), if i had more testing i would have played 3/4 murktides actually :laugh:

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So the reason they're doing great with Murktide is that people forgot the need to build decks to not die to Goyf.

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Actually people are putting the effort to build anti murktide, with some succes, but ur still is the best deck, this is why i do think it is bannable

REB is a Pyroblast. Not entirely true, but for most situations playing with or against, you won't feel the difference.
It is then conceptually fine to consider them identical, as you would play similarly against.

Goyf is not a big threat to combo: it does not pitch to FoW, does not fly, and a 3/4 is not an insane clock. Murktide is.
Goyf requires a splash, Murktide does not.

Categorizing helps if it simplify deck building and play decisions: rather than thinking about a specific card, you think about the category: eg. ponder & preordain as ritual cantrips, fetchlands, etc.
That is why we commonly refer to red blasts, cantrips and fetchlands without anyone complaining about the lack of precision, or the impropriety of the categorization.

Here Fox is talking about green playing flying edict, while it traditionally does not care much about Goyf. The two cards require different deck building decisions, at least in SB.
The length of the discussion on the topic should also be proof enough that it is not a useful categorization.

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And it is bullshit man :laugh:
By this logic giving flying to ragavan would make it worse because the hell knows who i running 4 run afoul?

...having the keywork flying printed on a card makes it strickly better literally because fewer cards can interact with it

Your argument IS subjective, saying that flying do not strictly buffs a card is objectively false tho

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So this is the thing about your netdecking, it just means you can pilot well - you understand tactics. When it comes to building decks and format balance, you're missing the big picture [strategy]. The way magic works is that once the truly abusive stuff gets banned [in this case Ragavan, which is a mana exploit and first player advantage exploit, making it doubly bannable], UR Delver is left with Delver & DRC & Murktide.
What this means strategically is that green can hit 100% of Delver, 100% of SnT, 100% of Reanimator, 100% of Depths-themed decks' credible lines of play by SB'ing flyabolic edict. They can then add Endurance on top to keep hitting Delver, Reanimator, peripheral threats of Depths decks [Reclaimer, KotR], and also pick up some amount of game vs Thassa. This is how deckbuilding works, you notice patterns other legacy players must abide by, and you target the pattern. We can also expand on the Depths-themed decks for a bit, these poor bastards are absolutely helpless clutching their Olle Rade [Safekeeper] and Sejiri Steppes pretending it'll make any difference at all vs flyabolic edict.
Legacy deckbuilding is a set of checklists, but you always start with don't die to Goyf followed by don't die to total hand destruction [which currently you don't really have to do b/c Uro exists and keeps Counterbalance and Hymn out of the format] followed by beat the FIRE card [Uro. Ragavan is also FIRE, but it will be banned]. There are ofc more crude forms of deckbuilding which include meme'ing [bad construction, dies to internal variance - this is modern style deckbuilding] and parasitize the card that is going to/should be banned.

As far as the rest of your list goes, none of the finishes except the most recent one happened during the time of Murktide. While there's no doubt that you are a capable pilot and can tune a deck, you're not a deck developer. In Murktide times, all you can do is flash a finish with a deck Ark4n and I are the sole creators. This isn't exactly a great starting point.

So again, you understand tactics and you live in the moment. You don't see a list with flyabolic edicts, so you have no insight into what happens when you turn on an entire color which has traditionally not had anything to say about that entire cluster of decks. You're focused solely on the text box of Murktide and the word flying and saying it's "strictly better," which simply isn't true when you understand the format. Cards that are soft to interaction from every single color in magic exist on a timer.

Your next strategy is citing the win % of a deck that dies the day a new card is printed; we saw UR fall off the map with Wrenn and then Oko and then Lurrus...and their deck is going to keep falling off the map b/c it has nothing to ensure lasting relevance. UR Delver is playing 1-card combos without any strategy behind it, and this always ends by death to power creep. That doesn't mean that Goyf isn't a miserable effing concept that chokes out most of the deckbuilding diversity in the format - it's just that the entire history of legacy dictates it won't ever be banned.

When it comes to the win percentages themselves, that's Ragavan the mana & first-player advantage exploit. Legacy players are really bad about looking over this simple fact, and we see a lot of "ban Iteration" when the card is clearly overperforming b/c the Lotus Petal magus is cheating on the 1 land per turn rule [this enables Iteration to get value early by putting a land in exile]. We saw the same thing back when Dig Through Time was legal when the majority of legacy players didn't see the whole part where Gitaxian Probe was a cantripping Lotus Petal turning on the CA payoff...

When it comes to understand legacy on a strategic level, whether your deckbuilding or talking about balance, always always always look for mana advantage exploits and first-player advantage exploits - these are the bad actors. No matter how dumb a Goyf by any name is, it is something you can address with minimal adjustment. It's not fun to build against Goyf, and you really shouldn't have to in a perfectly managed format, but there will always be bigger fish to fry.

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Bug is not played at all, bugW is played, the difference is swords to plowshares, which happens to make your deck not instalosing to murktide regent

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Oh jeez...like 20% of the format plays Saga and both Saga and Murktide die to Trophy...and BUG *has* to play Plow? Please don't ever claim that Murktide is keeping BUG out of the format. :tongue:
Again and again you are demonstrating that you do not understand legacy on a strategic level. Netdecking well does not mean you get the big picture.

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Untrue, you probably just checked the last list there and called the day

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So you really don't want to make comments like this if you didn't create TES or Lands or NicFit or DDFT etc...
Competently netdecking means you are a good player, but that's kind of extent of it. Adding current statistics largely created by Ragavan and its downstream hijacking of the format does not equal Murktide should be banned. Yes, MurkGoyf is a miserable effing card...but the fix we went with for all Goyf cards is letting time [power creep] take care of it.

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Everybody but you must be missing it because delver has the best playrate and winrate at the moment

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So you're not a deck designer and you don't really get this, but here we go anyways; three things matter in legacy:
1-Goyf
2-total hand destruction [Counterbalance, Hymn/Snapcaster, Echo, and previously Grixis Delver's Probe/Therapy]
3-FIRE, meaning 1-card combos that generally beat both of the concepts listed above. Currently this is Uro and Ragavan.

What you are noticing is that FIRE [Ragavan] + Goyf [Murktide] being in the same deck is horrifically bad for the format, and that combination has the stats to back it up. The problem there is Ragavan, it will only ever be Ragavan. With Ragavan gone the format goes back to Uro keeping Hymn and CB out of the format. The Uro players will throw existing anti-Goyfs at MurkGoyf, and they will incorporate future printings of anti-Goyf...and over time they will push MurkGoyf out of the format, just like they pushed out actual Tarmogoyf.

Remember that anti-Goyf printings far outpace that of Goyf printings. You know this is true because WotC makes money off of the limited format. People aren't going to pay to play limited if WotC keeps printing 2 mana Juzam Djinns - there's not only a "that's bullcrap" factor, but it specifically closes the door on ever drafting Boros. The evidence is all around you: Lupine Prototype, Vantress Gargoyle, Myr Superion - they always put massive conditions on rates like these...except somehow that healthy understanding of card design goes down the toilet with the word delve and P/T that isn't strictly defined by a high number. Goyf and Murktide are huge design mistakes, but they're pretty rare as compared to anti-Goyf cards.

While there is nothing fun about wizards dropping the ball in the same predictable way, a Goyf mistake is much easier to beat than...a 1 mana non-creature artifact that draws a card without going to the graveyard for example (SDT, Astrolabe - and guess what happens when they print another 1 mana non-creature artifact that draws a card without going to the graveyard!!!). You really need to step back and get some perspective, even if your style of legacy is netdecking and being a successful player. Ban Murktide is not a valid opinion in the grand scheme of things. You can whine about Goyf and how it ruins the format - that's a valid sentiment, and you're not wrong...it just isn't getting banned.

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(getting a master deg in physics is not a joke)

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I'm going to pretend you didn't just try to make this about education level.

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Actually people are putting the effort to build anti murktide, with some succes, but ur still is the best deck, this is why i do think it is bannable

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I would encourage you to go play Pre-modern with just Tarmogoyf added to the format. The concept of Goyf is oppressive as hell, but holy smokes playing vs MurkGoyf with today's card pool is so much less horrific. You don't know how good we have it on the Goyf front; our problem is Ragavan.

The obvious solution is to ban everything that defines the current format. Ban Goyf so we can play Werebear again, ban Ragavan so Red can suck again, ban every Black card that has targeted discard so Black has to Ritual out Hypnotic Specter again. Then everyone can go back to the drawing board and stop wondering how to squeeze unfair shit into their fair decks, except Blue will continue to free-counterspell everything so at the end of the day it doesn't matter anyway.

I agree with dte's point. Grouping Tarmogoyf & Murktide together isn't useful here (for most decks).

Yes, some decks will answer all 2 cmc summ-sick non-trample GY-dependent fatties with the same cards:
StP + Snapcaster
Strix
Assassin's Trophy
Sudden Edict
Karn -> Ensnaring Bridge
GSZ -> Grist
cantrip + Terminus
Relic of Progenitus
Sai + artifacts
Rest in Peace
Crop Rot -> Maze of Ith
Solitary Confinement
etc.
In those cases I see how you can treat the threats as interchangeable, except on average you have less time to answer Murktide (power-creeped Goyf).

But in plenty of cases, decks would answer Goyf differently than Murktide. Commonly-played Legacy cards that pass the Goyf test but don't pass the Murktide test:
Prismatic Ending
Abrupt Decay
Fatal Push
Skyclave Apparition
Endurance
Knight of the Reliquary
Mother of Runes
Eliminate
Submerge
Veteran Explorer
Mogg War Marshal
Empty the Warrens

This is what's relevant. Plenty of decks had answers to potential Goyf that were also useful against a range of other problems, but those answers don't work on Murktide. So they can't treat them as the same type of threat. Murktide demands some different answers. Pyroblast is the main one that would already see a lot of play, although Teferi/Jace bounce are strong too. If you have to run a card like Run Afoul that you wouldn't otherwise run, it costs in other matchups (including just regular Goyf). That doesn't mean you can't rebuild decks to answer Murktide (you can). But it does mean it's not useful to group it with Goyf.

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Originally Posted by Fox

I would encourage you to go play Pre-modern with just Tarmogoyf added to the format. The concept of Goyf is oppressive as hell, but holy smokes playing vs MurkGoyf with today's card pool is so much less horrific. You don't know how good we have it on the Goyf front; our problem is Ragavan.

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This part I agree with. Goyf was oppressive when it first hit Legacy in 2009ish, until they started printing more Goyf answers. Goyf mirrors were so common and boring that Noble Hierarch's exalted was heralded as a way to break them. Deadguy Ale played maindeck Spectral Lynx, lol. Relatively speaking, Murktide is easier to answer now.

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Originally Posted by FTW

They became unplayable because blue got the new best creatures. Blue can play the best aggro creatures (and do other things too), which makes blue tempo clearly better. The point of aggro was to pick up free wins vs blue because blue had worse creatures and FoW is card disadvantage vs fair creatures. When blue gets the best creatures, blue tempo makes aggro obsolete.

There was a natural rock-scissors-paper dynamic. Blue beats combo. Aggro beats blue. Combo beats aggro.

If a metagame became too much fair blue, aggro stomps it. This is how you reduce the Brainstorm % in the top 8. You don't need to ban Brainstorm. Just give aggro new tools (to keep up with power creep) that blue can't play. Taiga aggro is still stuck back in Wild Nacatl land while blue gained the best beatdown in Delver of Secrets, True Name Nemesis, Sprite Dragon, Dragon's Rage Channeler, Murktide Regent as well as defensive 2-for-1 anti-aggro tools like Baleful Strix, Snapcaster Mage, Stoneforge Mystic, Ice-Fang Coatl, Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath. How can beatdown ever keep up when the new power-creeped creatures go to blue?

Wild Nacatl was good card design because it was an overstatted (for the time) aggro creature that is easy to run in Taiga decks but bad in Island decks. This is what aggro needs to be viable. Power creeped beatdown creatures that aren't just better in blue decks. As for the format being more powerful now, that doesn't obsolete the aggro game plan, it just means aggro would need new tools to keep up with the format's increased power level.

Beetdown R/G
Creature - Human Warrior
Haste
When ~ ETB, sacrifice all Islands you control.
If a land you control would produce mana, it instead produces R or G.
4/4

Megantic Nacatl G
Creature - Cat Warrior Berserker
First Strike
+1/+1 as long as you control Plains
+1/+1 as long as you control Mountain
+1/+1 as long as you control Forest
-2/-2 as long as you control Island
2/2

If you make the card strong enough to keep up with the format's power, and not playable in blue tempo, then aggro as a concept can work. Wizards just keeps giving the best creatures to blue.

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Then we're mostly in agreement. My original point was that the newly printed creatures are not what caused non-blue aggro to fall out. It's only gotten more ridiculous/apparent now because Delver can play UR and doesn't have to splash black or green anymore to get access to beaters. I agree that's stupid but that doesn't explain why aggro fell out. If all those creatures were non-blue, you would just see Delver splashing for them but you would not see non-blue aggro suddenly work.

As you've pointed out, there are a wide range of defensive cards that don't slot into Delver that render non-blue aggro less playable. You would also likely acknowledge that combo decks have more tools than they had in 2010.

Ultimately, the death of red-green aggro cannot be solved by any realistic set of bans. Its another question as to whether new aggro cards could be printed to make red-green viable. My suspicion is those colors are not interactive enough to be viable unless you were going to print some truly heinous cards. A power-crept Nacatl wouldn't get it done. Like I said, this strategy is not even viable in Modern anymore.

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Originally Posted by Purple Blood

Then we're mostly in agreement. My original point was that the newly printed creatures are not what caused non-blue aggro to fall out. It's only gotten more ridiculous/apparent now because Delver can play UR and doesn't have to splash black or green anymore to get access to beaters. I agree that's stupid but that doesn't explain why aggro fell out. If all those creatures were non-blue, you would just see Delver splashing for them but you would not see non-blue aggro suddenly work.

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Depends on what you mean by "newly printed". If just MH2 or 2020 cards, then of course. Nonblue aggro died years ago. I'm an old player and still consider the Delver era "new"-ish. Since that's around when aggro went obsolete and blue tempo took off, those are the blue creatures I was talking about (Delver, TNN, Snapcaster, Strix). That's when WOTC really started power-creeping blue creatures over nonblue, giving blue both superior aggro and superior anti-aggro. The recent creatures are just a continuation of that trend (Sprite Dragon, Oko, Uro, Ice-Fang, DRC, Murktide). Yes, blue can still splash off-color cards, but it hurts even more when so many of these cards were printed in blue.

By "nonblue" I mean something that can't be played effectively in blue decks (Tarmogoyf was long considered a blue card). Cards like my above brews or Eidolon of the Great Revel. Creatures designed to be strong in nonblue but that have no business in a blue deck. Wild Nacatl as a concept was great design for that. But there's been a dearth of similar cards keeping up with the format's power creep.

This of course isn't solved by bans, nor did I advocate for that. It's an issue of many years of aggro failing to get adequate tools to keep up with the format's power creep. I just want to see those tools printed to balance the colors. Fireflux Stompy is an exception, because it's been a power creep of cards printed at 3-4 CMC (does not threaten Modern and Standard since they cannot accelerate like Legacy can). With the way Wizards has been curating Modern and Standard, they favor midrange and discourage decks that can win too quickly, so they avoid printing creeped aggro creatures at 1-2 cmc (and when they do, they often use keywords like Prowess, Surveil or Delve that make them even stronger in blue cantrip decks). Unless they print a Legacy Masters, there's not really a set where the needed cards would get printed, because creatures like that would be too strong in Modern or Standard.

This missing piece of the meta is/was one of blue's natural police. So when blue gets OP, instead of just banning every new blue tool, maybe they just need to print new tools for its predators...

This is a bit of a meta question. I'm a little lit, so this may be less coherent than I'd like it to be.

I remember reading something penned/sigged by Mark Rosewater around 2000/2001 (I think it was one of the non-cards parts of the Beatdown box set) in which he said that creatures, generally, are the most efficient way to deal damage and, thus, win games of Magic. And generally speaking, he was right in 2001(?).

Now I get that prison pieces and synergetic noncreature spells that can be played in Legacy are better than any of the creatures that existed back then, and I'm generally neutral about that. But that's clearly untrue now. I can't see the reason to play creature-light decks at all anymore, unless that deck is All Spells. Even garbage-tier unplayable creatures have body stats higher than their costs these days with no opportunity cost and no drawback. And yeah, that brings creatures more in line with the cost of removal, but then again, wasn't that the whole point of removal? To answer snowballing-damage threats on the cheap? Because it feels an awful lot like aside from a breakthrough spell here or there, Wizards didn't just power up creatures: They powered down everything else, too. I've been playing Arena (kill me), and I've spent precisely zero dollars to wipe the floor with people who spent actual, real money (not just the latest, dumbest GigaChipCoins™) by just spamming creatures about sixty percent of the time.

Did they just look at their decade(s) of game-design experience and piss all over it?

I say/ask all this because I don't think "FIRE" is the problem. I think it's been a deeper problem that continues to metastasize, and FIRE is only manifesting as a symptom because the company's been banning the playable noncreature cards before players can, you know, PLAY THEM. People talk about pushed cards all over the place, but I have trouble thinking of anything that approaches the warpitude of creature printings over the past several years. Underworld Breach is the closest thing, and it's just . . . fine. It's fine. It was fine. It continues to be fine.

EDIT: I feel like I should preempt some stuff by saying that I don't really have a dog in the fight re: Murktide Regent. If people have a problem with the format right now, the problem is and has been quite self-evidently Delver of Secrets. (Well, it's the last change to mulligan rules, but we know they won't ban that.) I don't really see a tremendous problem with the card, but a lot of people seem really twisted up about the state of the format. Raggy's a good card, and Murktide Regent's a good card. That's cool to me. I like good cards, even if I don't play those specific ones.

EDIT again: Planeswalkers are their own kettle of fish. I'd rather they'd just never made them, but I do play a few in Commander. This view is subjective. I think cat-people in fantasy are dumb, I like playing blue, and I hate planeswalkers, so of course I'm gonna build Lord Windgrace.

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As far as the rest of your list goes, none of the finishes except the most recent one happened during the time of Murktide. While there's no doubt that you are a capable pilot and can tune a deck, you're not a deck developer. In Murktide times, all you can do is flash a finish with a deck Ark4n and I are the sole creators. This isn't exactly a great starting point.

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As i told you those are not all of my finishes, after that event i actually got 3 more tournament wins with doomsday and i got a top8 in a showcase on mtgo, still playing doomsday and playing a list that i specifically developed, also, if you claim to have created sagavan, give reasoning and proof

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Murktide and the word flying and saying it's "strictly better," which simply isn't true when you understand the format.

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Please just say it straight, having flying is a malus on a card because of run afoul, if you do think so, state it

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Your next strategy is citing the win % of a deck that dies the day a new card is printed;

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You should definitely bring in actual data to back up what you are talking about, it helps sounding reasonable, and UR is staying tier 1 for quite a while for now, despite green having access to the ultimate edict

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we saw UR fall off the map with Wrenn and then Oko and then Lurrus...

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And all of them got banned, bringing Mishra Workshop to legacy would surely make UR delver not the best deck, and then by banning it it would return to be the best deck, so this reasoning makes no sense

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and their deck is going to keep falling off the map b/c it has nothing to ensure lasting relevance.

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The deck is lasting relevant, do not talk about your dream world, talk about reality, and if possible provide data

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UR Delver is playing 1-card combos without any strategy behind it,

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As a self claimed guru on deckbuilding you should definitely know that this is untrue, but yet again you decided that you alone have agency on defining what strategy is i suppose

and this always ends by death to power creep. That doesn't mean that Goyf isn't a miserable effing concept that chokes out most of the deckbuilding diversity in the format - it's just that the entire history of legacy dictates it won't ever be banned.

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When it comes to the win percentages themselves, that's Ragavan the mana & first-player advantage exploit.

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Provide data to back up your claims, all i have is anectodal evidence (bringing me to the claim "i would prefer that murktide gets axed aswell") that both ragavan broken starts and murktide stealing games by being blatantly overpowered are the two main culprits

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When it comes to understand legacy on a strategic level, whether your deckbuilding or talking about balance, always always always look for mana advantage exploits and first-player advantage exploits - these are the bad actors

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I think you love to oversimplify, but things are actually much more complicated than that, and a card can be broken in a lot of different ways

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No matter how dumb a Goyf by any name is, it is something you can address with minimal adjustment.

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This is simply not true, the stronger the beatstick is, the harder you get punished by not having an answer immediatly, the entire strategy of ur delver is in fact to be efficient, by having basicly 2 tarmogoyf sautered togheter, with flying and in color, it's actually quite easyer to do so

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Oh jeez...like 20% of the format plays Saga and both Saga and Murktide die to Trophy...and BUG *has* to play Plow?

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Blue Zenith, which is BUGW has an 9% play rate, while BUG currently has a nice <0.3% play rate, so yeah it does

I have also playtested bug specifically and the deck is decently good, but in testing we mostly lost to Murktide Regent, despite having 3 trophy and 2 run afoul + uro and endurance

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Please don't ever claim that Murktide is keeping BUG out of the format. :tongue:

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This is exactly what my playtest has shown, you can blame me or my test partner (which has also much more tops than me im kinda sure)


Again and again you are demonstrating that you do not understand legacy on a strategic level. Netdecking well does not mean you get the big picture.

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So you really don't want to make comments like this if you didn't create TES or Lands or NicFit or DDFT etc...

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Are you joking?
You are supposed to create an archetype to understand how deckbuilding works?

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So you're not a deck designer and you don't really get this, but here we go anyways;

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Do you realize how stupid it sounds?
There are at best 10 players currently playing this game which actually developed a good deck (not tier 3 decks capable of making 2/3 5/0 on mtgo), everyone else should have no understanding about deckbuilding?

By this logic, you basicly cannot understand quantum mechanics unless you come up with your own theory?

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three things matter in legacy:
1-Goyf
2-total hand destruction [Counterbalance, Hymn/Snapcaster, Echo, and previously Grixis Delver's Probe/Therapy]
3-FIRE, meaning 1-card combos that generally beat both of the concepts listed above. Currently this is Uro and Ragavan.

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This is actually untrue, the most important thing in legacy is likely tempo, everything else comes later, leveraging tempo or being able to follow at a resonable rate is what makes a deck viable or not

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What you are noticing is that FIRE [Ragavan] + Goyf [Murktide] being in the same deck is horrifically bad for the format, and that combination has the stats to back it up.

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By standing still on your fallacy, you fail to realize that "dies to REB LOL" is so big of a buff that it makes the cards extremely different and makes the deck quite a lot better.
As an example, Tombstalker is basicly better than tarmogoyf, once you cast it, but the BB alone made it a worse card, murktide is power creeping tombstalker, because in almost any scenario it is actually just a better version which is functionally the same card, but it is blue, and being blue actually does what has never been done, giving the best beatstick (by a mile), to blue

it is as if blue gets swords to plowshares or thoughtseize, it is not a "minor buff over existing cards", it is a meta breaker, UR having access to the best beatstick is what helps the deck (alongside ragavan nuts) being the most efficient deck by a massive margin, by not having murktide the deck would change at it's core and be massively weaker

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Remember that anti-Goyf printings far outpace that of Goyf printings.

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Hystorically this has never worked as you intend, mostly because of tempo, but ok

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You really need to step back and get some perspective, even if your style of legacy is netdecking and being a successful player. Ban Murktide is not a valid opinion in the grand scheme of things. You can whine about Goyf and how it ruins the format - that's a valid sentiment, and you're not wrong...it just isn't getting banned.

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I really do not netdeck at all, but you like to think that you should either came up with an archetype or have no rights to it, yet again, statistical mechanics belongs to Boltzmann, damned netdeckers having fun with it :laugh:

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I'm going to pretend you didn't just try to make this about education level.

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Nah, it was not intented, and if you feel that way, it was not what i meant, i literally meant that i am spending 999999999 hours a week on my master, so i have much less tournaments played/tops, just recently i had a shot at playing again (completely missed oko/breach/cascade rework and such)

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I would encourage you to go play Pre-modern with just Tarmogoyf added to the format

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I do, i have sleeved gro a tog actually :laugh:

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The concept of Goyf is oppressive as hell, but holy smokes playing vs MurkGoyf with today's card pool is so much less horrific. You don't know how good we have it on the Goyf front; our problem is Ragavan.

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What i am stating is that by having to constantly check 1 drops (or you mostly lose), it is way too punishing to have an 8/8 flying for UU as the top of the curve, you do play the answers, but you have to STP a turn 1 ragavan, you have to REB an iteration, you also have to STP/REB murktide, and making multiple of them is actually super easy (and being UU helps immensly), and eventually, if you do not have answers, you take 8 per turn, unless you do have a flying blocker

@Ronald Deuce a lot of the problems with creature design can be boiled down to a chess example: when you remove any downside from dudes and print CA on them (particularly at sub-Pyknite costs), it's basically like letting someone take two moves in chess before the opponent has a chance to make a counterplay. Such design is inherently uninteractive, and honestly we're going to see Torpor Orb printed on a land sooner rather than later - I mean this is like the level you need to drop to, to create real counterplay.

WotC needs to wake up and realize that what makes fair magic work is playing a flavorful, diversity-enabling card and then passing the turn to give the opponent a chance to do something about it. Unfortunately they took the constant mana requirement off Jeyemdae Tome (PWs), so all these clowns do is hide behind spot removal and cards resembling Snapcaster before slamming their JTMS-equivalent...so we're all left in this weird design space. At the end of the day in legacy, you just have to be happy that your hand isn't getting blasted to oblivion by Counterbalance and Hymn/Snapcaster and Probe/Therapy and Echo on a regular basis. When the FIRE is controlled and people can still have a hand that isn't destroyed (so like Uro legal, but not cards like Wrenn/Oko/Ragavan), legacy is still a pretty good format.
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As someone who loved how DTT OmniTell and Breach choked fair non-blue creature-feature decks out of the format, this stuff is unhealthy. I also particularly love watching discard-heavy fair decks getting dumpstered by Thassa of any flavor, but again this isn't exactly healthy. Likewise, I would love any meta created by unbanning garbage like Flash - for me these metas are the most fun time in legacy ever...but like definitely not healthy. The reason they're so much fun is people don't get to hide behind Goyf or total hand destruction or FIRE; but unfortunately the cost of these metas is that people don't get any room to play anything fair and non-blue.

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As i told you those are not all of my finishes, after that event i actually got 3 more tournament wins with doomsday and i got a top8 in a showcase on mtgo, still playing doomsday and playing a list that i specifically developed, also, if you claim to have created sagavan, give reasoning and proof

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https://www.mtgthesource.com/forums/...e-Fist/page233 5/29 is when the list was completed. DRC was spoiled on 5/28 and recognized instantly. Read into page 235 of the thread. The set was released on 6/18/21.

https://www.reddit.com/r/MTGLegacy/c...allenge_61921/ This is from 6/19/21. This is the first UWR Ragavan (aside from Ark4n's two dry-run leagues directly before the challenge)

https://www.mtgthesource.com/forums/...ons-2-Previews Your reference on Urza's Saga.
https://www.mtgthesource.com/forums/...reviews/page10 Your reference on Dress Down.
Couldn't find where in the spoiler thread DRC was first discussed, maybe that one was on reddit. Either way that one got incorporated by me within seconds of the spoiler being read.

Enjoy this moment, it's not very often you get to learn exactly where and who the list you netdeck'd comes from.

Edit: the 13 minute call to Ark4n was made on 6/17/21 through discord, with instructions about the ramifications of changing DRC to Ragavan. Details about Ark4n's co-authoring of UWR Ragavan is what you can find on pg. 235 of the Dreadstill thread, as well as a synopsis of most of what was discussed on our call. This joint venture belongs to Ark4n and I, and us alone.

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https://www.mtgthesource.com/forums/...e-Fist/page233 5/29 is when the list was completed. DRC was spoiled on 5/28 and recognized instantly. Read into page 235 of the thread. The set was released on 6/18/21.

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4x Tarn
4x Vista
5x Island
1x Volc
1x Mountain
2x Saga
3x Wasteland

3x DRC
2x Lavaman
3x Nought
1x TNN

4x Bstorm
4x FoW
4x Daze
4x Bolt
3x Stifle
2x Spikefield Hazard

4x Standstill
2x Shark'nado
2x Dress Down
2x Scroll

This?
This is a bad iteration of a bad deck, stiflenought is a tier 3 which has nothing to do with sagavan

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https://www.reddit.com/r/MTGLegacy/c...allenge_61921/ This is from 6/19/21. This is the first UWR Ragavan (aside from Ark4n's two dry-run leagues directly before the challenge)

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Which does not prove that you have done anything

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https://www.mtgthesource.com/forums/...ons-2-Previews Your reference on Urza's Saga.

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"Just so we're all on the same page, Urza's Saga is a manland for Dreadstill. Also you all are so effing lucky it can't wish out a Portable Hole."

This?
You are talking about a tier 3 deck, which has nothing to do at all with sagavan, to give context, people put 1 dreadnought in sagavan for memeing, and it is actually horrible, what is not horrible is murktide on the other hand

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https://www.mtgthesource.com/forums/...reviews/page10 Your reference on Dress Down.

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What does this mean?
Dress down as a dreadnought enabler has nothing to do with sagavan, maybe recognize dress down as urza saga hate would have, you are yet again talking about your tier 3 pet deck, which is fine, but pointless

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Enjoy this moment, it's not very often you get to learn exactly where and who the list you netdeck'd comes from.

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I know it's hard to read, but i have not netdecked, I came from a pause, asked what deck i could borrow which was a bit spicy and i got sagavan offered, then i wrongly decided to add DRC, dreadnought (which was indeed horrible) and to remove regents

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This joint venture belongs to Ark4n and I, and us alone.

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All I see is an attempt to include op cards in your outdated pet deck, the core of your deck is dreadnought, which is a bad deck and is the reason why you tunnel into "non-trample bruh", so i keep my statement of "Self proclaimed guru"

Btw, what i can see on the page you suggest is:

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Ark4n asked for my Dreadstill list and we talked about the issues with Ragavan on turn 1 -> Standstill on turn 2 -> your opponent just taps Karakas and you're screwed. This is why I use DRC in UR Dreadstill; that, and the 1-card delirium combo of Saga find Nought. The issue with Ragavan is that if it isn't able to attack, you suddenly need to fix the problem that makes it so you can't attack. Blue + Red is a really poor set of colors when it comes to being able to fix "Ragavan can't attack" problems; Daze doesn't always work and neither does Bolt.

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You missing that the best deck in the format will be exactly the "poor set of colors when it comes to being able to fix "Ragavan can't attack" problems" deck

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Ragavan is ideal for a white splash as you're technically able to cast Prismatic Ending for up to 5 colors

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Again missing the best deck in the format and thinking that ending for 5 is a somewhat relevant play

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On *enemy* DRC [Dragon Rage Chan], I don't think going to be the most viable of cards. They start sabotaging their Delver flips with Bauble, and I think it's a spiral they can't break out of. It takes very little from enemy decks to keep that card down at 1/1 status, and the DRC decks aren't going to be able to get delirium online quickly & reliably.

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Again missing the best deck in the format and thinking DRC is unplayable in UR delver


You failed to impress me with your proofs, all I see is recognize straight upgrades for your pet deck and trying to implement them, alongside terribad deckbuilding choices which had to be removed to make a non tier 3 deck

Dude, take your beating. You played Ark4n and my deck, and put it up as your only legacy finish during the time of Murktide being legal to come here and tell me I don't know anything about card evaluation.
-Then you brought up your masters degree...
-Then you decided to say I didn't design that deck...
-Then you got the lightning fast dates, and suddenly I'm making all this up despite all the timestamps to the contrary...

Enough with your foaming at the mouth over Dreadnought, your turn to offer up something real: who made UWR Ragavan before we did?
https://www.reddit.com/r/MTGLegacy/c...e_lists_61921/ show me.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MTGLegacy/c...e_lists_61221/ show me.
Yeah I guess that TNN and Lavamancer and Dreadnought and Stifle and Standstill all got there by accident...unreal dude.
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The point of linking the other cards is so that you get a feel for how quickly I process and incorporate cards that aren't even in print. You are not expected to understand my Standstill consistency engine, because you play xerox when on blue. You haven't been waiting years checking every spoiled card for a way to get 3x Factory to 2x manland and go up a basic - and you don't understand the significance. You're dazzled by what Saga says and Ponder'ing into it - you don't understand it's the extra basic that's the payoff. Just as with Murktide, you don't understand the concept.

All of your conventional experience in legacy about how busted Saga is, it doesn't scratch the surface of what the architect of a totally different consistency engine understands about the card. You have to wait for stats and other people's decklists to tell you DRC is a better card than Delver, or you actually have to figure this out by playtesting. You don't seem to understand that I play turn 1 DRC and then I play turn 2 Standstill and get the option to mill towards a land drop, and you don't understand that Saga wishing up a suicide Dreadnought is 1 card delirium - even under a Standstill. I don't need to play a single test game to know how all the pieces fit, all of this is knowable with theory alone - and it's a sequence whose pieces all decrease mana variance.

You only know how to fixate on stand-alone power of a card, and that makes you degrees of magnitude slower than me at card and concept appraisal particularly when these cards are printed for my decks and not-xerox consistency engine. This took Ark4n and me from 6/17/21 to 6/19/21 to go from Dreadstill to trolling the format with the Ragavan edit.

Since you seem to be so fixated on Portable Hole, this is in reference to UW Dreadstill where I was looking for over a year to get rid of Spell Snare. Saga doesn't work well with UW, but if Saga could have tutored up a card whose outcome would be similar enough to the end effect of Spell Snare, it would have gotten more serious consideration. Note also that this is before Prismatic Ending was spoiled, which is a card that does basically everything Spell Snare does, just better. It should begin to make sense that when I talk about the only good maindeck mana-requiring counterspells in legacy being Drown or a high variance maindeck Blast, that I add Prismatic Ending to this group. It doesn't really matter if someone resolves a Library or Vial or Chalice for instance if you just murder it before they untap; it's functionally identical to countering it.
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Back to MurkGoyf - go play Premodern and put Tarmogoyf in that format. Then come back here and tell me about how oppressive MurkGoyf is.

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You played Ark4n and my deck,

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Im asking for proof and i get janky dradstill lists in response

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and put it up as your only legacy finish during the time of Murktide being legal

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I told you i have more tops, not all of them are on TC Decks and some are actually on MTGO, do I have to link all of them?
https://i.ibb.co/Mn16dRr/wedidit.png

This is the easiest i could find, do i have to dig deeper?

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to come here and tell me I don't know anything about card evaluation.

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It's not my fault if you wish to keep talking as this enlightned master at deck building while providing nothing relavant to back your claims, I am not the only one telling you that this whole murktide = goyf debacle is simply wrong

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-Then you brought up your masters degree...

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As i told you, my goal was not to brag at all, if you feel offended, i can't really do much about it, at least i did not invented quantum field theory so i probably am just a netdecker

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-Then you decided to say I didn't design that deck...

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I asked for proof, for example a top finish you made, or a post in which you specifically come up with sagavan and not dreadstill with 3 DRC

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Enough with your foaming at the mouth over Dreadnought,

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There is nothing wrong playing and loving a tier 3 deck, i did the same for ages and also brew my lists (impossible i guess), and i think its one of the coolest things about legacy actually

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your turn to offer up something real: who made UWR Ragavan before we did?
https://www.reddit.com/r/MTGLegacy/c...e_lists_61921/ show me.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MTGLegacy/c...e_lists_61221/ show me.
Yeah I guess that TNN and Lavamancer and Dreadnought and Stifle and Standstill all got there by accident...unreal dude.

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Would you mind sharing your MTGO or linking me directly results you got please

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The point of linking the other cards is so that you get a feel for how quickly I process and incorporate cards that aren't even in print. You are not expected to understand my Standstill consistency engine,

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If the engine it's good i should expect to have plenty of results to back it up, so please link them to me (by results i do not count some 5/0 on leagues, you can clearly get there with any non tier 5 deck as long as you play enough)

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because you play xerox when on blue.

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Not doing so literally means "tell me I don't know anything about card evaluation.", exactly

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You haven't been waiting years checking every spoiled card for a way to get 3x Factory to 2x manland and go up a basic - and you don't understand the significance.

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Exactly as i told you, tuning you own pet deck, i actually know how to do so quite well, likely better then you, but do not brag about this ancestraly knowledge on how legacy works

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You're dazzled by what Saga says and Ponder'ing into it - you don't understand it's the extra basic that's the payoff. Just as with Murktide, you don't understand the concept.

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I literally played sagavan because it was what i could borrow and get into a 9 turns event with literally no games played prior, still made i decent run, and i do not claim to be the godsent builder which feels smart cutting ponder from it's deck

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All of your conventional experience in legacy about how busted Saga is,

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I had the decency to show you what my legacy experience is, would you mind doing the same and show me your finishes

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it doesn't scratch the surface of what the architect of a totally different consistency engine understands about the card.

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Show me the results you got with this consistency engine, to me it seems hella bad, so i would like to be proven wrong

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You have to wait for stats and other people's decklists to tell you DRC is a better card than Delver, or you actually have to figure this out by playtesting.

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You literally said that DRC was no good in delver because of Delver of secrets,

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On *enemy* DRC [Dragon Rage Chan], I don't think going to be the most viable of cards. They start sabotaging their Delver flips with Bauble, and I think it's a spiral they can't break out of. It takes very little from enemy decks to keep that card down at 1/1 status, and the DRC decks aren't going to be able to get delirium online quickly & reliably.

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This is your quote, so yeah, quit the BS

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You don't seem to understand that I play turn 1 DRC and then I play turn 2 Standstill and get the option to mill towards a land drop,

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This concept is insanely hard to grasp, truly unbelievable insigt

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and you don't understand that Saga wishing up a suicide Dreadnought is 1 card delirium - even under a Standstill.

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Ofc i do?
I can read man

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I don't need to play a single test game to know how all the pieces fit, all of this is knowable with theory alone

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And still the list you proposed was quite bad and im still waiting for you to provide actual results gotten with it

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Since you seem to be so fixated on Portable Hole,

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Nah, i have nothing on portable hole, i was just pointing out that the post you gave me talks about saga in dreadstill, and that any decent sagavan list is not on dreadnought, but is on murktide

So in a nutshell, if you claim to be this divine player which understands clearly how things work while the other mere mortals do not, provide evidence on what you have done with your godsend powers

https://c.tenor.com/mUzD8XHmgpEAAAAC...ime-movie.gif4

Can we derail this thread even more?

Discussions about quantum physics would be less grade schooly.

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Originally Posted by Noctalor

I told you i have more tops, not all of them are on TC Decks and some are actually on MTGO, do I have to link all of them?
https://i.ibb.co/Mn16dRr/wedidit.png

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Consider is interesting.

I have a PhD. It doesn't stop some posters from arguing that their intuitions about things directly in my areas of research specialization trump the facts I give them. Go figure.

The entirely unwarranted interpersonal conflict aside, I tend to find that Fox's and FTW's analyses of the structure of Legacy are pretty incisive.

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Originally Posted by FTW

Depends on what you mean by "newly printed". If just MH2 or 2020 cards, then of course. Nonblue aggro died years ago. I'm an old player and still consider the Delver era "new"-ish. Since that's around when aggro went obsolete and blue tempo took off, those are the blue creatures I was talking about (Delver, TNN, Snapcaster, Strix). That's when WOTC really started power-creeping blue creatures over nonblue, giving blue both superior aggro and superior anti-aggro. The recent creatures are just a continuation of that trend (Sprite Dragon, Oko, Uro, Ice-Fang, DRC, Murktide). Yes, blue can still splash off-color cards, but it hurts even more when so many of these cards were printed in blue.

By "nonblue" I mean something that can't be played effectively in blue decks (Tarmogoyf was long considered a blue card). Cards like my above brews or Eidolon of the Great Revel. Creatures designed to be strong in nonblue but that have no business in a blue deck. Wild Nacatl as a concept was great design for that. But there's been a dearth of similar cards keeping up with the format's power creep.

This of course isn't solved by bans, nor did I advocate for that. It's an issue of many years of aggro failing to get adequate tools to keep up with the format's power creep. I just want to see those tools printed to balance the colors. Fireflux Stompy is an exception, because it's been a power creep of cards printed at 3-4 CMC (does not threaten Modern and Standard since they cannot accelerate like Legacy can). With the way Wizards has been curating Modern and Standard, they favor midrange and discourage decks that can win too quickly, so they avoid printing creeped aggro creatures at 1-2 cmc (and when they do, they often use keywords like Prowess, Surveil or Delve that make them even stronger in blue cantrip decks). Unless they print a Legacy Masters, there's not really a set where the needed cards would get printed, because creatures like that would be too strong in Modern or Standard.

This missing piece of the meta is/was one of blue's natural police. So when blue gets OP, instead of just banning every new blue tool, maybe they just need to print new tools for its predators...

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I've played off an on since the late 90s but when I say new I mean starting with MH1.

Personally, I think Legacy Horizons would be heinous. Modern Horizons is already bad enough. These horizons sets are a (not very) covert way to turn nonrotating formats into rotating formats.

The Rock used to be a nice predator to fair blue. But now it sucks. Maybe they should focus on adding new tools to that color combo. Unfortunately, this may be an irreparable problem given their recent penchant to staple cantrips / other value onto every damn card. It's pretty hard to go 1-for-1 with discard and removal when they just keep drawing more gas as a side effect to playing their cards.

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Originally Posted by Fox

@Ronald Deuce a lot of the problems with creature design can be boiled down to a chess example: when you remove any downside from dudes and print CA on them (particularly at sub-Pyknite costs), it's basically like letting someone take two moves in chess before the opponent has a chance to make a counterplay. Such design is inherently uninteractive, and honestly we're going to see Torpor Orb printed on a land sooner rather than later - I mean this is like the level you need to drop to, to create real counterplay.

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I wonder how much of this is due to them deciding that its not fun when both players run out of resources so lets make an obscene number of cards that instantly replace themselves.

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Originally Posted by Purple Blood

I wonder how much of this is due to them deciding that its not fun when both players run out of resources so lets make an obscene number of cards that instantly replace themselves.

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I think this is survivorship bias talking.