As far as draw spells are concerned, does Frantic Search really break the format harder than Brainstorm?
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As far as draw spells are concerned, does Frantic Search really break the format harder than Brainstorm?
Definitely not. I cannot understand why it's still on the list. It does nothing. So High tide would be better? Reanimator would get Careful Study that's extra vulnerable to Daze, FLusterstorm and Spell Pierce? Madness would be a Tier2 deck? Where's the trouble?Quote:
Originally Posted by Barook
Apples and Oranges? It's pointless to try drawing parallels here, because there is no one. It's totally out of context.Quote:
Originally Posted by Barook
Edit:
Reanimator gets careful Study 5-8, High Tide /12-post get a Ritual + card-selection spellQuote:
Originally Posted by Bed Decks Palyer
Question is whether or not Frantic Search is more powerful than Brainstorm, considering one is on the Banned List while the other is not.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemnear
Any matching criteria for "powerful" in regards to these two cards? You can compare Ad Nauseam to Griselbrand to Bargain to discuss why one is banned and the other is not. The same applies to Tinker vs. Natural Order or Gaea's Cradle vs. Tolarian Academy or Intuition vs Gifts Ungiven in Vintage.Quote:
Originally Posted by Barook
The question to ask in regards to unbannings is: "Would the unbanning of this card make the format more diverse and enjoyable?" If the answer is "no" or "potentially the opposite", WotC does not give a fuck.
You can expect something random coming off the list if they decide to swing the banhammer on the Delver + TC circlejerk, for the sake of keeping the ban-list small, so they can pat their own shoulders for "balancing the format without a Giant banlist"
I'm glad to see some consensus on the power level of the blue shell.
I do find it laughable that people'd consider unbanning Mind's Desire. That card isn't funny in an environment with LEDs. You can pretty much just slide in into the ANT-shell, replacing Ad Nauseam. It Ad Nauseams without the lifeloss AND lets you cast whatever you draw while also combo-ing with PiF. OMG, lol. I used to play it when it was Extended-legal, but even there I could pull of T2 kills when having the utter nuts. Just chain Mind's Desires & Sins of the Pasts FTW. Now let's try that in a format that lets you run LED & buddies.
If you ban Force of Will then people start playing fast mana again in things other than combo. Plays like Dark Ritual - Dark Ritual big whomping creature come back into play. Plays like Dark Ritual - Chalice of the Void at 1 or Trinisphere come back into play. As Force of Will leaves the format Dark Ritual re-enters and we're back to black as something other than a splash color for a few power cards.Quote:
Originally Posted by Gheizen64
Blue doesn't become just a splash color for a few powerful cards in that situation either. It maintains Threshold, Stifle, Daze with Treasure Cruise to refill. Merfolk is still a big list with Cursecatcher and Chalice as options to suppress combo. Blue-based control might even re-emerge from the shadows that blue aggro control creates.
The DTB list is no longer 4 or 5 blue lists with a couple of non-blue shells. Now it's 4 or 5 non-blue lists with a couple of blue shells. That's a much more healthy meta that allows the majesty of Magic to re-appear after a long absence. Legacy has been broken since at least 2010. That's when the blue shell became the best shell with the banning of Survival of the Fittest and we've had bland sameness at the top ever since.
Isn't Force of will a necessary evil to counter decks like belcher?
From my point of view, Force of will is a fine card because it's Card disadvantage.
The blue shell itself is too powerfull, and brainstorm with the possibilities it offers (Unmulliganing, hiding card from discard... etc...) is the usual suspect of the blue shell.
There are safer cards to unban, but I'm not sure what makes you think that Mind's Desire would work as a drop-in replacement for Ad Nauseam.Quote:
Originally Posted by Echelon
Desire is strong, but not that much stronger than cards which are already available. Typically when Mind's Desire is likely to win, so is tutoring for Tendrils of Agony.
You are the only one prefering to cast a creature, a Chalice or a Trinisphere rather than Ad Nauseam after double Dark Ritual -.-Quote:
Originally Posted by FoolofaTook
How many Ad Nauseum's does an ANT list have?Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemnear
Using Dark Ritual to support fast mana in lists that won't win the game right away is what has gone missing in the meta since the blue shell began to dominate and define what everybody else could do.
The right way to look at it is that Force of Will and the blue shell has destroyed combo and fast mana aggro. That's something we can point at with no fear of contradiction. Combo is about 5% of the metagame right now after Elves is taken out of the picture. Fast mana aggro even less than that.
Everybody talks about how combo will absolutely dominate and destroy the meta if Force of Will is removed. Why don't we all talk about how having Force of Will in the meta has destroyed countless other archetypes over the years?
I can't believe people are actually arguing for a force of will ban. Do you people play legacy or vintage?
Force of Will has not "destroyed" combo. Combo is alive and healthy in various forms, and Force of Will acts as an "oh shit" to keep combo in check. If there is anything "dead" about combo, it is only through lack of interest. With your comment about combo only representing 5% of the meta without Elves, I assume you're talking about something like ANT only remaining and not considering things like Show and Tell and Dredge and Reanimator as combo. They would of course represent a much smaller percentage considering Elves's performance, but it wouldn't really be anything that's not directly comparable to how control would look without Miracles or aggro without UR Delver. Long live midrange.Quote:
Originally Posted by FoolofaTook
Also, I'm not sure how you mean your comment about fast mana aggro (fucking really?) being dead because of Force of Will. If you mean players shifted from junky unreliable shells with few reasonable global answers to decks that were capable of playing Force of Will, you hit the nail on the head. If you mean to imply that aggro actually gives a fuck about playing against Force of Will, you're very incorrect.
Theonly reason I don't like force now is because the blue decks can overcome the card disadvantage with Cruise now. Before, force of will was a bad bad card.
I think that cards like Force of Will that punish game plans which heavily invest in a single spell are important to the diversity of the format, and that instead of banning it, it would be nice to see cards with a similar profile in other colors.Quote:
Originally Posted by FoolofaTook
A-greed. Force is fine. After 20 years of cards, fair decks have way too much threat density and value to make a Force backbreaking to their plan. Turning your whatever spell into a Hymn to Tourach, then you just cast some other bomb, is fine. Combo decks have to play around it but that's the price of going all-in on a powerful instant-win plan. I know it's just as omnipresent as Brainstorm but its actual utility is sorely limited (and Brainstorm makes it better at times where it would be a dead card).Quote:
Originally Posted by rufus
This is the real issue with the metagame at this time. One argument I've heard for keeping BS in the format is that decks like Food Chain or Aluren need it to work. That's great, but it's not like you show up at a tournament and you just get overrun by Food Chain decks because so many people love it. There are more powerful combos, there are more powerful creature decks, and there is really no other reason other than pure love of the game why you would play a second-tier deck when you have all the staples for the most powerful decks.Quote:
Originally Posted by Bed Decks Palyer
Meanwhile, if you lack those staples or simply don't want to spend $40 and your whole Sunday playing Delver mirrors, your deck which may be full of very powerful cards in a vacuum simply can't compete with the raw efficiency of the blue tempo shell. So what do you do? You try to cut off their advantage. That means instead of playing more powerful cards, you are stuck playing lame hatebears that just make your deck some sort of inferior D&T. Go take a look in the Rock, Jund, DGA, Maverick threads. We're basically discussing which hatebears are maindeckable and how cool cards like Hymn or Liliana are invalidated by the card advantage and selection of the blue shell. Sure, that includes some discussion of style points cards like Chains, but if you play Chains yourself, you end up policing your own fun as well. Or you just cave and play blue yourself and we have mirror after mirror of the same counterburn decks. It's making the format stale.
Brainstorm is warping the format around it. You play a Brainstorm deck, you play one of three decks like Elves, Burn, or Dredge that can sort of ignore Brainstorm, or you overload your deck with Brainstorm hate like D&T, or you lose. That's the simple fact.
The talk of banning FoW seems to be a complicit, "If we can't ban BS because reasons, we'll pick off a known associate." Not the best remedy, but something more than nothing.Quote:
Originally Posted by Megadeus
Except a ban of force would actually hurt the format rather than help it. As much as you can scream about there being a multitude of free counters (foil, MB Trap, and such) they are completely terrible and if you are playing them, you probably are losing.Quote:
Originally Posted by ahg113
I see Tezz, 12-Post, Goblins, Jund, Imperial Painter, Maverick, Slivers, Dragon Stompy, Meerfolk, Junk, Nic Fit, Foodchain, Lands.dec and Oops! All Spells! with top 8 Performances within the last two months.Quote:
Originally Posted by maharis
In a meta ruled by the blue shell and FoW the logical answer for aggro lists is to have many redundant threats that take FoW and basically say "fine 2-for-1 yourself and I'll put out another threat next turn and make you pay for it". The alternate approach of trying to do something spectacularly aggro on turn 1 just doesn't pay when 40% of the time the opponent is just going to FoW your end result and another 40% of the time the threat will be removed afterwards.Quote:
Originally Posted by iamajellydonut
Malakir Bloodwitch would be an interesting card to play in this meta were it not for Force of Will. It would be the logical successor to the Juzam Djinn lists that also went out of favor at exactly the point that Force of Will emerged as a staple.
And some people live to be 90 while smoking a pack a day. What is your point?Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemnear
I think his point is that none of those decks are elves, burn, dredge, or DnT, as the previous poster attested. the argument that these results are flukes feels pretty sketchy when Lem listed over a dozen examples...Quote:
Originally Posted by testing32
The problem with this approach is that Magic is not Chess and forcing players to play with a very limited defined set of spells doesn't change that fact. There's still a luck element involved and when you herd people towards reducing that luck element you make the game much blander than it ought to be. That's what the blue shell does.Quote:
Originally Posted by rufus
There are dozens of viable archetypes that play off in a rock-paper-scissors format in which several lists are not all of rock-paper and scissors. That's what the best Delver lists are now. They're rock-paper-scissors all wrapped up in one. Their weaknesses only express themselves against other Delver lists and a few tier 1 non-Delver lists. That's because all of those lists are also rock-paper-scissors but skewed a bit off of the Delver list in question.
We'd be much better off back in the 2007 paradigm where there was a rock-paper-scissors list in Landstill but it could be beaten by several other things that were just faster than it or came at it from a tough angle. We'd be better off in the 2009 paradigm where there was a rock-paper-scissors list in Threshold CounterTop but it could be beat by very threat dense mid-range lists once they'd flipped it and it still had issues against things like Goblins.
What we have now is a much wider range of rock-paper-scissors lists but almost all of them are focused on the blue shell and as a group they heavily suppress the other archetypes that would prey on any one of them but can't match up well against the field of them.
That's just bad for Magic. It's not Chess. It's Magic.
http://tcdecks.net/metagame.php?form...&fecha=2014-10Quote:
Originally Posted by wonderPreaux
68% of the decks are Brainstorm decks.
12% of the decks are Dredge, Burn, Elves, or D&T.
About 20 other archetypes are represented in the other 10%.
You were .3% likely to top an event with The Rock in October. You were 2.5% likely to do so with Dredge. That is 8 times more likely. You are 6.8 times more likely to top an event with a random Brainstorm deck than you are with a random non-Brainstorm, non-Elves/D&T/Burn/Dredge deck.
That is the difference between outliers and real data.
Maybe you should learn to interpret numbers. You are NOT more likely to Top 8 just because of playing Brainstorm based on that numbers. In fact, all these numbers have absolutely ZERO effect on you being able to top 8 an event.Quote:
Originally Posted by maharis
It's plain obvious that if 68% of the field play Brainstorm, the Chance that you see Brainstorm in a Top 8 is more likely than Golgari Gravetroll which is in only 2,5% of decks.
Edit: if more than 30% of decks in Top 8s don't run Brainstorm, I would step back from making bold statements a la "Play Brainstorm or loose"
Yes, however if 68% of the field play Brainstorm then you have a meta warped by Brainstorm so it doesn't matter that they don't get into the top 8 at higher percentages than their play level. They certainly do suppress other lists that would otherwise be a bigger part of the field and likely cut into the dominance of Brainstorm lists in the top 8.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemnear
It would be helpful if you start realizing that it's not Brainstorm itself which wins games, warps the metagame or offends some players, but the whole shell, which is tuned to create a redundancy, which other colors can't mimic.Quote:
Originally Posted by FoolofaTook
It doesn't matter if you chop Brainstorm, if Preordain could replace it in most lists. All you do is hurting decks which need to shuffle dead pieces away, which is most likely if you play combo.
What is the reason to play a deck without Brainstorm if 68% of top decks do, though? How is that not format-warping? Cards entering the format are judged by how well they interact with Brainstorm.
I highly suggest you test a Delver deck with 4 Preordain instead of 4 Brainstorm. It is far less consistent against fair decks, but it retains the exact same blue count and ability to dig for Force of Will in matchups where that is relevant (since your consistent argument against banning Brainstorm is that we would be overrun with glass-cannon combos).
Both Preordain and Brainstorm dig you three cards from the top of your library to find Force when the only thing that matters is that you have it in your hand. The only slight differences are the cases where you do not have a blue card besides the cantrip itself in your hand or if you are trying to do it at instant speed for some reason.
What you can't do with Preordain is replace the land and Spell Pierce in your hand with a Goyf and a removal spell when you are facing down an army of attackers. You still have to hold the dead cards and choose between a blocker or removal that turn.
If everyone would Judge cards simply because how well they play with Brainstorm, Punishing Fire and 12-Post would never have seen the Light of Day as engines. Thanks god, not everyone is that narrow minded.Quote:
Originally Posted by maharis
You know that being less consistent overall in terms of Delver is a big difference to being unplayable if we talk about decks like S&T/Reanimator/etc.? In regards to glas-Cannon combo: The talk was primary about banning FoW. On a secondary Position within that topic, Glas-Cannon combo would increase as a result of traditional, resistant combo like S&T suffering. I doubt the overall number of combo decks would increase and I never said we would be "overrun" because of a Brainstorm-Ban.
It's pointless to throw in examples of current deckdesign which grounds on "Brainstorm can switch cards out if neccessary" and just switch Brainstorm with Preordain. I suspect, people would credit the fact that they can't shuffle dead cards away anymore with their deckbuilding and remove most of the conditional stuff we run today, especially if the whole metagame is changing and makes certain cards unnecessary for example. The idea that people switch 4 cards out and call it a day is stupid.
Then there are lots of narrow-minded people out there in the lgs/scg scene, as I see far more DelverHerpGo decks than anything from above list. Which brings me back to the fact that I should honestly build the RUG PFire Vexing Sphinx Counterbalance deck...Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemnear
Honestly, this is the biggest issue with statistical analysis based on results - we don't get to tie an 'Expected to perform' value to a result. If you have a 100 person tournament, and 50 people play brainstorm, 25 people play Elves, 24 people play Storm, and 1 person plays Dredge, you should expect to see the top 8 have 4 Brainstorm, 2 Elves, and 2 Storm. If that Dredge player makes the Top 8 (and especially if they win) then the deck significantly over-performed.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemnear
Most of the analysis here seems to be done regardless of the composition of the field, and seems to discount a very crucial factor: 40-60% of the attendance at Legacy events either enjoy or choose to cast Brainstorm. The argument to ban Brainstorm has nothing to do with your individual likelihood to win a given tournament by playing or not playing a certain card, and everything to do with the perception that a vocal minority of active players seem to hold: That banning Brainstorm would somehow make Legacy "Better." And yet, we are sitting a week out from the largest Legacy GP in NA, and what could very well be the largest Legacy GP ever.
And guess what? It will likely be won by a deck playing Brainstorm. And that's OK.
Without significance testing, those percentages don't say a whole lot. Especially for distinguishing rogue decks' lucky top 8's and valid new contestants of the meta, proper analysis should be conducted. Does anyone know if it's possible to obtain / crawl detailed data from MTGO? Offline magic is pretty much useless for proper analysis.
If I had the data I'd use discriminant analysis or multinomial logit to predict upcoming meta games at the tournament / city level. You could even use time series analysis to fine tune choice modeling using assumptions that if player X plays sneak and show the last Y times, the odds that Sneak and Show is his only deck Z increases with some arbitrary amount.
That means you'd get a model that, over time, quiet literally maps all players / DCI numbers and the decks they own / deck choice evolution.
You could cluster (non-hierarchical clustering & k-means) DCI numbers using geographic distance / willingness to travel and identify which players will be most likely to attend, and which ones will be too far away from the tournament. You could then moderate that willingness to travel using tournament size (Bazaar of Moxen / Ovinogeddon) and event coverage (Chance of Camera time @ SCG / WOTC tournament).
and this is why
http://archive.wizards.com/dci/judge...esult_slip.jpg
sucks
edit:
This is also why Hearthstone, in the end, will be the more successful game. Analysis > Intuition
It's almost impossible to get a full metagame report from any Legacy tournament, so your 40%-60% number isn't tied to anything at all other than your feeling. Of course, both values fall under the 68% actual reported penetration of the card in top 8s, which means that if it is as low as 40%-60% at an average tournament, then Brainstorm decks do outperform their expected results, sometimes significantly so. In fact, I would posit that the Elves, D&T, Burn, Dredge decks are outperforming their expected results because so much of the field is on a Brainstorm deck. Which goes back to what I said: You play Brainstorm, or you play one of a few non-Brainstorm meta-stalking decks, or you likely lose.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ellomdian
It's great that a lot of people like playing legacy. I am one of them. I'm not ranting about Brainstorm in new posts or anything, I'm doing it in the thread that's for ban list discussion specifically. And in this thread when people suggest that the currently most broken card in all of Legacy is a 1/1 that's a conditional 3/2 with no innate protection from removal... well, that just doesn't seem right. Powerful, out of flavor, sure. But I can't take seriously the concept that a french vanilla creature is the most broken card in a format where the threshold for banning is a card like Oath of Druids or Yawgmoth's Bargain.
Many of the non-Brainstorm cards that are discussed ITT impact the top of the library: Delver, Terminus, SDT, Counterbalance, even Treasure Cruise to an extent. Controlling what you draw is one of the most powerful effects in the game. The fact is that Brainstorm's effect is so unique that it is often one of the only ways to influence the way these cards work is why it is so powerful. Cards like Sylvan Library, SDT or Ponder don't let you put cards from your hand back to the top of the library, and certainly not for one mana at instant speed.
While I understand that this unique and powerful effect is attractive to many players, the same could be said about a lot of unique and powerful effects currently on the banned list for being too powerful. All available data and the eye test indicate that this card is warping the metagame in that you are playing it, overtuning to fight it, or losing. Banning Brainstorm rather than Delver would be right in line with Wizards' history of banning enablers in Legacy instead of kill conditions. That is why Mystical Tutor, Windfall, and Mind's Desire are banned instead of Tendrils of Agony.
The intuition suggests that brainstorm is a problem card, but it MIGHT NOT be Brainstorm. Correlation is not causation. It could very well be that Force of Will or Lightning Bolt are the true culprits (FoW being a necessary evil to contain combo). As it stands, NO ONE knows how badly Brainstorm warps the meta in favor of blue decks because no one here has the empirical evidence with statistical rigor to prove that Brainstorm is the correct ban.
Inferring from the fact that Wizards doesn't even TEST for eternal, I DOUBT that they will have done anything more than look at mtgtop8.com for their ban decisions.
I think one key point in regards to Force of Will vs. Brainstorm that should be noted: Force of Will is unimpressive or even flat-out bad in some matchups. It's often sided out for a reason. How many people have ever sided out a Brainstorm in Legacy?
Basically, everybody is talking out of his ass here. Both camps, for and against Brainstorm, are grounded in anecdotal evidence, opinions and are equipped with weak empirical evidence. Top 8's mean nothing if you don't get the full meta breakdown. You guys aren't cardslingers, you're a bunch of tarot readers :)
That's a valid observation. I think that if you want to ban Brainstorm, you'd need to take into account the 'tenure' of the card (it's been getting top 8's since the Y2K bug), and compare that to other cards' tenure while looking at the composition of the meta for every tournament (e.g. proportion of brainstorm decks in total, how many top8). This way you can see which cards are 'flavors of the months' and which ones are true staples you cannot do without. I wanted to build a brainstorm quotient before, but since tournament organizers are terrible data collectors there's not much that I can do.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lord Seth
No data = no insights. Guess work is a terrible basis for ban-decisions.
If we ever want to progress the eternal format, tournament organizers must work to collect the data so that we can do proper analysis on them. This means more elaborate result slips (note play or draw), reporting of all FULL deck lists NOT just top 8's and standings in between EACH round; as well as more camera event coverage to add context to findings (e.g. player cheats on camera, mark as an outlier in following datasets; but also to gain a better understanding as a community of the development of matches / fundamental turns / key spells.).
Some of the most nonsensical bullshit I've ever heard on this forum. Sorry, but your Brainstorm quotient isn't even used by the DCI on any card nor will it ever be. They look at winning deck lists. Evidenced by every past banning.Quote:
Originally Posted by bruizar
Why? 'True Staple' isn't a ban criteria. It's up there with 'Pillar of the Format', 'Skill Intensive', 'Skill Tester', 'Go play modern'.Quote:
Originally Posted by bruizar