All B/R update speculation.

If they don't ban anything they're basically going to be saying that most of the cards we own that were Legacy playable as of approximately 1/1/12 are no longer playable. That'll be really depressing because it will mean that the printing of just a few cards took down a host of others that were in really interesting lists for a period of years.

I'm not talking Werebear, I'm talking Nimble Mongoose. I'm not talking Nevinyrral's Disk, I'm talking Pernicious Deed. I'm talking about Wrath of God, Supreme Verdict and Damnation. I'm talking about Sinkhole, Vindicate and Oblivion Ring. I'm talking about Crime // Punishment and Raven's Crime. I'm talking about Back to Basics and Bitterblossom. I'm talking about all manlands not named Mishra's Factory, Mutavault or (Bl)inkmoth Nexus. (Why do these guys get by when all the others don't? Because they activate for just :1: and the meta has now become too fast for slower manlands to matter.) I'm talking about any black spell that doesn't meld smoothly into the blue shell, and it's very possible that will include Jund staples like Liliana of the Veil and Dark Confidant as well.

Jund has become redder as the overall meta has become bluer, surprise, surprise...

People worried about losing Brainstorm need to understand that I've lost dozens of playable staples over the last 3 or 4 years to just a few blue prints and few cards that were grabbed by the blue shell. My playable Legacy collection has shrunk to a small fraction of what it was in 2011. I'm a brewer and it's of no interest at all to me to try to shoehorn whatever the next powerful cards are into some variant of the blue shell. That meta is like a pale copy of what we had before WotC went insane.

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Originally Posted by Barook

Its power depends on the cards it can fetch, and power level has increased alot in recent years, Gatecrash-Journey into Dicks era aside. The cards it can fetch on average have become alot more powerful.

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Fantastic, how this argument should apply to Brainstorm which lets you see your top 3, but isn't an argument if it comes to Survival which lets you search your whole library.

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Originally Posted by Barook

For the same reasons Brainstorm and Ponder were restricted in Vintage years ago, simply because the cards they could dig for were too powerful.

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There it is again! The stupid Vintage parallel, which sets Delver, SFM and Terminus in a line with broken shit like Necropotence, Mind's Desire, Balance, Ancestral Recall and Yawgmoths Will! Maybe we should ban DRS and Jace because they are banned in Modern as you obviously think that formats and bannings are somewhat connected!

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Originally Posted by Lemnear

Fantastic, how this argument should apply to Brainstorm which lets you see your top 3, but isn't an argument if it comes to Survival which lets you search your whole library.

There it is again! The stupid Vintage parallel, which sets Delver, SFM and Terminus in a line with broken shit like Necropotence, Mind's Desire, Balance, Ancestral Recall and Yawgmoths Will! Maybe we should ban DRS and Jace because they are banned in Modern as you obviously think that formats and bannings are somewhat connected!

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Who was talking about Survival? If it ever becomes unbanned, it would still need to be watched closely.

As for the Vintage parallel: Different format, different problems, different answers. Are you denying that the power level of Legacy hasn't picked up? Why not mentioning Griselbrand and its ilk when talking about power level? Why has the percentage of blue decks/Brainstorm increased from 50% in 2011 to 70% of what we have now?

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Originally Posted by Lemnear

And before that it was SFM + Batterskull ... and before that it was Survival+ Vengevine...

Jesus Christ, people should stop acting like Goblins, Zoo and shit were top decks just recently and blame the CURRENT printings. This isn't getting us anywhere ... sorry ... forgot in which thread I am



Terminus would be so "less oppressive" that people would simply switch them for SFM + TNN ... as mentioned 5 times in 3 weeks

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I agree. And TC, Brainstorm, etc would be less oppressive if people played REB or an equally broken draw engine like loam, or elves. Hell, or if people played a deck based on taxing people.

But alas, people want to play their pet decks, and then complain when they get shat on. They need to realize the meta changes and to be competitive, you need to adapt.

I love Goblins. I'd play it all the time if I could. Then I moved to Elves when Goblins became shit.

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Originally Posted by Sloshthedark

TC is idiotic, but please gimme "no changes" just to have a good laugh here :tongue:

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What I expect will happen is that TC will be banned both in Legacy and in Modern, and there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth and feigned shock. Then for years to come we will hear about how WotC caved in to the crybabies.

So, yeah, either way things will be funny.

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Originally Posted by AznSeal

I agree. And TC, Brainstorm, etc would be less oppressive if people played REB or an equally broken draw engine like loam, or elves. Hell, or if people played a deck based on taxing people.

But alas, people want to play their pet decks, and then complain when they get shat on. They need to realize the meta changes and to be competitive, you need to adapt.

I love Goblins. I'd play it all the time if I could. Then I moved to Elves when Goblins became shit.

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REB is actually a poor answer to Brainstorm in non-blue decks. It forces you to play reactive in decks that are generally proactive. It's good as an escape hatch for TNN, Show & Tell or Counterbalance (if you can resolve it), but even those cards have more fitting answers at the moment. It's not as easy as just jamming REB into your deck.

Loam is a fine draw engine in a fair meta, but is very soft to combo decks. Elves is a solved deck that is one printing away from obsolescence like any non-blue deck. D&T is a fine deck but you can clunk right out with it due to its complete lack of library maniuplation or selection other than SFM.

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Originally Posted by AznSeal

But alas, people want to play their pet decks, and then complain when they get shat on. They need to realize the meta changes and to be competitive, you need to adapt.

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Legacy is great, because any time you put something on the shelf for a while, odds are that you can pull it back down next year and either it's better because the environment has shifted or because new printings make it stronger. The problem is that people have an expectation that because they have invested so much time and $$$ into decks that the same 73 cards should work just as well, week in and week out, for years.

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Originally Posted by Lemnear

Fantastic, how this argument should apply to Brainstorm which lets you see your top 3, but isn't an argument if it comes to Survival which lets you search your whole libraryfor the cost of :1::g::g: and a creature card..

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ftfy.

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Originally Posted by Bed Decks Palyer

Bingo! Shit, why I never thought about something that clear?!
Now would you help me a bit with my new deck and fill the empty slots? So far I'm at:

4 blue feces
4 other blue feces
4 blue duals
4 other blue duals
4 BS card
4 Ponder card
4 TC card
4 FoW card

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that's 28 left for your creativity, more than enough...

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Nah, you need 4 more lands and then Preordains, everybody loves some Preordains. Now list the 20 remaining cards and name me the deck, that's what I call a challenge!

Pfft just because a specific line-up is strong and viable and a LOT of people jump on the band-wagon doesn't mean it's unbalanced. Choosing your cards & deck with regards to the metagame is... pretty much what games with any predictability on the metagame are about, and whether it's "not playing card X or combo Y because it's too slow [in the current metagame]" or "playing stifle because it's awesomely good against fetchlands", "playing blood moon because everybody tends to play non-basic lands" or the same for Chalice and others.

By the time that there are no means to fight a specific deck/card, that's when I would worry. Of course, I'm not the one to tell you guys what you should do. I don't have the feeling that Brainstorm, nor Treasure Cruise is overpowered - there are enough answers. There are just a lot of people who choose this route.

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Originally Posted by Daize

Pfft just because a specific line-up is strong and viable and a LOT of people jump on the band-wagon doesn't mean it's unbalanced. Choosing your cards & deck with regards to the metagame is... pretty much what games with any predictability on the metagame are about, and whether it's "not playing card X or combo Y because it's too slow [in the current metagame]" or "playing stifle because it's awesomely good against fetchlands", "playing blood moon because everybody tends to play non-basic lands" or the same for Chalice and others.

By the time that there are no means to fight a specific deck/card, that's when I would worry. Of course, I'm not the one to tell you guys what you should do. I don't have the feeling that Brainstorm, nor Treasure Cruise is overpowered - there are enough answers. There are just a lot of people who choose this route.

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My magic crystal ball says that Treasure Cruise will be banned in every format. Brainstorm on the other hand will stay.

Meh, that'd be sad. I rather hope that, totally flavourwise, one of the other "guilds" or whatever in the last set of Khans comes with some not-too-specific Delve hate, DRS style. That would be a lot more interesting than just a simple ban. Although personally that would hurt my Manaless style a lot :(.

Honestly, without access to stupidly efficient cantrips, Treasure Cruise is probably not broken.

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Originally Posted by Finn

Honestly, without access to stupidly efficient cantrips, Treasure Cruise is probably not broken.

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Replace that "probably" with "definitely." Its lack of presence in Standard shows that pretty well.

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Originally Posted by Finn

Ok, so basics here. I began with 3/4 of the decks are blue and feature the same card filtering mechanic as the primary engine of the deck. These include combo, control, and aggro decks.

Being able to augment the draw step with cantrips is NOT always better than other ways to design a deck or else every format would have our issues. The opportunity cost of that is mana spent, extra card in the graveyard, etc. Yet of all the thousands of different ways you could conceivably construct a magic deck, this particular method continues to occupy majority of top 8 spots. It was not always thus.

How is this hard to understand?

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Just wanna comment on this, though the quote is a couple of days old. Being to able to augment the draw steps with cantrips hasn't always been better, but Serum Visions, Ponder, and Preordain have not always been around. If anyone thinks BS/Index/Opt could somehow be compared to BS/Ponder/Preordain then they are delused. I think Magic was always moving towards this direction, and that in any eternal format, running a cantrip shell would make the best deck. Combo, control, and tempo all use it greatly, and if any other format had access to such good card selection they would use it. Since so many comparison are being drawn there is a reason all the cantrips were banned from Modern (though trying to draw any relatives from the Modern ban list is almost impossible. That thing is longer than a Cadillac). It's because unless you are doing something broken as hell (hah, yeah right, it's fucking Modern. Dream on!) like playing 12post the cantrip decks will probably make it to the top.

tl;dr= The best cantrips have come out in recent years. They blow older cantrips out of the water. It's Turbo Xerox all over. Only this time it's Turbo-Turbo-holyshitI'mgoingfast-Turbo-someoneslowmedownplease-Turbo-ohlookIfoundmyGoyf-Turbo Xerox.

Also, I see GSZ as the "new" Brainstorm. Don't really see green decks competing in the future unless they are main-decking 4 GSZ's. I feel like another tutor is coming and then you guys can start talking about the "Green" shell. And then people with combine shells and make a UG Tortoise Shell deck with 4 main-deck Shelldock Isles and we will all be fucked.

tl;dr again, Ponder, Preordain, and friends are incomparable to Portent, Index, Mental Note, Opt, etc. They are in a different league altogether. Being able to augment your draw step with cantrips isn't always better, it's just better when those cantrips are Brainstorm, Ponder/Preordain.

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Originally Posted by Ingo

Consistency is a good, necessary thing. Its a bad thing though to have it monopolized by one color.

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Why? It's splashable in literally every deck, which is why virtually every archetype is represented in this format at a competitive level. Would you have a problem with Brainstorm if it was colorless?

Because when I look at the color pie I see 5 pieces of the same size. Not half a blue pie. And no one is "splashing" for Brainstorm. Brainstorm decks do splash colors though, depending on what threats they want to find with their Brainstorms. Let's not get it twisted.

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Originally Posted by Zilla

...Would you have a problem with Brainstorm if it was colorless?

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I certainly would! If every deck is improved by a card, is that not a crystal clear case of a broken card?

It is not a question of strategy. Yes, Miracles and Storm have radically different strategies. It is a question of tactics. I want a format with tactical options as well as strategic ones. How screwed up is it that UR, a deck with only twelve creatures in it is more consistent and faster than the ones with 32, oh and it has the four Ancestral Recalls for the long game? That entire deck is nothing without the ability to chain spells each turn. The cantrips are so good at what they do (because the "cost" of including them is so low compared to the benefits) that you get a single best tactic powering every archetype - even the ones that they should be terrible in, like aggro.

Remember when Zilla Stompy would kick decks in the nuts for too much durdling? Intuition into AK or slow-ass Thirst for Knowledge were terrible against a decent aggro deck, but excellent against other control decks. There was that price you pay for having them, and you would not dream of putting them in an aggro deck. There is no such price today, so the tactic is ubiquitous. I want the option to have an engine power my deck, or go straight aggro, or mana ramp, or whatever - hell I want the option to not use blue. But I can't. Those decks make up a tiny fraction of the meta because they are considerably less consistent than THE ONE tactic.

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Originally Posted by Zilla

Why? It's splashable in literally every deck, which is why virtually every archetype is represented in this format at a competitive level. Would you have a problem with Brainstorm if it was colorless?

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Cards that are auto-includes and lead to 56 card decks are in the "BAN ASAP"-category. See: Mental Misstep.

So yes, it would be a problem. Although Brainstorm has essentially MM levels of representation anyway, despite being colored.

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Originally Posted by AznSeal

I agree. And TC, Brainstorm, etc would be less oppressive if people played REB or an equally broken draw engine like loam, or elves. Hell, or if people played a deck based on taxing people.

But alas, people want to play their pet decks, and then complain when they get shat on. They need to realize the meta changes and to be competitive, you need to adapt.

I love Goblins. I'd play it all the time if I could. Then I moved to Elves when Goblins became shit.

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Of course you have to adapt, but I think that most people want to make their own desicions: nowadays to adapt almost always means playing the Blue-shell. And why is that? Because those cards can be used in a variety of decks, so the investment isn't that big over the course of the years to come.

I too love Gobbo's (that's why I would like for the unbanning of GR, which of course is a dream), and have recently switched to RG Combo Lands, because I could affort it (despite having to get a Tabernacle, pretty weird huh?). If this is the trend regarding the Blue-shell, I think we will lose a lot of variety. And yes, I like being competative, but not at the cost of everything.

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Originally Posted by Barook

Cards that are auto-includes and lead to 56 card decks are in the "BAN ASAP"-category. See: Mental Misstep.

So yes, it would be a problem. Although Brainstorm has essentially MM levels of representation anyway, despite being colored.

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Isn't this a slippery slope to take for every colors competitive shell? White decks from D&T to Blade to Maverick start with 4 SFM and 4 Plows (even in some Miracles we see the SFM!). No one complains about that. Green/Black decks start with 4 DRS and 4 GSZ. I still hear no one complaining. I could also point to most red decks and Lightning Bolt. No competitive deck starts from the scratch with 60 undefined cards. Period.

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Originally Posted by Finn

Honestly, without access to stupidly efficient cantrips, Treasure Cruise is probably not broken.

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To do this you have to ban Brainstorm AND Ponder AND Preordain. The joke however is that the deck still seems to work without those cards if I look at Modern.

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Originally Posted by AznSeal

I agree. And TC, Brainstorm, etc would be less oppressive if people played REB or an equally broken draw engine like loam, or elves. Hell, or if people played a deck based on taxing people.

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While it's true there are decks that keep up versus brainstorm/TC/... , you can't deny that these decks are limited in their possibilities. Loam evidently needs a deck full of abusable lands, Elves - well you know what I mean.
Blue shell decks however don't require specific card synergies, and because of that can be slotted into any form of strategy you'd like. Basically, the blue shell provides a player with almost anything he needs, from consistency to (free) counters to carddraw to amazing aggro creatures. Blue can play any strategic line it wants because it was provided with absurd amount of powerfull cards without restraints.

Blue shell was already pretty dominant with ponder, brainstorm and force of will, but I found it acceptable because it was a control/combo color. By adding delver and Treasure Cruise to the mix, blue shell took over agressive strategies as well, and with TC even means to reload. When even aggro strategies are dominated by blue, I think it's time for some serious re-evaluation.

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Originally Posted by Zilla

Why? It's splashable in literally every deck, which is why virtually every archetype is represented in this format at a competitive level. Would you have a problem with Brainstorm if it was colorless?

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The premises of having to splash blue to make an archetype playable is -according to me- a reverse way of looking at things. You can equally say that the blue core is overpowered, which makes splashing it mandatory for many decks, and reduces the variance of archetypes (instead of increasing it).

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Originally Posted by Zilla

Why? It's splashable in literally every deck, which is why virtually every archetype is represented in this format at a competitive level. Would you have a problem with Brainstorm if it was colorless?

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I would be more than ok with brainstorm and ponder being colorless because that means FOW is not as easily played. Brainstorm by itself is not so bad. It is more so the holy trinity...Brainstorm FOW ponder that creates the issue. Brainstorm and ponder together create the best digging engine in the game for their cost. If anyone wants to dig for anything in any deck OR create consistency, they can do so for 8 card slots. Additionally, if you want protection against combo, add FOW. Now you are only 4 blue cards away from reliably casting FOW, and having the best digging engine. At this point all you have to do is insert the combo of choice or selected aggro cards and you have the basis of a top tier deck. It has consistency, and protection, and can be added easily to any other colors. Any one of the above mentioned cards when isolated from the rest are not too powerful and without the others the individual card would not see near as much play as it does now.

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Originally Posted by Ingo

While it's true there are decks that keep up versus brainstorm/TC/... , you can't deny that these decks are limited in their possibilities. Loam evidently needs a deck full of abusable lands, Elves - well you know what I mean.
Blue shell decks however don't require specific card synergies, and because of that can be slotted into any form of strategy you'd like. Basically, the blue shell provides a player with almost anything he needs, from consistency to (free) counters to carddraw to amazing aggro creatures. Blue can play any strategic line it wants because it was provided with absurd amount of powerfull cards without restraints.

Blue shell was already pretty dominant with ponder, brainstorm and force of will, but I found it acceptable because it was a control/combo color. By adding delver and Treasure Cruise to the mix, blue shell took over agressive strategies as well, and with TC even means to reload. When even aggro strategies are dominated by blue, I think it's time for some serious re-evaluation.

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Loam needs a deck full of lands, Glimpse a deck full of creatures and Treasure Cruise a deck full of cantrips. You act as if the whole Brainstorm + Ponder + Probe + Treasure Cruise + FoW shell isn't outright occupying 1/3 of your decks space and makes decks pretty "airy" and ergo can't "be slotted into any form of strategy you'd like" or we could say the same about Loam as it supports different endgames of either KotR, Seismic Assault, Worm Harvest or Marit Lage. Fact is, that the decks which run the full 20 blue cards listed above are exclusively flavors of Delver or Blade and we have to differ between the strategic flexible 8-cantrip-shell established at the beginning of 2008 and the streamlined-for-aggro-control 20-cards-package, but some gentlemen in this thread want to revive the 2006 Pre-Ponder metagame which looked like this:

The Legacy Metagame and 2006 Legacy Championship

Edit: Now look at Tom Bennetts deck and his cantrip & draw shell in 2006:

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Main Deck

60 cards

4 Flooded Strand
1 Island
4 Tropical Island
4 Tundra
4 Windswept Heath

17 lands

3 Meddling Mage
2 Mystic Enforcer
4 Nimble Mongoose
4 Werebear

13 creatures

4 Brainstorm
2 Counterspell
3 Daze
4 Force of Will
3 Mental Note
3 Pithing Needle
4 Predict
3 Serum Visions
4 Swords to Plowshares

30 other spells


Sideboard
3 Armageddon
4 Blue Elemental Blast
3 Disrupt
1 Meddling Mage
4 Tormod's Crypt

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Surprise, surprise! Brainstorm + Mental Note + Serum Visions were his cantrips and Predict the 2006's Treasure Cruise.


The metagame had 3 DtBs, 2 with blue and Brainstorm aka T.Hold & Solidarity with Goblins being the third. Landstill marking the 4th place after a significant gap. That's 75% blue decks at the top in 2006! I habe no fucking clue why people bring up,the fairy tale that blue was less dominant back in the days. I suspect it's because they only have the short era of Zoo and Maverick in mind after the release of Alara (2008-2009)

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Originally Posted by Lemnear

Loam needs a deck full of lands, Glimpse a deck full of creatures and Treasure Cruise a deck full of cantrips. You act as if the whole Brainstorm + Ponder + Probe + Treasure Cruise + FoW shell isn't outright occupying 1/3 of your decks space and makes decks pretty "airy" and ergo can't "be slotted into any form of strategy you'd like" or we could say the same about Loam as it supports different endgames of either KotR, Seismic Assault, Worm Harvest or Marit Lage.

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Are you really comparing the variations of blue core decks in all its flexibility, be it combo/aggro/control, with the variations of loam? Ofcourse blue cards take up space, but their cantrippy nature picks out the resources it needs, be it combospells, Griselbrand, delvers, goyf, counterbalance, force of will, etc, and with which it requiers a minimum of synergy. Whereas loam only works with a limited cardpool, with high synergies, and therefore a limited amount of deckpossibilities.

I finally realized where the trouble, why we're having this skewed discussion.

Back in Stone Age, there were those really powerful and consistent blue decks whose cantrip suite started with Brainstorm and then the remaining slots were occupied with Portent, Serum Vision or *gasp* Sleight of Hand. That was before Ponder that immediatelly constituted itself as the Cantrip No.2; in fact what we see now is that the two cantrips are inseparable, people nearly always use both of them.
Add the next CA and CQ (be it Preordain, Treasure Cruise or Dig Through Time; I guess that there's nothing important missing), and we're at today's situation.

Now, all those cards function as Jokers, they can become whatever the player needs, and some people view this as overpowered. Spare me "but they're no overpowered, they alone don't do anything!" Jokers don't do anything, and you cannot play flush only of Jokers, but you know, but they kinda help to complete the flush.

The cantrip-lovers say that it's silly to mix the decks together, because they are strategically diverse. I'll leave that to someone else who cares about this mantra to think and write about the strategical diversities of 28Jokers.dec, moreover I don't even think that there's that much of a difference between the certain decks, e.g. the Delver-centric piles are strategically the same.

While for the most part of MtG history the blue color was more about CA+CQ than all other colors, it wasn't that of a difference as we have today. There's nothing as close to the cantrip suite (which is always accompanied by next CA/CQ tools, be it TC, JTM, DTT or SFM), so all that "strategical diversity" and "lots of different decks" boils down to what kind of additional blue CA/CQ tools you use alongside BS+Ponder. There's no SotF+GSZ, there's no Sylvan Library + GSZ, there's no [enter example here] simply becasue all those cards are either too slow, too unreliable or too banned to create an opposition/competition to The Blue Jokers Gang.

"But it' ok, blue should have dominance on CQ+CA, it's in its color pie dammit! Also, you need to leave the casual shell and acknowledge that your Kavu petdeck won't fare well against established decks!"
Of course. But care to enlighten me why the only playable decks should be the ones with 16 cantrips? "Something something consitstency, something something play w/e you want." Ok, I'll play w/e I want, maybe even a consistent deck, but would you mind to point me towards a non-cantrips consistent deck that can actually... um, win?

"Competitive players don't thnk like that. We play w/e wins. Even Jokers." Yeah, and that's the point. While it was pretty usual to play anything else than just 16 blue cards, it's not anymore. And all those competitive minds (that never touched nor a shardland, neither a sealed deck) owe me an answer why (when they're so thrilled about consistency) they don't want to see another CA/CQ tools other than cantrips injected (back) into the format.

I would never guess that the sole reason why I'm leaving the game after 18 years of playing is too much consistency. Nowadays strategically diverse consistent decks lead to robotic gameplay and boring tournament experience where you see the same and same and same shit all day long. That's some unbelievable waste of time. There's nothing interesting left in Magic tournaments, only a bunch of nerds assembling the same pieces all over again and again. It's like watching a dice roll olympiad and masturbation contest combined. Dull robotic people play dull robotic decks. Amazing.

I'm not sure if bans and/or unbans could do something about this state, fortunately I'm ceasing to care. It says a lot that I enjoy Kingdom Rush far more than a game of Magic. Kingdom. Fucking. Rush. A tower defense freeware videogame.


edit:

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Surprise, surprise! Brainstorm + Mental Note + Serum Visions were his cantrips and Predict the 2006's Treasure Cruise.

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One would guess that all is lost when you're comparing Mental Note with Ponder and Predict with Treasure Cruise, especially in context of Survival still unbanned and no post-2006 card (Omniderp, Griselderp, Derper of Secrets) printed yet.

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Originally Posted by Lemnear

Isn't this a slippery slope to take for every colors competitive shell? White decks from D&T to Blade to Maverick start with 4 SFM and 4 Plows (even in some Miracles we see the SFM!). No one complains about that. Green/Black decks start with 4 DRS and 4 GSZ. I still hear no one complaining. I could also point to most red decks and Lightning Bolt. No competitive deck starts from the scratch with 60 undefined cards. Period.

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I guess the problem is, almost all of those decks share Brainstorm (and Ponder and FoW). There is no good reason not to use BS when you join 4 SFM with 4 Bolts. This in turn gives you the color with the best and most efficient creature in history: Delver.

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Originally Posted by Lemnear

To do this you have to ban Brainstorm AND Ponder AND Preordain. The joke however is that the deck still seems to work without those cards if I look at Modern.

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Aren't you always the one telling us not to draw parallels with Modern?? I challenge you to try to Modern version of that deck in a Legacy tournament, even if your Modern deck is the only legal Blue deck you can play :eyebrow:


Maybe we need Brainstorm 2.0 and Ponder 2.0. Nobody will complain about Infernal Tutor, it needs a specific setup to mimic Demonic Tutor or else it has a specific drawback. Brainstorm and Ponder don't have this, they actualy are too agressively costed for what they do. If Brainstorm didn't exist and Wizards would print it today, I can't imagine them to design it costing only one blue but more something like 2U.

Argh, who am I kidding? If Wizards would design Brainstorm today, it would cost 1 blue phyrexian mana :mad:

I would ban Fetchlands before I touch Brainstorm and see how the blue cantrip shell pans out in the format. (was just looking to the 1999-2001 extended decklists to reply to another thread so I went back to the good old times when BS was just a benign cantrip without so much shuffling effects). Also if BS gets the axe I would be in favor of unbanning powerful bullsh*t like Survival, Oath, Tinker etc. cause if we lack consistency in the format at least we should be able to jam powerful stuff and be able to fling fun spells rather than going into full Modern mode.

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Originally Posted by Higgs

I would ban Fetchlands before I touch Brainstorm and see how the blue cantrip shell pans out in the format. (was just looking to the 1999-2001 extended decklists to reply to another thread so I went back to the good old times when BS was just a benign cantrip without so much shuffling effects). Also if BS gets the axe I would be in favor of unbanning powerful bullsh*t like Survival, Oath, Tinker etc. cause if we lack consistency in the format at least we should be able to jam powerful stuff and be able to fling fun spells rather than going into full Modern mode.

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yeah but you can't ban a whole cycle of lands because that would destroy the format entirely. I agree brainstorm is just alright without fetches but fetches are just alright without brainstorm.

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Originally Posted by Bed Decks Palyer

...

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For the sake of internet's signal-to-noise ratio, I challenge everybody who publicly decides to quit playing magic to also stop crying in public about mtg-related matters that do not touch them anymore.

Also some others seem to think that pretty much every card in the history of magic should be playable, otherwise the meta is warped/broken/stagnant/boring. Unfortunantely it doesn't go like that. In general the playable cards in eternal formats need to be aggressively costed, efficient and quite powerful. That closes the door for vast majority of cards in existence. What the whiners want is to artificially break this and open doors to shittier cards. It makes zero sense to force crappy cards to replace good ones in this format when there are many other formats doing excatly that already.

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Originally Posted by Hopo

For the sake of internet's signal-to-noise ratio, I challenge everybody who publicly decides to quit playing magic to also stop crying in public about mtg-related matters that do not touch them anymore.

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I never knew that this forum is for the owners of cards only. Also, these things still touch me, as I got a box to get rid of.

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Originally Posted by Hopo

Also some others seem to think that pretty much every card in the history of magic should be playable, otherwise the meta is warped/broken/stagnant/boring. Unfortunantely it doesn't go like that. In general the playable cards in eternal formats need to be aggressively costed, efficient and quite powerful. That closes the door for vast majority of cards in existence. What the whiners want is to artificially break this and open doors to shittier cards. It makes zero sense to force crappy cards to replace good ones in this format when there are many other formats doing excatly that already.

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"The queen could read ones minds."

Where does this certainty of yours that "the whiners want... open doors to shittier cards" come from? Or do you really think that people who dislike playing against the ever same pile of shit wouldn't welcome say Survival? But idk, maybe Survival is shitty card.

Reading this thread makes me wonder what I found so interesting and time-deserving about the whole community.

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Originally Posted by Hopo

It makes zero sense to force crappy cards to replace good ones in this format when there are many other formats doing excatly that already.

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Infernal Tutor is a shittier version of Demonic Tutor. Fauna Shaman is a shittier version of Survival. Where do you draw the line?

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Originally Posted by Bed Decks Palyer

But care to enlighten me why the only playable decks should be the ones with 16 cantrips? "Something something consitstency, something something play w/e you want." Ok, I'll play w/e I want, maybe even a consistent deck, but would you mind to point me towards a non-cantrips consistent deck that can actually... um, win?

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Definitely Elves, Lands, Death & Taxes and possibly Maverick.

If feeling feeling generous, specific meta call decks like Dredge, Painter and "good" chalice decks such as Tezz, 4C Loam.

I believe they invented EDH for those that like to play with crappy cards.

As for consistent, non-blue decks - try Manaless Dredge. Rather then cantrip and filter, it just "draws" 5/6 a turn until it can strip the opponents' hand and flip its library FTW. When goldfishing, you usually hit the mark between turns 2-4. When not goldfishing, you can easily stall your opponent long enough to either develop a winning board state or combo out after all.

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Originally Posted by Nielsie

Infernal Tutor is a shittier version of Demonic Tutor. Fauna Shaman is a shittier version of Survival. Where do you draw the line?

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That is a very good question. I thought about adding the phrase "notoriously broken cards aside" somewhere there but didn't because I've learned that some think even cantrips can be broken.

There are some similarities between vintage deck construction starting with solomoxen or null rod, and legacy deck construction having decks that star the blue shell vs decks that fight the blue shell, with the obvious argument that legacy non-blue decks are maybe not as good at fighting blue as vintage null rod decks areat fighting decks with moxen.

Look how many decks I can put solomoxen in! Strategic diversity! Actually has some truth to it. Feels a little filthy though.

I guess recent printings have created an era where the increased consistency level of blue has pushed some of the worse decks out of the format, and now that the bar is raised a ton of things that were good enough before .. aren't.

Huh. no wonder people are screaming. They feel like their format is drowning under rising water (zing!).

If it feels like this post is all over the place it's because I don't know how i feel about this. In my meta people just find a way to be successful with nonblue, and we still get new players sometimes. Just play thalia or choke or kill them with thespian depths or elves or.. something. just don't do it consistently.

I'm increasingly coming around to the idea that Gitaxian Probe needs to go in Modern if that format's going to continue to have the rest of its current card pool. And starting to think that it might not be such a bad idea for Legacy, too -- it tones down the most oppressive opening hands of the UR Pyromancer shell, and also sets back quite a few combo shells, giving fair decks more opportunity to fight them.

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Originally Posted by Ingo

Are you really comparing the variations of blue core decks in all its flexibility, be it combo/aggro/control, with the variations of loam? Ofcourse blue cards take up space, but their cantrippy nature picks out the resources it needs, be it combospells, Griselbrand, delvers, goyf, counterbalance, force of will, etc, and with which it requiers a minimum of synergy. Whereas loam only works with a limited cardpool, with high synergies, and therefore a limited amount of deckpossibilities.

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When, please show me the Combo or Control deck which runs the full 20 cards listed. Where is your Counterbalance or Griselbrand deck with Treasure Cruise? Is it THAT hard to admit that you find these 20-card-shell ONLY in Aggro-Control variants?

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Originally Posted by Bed Decks Palyer

While for the most part of MtG history the blue color was more about CA+CQ than all other colors, it wasn't that of a difference as we have today. There's nothing as close to the cantrip suite (which is always accompanied by next CA/CQ tools, be it TC, JTM, DTT or SFM), so all that "strategical diversity" and "lots of different decks" boils down to what kind of additional blue CA/CQ tools you use alongside BS+Ponder. There's no SotF+GSZ, there's no Sylvan Library + GSZ, there's no [enter example here] simply becasue all those cards are either too slow, too unreliable or too banned to create an opposition/competition to The Blue Jokers Gang.

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Yeah, ignore the fact that DRS + GSZ are exactly such a combination in green, providing a redundancy effect for both "early acceleration" and "reach" in all decks which run it.

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Originally Posted by Bed Decks Palyer

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One would guess that all is lost when you're comparing Mental Note with Ponder and Predict with Treasure Cruise, especially in context of Survival still unbanned and no post-2006 card (Omniderp, Griselderp, Derper of Secrets) printed yet.

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...says the man who compared Brainstorm and Ancestral Recall for several weeks in this thread. I'm convinced it's fine to compare the construction structure of 2006s T.Hold with 2015s Delve decks, as both work on a common base of "get 7 cards in your graveyard asap", knowing that also the non-blue decks got improved tools since when in form of KotR, DRS, GSZ, etc.

It proves that the cantrip shell and blues dominance over the Legacy metagame is stone old and claiming that the metagame had a certain balance between colors back in the days is blatant nonsense.

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Originally Posted by Nielsie

Aren't you always the one telling us not to draw parallels with Modern?? I challenge you to try to Modern version of that deck in a Legacy tournament, even if your Modern deck is the only legal Blue deck you can play :eyebrow:

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Yes. I took the 2006 example and the Modern Delver to show where the root of the issue is: It doesn't matter much if you cast Ponder, Preordain, Mental Note, Thought Scour, Probe or Portent in a redundant enough number to fuel Delver, Tarmogoyf, T.Hold or Delve, as long as the limited number of oppressive threats and kill mechanisms are outclassing all other options. People pointing to Brainstorm ignore, that we are long past the point to fix blues supremacy in CQ tools and all you can do is chopping the Hydras head so the next cantrip ascends to being the top choice. What WotC CAN do in Legacy is controlling the CA tools which are (suprisingly) STILL limited in the format, but mainstreamed by the obviously broken Delve mechanic (T.Hold itself and Tombstalker should have given WotC a clue)

Can someone please close this thread? There is no end to this pointless discussion.

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Originally Posted by Bobmans

Can someone please close this thread? There is no end to this pointless discussion.

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Wisest words in the thread.

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Originally Posted by Lemnear

Yes. I took the 2006 example and the Modern Delver to show where the root of the issue is: It doesn't matter much if you cast Ponder, Preordain, Mental Note, Thought Scour, Probe or Portent in a redundant enough number to fuel Delver, Tarmogoyf, T.Hold or Delve, as long as the limited number of oppressive threats and kill mechanisms are outclassing all other options. People pointing to Brainstorm ignore, that we are long past the point to fix blues supremacy in CQ tools and all you can do is chopping the Hydras head so the next cantrip ascends to being the top choice. What WotC CAN do in Legacy is controlling the CA tools which are (suprisingly) STILL limited in the format, but mainstreamed by the obviously broken Delve mechanic (T.Hold itself and Tombstalker should have given WotC a clue)

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I am not convinced that blue strategies would be as effective as they are now if Brainstorm and Ponder would be banned. If only Brainstorm is banned, then perhaps you are right. I think there are two easy options: ban Brainstorm + Ponder OR ban Brainstorm + Treasure Cruise.

Sure, you will still have blue cantrip engines, but they won't be as effective as Brainstorm + Ponder engines. Other (non-blue) strategies would find themselves in a much better position to fight this cantrip engine and I think that's what this is all about.