All B/R update speculation.

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Originally Posted by jimmythegreek

I play a lot of dredge at my local store. If the game gets to a point where someone is casting DTT they might as well draw seven as most often they will find the hate they are looking for. This mind you is a corner case. It's extremely frusterating when this happens, more often than not if I don't have enough damage for the swing back I've lost the game. Seeing seven is completely out of control for the price of UU.

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If you are on dredge and you lose to a DTT there is something wrong.
DTT just can't be the reason you lose even a single game if you are on dredge.

Still is true that slower and more grindy combo have an hard time against dig unless they play it too, is not really about the card selection, the problem is that a post sb blue aggro-control/control is almost full of combo hate, so dig is 100% gonna get something cool, and it being an instant is too punishing for most combo in the mid/mid-late game.


I would love if MTG had a system like hearthstone for "banning" cards, they just hotfix the card (for example making the card more expensive or a bit less effective) if something is over the top, i would like to see a sorcery DTT (and i actually play a DTT deck, the nerf would hurt me) or a less broken miracle mechanic (at least make terminus WW instead of W, that card is a joke) and so on :rolleyes:

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Originally Posted by Crimhead

Reliably finding aside-board card =/= drawing seven. You are defending a statement different than the statement I was calling you out on.

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Perhaps drawing parallels with banned draw sevens weakens the argument, but I still think that the toxic part of a draw 7 is being able to see seven fresh cards. Chances are, when you cast you only need 2 of them to win anyway. Myriad examples exist for almost 20 years now, like Wheel into Yawgmoth's Will, or Tinker to complete Vaultkey. Playing a Wheel you could care less about the 2 or 3 lands you hit, you just want to draw into juice.

Dig Through Time may not draw an additional 5 cards, but it grabs the 2 best cards, ones you are probably actively looking for, from a fresh 7 off the top of your deck. Discount the 2/3 lands you hit that you probably wouldn't need anyway and DTT starts looking like a 2 mana draw 7 more and more.

I believe it needs to fall into the draw 7 category because it lets you see 7 off the top, it gives more than one card and only costs UU. Impulse costs 1U, digs 4 cards and draws only one and that card used to be played quite a bit back in the day.

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Originally Posted by bruizar

Perhaps drawing parallels with banned draw sevens weakens the argument, but I still think that the toxic part of a draw 7 is being able to see seven fresh cards. Chances are, when you cast you only need 2 of them to win anyway. Myriad examples exist for almost 20 years now, like Wheel into Yawgmoth's Will, or Tinker to complete Vaultkey. Playing a Wheel you could care less about the 2 or 3 lands you hit, you just want to draw into juice.

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LOL! In Legacy you can't draw into Yawg's Will because that card doesn't exist in this format. Nor would this play be particularly good after delving away your graveyard. That's right, DTT has delve and costs :6::u::u: - not :u::u:! I think you might have forgotten this.

Wheel and Twister are not OP simply because they can help find one or two cards a player might need to close the game! They can also draw mana ramp and more card draw to make Storm and/or Solidarity the most powerful and consistent deck(s) in Legacy.

Drawing parallels with banned draw sevens doesn't weaken any other arguments - it just betrays your lacking comprehension of the game. But it might cause people to dismiss any other (anti DTT/cantrip) arguments before they even read them.

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Originally Posted by Megadeus

If I ran the ban list I would simply ban every card played in the latest miracles list.

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Thank fuck you never will! Let's ban Force Of Will, Swords To Plowshares, Island, and Plains. :rolleyes:

Must be a banned announcement coming - the idiocy is on the rise.

You clearly don't have much experience with Vintage (or any other format where those cards are legal). Yes, obviously Dig through Time has a delve cost. It's not hard to delve away fetches, random Duresses and other crap and leave your business spells in your yard for you to reuse with a PiF or Yawg Will.

Secondly, Wheel and Twister have real costs attached to them where they draw your opponent into a fresh 7, meaning they draw into more permission for you to fight through (that permission that you just recently discarded away with your Duresses). Dig through Time has no such cost, you get 2 best cards out of your 7. More often than not, a draw7 only really results in ~2-3 relevant cards. If you have played with them at all, you'd know this. If you follow Vintage discussions at all, Dig through Time has very often been compared to the Draw7s and favorably so.

Below is a quote from Ari Lax in one of his articles where he discusses Dig Through Time back in November of 2014: http://www.starcitygames.com/article...ough-Time.html

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As for the rest of the text on Dig Through Time?

Choose two of seven is the better part of a draw seven. Think about the average opener: two or three mana, two or three filler, and twoish gas. Pick the gas or mana as needed, pass on the rest.

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But go ahead, keep repeating tired cliches over and over.

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Originally Posted by Noctalor

If you are on dredge and you lose to a DTT there is something wrong.
DTT just can't be the reason you lose even a single game if you are on dredge.

Still is true that slower and more grindy combo have an hard time against dig unless they play it too, is not really about the card selection, the problem is that a post sb blue aggro-control/control is almost full of combo hate, so dig is 100% gonna get something cool, and it being an instant is too punishing for most combo in the mid/mid-late game.


I would love if MTG had a system like hearthstone for "banning" cards, they just hotfix the card (for example making the card more expensive or a bit less effective) if something is over the top, i would like to see a sorcery DTT (and i actually play a DTT deck, the nerf would hurt me) or a less broken miracle mechanic (at least make terminus WW instead of W, that card is a joke) and so on :rolleyes:

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Against a deck like miracles which runs swords and terminus the match can definetly become a bit grindy. DTT is an absolute nightmare after a terminus.

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Originally Posted by HrishiQQ

You clearly...

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DTT also can be played EOT to maximize its usefulness. It's really hard to do that with say Wheel of Fortune or Memory Jar.
Otoh, Wheel has some really sick illustration.

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Originally Posted by HrishiQQ

You clearly don't have much experience with Vintage (or any other format where those cards are legal).

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Why are you talking about Vintage?

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Originally Posted by Crimhead

Why are you talking about Vintage?

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Probably because you've been bullshitting about Vintage cards for the last page or so.

The miracle mechanic is busted because of the broken overpowered ubiquitous card Brainstorm. The end. You have to be a rhesus monkey to think adjusting the cost to WW is a real discussion or a solution.

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Originally Posted by nedleeds

The miracle mechanic is busted because of the broken overpowered ubiquitous card Brainstorm. The end. You have to be a rhesus monkey to think adjusting the cost to WW is a real discussion or a solution.

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So in your opinion, if Brainstorm was actually banned, what would the resulting format look like?

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Originally Posted by MGB

So in your opinion, if Brainstorm was actually banned, what would the resulting format look like?

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I don't think anyone can conclusively say that. Will blue be weaker? Yeah, for sure. But who knows whether archetypes will die out or just adapt (or if something new will show up). I think the only way we could know besides it happening is to do some kind of large-scale experiment including tournaments where there is no Brainstorm in the format.

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Originally Posted by MGB

So in your opinion, if Brainstorm was actually banned, what would the resulting format look like?

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Less miracle. The rest stays the same. Perhaps a few more higher finishes for decks like jund, etc.

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Originally Posted by MGB

So in your opinion, if Brainstorm was actually banned, what would the resulting format look like?

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I almost feel like we need two different B/R speculation threads.

One for brainstorm and one where brainstorm isn't allowed to be mentioned.

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Originally Posted by MGB

So in your opinion, if Brainstorm was actually banned, what would the resulting format look like?

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I don't actually know what the format would "look like", that's tangential to the BNR list argument. I can say with a great deal of confidence that decks containing blue cards would remain the vast majority. No other spell has sat at 80% usage, 32/32'ed the formats premier events and survived a banning. It's absurd. If Legacy was a Pro Tour format it would have been long since banned, we'd have moved on, and people wouldn't have Brainstorm as a deck building crutch.

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Originally Posted by bruizar

Less miracle. The rest stays the same. Perhaps a few more higher finishes for decks like jund, etc.

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Except discard becomes exponentially stronger, FoW gets weaker, glass cannon combo gets stronger, and Punishing/Grove does as well, delve and token strategies tank and tarmogoyf goes up in price again. Lame.

From my phone. I do my best, dammit!

"But then there would be too many glass cannon decks" is a bad argument because most of those decks can (and should, in my opinion) be also banned anyway. Belcher-style combo decks don't bring anything positive to the format. Magic doesn't need people showing up to a tournament w/ no purpose beyond adding variance to the results.

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Originally Posted by iatee

"But then there would be too many glass cannon decks" is a bad argument because most of those decks can (and should, in my opinion) be also banned anyway. Belcher-style combo decks don't bring anything positive to the format. Magic doesn't need people showing up to a tournament w/ no purpose beyond adding variance to the results.

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So now we ban decks because people refuse to prepare for the metashift? If people run slow decks with little interaction, why not run a T1 deck and win the tournament.

T1 decks are high variance enough that they are unfavored in long tournaments regardless. They're never going to be a good choice for good players because you completely give up the ability to outplay your opponent and put your fate in god's hands.

Also your predicted metashift w/ more discard makes up a little for the fewer FoWs.

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Originally Posted by iatee

"But then there would be too many glass cannon decks" is a bad argument because most of those decks can (and should, in my opinion) be also banned anyway. Belcher-style combo decks don't bring anything positive to the format. Magic doesn't need people showing up to a tournament w/ no purpose beyond adding variance to the results.

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More bullshit. Brainstorm vs. belcher only has text on the play. If there's an overwhelming amount of turn zero combo then people will have to (GASP!) adapt and play different solutions. If Goblin Charbelcher is in 80% of all decks and 32/32s a Grand Prix it will be banned as well. The belcher deck as currently constituted has internal inconsistency, can lose to just Force of Will, Spell Pierce, Snare, Thoughtseize, Duress, etc. on the draw. Regardless highlighting some other random deck that may or may not see a rise in usage isn't material to a BNR discussion, which is about cards not decks.

Instead of banning brainstorm they should just unban more broken stuff. I would like to see them unban earthcraft, goblin recruiter, memory jar, survival and yolo unban balance because that card gets no love.

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Originally Posted by nedleeds

More bullshit. Brainstorm vs. belcher only has text on the play.

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Brainstorm isn't important because of its text in that particular match-up, it's important because it allows blue decks to maindeck a lot of free/one mana interaction w/ much less downside, as the cards can be brainstormed away once they lose their value or in a bad matchup.

People saying unban balance. And I wonder why this thread isn't taken seriously

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Originally Posted by iatee

T1 decks are high variance enough that they are unfavored in long tournaments regardless. They're never going to be a good choice for good players because you completely give up the ability to outplay your opponent and put your fate in god's hands.

Also your predicted metashift w/ more discard makes up a little for the fewer FoWs.

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Sounds like you've never played spanish inquisition or belcher. If by outplay you mean cantrip sure they can't cantrip like most decks do via ponder/brainstorm/SDT but the notion that they can't outplay an opponent is absurd. You just don't know how to do so yourself.

You know what matters against RG belcher? Having force in your opener on the draw AND on the play. Keeping a hand because it has brainstorm/ponder to look for a force of will is laughably bad and is going to reduce your life total to -30 before the game starts. Daze can also be piss poor against RG belcher. Oh hey there spirit guide thanks for paying for daze and having it not matter when I belch/empty/wish for empty anyways. People also don't play pierce, daze, snare, flusterstorm, etc. etc. because of belcher they do so because they're good in a lot of matchups granted you sometimes want to brainstorm them away but at worst force of will exiles them to counter a spell. There's also this great thing called sideboarding and it's suggested that you use it to make your deck better against deck X in games 2 and 3. People cut spell pierce and such against decks they're bad against like miracles usually doesn't care about spell pierce as it intends to go long to the point that pierce is just dead.

Dig is a busted magic card and should be banned. Like Bruizar said about it's relation to D7's it compares favorably as D7's are symmetrical. Dig is anything but. Dig in conjunction with yawg will can sometimes weaken it but at the same time you're looking 7 cards deep and should likely be fine as a result because 7 cards is a lot.

If anyone says or thinks they know what legacy would look like if brainstorm was banned they're lying. No one knows as it would flip the format on its head, literally. Open to speculation but no one definitively knows. I just suspect ponder would be the number 1 card in legacy then but we'll never know in all likelihood.

Yes thanks for sharing your notes, now the world finally knows the strategy 'mull to force of will against mindless t1 combo decks'. Dunno what we would do without these decks creating that deep and intricate gameplay for the format.

The point is that your argument that a brainstorm ban somehow helps fragile combo decks is completely wrong

That was never my argument, that came from Secretly.A.Bee's post. My argument was 'Even if that is true it doesn't matter, just ban high-variance non-interactive t1 decks too, they're basically a virus for the format anyway.'

Though:
- brainstorm makes blue decks more consistent than anything else
-> brainstorm gone almost certainly means the blue deck % decreases by some amount greater than 0
-> fewer blue decks means fewer Force of Wills floating around.

Brainstorm doesn't have to be 'good vs belcher' to be good vs belcher.

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Originally Posted by iatee

"But then there would be too many glass cannon decks" is a bad argument because most of those decks can (and should, in my opinion) be also banned anyway. Belcher-style combo decks don't bring anything positive to the format. Magic doesn't need people showing up to a tournament w/ no purpose beyond adding variance to the results.

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Belcher gives me joy, how is that not positive?

Well, uninteractive t1 losses bring misery to the other guy and the net effect is probably more misery than happiness since you ruined someone's tournament but have almost no chance of winning yourself. So you get some troll-lolz, great, you probably could have done that by tripping an old lady or something.

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Originally Posted by iatee

That was never my argument, that came from Secretly.A.Bee's post.

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Sorry to misattribute, I saw his text when you quoted him. I've had him blocked for years.

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Originally Posted by iatee

Brainstorm doesn't have to be 'good vs belcher' to be good vs belcher.

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Being 'good vs. belcher' isn't a criteria for remaining banned or unbanned. Force is good vs. belcher, is a powerful card, but is balanced by the card disadvantage and deck building constraints.

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Originally Posted by nedleeds

Being 'good vs. belcher' isn't a criteria for remaining banned or unbanned. Force is good vs. belcher, is a powerful card, but is balanced by the card disadvantage and deck building constraints.

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But it should be.

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Originally Posted by Quasim0ff

But it should be.

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Great. Long live Mindbreak Trap.

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Originally Posted by nedleeds

Being 'good vs. belcher' isn't a criteria for remaining banned or unbanned. Force is good vs. belcher, is a powerful card, but is balanced by the card disadvantage and deck building constraints.

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The deck building constraints is part of the bigger problem - you can't splash force if you want the effect, so you have to play a lot of blue cards. Which end up being the same blue cards everyone else plays. DTT now allows these decks to make up for the card disadvantage too. So as long as DTT is unbanned Force is 'even more powerful' - you'll make up for that early 2 for 1 in a few turns.

Realistically I don't see brainstorm ever being banned at this point, purely due to the backlash. People like the decks they own, hate change and are bad at envisioning a better format. But DTT is also obviously busted, even less interesting a card than brainstorm, and has created a t1 deck that is both super powerful and super boring to play w/ or against (omni.) If wizards cares at all about legacy banning DTT is the least they can do. Nobody's gonna quit over that. I think even the omni players know that their good times can't last forever.

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Originally Posted by iatee

Well, uninteractive t1 losses bring misery to the other guy and the net effect is probably more misery than happiness since you ruined someone's tournament but have almost no chance of winning yourself. So you get some troll-lolz, great, you probably could have done that by tripping an old lady or something.

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I don't know what legacy scene you're at, but Belcher makes me chuckle - and I exclusively play decks that get shit on by Belcher. Most legacy players I know don't get pissed seeing Belcher do well, and if they get that pairing they take it in good grace.

I mean it depends on the stakes of the tournament. I do think that legacy is generally less spike-y than other formats, probably cause there's relatively little on the line and the playerbase is a little older. But in a serious tournament, nobody is going to be happy when they lose a match without playing a card. So there's a big difference between playing belcher at your local event one night to troll your friends and showing up to GP Seattle with it.

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Originally Posted by iatee

The deck building constraints is part of the bigger problem - you can't splash force if you want the effect, so you have to play a lot of blue cards. Which end up being the same blue cards everyone else plays. DTT now allows these decks to make up for the card disadvantage too. So as long as DTT is unbanned Force is 'even more powerful' - you'll make up for that early 2 for 1 in a few turns.

Realistically I don't see brainstorm ever being banned at this point, purely due to the backlash. People like the decks they own, hate change and are bad at envisioning a better format. But DTT is also obviously busted, even less interesting a card than brainstorm, and has created a t1 deck that is both super powerful and super boring to play w/ or against (omni.) If wizards cares at all about legacy banning DTT is the least they can do. Nobody's gonna quit over that. I think even the omni players know that their good times can't last forever.

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I don't think in terms of _______ players, or ______ players. There are just cards and the card pool. One card out paces the other by double and is way better and way more of an offender in creating a 56 card format.

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Originally Posted by nedleeds

I don't think in terms of _______ players, or ______ players. There are just cards and the card pool. One card out paces the other by double and is way better and way more of an offender in creating a 56 card format.

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Yes, brainstorm is everywhere. This does have the function, that the format is actually broader than without brainstorm, as it's playable in everything [wanting that effect]. No other card has that quality.

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Originally Posted by nedleeds

I don't think in terms of _______ players, or ______ players. There are just cards and the card pool. One card out paces the other by double and is way better and way more of an offender in creating a 56 card format.

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I mean you don't have to convince me there. You just have to convince the people with foil japanese brainstorms and everyone else who feels super attached to their current brainstorm deck.

I have signed Korean Oaths and a double signed beta Black Lotus. Let's unban them. Because, attachment.