[Premium Article] The New Legacy Banned List, and What it Means for You

Ehm, we're still arguing about Combo/Control/Aggro?

I was under the impression that kind of classification was pretty old and was replaced by something like this:

Grinding decks (most control, few aggressive cards, lot of setup cards) -> Bomb Decks (ramp, midrange, combo, some big aggressive cards, some setup ones)-> Swarm decks (aggro, burn, little to no setup cards, lot of aggressive cards)-> Grinding decks

In this case, if Combo disappear (which i don't think it's the case) and aggro deck go wild, the logical consequence is to play midrange decks like Rock. And those deck lose to permission even more than combo does.

Just my 0.02

Since combo will be less popular Counterbalance decks will also see less play.
Zoo will be everywhere, and maybe Landstill will return as a solid choice. Also Enchantress and Aggro Loam become good choices..
Anyways the choice of banning MT will affect the meta.
And for the last time: banning Tarmogoyf is wrong!! It's a vanilla creature. It's strong, but has no evasion and dies easily to whatever removal in the game!

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Originally Posted by Vacrix

Less forgiving = harder to play
If you fuck up with a non-storm deck, at least you can recover from your mistake. Play mistakes don't put you behind; they literally kill you. This can be said of pretty much any storm combo deck in the format. If you fuck up, it isn't likely you will be going off again for a few turns. Those few turns is all a deck with a half decent clock needs to kill you.

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No it doesn't. Less forgiving = less forgiving. Harder to play = harder to play.

A deck that is less forgiving means that making a single mistake is more deadly, but that doesn't mean that the decisions are intrinsically more difficult or intellectually challenging.

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Since combo will be less popular Counterbalance decks will also see less play.

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Counterbalance was popular when combo wasn't seeing much play, to begin with. Counterbalance prevents the majority of the format from playing spells, and is still extremely strong against decks like Zoo, despite popular belief.

Counterbalance is going to continue to see alot of play. The difference now, is that you are going to see those Counterbalance decks become alot more hostile towards aggro strategies.

I see board control with Counterbalance becoming the next Tier 1 deck, although I think that archetype should have become a Tier 1 deck a long time ago.

I also see the aggro/control CounterTop decks splashing red. Grim Lavamancer dominates Goblins and Merfolk, which were CounterTop's worst matchups. Firespout answers Goblins, Merfolk, and Zoo.

Once the format starts to handle all of these small aggressive aggro decks, midrange aggro will probably make a comeback. Aggro Loam and The Rock will trump the small aggro decks, as well as the small aggro answers like Grim Lavamancer and Firespout.

The metagames going to keep shifting like that until it finds its new sweet spot.

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Originally Posted by Smmenen

No it doesn't. Less forgiving = less forgiving. Harder to play = harder to play.

A deck that is less forgiving means that making a single mistake is more deadly, but that doesn't mean that the decisions are intrinsically more difficult or intellectually challenging.

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I'm not sure this is in any case the correct question to ask. I was thinking at a simplified model, where you have 2 decks equally "hard to play", but more or less "forgiving"

Let's say you have to take 3 decisions during a game, and let's assume that an average player has 90% possibility to make the right choice and that this possibility is independent of the deck (CB or ANT), but for ANT every mistake has 100% of losing you the game, while for CB the value is 10%.

So, with ANT you have a 27% chance of losing the game on bad decisions, with counterbalance only 3%. To obtain that value the ANT player should be able to master his deck at 99% correctness. This basically means that a higher skill level is required to play ANT (well) than CB.

Lets look at an opposite scenario. Let's suppore that ANT is "harder to play" but "equally forgiving", and the same average player has an 80% possibility to make the correct decision with ANT and a 90% with CB, but in either case he has a 10% chance to lose the game if he makes the wrong choice.

Now the chance to lose the game with ANT due to bad decisions is only 6%. You could say that this deck is "harder to play", but this may very well be a pure phylosophical question, since Average Joe tends to "auto lose" more with the "easier" deck.

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Originally Posted by Hanni

Counterbalance was popular when combo wasn't seeing much play, to begin with. Counterbalance prevents the majority of the format from playing spells, and is still extremely strong against decks like Zoo, despite popular belief.

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Zoo is much stronger now than it was then, and Merfolk rose a lot in popularity. Even with the banning of MT, the metagame wont be the same as 1 year and a half ago. It's not assured that CB will still be a winning strategy. Of course neither can we say for sure that it will disappear.

I have the feeling that CB will be no more a Tier 1 strategy, but we will see in some months.

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I have the feeling that CB will be no more a Tier 1 strategy, but we will see in some months.

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By design, Counterbalance is a very broken strategy. The format was completey warped because of it, and the metagame adapted to handle it. It's still a broken strategy. Legacy is format defined by 1cc and 2cc staples, and Counterbalance prevents those spells from being played. Zoo has Qasali, which itself is countered by Counterbalance. Krosan Grip is the only spell that adequately answers it.

Expect to see Counterbalance decks become much more hostile to aggro strategies in the coming months. By hostile, I mean expect to see spells like Grim Lavamancer and Firespout make big showings.

Spanish Inquisition will dominate. Mark my words.

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Originally Posted by Sevryn

Spanish Inquisition will dominate. Mark my words.

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Shhhhhh. You can't have people expecting it.
(See what I did there?)

hahaha

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Originally Posted by Sevryn

Spanish Inquisition will dominate. Mark my words.

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I am also rooting for Cephalid Breakfast. Screw you WotC, you can't stop my turn 1-2 combos!!


EDIT: I dare you to ban Worldly Tutor too or I will break the card in every possible way imaginable.

I can't believe I wasted my time reading this.

We are back to Chicago metagame. That's it.

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Originally Posted by frogboy

@Dalkon: Tendrils has been dominating the Netherlands for months, and to discount the results from the largest tournament of all time that saw a Mystical v. Mystical final due to a lack of sample size is more than a little disingenuous. Sure, a lot of Zoo decks made day two, where they got crushed by all of the people playing loam decks and combo decks after they started getting paired against Silvergill Adept.

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With all due respect to our Scandanavian brethren, I think the dominance of AnT there has more to do with saturation than with the inherent goodness of the deck. To simplify, let's say that CB Top has a 70% win ratio against AnT and that you've got a 5 round tournament with cut to T8 where said CB Top faces AnT all 5 rounds. You've got a 50/50 shot of making T8 with that CB Top even though you post a fantastic matchup in all 5 rounds. On average, you win 3.5 matches, meaning half the time 3 and half the time 4 (obviously that's not 100% accurate, sometimes you'll scrub out after 2 rounds and sometimes you'll win out, but 3-2 and 4-1 will be the most common finishes). 3-2 (or worse) is not going to put you in T8. So it looks like AnT is dominating, but in reality, it's just field saturation. Again, this is very simplistic, as you'll never see clean numbers like that, but the model illustrates how saturation can cause a deck to appear better than it is. I felt the same applied to the NE metagame when Legacy split from Vintage. It took months for bad storm decks to disappear and even longer for ATS to fade out and I will argue to my dying day that neither Long or ATS was ever a tier 1 deck.

Edit: That's not really fair. I do think that ATS was good, just not as dominating as people thought it was. I got a little carried away at the end there.

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Originally Posted by Hanni

By design, Counterbalance is a very broken strategy. The format was completey warped because of it, and the metagame adapted to handle it. It's still a broken strategy. Legacy is format defined by 1cc and 2cc staples, and Counterbalance prevents those spells from being played. Zoo has Qasali, which itself is countered by Counterbalance. Krosan Grip is the only spell that adequately answers it.

Expect to see Counterbalance decks become much more hostile to aggro strategies in the coming months. By hostile, I mean expect to see spells like Grim Lavamancer and Firespout make big showings.

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I 100% agree with your last sentence, I also think that this will be the way to go. I don't know if it will be enough. Future metagame will be different from what it was post Chicago, it will be faster, even with the downfall of combo. We will see if a new version of a Counterbalance deck will manage to fight to the top.