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I concede that data from 10 SCG tournaments, consisting of thousands of matches, deriving win percentage to overcome bias of pilot numbers, looks a bit silly next to the entirety of data you touted as evidence: top 8 participants from 1 SCG tournament and a 25-person tournament.Quote:
Originally Posted by maharis
This is the April Italian Meta at this time (analysis and research work by Pera):
MAZZO........................PT....TOP
1 StoneBlade...................51.....7
2 Team America.................49.....8
3 Infect.......................35.....5
4 Omnitell.....................35.....5
5 Death&Taxes..................32.....5
6 Shardless BUG................27.....4
7 ANT..........................25.....3
8 Threshold.....................24.....4
9 DeathBlade...................23.....3
10 UWr Miracle..................22.....4
As opposed to a five round event? 3 out of the top 8 on miracles when 20% of the room is on miracles sounds alarming to you?Quote:
Originally Posted by maharis
I'd rather trust larger events, more events.
Legacy is a FANTASTIC brewing format. Why? Because regardless of what strategy you want to employ, every deck has -something- very powerful at its disposal. The same cannot be said of most other formats.Quote:
You know why I like modern? Because it's brewable. Because there's no "well, guess I'd better start with these 30 cards or totally hate on them because there's no other option to win." That is actually somewhat refreshing.
That's why we get so many new decks all the time. :rolleyes:Quote:
Originally Posted by Tammit67
What were the latest addition to the meta that were actually new decks and not variants of the same crap? I can only think of Sylvan Plug and Grixis Delver/Control (which isn't too different from the stuff we already have - same shells, different wincons, maybe slightly different disruption).
There are basically three kinds of decks in Legacy:Quote:
The "because there's no other option to win" is an incorrect assessment of Legacy as a format, or intentional exaggeration.
1) Brainstorm decks
2) Narrowly focused blue hate decks (D&T/Painter)
3) Decks that run on very specific and unadaptable CA engines that can't be replicated elsewhere (Elves, Dredge, Lands)
And Nos. 2 & 3 make up less than a quarter of the format. So I don't think it's inaccurate to say that if you are attempting to brew a new serious deck, that your deck probably needs to run the Brainstorm + fetches engine or have an answer to that engine (Chalice on one, MD choke/REB, etc.)
As I said upthread, I had a lot of fun when I was able to land my SDT/Sylvan + Courser engine in Junk, but I would never take it to a long tournament because over more rounds, I know that attempting to stick a couple permanents is not what I want to depend on. I will probably just take a deck with 8+ cantrips. That kind of sucks.
Quote:
The Modern is brew-able claim has yet to be validated, that's your subjective understanding as well.
Look, I'll play Cloudform-Dreadnought all day, but it's still a Brainstorm + fetch deck. I don't love Modern, but I like that I have an outlet for some of my wackier ideas. Let's take a card like Myth Realized -- it's a nice fit with Loam/Crime/Souls/Smallpox. But there's no way a BWG pox/loam deck can keep up in Legacy because Brainstorm just stabilizes the opponent before the attrition engine gets online. And these are all good cards, it's not like I'm trying to play tribal dwarves and getting frustrated. Just that any attempt to brew is diminished by the presence of the Brainstorm engine because why do anything else?Quote:
Legacy is a FANTASTIC brewing format. Why? Because regardless of what strategy you want to employ, every deck has -something- very powerful at its disposal. The same cannot be said of most other formats.
And you are right, I suppose, and that's calling Sylvan Plug a real addition to the meta and not a fun pet deck that some people are working on.Quote:
What were the latest addition to the meta that were actually new decks and not variants of the same crap? I can only think of Sylvan Plug and Grixis Delver/Control (which isn't too different from the stuff we already have - same shells, different wincons, maybe slightly different disruption).
You can't call Grixis a "new" deck with a straight face IMO, its just cantrips-bolt-REB-pyromancer with Therapy and Tasigur instead of Stoneforge and STP.
And to you and everyone else criticizing my choice of data -- I don't expect you to read every post I make, but I'm talking about a trend over the last few months where Miracles players are saying that the deck is incredibly powerful in nearly all matchups, plus an increase in results.Quote:
I concede that data from 10 SCG tournaments, consisting of thousands of matches, deriving win percentage to overcome bias of pilot numbers, looks a bit silly next to the entirety of data you touted as evidence: top 8 participants from 1 SCG tournament and a 25-person tournament.
The Reddit data is nice as a sort of overview, but it really is incomplete -- we have no idea if any top 8 competitors are even reporting. I mean is it really credible to call D&T 48% against the field when the deck is in the DTB section?
Fair enough point, but since Mystical Tutor, all bans have been explicitly based on power level -- Survival, Misstep, Cruise.Quote:
Originally Posted by btm10
Fine with me.Quote:
Originally Posted by btm10
I'm just going by the DTB forum, and seeing that graphs with Miracle Control at the top look a lot like UR burn or whatever they called Cruise Delver. There is still time to adjust, of course.Quote:
Originally Posted by btm10
I've only started this discussion because of the way the best Miracles pilots talked about the deck on the EE podcast and the fact that it's been at the top for nearly 18 months uninterrupted. I'm not even doing terribly against the deck personally (I did get blown out twice at Eternal Extravaganza but I was playing my deck very poorly) so this isn't so much a personal crusade because I can't win against it, but rather that I would like more options to actually play in Legacy and Miracles holds down a ton of them.
You are probably right. Sorry Nic Fitters. :mad:Quote:
Originally Posted by btm10
We don't many new decks all the time because it is difficult to print cards that are good enough to warp the meta. However, every archetype can do powerful things so should a card be printed powerful enough for our standard, the support cast to make it good exists!Quote:
Originally Posted by Barook
Consider the printing of vengevine: madness makes a comeback because it slots in a relatively powerful UG madness looking thing. Then people figure out the stuff we can do with survival! The survival plan ends up so good, we can slot something else into the deck- necrotic ooze. Suddenly, finding our survival is kinda core, so we can run enlightened tutor and with tutor in the deck, some people even get the chance to run a 1-of LED. New deck based around relatively new cards but the old powerful shell is ready to adapt it.
Omnitell: Show and tell shell exists already as UR sneak and show. July 2012 omniscience gets printed and while I'm sure people are trying to play the card, I don't see much in the way of results. 5 months later Enter the Infinite gets printed and we hit a critical mass of dumb blue things to cheat into play. Good thing a shell exists! Mono U Omni show makes an appearance, running the old card dream halls as show and tells 5-8 and suddenly we have a show and tell deck running cunning wish and release the ants of all things. Dig through time gets printed and we transition away from dream halls and enter the infinite to just cast emrakyl. You probably don't consider this a new deck since this all uses show and tell.
Miracles: I don't thing I really have to explain this one right? Sure a UW CB shell is there but the core of the deck changes so much with snapcaster/terminus/entreat.
Deathrite/abrupt decay: BUG delver certainly exists in the form of team america but it isn't a midrange sorta deal. Agent's printing reinvigorates the potential for Ancestral vision to be used as a card advantage engine and coupled with the printings of deathrite and abrupt decay to form Shardless BUG while a more modern (the format) approach creates Jund in Legacy, which in turn brings value back to punishing fire.
If you want to argue that new decks don't appear since things just slot into shells, I guess that is true. That is a feature of a non-rotating format: either a cards isn't played, replaces a currently used card, or defines an archetype. The problem with the last is if there is a card in legacy that defines an archetype, it has to be extremely powerful to carry the burden of the rest of the deck that previously didn't exist. That sort of power level is beyond what WotC is willing to knowingly and consistently print.
I on the otherhand disagree that these cards aren't spawning new playstyles or re-imaginings of other decks and that innovation is still possible.
EDIT: Brainstorm + fetch deck? Focus not on how a deck finds it's core strategy, but more on what it does when it finds the cards it wanted in the first place.
I have a dream that a deck is not judged based on the color of it's cards but on the playstyle of its defining interactions
It's funny that we indeed reached the same saturation of blue deck like we had with TC around once more with DTT pushing up to 51% of metagame presence which is even more than TC had in it's climax.
Sorry WotC, but this was expect- & avoidable.
Edit: The joke is that even Delver.dec runs it, and instead of potentially drawing lands among your 3 random cards you get to cherrypick 2 from the top 7. Seriously guys, WotC just shifted the issue of one Delve-Cardadvantage-card to another instead of hammering both and burry the concept right beneath storm
This is a rather specious argument, because it ignores that decks in category 1 run the gamut from aggro control to combo to pure control. Suggesting they're basically the same deck because they share a color and a CA engine is pretty misleading.Quote:
Originally Posted by maharis
That said, I don't think you're trying to be intellectually dishonest; rather I think this is where the breakdown in communication is happening in the pro- and anti- ban crowds. One side feels that Brainstorm essentially promotes diversity by lending consistency to a wide range of deck types, and the other side feels it stifles diversity by requiring that most decklists start with the same 4 cards / color.
I don't think either side is objectively right or wrong - it really is a matter of taste and opinion. I just think it's important to recognize that this is the point that's actually being argued. I think very few (if any) pro-Brainstorm people would argue that it's not the strongest or most influential card in the format. They just don't see it as a problem.
What was the TC saturation at its peak? About 40%? DTT sure sky-rocketed fast. I didn't believe it at first, but it's at almost 55% on MTGO now. :eek:Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemnear
I agree that it had to be expected, though. DTT is barely any worse than TC, depending on the deck, it's even better than TC. It might have been better to ban both similiar to Modern, but oh well, here we are.
I guess it's going to be banhammered within the next two ban announcements. When is the next one coming? With MMA2 or Origins?
Origins I believe
Hahahahaha, this is brilliant!Quote:
Originally Posted by Tammit67
Well said. We've seen a bunch of new decks in the last couple years. Legacy is the format of consistency. Eventually, other colors will get one-mana consistency generators - probably green specifically, WotC seems to be giving them better and better tools to dig, they just haven't hit a broken one yet. Lately, most of WotC's mistakes have been blue, but on the flip side they keep printing uncounterable cards - eventually we'll get an uncounterable discard spell.
I think the point is more that the 'blue CA engine' is more defining or more relevant than the archetype(s) they support.Quote:
Originally Posted by Zilla
To go way out on a limb, if there were a hypothetical Horrible Future where decks were 56 "Blue CA Engine" cards and 4 "something else" cards, it would illustrate a hyperbole but it would make a fair basis for argument - what part of the deck is more critical to its form and function at that point, the blue CA engine or the 4-of that ends the game directly? If we had decks that were like...
56x Blue Engine
4x Isamaru
...and they were pitted against decks like...
56x Blue Engine
4x Terminus
...who's gaming who here? What actually wins anyone the game, the ability to deal with the opponent's threat or the ability to interrupt the engine? Which cards are actually responsible for the bulk of the gameplay?
Maybe this resonates as a better one-off example; you ever play a mod of a game that was for all intents and purposes 'a different game' but you knew when you were playing it that the original engine was actually defining the execution of the game and the graphics, sounds, power-ups, etc were just borne out of that engine? If you played Shadow Warrior (1997), it basically played like a re-skin of Duke Nukem 3D -- and indeed they share the same engine, essentially (the Build engine). All the art was different but all the same mechanics were still there; the random quips from the hero, the look of the char at it moves through the world, the way the game handles, and so on... all these things made the game feel "only okay" at the end because it may as well have been Duke Nukem at the end of the day. It's like every Bejeweled clone that comes out; they are not different games, they just *look* different, or have one or two features that the devs wished that the original actually had, but at the end of the day the game had not really changed at all.
The presence of "blue shell + some cards I like" decks, have that same hollow look and feel that poorly executed games have; it makes you ask yourself why you aren't just playing the original, because palette swapping all the good guys/bad guys and changing the title doesn't actually make it a different game, it just makes it a funny-looking version of the original game.
Just to be clear, no one is truly, unironically and unsarcastically, trying to argue that combo, tempo, and control are just "re-skins" or "pallette swaps" or whatever of the blue shell in the general case, right? Ignoring many levels of gameplay nuance just for the sake of making a hyperbolic argument seems incredibly disingenuous, especially on a site devoted to legacy strategy.
What's especially egregious about the "Brainstorm deck" argument is that it also serves as an attempt to completely ignore the opportunity cost of playing cantrips, which is another underhanded angle to approach the argument from. Cantrips aren't tutors, they do involve sacrifices of tempo and composition, and they AREN'T a free pass to an immaculate and superior execution of a gameplan.
A good example of this is ANT, the 16 cantrip Adam Prosak build is an outdated relic, many builds have dropped down to anywhere from 13-15 cantrips. The rationale is significant: cantrips are slow by nature and just sitting on chains of cantrips exposes the pilot to all sorts of disruption. Nowadays, adding more power plays like Grim Tutor, PiF, or discard is a better choice because it actually lets the ANT player apply pressure. It's not as though every deck that can play cantrips necessarily gets better by continuously adding more cantrips, there is an optimization point because cantrips DO have a marginal cost for being played.
The thing that skews this paradigm is control or mono-blue combo that has countermagic to defend itself even when tapped and, most importantly, DTT to negate the card loss of Force of Will and put a player back into the game despite an exchange of cards. Again, revisiting ANT, if a Storm pilot bleeds both players out with discard, they have Ad Nauseam or Past in Flames to suddenly leap back into the game. These Storm engines put deck-building constraints on the user, though. Fair blue decks or mono-blue combo using Dig get a smaller version of that, that they can use 2-4 of, where the only constraint is "do things you were already considering doing". When you give common blue decks something unfair, then of course common blue decks will start to appear unfair, but maybe go after the thing that's breaking the standard paradigm as opposed to attacking the benign paradigm that's suffering from the broken card.
Oh no, I'll totally argue that as a hyperbole-binge. You can definitely break down a ton of matchups involving the standard Blue engine to "sculpt your hand, resolve your threat, and stick it." I am definitely omitting the nuance, and that's intentional. The 'nuance' you're talking about is only lost in translation if you're hung up on the other cards in the deck, which you don't have to be; that's always been Blue's slot in the game, is playing the game instead of being part of the game. Every other color deals in "color pie" and "flavor" and yada-yada-yada, and Blue just straight up goes "this shit is just cards. I want cards, and I want cards that make the other cards not resolve. The game is made of cards and that is all I want, is fucking cards."Quote:
Originally Posted by wonderPreaux
So there's a difference between S&T and UR Delver - of course there is. Not enough difference to remove all the cantrips and Forces, because that would be stupid. At that point, you're basically talking about pivoting away from the Blue core to something that tries to make up for not playing those cards. I don't think it is hyperbole to say that if we could build just to reduce variance and get good results as long as the cards were potent enough, Burn would be a major Deck to Beat for years and years. That deck has almost zero variance - you are either drawing land or 3/4 damage to the face. Zoo borrowed against that - what's Nacatl but a Bolt every turn? - where's Naya these days except squashed out by RU/x aggro variants that can play the aggro game more resiliently and more consistently than Zoo.
For all the goofy shit I say, I do read this website, believe it or not - take a look at the regular D&T players, see how they talk about what it is to play that deck knowing that they don't have the card selection that any given deck with Brainstorm has. A metagame deck with no cheap card draw - that's bringing a sweater to a wet t-shirt contest and hoping it snows.
That's true, but there hasn't been anything purely threatening the enjoyability of the format without also being broken since then either.Quote:
Originally Posted by maharis
I think the points where we actually disagree about Miracles are when it became dominant and whether we've had enough time to adjust. I don't think that Miracles was problematic until around the time Khans came out, which also coincides with the widespread adoption of the four-Ponder build. Until Cruise was banned Miracles was held in check by the Cruise decks, but the introduction of a smoother, easier to play Miracles deck (making the deck's full power accessible to people who don't have Lossett-levels of time with it), coupled with the deck finally gaining a raw CA tool in Dig (and giving it the ability to fight back against decks like Shardless that seek to win by making the game about card advantage) are the things that make it the best deck right now. That all being said, Grixis Pyromancer Control has a strong Miracles matchip, lots of existing decks can be tuned to improve their Miracles matchups, and decks like MUD, 12Post, and Tezzerator can pick up anlot of metagame slack if too many people start playing Miracles.Quote:
I'm just going by the DTB forum, and seeing that graphs with Miracle Control at the top look a lot like UR burn or whatever they called Cruise Delver. There is still time to adjust, of course.
I've only started this discussion because of the way the best Miracles pilots talked about the deck on the EE podcast and the fact that it's been at the top for nearly 18 months uninterrupted. I'm not even doing terribly against the deck personally (I did get blown out twice at Eternal Extravaganza but I was playing my deck very poorly) so this isn't so much a personal crusade because I can't win against it, but rather that I would like more options to actually play in Legacy and Miracles holds down a ton of them.
Quoted for truth. Because Dig's brokenness is more subtle I don't see it getting banned for at least 18 months, if it gets banned at all.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemnear
What dig tools? :really: The last one I can think of is Ancient Stirrings at one mana. GSZ is also nice. But that's about it. The rest is either blue, overcosted or shit. Edit: Also, if it's broken enough, it would need to be very specific to prevent blue decks from abusing it best. Best example: Mental Misstep - playable by every deck, but it boosted blue decks the most.Quote:
Originally Posted by iGrok
As for discard, call me when they print a good discard spell for :b: that also fateseals 2. Brainstorm hiding cards is a arguably a bigger offender than counters.
I don't think that 55% meta penetration (while probably still rising) is very subtle.Quote:
Originally Posted by btm10
I think that people will work out some 'optimal pile'. What if 3/4 of the decks all contain:Quote:
Originally Posted by btm10
4 Brainstorm
4 Ponder
4 Gitaxian Probe
4 Dig Through Time
4 Force of Will
Fetchlands
And the format will turn into:
1. Blue shell
2. Anti-Blue shell
3. All In.
Discard plus fateseal would probably be too strong - I think split second or making the shuffle would be more appropriate.Quote:
As for discard, call me when they print a good discard spell for :b: that also fateseals 2
But we are already in that kind of format for quite a while now.Quote:
Originally Posted by rufus
And the prediction you made isn't too far off from reality. The only things off right now are the use of Probe (currently around 34%) and people not running 4 Digs.
As for the discard, I'm not expecting them to put Fateseal on any discard anytime soon. Split Second never appeared after TS block. Shuffling sounds like an elegant solution, especially with a may clause, because it forces both players into skill-based decisions.
We're never going to get to this though. The character of the 20 cards in your shell kind of guarantees that you'll never see all of them as the basis of the format.Quote:
Originally Posted by rufus
What we will get to at some point is something like this:
85% of lists
4 Brainstorm
4 Force of Will
90% of those:
4 Ponder or 4 Gitaxian Probe
4 Delver of Secrets or 4 Terminus or (4 Ponder if 4 Gitaxian Probe above)
4 Daze or 3 Spell Pierce + 1 Spell Snare or 3 Counter Spell + 1 Spell Snare or 4 Preordain
Some number of Spell Pierce + Spell Snare if 4 Daze above or some number of Dig through Time if not Daze above
A few obvious best choices to supplement the choices above from cards currently in print or to be printed
18-25 mana sources and utility lands
That's where we get to the Blue Shell Over All Meta and while it may seem very diverse in fact it is excluding 99% of all the good cards ever printed from active consideration. We're already well down the road to that meta at this point given the 2006 to 2015 progression, which has gotten steadily bluer over time.