All B/R update speculation.

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Originally Posted by iatee

So Survival = t4 Griselbrand (or Emrakul even, since you can do it on the stack) assuming no disruption? T3 with a dork. That's probably too strong overall but it's close.

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Show and Tell can do that on turn 1 and often does on turn 2... I do not know anymore whether my blind hatred of Show and Tell has made me irrational or whatever, but doesn't turn 3 Griseldicks sound rather quaint given Legacy's current nature? I mean, why is one version of t3 derp ok but another isn't?

Let me know if I'm in the wrong peeps.


I'm still not understanding these arguments against Recruiter of "time." Does anyone remember the GP Lille coverage? 20 mins to resolve 6 cantrips in 7 turns is a lot slower than I am with my Recruiters. Do we ban High Tide cos it's "slow" in the hands of anyone not called Feline Longmore or David Gearhart? Wait Miracles still exists and even good players take an age to play it... and again, people resolving ponder/preordain/brainstorm take fucking ages. Can we just be consistent on our rulings please? I'm still not over Goblins yet, so I will harp on about this until I finally get over the deck.

P.S: What is this obsession with speed and only playing 30 second games? This isn't fucking speed chess, it's Magic. Should we not be allowed to play cards that are interesting because they *may* take 20 seconds longer to resolve than Lava Spike or Reanimate?

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Originally Posted by Barook

Why are people arguing now what control decks are prison decks? That distinction seems rather silly as any control deck's ultimate goal is to control the game aka preventing your opponent from what he/she wants to do. If you don't control your opponent's game, your deck is probably more of a midrange deck.

Countertop does lock certain decks out of games. It's a bonafide prison element.

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I was being sarcastic. It's frustrating to hear constantly that Miracles is Legacy's only "classic" control deck because of its low creature count and blue cards despite the fact that:

--The best builds are consistently adding creatures, not taking them out

--It's not really a classic control deck if counter/remove everything then win counts, unless you also consider Chalice decks to be classic control decks, which no one does because they're not blue

--Lands (for example) is a creatureless and reactive deck, but since it doesn't play blue people call it a prison deck and say that doesn't count

Lands has also shifted more towards being a combo deck, Miracles does remain the only purely control strategy in the format.

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Originally Posted by Stevestamopz

Show and Tell can do that on turn 1 and often does on turn 2... I do not know anymore whether my blind hatred of Show and Tell has made me irrational or whatever, but doesn't turn 3 Griseldicks sound rather quaint given Legacy's current nature? I mean, why is one version of t3 derp ok but another isn't?

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Not to mention you have to find, resolve and untap with a permanent, then activate it a couple times (needle/revoker come into play here), then put another creature on the stack and into play while your target sits in the GY (DRS, scooze, SB hate).

I don't see it being that much more oppressive than S&T or Reanimate.

That brings us to the Vengevine problem but then again what's 16 power coming across on turn 3 compared to what Elves can do with its nut draw?

To me I think the RL status, fear of what happened before, and unease over what could happen with future printings will keep it banned but I don't think it would do much more to the format than Eldrazi did... present a new viable threat that you have to think about, but still be eminently beatable.

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Originally Posted by Lord_Mcdonalds

To be fair, Lands has also shifted more towards being a combo deck, Miracles does remain the only purely control strategy in the format.

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Miracles has always had a combo finish, unless suddenly untapping with 24 power of angels or finding a top and a mentor then attacking for 36 doesn't qualify because the deck also plays counterspells.

The difference between SnT + Griselbrand/Omni/whatever and Survival + stuff is that Survival is a one card combo. Two only if you count 'you need any creature in your hand', but that's very easy. Resolving one two drop and not having it instantly answered shouldn't be enough to win the game. We accept two card combo decks because they rarely just have the natural combo and have to spend time / resources digging for it.

Overall I think people are too hopped up on unbanning stuff. There are like 15k magic cards out there, you get to play with 99.99% of them and they print hundreds of new ones a year. Banned cards are not gifts from god that Wotc takes away from us, they are just attempts to fix things that were clearly mistakes, attempts to tailor the format and make it more interesting and dynamic. I think you could find justification for banning at least a dozen currently legal cards that 'trap' the format and were ultimately design mistakes that would never be printed today. The set of 'decks that are playable in that theoretical world' would be far larger than the decks that exist right now, but it's harder to mourn for those theoretical decks than it is for cards you already play / used to play - which is why Brainstorm will never be banned, regardless of whether it should.

The difference in survival and show and tell is that one gets to run the cantrip cartel and force very easily and the other one needs a pile of green mana to do anything at all and requires much more deck restriction needing your deck to run terrible things like loyal retainers.

Well, you have a 40% chance of having it in your opening 7, higher if you count mulligans + an extra card on the draw. And who needs Brainstorm - you can play 4 E tutor. At that point your chance of having it on the field t2 is already extremely high. That goldfishes pretty fast. In any case, are we really missing out by not experiencing this deck? Is 'we don't have enough linear combo decks that get a fast Griselbrand' an issue for legacy? I don't think so.

Survival is a cool card when it lets people play decision dense games with a large tutor package, not when it's just a linear combo piece. We have enough of those already.

With survival, wouldn't new printings like Cage or C. Priest make it less obnoxious?

Anyways as an Elf player, I would love to see what survival would do. However, in the mean time: fuck miracles. I don't think it needs a ban per say, but I have to admit it's obnoxious to play against.

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Originally Posted by AznSeal

With survival, wouldn't new printings like Cage or C. Priest make it less obnoxious?

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Yes and no... The Survival pilot could just search up the singleton answer in response to your sideboard card. This is also the case for Pithing Needle and Phyrexian Revoker.

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Originally Posted by Megadeus

The difference in survival and show and tell is that one gets to run the cantrip cartel and force very easily and the other one needs a pile of green mana to do anything at all and requires much more deck restriction needing your deck to run terrible things like loyal retainers.

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Because Brainstorm was never IN THE SAME DECK as survival /s

Because Survival would create SO MUCH diversity among creature strategies /s

I need a second ... can barely write because of laughing

Lemnear, everything he said is entirely true. What has you laughing?

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Originally Posted by Finn

Lemnear, everything he said is entirely true. What has you laughing?

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Because a) UG Survival ran Brainstorm AND SotF while b) completely killing ANY diversity of creature strategies, ergo the complete opposite of what we expect an unbanning should do.

Its completely ridiculous to claim StoF is a fairer card now given how the creature-cardpool developed and its comical that people still discuss about Vengevine as if it was the benchmark for Survival TODAY.

Cursory Google search yields that people did run brainstorm and survival in the same deck, admittedly this was Bant survival, not UG survival.

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Originally Posted by Lord_Mcdonalds

Cursory Google search yields that people did run brainstorm and survival in the same deck, admittedly this was Bant survival, not UG survival.

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Next time I write UGx Survival. Cool?

Regarding why these cards won't be unbanned: (warning, wall of pedantic text incoming) part 1 of 2

• Mental Misstep - Legacy is largely centered around 1-drops, especially in the early turns. If this card cost 1{U}, *maybe* it'd be alright. Or perhaps even {U}{U}, or perhaps instead {U}{some other color of Phyrexian Mana, maybe Black?}. Or perhaps it could have a "real" mana cost of 1U and then also have an alternate cost option of {U} + exile a card in your hand (the idea being that the life loss becomes more significant and/or having card disadvantage like FoW, and also making it 2cmc so that it couldn't target other copies of itself). But as printed, Misstep just led to a very miserable format, made even worse by the fact you could Misstep other Missteps. The format shouldn't require decks to start with 3-4 Missteps and then decide on the other 56-57 cards (as even non-Blue decks were playing Misstep). I think they had pure intentions with designing this card to give non-Blue decks a way to fight combo and interact on turn 1 on the Draw against all the various unfair 1-drops, but clearly it wasn't tested for Legacy and as-printed it should remain banned. Perhaps they could print one of my 'fixed' suggestions when they inevitably do the Return to New Phyrexia block, and perhaps a fixed version would be okay in Legacy (but even then, maybe not! Perhaps 4 copies of an On-the-Draw counterspell (i.e. Force of Will) is the maximum allowable amount for Legacy format balance).
  
• Earthcraft - This one might be safe. It combos with Squirrel Nest, but that's rather clunky in comparison to alternative two-card combos already in the format. And without a Haste enabler or similar method to use the Squirrel army on the same turn as generation, the combo even gives your opponent another turn to interact. I think it'd actually be more easily abused in Elves.dec, even without playing Squirrel Nest. There are plenty of main-deckable answers to this card, and giving Green access to a combo and/or making Enchantress.dec more competitive probably wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. *However*, a problem is that the combo pieces are tutor-able with Enlightened Tutor, which could make some sort of Bant or Selesnya Control/Combo deck with a bunch of toolbox answers and a combo finish (that's relatively cheaply costed to boot) quite powerful and consistent. So actually... Earthcraft should probably stay banned. There are enough degenerate combo decks available; having another one in the format isn't necessarily a net-gain for the Legacy format as a whole. I like variety, but Combo is not the archetype that needs more options in my opinion.
  
• Flash - Without Mystical Tutor to consistently find it, Flash Hulk is a bit less consistent... But still busted, especially as you can still use Summoner's Pact to find your Protean Hulk and win with a hasty team of Slivers or whatever. There's also plenty of other high-CMC creatures with busted ETB triggers. No thanks. Flash is a card that was designed at a time when creatures where not nearly as powerful, and I think the 'spirit' of the card when it was designed was likely intended as a method of enabling a creature to be cast at Instant speed, perhaps as a surprise combat trick or as an end-of-turn threat deployment for Draw-Go Blue decks of that earlier era that wanted to generally hold up mana for their counterspells. I highly doubt that the card's designed intention was to enable degenerate game-ending board states for a mere 2-mana. Flash should stay banned and only played in Vintage.
  
• Frantic Search; Gush - Blue has enough broken draw spells, it really doesn't need more. These cards are especially busted in the right shells, e.g. Frantic Search in UBx Reanimator and High Tide; Gush in Delver.dec (but really ANY Blue deck, as it functions in multiple roles as free card draw, Storm count increaser, Mentor/Pyromancer token generation, Wasteland-proofing for your Island duals, and enabling a 3rd-turn land drop and thus mana acceleration if you only have 2 lands at the moment, etc... Gush's "draw-back" of the alternate cost is quite frequently an advantage, as in addition to the aforementioned uses it also gives you 2 un-needed lands in hand to put back with Brainstorm and shuffle away). No and no, these cards are at Vintage power level and should stay there.
  
• Hermit Druid - I am not a fan of 1-card combos. At least with stuff like OopsAllSpell.dec, you have to run a Belcher-esque strategy that folds to even just a small amount of disruption; a Hermit Druid deck would be able to run Blue to protect its combo, smooth it's draws, and could also easily search for its namesake via Worldly Tutor and Green Sun's Zenith if it wanted tutoring in addition to Brainstorm + Ponder. With Cavern of the Souls, Hermit is even uncounterable, and there are a myriad of options of giving him haste and/or protecting him for a turn to activate for the win. And Hermit only costs 2-mana, meaning there's no need to even run acceleration like you do for a lot of Combo decks (unless you wanted to run Lotus Petal or ESG, etc. to power him out on Turn 1). No thanks. I prefer games with a higher degree of interaction; 1-card combo decks (and combo decks without much or any interaction in general) are usually 'feel bad' games for both sides of the table, regardless of who even wins. (Full disclosure: I'm one of those players who'd like to see Show and Tell banned just because of how absurd high-CMC permanents have become over the years -- cards like Emrakul, Griselbrand and Omniscience have rules text that come just about as close as possible to saying 'you win the game' without literally saying so, and SnT is arguably a 1-card combo despite requiring said permanent to be in your hand when you cast it -- or perhaps another way of looking at it is as a Ritual that can you net you upwards of 15 mana for only :2::u:). Plus, Hermit Druid wouldn't even have to be the *only* combo element in a deck; you could easily slot him into something like BUGx Aluren or Food Chain or whatever and have an extremely fast & consistent Plan A and Plan B combos that basically win on the spot. You could even slot him and the requisite combo pieces into some "normal" non-combo deck to have a transformative sideboard that wins out nowhere unexpectedly, similar to how some builds of TinFins.dec are using Mentor + Mystic/BSkull as a backup sideboard Plan to sidestep hate for their primary combo strategy, except in reverse. The only requirement is that you put a couple cards that interact when they're in the graveyard and run no Basic lands -- meaning Druid could easily be a backup plan for a UGx Delver or Infect deck that wins as early as turn 3 with counterspells to protect it -- perhaps even spending a few slots in the main deck as an "oops I win" option that you can just stumble into randomly. I would hate for Legacy decks to start having to main-deck stuff like Pithing Needle just to address the variety of combo decks in such a format, and Hermit.dec wouldn't even be particularly fun or interesting to face off against. tl;dr: No.
  
• Goblin Recruiter - Resolving the trigger optimally could end up taking too much time in a tournament setting, even for an experienced Goblin pilot. Furthermore, any card that allows you to stack your deck sadly opens the door for possible cheating (even if only by supposed 'accident'). If they printed a "fixed" version of this card (likely with a higher CMC) that also only searched up a smaller number of Goblins (say, up to 3 or maybe 4) and required you to reveal them to your opponent and then perhaps even had your opponent choose the order they were stacked on top, then perhaps Goblin Recruiter 2.0 would be alright for Legacy and give Goblin players a new toy to play with and perhaps make the deck a bit more competitive. But this card is another holdover from a time when the best options it could search up was stuff like Goblin Balloon Brigade and Goblin Tinkerer and hope that your Goblin King (which might have not yet even been errata'd to be considered a Goblin instead of a "Lord") would get there. tl;dr: No. But perhaps a 'fixed' version could be introduced at some point.
  
• Mana Drain - we don't need to give Blue a strictly-better Counterspell. The color simply doesn't need any more help right now, and this card would support the sort of deck that I'd honestly rather not see in Legacy. Countering the opponent's 2-drop and playing a turn-3 Jace is simply Not Fun (or fair, for that matter), and neither would having to shell out like $1000+ to bring your Blue control deck up to the new Legacy post-Mana-Drain-unbanning Tier 1 standards. (And that's *if* you could even find and afford the card; I'm sure speculators with plenty of disposable income would rush to buy-out all remaining available copies once the announcement was hinted at [add to that, the tinfoil hat theory that some retailers are suspected of having insider knowledge of B&R updates in advance of the official public announcements], thus raising the secondary market-value of a single copy to be worth more than many Legacy player's entire 2-week paycheck... and this card was printed in such low numbers that it'd be possible that even people with the requisite monetary funds couldn't even find a playset to purchase... and it's not exactly a card that Wizards seems all that keen on reprinting in supplementary products, reserve list status or not). I'm also fairly certain that the 'spirit' of the card was designed so that at least sometimes the tacked-on ability would become a legitimate drawback because of the now-absent Mana Burn rules. Under the old rules with Mana Burn, Mana Draining a high-CMC spell could occasionally be a risky endevour if you didn't have something to sink the extra mana into, or at least provided a tangible drawback at times, making it not always better than the original, good ol' Counterspell. Without that drawback, Drain is now strictly better than Counterspell (which is already very Legacy playable). Drain is solid disruption that has a potentially huge upside that could help fuel a degenerate Ux deck playing a bunch of higher-than-typical-CMC bombs that would be accelerated out by countering your opponent's spells -- such a deck might even counter a comparatively minor threat that would've otherwise been ignored with Counterspell, just to have access to the extra mana available on the following turn to cast their Jace or Tezzeret or whatever. From a design and flavor perspective, Mana Drain is also partially in the wrong color and breaks the color pie. Green (and sometimes Red, and now more rarely Black) are the colors of ramp and short-term, one-shot mana acceleration. Now that Wizards' design team has a better handle on color identity and a card's power and effect balanced with its CMC, we know what Mana Drain should have cost: :g::g::u::u: -- also known as Plasm Capture (well, maybe it'd actually cost :1::g::u::u: seeing as Drain only yields generic mana as opposed to PC's colored yield).

Wall of Pedantic Text explaining why cards won't be unbanned, part 2 of 2:

• Memory Jar, Wheel of Fortune, Timetwister - We should always be wary of any card that says 'Draw 7', and unless said card has a significant drawback, requires some difficult set-up or has an incredibly high mana cost it is likely to be abused in a combo deck that somehow makes the effect essentially one-sided. None of these cards belong in Legacy; Storm.dec is capable of operating as a Tier 1 strategy even without added help.
  
• Mind's Desire - see above; Storm.dec doesn't really need additional cards like this. From a purely personal standpoint, I'd also prefer to not have more High Tide decks running around and dragging tournament rounds to time each and every round as they finally start resolving their final combo turns.
  
• Mind Twist - While this card is frequently just a bad Hymn to Tourach, Hymn limits itself to *only* hitting two cards at most, and also has the significant cost of requiring double-Black mana to be consistently played on Turn 2 -- which forces some deck building concessions and can't be easily slotted into just any deck splashing Black. Mind Twist doesn't have this drawback, and the effect scales as the game goes on. "Hymn, Hymn I win" is a famous MtG idiom for good reason, and Mind Twist for 4 achieves the same result but on a single card. Twist can be abused early with the aid of mana acceleration -- a Black deck running Rituals, Sol lands and/or cheap mana rocks such as Grim Monolith could turn Mind Twist into a savage beating. Resolving a Twist with X=3+ in the first few turns generally means you've won the game, and could be realistically achieved with consistency in the right build. Storm.dec could run this alongside its other Discard spells as something to do with its available lands while crafting its hand (obviously they'd probably first want to cast Duress in advance to clear out any Misdirections/Diverts). UBx Delver and Esper-Blade decks could run some of these as a mid-game disruptive element that likely wins the game with enough mana expenditure. There are plenty of other decks that could easily slot this in with basically no consequence or requirement to build around it aside from access to a Black mana source; Twist would simply be an "Oops, guess I win since I resolved this spell and you didn't have a counter" thing. While I don't think it's nearly as strong as some of the other cards on the banned list, discard at this level of power is definitely busted in Legacy (regardless of Brainstorm and other cantrips) and doesn't lead to fun or interactive games. That said, I think it's probably one of the "safest" banned cards to release back into Legacy (at least as a temporary test-run with the contingency of immediate re-banning if needed), but I don't think it'd be very fun or make for better tournament play experience -- and Fun and Interactivity seem to be major factors considered for the DCI's B&R List management. There's also not really any deck I can think of that is severely lacking in power or competitiveness due to the absence of this particular card that would suddenly become more playable just because of its addition. What would be more likely to happen is that UBx decks would run 1-2 copies of Mind Twist (with perhaps more in the sideboard), leading to random blowouts and un-fun games. No thanks. *However*, I think that perhaps Vintage could have this card come off of the Restricted List (if it isn't already?), since boosting the power of discard in that format wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing since stuff like Ancestral Recall, Gush and Treasure Cruise are cards that realistically enable a come-back following a big Twist -- it'd also incentivize Vintage players to run Black instead of just sticking with White and/or Red as the splash colors for their Blue decks, which seems to be all the rage now.
  
• Mystical Tutor, Vampiric Tutor, Imperial Seal - Mystical Tutor is basically a better Vampiric Tutor as it's Blue and doesn't cost life and often searches up the same targets as Vampiric anyways. Imperial Seal being a Sorcery still doesn't make it weak enough to offset bringing incredible consistency to Combo.decs (and I'd also hate to see Legacy combo decks have to tack on yet another $2000+~ to their price tags to be optimally competitive). I'm surprised that Mystical Tutor was even allowed to exist unbanned for as long as it did, as clearly ANT and UBx Reanimator were the Best decks in that era of Legacy, no question about it. The "Gentleman's Agreement" of not playing combo simply no longer exists given how far Legacy has evolved and expanded since that time. Personal Tutor has enough of a drawback I suppose that makes it safe for now, but that card is probably on the DCI's watch-list. In any case, these Tutors are simply too powerful for Legacy, and there may indeed be a time when Enlightened Tutor and/or Worldly Tutor join them on the banned list. These Tutors come from the Mirage era, when the combo decks were far more clunky and weak to disruption (Prosperous Bloom.dec required like 3+ cards to go off and multiple land drops to even get going, and victory wasn't even entirely guaranteed 100% -- additionally, Stupor was an effective method of battling that deck, to give you an idea of how much slower the format was at the time). The fixed, "balanced" cost of Demonic Tutor is :2::b::b: (Diabolic Tutor). Getting that effect for only 1-mana simply doesn't belong in a more balanced format without a Restricted list, even if it does cost you a draw step. tl;dr: Tutors belong on the restricted list in Vintage.
  
• Shahrazad - it's not really the power of the card that makes it ban-worthy, it's that it'd potentially screw up tournament structure and likely force even more rounds to go to time than they already do. I love the flavor of the card and think it's really cool in casual formats and earns tons of Style Points for anyone playing it in EDH or kitchen table, but the card really has no business existing in a tournament format like Legacy.
  
• Skullclamp - Simply broken, and there's an article on Wizard's own site about the creation of this card explaining how it was a design mistake that made it through the play-testing and final approval process mostly by accident and oversight. Elves.dec and D&T are Tier 1 already and don't need additional help in the form of busted card draw, same with other X/1 creature decks (can you imagine how much more busted Young Pyromancer and Mentor would be?). I suppose a higher-cost 'fixed' version, that also required much more mana to equip and/or only drew 1 card and/or didn't give the creature -1 toughness and/or required it to be tapped to activate (thus limiting it to one activation per turn) -- or some other variation on the theme -- could be theoretically printed someday; as-is this card belongs in Vintage only.
  
• Windfall - the thing that makes it so incredibly broken is that the player casting Windfall can empty their hand while their opponent still has a full or nearly-full grip, turning it into potential card advantage tacked onto hand disruption (imagine this getting powered-out on turn 1 or 2: the Windfall caster gets to draw back up to 6/7 even after deploying some lands and acceleration, while the opponent is forced into taking a Mulligan that might or might not completely screw them over). It's also needlessly Blue, slotting effortlessly into the existing Ux combo decks in Legacy (and could be played to great effect in Delver.dec and URx Burn as well, as both decks tend to empty their hand by around the point of having 3 mana available). It closely resembles cards like Wheel of Fortune (and Balance to some extent too, in a sort of reverse sense), which I've previously explained the reason they should be banned. This card belongs on the Vintage restricted list.
  
• Yawgmoth's Bargain - Yes, Griselbrand is legal. Griselbrand is a stupid, stupid card that probably should't have been printed. But Griselbrand does have some disadvantages compared to Bargain: a higher mana cost does matter when it comes to the potential of hard-casting him; he is a Legendary creature and thus is susceptible to a large variety of Removal spells including Karakas which are more typically run main-deck as opposed to [non-Abrupt Decay] Enchantment removal; his life-for-cards ability is only available in increments of 7 which can sometimes make it risky or impossible to use at lower life, especially if you've Reanimated him, are already in single-digit life, and/or are facing the threat of Stifle and/or Lightning Bolt(s). Getting Griselbrand into play typically requires an enabler such as Discard + Reanimation Spell, or Griselbrand in hand + Show and Tell -- and as we all know, while UBx Reanimator is a powerful deck, it's very beatable with the right sideboard and a little luck. EDH aside, Griselbrand is rarely getting cast for his actual mana cost in constructed formats. Comparatively, Yawgmoth's Bargain only costs :4::b::b:, which is completely feasible for a deck playing Rituals and/or artifact acceleration to pay for. Drawing 1-for-1 is also much, much safer and allows you to cast spells in between your draw activations as needed. Some people might argue that Bargain is similar to Ad Nauseam, and more expensive too. Well... sure, but a combo deck playing Bargain wouldn't have to care about having a low curve (like it does with Ad Nauseam), so cards like Force of Will or even Soul Spike could be run to keep the cards coming and protect your combo and disrupt your opponent, it also wouldn't lose to multiple unlucky flips of your higher CMC cards. Furthermore, Bargain stays in play and could be used over multiple turns instead of requiring a singular all-in combo turn. Such a deck could also run some form of cheap life gain, e.g. Ivory Tower or perhaps Zuran Orb to offset the loss of life and buy extra time against aggressive decks (these sorts of cards are basically useless for Ad Nauseam decks since they are all about the single combo turn instead of winning over multiple turns, and they need all of their cards to play towards the singular goal of Storming out). I'd imagine that a Bargain deck would converge into some sort of UBx Combo/Control monstrosity that could have versatility, resiliency and inevitability -- and could also perhaps feasibly have a Plan B transformative sideboard as well. I realize that Yawgmoth's Bargain isn't a 7/7 flying lifelink Demon, but all of the aforementioned qualities set it over-the-top of said Demon and Ad Nauseam as a combo/control element. And who's to say you couldn't run *both* Griselbrand and Bargain in a Show and Tell shell thrown into said UBx Bargain deck? Bargain could be more feasibly cast-able, unlike Emrakul which requires an enabler in non-ramp decks. Bargain is just so broken, and I think it's broken-ness might take awhile to manifest since I think an optimized Bargain deck wouldn't exactly look like any existing deck, i.e. I wouldn't just slot it into Storm in its current form and consider it done.
  
• Survival of the Fittest - I saved this one for last as I think it deserves the most serious consideration for unbanning. Survival is a repeatable tutor with a low initial cost and low activation cost, which on a fundamental level probably means it should be banned. Survival decks certainly do have a lot of power, even without their namesake card on board. But right now, with UWr Miracles being The Deck To Beat, I think a creature-centric strategy that had access to a toolbox of answers to Miracle's prison pieces and also the capability of speeding out a quick aggro finish before Miracles could stabilize might be a good thing for the format, especially if the decks weak to Miracles were favored against Survival. That said, there are a few cons to introducing SotF back to Legacy:
  -Elves.dec might adopt it, and that deck really doesn't need any more help to be competitive. Nor do Aluren, Food Chain, Cephalid Breakfast or any other creature-centric combo deck require additional help.
  -Aside from Vengevine, Survival also has access to the Retainers + Iona/Griselbrand/[whatever] combo as well as a toolbox of Silver Bullets that can beat a wide range of strategies. Such a versatile and powerful deck might push out other options that became viable because of its initial banning, ironically decreasing the format's variety.
  -I wouldn't want non-Survival decks in Legacy to have to play narrow cards like Grafdigger's Cage or Pithing Needle or whatever in the main deck just to answer the glut of Combo.decs in such a format.
  -While Abrupt Decay (and Deathrite Shaman to an extent) is perhaps the most obvious answer to SotF and Counterbalance, forcing all non-Miracles/Survival/combo to play GBx wouldn't help format diversity.
  -At the tail end of the Survival era, the SotF decks were moving away from Blue and heading towards GWx (often Black as the tertiary color), and Survival was quickly becoming the format's Best Deck -- you were either playing Survival or a deck geared to beat it (or were playing on a budget and just jamming what you had). It's impossible to say for certain which colors a modern Survival deck would adopt (probably GBx for Deathrite + Decay), and creatures have only gotten better and better (especially the Hate Bears) since SotF was initially banned. The card was banned for this very reason (i.e. creature power creep), and to be entirely honest it's a valid consideration to justify keeping Survival out of Legacy for the sake of format diversity.
  -If you want to play Vengevine/Madness, there have been players who've brewed some variations using stuff like Intuition which is a much fairer method of enabling that combo. If you want to play a Toolbox creature deck, GWx Maverick with Green Sun's Zenith and Knight of the Reliquary is a legitimate option. So really the lack of Survival doesn't mean that these cards are completely unplayable; it just means they don't get to converge into a singular Best Deck and you are instead forced to make actual choices and concessions and have limitations.

As said many times in the past: Its criminally underestimated how absurd MindTwist would be in Legacy Elves. I would play 4 maindeck immediately. Hymn to Tourach on Crack against combo or to make sure your opponent never gets in the game at all? Hell yeah

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Originally Posted by Lemnear

As said many times in the past: Its criminally underestimated how absurd MindTwist would be in Legacy Elves. I would play 4 maindeck immediately. Hymn to Tourach on Crack against combo or to make sure your opponent never gets in the game at all? Hell yeah

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Yep. I've lost on turn 2 to an Elves opponent whose Turn 1 on the play was Forest -> Llanowar Elves, Pass. Leading with Llanowar Elves seemed so incredibly innocuous that I didn't bother Bolting it; I instead played a Delver and passed back. Well, needless to say, a bunch of creature activations, triggers and Draws from Glimpse later, I was basically dead to about a dozen or so creatures on board and an opponent with a full grip (and this was after having discarded down to the 7 of his choice.) Forget Cabal Therapy; why not just Mind Twist them for X = the opponent's hand size on Turn 2 or 3?

As I said in my section about Twist, the card is not Fun or Interesting, scales upwards easily without any difficult color requirements, and would just lead to stupidly random blowouts and feel-bad moments. A lot of these qualities applied similarly to Black Vise, but the difference is that Black Vise isn't anywhere near MT's power level and is really nothing more than a minor annoyance in the early turns of the game and quickly becomes a do-nothing. Mind Twist *can't* be ignored, as it's directly attacking a critical resource that effects whether you can have any further interaction or not. At least in Vintage, Mind Twist is a) Restricted and b) you have cards like Ancestral Recall to conceivably get you back into the game even if you've become hell-bent; in Legacy cards are not Restricted and there is no card draw option that can dig you out of the deep, deep hole caused by a fairly early medium-to-massively-sized Mind Twist. Again, "Hymn Hymn I win" is an idiom for a reason, and while Hymn's power level waxes and wanes depending on what's going on in the Format at any particular moment in time, it's generally still one of the most powerful Sorceries in the format and often wins games entirely on its own. Giving every deck that just merely splashes Black access to a potentially superior version of that card would not make for a better format -- and no, Mr. Devil's Advocate, you're not always going to have Misdirection or Divert at the right moment.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Lemnear

Next time I write UGx Survival. Cool?

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Only if you name your rap album after survival.