Yes
No
I've heard some people saying this, but Goblin Lackey is only game-braking if: you don't have any creature to block it or any removal. And it is played in a deck without counters, so realy any answer is enough.Originally Posted by puppektion
When Goblin Lackey was format dominant, it wasn't an impediment to play your own different creatures, in fact it was a reason to play them (to block it at least).
I think that if they don't ban Goyf (something I doubt they'll do), there are 2 posible situation:
1- They keep the actual power/cost ratio so nearly every creature they print in the future is useless
2- They change the power/cost ratio in tha future to make creatures that at least have a slim chance against goyf
The second point is one I doubt they will adopt because it will break standar and obsolete every creature in all magic history, but after tombstalker, there's a little hope that some creatures now and then can compete against goyf at least...
Goyf is about as format warping as goblin lackey was in his heyday, but the problem is that lackey had to be played in a deck of all goblins. In contrast goyf goes into anything and everything, even as a backup plan for some combo and control players. Also, you can NOT take 'a few' hits from goyf and 'not feel pressure,' your life total is probably anywhere from 5 to 11 after three swings of a CMC 2 creature! lackey has to have company to beat face upon connecting, and almost every other creature and removal sepll ever printed can neuter him. The only (commonly played) creature that can block a goyf and live is goyf, (and some tombstalkers after decent GY shrink-jobs) and burn doesnt touch him. An unanswered goyf, even when it's controller is hellbent, may take only 4-5 swings to kill an opponent, lackey takes 20. Goyf is a bigger problem than lackey ever was, and you only had to worry about facing off against a lackey in ONE matchup. Now, if your deck cannot handle an early resolved goyf, you may as well pitch it or add goyfs of your own.
Your arguments in favor of Tarmogoyf get dumber and dumber as time goes on. I can't believe people aren't downright calling you a troll on the same level as Cavius.
Ignore the fact that as a "vanilla" beater, at 1G it ignores all aspects of creature balance? Sounds fair. Let's just make him 2 colorless and see if you say the same. To this format, that's basically what it really is. It's a 2cc x/x+1 creature that happens to cost the controller absolutely nothing to grow bigger, and caps out much higher than a majority of the field it has to face. Did I mention the only thing they have to do is pay 1G, and they could just ride their opponent's graveyards to victory, they hardly ever have to do work themselves?
And the $30 price tag? Laughable. Did you ever sit back and think that the most expensive non-limited production Standard legal card in history being a creature wasn't an indication of it's power level? When it was $50+ still, it was the most played creature across ALL formats. From Vintage all the way through Standard, it was guaranteed to be in damn near anything that could produce green. In Extended and Eternal formats, it was a common splash piece, alongside the utility of K.Grip. Consider that fact, as well. A creature is the #1 reason to splash a color, over utility. And generally speaking, it's more powerful than anything the "main" colors could have brought to the table.
Also, your Lackey argument really needs work. If Lackey hits once, it deals 1 damage to you. It's trigger may or may not be abused, but it always does just 1 damage. The best play requires being able to drop an SGC (often only a 2 of), and back it up with Warchief and Piledriver. Oh, and they have to protect said threats......without protection spells. On the other hand, when Tarmogoyf drops on the table, chances are it's swinging for 3 (at minimum) in Legacy. In mid or late game, it's swinging for 5 easily. That's not "a couple hits" of buffer, as you seem to so eloquently put it. That's a 4 turn clock, all on it's own. And in most decks it's in, it's got protection. And generally speaking, that protection usually gets it to the red zone, where it "gets chumped" and causes incredible card disadvantage to the opposing player, repeatedly. We'll also neglect to mention it's a great early wall against Lackey as well. Or not.
And for god's sake, stop trying to say the damn thing is easy to answer. Creatures have to chump it all day, because most of the time they can't remove it without going at least 2 for 1. Then they just drop another on you. The only targeted removal that works on it is black or white based, because blue really only has counter magic, and red's burn generally doesn't go 1 for 1 against it, as it should. This leaves mass removal (typically in the form of Powder Keg, EE, and Deed.....the former two being extremely narrow "mass" removal, as they generally only 1 for 1 against a single Goyf), or just playing Goyf yourself. Again, not very balanced.
I'm about 99.9% certain you aren't going to bother trying to actually put anything constructive as a retort, but really I'm just fed of seeing you in threads on all different forums talking about Goyf as if it's the friendliest little critter Wizards ever invented. It's rather sickening.
I think this assessment is ultimately correct. I think the shakedown in the format is between designers and competitors. Now sometimes those are the same people, I recognize that. But for people who are interested in the game in terms of designing new decks, which is a community that wizards damn well better support, goyf is a constant on their horizon. If, like the pros that showed up at the Grand Prix, you're there to participate in the meta game and play the best deck, the goyf not really and issue to you. It's just part of the meta game. the people who approach the game with this attitude shouldn't really care one way or the other whether or not goyf is banned. but if for you the game revolves around understanding that competitive meta-game and designing for it, goyf radically alters your relationship to the format. In a sense wizards has to choose a side. I think this is much more challenging for them than recognizing the card is overpowered and responding to its presence in the meta game. if you ban it then you anger the spikes who did shell out for the card, you anger the forward thinking spikes who recognized the cards value before its price skyrocketed even more. But you provide more room for the designers to play their version of the game, and it is a different game.
LED, LED, Announce my intention to play Yawgmoth's Bargain...
Replace "format" with "this thread," and I agree. Designers can rightly argue that Tarmogoyf limits design possibilities because he's so much stronger and more efficient than most creatures that don't occupy a niche in the format (Dreadnought, Dark Confidant, Trinket Mage, Lord of Atlantis, etc.). The competitors see a creature with absurd p/t efficiency that doesn't require a lot of tricks and say, "Obviously, I'll play him. What's the problem?"
These are impossible points to reconcile because they're based on completely different sets of values.
/Thread?
Legacy would be MUCH more interesting for the designers if a good dozen cards were banned for power level reasons. It wouldn't still be Legacy, in the spirit that Legacy was created for, but it would be a much more interesting format to design decks for.
Basically Legacy is the format for people who want to play with their cards without including the auto-includes that fit in EVERY deck and the few truly broken cards that turn Magic into a sumo wrestling match.
I don't like the fact that there's a 'token beater' now, but honestly? After a given interval, doesn't the game eventually turn into this anyway?
I mean, the "4x'es" are really pretty concrete. 4 Forces, 4 Thoughtseize, 4 Swords to Plowshares, 4x Fetches/Duals.... now we know what the 4x beater is.
I don't think it's necessarily A Good Thing. I don't like that the existence of one man can make us rethink all the rest of the mans in the format. But that's exactly what we've done with spells like Mana Leak vs Counterspell vs Force, or Cabal Therapy vs Duress vs Thoughtseize.
Inevitably the format reveals itself as being able to deal or not to deal. And if the format eventually gets to the point where it's the One Best Auto-Includes Deck, followed by a series of counter-decks that only work because the aforementioned deck is the best one, then yeah it's time to banhammer the shit out of the problem children in the format.
For, perhaps, a year. Then bitching about the dominance of wild mongrel/dust bowl decks would begin. "Knights! is so fucking degenerate, Haakon is OP..." etc. etc.
LED, LED, Announce my intention to play Yawgmoth's Bargain...
Card power follows a right skewed distribution.
At any rate, it's a ridiculous argument to say that banning cards only leads to more bannings. Sure, some other cards will rise to the top and be the best, but there are more cards at each lower power level, so the cards would stick out less.
E.g. Wizards banned Time Walk. People aren't crying about Time Warp.
Wizards banned Timetwister. People aren't crying about Temporal Cascade.
Wizards banned Black Lotus. People aren't crying about Lotus Petal.
Why? Because instead of there just being one broken card, far ahead of the pack, the herd got trimmed and now there are more cards available at similar power levels.
Wild Mongrel might be the best card after a wave of bannings, but it'll be so close to Werebear, Serra Avenger, and Troll Ascetic that nobody would complain.
Although, again, I think Tarmogoyf should stay, it's a batshit retarded argument to say that banning Goyf would just make Werebear the new Goyf. Not even close. Try again.
In all fairness I was talking about bitching, not banning. Banning cards leads to people bitching about new cards. I think we all know that bitching will arrive whatever they do.
Christ, I found myself bitching about Knight-Captain of Eos the other day. (I'll let you ponder the format and situation which would make that jank a bomb on your own...)
LED, LED, Announce my intention to play Yawgmoth's Bargain...
EDH. OR you're one of five people still playing Rainbow Stairwell.
In any event, the argument that banning broken cards leads people to bitch about far less degenerate cards is speculative at best. The truth is, you can't know what a format will look like when the cardpool changes, even a little bit. Remember the beginnings of the Legacy days, when people thought it'd be a new dawn for UG Madness and Belcher? Then we started actually playing the format.
I include the assumption that new auto-includes would also be banned as they merged and became obvious. I don't think Wild Mongrel would ever potentially be in that group because there are different 1G beaters that would compete with him in the absence of Tarmogoyf and it's highly unlikely that he would drive them all out of the competition the way that Tarmogoyf has.
Nonetheless, if you want Legacy to be the format in which you can play with the vast majority of your cards you need to be able to tolerate some auto-includes in the color wheel. Moxen went into every deck, ditto Lotus, and 95% of decks included blue for Ancestral Recall and Timewalk. That's an auto-include level that you cannot have and have Legacy still be Legacy. If two-thirds of the decks splashed green for goyf it's livable. If 95% of them did it's probably not.
That's worth the quote, that is. While format must-runs exist, it's not generally required to run them as an answer to.. themselves. Not every deck needs to run Force of Will, in fact most decks would not splash for Force (even if it didn't require like 17 other blue cards), or Thoughtseize for that matter. Generally speaking we feel like good players can play around these things. Yet there's hardly a decklist that wouldn't seem to benefit from just throwing in four Goyfs, and most people seem to be convinced that the best answer to a Goyf is 'more Goyfs'. Can't say that about Thoughtseize.
What decks would be instantly made more viable if 'Goyf was banned? What ones would be made instantly less viable if 'Goyf was banned? If a deck has to scoop because their 'Goyf died or a 'Goyf resolved, the deck has problems to begin with.
Yeah, 'Goyf is the best creature in print. 'Goyf is undercosted for what the p/t ends up at. But I guess I don't see how this makes the format more or less interesting. Just because aggro decks use 'Goyfs because aggro decks use creatures to win and 'Goyf is the best creature doesn't make the deck uninteresting, it makes the deck better. The more viable decks that can be played in the format, the more interesting I think the format can become. So I guess I lied, 'Goyf can make the format more interesting.
It's points like these that continuously get debunked, and yet nobody seems to be paying attention to it.
PLEASE tell me the removal package that every deck (and every color, for that matter) that can support killing a Goyf as if it were the same as any other 2cc creature we've got in the format. I've gone over this point specifically multiple times in this thread alone:
A single Goyf on turn two can win games simply because card design is not capable of dealing with a 2cc passive-aggressive threat. It requires nothing more than playing spells to make it larger, and there's very little (if anything) regularly played in the format (aside from another Goyf) that survives a single mid/late game swing from it. I'm not listing Dreadnought here simply because it's a 2 card combo just to get it on the table.
Again, how is this even remotely being defended? It obsoletes EVERY SINGLE COLOR as far as creature selection goes. You need to have blue to make Dreadnought work, you need to have black and a seriously high range of spells/lands that go directly to the yard to make Tombstalker work (effectively...otherwise he's just a late game beater). You need nothing more than to play the game any other way to make Goyf work, and he's a single 1G requirement.
And please, stop saying it's just aggro that uses him. He's a combo sideboard creature (he's the main course for Cephalid Breakfast's combo), and he's maindeck material in Landstill builds, which is basically the MVP of control in the format. It's not JUST an aggro thing here, it's everything.
Whether people like to admit it or not, Goyf simply plays outside of the rules of creatures. Being vanilla is probably the only thing that kept it from being on the chopping block in production, and it's very obvious that Wizards had no clue how fast the average game is at getting each spell type in the yard. I guarantee you if they reprinted it again it'd have been GG or 1GG, and in all honesty, I find that perfectly acceptable.
Hellooooooooooooooo? If Goyf didn't exist, then scooping to Goyf wouldn't be a problem. That's the whole point of this discussion.
There are plenty of decks that exist or could exist that put 4/4s and 5/5s on the table as the main answer to early game creatures. Those are totally invalidated because their opponent can trump them for 1G. Goyf simply cannot be answered with other creatures in a timely and efficient fashion.
It used to be decks didn't need creature removal, because Goyf simply did not exist as a card you had to fear scooping to. Now you can't leave home without farming equipment. But it wasn't always so.
I think it should have been -0/-1. But anyway, what's so bad about being vanilla? In the scheme of things, vanilla is great. Phyrexian Negator has a huge drawback (although it has trample, wootwoot). Flesh Reaver has a big drawback, too. At Tarmogoyf's Power:Cost ratio, it should easily have a fat drawback. Vanilla is a blessing for Goyf. Hell, 1G for a 4/5 WALL would probably see play, and that's the steepest creature drawback imaginable.Being vanilla is probably the only thing that kept it from being on the chopping block in production, and it's very obvious that Wizards had no clue how fast the average game is at getting each spell type in the yard. I guarantee you if they reprinted it again it'd have been GG or 1GG, and in all honesty, I find that perfectly acceptable.
Vanilla is not what kept Goyf alive, failure to understand how easy it is to play Fetchlands, Sorceries, Instants, and one other to make a 4/5 for 1G is.
I personally see no flaw in it being vanilla, because it still eats most of the format anyway (and does so in most formats it's in). I'm just saying from a designer looking in, that's what they decided to do for it as an aspect of balance (from my guess, at least). All the other recent goyfs had something special going on, and could very well get larger than this one, but this one is the only one that's both easily splashable and gets fast quick without a strategy behind it.
Those two things make for a perfect example of bad R&D.
Just to name a tangent, relevant example...
People have discussed banning either Sensei's Divining Top or Counterbalance, as the strongest strategy in the format.
I admit that Balance-Top may be the strongest strategy playing Tarmogoyf. However... don't you think the power of Balance-Top would be drastically reduced if
a) They could no longer splash green to have the best beater and, more precisely;
b) Their combo could no longer reliably counter the strongest creatures in an opponents deck?
For my confessions, they burned me with fire/
And found I was for endurance made
Still boring, but now it at least does not counter "the strongest creatures in an opponents deck" and it also does not win in three swings...
Would you (if you had the power to decide such thing) ban all three cards? (I mean: CB, SDT and Goyf.)
EDIT: "They could no longer splash green to have the best beater"
Interesting point, I cannot imagine how can the real control decks compensate Goyf. Sure, NQG will reuse Werebear, but what for Landstill, itf, etc..?
EDIT 2: And same applies for combo, too. No more "side in four huge swines". Although - in a format without Goyf, is uit possible for Negator to see the play?
Was this even a real Skeggi's hero?Lol. You're my hero.
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