Brainstorm
Force of Will
Lion's Eye Diamond
Counterbalance
Sensei's Divining Top
Tarmogoyf
Phyrexian Dreadnaught
Goblin Lackey
Standstill
Natural Order
When a game starts each player has an equal share of the fun.
It's 1 persons job to take all the fun at the end of the game.
If you can't beat "brainstorm.Dec" you need a better deck.
The power of blue is overrated...
There are plenty of decks that are extremely competitive that don't have blue in them...
For combo you have Belcher and Elves
For Midrange you have JUND and Junk and Nic Fit
For Aggro you have Eldrazi and Burn
For Tempo you have Death and Taxes
And most prison decks aren't blue...
I think if more people were to stop paying attention to the Brainstorm or Bust people, the meta would have less blue in it... I personally play Jund and I consistently top 4 FNMs with it... Instead of complaining about Brainstorm, hop onto and master a deck that doesn't play it and you will be surprised at your success.
Even if I were forced to play Brainstorm I wouldnt quit or anything... there is plenty of diversity in blue decks in this format...
I dont get the haters what are they complaning about??? No one is forcing you to play Brainstorm in this format
It's about 40%-50% last I looked on mtgtop8 but that's 90% mtgo so not a really basis of the whole legacy meta(cardboard).
The recent GP' maybe but that's because people see popular decks from mtgo and expect that when from the reports I read here was not true.
I'm of the opinion if you struggle against a specific deck you need to tune your deck to that.
Copy+paste does not fix the problem of your deck is not optimized for that deck/meta.
Me my boogieman is dredge type decks and I play high tide, burn and affinity.
All decks that have bad matchups with dredge shenanigans because they are not as fast to end the game or find they few hate cards.
I'm not making a hateboard just for one deck because I got 5 other decks to worry about that may not be as fast as the mtgtop8 lists but close.
Unlike that other guy I adapt instead of cry ban this and that.
Simple case of disproportionate loud overactive voices. The overwhelming majority of Legacy players don't want Brainstorm banned. Fact.
For the record, I don't want to read this fucking thread, please don't make me. If anything pops up, report it. Just report it. Don't respond, don't edge on others. Just hit that triangle and move on.
Hopefully this volcano will become dormant again soon.
WantToPonder
former: Team SpasticalAction & Team RugStar Berlin
Team MTG Berlin
The Dragonstorm
http://www.mtgthesource.com/forums/s...he-Dragonstorm
I think you are missing something. The idea is that if we lose Miracles (ie, ban Counterbalance), Legacy will no longer have a non-midrange control deck. This distinction may not matter to you, but clearly it matters to me and to other people too. That's why nobody cried boohoo when we lost Omnitell. There are other combo decks that play a very similar game.
Incidentally, CB + SDT is the defining engine in Miracles. Losing DTT took Omnitell down a notch - enough that it is no longer tier one. But it didn't negate the deck's core identity the way losing CB would completely gut Miracles.
And there is no need to destroy the deck! If we were to agree that Miracles is too strong, there are a number of ways to take it down a peg without completely ruining it. Personally if we had to choose a Miracles staple to ban I would vote for Mentor. The card makes it much harder to attack the deck with a single strategy, plus it gives Miracles outs against what would otherwise be tougher MUs.
Supremacy 2020 is the modern era game of nuclear brinksmanship! My blog:
https://fieldmarshalshandbook.wordpress.com
You can play Lands.dec in EDH too! My primer:
http://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/t...lara-lands-dec
I think you're conflating Deathblade (which is definitely a controlling midrange deck) with UW, Jeskai, and Esper Stoneblade, which are control decks. Running creatures doesn't make them not control decks; some Miracles lists run 7 or 8 creatures MD, as compared to ~10 in most Stoneblade lists. Wall of Air has a long pedigree in Ux control, and the fact that having a Batterskull in play on turn 3 or 4 is occasionally enough to completely shut an aggressive deck down doesn't detract from the fact that the control deck stabilized the board and rendered the aggro deck's draws mostly irrelevant before it won the game. Old mono-blue control decks had plenty of draws against Suicide Black and Sligh where the right line was to play Morphling with U up and Force + Blue card as early as possible and ride that to victory. On a somewhat related note, I'm not sure how likely Stoneblade as we know it is to make a comeback since it's so easy for actual midrange decks to just run it over with card advantage and superior creatures.
The best argument I've heard for banning something from Miracles is that its conversion rate at GP Columbus is a direct result of there being a larger number of US players than European players (mostly top end GP/PTQ grinders and high-level Pros) who are both willing and able to 'just play the best deck' and not be significantly punished for not being regular Legacy players. I'm not sure how accurate this assessment is, but it's in line with WotC's history of placing more emphasis on the feelings of Pros and on North American results than on community sentiment or results from outside North America when making B/R decisions.
Last edited by btm10; 06-21-2016 at 01:11 AM.
I don't think it's an accurate assessment at all. Legacy isn't like Modern or Standard where you can pick up the best deck and autopilot it with minimal format exposure. If you look at the Miracles players doing well, they're all players that have been on the deck for years.
The purpose of any moat is to impede attack. Some are filled with water, some with thistles. Some are filled with things best left unseen.
If Counterbalance is banned, people will figure something out. Just as nothing will stop someone from playing post-DTT Omnitell or Sneak and Show, miracles die-hards could still play SDT/Terminus/Entreat (i.e. some second-rate control deck that can exist without losing the mysterious label of 'non-midrange,' however one goes about that). I'm just not sure how changing 4x CB -> 4x SFM and 3x SDT to 1-2x Equip and 1-2x Trinket Mage means it's suddenly a midrange deck - when did the nomenclature change?? Sure Terminus amounts are probably dropping too, but like how is adding in some 1/2s and your 4/4 changing from creature type angel to germ constituting some new 'midrange' archetype? The key difference is that, like everyone else, a Stoneblade player has to lose a card from hand to deny an opponent a card (or two life according to Zur's Weirding precedent) each time they want to deny one - I'm not sure why a move in this direction is anything but desirable.
Going back to why things get banned in Legacy/Vintage it's generally due to: quality of life/ethics (i.e. Goblin Recruiter, Earthcraft, Shahrazad), power level (i.e. Yag. Will, Necro, Frantic Search, Gush, Fastbond), or diversity killing (i.e. Survival, Library of Alexandria, Mental Misstep - most in this category have power level problems as well). When you look at any of these three broad categories, only SDT and Counterbalance can fit the bill. Don't misunderstand, there is zero reason why Monastery Mentor tokens should ever have had prowess, but I'd really look to vintage where you could legitimately have claimed diversity-killing status right after Lodestone restiction - but even there looking at the most recent tournaments Mentor/Gush is getting Snuff'ed Out (pun intended, but really start re-using this to kill TKS in vintage) of top 8s by white eldrazi lists. While Mentor is, like Terminus, a generically good card in legacy it [Mentor] lacks power, quality of life/ethical issues (dragging games on), and diversity-killing status (not even all miracles lists run this card, let alone other decks).
There have been far too many Abrupt Decays [importantly pairing BG together, lowering diversity] for too long, and recently a more severe drop-off in combo decks (sure ANT and pseudo-combo won GPs...with 5 miracles in top 16)...and I think, we all know what deck is to blame; even if we don't agree on the specific card. The DCI always makes the call regardless of what stance one takes nor how sound one's reasoning is in a forum like this, but this advocating of banning good cards instead of the problem cards they enable has to stop somewhere - can we at least keep the modern ban mentality out of legacy forums? The primary motivation has to be health of the format, not deck identity.
After playing Miracles I really don't think anything needs to be banned from it. It isn't as good against Wasteland as people seem to think, most of the power comes from Snapcaster Mage & Jace which aren't at all exclusive to Miracles, and as Joe Lossett was saying the other day in the Tales of Adventure stream people just aren't sideboarding enough to beat Miracles.
Yes, he might be biased because he is an adamant proponent of the deck, but I have to agree with him. People aren't putting in enough hate.
Seriously though, if you want to learn how to beat Miracles more often, try playing with it. Proxy it up and test with/against friends. It is more susceptible to all sorts of hate than it may seem. Playing with the deck against some very talented opponents opened my eyes.
I don't know how many 3-4x Abrupt Decays you need to see before you can't make the claim that people aren't boarding for miracles, or that diversity in the format is suffering.
The fact of the matter is that you need between 8-12 cards to effectively stop Counterbalance directly, which means you're hemorrhaging win % vs other decks. It is much less slot intensive to stop playing magic (Caverns/Boseju) or employ basic land hate than it is to deal with CB. There is no viable game actions-only deck that can win a post-board game. 50/200 decks with "good" miracles matchups [Shardless/Edlrazi] advanced 1 deck into the top 16 between the 2 GPs while miracles advanced 5 copies. You can make an arbitrarily questionable cmc deck and it will generally beat miracles, but is that really where you want legacy to go?
Now all of that in the last paragraph is certainly biased, but it's still a pretty accurate summation. As frustrating as CB is though, it's the kind of card that would get banned because:
-it wastes time; it's the only card that consistently encourages spinning SDT >1x between draw steps.
-it wastes time again; you can concede to Voltaic Key/Time Vault (combo pieces that do almost nothing alone unlike CB and Top). This is the same 1cmc spell into 2 cmc spell, except it doesn't certainly end the game on the spot...and they are 4-ofs.
-it is overpowered; it can counter more spells than discounted Decree of Silence, which would be instantly banned in all formats.
-it kills diversity; see Abrupt Decay or meta-game breakdowns.
There are any number of perfectly legitimate reasons to ban the card, and none of it has to do with "I don't like card x." It is saying something when banning CB and unbanning Time Vault would make legacy more enjoyable with less extra turns time between rounds...not that that card should ever actually be unbanned.
Again competitive decks in-part designed to have "good" matchups vs miracles are consistently losing to it. Now I respect the opinion that 'nothing is wrong with miracles' a whole lot more than 'ban terminus,' but what exactly do you need to see before you say something isn't right here? Does combo have to fall under x%, do you need to see quad-Grip/quad-Decay 75s, does miracles need consistent GP wins rather than flooding top8s, does it need >20% representation on mtgo?
Since I'm still very much on the fence about whether anything in Miracles ia banworthy I'm going to respond somewhat sceptically to both of you.
The problem with Miracles hate (as opposed to cards that are merely incedentally good against it) is that unlike BGx hate (Blood Moon, Price of Progress, Ruination) is that it's either extremely difficult to execute (they can't beat Zur's Weirding, but it's a 4 cmc blue enchantment and they board in 2-3 Pyroblasts against other blue decks) or unavailable to most decks in the format because it's nearly as hateful toward them (Boil, Choke). Non-combo decks can't really make use of Boseiju, and even decks that are otherwise strong against Counterbalance, Mentor, and the incremental advantages that Top provides are soft to Entreat. It's entirely possible that Winter Orb in particular isn't being used enough relative to how good it is, especially aince it has applications against wide swaths of the format.
Abrupt Decay and Krosan Grip are more like Null Rod in that they're good against one of the deck's engines but don't rise to the level of 'hate' the way that Boil or Blood Moon does. Lossett and ironclad are right, though, in that people haven't adapted to updates in Miracles technology. If we all harp on Null Rod, Sylvan Library, and Liliana of the Veil like it's 2013, then we deserve to lose to Miracles because they've adapted and we haven't. While those cards are all fine, most Miracles players are accustomed to working through them, and there's little uncertainty as to whether decks that can include them will do so. Sloppy technical play also costs many players games against Miracles that they should be winning. I've discussed the effectiveness of appropriately Wastelanding Miracles' uncracked fetches in at least two other threads and I continue to have a lot of success with this approach despite hardly ever seeing anyone else do it. Similarly, people aren't being nearly aggressive enough with regard to exploiting their graveyards for advantage now that most Miracles players have dropped Rest in Peace for Surgical Extraction. Miracles isn't Cruise or Dig where there was an obvious problem on power level alone that can't be fought effectively without hate like maindeck Pyroblasts. The fact that it's developed technology much more quickly than other decks is a community problem, not.a deckbuilding problem, and using bans to.fix a community problem is unprecedented.
As for the GP results: it's clear from the coverage of Prague that a second Shardless player drew himself into 9th and the Miracles player into 8th. Make that one inversion of 8th and 9th places and you have a much starker difference between the two GPs in terms of top 8 composition. I think it's fair to say that Eldrazi succumbed to an overwhelming amount of hate aimed squarely at it, while Shardless put up the top 8/16 numbers at Prague that one would expect based on its numbers at the start of day 2 (and a second in the top 8 would more-or-less double the expected number). Discussing two different tournaments as though they can be meaningfully understood as a single entity is silly. It definitely seems like something weird happened at Columbus, bur no one has offered a compelling explanation as to why that might be.
Yeah, when I'm watching people play against Miracles I've also noticed people don't see these plays. Wastelanding fetches can limit their outs or disrupt a deck that's been carefully stacked.
Strong players play Miracles because it's a deck that has game against everything and is fun + difficult to master. Because it's a good deck that the best players gravitate to, it does well pretty consistently. If you want to load your SB to beat it (which as Lossett noted, few people actually do, strange considering it's the most widely played t1 deck) and don't let yourself get outplayed, you can beat it. Most Miracles players *aren't* Joe Lossett and are going to make some mistakes. I think legacy is in a much better place when a very difficult control deck is the top dog and not something like Eldrazi or SnS, both of which could be handed to someone who's never played legacy before.
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