Brainstorm
Force of Will
Lion's Eye Diamond
Counterbalance
Sensei's Divining Top
Tarmogoyf
Phyrexian Dreadnaught
Goblin Lackey
Standstill
Natural Order
The danger is high, but the variance is also high. Paying 4UU for Desire @ 3 and to hit lands and mana rocks is a big bust and could lose the game. There's a significant probability of hitting 0 fatties/Desires. Considering Show and Tell is already a top-tier deck without that, do they need the boost in power if it comes with such a spike in variance?Originally Posted by TheInfamousBearAssassin
Mind's Desire is busted. But Show & Tell seems like a bad example compared to much better shells it could be in: High Tide, blue artifacts, Riddlesmith storm, PITA
https://twitter.com/Griselpuff/statu...qbAEPrigQ&s=19
I was told this couldn't happen, that Mississippi River had no use for the best enabler ever printed.
I wouldn't have batted an eyelash if you'd said to Lord Seth, "Free casting seven cards is just way better than untapping all your mana and having everybody wheel. You'll see."
Instead you said "Free casting seven cards is just way better than having everybody wheel. You're an idiot."
Forgive my paraphrasing --- I'm trying to use parallelism to make my point, but if you feel I've substantively misrepresented your tone or your words, let me know.
If you're going to compare Mind's Desire and Time Spiral, why not be evenhanded about the strengths and weaknesses of both? It was the combination of your contemptuous tone and your major omission of what Time Spiral actually does that spurred me to recommend a more apt comparison:
Inapt comparison: [Freecasting seven cards] vs [Everybody wheels]
Apt comparison: [Freecasting seven cards] vs [Everybody wheels and you untap all your mana]
(I believe you and Lord Seth were temporarily taking storm = 6 for the sake of argument.)
How are you under the misapprehension that I don't know Mind's Desire casts the spells for free? I never misstated what Mind's Desire does at all. Perhaps you got that idea because I repeated the fact that Time Spiral untaps your mana without responding to your and FourDogs' statement that Mind's Desire makes infinite mana (I'd scrolled straight to the part where you quoted me, assuming that was the totality of your reply to me). But ... do you know what Mind's Desire does? It doesn't make infinite mana. Freecasting is a great upside, but it's not always better than untapping, say, 8 mana if you hit cantrips, which is a reasonable scenario in High Tide. I don't understand your aversion to just setting up a fair comparison in which one neither pretends that Mind's Desire "makes infinite mana" nor ignores that Time Spiral makes mana.
It seems self-evident to me that my version of the comparison is more apt --- as you put it earlier, "because that's what the cards say."
I'm not even trying to tell you Mind's Desire isn't broken. You used a faulty comparison in an uncharitable attempt to make Lord Seth out to be some kind of numbskull. I pointed out that your comparison was faulty. You may feel I was nitpicking --- perhaps the more salient point would have been that you were being needlessly unkind --- but such as it was, my point was 100% correct. Then you uncharitably attempted to make me out to be some kind of numbskull. I'm not telling you that you're wrong about Mind's Desire, I'm inviting you to debate less fallaciously (e.g., Mind's Desire is better because Time Spiral = Wheel of Fortune for 4UU) and to be less unkind.
I mean sort of still the case. It's a mighty stretch to call that list Mississippi River.
Mighty like the Mississippi the deck is named after. Creative Technique combo is river whatever the other cards are.
lol sure, 6-7 cards in common, same deck!
Do you have a hard time distinguishing between TES and Ruby Storm? I mean, they both Burning Wish for Tendrils, right? Samesame
I know that differences don't matter. Both need a critical mass of whatever and both have a storm trigger to stifle. If you want to focus on the inbetween stuff whatever.
Kind of the whole point I was making is that when you get an enabler this powerful you should expect the boundaries to blur and new archetypes to emerge. It’s not just a card that gets jammed into an existing deck list and that’s it.
For my confessions, they burned me with fire/
And found I was for endurance made
Kindly, your back pedal is pathetic and you should stop while you’re ahead
lmao “I’m inviting you to debate less fallaciously” go step on a lego
For my confessions, they burned me with fire/
And found I was for endurance made
What really gets to me about this is this bit from the announcement:
Was combo ever in a bad place?Two decades have passed since Mind's Desire was banned, and in that time, creatures have become more powerful, new planeswalker cards have been introduced, and there are multiple cycles of free spells that have made it much harder to be a lover of the storm mechanic. In the interest of making sure that combo players also get the same level of new content and strength that other archetypes incidentally gain through our tentpole offerings, we've decided to unban Mind's Desire in Legacy.
Was there any need for new toys?
Was there really someone asking for this?
Most of the time contribution to combo in legacy are accidental because otherwise they do stuff like Underworld Breach.
This reeks of the later.
Even if Desire doesn't prove to be a problem, which is rather unlikely given the nature of the card, the other outcome would be that it just replaces other combo decks/slots into them to make them better.
Being able to beat combo is already a strong natural selection criterion for the meta and making it even harder is not going to increase format diversity.
The worst thing about Minds Desire is that the card has a super low skill ceiling as it's outcome is random.
All you do is maximize the storm count and pray you'll hit something.
Ad Nauseam has at least significant choices in how far you go.
You should read the modern one for a real laugh "my pet deck wasn't doing well, so I gave it a card"
Draw card if Life Total > [highest CMC card remaining in deck] + 3 (if red mana available to opponent).
Doesn't sound so significant to me.
Hilariously it won't actually do any good
The significant choice is in deck construction. Deck construction is severely constrained by CMC.
Actual resolution of Ad Naus is kind of random, like Mind's Desire, except the number of cards you get is random & dependent on the order of CMCs. Resolution is relatively skill-less. You pick a stopping life based on highest CMC left in deck and whether the opponent is on Bolt, then iterate until the stopping criterion is met.
There is some skill in digging beyond that, but it's a gamble: odds of a lethal reveal. Beyond doing the math on those odds, there aren't meaningful decision forks.
I mean there is deck building skill in figuring out how much you want to maximize storm count with Desire vs maximizing payoff, but there’s still a lot less constraints than something like Ad Nauseam yeah
And it’s not like “Ad Nauseam isn’t good enough” was really a problem the format had
For my confessions, they burned me with fire/
And found I was for endurance made
The only place where Ad Nauseam wasn't good enough is it couldn't also run things like maindeck Peer into the Abyss or multiple copies of Echo of Eons and Lorien Revealed, due to the CMCs. That's the design space for new storm brews. Mind's Desire plays even better with multiple high CMC engines, while ANT can't run them at all.
Maybe we'll see some iteration of UB storm with 4 Peer into the Abyss + 4 Mind's Desire and a boatload of mana.
They also declined to unban Splinter Twin, despite the fact the deck would be little threat in today's metagame, and probably shouldn't have been banned to begin with.
The reason Splinter Twin was strong--though not overpowered, in my view--was because it was able to combine a tempo game with a combo game. Since it's extremely dangerous to tap out against the deck, you need to keep mana open for removal to stop them from comboing off, which slows down your gameplan and lets them play a tempo game where they chip away at your health with their Pestermites and Bolt+Snap+Bolt, while you're stuck playing several turns behind by keeping your mana open to stop the combo.
This plan is far weaker nowadays. First, there are free spells people play maindeck (Force of Negation, Solitude, and Fury) which stop the combo, so they don't have to put themselves behind to protect themselves from the combo. Second, the tempo plan itself is more lackluster because there are more powerful cheap drops, making Twin's tempo plan look a lot worse by comparison.
I guess in a sense Preordain is a more interesting unban in that it would probably have more of a metagame effect, but there's really no reason for Twin to be banned at this point (if there ever was a real reason other than "let's ban stuff to shake things up for the Pro Tour"). Oh well, at least they unbanned something.
Both of these are wrong. It brings me no joy to report this
How? Splinter Twin's banning occurred because they wanted to shake things up for the Modern Pro Tour. That was pretty blatantly why it was banned. It was a good deck, but it wasn't close to dominant--but they wanted to shake things up for the Pro Tour, so out it went. The funny thing is that this banning didn't actually help at all in that regard, because we then had Pro Tour Eldrazi, and Twin would've gotten crushed by it along with the rest of the format.
Still, even if Splinter Twin was too good back then, the answers to it have gotten better while the key cards in the deck have gotten worse thanks to power creep. How is it going to be too powerful in the format?
Last edited by Lord Seth; 08-12-2023 at 06:07 PM.
I’ve been consistent, actually.
Look, you got Time Spiral’s effect totally wrong. Either (a) it was an honest oversight — at first I thought this was possible, so I chimed in with what Time Spiral does — or (b) you deliberately made up a useless card just so that you could pretend that a fellow forum-goer had expressed a positive opinion on your useless card and then you could mock them for the opinion you were pretending they held. I do recognize at this point that it was probably not (a).
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