All B/R update speculation.

[Hof]

I dont understand why people defend Brainstorm that much?

Because it is fun to play with and against, and because it improves consistency in any blue deck, making winning or losing to mana flood or mana screw, or flat out bad drawing, less likely. I would much rather lose because my opponent outwitted me or had the better spells, timing, or understanding of the game than I would win due to my opponents mana screw or mana flood. That is simply not fun. I believe one of the reasons Legacy is so popular is that you get to make your deck in a very consistent way that lets you play your deck the way you meant it to be played - and not win or lose to your draw step as much as in other formats. This isn't just about Brainstorm, though. Green Sun Zenith and Faithless Looting does much the same thing in Legacy. While those examples are not as powerful as Brainstorm, they are clearly meant to improve the consistency of nonblue decks, and really have done so with great succes. This tells me that Wizards also sees this, and I would look out for more of the same type of cards in nonblue colors in the future.

[(nameless one)]

I think the problem with evaluation of Brainstorm is that it doesn't do anything flashy.

Mental Misstep didn't do anything flashy.

[Lemnear]

I was told by Aaron Forsythe on twitter that the criteria for bannings is when people stop playing the game. Bannings happen due to disinterest in a format. Having only one deck making Top 8s isn't an issue as long as tournament players want to play that kind of format, so even if a deck is everywhere, that's not criteria for bannings.

Knowing that, it would mean they restricted brainstorm in vintage because the format died, and not the other way around. It looks like we'll have to wait until legacy dies a little for them to do something about it.

It well known that Vintage had an all time popularity high while Gush, Scroll, Brainstorm, ponder and Flash were legal. Shop, Flash and gushbond were the only 3 viable strategies back then with workshop being the hate.dec for both Blue contenders.

So we had the following situation of playing Flash as a deck, workshop as the hate strategy or gushbond as the ONLY engine for any other deck resulting in gush-oath, gush-storm, gush-Control etc.

So WotC to restrict the oppressive engines to create diversity and give other engines space to breathe.

Obviously they overdid it by resticting gush and Flash too instead of the Problem-card (Merchant Scroll) right after doing the same mistake before (Gifts ungiven instead of scroll).

Sadly the freshly printed Tezzeret and restored Time Vault created again a oppressive Engine (thirst 4 Knowledge) that was resticted later on. After both restriction waves the common interest in Vintage decreased even now there are several engines "on par" (Bob, Gush, Intu-AK, etc.)

This shows that a) WotC reacts to oppressive engines and strategies that can only be handled by Meta-hate, massive adjustments or playing it yourself and b) diversity is Not an indicator for popularity.

Because people here started to draw lines between Legacy and Vintage (which is stupid because Vintage's fastmana Not only negates Tempo-strategies but makes Cards like gifts, fact or fiction, t4k, etc. So much faster) i made this lil' Hop to Vintage history.

If you think that the dci manages both lists a similar way you should evaluate IF brainstorm is an "oppressive engine" or just a "color staple" like FoW, Swords to plowshares, Lightning bolt, Dark ritual, etc. Is Brainstorm an Engine? No. BS + Fetchlands? Yes. Without alternatives in the format? not the case or Maverick, elves, goblins, lands, etc. Would be unplayable.

[DragoFireheart]

In the end, its not SNT nor Grizzle what the problem. Its Brainstorm that provides this deck with more consistency than non U decks will have to find the answers.

I made a lot of playtesting against SneakShow with a lot of different decks and answers. In the end, I lost. To Brainstorm.

How cant anybody see, that this cards powerlevel is way above legacys level. Its even restricted in vintage.

Ban it.

No, it's actually Islands that are the overpowered card since they let you play Brainstorm. Duals are fine since Blood Moon and Wasteland keep them in check, but nothing keeps Islands in check.

I made a lot of playtesting against Islands with a lot of different decks and answers. In the end, I lost. To Island.

Ban Island.

[DragoFireheart]

Mental Misstep didn't do anything flashy.

Neither do Islands.

[xfxf]

In the end, its not SNT nor Grizzle what the problem. Its Brainstorm that provides this deck with more consistency than non U decks will have to find the answers.

I made a lot of playtesting against SneakShow with a lot of different decks and answers. In the end, I lost. To Brainstorm.

How cant anybody see, that this cards powerlevel is way above legacys level. Its even restricted in vintage.

Ban it.

We hates them precious, we hates the filthy Hobbits! Gollum..Gollum...

[Tao]

Tao, your assertion, if I'm understanding you correctly, is that since Brainstorm sees the most play across all tournament placing Legacy decks, it should be banned. Fine. Let's say you get your wish and Brainstorm is banned solely because it is the most played Legacy card. Then what? Are we going to ban Force of Will (which would presumably become the new #1)? How far do we go with banning simply because it sees a lot of play?

No, you are not understanding me correctly. Several indicators strongly suggest that Brainstorm is a problematic card and maybe too strong for the format (Preordain, Ponder, Brainstorm banned/restricted in other formats; little brother of Ancestral; 1 Mana early game fix / late game card draw; shuffles away multiple combo pieces to help decks like SnT/Reanimator; sets up top card for Delver/Miracle/Confidant/Counterbalance; makes discard unplayable).

The statistics are simply there to back up this theory. But no one (yeah except Dr Jones) would claim that FoW has a bad influence on the format so there would be no need to even talk about banning that card.

[Arsenal]

But the statistics DO NOT prove any of your theories. All the statistics show is that it is the most played card in Legacy. Period. Nothing else.

[menace13]

Maybe, and I know this is crazy, but.... What If the other colors were never meant to be played without blue?

[DragoFireheart]

Maybe, and I know this is crazy, but.... What If the other colors were never meant to be played without blue?

- I think it's near impossible for all of the colors to have an equal representation in competitive play. People want to play the best deck and don't care what color.

Bannings should be done in respective of the merit of a card, not its color.

[Tacosnape]

Maybe, and I know this is crazy, but.... What If the other colors were never meant to be played without blue?

You phrase what is simple fact as though it were a hypothetical.

I will say this - Brainstorm's existence largely makes this true, because of how incredible Brainstorm is at making precision discard (And by this I mean Therapy, Inquisition, Duress, Thoughtseize) awkward at disruption.

However, I firmly believe that Brainstorm isn't the problem as much as it is the common denominator that appears in the problem decks. That doesn't mean I oppose banning it, necessarily. But let's look at some things:

1. Blue now has the single most efficient and reliable 1CMC beater in Legacy - Delver of Secrets. 1-mana powerhouse creatures have always been a defining factor in Legacy (Goblin Lackey, Nimble Mongoose, Wild Nacatl, Grim Lavamancer, Mother of Runes, Cursecatcher, Noble Hierarch, etc.) Blue's got the boss of them all now.

2. Blue has still the flagship disruption card in the game - Force of Will. It also has many other top contenders in Daze, Spell Pierce, and up until recently, Spell Snare.

3. Blue has arguably the best control kill condition in the game - Jace the Mind Sculptor. Regardless of what route you take, Jace is a grinding irrecoverable game state with built in self-protection and disruption.

4. Blue has two of the very best utility creatures in the game - Snapcaster Mage and Vendilion Clique. Both are flagship creatures in the format.

5. Blue has the best hand manipulation card in the format in Brainstorm, as well as a slew of other options.

6. Blue has tutors (Intuition, Personal Tutor)

7. Blue has the premier combo card in the format in Show and Tell.

8. Blue has access to more than enough graveyard hate (Crypt, Relic, Surgical, Leyline, Macabre)

So in essence, why would you NOT play Blue, when there's so very very little it can't do, and what it can't do efficiently enough requires only a minor color splash to fix?

And because you're playing blue, you're going to naturally want Dig/Draw, and you're going to naturally want amazing disruption, so you're now playing Brainstorm and, if you can support it, Force of Will.

So if you want to bring blue down to earth, then yes, you ban Brainstorm. Because all the blue decks will take a slight power cut without it. But not because it's actually the problem. It just happens to be standing near all the crime scenes.

[DragoFireheart]

Exactly. Blue is power not just because of Brainstorm, but because of Brainstorm, FoW, Delver, Snappy, Clique, Show and Tell, Jace the Wallet Slayer, etc.

Wanna play one of the best combo decks? Blue with a splash.

Wanna play one of the best tempo decks? Blue with a splash.

Wanna play one of the best control decks? Blue with a splash.

[Tao]

But the statistics DO NOT prove any of your theories. All the statistics show is that it is the most played card in Legacy. Period. Nothing else.

People were arguing that Griselbrand / SnT was too strong and one piece needed to be banned. They had good arguments (Bargain on a giant flying lifelinker, unbeatable). But when you look at the stats you see that neither card has ever been in the top20 of most top8'ed cards of any month. So a simple look at the statistics could have saved us a lot of discussion because while these stats can't prove that a card is banworthy they can certainly prove that a card is NOT banworthy once you have the nessecary amount of data.

Another theory with good arguments is that Brainstorm is too strong. And when you look at Brainstorm stats you will see that every month Brainstorm top8s ~ four times as often as the most top8'ed card that is not also played in a Brainstorm deck (GSZ).

So in case of Brainstorm the stats support the theory. That's one reason why I bring them up. The other is to disprove the frequent claims that Brainstorm isn't extremely successful.

[DragoFireheart]

People were arguing that Griselbrand / SnT was too strong and one piece needed to be banned. They had good arguments (Bargain on a giant flying lifelinker, unbeatable). But when you look at the stats you see that neither card has ever been in the top20 of most top8'ed cards of any month. So a simple look at the statistics could have saved us a lot of discussion because while these stats can't prove that a card is banworthy they can certainly prove that a card is NOT banworthy once you have the nessecary amount of data.

Another theory with good arguments is that Brainstorm is too strong. And when you look at Brainstorm stats you will see that every month Brainstorm top8s ~ four times as often as the most top8'ed card that is not also played in a Brainstorm deck (GSZ).

So in case of Brainstorm the stats support the theory. That's one reason why I bring them up. The other is to disprove the frequent claims that Brainstorm isn't extremely successful.

- I agree with you mostly. People saying that Brainstorm isn't successful shouldn't be taken seriously.

Brainstorm IS in fact one of the most played cards. Most powerful? Debatable. THE staple of blue? Unless you play Merfolk, you're bad if you play blue and don't play Brainstorm. It's like playing a deck without Wastelands: you need a damn good reason not to.

[dontbiteitholmes]

You phrase what is simple fact as though it were a hypothetical.

I will say this - Brainstorm's existence largely makes this true, because of how incredible Brainstorm is at making precision discard (And by this I mean Therapy, Inquisition, Duress, Thoughtseize) awkward at disruption.

However, I firmly believe that Brainstorm isn't the problem as much as it is the common denominator that appears in the problem decks. That doesn't mean I oppose banning it, necessarily. But let's look at some things:

1. Blue now has the single most efficient and reliable 1CMC beater in Legacy - Delver of Secrets. 1-mana powerhouse creatures have always been a defining factor in Legacy (Goblin Lackey, Nimble Mongoose, Wild Nacatl, Grim Lavamancer, Mother of Runes, Cursecatcher, Noble Hierarch, etc.) Blue's got the boss of them all now.

2. Blue has still the flagship disruption card in the game - Force of Will. It also has many other top contenders in Daze, Spell Pierce, and up until recently, Spell Snare.

3. Blue has arguably the best control kill condition in the game - Jace the Mind Sculptor. Regardless of what route you take, Jace is a grinding irrecoverable game state with built in self-protection and disruption.

4. Blue has two of the very best utility creatures in the game - Snapcaster Mage and Vendilion Clique. Both are flagship creatures in the format.

5. Blue has the best hand manipulation card in the format in Brainstorm, as well as a slew of other options.

6. Blue has tutors (Intuition, Personal Tutor)

7. Blue has the premier combo card in the format in Show and Tell.

8. Blue has access to more than enough graveyard hate (Crypt, Relic, Surgical, Leyline, Macabre)

So in essence, why would you NOT play Blue, when there's so very very little it can't do, and what it can't do efficiently enough requires only a minor color splash to fix?

And because you're playing blue, you're going to naturally want Dig/Draw, and you're going to naturally want amazing disruption, so you're now playing Brainstorm and, if you can support it, Force of Will.

So if you want to bring blue down to earth, then yes, you ban Brainstorm. Because all the blue decks will take a slight power cut without it. But not because it's actually the problem. It just happens to be standing near all the crime scenes.

Thank you. You finally summed up what I've been trying to say except a few points.

First I think more the issue than the power level of blue is how splashable every other colors bombs are. Blue is the hardest color to splash effectively.

Okay so you want to play blue? That means you probably want Force of Will. Off the bat that means you are running minimum what 15-16 blue cards just to support FoW? So you need blue cards but in aggro matchups the blue cards are the weakest in your deck. Of course the perfect solution is to run Brainstorm since it goes towards your blue count and is virtually never dead. If you don't want FoW you are probably just running blue for the filter for some combo in which case you are still running Brainstorm naturally.

If you want to splash white you probably just want hate bears/Swords/maybe a sweeper /and or Mystic in which case you are only going to need one white mana at any given time maybe 2 late game.

If you want to splash red you want burn/lavamancer/guide again you only need 1 red mana.

If you want to splash black you want discard/Confidant/maybe Tombstalker/maybe hymn/of a bunch of combo pieces with only 1 black mana symbol black is slightly harder to splash with blue because several of the most powerful spells require 2 black mana which requires opening yourself up to hate more, this partly explains why most of the decks that successfully splash black right now only use the cards that require 1 black mana and we aren't seeing many Tombstalkers and Hymns tearing up the top tables right now.

If you want to splash green you usually want either 2 playsets of tempo creatures and maybe 1/2 utility spells and some SB stuff or you go the other route and want GSZ.

GSZ is probably the best green card right now but it actually requires a significant green investment which is hard to balance with the heavy investment required by blue decks sporting FoW, also GSZ jives very well with Knight which requires a small white commitment in addition. It is difficult to balance the blue commitment required for FoW, with the green commitment to GSZ and the need for removal (white obviously being the best splash here because of Knight) which is why we aren't exactly seeing Bant tearing up the top tables lately.

So basically aside from Green Sun Zenith, Tombstalker, and Hymn (and maybe a handful of other cards) every color other than blue requires a very weak commitment for a very powerful effect. Since a deck has to commit fairly heavily to run blue and get its most powerful effects (need enough blue cards for Force, Islands for Daze + early cantraps and to have mana left open EOT for counters means you usually want more than one island in play at any given time, + double blue required if you are casting Jace) it doesn't have room to easily splash cards that also require more than a cursory (read fetches + duals for single colored mana spells) investment in other colors. Imagine if Knight was 2G, imagine if Hymn was 1B, imagine if Tombstalker was 7B (and you still had to pay a minimum of 1B of course), these cards would be all over blue decks, as is they barely make a splash.

Brainstorm is not the problem. Blue isn't even the problem. The problem is the best spells in every other color require an average of one off color mana for blue decks. If you didn't notice blue kind of sucks on it's own, it's only when splashed easily with the best spells and creatures from other colors that cards like Snapcaster, Delver, and Jace really shine (Image if Snap only flashbacked blue spells, he'd be a non-factor).

The solution is not to ban Brainstorm the solution is in 3 steps and they are all fairly easy.
#1 - Give non-blue decks more ways to interact with non-creatures. This effort is well under way since around Lorwyn block (see Pridemage, recent hatebears, Teeg, Leylines, Inquisition, Thoughtsieze, Surgical, Mindbreak Trap, Ooze, ect.). WotC needs to keep going in this direction. No other color needs a Force of Will but if Force of Will is the only real way to answer a combo the format will end up being heavily blue whether Brainstorm is banned or not. Force of Will will always be the shotgun blast to broken decks but there should be more "laser like" precision answers for the rest of the color pie (example of a "laser like" answer Cannonist is brutal vs. Storm but weak vs. Show and Tell or Reanimator type decks)
#2 - WotC needs to dial back on blue. Seriously blue is power creeping pretty hard. The rest of the color are creeping too and blue needed to keep up but right now every other color needs more attention from R&D to pull even (especially poor black and red).
#3 - WotC needs to stop printing these ridiculous bombs at C, 1C (where C = any given color). Look I know durdle players don't know how to build a mana base and can't stand to lose because they can't cast their 2 drop until turn 5, but you know what they hate more? Getting blown out by the guy who does know how to build a mana base with a 3 color "best cards dur" deck. It doesn't even have to be double colored mana, you could use the "reveal a white card, if you don't ~this~ costs X more mana to cast." Just give people a compelling reason to commit to a color more than throwing a couple fetches and duals in and calling it a day. GSZ is a step in the right direction. It's no surprise that the best GSZ deck right now doesn't run blue. Right now GSZ is one of the very few legit reasons to not just make your deck FoW + counters + dig + 16 bombs from whatever color I feel like today. More GSZ less SFM/goyf please.

[Arsenal]

People were arguing that Griselbrand / SnT was too strong and one piece needed to be banned. They had good arguments (Bargain on a giant flying lifelinker, unbeatable). But when you look at the stats you see that neither card has ever been in the top20 of most top8'ed cards of any month. So a simple look at the statistics could have saved us a lot of discussion because while these stats can't prove that a card is banworthy they can certainly prove that a card is NOT banworthy once you have the nessecary amount of data.

Another theory with good arguments is that Brainstorm is too strong. And when you look at Brainstorm stats you will see that every month Brainstorm top8s ~ four times as often as the most top8'ed card that is not also played in a Brainstorm deck (GSZ).

So in case of Brainstorm the stats support the theory. That's one reason why I bring them up. The other is to disprove the frequent claims that Brainstorm isn't extremely successful.

Again, the statistics you cited show nothing other than Brainstorm is the most played card in Legacy. Period. All of the other issues surrounding Brainstorm, valid or not, cannot be derived or inferred from the data you cited.

EDIT: Lol at this kid getting butthurt and having to send me a PM. Please don't contact me anymore.

[DragoFireheart]

Summary of what dontbiteitholmes said:

We need Force of Will power level cards in other colors where you need to invest heavily in a non-blue color and doing so is worthwhile. Green's Sun Zenith is a good start. Tone down the blue love, spread it out among other colors. give us more anti-combo non-blue cards. Stop making overpowered CMC 1 spells.

[Moondancerbb]

Summary of what dontbiteitholmes said:

We need Force of Will power level cards in other colors where you need to invest heavily in a non-blue color and doing so is worthwhile. Green's Sun Zenith is a good start. Tone down the blue love, spread it out among other colors. give us more anti-combo non-blue cards. Stop making overpowered CMC 1 spells.

Smartest Post in this thread to date.

[dontbiteitholmes]

Summary of what dontbiteitholmes said:

We need Force of Will power level cards in other colors where you need to invest heavily in a non-blue color and doing so is worthwhile. Green's Sun Zenith is a good start. Tone down the blue love, spread it out among other colors. give us more anti-combo non-blue cards. Stop making overpowered CMC 1 spells.

Good summary but I would change "stop making overpowered CMC 1 spells" to stop making bombs that require no more than one colored mana to splash.

They don't really make too many Lightning Bolts and Swords now adays that don't do something similar to a card we already have, it's more the goyfs/SFM type spells where you throw in 3-4 duals and maybe 2 extra fetches and all of a sudden have the full power of whatever color that card is as a splash color. Make people commit past the land base for non-blue colors or you can ban all the Brainstorms and Ponders you want and it won't change too much.

[Tacosnape]

Problem is, this is going to be absurdly difficult to do from a design standpoint.

The statement "Blue is power creeping heavily" is inaccurate only in tense. Blue has already power crept. Blue has power tidal waved. So the design challenge is this: Design something that you can't just splash in a blue shell that makes an actual difference.

Green Sun's Zenith was a pretty good effort. It was Wizards' appeasement card to Survival players who, despite the green mana intensity, were still playing it in a blue shell when it got banned. Green Sun's Zenith can and has still been played in blue shells (UG Natural Order decks, Bant,) but for the most part, it requires a somewhat green commitment to maximize.

Thalia, Guardian of Thraben was a second excellent choice here, since she's very difficult to play successfully in blue.

Black has Hymn to Tourach and Cabal Therapy still going for it. Hymn requires a heavy black commitment, but has still been seen in UB control lists. Therapy requires plenty of creatures or a heavy graveyard strategy, but again, decks like Cephalid Breakfast have made powerful use of it in a blue shell.

Red has Goblin Lackey. Period.

So in order for a card to fit this criteria, one of two things must be true.

1 - It needs to be incredibly powerful and require at least double mana of a color that isn't blue to either be cast or be most effective.

2 - It needs to be incredibly powerful and require that your deck be constructed in such a way that playing blue isn't compatible with the card.

Which is a very difficult task to do and still be balanced in all formats.