Brainstorm
Force of Will
Lion's Eye Diamond
Counterbalance
Sensei's Divining Top
Tarmogoyf
Phyrexian Dreadnaught
Goblin Lackey
Standstill
Natural Order
Griselbrand, Omniscience, etc...Originally Posted by Dark Ritual
If you're wondering how a dedicated two-card-combo can be tier one competitive without any Tutor effects, cantrips (like Brainstorm) are the answer.
The tournament I started is over. You should join the next one.
Good cards.
Consider 56 island+4 brainstorm.dec versus goodstuff.dec. Which deck will resolve the more powerful Brainstorm? Brainstorm is as strong as the cards it draws.
- Stronger cards = better Brainstorm
- Power creep is inevitable as long as Wizards plans to sell boosters
Brainstorm does get better over time.
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Survival don't actually get better over time. The reason is simple, cards that are good vs survival (enchantment, triggered ability, discard, graveyard interaction etc...) are printed more often than cards that are good IN survival decks. Survival creatures need to have some sort of built-in recursion a-la vengevine else survival is just a slow card that fuel T2 decks like it was BEFORE vengevine was printed (Tools and Tubbies anyone? Best deck). Meanwhile, since Vengevine was printed, the following cards that are good AGAINST survival or in deck that are NOT survival were printed:
- Abrupt Decay (maindeckable enchantment removal)
- Delver (anti-sinergy with Survival and can race or block Vengevine)
- Prowess creatures in general (anti-sinergy with survival), Pyromancer
- DRS (maindeckable grave removal)
- RiP (strongest grave hate)
- Revoker (maindeckable needle)
- Terminus (W remove three vengevines)
- Snapcaster (combined with Swords)
- Bojuka Bog (land deck in general)
In general, Survival power level was too good for 2010's Legacy. Since then, not many new actually good survival cards were printed, other decks got exponentially better, and many cards that are actually good vs survival were printed and maindeckable. Survival also work against the dominant strategy of the format of playing 20+ spells because you actually need a significant amount of creatures (20+) to ensure being able to cycle, or it become a dead card.
Unless wotc print a creature that read like :
Emrakul , reborn 15
Cretaure .adshashah
Annihilator 5
Madness: 0
12/12
Survival won't ever be broken again in a format that is dominated by cheap answers and fast clocks because it's just too slow now. Also, do you know what actually got more broken since 2010? Show and Tell. The card got legitemately bomb after bomb after bomb printed, and it's not far the day where they just print an even better omniscience and break the card completely. But somehow, survival, which sin was to enable 4/3 with haste is too much for the format and will "always" get better whenever they print strictly better vengevines, aka never.
Brainstorm itself does have slight negative tempo. Of course, as soon as BS makes you hit an extra land drop, that's been offset.
Who are you trying to kidding here? More than 70% of cards WotC prints are creatures, ergo the options for Survival get more diverse automatically.
No, they just simply need to be good enough to push your opponent against the wall. We hav Survival seen operating with a stream of Knights & Tarmogoyfs in case of yard-removal. I suspect most fair decks would get mauled by back to back TNNs these days.
Delver is a good anti-survival card because it can block Vengevine if blocked? Are you fucking serious? Moreover: None of the cards (except revoker) really deals with the two angles of attack Survival offers.
Yeah, DRS which is a straight upgrade to Birds to power Survival and turns survival into a lifegain/lifeloss machine by tutoring several DRS' just as example. TNN, Reclamation Sage, Griselbrand, Decay, TNN, etc can all be run in Survival shells. I lack words for the pathetic try to sell GREEN cards as unplayable in a core GREEN deck.
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I feel like the printing of more strong cards actually 'weakens' Brainstorm, as filtering has a higher impact if there is a big difference in quality between your individual cards. Consider why Merfolk never needed to play it.
The printing of very conditional cards (e.g. MDable hate such as pyroblast), cards that boost two-card derp decks (Omniscience), strong shuffle effects (e.g. Fetch & SFM) and cards that are better in your deck than in your hand (e.g. Progenitus, Terminus) makes Brainstorm stronger.
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A short list from top of my head that have insane or good Brainstorm synergy, cards that Brainstorm makes better and that make Brainstorm better:
Insane synergy:
- Allied Fetches
- Terminus / Entreat
- Counterbalance
Strong synergy:
- Stoneforge Mystic (extra Shuffle Effect / Shuffle back equipment and then fetch it with SFM)
- Delver of Secrets (triggered by BS, BS can force-trigger)
- DTT, Tombstalker, Treasure Cruise (BS acts as Lotus Petal, also can shuffle away uncastable 2nd or 3rd copy)
- Thoughtseize (targeted Discard would be way better, especially against Combo, if BS could not hide key cards)
- Snapcaster Mage
Some synergy:
- Ad Nauseam (Cheap card)
- Dark Confidant
- Tarmogoyf (BS gives +1/+1 too your creature)
- Ancestral Vision (negates drawback of not drawing in opening hand, places conveniently on top for Shardless)
- Monastery Swiftspear
- Past in Flames
- Monastery Mentor
Add Infernal Tutor to that list.
It is better to ask and look stupid then keep your mouth shut and remain so.
I hope your afterlife is filled with eternal torment.
Fuck. Which one of my quotes do I drop for this?
Add Young Pyromancer near the top of the list - for obvious reasons - and Deathrite Shaman somewhere in the middle. I don't even think Brainstorm ought to be banned, but this list gives me a pause.
lol this looks like the majority of the format...
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Did you mean Lion's Eye Diamond? (Discard as a cost stuff has synergy with brainstorm.)
No. The issue sometimes with getting your hand empty is land drops not mana. With Brainstorm you can tuck lands and naturally empty your hand should that play be needed. You can add LED to the list, but I did mean tutor.
It is better to ask and look stupid then keep your mouth shut and remain so.
I hope your afterlife is filled with eternal torment.
Fuck. Which one of my quotes do I drop for this?
I think this overstates the power of Brainstorm a bit. Yes, it's good against discard, but only in matchups where only a few cards matter; in most cases (i.e. in "fair" mirrors) the benefit to hiding things from discard is marginal. You want your Ponders to be Brainstorms only slightly more often than you want your Brainstorms to be Ponders.
There's a lot of truth to this, and I think that the hair splitting is useful in understanding why I think that Treasure Cruise and Dig Through Time are problematic despite still allowing some semblance of strategic diversity while cantrips are a net positive despite the fact that they can result in strategically different decks having occasionally similar tactics.
While a combo deck, a control deck, and a tempo deck might all be using cantrips to help implement their strategy, they're ultimately making different choices both about which cards to put where and how to sequence their cantrips to set or respond to the pacing of the game. A Delver deck cantripping to find threats, flip Delver, or find offensive disruption is similar to a control deck cantripping for removal only in that they're using the same tools to find what they need. The sequencing of the cantrips and the manner in which they deploy the tools they've found are substantially different. They also create hidden information in a format where cards like Thoughtseize, Vendillion Clique, Gitaxian Probe, and various recursion tools do a lot to make hands much less hidden than they are in formats without a critical mass of these sorts of effects.
While the Delve draw spells share some of these features (creating unknown information, allowing a variety of decks to implement a game plan that involves them) they're dangerous because they create card advantage at what is simply too low a cost. Decks that can't dedicate at least a few slots to them are simply driven out of the format because they can't keep up with the sheer number of threats or answers a deck employing Dig or Cruise presents unless they can reliably kill the opponent before running out of cards themselves. This is in stark contrast to the pre-Khans era where nonblue decks frequently had strongly favorable matchups against blue decks because they could win card quality fights simply by running threat dense or employing slightly weaker card quality engines like Sylvan Library alongside more powerful threats or answers. Jund, Junk, and Maverick against Delver and Stoneblade are the classic examples of this dynamic, where the former win by overpowering the latter. Death and Taxes is able to exist almost entirely because blue decks designed to rely on cheap spells to find comparatively diffuse threats and answers line up poorly with a threat-dense deck that makes it hard to cast cantrips. The idea of grinding someone out who can draw extra cards every 2-3 turns simply by playing their normal game plan is completely untenable. I strongly suspect that the reason these decks were underplayed relative to their overall strength relative to the metagame is that people hate losing to combo and perceive these decks to have worse combo matchups than they do, while simultaneously assuming that blue decks have better combo matchups than they do. That's a problem with the players, not with the game.
I'm just going to respond broadly to this since I think Survival is right on the line of banworthiness. My general hunch is that it's best to keep banned but being open to unbanning it in the future, espeically if Miracles becomes a problem since it's naturally resistant to Terminus. That being said, the fact that it's extremely slow and vulnerable to hate is hard to balance against the fact that it's monstrously powerful once it gets going. Lands is the obvious point of comparison as a nonblue graveyard engine deck, but Survival confounds the comparison by being hyper-aggressive instead of durdly while also being far more tempo-negative to get rolling than Loam.
Discard is a shitty foil against agro and agro control. Discard is a natural foil against combo. In other words, who gives a crap if Brainstorm is marginal at helping agro against discard? It helps combo against discard which is what counts much more.I think this overstates the power of Brainstorm a bit. Yes, it's good against discard, but only in matchups where only a few cards matter; in most cases (i.e. in "fair" mirrors) the benefit to hiding things from discard is marginal. You want your Ponders to be Brainstorms only slightly more often than you want your Brainstorms to be Ponders.
Last edited by Finn; 09-28-2015 at 09:05 AM.
"Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."
"Politicians are like diapers. They should be changed often and for the same reason."
"Governing is too important to be left to people as silly as politicians."
"Politicians were mostly people who'd had too little morals and ethics to stay lawyers."
Discard is fine out of control and midrange against aggro and aggro-control; it lets you steer their hand in the direction you want or proactively remove threats or disruption that you don't want to or can't react to. As for the combo cases that you consider the only ones that matter, Brainstorm is only helpful when the combo player's hand pre-Brainstorm contains exactly one non-redundant combo piece AND has and no library manipulation spells other than the Brainstorm. So we're taking about a small subset of combo hands where Brainstorm is functioning as substantive protection - they hide exactly one card that they need to go off and expose only redundant combo pieces, then untap, draw the hidden piece, and go off. Even if they hide two non-redundant combo pieces and expose only chaff, you've bought yourself at least one draw step which is all you can realistically ask for against combo from any sort of non-permanent disruption.
Have you ever cast Thoughtseize or Duress against a brainstorm combo player? It very often ends up with them hiding the combo pieces on top and your discard amounting to shit
I have, tons of times. Sure, sometimes they hide the relevant pieces. I'd contend that the majority of the time you still hit something not irrelevant provided you have some other angle of disruption beyond discard that you can make more effective or force through using the discard. Sometimes it's as good as a counter on the discard spell, and I didn't contest that. I said that Brainstorm doesn't effectively counter discard nearly as often as you suggest. In most cases you can at least strip another cantrip or piece of protection, and in cases where they hide everything that's non-redundant from the discard you've usually bought yourself another draw step, which isn't irrelevant.
Obviously the foil to Brainstorm hiding pieces is instant speed Thoughtseize. #thinkAboutIt.
-Matt
Split second thoughtseize
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