http://www.starcitygames.com/magic/l...Miserable.html
Discuss.There is a persistent myth that Legacy is a wide-open format with dozens of different strategies and decks, and that you can play more or less anything you want. That claim is just not true.
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Whining about combo is stupid.
Seriously, sure combo is strong, but this guy has obviously had some kind of bad experience with combo because he is blowing it WAY out of proportion. Personally, I think that legacy right now is in a very healthy balance.
Well, I can't say that I found the article too terribly informative. Aggro decks have a problem with combo decks yeah sure, but I think the author was a bit melodramatic about it.
My favorite bit, at the end...
Honestly, I think this bashes on combo players more than anything. I myself do not care for combo decks, but the author basically said that if you aren't winning the aggro matchup then you do not know what you are doing. Ouch.I consider aggressive decks without Force of Will to be basically unplayable in Legacy.
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The author plays combo.Originally Posted by Jeff Kruchkow
Combo is only kept in check right now by the presence of Counterbalance and blue's wider popularity, and by the large number of inexperienced pilots who fold to hate or just flat-out lose to themselves.
EDIT: Besides, his point was less that combo is stupid and more that there are a lot of ways in Legacy to make combat completely non-interactive or to outright shut it down. Enchantress, Lands, and Reanimator tend to fall into this category by negating removal and/or making it impossible to attack.
So when people stop being bad at magic and blue stops being a color, the format will be SO broken!
The last good blue cards printed were Ponder, which was just a reformat of Portent, and Tarmogoyf, which was an accident. Combo, on the other hand, constantly gets cool new toys to play with. The reality is that combo will by its nature become degenerate over time.
On the other hand, we do have a banned list.
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I think you've made a mistake here. See, Tarmogoyf isn't blue because Wizards R&D didn't want players to make the wrong play and accidentally pitch it to Force of Will.
You wouldn't theoretically want to pitch an Ancestral Recall to Force of Will, would you? Well, the same, apparently, applies to Tarmogoyf. It's such a powerful blue card that you CANT pitch to Force.
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Combo decks might seem really overpowered if you are the one playing Zoo, but Zoo seems really overpowered if you are playing any non-combo blue deck. I, for one, became really tired of having to deal with turn 1 3/3's.
I think it's a good thing the domination of combo finally comes to light. Here in The Netherlands, ANT has dominated since the printing of Ad Nauseam and even before that combo was a very popular and strong archetype here. I think it's a good thing that you can win via various strategies, and personally, I would like as many strategies as possible be equally viable. But that is simply not the case. At the moment, as it stands, winning via Tendrils of Agony is simply the strongest win possible, followed by winning via Elspeth. This indicates that either Combo or Control which (eventually) wins through the attack phase are the strongest ways to go. The fact that winning via Tendrils is stronger than winning via Elspeth is because Combo kicks Controls arse. It has done it for quite a while and will continue to do so.
The old Rock-Paper-Scissors idea that Combo beats Aggro beats Control beats Combo is no longer the case. Combo wins against most non-Counterbalance or non-Force of Will tempo decks. And even against those decks it stands a pretty good chance: remember, CounterTop is only really active on turn 3 (turn 1 Sensei's Divining Top, turn 2 Counterbalance, turn 3 you have mana to activate Top). Combo often has the chance to win before that, meaning CounterTop isn't a sure Combo-win. It may be Combo's hardest match-up, but when looking at a field with Qasali Pridemages, Elspeths and lots of tribal like Goblins and Merfolk, it's not a very attractive deck to play. The other decks that have a chance against combo are the blue based aggro decks like Tempo Thresh, Merfolk and Bant Aggro. But also these have a hard time, an even harder time than CounterTop to beat Combo, as Combo utilizes cards like Orim's Chant, Silence, Xantid Swarm and Duress to make sure they can go off. To make things worse, Combo utilizes Carpet of Flowers against blue based decks, generating massive amounts of mana to pump into Ad Nauseam, Ill-Gotten Gains, Tendrils of Agony or whatever little extra they could use.
Another problem against Combo is that alot of people who don't play it, don't play it because they don't have it, don't understand it, don't want to understand it or simply hate it. Resulting in the fact that half the field doesn't know how to properly play against Combo. Everyone knows how to tackle a few creatures, but what do you Thoughtseize when you see a hand of Underground Sea, Dark Ritual, Dark Ritual, Cabal Ritual, Lotus Petal, Lion's Eye Diamond, Infernal Tutor? The answer depends on the situation ofcourse, but while you may instantly see that the Infernal Tutor is likely to cause alot of trouble here, your average just-came-in-from-standard-player might have heard rumors about how broken LED is, and that it should be banned and pick that one instead. Doesn't matter, because if a Combo player has such a hand you're very likely to lose that game anyway.
I'm not saying Combo should be gunned down at the next bannings, but by all means, something has to be done. In The Netherlands, nonblue decks like Goblins, The Rock or Zoo often pack maindeck Combo hate (in the form of Thorn of Amethyst, Gaddock Teeg, Ethersworn Canonist and even Orim's Chant), because otherwise you know you could never win a tournament. When you reach a point where you have to pack maindeck hate against a certain archetype, that archetype has crossed the line and something should be done. I won't go deeply into what should be done because this thread will probably turn into a banning-discussion, but I think we can all point out a few cards that simply give Combo too much unfair advantage.
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I think its worth noting that the author didn't discuss how Stax or other Chalice decks figure into this equation. I would have thought that they would be considered another "pole" of the legacy metagame
Prison decks like Angel Stax, Armageddon Stax, Dutch Stax, Dragon Stompy, Demon Stompy and Faerie Stompy have run their course. They hit a wall when Qasali Pridemage was introduced and now are alot less attractive to pick up. They're still viable, but are only played by those lonesome cowboys who love Stax or Stompy. Therefor these decks are as good as neglectible when discussing Combo in the metagame.
In a way, you could say that Qasali Pridemage is partially responsible for Combo to become so dominant. The card helps decks like The Rock and Zoo to become stronger, which are very good match-ups for Combo (incidentally The Rock crushes CounterTop, which is a relative bad match-up for Combo). The card also helps various Bant decks with being able to fight Prison decks, making sure Prison decks are less and less played, which is also a good thing for Combo.
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The situation of chalice aggro decks is particularly interesting, since they're non-force aggro decks that have a decent to good combo matchup. Maybe what we can learn from this is that aggro players should start maindecking chalice, like people do in Vintage. Anyways I think combo still isn't as scary as the author depicts it. Dredge and reanimator can still be stopped by the right amount of hate (and this of course means more than a singleton Jotun Grunt in the board). Zoo is of course a favourable matchup for ANT, but not an auto win. Gaddock forces the ANT player to search for a solution, and this buys the zoo player time to beat, making Ad Nauseam less attractive, and Doomsday very difficoult to set up (you've got to Silence the Zoo player to avoid being burned to death, and then prepare a pile that wins on the same turn while fighting the hate). Of course it's not enough to turn the matchup, but it give's the Zoo player a fighting chance.
But even given that combo is a very bad matchup for aggro decks, I don't see why aggro shouldn't be playable. Goblin has a good matchup against merfolk, merfolk has a good matchup against countertop, countertop has a good matchup against combo and combo has a good matchup against goblins. So, if it's not a triangle, it's at least a square. Of course a Goblin player should be really skilled and lucky to make a top8 after having to beat 4 combo decks in a row, but the same can be said of the combo player who meets 4 countertop in a row (and the second occurrence is probably more likely to happen...).
Edit: just to add that I really liked the article, anyways. It's well written and defends such a controversial position very well.
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maindeck chalice isn't feasible for most aggro decks, though. In fact, chalice owns most aggro decks unless they can get the previously mentioned pridemage to remove it.
While the author took some dramatic license with the tone of the article I'm pretty sure his point about forcing the opponent to become irrelevant is correct in both the description of current strategies and the assessment of its power level.
I believe that Combo is harder to play because 1 mistake going off with AdNT is often the game, where a mistake with an Aggro deck doesn't mean you automatically lose. I tend to agree with Skeggi's generalizations
Excuse me? The only decks in Vintage that run maindeck Chalices are Stax and Workshop Aggro. And they work alot better in Vintage because they have Workshops. We don't. But unbanning Workshops for Legacy doesn't seem like a good deal either.
This is a common misconception. If you put an experienced ANT player against an experienced Zoo player, the ANT player will win 99% of all match-ups. ANT simply has too many outs against Gaddock Teegs, Ethersworn Canonists and whatever else the Zoo player would like to throw at the ANT player (perhaps even Thorn of Amethyst).
Is it a square? Let's see:
CounterTop vs ANT: 80-20
Random Prison deck vs ANT: 70-30
Bant vs ANT: 50-50
Tempo Thresh vs ANT: 50-50
Merfolk vs ANT: 50-50
Dredge vs ANT: 40-60
Eva Green vs ANT: 40-60
The Rock vs ANT: 30-70
Goblins vs ANT: 30-70
Zoo vs ANT: 30-70
Aggro Loam vs ANT: 20-80
Landstill vs ANT: 20-80
In this list of 12 archetypes, only 2 have a possitive match-up against ANT, there are 3 with a 50-50 chance and 7 archetypes with a negative match-up. While the deck with the best anti-combo match-up has a 50-50 chance against Bant, Zoo, Tempo Thresh, Eva Green and Random Prison deck, it has a bad match-up against all the other decks on the list.
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Combo (ANT) might be the best to play right now, but I don't mind it as long as a very large percentage of the players seem to play the aggro decks (zoo, goblins, merfolk).
In fact, aggro has been boosted alot over the past few sets compared to control. I'd love to see some good new blue spells being printed which will properly restore the "Power Triangle" of Combo > Aggro > Control > Combo.
Although I wouldn't be against the banning of AdN and maybe LED. Combo would still be possible without them, and would still have the upper hand against aggro decks, it would just have a harder time control, as it should be.
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Uh? This has been the case for Extended since the limelight of Mind's Desire, pretty much; aggro has needed some MD cards against combo to compete if it can at all afford them. I don't see why it's really wrong for Legacy-players to have to try and find ways to interact with more unfair decks too, to buy some extra percentages.
Also, it's not like Storm (let's be honest, ANT is the worst of that pile) has off-the-charts EV. It's got legitimate bad match-ups. Some people just sideboard so heavily for it that it loses to that; something that's not really possible against e.g. aggro. Zoo has good MUs against most of that MU pile you pasted, quite possibly with better EV than Storm. Good match-ups and bad match-ups exist; I don't see how this is newsworthy. Metagame exists too for that very reason and shifts and the optimal deck to play varies based on what others are playing and there's the art of picking the right deck at the right juncture.
First off, ANT is currently the best deck in the format. The power of Legacy ANT is so high that it's even more powerful than any Vintage Storm Combo deck, simply because ANT can play 4 Black Lotus, 4 Demonic Tutor, 4 Mystical Tutor, 4 Brainstorm and 4 always-on-color Moxen in the form of Lotus Petal. If you are not in awe by the raw power of Legacy ANT, I dare to say you simply have not witnessed its full potential yet.
I agree, there should be bad match-ups and there should be good match-ups, but ANT has too many good match-ups and not enough bad match-ups that it's getting rather rediculous.
I must say, in a combo heavy meta like The Netherlands it's easy to come to this conclusion, and I understand people in other countries have trouble coming to the same conclusion. But let me just say this: the Dutch Legacy meta is more advanced than any other meta in the world. Why? Because here in The Netherlands, there is a tournament within travel distance at least 2 times a month. For April alone there are 7 tournaments scheduled, while most of them will have about 20 attendants, there are 2 or 3 which will have a turnout of over 32. In March there were 9 tournaments with about the same turnout. If you know a place where there's more competative Legacy play, I'd like to hear about it.
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To my knowledge is not uncommon to play Chalice set at zero to gain time to play your hate bears, but I might be wrong. Of course I wasn't speaking about workshop aggro, which is more akin to stompy/stax (depending on the build)Excuse me? The only decks in Vintage that run maindeck Chalices are Stax and Workshop Aggro. And they work alot better in Vintage because they have Workshops. We don't. But unbanning Workshops for Legacy doesn't seem like a good deal either
I tested a bit with ANT, although I am by no mean an experienced player of the deck. If ANT is on the draw and can't win on turn one, it takes a bit to get rid of Gaddock (particularly g1 where you usually have very few answers maindeck). If the zoo player can put pressure he/she has a chance, I'm not saying the matchup is even, but is more like 70%-30% than 99%-1% IMHO.
This makes ANT probably the tier 1 of the format, but still not an unbeatable monster. Some matchups (not all, I admit) can be heavily modified by a strong sideboard plan (like people already do for dredge). [Is it that bad for aggro loam? I never tested the matchup, but the deck maindecks chalice, has a strong LD plan and big beaters... I would be glad to hear some more details about this :) ]
- Zoo, Goblins and Dredge can bring in chalice of the void to set at zero. This should buy time to drop more hate (gaddock or canonist for zoo, pillar for goblins - ok, I know it's hard for gobbos) or simply win (dredge). Mindbreak trap is also an option, though less effective, IMHO.
- Merfolk, Thresh can bring in more counters (and maybe substitute pierce for snare in the maindeck for the latter), Bant can board more counters, canonist, and teeg.
- Eva green could board in 4 Sadistic Sacraments, more discard, Oppression. Considering it has dark ritual to power them out, it shouldn't be so hard to at least even the matchup. (As a side note, I find this approach also pretty interesting)
- Landstill can (and already does) bring in countertop (alongside with the usual canonist and mage)
What it's true is that people should start to rethink to their board. One year ago Countertop was dominant, and everybody was playing 3+ krosan grips in their board. Even now, almost every board contains 3-6 pieces of grave hate. It should probably contain also 4+ pieces of storm combo hate. If ANT becomes really that dominant people should start to maindeck some answers (many zoo lists already maindeck teeg). I don't think we're at this point, though. Combo is strong, really strong, but still manageable. If it doesn't receive some extra help (via unbannings or new cards) I think the format can handle it, like it handled Countertop before.
EDIT: I spent a long time writing the post, and some of my points were anticipated by eldariel.
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