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Thread: [Article] Unlocking Legacy - Lessons Learned

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    [Article] Unlocking Legacy - Lessons Learned

    Linky

    Just thought I'd throw this out there:

    Aether Vial is a really good card... in a different metagame. In a world of Landstill and blue-based control decks, Aether Vial is incredibly good. The problem is that counters are only important to stop a few cards in the Goblins/Threshold matchup. Goblins loses most of its games when Threshold gets out a quick set of creatures before Goblins can stabilize, and Aether Vial really does nothing to stop that. Aether Vial slows the deck down a turn, but Chrome Mox and Ancient Tomb speed the deck up a turn. Seems good.
    Seems good? No. Seems awful. I am no proponent of Goblins by any means and do not consider myself knowledgeable of the deck, but I am also no idiot. Apparently somebody doesn't have enough work under their belt to fully grasp what Aether Vial does for Goblins. Please, please, please do some more groundwork before throwing this stuff out to the public. Actually, I take that back. Please continue shedding this type of information to the format-dwellers. I would like nothing more than to go into the first round of the next large tournament and see that my Goblins opponent decided to cut Aether Vial. Oh holy day!

    EDIT: I also bid you good luck ever casting a blue spell with the Faerie Stompy list. I was running 4 Chrome Mox along with 9 land-based blue sources and was still having difficulty with blue mana. Go go testing.

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    Re: [Article] Unlocking Legacy - Lessons Learned

    Goblins without Aether Vial? That's, umm... below average.
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    Re: [Article] Unlocking Legacy - Lessons Learned

    Quote Originally Posted by Article
    You know what card is really good? Stingscourger... sort of. Stingscourger fills an important role in the deck, which is mostly just being better than Gempalm Incinerator. In a world of Tarmogoyfs Gempalm is incredibly underwhelming. Naturally you keep the Gempalm Incinerators in the sideboard or the maindeck and switch them when appropriate.


    Incinerator is an incredibly underwhelming card but you should play it in your sideboard/maindeck? I dont get it.
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    Re: [Article] Unlocking Legacy - Lessons Learned

    Quote Originally Posted by Di View Post
    Linky
    Actually, I take that back. Please continue shedding this type of information to the format-dwellers. I would like nothing more than to go into the first round of the next large tournament and see that my Goblins opponent decided to cut Aether Vial. Oh holy day!
    Still, it was more productive than reading this article. Thanks for writing it, but please test decks before you post about them. Goblins could use black, yes...but Mox?

    Removed insults.
    Last edited by Jander78; 11-26-2007 at 10:38 AM.

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    Re: [Article] Unlocking Legacy - Lessons Learned

    Considering how hard I pushed for the traditional Goblins list, I know it's kind of weird for me to come out showing this list I've been testing/working on. And yes, cutting Aether Vial does horrible things to your Landstill matchup or your Prison matchup (for example). I've been aiming pretty exclusively at Threshold with these changes to see what you can do. That dictated the Stingscourger/Incinerator swap, or the Mox/Vial swap.

    I'm not saying Chrome Mox is right; I don't have the testing to determine one way or another. All I know is that it's worth considering. Goblins clearly isn't perfect; if it was it would continue to dominate. All my testing with stock lists suggests that Threshold is now favored in the Goblins matchup, which means that it basically doesn't have any good prey except Cephalid Breakfast. Therefore I'm willing to do some silly things to swing the matchup. All I know is that turn 3 Ringleader, turn 4 Auntie Wort is kinda silly against Threshold, and unlike a comparable Aether Vial draw, that draw is fast enough to beat turn 2 reasonably sized Goyf.


    xsockmonkeyx: Incinerator is really good in some places, but I feel like Stingscourger is a better maindeck call. That's what that quotation is trying to explain. When I tried to suggest a specific metagame call (Pyroclasm vs Swords to Plowshares in the maindeck of UWR, and the other in the sideboard) people jumped all over me for not being explicit about it, so I'm trying to clear that up.


    As for Faerie Stompy; getting blue mana was a problem, but since Efreet is gone (which is clearly wrong in hindsight, since flight is so good), it wasn't as much of an issue.
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    Re: [Article] Unlocking Legacy - Lessons Learned

    Quote Originally Posted by Anusien View Post
    I don't have the testing to determine one way or another.
    Don't want to flame here, but one question: Why don't you? I would love to read articles by authors that actually test the decklists they publish. Is this too much to ask?
    Sometimes you have to read between the minds.

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    Re: [Article] Unlocking Legacy - Lessons Learned

    @all Why can Hi-Val write about aweful decks and Anusien can't without getting bashed? Seriously folks, he explicitely states that the decks are bad but serve to show concepts that didn't quite work out up to now.
    Even the title of the article indicates that you will see bad decklists in there.
    @Anusien One thing I'm always thinking when I see your testlists is: You are trying too hard to fit all the cool improvements into one list. Just go step after step. For example in the Goblins list, not only did you cut Ports (a very integral part of the original deck), you also cut Aether Vial (the namesake of the original deck) and Gempalm Incinerator. Even though Incinerator is not that important in the original deck you have no data whether it is or is not better than Stingscourger in your build. It's like you are saying all the people who want Port in the deck are wrong and all the people who want Aether Vial in the deck are wrong and on top of that why not tell all the people who want Incinerator that they are wrong.
    Another big problem I see is that no matter how valid your testing is you have built up a bad reputation in the past when other people tested your decks and found your results to be wrong. Maybe you should try to find someone to do a play by play walkthrough of a match with one of your decks like the Goblins vs Threshold series.

    So now let the bashing continue
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  8. #8

    Re: [Article] Unlocking Legacy - Lessons Learned

    Conventional wisdom tells when to decide whether we want 0, 1, 2, 3, or 4 copies of a card. In one of his articles about Long.dec he presented the theory that if you wanted to see a card in your opening hand every game, you wanted 7-8 "copies" of a card.
    I assume the 'he' you are referring is Smmenen.

    Why are you attributing this bit of theory to Smmenen? In fact, why are you attributing it to anybody? This is pretty common knowledge. 60 cards divided by 8 copies equals one copy every 7.5 cards. I figured this out at roughly the time I bought my fourth preconstructed deck, and needed to figure out how many swamps I needed if I wanted to see one in my opening hand.

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    Re: [Article] Unlocking Legacy - Lessons Learned

    I thought this article sucked. I'm not sure why SCG doesn't openly accept submissions anymore, and continue to post dreck like this, and like half the stuff written by their 'premium' writers.

    Quote Originally Posted by anusien
    That's actually not the quote I wanted to use to open this article. The downside of starting each article with a quotation is that the one I wanted to use, one about inspiration by Jack London, headlined an article five months ago. The upside is that I get to sound like an intellectual (or at least a pompous jerk!) without trying hard.
    No, you don't get to sound intellectual when you don't use the quoted source in a relevant way. Then it just sounds like you're namedropping, and have no other way to start an article besides some formula you thought would be good to repeat article after article.

    Quote Originally Posted by anusien
    It turns out that the Affinity concept is not nearly as strong with only 8 artifact lands and only Ravager as a cheap artifact. I made the mistake of thinking Affinity was still good, when clearly things have changed.
    Affinity can still be good, if you actually knew how to build it. It's been a pretty long standing rule that, at a bare minimum, you need 12-14 artifact lands for Affinity to function correctly, with most decks playing 15 or 16. I hear that AEther Vial is a pretty good cheap artifact too.

    Quote Originally Posted by anusien
    I basically said, "Wow, the four-drops in Goblins are hundreds of times better than the two- and three-drops. How do we change the deck to basically just play four-drops?"
    When did Goblin Warchief, Goblin Piledriver, and Goblin Matron start being bad, or hundreds of times worse than Boggart Mob? You'll have to fill me in on that, and why in the hell you think Stingscourger is realistically better than Gempalm Incinerator, or even Tarmogoyf itself.

    Quote Originally Posted by anusien
    Aether Vial is a really good card... in a different metagame. In a world of Landstill and blue-based control decks, Aether Vial is incredibly good. The problem is that counters are only important to stop a few cards in the Goblins/Threshold matchup. Goblins loses most of its games when Threshold gets out a quick set of creatures before Goblins can stabilize, and Aether Vial really does nothing to stop that. Aether Vial slows the deck down a turn, but Chrome Mox and Ancient Tomb speed the deck up a turn. Seems good.
    No, it seems like you don't know what you're talking about, which I think we can all understand when you cut AEther Vial and Rishadan Port from the deck. Since you think that "Wasteland and Rishadan Port only help you against Landstill and sometimes against combo decks," let me give you a little run down on how to actually play Goblins.
    1) Option 1, connect with a Goblin Lackey on turn 2, and drop something that's going to win you the game. The options for dealing with Goblin Lackey on turn 2 are dwindling in people's decks as they basically ignore Goblins at present. There is a reason that Goblin Lackey has been banned in Extended for so long. It is busted.
    2) Option 2, resolve AEther Vial and then proceed to Wasteland an opponent's early land, and Rishadan Port them for a couple of turns to keep them off a relevant color until AEther Vial just wins you the game. This is so easy to do against so many decks, that if you actually played with Goblins for any significant amount of time, you probably wouldn't make terrible suggestions like cutting these cards. Cheating mana costs and disrupting the opponent are part of the inherent strategy in modern Goblins decks that make them so strong. There is a reason that AEther Vial has been banned in Extended for so long. It is busted.

    If you are having trouble against Threshold, you can either attempt to do do options 1 or 2, or actually learn to play a tempo game with Goblins and try to beat Threshold in the mid to long game. Tarmogoyf is usually a bigger threat than anything you have, but Gempalm Incinerator can equalize or win you most fights if you play correctly, and cards like Goblin Matron, Goblin Ringleader, and Wort, Boggart Auntie can go a long way towards creating tempo and card advantage that will ultimately win you the game. Play any of those cards, get more threats, block an opposing Tarmogoyf if you're playing the defense role, and continue to drop threats until your card advantage and creatures can win you the game.
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    Re: [Article] Unlocking Legacy - Lessons Learned

    Quote Originally Posted by Lukas Preuss View Post
    Don't want to flame here, but one question: Why don't you? I would love to read articles by authors that actually test the decklists they publish. Is this too much to ask?
    The unfortunate side effect of writing on a deadline is that the article submission date does not always coincide with the end of a run of testing.

    Silverdragon: That's an interesting point, and you're right, I don't really do incremental testing. The problem here is that I basically made one change (inclusion of more 4-drops), but had to make a lot of other changes to accommodate it. Incinerator/Stingscourger can stand alone, so that is probably an interesting change to try on its own first.

    etrigan: The math doesn't actually work out that way (statistics etc). In this case I attribute the thought to him because he's the one that I read it from first.

    JACO: I think you're missing the point. I understand what a core Goblins list or a core Affinity list look like. Neither deck are putting up the numbers they should, so I'm hybridizing. A pure Affinity deck wouldn't do that well anyway, even with Tarmogoyf, because Threshold is just too much better of a creature deck now.

    Why am I taking this hate though? I never said that was a finished decklist. I found the 4 drops extremely powerful, but I have yet to make claims about whether this is better than the typical Goblins list!

    If beating Threshold was as easy as you say, the matchup would be in Goblins's favor, and Threshold wouldn't have dominated GenCon. Let's look at where you have the card (Vial, Force) and they don't have Force (you on the play) or Daze (you on the draw). That will happen roughly 0.40*(0.5*0.6+0.5*0.6*0.6) = 0.192% of the time. Even if you do pull it off, it's not impossible for Threshold to come back, especially with an early Tarmogoyf. The most prevalent build is also UGR which is extraordinarily hateful to the traditional Goblins deck.
    The first scenario almost never happens. Goblin Lackey is an incredibly credible threat, but it connects very rarely. Even if it does hit, you can't really maximize the power. You have maybe 2 SGC as main threats, and 4 Goblin Ringleader + 4 Goblin Warchief as cards there that Threshold really cares about coming off a Lackey trigger. Threshold can still win through that. I still run Goblin Lackey, and it's a good card (due to the increased number of high-end threats I'd claim I make it better), but it's not enough.

    The traditional way of beating Threshold simply doesn't work any more. It used to be that Threshold would have to develop its mana and not use Tropical Islands right away, since they had to hit 7 cards in the graveyard before dropping a Werebear. Now they can just go turn 1 Fetch->Island, Ponder; turn 2 Fetch->Tropical Island, Tarmogoyf and suddenly Wastelands and Rishadan Ports are much less relevant.

    Incinerator doesn't work. It's too easy for Threshold, especially UGR, to nullify your Incinerators with removal. If you could get up to 5-6 Goblins, you'd be winning even without Incinerator. That's why I like Stingscourger, because it lets you play a tempo game.

    I found that Tarmogoyf fundamentally changes the Threshold v Goblins matchup because it lets Threshold steal either role early on depending on what it wants. Half of the article is a natural progression of that.
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    Please be less rambling in your next post. I only bothered with figuring out what the fuck you were trying to ask because I took it as a challenge.

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    Re: [Article] Unlocking Legacy - Lessons Learned

    Not to be condescending or anything, but I dont see the point at all in articles such as this that publish lists of established decks that are CLEARLY worse than already established lists, even though the article doesnt claim superiority. You speak of Threshold like its 'Big Brother' or as dominating as Flash was but thats simply not the case, you dont need to warp goblins or faerie stompy for them to viable, and the warpings didnt even make the decks better at all. On a positive note, I got many lulz from the article.

  12. #12

    Re: [Article] Unlocking Legacy - Lessons Learned

    Does he have adept status?

    Take it the fuck away.

    Cut Aether Vial? Jesus christ. That card does so much in every single match-up. It's kind of like Goblin Lackey 5-8, in that it's a completely stupid fucking mana cheat.

    Cut Aether Vial... please.

    edit: I will, however, give you credit for Chrome Mox. It's a card that I've wanted to run in Goblins for a long time.

    edit2: Boggart Mob is fucking awful. It's like if SGC and Piledriver had a lovechild. Except it has Downs Syndrome.

    edit3: You know why Goblins isn't putting up the numbers like it used to? Because people learned how to play against it. Ask the Syracuse people, I used to rag on Goblins all the time, because it's easy to beat. People started dealing with turn one lackey, and running cheaper mass removal. And they printed Tarmogoyf (fuck that card). Goblins turns a lot of people away because it's stereotyped as an "easy" deck to play. Sure, the turn three nut draw plays itself. But it's a lot harder to play when you're staring down 'goyfs, Silver Knights, Jittes and 12 1/1's on turn one.

    edit4: you're right, the Thresh v Goblins match-up has changed. Mana denial doesn't work anymore (shit, I cut Port months ago). You know what does? Fucking Smother. That's really all you need to deal with Tarmogoyf. It's better than Stingscourger because the Thresh player won't simply play out 'goyf again next turn.
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    Re: [Article] Unlocking Legacy - Lessons Learned

    The unfortunate side effect of writing on a deadline is that the article submission date does not always coincide with the end of a run of testing.
    I can understand that, but then again, why not let someone else fill the article slot while you continue testing in order to write a more solid article later on.

    I don't get off on reading theory alone; I'd rather read a post-testing explanation of why a card choice was good rather than a claim not backed by anything except theory.

    I'm sorry but I don't like taking the time to read an article/post only to realize that the person who wrote it didn't test much (even if its content turns out to be true).

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    Re: [Article] Unlocking Legacy - Lessons Learned

    Quote Originally Posted by Silverdragon View Post
    @all Why can Hi-Val write about aweful decks and Anusien can't without getting bashed? Seriously folks, he explicitely states that the decks are bad but serve to show concepts that didn't quite work out up to now.
    Even the title of the article indicates that you will see bad decklists in there.
    Whoa, whoa. I'm going to take your word "aweful" and interpret that to mean "full of awe", and I agree with that. My lists are actually handed down to my by the ancient Sumerian god Uhura Mazda, full of insights and wisdom and tempered in the mind of a six thousand year old diety. So yes, it's actually an understatement to be awed by my lists, and I'm glad that you feel that way too.

    And I test the hell of out of decks that I publish, because I'd be ashamed to put bad lists out there. If something is a concept and not a reality, I explicitly state that.

    As for the Faerie Stompy list, did anyone else see the line about how it was a failed experiment? I think more reading comprehension and less skimming for decklists is in order so you don't look like a fool publicly.

    Finally, I'd like to have seen some in-depth discussion about things like Wort. Can you give specific examples about when it's good? I see nothing wrong with questioning Aether Vial's inclusion, as long as testing and results back up cutting it from the deck. Sacred cows make the best hamburgers.

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    Re: [Article] Unlocking Legacy - Lessons Learned

    Great article man, keep up with thinking of those rough outlines for decklists!

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    Re: [Article] Unlocking Legacy - Lessons Learned

    I guess the question is, do you readers want to hear about "failed experiments" or something more relevant to tournament Legacy?

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    Re: [Article] Unlocking Legacy - Lessons Learned

    Quote Originally Posted by Machinus View Post
    I guess the question is, do you readers want to hear about "failed experiments" or something more relevant to tournament Legacy?
    Yeah, this pretty much hits it on the head. I almost think that if you are going to write an article like this, it shouldn't even include any lists so no one gets confused or angry. Throw out like 5 radical ideas (put Thorn in FS, cut Vial from Goblins, etc) and talk about the general theory behind them, then come to the table with a list when you have done the requisite legwork. I have no problem with challenging our assumptions, but this article seems to challenge them, and tell us to reverse our notions based on theory, not fact (or testing which is as close to fact as we can get).

    I mean, vial in Goblins is as close to holy Legacy scripture as there is. if I were going to challenge it I would bring the Fury, not just the Sound.

    On a more technical note, is Thorn really good in FS? I used to run Trini out of the board and found it lacking in non Combo matchups such as Thresh. Making a Brainstorm cost 2, and a Daze cost 1 sounds decent, but not backbreaking.
    I've never seen him so upset....or ever before.

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    Re: [Article] Unlocking Legacy - Lessons Learned

    My IQ drops every time I read one of these things.

    Unchecked Aether Vials win. The end.

    Quote Originally Posted by majikal View Post
    Damn it, Taco, that exactly sums up my opinion on the matter. I need to buy you a beer for that post.

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    Re: [Article] Unlocking Legacy - Lessons Learned

    Quote Originally Posted by Silverdragon View Post
    @all Why can Hi-Val write about aweful decks and Anusien can't without getting bashed? Seriously folks, he explicitely states that the decks are bad but serve to show concepts that didn't quite work out up to now.
    Presenting a terrible decklist does very little to improve deckbuilding except to show what is obviously wrong. I don't know many times someone would have to do this to realize that it exposes the same problems over and over again.

    Quote Originally Posted by aTn
    I can understand that, but then again, why not let someone else fill the article slot while you continue testing in order to write a more solid article later on.
    This sounds like a great idea, but wouldn't the writers have already done this if it was going to happen?

    I thought that this column would be really good for Legacy when it was started. It represented guaranteed Legacy coverage every week on SCG. In all honesty, I still read these articles but I question my decision every time. I fail to learn anything and feel that I'm reading about casual Legacy, which I guess is okay if you don't care about competitive tournaments.

  20. #20

    Re: [Article] Unlocking Legacy - Lessons Learned

    Quote Originally Posted by Anusien View Post
    The unfortunate side effect of writing on a deadline is that the article submission date does not always coincide with the end of a run of testing.
    I'd rather see more polished articles posted less frequently than articles like this one.

    I see nothing inherently wrong with removing Aether Vial from Goblins (Extended Goblins does OK without it), but it's nonetheless is a big change. And you devote a single paragraph to explain it, summing up the change with "Seems good." That doesn't explain anything, and you certainly do not cite any testing to backup this claim.

    If you dont have enough time to test, that's fine. But you should put more time and thought into your card choices, and then, in a later week, explain your testing results. This just looks like half an article on Goblins, and then a failed experiment that doesn't really prove any points, or teach any lessons.

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