Quote Originally Posted by Fox View Post
When piloting combo: if you're not winning, you're losing. Having this card in hand/drawing it does not help you win from a goldfish perspective. It is also just a plain dead card against combo (3 most represented archetypes from mtgtop8 in this category are Storm, SnT, and Reanimator). "Bad" cards can always be situationally amazing...but when they're bad, they're awful. You have to really know your local meta to mainboard cards like this and disproportionately get rewarded, because you're losing game 1 win %age when you do it in a general sense.
Maybe maybe. But: I regard Reanimator not as a goldfish deck. "When piloting combo: if you're not winning, you're losing." > I don't want to misunderstand you here but an exaggeration would be: "Let us cut discard spells in ANT because they do nothing to for the combo." > Because I don't need discard spells against certain decks. > Then Duress is aweful. Sure. With eight main deck counterspells, I feel like one can "control" the game state quite a bit. I played only two Decays main (two in SB as well) and they help to interact not only on the stack but also disrupt the opponent on the ground. I feel like Deathrite/Chalice/Counterbalance to name a few are too dangerous to let them unchecked or to simply put all the trust in playing around/FoW/Daze.
Of all the decks in Legacy (most known) you just named the two where Decay might be worse than Thoughtseize or other common choices(certainly not worse than SnT against SnT decks). Although even against ANT it might get some utility when they play out their LEDs (which they should). And: There is still Brainstorm. (I know; not the best argument. Don't take it too serious.)
Randomly enought, I won 2-0 against ANT yesterday (player who visits the city, didn't know him) but that's pretty much irrelevant data.

In the end, I was just wondering.