Brainstorm
Force of Will
Lion's Eye Diamond
Counterbalance
Sensei's Divining Top
Tarmogoyf
Phyrexian Dreadnaught
Goblin Lackey
Standstill
Natural Order
You can't have one without the other. Moon is a viable Main deck choice too.I don't mind chalice in the SB of decks, I am opposed to the fact that it exists as a semi-viable G1 strategy
Either way you lock out a deck, the how is not that important to the person who is locked out. Also it's not like 3 mana has ever stopped me from casting Moon turn one.Maybe I am being too nitpicky but targeting decks with 4+ colors using a card that costs 3 mana doesn't seem comparable to neutering every single spell that costs 1.
That wasn't the point I was making, but agreed.If we determine by a certain metric that Chalice is not good for the format then maybe by the same arguments there are other cards that are not good for the format, sure.
So, it's ok to accept that your going to get squeezed but someone else playing Blue but if someone builds a deck, totally devoid of 1 drops and fucks their own consistency, then uses an Artifact to Tempo you its not ok? Daze is fine, Force is fine, Stifle is fine, locking you out with these cards and beating you down with a Delver is fine, but please don't fuck yourself over consistency wise and Chalice me? Meh.Cards in legacy that cost a lot of mana are bad because of Pierce/Force/Daze/Stifle/Wasteland etc etc
As more sets get printed we get more good cards to choose from that cost less, i.e. 1
We replace the expensive cards with the new cards that cost 1
Decks now have more cards in them that cost 1
Why is this "a race to the bottom?"
Let's say, if we accept that Daze, Force and Stifle are ok then Chalice is 'Flanking' an existing weakness. As for a Race to the bottom, I simply mean we are chasing the lowest curve possible. It's not an insult, it's an observation.
Run shit that can destroy it in the sideboard. I have a sideboard that consists of 6 pieces of hate for a deck playing Lotus Petal (They all hurt) 4 for Artifacts and Enchantments and 5 "Free" slots. If you biggest weakness is Chalice, plan accordingly.The problem is that 'plan for chalice' means what exactly?
It is better to ask and look stupid then keep your mouth shut and remain so.
Originally Posted by Spam
I hope your afterlife is filled with eternal torment.
Fuck. Which one of my quotes do I drop for this?
Playing with a tight curve isn't a linear strategy. It's a thing people do so that they can actually resolve their spells.
Blue decks aren't even the main thing squeezing curves in Legacy. The biggest reason people are forced to play hyper-efficient strategies in this format is that half of the decks play Wasteland. You play a deck that can recur Wasteland and Ghost Quarter. "Maybe you guys should play more expensive spells." Yeah, very helpful advice.
My advice was never to play more expensive spells, but to play answers to the questions that are asked of you. I don't know how many times I have to say "Hey look, I have to deal with this shit thanks to Bloodmoon and RIP, so I run answers" for people to understand that, put simply, Chalice is just a different version of the same problem others already had to deal with.
If you build your 75 in such a way that you can't answer a 2 drop artifact that's on you not the format.
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?
You deal with hate cards because you play an abusive hyperlinear strategy that doesn't play anything close to normal Magic and wrecks decks that do. If strong hate cards didn't exist for Lands, it would be banned. "I have to deal with cards that attempt to prevent me from recurring Wasteland/Ghost Quarter and making infinite copies of an indestructible 20/20" is not the same as "I have to deal with a card that randomly prevents me from playing a normal fair Magic deck with a tight curve."
Totally agree. And if your playing a deck that is running 8 to 12 cards that do nothing but filter, and the hyper aggressively structure the rest of your deck around that shell, it might not be a bad idea to defend your shell from a known quantity that attacks it.
Alternatively you could whine, bitch and complain about how unfair it is that your not just given a free pass to play your abusive hyperlinear strategy that revolves around playsets of the same 2 or 3 cards everyone else is playing?
Chalice, meet your haters, haters, meet a two drop artifact that dies to effects 3 colours have easy access to.
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?
TL:DR of Dice_Box last few posts
Deathrite Shaman is not in 60% of winning decks, unless we are using a different data set than either of these two:
MTGGoldfish: 48.15%
MTGtop8: 34.3% (last two weeks)
39.6% (last two months)
36.2% (live tournaments last two months)
That's high, but even then, ubiquity has never been a ban criteria in Legacy.
I get the argument about game play/deck construction, but I don't find it particularly more egregious than the same impact from allowing Brainstorm and Ponder to be in 40%-60% MORE decks than Deathrite Shaman. I don't see how we get more deck/gameplay variety if Deathrite is banned.
That's not to say it can NEVER be banned, but if you are looking for more meaningful decisions at the point of deck construction or more variation in game play, you have to look other places. And, there needs to be some amount of unbannings/new printings that don't just push UB value piles into the stratosphere.
There is a card on the banlist that is problematic, but if the format was tuned a little better could enable a LOT of powerful synergies to exist that may not need/want Deathrite. That card is Sensei's Divining Top.
But because god forbid they ban a card that says "counter spell" on it, we lost one of the best glue cards the pool has available, which could be used by ANY deck. "But people tanked!" Looking 1-2 times per turn cycle in order to fix your draws is different than having to float cards and respond to triggers. Rounds STILL go way past time regularly. There is STILL a terminus deck. Banning Top instead of banning the card that broke it and enforcing slow play had a lot of unintended consequences.
Sadly, MTG Goldfish data can no longer be used for debate. Thanks to Wizards policy of not releasing any meaningful data from MTGO Goldfish is sadly too flawed to be statistically useful.
Also, fuck my spelling was terrible. Love you auto correct.
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?
The time thing with Top just proved that a lot of people abuse the play speed rules. Just institute a goddamned chess clock already. We've had one online for forever and it's a great thing. Forces people to actually win games, and if they want to durdle around wasting time, cool, enjoy the loss.
I know, but the point is that there's no backup anywhere for the claim that DRS is in 60% of winning decks. Goldfish had lots of other problems too, like being unable to filter a certain time period or live vs. online.
You can play leagues where it's all DRS decks or you can play leagues where you play against 0. Same with weeklies/other paper tournaments. 60% is overestimated.
If the %of the format that used top and wasn’t Miracles was greater than 2%, I would honestly be shocked.
The % of the format that plays DRS and not Brainstorm is similarly low. But the DRS + Brainstorm decks are better than the DRS w/o Brainstorm decks by a lot. Same was true of decks that played Top + CB vs. Top w/o CB.
It's a shell that's a problem, not a single card.
I'm not the person with whom you were arguing, but I think the difference is that Chalice rubs a lot of people the wrong way. I still don't see a reason to ban it, but when a card punishes people for obeying the cardinal rule of deckbuilding (play better cards for lower costs), it's bound to draw a lot of hate from people who don't play it. It's not just blue-X decks that suffer from Chalice. There's also the fact that good control cards tend to irk people who don't play them simply because being told you can't do what you want to do is never something about which people are happy.
Also, I'm not saying the card is overpowered (at least, not in comparison to the rest of the format), but "dies to removal" still isn't a valid argument.
Totally agree with you on this, and I didn't play much Sensei's Top. Definitely the wrong ban and a winnowing of the format.
I am going to let this go, so take this as a more broad statement on the format as a whole over one or two cards.
"Dies to removal" or "Can be ignored" have been Legacy's go to view points for non creature permanents* since the dawn of the format. There really are no other choices. You can't block an Enchantment, you either null its effect or you kill it. This is actually a flaw in my view of one of the early rules changes. The difference between Artifacts and Enchantments feels very small now, a feeling that has further diminished since coloured Artifacts became a thing. At one point if you tapped an Artifact you turned it off, a legacy seen in Winter and Static orbs, alongside 3Ball with the text now printed on those cards to reproduce that old effect.
I feel that, since you are granted a lack of other options, you have no real other option when it comes to cards like Chalice, Moat, RIP or Moon than to kill them or try and play though them. Thus you should plan ahead to do that. This is also one of the reasons Decay is such a strong card as it lets you answer these effects when you otherwise had to counter them or try and brute force though them.
I would be happy to stand corrected here if I have gotten something wrong.
*Just remembered you can punch a Walker, for what that's worth.
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've decided I'm going to count silently to ten, then begin audibly counting upwards while staring at my opponent if they go into a deep tank without the board state changing. Some people try too hard to be that computer from Wargames and plan out every scenario that could possibly come from every situation, then change that plan every time something changes.
Ten seconds is fine. Even twenty. One minute? Too long. Its a card game, its not international cold war politics.
A chess clock is impossible to implement in real life mtg games, there is too much hidden information and priority passes.
Every color has access to EE@0 - that makes the whining about Chalice even sillier.
Some opinions,
The chalice debate is not even reasonable, for one reason, legacy is about unfair strategies. We do separate unfair and fair decks, but today all tier 1/1.5 fair decks also are doing something that either tries to lock the opponent from turn 1 or 2, or puts a huge pressure like Chalice/Blood Moon/DRS. Some examples, delver strategies are all considered fair, but if you played with or against and saw something like, T1 delver, daze/FoW on your turn, T2 flip delver wasteland your 1 land.. That's the delver opening, and is totally trying to lock you out from playing your game, or DnT that goes t1 Vial, t2 and on, Rishadan/Wasteland while ticking up vial or it can be The swiss knife DRS on 4c Control. Legacy is full of broken mechanics, and the most of them is not DRS, Chalice or Blood Moon, but Brainstorm into fetchlands giving virtual card Advantage and cantriping at the same time at instant speed. Even stoneblade is built around a broken creature that cheats out equipment, there are no decks that are playing fair, so why is Chalice a bigger deal than Aether Vial + wasteland/eternal rishadan port on your upkeep?
Anyway, the numbers of DRS are going down because 4c Control is already losing its hype. It is definitely strong, but not even close to what top Miracles was, so like "new" decks when people discover they exist, by people I mean net deckers, heck even Eldrazi Aggro had absurd numbers last year and now isn't even considered a tier 1 deck. I think the hype is gone from the deck, and it should stay at about 6-8% of the meta which for me is pretty healthy, and for me the discussion of DRS is because of Czech Pile sudden peak.MTGtop8: 34.3% (last two weeks)
39.6% (last two months)
I think following how the banlist evolves from legacy, if DRS/Probe/Chalice/SnT is not making any deck suffocate the meta like Miracles did, than they will not be banned because of the bunch of broken cards/mechanics available in the format.
Oh, I totally agree with you about all this. (I also wish they'd kept the distinction stronger between artifacts and enchantments, too; it feels a lot like they're two things that do the same type of stuff but have an arbitrary designator that makes some spells good against some of them and other spells good against the others.)
My main point was that I don't think it's valid to say "Just run answers," especially when people do, and it's still often not enough. I've died to a Chalice with a Decay in hand and several lands but no way to pay for it; I've fought through two Chalices and beaten Eldrazi with an Ad Nauseam from seven life. I've also just said "screw it" and Dredged Chalice decks (and CounterTop decks) into oblivion. I don't see any reason for a ban there (or, for the time being, elsewhere), but I can absolutely understand why people don't like it and want it gone. I just think saying "deal with it" only goes so far because, well, it's not like people aren't dealing with it (or, in your case, with Blood Moon) the way things are now. When the go-to answer for a card is in specific colors, that does warp the metagame—just look at Force of Will.
I can't believe that people are throwing a fit about Chalice when what is arguably the best deck in the format has long since had main deck copies of a way to combat it, whether that be by happenstance or not. Seriously, some of the people placing well with Czech Pile recently are playing three (3!) copies of Kolaghan's Command in their 60! My local metagame has even seen people playing Abrade in the main of their UWr lists recently. Reasonable answers to these things do exist, it might be time for other decks to start doing the same thing that Czech did.
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