All B/R update speculation.

[MorphBerlin]

Oh, but I do play it. I play EDH, Legacy, and even a little bit of Vintage. And you're sorely misguided about EDH, as people bitch and moan even more about lockpieces, combos and prison strategies than they do in Legacy and Vintage. And let's not speak about Modern where people keep crying to get Blood Moon or the Tron Lands banned.

Look, I just want to do my thing without people getting mad at me, calling me names or being condescending over pieces of cardboard with children cartoon art on it. As much as it lost diversity over the years, Legacy is still the one format that lets me do that. Also, thankfully, most players don't pretend the format is a Spike country club for chess wannabes and are more than happy to let me land my lockpiece or t1 them. When I was still new to playing on paper, I t2'd my Elves opponent but took a bit of time to go off. I apologized for being slow and not letting him make a single relevant play. He just shrugged, said "That's Legacy" and proceeded to t3 me in the next two games, and we had a bit of a laugh over it. That's Legacy. Yes, I like my libertarian carnival where anything goes, my gladiatoral arena, my hodge-podge of chunderbuckets, my pile of piles, my mish-mash of trash, because it's the only one I have. And even now it's endangered by blue grinders and very serious players like you who would turn it into 'expensive standard'.

God you sound like someone with very limited social skills...So I read it people are not likeing to play EDH with you? I can understand them 100% as I would kick you from the playgroup after a single game as you really seem to lack any understanding how a enjoyable game of magic or any game for that matter for all parties looks like. YOu talk about magic not beeing chess but your version of magic is basically rolling dice... Either you do your thing or they do theirs and we look which one was faster. I mean you could also just goldfish on your own and tell yourself: "If I win before T3 I have one otherwise I lose" but I guess there has to be another person present to feel miserable as they watch you do your shit for you to get enjoyment out of it. Sure sounds like somebody fun to play with.

Let me guess your perfekt boardgame: 4 Players roll a dice and whoever wins gets to play the game for an hour while the other 3 have to watch and are forbidden to talk

[Ronald Deuce]

I don't suppose I'll ever understand why people think turning off all 1-drops for the exorbitant cost of activating a single mana ability and playing a card is better for the game than facing more blue decks than red decks or white decks or green decks (whatever that actually means in a format with duals).

I also think it's worth pointing out that a number of prison pieces are much better against my pet decks than Chalice is. I'm not making my argument solely for the purpose of putting AnT squarely back in the DTBs; Chalice is just as aggravating for Elves, Burn, or Delver as it is for what I like to play—it's not solely good against combo decks playing cantrips.

That's symptomatic of a toxic card. Maybe (probably) not toxic enough to warrant a ban, but it's really, really bad for gameplay.

And while we're on the subject of EDH, I've never seen a card draw so much ire in that format as Void Winnower does, and it does so for the same reasons. You're not hitting other people on an axis that makes any developmental sense; making specific mana costs a hindrance as Chalice does literally makes Storm Crow better than Deathrite Shaman in Chalice matchups simply because it's not a 1-drop. (Flying also helps, obviously.) So the "adapt by varying your mana costs" argument falls flat (assuming, as I don't, that it was ever really intended to be meaningful in the first place).

[chunderbucket]

I don't get why it is so offending to suggest that people play less one-drops if they don't want to get blown out by Chalice. It's not a bad card choice if it doesn't auto-lose to some decks. Like I said before, the fact that it runs contrary to one of the cardinal rules of deckbuilding may rub people the wrong way, but people aren't offended when suggested to play basics instead of duals in the face of Blood Moon, Wasteland and Back to Basics. So, what gives?

@taconaut: I did try modern for a while. It has plenty of wacky decks and you can experiment a ton, but ultimately I ran into to caveats that made it unappealing (for me, who is primarily, as you guessed, attracted to combo and prison decks):
1. Combo is slow, because Wizards has this byzantine policy of Modern being a "t4 format". You sometimes get those fast wins, but most of the time you feel like your feet are chained to a ball or something.
2. People bitch a lot more about combos and prison decks. Like, a lot. We know that Magic players aren't an overall wholesome social bunch, but I don't know why I should tolerate grown adults being smug, dismissive, condescending (even when losing), calling your deck "cancer" [sic] or generally flipping out when I play my preferred strategy in a children cardboard game. We saw a bit of that in this thread with people's posts amounting to "well your social skills suck" or "your deck choice is bad and you should feel bad" but imagine every other player being like that in real life. It seems ridiculous to have to say it, but the fact that you may not be enjoying a given game does not mean you should be ruining everyone else's fun, either, especially in an environment where people spend time and money to have their fun. I for one do not bitch when people play the card Daze, which I personally loathe, or the Miracles deck, which I dislike even more. I just play around it and it is even more satisfying to beat them. Some people like hard control or blue tempo, and I accept (and respect) that. Fortunately the Legacy community tends to be more mature and accepting (some apparently very serious players notwithstanding), and it's easy to introduce new people and lend them whatever.

[Dice_Box]

The other argument for chalice was based around varying CMCs, which is not a reasonable proposition in the context of the greater metagame:

Fairly sure my suggestion was "Play answers". I think I repeated this over and over, mentioning that I, myself, have turned to this option in the face of troublesome Enchantments I have to deal with as an example.

In not suggesting playing some unknown two drop cantrip, I'm suggesting playing answers. Abrade as an example. Base Red gets Shattering Spree, if your not base red By Force does more or less the same thing. These are flexible and hard to stop. Chewer is another dog of a card to face. There are answers, play them.

[Lord_Mcdonalds]

Fairly sure my suggestion was "Play answers". I think I repeated this over and over, mentioning that I, myself, have turned to this option in the face of troublesome Enchantments I have to deal with as an example.

In not suggesting playing some unknown two drop cantrip, I'm suggesting playing answers. Abrade as an example. Base Red gets Shattering Spree, if your not base red By Force does more or less the same thing. These are flexible and hard to stop. Chewer is another dog of a card to face. There are answers, play them.

Look Dice, don’t you understand cards like disenchant, wear//tear, Krosan Grip, Abrupt Decay, Kolaghan’s Command, and hurkyls recall are just unplayable?

I don’t think you do, I mean, imagine casting Krosan Grip, it’s awful, it can be potentially countered off Counterbalance.

As someone who also plays cantrips and pisses excellence, we should know what’s best for the format

[Stuart]

God, I wish Legacy players weren't such fucking babies. Play the decks that appeal to you, and don't be a prick to people if they like a different style of Magic.

[Lord_Mcdonalds]

God, I wish Legacy players weren't such fucking babies. Play the decks that appeal to you, and don't be a prick to people if they like a different style of Magic.

Magic players in general have been known to bitch about a free blowjob so I don’t think that’s unique to legacy

[Rascalyote]

Brainstorm is the best card in the format by a mile, god forbid theres a card like chalice to help fight those decks. Nothing is stopping you from playing a 2nd land into a 2 drop or 3rd land into a 3 drop and not having 90% of your spells be cmc 1 and having 18to20 lands in your control deck. But no people would rather be greedy and have close to 4 ancestral recalls in their deck and still whine when someone tries to fight back against it.

Unfun is a terrible reason to ban a card imo. Like when edh banned sundering titan and left sol ring legal, ew.

[Ronald Deuce]

Magic players in general have been known to bitch about a free blowjob so I don’t think that’s unique to legacy

Do tell. Privately, if necessary, but as a broke-ass Legacy player with little gravitas and few friends, this feels important for some reason.

I don't get why it is so offending to suggest that people play less one-drops if they don't want to get blown out by Chalice. It's not a bad card choice if it doesn't auto-lose to some decks. Like I said before, the fact that it runs contrary to one of the cardinal rules of deckbuilding may rub people the wrong way, but people aren't offended when suggested to play basics instead of duals in the face of Blood Moon, Wasteland and Back to Basics. So, what gives?

Not totally sure what that meant, but I'll give this a shot.

You may be surprised, but I agree that the same argument applies to Blood Moon and Back to Basics. Apparently in contravention to your point, I think it's equally ridiculous to tell people not to play with nonbasics in the face of a card that hurts those, especially given that accessible and/or capable monocolored decks often use those nonbasics to function. So it appears you're actually arguing for homogeneity, whether you like it or not: the only decks that are really good against Chalice decks either are part of the "Blue-stew control" status quo (because Force of Will! CALL DOCTOR JONES!), or they're other Chalice decks. (The "Mental Misstep" analogy comes to mind, though I don't really feel like flogging a rather mutilated dead horse.) Or, of course, people could play StandardSuperstars.dec, which runs a myriad of six-drop creatures and, of course, deserves to win it all because it's new and unique and creative and intrepid and doesn't play the exact same 4/75 cards that approximately 50% of the metagame runs. Because top-8 lists are the whole metagame—I swear.

With all that said, there's a palpably higher cost (and higher threshold of viability) to running any of the cards you mentioned than there is to running Chalice. And again, frankly, as a Storm fanboy, I really don't think Chalice is appreciably worse for me than Thorn of Amethyst or Sphere of Resistance. (I'd much rather face two Chalices than any other combination of redundant artifact-based hate cards, even if one were a Chalice. And only other people's deckbuilding conventions—NOT feasibility—prevent me from including Trinisphere, Actually Playable Thalia, Sanctum Prelate, or Eidolon of the Great Revel in that list.) Chalice is just a shitter of a card for any deck that isn't playing it, and that's not true of anything else that readily comes to mind without deconstructing everything in the format (and, thus, making any argument effectively pointless). Anecdotal though this evidence is, I've watched plenty of people playing a variety of decks just crumble in front of an early Chalice regardless of their sideboard options. Not just "Teh Canrip Cartell."

And no, Chalice isn't an answer to a toxic metagame; it's an answer to anything that doesn't play Chalice (and/or anything that isn't a terrible deck to begin with). That's been more than enough to get significantly less offensive cards banned for almost two decades. But sure, call it fine because it's good against "Brainstorm decks."

Come on, team. I get it: Brainstorm's everywhere, perhaps for the worse. But—and this is a separate point; I'm three sheets to the wind—I've never seen people abandon a deck because Brainstorm was too boring. I've watched neophytes pick up Eldrazi, rock multiple consecutive tournaments, even against decks that are "supposed to be" favorable against their builds, then quit the format because "IT'S BAAAAAHHHHHHHH-ROKENNNNNNN™" and "boring." Hate me if you want. But facts are facts, and the fact is that nobody likes dealing with Chalice except people who play Chalice, and the reason they don't mind dealing with Chalice is that they (and their opponents!) sideboard out their Chalices.

On a totally different note, the format looks pretty good right now. RIP Doomsday, a deck I've never played.

[MorphBerlin]

Fairly sure my suggestion was "Play answers". I think I repeated this over and over, mentioning that I, myself, have turned to this option in the face of troublesome Enchantments I have to deal with as an example.

In not suggesting playing some unknown two drop cantrip, I'm suggesting playing answers. Abrade as an example. Base Red gets Shattering Spree, if your not base red By Force does more or less the same thing. These are flexible and hard to stop. Chewer is another dog of a card to face. There are answers, play them.

Oh the great mastermind Dice_Box easily adjusting to any adversty he is facing. I would really like you to play lands on mtgo and get your ass handed to you instead of padding yourself on the back for mastering some weekly 8 man aussie LGS-torunaments were you loan decks to half the palyers and the main benefiit of the evening is beers starting R2. I am sure this is some GP Level enviroment and you are the legacy cream of the crop of adjusting.

In the real world lands has fallen of pretty significantly and is actually not able to easily adjust to anything. But I am sure you have some secret tech others are missing including Jarvis Yu whoose stream I am reglulary watching and even he says that lands is in a bad postion.

Suggesting maindecking something like by force or ingot chewer in legacy is really a new level of ridiculuusness. The 2 best decks are running maindeck EE and Coucils or 3 MD K.Commands as anwers in addtion to 4 Fow. So Miracles has 6 preboard and 8 postboard answers while grixis has 7 answers prost pre- and postboard still plenty of games are folding to T1 Chalice because guess what: when you play T1 Chalice OTP you are not only Mind Twisting them for 2-4 but also taking away their T1 play for free without even spending a card. Menawhile your precious lands deck is running 3 SB Grips, so regarding these facts I find all your "Just play answers like I do"-comments pretty amusing.

The play more basics to beat blood moon is another story of BS. Pretty sure Miracles with 6-8 Basics is playing the most Basics of any multicolored deck in the format. But since most decks are not looking to play Moon on curve but instead are looking to power it out on T1/T2 often Moon still prevents you from playing the game. Plus there are nealy zero non-fow ways to answer resolved enchantments in certain color combinations (grixis has basically nothing, while BUG hast tools but will not be able to cast them)

[chunderbucket]

@Ronald Deuce: Are you sure that what you said holds up in practice? There are plenty of nonblue, nonchalice decks that simply don't care that much about Chalice.

D&T: You lose STP, Vial, Mom, and that's it. Sometimes you go land vial go on the play and can ignore Chalice for the rest of the game, and later on you still have Flickerwisps to reset the Chalice. I agree losing Mom against the Eldrazi matchup does suck though, it's such a critical card.

Elves: Cavern, GSZ, Rec Sage to remove it as many times as you want. Or you can just Natural Order a fatty out. Nice Chalice dude.

Reanimator: Chancellor, Unmask (self to bin the fatty or opponent to discard the chalice), CoBru, animate dead, exhume. Discarding to hand size is also a thing

Dredge: lol

Goblins: Cavern, lackey is pretty much the only one drop, and you now have a billion options like Trashmaster or Cratermaker.

Maverick: You lose hierarch, mom and stp, wow such a big deal. Also unlike D&T most lists have maindeck answers like QPM or Knight of Autumn, and can gsz hierarch anyway.

Lands: I'll let Dice comment on that.

Dark Depths: None of the combo pieces care. Some lists also pack Decay maindeck

Painter: Virtually all lists run Recruitable artifact removal of some kind.


So no, I disagree Chalice leads to format homogeneization. All those decks can either sidestep it or pack maindeck answers to it. And yeah, Chalice's primary targets are decks that run a bunch of one drops to find everything they need (lands, threats, answers), aka cantrips. You want interesting, nonbinary games? Don't make your deck so reliant on cantrips, like pretty much every above deck. I mean you have to see, from our point of view, the gall of cantrip players, when they complain that the most consistent strategy in the game has one vulnerability, and they accuse Chalice players of creating unfun games because they knowingly keep running into the same vulnerability and won't budge from it. And it's never about them, it's always about grand notions like 'the health of the format', 'interactivity', 'the decision making process', 'skill testing', what have you. Grown men (it's always men) who would rather lecture or demean their opponent on their deck choice than play two-drops, it's surreal.

And it's recent too. Older decklists used to pack 4 Disenchant maindeck because of random crap like Moat or Humility and no one made a fuss about it. And there wasn't always a brainstorm to fix dead cards stuck in hand, or a Force of Will as a get-out-of-jail card. And yes, you could land it very early, too. Can you imagine Old School players bitching that Moat creates too many nongames agaisnt creature decks, or that Channel Fireball is boring because you either have it or you don't? Surreal I tell you.

[Cave]

So no, I disagree Chalice leads to format homogeneization.

Blue players know that Cotv kills all their cantrips and their fancy cmc 1's, but this doesn't stop them from running all the good stuff, because it's too strong.
That is "format homogeneization", but it's far from cotv's fault. If the stompy shell was so good that it forced every blue player to mix up their cmc's, like it was in Vintage, then i'd agree chalice was too strong or too boring. But that doesn't happen.
I play both blue decks and stompy and I enjoy both angles of attack. Reading blue players having issues with chalices looks to me like a western country person saying: "it's unfair that they got much better weather in West Africa". Reading non-blue players complaining that cantrips are too strong makes me think back to 2006-7 when I came to legacy because I wanted to play vintage but it was too expensive. I would really enjoy drawing 3 for one mana and do all the crazy stuff with insane card advantage, if only I could. The fact that 1x1 cantrips are too strong in legacy always make me smile.

Anyway, bye bye. Some days ago I saw an interesting comment by Dice_Box in this thread and I decided to answer: that way I just noobtrapped myself again into posting here a couple more times. Previously I had been forcing myself to ignore this wretched place, and that's what I'm going back to do. I know I won't be missed, but before going let me just point out a couple of things for you people who like posting here:

1. I have just read the last three pages, and I have already seen people using big words against other people (you must be an unsocialized nerd and so on and so forth)
2. Brainstorm is still a hot topic
3. There's no real talking about any B/R speculation
4. People here have been talking about the same-ish stuff for more than 1000 pages, mostly without changing ideas or coming to a conclusion.
5. Brainstorm is still a hot topic

This thread is a senseless unconstructive clown fiesta of mental-wanking leading to nothingness. I believe mods keep it open to prevent all this nonsense to flood the rest of this forum.

[PirateKing]

This thread is a senseless unconstructive clown fiesta of mental-wanking leading to nothingness. I believe mods keep it open to prevent all this nonsense to flood the rest of this forum.

It lightens up from time to time when someone wanders in an suggest Tinker should be unbanned.

[FourDogsinaHorseSuit]

I have just read the last three pages, and I have already seen people using big words against other people (you must be an unsocialized nerd and so on and so forth)

princessbride_ignorantbuffoon.gif

This thread is a senseless unconstructive clown fiesta of mental-wanking leading to nothingness. I believe mods keep it open to prevent all this nonsense to flood the rest of this forum.

Got 'em!

[H]

It lightens up from time to time when someone wanders in an suggest Tinker should be unbanned.

This thread is a comedy of bias. It's fun to point out to people sometimes how their "logical argument" is actually just personal preference wrapped in confirmation bias and tied with a bow. Most of the time it's just a sad example of how people are unwilling and incapable of engaging in actual discussion, they only want to only explain why they are right and everyone else must be wrong. No one is immune, we are all biased. The more someone thinks they aren't biased, the more evident they are actually ever more so.

[taconaut]

People adopt two strategies: they pack answers to chalice, which are at the same time a bit more versatile than that. Cards like Abrade, Abrupt Decay or Kolaghan's Command. Or they pack cards which allow them to play around or through a chalice, like delve creatures, planeswalkers or young pyromancer.

Yes, these are all fine solutions, and I employ them where I can. They don't make Chalice any less binary or boring.

I agree partially. The big problem with chalice is its play/draw sensitivity. Any card abusing this dynamic reinforces the importance of the die roll, which is an unsatisfying aspect of the game. This is a big problem in legacy in general, with chalice partially to blame.

I don't want to attach this problem too much to chalice only though. Cards like deathrite shaman (rip), daze, thoughtseize, hymn to tourach, delver... all abuse(d) the play/draw mechanic signficantly to achieve their current power level.

I think the play/draw angle is an interesting discussion point. I think it has separate issues from Chalice, and a Chalice on one on the draw can still be pretty miserable, but it would be nice to see more reasons to be on the draw.

But I also think that this massive impact of chalice is due to decks too often banking on cantrip-reliant hands. In this sense, chalice is an effective hoser disrupting this very powerful deck-building mechanic, which allows players to cut back on lands and threat/answer density.

I know a lot of people disagree, but I think the cantrip dynamic is a strict improvement on not having generic consistency tools, because the only "games" that are worse than ones that involve chalice are the ones where you just don't draw lands/spells/whatever. Cantrips let people play the actual game, instead of the topdeck lottery.

At a fairly similar power level you have steel stompy and 4c loam. These decks pack chalice and have a lot of room for pilot skill to impact the match result. I would say this consideration of chalice being an easy card is more because of R&D screwing up the development of eldrazi tribal and the format's vulnerability to blood moon (pre drs ban).

I think those decks do have more play to them than Eldrazi does, but I also don't think it's fair to characterize them as Tier 1 decks. The "easy-mode" tomb-chalice-beater decks are the ones that occasionally make the DTB, so those seem more relevant to me.

The problem will be that, if they print something powerful and generic enough, it will be better in cantrip shells, because it is improved consistency on top of them. You'd need engines which work poorly with cantrips, yet still provide sufficient power. Survival is a good example, but with the power creep of the last years, it'd become too format-warping. Or engines at a similar power level as cantrips, but available to other strategies. Faithless looting is a good example of that.

I actually think that they could unban survival and nothing would really happen. People would definitely play it, but I don't think it would be better than existing combo decks or creature decks. If anyone has a list they think would break the format if survival were unbanned, I would love to see it.

I agree Faithless Looting is a sweet card, and a great example.


The metaphor is supposed to highlight that the main "problem" with chalice is that it addresses an inbred metagame, based on a mechanic in the game with very few tools interacting with it.

OK, sure; I still don't think it's especially instructive. Taking the idea of the low jab you're proposing, the issue is still that it's as if the guy who learned to do the low jab had to give up other fighting fundamentals (efficient, reasonable curve, for example) to learn it, and now it's the only thing he can do. Fortunately for him, a lot of boxers use the reasonable strategy, so he still gets some wins when he gets lucky and gets paired with them.

We were talking about how chalice is boring, not its turn 1 impact. I gave jace as another example of cards which are boring, because they warp match-ups around their resolution and timing. It's no more interesting or skill-intensive to face a resolved turn 1 chalice as rug delver than it is to face terminus/k-command/snap-plow into jace as a creature deck.

Yes, it is, because the timing of the other examples actually matters. With chalice, it is basically always correct to jam it on turn one. With terminus, how long do you wait? Do you use your life total as a resource? How many other threats do they have? Is it worth it as a one-for-one? what if they have a counterspell? Can you afford to try to float it (especially now with top gone?) ...Chalice? Have it? Slam it. Optimal play with terminus and other reactive cards is meaningfully different than chalice.

At both points, your only out typically becomes hoping your opponent messes up. Which I guess is more likely with jace, as it has more options, but that is some pretty poor consolation.

But there is some possibility of you playing around it. With Chalice, sure, they could miss a trigger, I guess? But that's more like angle shooting than making some sort of play to cause them to misplay with the Jace

In all my years of magic, I can remember maybe one instance of combat math having any impact with jace on the battlefield. Jace player needs to keep him alive, other player needs to get him dead. Combat is just about that, nothing more.

I've played plenty of games where it was not a given that Jace would live on any particular turn, and where I've made choices to sacrifice him to save some life/make a play. Certainly more games like that than games where literally anything interesting happened after one player played a chalice.

I don't get why it is so offending to suggest that people play less one-drops if they don't want to get blown out by Chalice.

As we've said, because that suggestion looks a lot like "make your deck strictly worse against everyone who doesn't do that," which is an untenable metagame choice.

People aren't offended when suggested to play basics instead of duals in the face of Blood Moon, Wasteland and Back to Basics. So, what gives?

Playing basics feels more like a structural/strategic adjustment than just playing weird spells because maybe they won't get cupped. I don't want to oversell it though, I do get your point. I think, for me at least, Blood Moon and Back to Basics feel like they align with the actual tenets of the game, like you're saying; playing five colors or a bunch of nonbasics feels "greedy" to me, whereas playing efficient spells and cantrips just feels like trying to play the game correctly.

@taconaut: I did try modern for a while. It has plenty of wacky decks and you can experiment a ton, but ultimately I ran into to caveats that made it unappealing (for me, who is primarily, as you guessed, attracted to combo and prison decks):
1. Combo is slow, because Wizards has this byzantine policy of Modern being a "t4 format". You sometimes get those fast wins, but most of the time you feel like your feet are chained to a ball or something.

Yeah man, I used to love Pyromancer Ascension Storm, and they just constantly ban things from it. RIP. (I understand storm is technically a deck, but it's just so ugly with all those electromancers. If I'm playing storm, I don't want "lightning bolt" or "terminate" to be relevant cards against me G1, just feels wrong.)

2. People bitch a lot more about combos and prison decks. Like, a lot. We know that Magic players aren't an overall wholesome social bunch, but I don't know why I should tolerate grown adults being smug, dismissive, condescending (even when losing), calling your deck "cancer" [sic] or generally flipping out when I play my preferred strategy in a children cardboard game. We saw a bit of that in this thread with people's posts amounting to "well your social skills suck" or "your deck choice is bad and you should feel bad" but imagine every other player being like that in real life.

So this is a huge bummer, and I'm sorry you've experienced that. I try really hard when posting on here not to be insulting to people, so it bums me out when people do. I think you've been pretty reasonable, and I don't think you're lesser because you disagree with me.

I for one do not bitch when people play the card Daze, which I personally loathe, or the Miracles deck, which I dislike even more. I just play around it and it is even more satisfying to beat them.

That is a positive outlook. I do think Miracles and Daze in particular are easily much more interesting than chalice, though, in terms of gameplay.

Fortunately the Legacy community tends to be more mature and accepting and it's easy to introduce new people and lend them whatever.

agreed!

Fairly sure my suggestion was "Play answers".

I did acknowledge that in my post, if you look back. I specifically looked for an example and didn't find any, I won't try to put words in your mouth.

There are answers, play them.

Naturally - I play several Hurkyl's Recalls and other answers in my Storm sideboard, and EE/Council's Judgment/etc in Miracles. I don't think Chalice is bannable or too powerful, I just think it's dumb and boring. Just because it's possible to remove it with reasonably playable cards doesn't mean the games that involve it are enjoyable in any way.

@Ronald Deuce: Are you sure that what you said holds up in practice? There are plenty of nonblue, nonchalice decks that simply don't care that much about Chalice.

D&T: I agree losing Mom against the Eldrazi matchup does suck though, it's such a critical card.

Why would they care about losing Mom against the colorless deck? I am not being facetious, it seems strange when most of their threats are colorless.

Elves

Reanimator

Dredge

Goblins

Maverick

Lands

Dark Depths

Painter

Not to be dismissive, but exactly one of the decks you cited is currently in the DTB, which perfectly illustrates the point. Yes, you can play decks that are not very good if you want to beat chalice, but then you're playing a deck that isn't very good.

You want interesting, nonbinary games? Don't make your deck so reliant on cantrips, like pretty much every above deck.

The games that cantrip decks play against other cantrip decks are interesting and nonbinary. If it weren't for chalice, there would be more of those.

I mean you have to see, from our point of view, the gall of cantrip players, when they complain that the most consistent strategy in the game has one vulnerability, and they accuse Chalice players of creating unfun games because they knowingly keep running into the same vulnerability and won't budge from it.

The notion that Chalice is exploiting a vulnerability is separate from how fun it is. I think it's actually important to have hosers for all different kinds of strategies, I would just like it if they were a little more multidimensional and demanding than chalice is.

And it's never about them, it's always about grand notions like 'the health of the format', 'interactivity', 'the decision making process', 'skill testing', what have you. Grown men (it's always men) who would rather lecture or demean their opponent on their deck choice than play two-drops, it's surreal.

This is a false dichotomy - people aren't playing two drops because the two drops are not as good as the one drops, not because they want to make a statement about chalice players' life choices.

Do you honestly feel that Sol Land > Chalice is an interesting, multifaceted line?

And it's recent too. Older decklists used to pack 4 Disenchant maindeck because of random crap like Moat or Humility and no one made a fuss about it.

Modern deckbuilding approaches suggest that making lists like that is not optimal - why would we hew to outdated approaches?

And there wasn't always a brainstorm to fix dead cards stuck in hand, or a Force of Will as a get-out-of-jail card. And yes, you could land it very early, too. Can you imagine Old School players bitching that Moat creates too many nongames agaisnt creature decks, or that Channel Fireball is boring because you either have it or you don't?

This is actually a more interesting argument, because people do play Old School. I think part of that has to do with the constraints on the format - it might actually be optimal in that context (which lacks cantrips, fetches, and many of the efficient spells, and has wildly varying powerlevels among cards in that you can play both Power and Thunder Spirit).

Also, from a less serious perspective, I think Old School players (and in a similar way, Vintage players) are much more willing to/excited to experience high variance blowout games, which are the kind of games Chalice makes. I think Legacy players in general want more of a nuanced back and forth, and enjoy having some consistency/more opportunities to make nuanced decisions. That isn't a dig against Old School or Vintage; a lot of people like them, just like some people like Chalice and a lot of people like Modern.

[chunderbucket]

It lightens up from time to time when someone wanders in an suggest Tinker should be unbanned.

They should just unban Bazaar. It's completly broken but it's hella fun. If Brainstorm is a protected citizen because it's been reported to give people literal erections when they cast it (per Aaron Forsythe), I should be allowed to get off off Bazaar activations in Legacy.

[Dice_Box]

Oh the great mastermind Dice_Box easily adjusting to any adversty he is facing. I would really like you to play lands on mtgo and get your ass handed to you instead of padding yourself on the back for mastering some weekly 8 man aussie LGS-torunaments were you loan decks to half the palyers and the main benefiit of the evening is beers starting R2. I am sure this is some GP Level enviroment and you are the legacy cream of the crop of adjusting.

Not sure where the hell this is coming from. I have never claimed to be some mastermind, hell I have never even claimed to be a good player. All I have said is "If you have a problem, play an answer". Its not fucking hard. But if you find that idea is so hard that you have to strike out like a petulant child, well, thats on you not me.

In the real world lands has fallen of pretty significantly and is actually not able to easily adjust to anything. But I am sure you have some secret tech others are missing including Jarvis Yu whoose stream I am reglulary watching and even he says that lands is in a bad postion.

So you want the full list of reasons on why this is, or can I just say DRS getting Banned was bad for us? As for not able to adjust, you misunderstand why I play Lands. I owned everything in Legacy save SnT and sold it to foil Lands. The reason had very little to do with Lands placement in the format and everything to do with how the deck plays. Plus, Lands can adjust, its very flexible but it is a meta deck. I never claimed otherwise.

Suggesting maindecking something like by force or ingot chewer in legacy is really a new level of ridiculuusness.

Find where I said "Maindeck" and quote it back to me, I'll wait.

Lands: I'll let Dice comment on that.

Lands tends to beat Chalice decks not because the card does not hurt (It does) but because those decks that run it are weak to a recurring Wasteland. Save for Red Stompy but there we just lose. That said if they Land a Chalice on 2 the game tends to be over then. That does lock us more or less out of the game. DnT does this with Prelate and its the reason we have moved to running Barb Ring again, to answer that single effect.

This thread is a senseless unconstructive clown fiesta of mental-wanking leading to nothingness. I believe mods keep it open to prevent all this nonsense to flood the rest of this forum.

Correct.

[Megadeus]

They should just unban Bazaar. It's completly broken but it's hella fun. If Brainstorm is a protected citizen because it's been reported to give people literal erections when they cast it (per Aaron Forsythe), I should be allowed to get off off Bazaar activations in Legacy.

I get my rocks off when I Skarrg, The Rage Pits my Wild Nacatl to trample over a true name.


I don't ever want to hear a blue player bitch that they have to play "bad" cards to beat chalice or otherother cards. Disenchant may be bad in a room full of Delvers, but in a room full of MUD you would trade your kingdom for a wear/tear. God forbid you have to play a few less efficient cards to metagame or shore upup a weakness you have. You know how many awful cards I've tried in Zoo to beat a fucking true name? Maverick doesn't particularly WANT to have to play a Karakas, but sometimes you gotta beat a Griselchimp somehow. I don't want to have to play abrade in my painter deck, but I've identified that chalice is potent against me along with other things like Revoker and thus should play an answer. If you've pigeon holed yourself by making your only engine vulnerable to chalice you don't get to bitch about it.

[Alfy]

I get my rocks off when I Skarrg, The Rage Pits my Wild Nacatl to trample over a true name.


I don't ever want to hear a blue player bitch that they have to play "bad" cards to beat chalice or otherother cards. Disenchant may be bad in a room full of Delvers, but in a room full of MUD you would trade your kingdom for a wear/tear. God forbid you have to play a few less efficient cards to metagame or shore upup a weakness you have. You know how many awful cards I've tried in Zoo to beat a fucking true name? Maverick doesn't particularly WANT to have to play a Karakas, but sometimes you gotta beat a Griselchimp somehow. I don't want to have to play abrade in my painter deck, but I've identified that chalice is potent against me along with other things like Revoker and thus should play an answer. If you've pigeon holed yourself by making your only engine vulnerable to chalice you don't get to bitch about it.

While I can agree with the general sentiment, a couple of things:

- Karakas in Maverick is a tutorable answer that still gives white mana. It’s hardly the equivalent of sticking a Wear and Tear in a 75 “in case of”.

- Maindecking answers to threats that are expected to be common in the metagame is hardly a novel idea. Talking about TNN, there’s a reason why Grixis lists will include Edicts and Deluges. But these cards are good against other threats as well. Maindecking Abrade JUST for the odd Chalice or Painter in a metagame where these decks are not omnipresent is simply not efficient.

Again, I don’t have a big problem with Chalice, except that I would agree the card is boring and requires very little skill when compared to its impact (but it’s hardly the only card in Magic in that latter respect). But saying “just play answers” is really trite. People complain because it creates non-games, and that’s never a good thing in Magic. And again, I don’t think it’s a big problem, mostly because I’ve had many more non-games against Reanimator than I’ve ever had against Chalice, but it’s worth understanding the sentiment.