You make a 3/3 double strike and have 3 cards left in hand. How exactly is that going to compete in legacy? This is Chandra's Incinerator is legacy playable levels of nonsense.Originally Posted by FourDogsinaHorseSuit
If I read correctly the few previous posts, the three of you (4dogs, Fox, and FTW), fully agree that torpor orb + fury is not a winning strategy nor a sound base for deckbuilding, at least if you want to win matches in legacy.
You also seem to agree that the two cards interact, and that this combination (which 4dogs very literally calls "combo", which FTW calls both combo and nombo, and which Fox calls a bunch of expletives) is far less useful to win legacy games than alternatives, or even fury alone.
Do we need 20 more posts on the topic, and are there any reasons to continue on the topic of orb + fury?
Control+F "dipshit" won't bring up my posts. Edit this, now.
For example: Fourdogs insists this is a combo, provides no recognition of the simple fact that you have to recoup CA, provides no recognition that Tomb has no place in this archetype, and when educated by others on shortcomings in his logic they oscillates between personal attacks [with expletives] and "it's a combo"
"Edit this, now" is a bit aggro.
But sure, 4dogs called you names.
Maybe re-read 4dogs' posts: (s)he seems to fully agree that orb+fury is not good and should not be played. It seems that for you "combo" means that it is good and/or worth playing, while it doesn't imply it for 4dogs.
I agree that it was not particularly well nor politely communicated by neither of you.
The thing is, you generally have interesting posts in this topic, and I am sure we are several that use to enjoy reading it. The last pages seem to circle round.
Don't make me tap the sign:
Do not engage with Fox!
Ok, acknowledging dte's point and getting back on topic, I do want to address this separate point:
Tomb's historically never had a place in Dreadnought. Is that worth reconsidering due to new cards?
1) Lorien Revealed
Before Tomb would risk color-screw or inability to develop mana. Lorien lets colorless fix for U or UR
2) Currency Converter
As above, Converter lets Tomb fix & loot. Tomb helps Converter loot more efficiently
3) Urza's Saga
Tomb is clearly good with Saga, which is also good with Dreadnought & Converter. If T1 Tomb gets Wasted, less likely Saga gets Wasted before it turns into a 12/12, so that's not necessarily bad.
4) Pyrotechnic Performer + Scroll of Fate
Performer + Scroll are clearly amazing with Dreadnought. Tomb makes Scroll and Morph easier to cast. There could be another playable disguise creature in the new set too.
5) Karn, the Great Creator
Karn is a already a good top end for Dreadnought decks: killing Chalice, providing card advantage, Null Rodding artifact decks, playing mana denial, or tutoring higher-variance Dreadnought enablers (1-of Torpor Orb). Tomb makes Karn better.
6) Fable of the Mirror Breaker
Another good payoff for Tomb that helps red fix colors or smooth variance
7) Prismatic Vista
While not directly related to Tomb, it means you can play Tomb + 8xfetch + Loriens and have reliable access to basics, so you don't get color-screwed by Wasteland (T1 Tomb T2 fetch into Volcanic lets opponent Waste Volcanic and leave you on 0 colors). They may Waste Tomb but won't take you off colored spells.
For most of the history of Dreadnought where Tomb was not viable, these cards didn't exist. The Tomb decks were linear monocolor 4x Torpor Orb 4x Illusionary Mask builds, suffering from variance issues and lack of ability to pivot plans. I think we can all agree history has proven those builds not competitive (although I did get some wins with Mask-Nought during the brief Mental Misstep era - Tomb decks were extra strong then). But now Tomb doesn't have to look like that.
The monored build I proposed above is clearly not viable. But what about a UR deck with 2-3 Tombs? Or even 4 Tomb? Or maybe an RB deck? The 2nd color gives more interaction with opponent. The Dreadnought-related payoffs for Tomb are higher now, and the manafixing is better too.
When I got into legacy back in 2011 or whenever I was using tomb/city to great success. It was blue stompy with orb/mask/stifle plus monolith for the t1 Dreadnought, backed up with force and misdirection. And a few larger colorless creatures like wurmcoil that didn't need your Dreadnought plan to succeed.
Eater of Days was in a supporting role.
I think I stopped because Thought knot seer was printed and the eldrazi seemed better and I slowly transitioned their way.
Expletive: an oath or swear word.
Your post: "and which Fox calls a bunch of expletives"
Expletive is not a valid contraction of Explain + Explicit. There is one person using expletives here and it is FourDogs, and nobody else.
Now I did shut down FourDogs pretty hard because "it's a combo" does not equal "it's competitive" and the goal of threads on this website is competitive discussion. I spelled out why the deck will lose to its mana, lose to its mulligans, fail to interact/move the advantage bar in early turns, and have inadequate followup. FourDogs responds with nothing of substance and resort to his default personal attacks, a pattern we've seen many times before in this thread.
Stuffy Doll and Blasphemous act is a combo too? So what? Saying it's a combo over and over doesn't change that it isn't competitive. FourDogs needs to stop floating this idea that Fury and Tomb is the future of Nought. It's patently ridiculous. Not sure how we can make that sound nice. The fact of the matter is that at any point FourDogs could have explained how the game was going to evolve that would result in a viable gameplan.
Unfortunately we're dealing with someone who thinks a Tomb deck ahead on board with Fury racing a 3/2 lifelink. I mean come on.
Was that in the Mental Misstep era?
MaskNought and Blue Stompy both hit their peak in that meta. Turns out it was strong to be on Tomb/City, Chalice @ 1, FoW when everyone else was on 4x Misstep 4x Brainstorm playing with 5-card hands. HiveMind won an SCG lol.
MUD also got a surge after the Metalworker & Monolith unbans. Wurmcoil's a good backup plan and hard for the format to answer outside StP. But that MUD surge didn't last long.
Unfortunately some builds that did well a decade ago got power-crept out of the format. Not viable now.
If you were to make colorless Nought now, Monolith does help accelerate into better turn 1 plays. Instead of Standstill or Uro, you get card draw from The One Ring, so co
Monolith / Key / Tomb / Saga / Ring is a proven shell that's known to work. The question is if putting Dreadnought in that shell is better than just playing combo (Mystic Forge, Coveted Jewel, Paradox Engine) or playing regular artifact beatdown.
Last edited by FTW; 01-21-2024 at 03:05 PM.
What date range are you referencing here? Mask was banned from 2004-2010 (which is really odd since it actually cast cards, while Aether Vial never has, and Vial is a much more egregious card. Darksteel released 2004). That sounds like we're in the UR Dreadstill tier 1 status era (until the printing of Snapcaster in 2011, which tipped balance in favor of UWx Landstill, until 2012 when Legacy took a very bad turn with quad-laser CB/SDT enabled by printing of Terminus). As an aside, Monolith was also banned from 2004-2010.
Random finishes are not markers of viability. UG StifleNought more recently getting into some small top8s off the back of rolling 3-4 rounds of autowins because the field was ~30% Delver, in 6-7 round events isn't a good marker of viability either. If you could post a 33% winrate vs not-Delver, you were top16.
The reproducibly strong performance supposedly put up by TombNought is hard to believe in a format where a tier 1 deck can trade off 12/12s, and had access to red artifact hate. We'd also be talking about a pretty different time where Plow was alone and not re-castable from GY. It's also a time largely before the widespread printing of effects that could give -2/-2 status (which does not trigger a flip). There's a lot of reasons to not use this as an example of success for TombNought. If Tomb's endpoint is dies to removal and not really a followup, it's not viable (hence why you see ForgeKarn, 8cast, etc).
Edit: you have to go off the source to find the original starting point of Dreadstill as tier1. I want to say it was like 2005-ish, if I remember correctly. The timeline suggests what you describe is flavor of the month syndrome, recently unbanned edition.
The Mental Misstep era. Around 2011.
It was after Misstep was printed, before it was banned. I wouldn't call it flavor of the month, but more like the recent Lurrus meta: the entire format warped until the ban.
It was also shortly after the Monolith & Mask unbans, so Tomb decks were a popular reaction to Misstep. Snapcaster and Terminus had not been printed yet so Tropical Island was still worth much more than Tundra (i.e. it was still better for blue to play Goyf than to play to beat Goyf; that also made Dreadnought better, since RUG is worse at beating Dreadnought than UWx).
Legacy was the 2nd biggest format back then. An SCG win was a 1000+ person major sanctioned tournament, one of the biggest in the world, not a random finish. Hive Mind winning such a large event was not a fluke; blue stompy was very strong in the Misstep era, so strong that a janky combo like Hive Mind could win games in a long event.
MaskNought had a good winrate then too for the same reason. StP was invalidated by 4xMisstep in 90% of decks and Chalice @ 1 in yours. Mask could cast Dreadnought at 2 cmc right through Misstep & Chalice, without opponent knowing for sure what you were putting on the stack.
Edit: UR Dreadstill was good that year but not a DTB, though UWx Landstill had waned by then. The dominant fair blue decks pre & post Misstep were Canadian Thresh, Stoneblade, UGx CounterTop Goyf, and NO Pro. Misstep made fair blue awkward and parasitically hate on each other; Tomb decks sidestepped the Misstep arms race and left them all with dead cards.
Last edited by FTW; 01-21-2024 at 07:06 PM.
Yeah gotta be careful reading into that timeline. I wouldn't read too much into legacy during Breach, Flash, or Misstep; these make TC Delver look pretty reasonable. Concerning the cmc on Mask'd dudes, it's always 0 on the stack. The amount of mana you pump in doesn't change that (you can tell by looking at the top right of the face-down card and seeing no mana cost). That raises another question of whether or not people knew the rules b/c a Chalice on 0 is a 4-for-1 vs Mask. As someone who played thousands of games with Mask, it is exceedingly rare for any player in magic to know how Mask works. You also have to question how many times both players failed to enforce the rules of paying 3 mana for Trinisphere after activating Mask. Do you know of any youtube videos of these matches, I think it would be interesting to see how many GRVs were made and how commonplace Chalice gamers throwing the game was.
Youtube has poor cataloguing this far back but this is pretty telling https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ad1Aau4W-sY. It's at least Mask, but I haven't seen any Tomb stuff. Pretty incredible slow play, and around 9:40 one of the talking heads don't even know if Mask casts spells vs putting them into play, and continues to incorrectly guess how the Mask works for multiple minutes. It took about 15 minutes to find. Anyways you get even more confusion around the 29min mark combat, and also the Mask player is overpaying for Nought into a Daze deck. Loosey goosey stuff all around. I'll have to see if there are more examples of Mask.
Who was reading into that timeline?
If you're implying I extrapolated from the Mental Misstep era to a deck's viability outside the Mental Misstep era, gotta be more careful reading more carefully.
This was over a decade ago so maybe I'm remembering the gameplay wrong. I just remember Mask let you play 1cmc Dreadnought around Mental Misstep and Chalice @ 1, because it didn't count as 1cmc on the stack. Playing around Chalice @ 1 was critical because you were the one playing Chalice. Paying 2 may have been to confuse Dreadnought with other creatures, not to beat Chalice. It was a long time ago.
The quirk of the meta at the time was that 90% of decks were on 4x Mental Misstep. The few decks who weren't were on Chalice @ 1 and nothing at 1cmc (to punish the Misstep/1cmc decks).
Most decks had 0 copies of Chalice. If facing a Chalice deck, it was very rare for them to Chalice @ 0 in game 1 (because you could be Moon Stompy, blue stompy, MUD, etc). Then once they saw you weren't a Misstep/1cmc deck they would board out Chalice. MaskNought wasn't Tier 1 or prevalent enough for players to specifically metagame around, but it did have a good win rate due to favorable matchups in the warped meta. Perhaps misunderstanding of Mask also led to opponents not thinking to keep in Chalice @ 0 for game 2.
It was very rare to stream matches back then. That took off later.
Interesting. Watching the match now. That must be a Hunted Horror + Dreadnought Mask deck, hence the black heavy mana instead of Tomb.
Slow play was very common then in paper Magic. Players would sit and shuffle their hand cards around, whether they were actually thinking or just pretending to think or just drawing out the drama. Sometimes it was to bluff thinking about interaction, sometimes it was to pause long enough to make sure your face wasn't giving a tell. Sometimes it was just to make sure they weren't acting impulsively. Whatever the reason, it was quite common, even for players who weren't new to the format. It does seem slow by today's standards though.
Edit: I figured out why he payed 2 for Nought.
The facedown creature could be anything: Nought, Goyf, Hunted Horror, something smaller (Bob seems reasonable to play in that list). He wanted opponent to hope it was Goyf or Bob. If it was, the correct line was to attack with both Goyfs and Factory to push damage through. If it was a Nought, attacking was a bad idea. He needed the Goyfs to attack into Nought to turn the game around. If he paid 1, it was obviously Nought. By paying 2, maybe opponent would attack into it. It paid off. They did attack into Nought, suiciding a Goyf and then eventually losing that game. However that line does walk into Daze. The Standstill player may not have even realized Mask still casts the spell.
Last edited by FTW; 01-22-2024 at 04:14 AM.
Both players were savagely misplaying at almost all points, but it was round 2 and one of the players looked like they were 10 years old. Watching videos on the hunt for Mask didn't generate any more hits. SCG articles recapping 2011/2012 don't mention anything about Mask (Hive Mind is readily located). MtgTop8 has nothing on this Tomb + Nought until 2020. Tons of hits on Dreadnought dating back to 2007 (I would guess this is when their website began existing). There is a single deck with Torpor Orb + Mask in BG that pops up with timestamp 2011. We should have records that TombNought was finding success in that time window?
This is what I said about MaskNought above, that started this discussion.
If you read carefully, you'll notice I never claimed any of the following:
a) Results in Misstep era could be extrapolated to other eras
b) MaskNought was Tier 1 in the Misstep era
c) MaskNought was commonly played in the Misstep era
d) MaskNought was playable for a long period of time or now
e) TombNought found great success in that meta window
What I did say was:
- I got some wins with it then
- MaskNought was at its peak in that meta
- "Tomb decks" were extra strong then (not "TombNought decks")
- It was strong to be on Tomb/City, Chalice @ 1, FoW (not that list of cards + Dreadnought)
- MaskNought had a good winrate for the same reason
The example I gave for winning Tomb decks was blue stompy/Hive Mind.
I just asked 4Dogs about his build, speculating if his deck did well because of the meta strengths of the blue stompy shell at the time.
MaskNought wasn't my main deck at the time. I do remember getting a good win rate with it, seeing other players on it too, and noting the overall shell was positioned well in that meta by playing around the common decks (probably getting free win % from opponents misplaying against Mask). It did not see widespread play though, and did not get the kind of results that Hive Mind did.
The point was to say that Tomb+Mask+Nought was not viable in the past, except perhaps during that warped meta. However, the past also didn't include a lot of cards available now.
The reason to consider Tomb now is not the Misstep era, but the list of newer cards above that you've ignored. I was trying to start discussion about those cards and their impact on the viability of Tomb now. They solve some of the problems TombNought decks had in the past.
Last edited by FTW; 01-22-2024 at 10:02 AM.
There was a 3 card monte thread with the general concept of colorless Dreadnought then if that didn't work Karn lattice?
Notably UR Dreadstill is almost invisible on mtgtop8 in 2011 and hard to locate in YouTube videos, yet you're claiming it was Tier 1 then.
Under 2011 Dreadnought, there are few results in general and most are not actually Dreadstill (labelled wrong):
https://www.mtgtop8.com/archetype?a=85&meta=61&f=LE
1 Uwr Dreadstill
1 Urb Dreadstill
3 RUG Stiflenought
1 UB Stiflenought
1 UBW Stiflenought
1 BUG Stiflenought
1 UW Stiflenought
1 URB Stiflenought
1 Hive Mind (0 Dreadnoughts, mislabelled)
Only 2 Dreadstill decks in 2011. Both events under 60 players. No presence at the SCG series.
Not much more data supporting Dreadstill than MaskNought!
Part of the problem is there was much less streaming and data collection of smaller events back then, so coverage of Legacy Magic in the early era is spotty. The best coverage came from the large SCG events.
Edit: On the other hand there are still a ton of results for UWx Landstill: https://www.mtgtop8.com/archetype?a=34&meta=61&f=LE
Landstill was still tier then. I played it a lot up until 2012ish when Terminus radically changed UW control.
The point is that results exist for one and not the other. There's around 10 entries of not-Aeon Bridge for 2011 with search criteria Dreadnought, so it was still around.
The original date range I was working with was 2010 as Mask/Monolith are unbanned, where you can see Dreadstill finishes including: #2 of 498 (15 May 2010) -> #16 of 200 (17 Oct 2010) -> #3 of 218 (7 Nov 2010). The deck is still putting up results at the close of 2010, and no impactful legitimate printings coming to mind until Snapcaster in Sep 2011. So yes, you still have to be careful about tier decks fighting TombNought on the 12/12 axis.
We do have the illegitimate impactful release of Misstep in Feb 2011 and the ensuing clown legacy format, ending Aug 2011. While we can see Hive Mind during this period, TombNought is either invisible or nonexistent.
One thing that is clear about this period is that the entire Dreadstill community didn't figure out how to put Mask in their deck vs Misstep, and presumably most went on to other decks never to return (the closest migration is Standstill/Landstill). It's been a few years since I read the entire Dreadstill and UWx Landstill threads, but I do remember discussion of Torpor Orb but not much to any discussion of Mask. I think you have to wait until I pick up the deck (around Khans) to find anyone realizing how important it is to change cmcs.
So in this 2011 clown legacy period, we've got a failure to see Mask visibly incorporated pretty much anywhere, despite favorable mechanics vs Misstep. While we see people still using Nought, we note that Aeon Bridge is less common that UR Dreadnought builds, and B/BG MaskTorpors is less common than Aeon Bridge, and then we see just straight-up no record of TombNought. This is with YouTube and MtgTop8 and SCG searches; so again where can this information be located?
From the rare video of Illusionary Mask in 2011, it is apparent that wide swaths of legacy players (including Mask pilots themselves and commentators) have no idea what is going on...but the sample size is 1 so far, and that was a round 2 VoD. The Mask pilot who looks all of 10 years old gets a pass on this due to age.
I'll take another look later today, but at this time it looks like nobody seemed to understand what the cmc of a morph was on the stack, or that there was a spell on the stack in mid-2011 (pretty sure that was an scgBaltimore event).
Edit: yep end of June, Baltimore almost 1 month from the ban on Misstep. https://articles.starcitygames.com/a...e-legacy-open/ another look at the data. Let me know if there's a set of specific scg event where we can find evidence of lasting success by TombNought.
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