I think that you misrepresented (I mean that in the actual, non-political way) the circumstances surrounding the card's interaction with the decks it was pitted up against. Why have you bothered to write about scenarios that are meaningless? That was the bulk of the article.
Land Tax would be a strong card right now - probably tier 1 at least in power. I don't know that the card would be dominating, and from that standpoint, it may be a safe card to unban. But you have to give it to Wizards for seeing the card's ability to stalemate the game. It DOES.
I am skeptical about this. I am willing to analyze design innovations, but there is not a lot of room to improve the overall performance against all of the disruption and pressure present in the format. I think you should contribute your deck design to my thread on the card, so you can talk more about this.Originally Posted by Finn
I am interested in the design possibilites of the deck just because I like building decks. But the design isn't directly pertinent to the question of it being banned or unbanned.
Think about my article in a different way. I'm not saying "Land Tax is a crap rare and it is unplayable." Instead, my article is a test of brokenness. If the card really was too good for the format, there would be no way that given a reasonable set of assumptions, it could perform that poorly in typical scenarios.
I am sure the list isn't optimal since I haven't spent months testing and tuning it - but we are not testing for optimal matchup percentages here. This is about a card being so fundamentally powerful that it has to be banned from the format. If that is the summary of my argument, there is no need to debate the finer details of the deck design, even though I think they are incidentally worth discussing because they are interesting.
Last edited by Machinus; 07-27-2007 at 06:59 PM.
I appreciate your desire to see this topic through, but I am not willing to work with a banned card any more than I have to. But I did it last year. I will look for the thread.
This is a valid argument. This also brings to light what I believe to be the real argument about the Banned list - what is the criteria for a card to be banned? Does the effect generated by the card have to be broken? What does it mean to be 'broken'? How many cards are truly 'broken'?
I would never argue that Land Tax would be 'broken' in the current format. I just disagree with the sentiment that it would be necessarily 'bad' or underpowered.
I refuse to get into pissing matches on forum boards. You wrote an article and I challenged your assumptions and conclusions. If you choose not to address my concerns and just leave your assumptions as 'obvious', that is your right.
To address your points, though - (1) I think it would be extremely narrow-minded and hypocritical for you to claim that your list (which was not published mind you) is the most consistent and competitive build possible (when that's essentially what you're criticizing Forsythe of). I don't have a specific list in mind since I have not actively worked on the subject, but I have a few ideas. (2) I believe the 'power' of Land Tax is hidden in the fact that it isn't 'broken'. I feel like you have mistaken disagreement with your article as agreement with Forsythe. I believe that Land Tax could be a very strong tool in the current environment, but it is most likely not broken.
Like I said, I don't have a specific list in mind, but think about these plays...
Turn 1 - Tundra, Land Tax, Go
Opponent - Mountain, Lackey,
Response - Daze returning Tundra
Turn 2 - Land Tax Trigger, play...
Turn 1 - Forest, Exploration, Plains, Land Tax, Go
Opponent - Mountain, Lackey
Turn 2 - Mountain, Crop Rotation, Lotus Vale, Seismic Assault, Go
Opponent - Rishadan Port, Attack, Lackey out Ringleader, Go
Turn 3 - Port Vale, Trigger Land Tax, kill Lackey, kill Ringleader, Go...
Neither are broken and maybe neither are truly competitive, but as far as I know, neither approach has ever been taken with Land Tax previously. How many other ways could there be to take advantage of a Land Tax engine?
Your conclusion
is a direct result of the way you looked for it, that's all I ever said. If you lift your assumptions, you can make a competitive deck that utilizes Land Tax but may not depend on it.Land Tax is weak enough...
Fred Bear...
[Aside - I don't think it's fair to request decklists at this point because if I or anyone else did find a way to utilize Land Tax and it did get unbanned, I or that person should be able to take full advantage of it prior to that list's release. It seems like that is the status quo of the boards and the community at large (i.e. secret tech).]
I'm not challenging you specifically to prove your counterpoints. However, it would take some effort to go in-depth to answer your questions, and as I think they are at best tangential to the relevant question (should Land Tax be banned?) I am comfortable leaving them open-ended at this point.
The two design possibilities you just posted are fine examples of alternate methods of generating faster advantage from the card. What I wish to suggest is that we look, seriously, at how consistent that deck would be when it was done. I think it is a big task to demonstrate without tournament results that it could be consistent enough to beat Vial + Wasteland, Tarmogoyf + Force of Will, and Belcher + Warrens. Those are really tough benchmarks.
Even if it was that consistent, you then have to consider how adaptable Legacy decks are, and the large amount of room for response and counterstrategy that is available. Again, the usefulness of such a discussion diminishes rapidly as there are an infinite number of hypothetical scenarios, and why I tried to make my article as general as possible in this sense.
That is a good point about me not proving a decklist, and being similar to Forsythe in that respect. But I am merely disproving a very serious claim he made, rather tham making any serious ones of my own. The claim that a card deserves to be banned with no tournament results is significant. In fact, his statement was so tough to support that little analysis is required to refute it. If you recall:
I have refuted this claim, and that was one of the bigger points of the article.
I love how the Land Tax deck still gets ass raped even when you make all kinds of huge concessions in your theoretical testing. Combo has a good game against white control as it is, but trying to abuse Land Tax would make it that much more of a bye. And besides, no one plays Tithe in this format, which is the next closest card. Making Tithe recurring doesn't make it better.
The article was well written, but I feel the entire premise was rather flimsy. You're pitting a theoretical deck which only actually contains 16 defined cards (8 artifact mana sources, Land Tax, draw engine) against completed, highly tuned decks. The theoreticals completely favor Land Tax's ability to resolve and activate, but fail to take into account anything else the Land Tax player might be doing to further accomodate the deck's strategy.
For example, the assertion is made that Threshold's position just gets stronger as the game progresses, because it can operate efficiently on one mana, thus Land Tax never really generates advantage. What happens if the Land Tax player is playing Chalice? Sphere of Resistance? Trinisphere? Tangle Wire? Winter Orb? Smokestack? Glowrider? Suddenly this standalone engine is supported by a strategy which forces the opponent to play into the Land Tax player's hands, which is the only possible way the card could be utilized with any degree of effectiveness to begin with.
I also dislike the assumption that the Land Tax player will always be racing to get the engine set up as early as possible. Control decks, by definition, tend to use the early game to control the opponent's development, and once a level of equilibrium has been achieved, then goes about generating overwhelming card or board advantage until it can win the game. The provided examples all appear to be approaching the control strategy in an ass-backwards way, which doesn't lend to accurate analysis at all.
Don't get me wrong - I agree that Land Tax isn't likely to be a broken or unfair strategy and that it should come off the list. I simply think your methodology in proving your thesis is flawed to the point of uselessness.
Am I the only person that read Forsythe's article where he explicitly stated that the danger of Land Tax was on turn 1?
Anyway, that's not even the important point. Land Tax is not good in the late game just because if you can actually get there with a control deck, there are better ways of generating card advantage. Land Tax is not something you play just for some card advantage - it takes up tons of slots and screws up your manabase. It is the centerpeice of a deck and you can't just throw it in a Control deck based on other cards.
I mentioned several times that the disruption that the Land Tax deck plays can make a big difference - but then why are you playing Land Tax ? Why don't you just play all relevant cards in your deck in the first place instead of having to go to such effort to draw them?
The scenarios I posed are theoretical, and limited, and not intended to comprehensively answer all possible questions about Land Tax in Legacy. They are a test of brokenness. Land Tax does not qualify at all.
Although this question appears to be rhetorical, I would argue that the reason you'd put it in a deck like Stax is because it has basically no other means of drawing cards. It runs Grafted Skullcap sometimes, and that's about it. Given the inherent synergy between Land Tax and resource denial, I'm not really sure why this combination couldn't be considered as viable or competitive as other pure control strategies, at least in theory.
Well I would never run it in Stax, but that's not the point you are making.
However, the reasons why are related, since they are the same reasons other control decks would not incorporate them.
To begin with, here are the incidentals of Land Tax: you have to run a more vulnerable, less consistent manabase in order to make use of the card, and you have to run more cards which are likely suboptimal unless used with an active Land Tax. Already these are the worst kinds of cards that control decks want to be playing, since anything that is situational must be exactly suited for the metagame. You can't afford to draw narrow cards if you are seriously trying to make a deck successful at answering Goblins, Belcher, and Threshold. There is no room for it, especially if you are attempting to wait until the late game to activate your draw engine.
Further, there are the general constraints on building a control deck. You are always going to have more land than your opponent (unless you're playing the Control mirror, in which case Land Tax might be a great sideboard card. When a control mirror gets played in Legacy I will analyze this situation more). Land Tax therefore has to be pushed as an early play anyway, on the back of the inconsistent manabase I already mentioned.
But even as a late game card advantage engine, there is little reason to use it. You have already invested cards into your manabase (moxen), Land Tax itself, the engine cards, and other support cards you are using like Englightened Tutor or whatever else. Right off the bat you have seriously restricted your decks options and have to set up Land Tax and compensate for the dead cards it will inevitably give you. Instead of giving up all these cards and reducing the versatility of your deck, you are better off running cards like Fact or Fiction which require no setup, no investment, and aren't vulnerable to the removal in the format. They are certainly cheaper than paying for all those other cards, and most importantly they don't constrain the design of the entire deck. You can add 3 Fact or Fictions to whatever blue control deck you are planning on using to counter your meta, but you can't add the Land Tax engine.
Control decks have a very tough job, and even with the best engines they are not able to reach the late game to use them. I don't see how the Land Tax engine could fix these problems when it adds even more of them.
On Land Tax:
Turn 1: Lotus Petal, Land Tax, Go...
Yeah, extra lands are great when you've already denied yourself mana development.
Which is the problem with Land Tax all around. The effect would be insane if you could actually play mana, but even with Moxen and Lotus Petal you're barely able to scrape together enough mana to play Scroll Rack, much less compete with relevant decks using Stax or MWC elements. The only decks that could conceivably use it are going to be aggro-based ones that don't need more than one or two mana, but I think Empyrial Armor's best days are long since past.
For my confessions, they burned me with fire/
And found I was for endurance made
The point everyone seems to ignore is that just because nobody can come up with a spur of the moment deck built around a banned card to prove its power in no way is indicative that said deck can't and won't be made.
Land Tax is oppressive, in my opinion. I played with it for about nine and a half years. There are at least ten cards I would personally remove from the banned list before Land Tax. Therefore, while you can argue this point with me all you want, the point you can't argue is that this isn't a unanimous feeling among the magic community. And I'm never a big fan of articles which serve no purpose beyond being Magic political campaigns rather than educating people about the format.
isn't the argument whether or not Land Tax is too powerful for legacy rather than whether the card sucks or not? It seems like the mob mentality is either the card is broken and needs to be banned or that it sucks.
I personally am in the camp that it's powerful enough to build a tier 1.5 or tier 2 deck around. Isn't the combination between Land tax, jotun grunt, and seismic assault worth considering? It'd be like running an aggro-loam deck without the loams o-o.
isn't going t1 diamond, plateau, land tax, t2 assault really good? its 6 dmg a turn for free almost. follow it up with a grunt and some burn and it seems like there's a good engine going on. Throw in Confinement and the deck doesn't seem as bad anymore, right?
Id think it'd be a good addition to the pool, and at worst, Wizards can just re-ban it. its not against policy to admit they were wrong right?
That's because you don't have to come up with one. I have shown in my article that at it's best, any Land Tax has a poor early game against the format in general. All the alternate scenarios involve weaker interactions.
There is no way to escape from this and continue to suppose a broken deck exists hidden in the card pool. Even with the best acceleration, cheapest engine, and perfect draws, the deck is not as good as the top tier of the format. Therefore it should absolutely be unbanned.
Umm, no you didn't. You showed that a dumb player using a poorly conceived deck/gameplan has a crappy early game. That's precisely what zilla and I both told you, and you dodged it both times.
I would again disagree that you proved any Land Tax opening is poor, since that again assumes that your hypothetical deck is the best Land Tax deck which may or may not be true based on the assumptions. As has been pointed out previously, you assume that the Land Tax/Scroll Rack interaction is the goal of the deck which is only true assuming Land Tax is broken. If Land Tax is not broken (but merely strong if built around properly), then you have to assume that in all of your scenarios, the deck will have 'other' answers for the top decks.
You proved that Land Tax is not broken in a mono/heavy white deck that tries to abuse it. You did show that it may not be as 'oppressive' as Forsythe implied by showing several openings that would be common for any Land Tax deck and how other top decks could still play through it.
To me, the question remains - should any card that is not 'broken' come off (or never be put on) the banned list? I tend to disagree. I think the banned list needs to have the enough room to maintain the format in general. I'm still not convinced that Land Tax 'obviously' comes off the list. I believe there are a lot of card interactions where there is a lot of synergy.
Fred Bear...
It could just as easily be Chrome Mox, Land Tax, Go...
I just used the two card combo that somebody would be most likely to have in their hand without mulliganing at the start. And it's only the simplest opening, there are obviously a bunch of very broken openings that are far less likely to occur.
As an example: Chrome Mox, Land Tax, Go... Turn 2: Lotus Petal, Abandon Hope, Go...
Double post.
Mysticism:
3 a : vague speculation : a belief without sound basis b : a theory postulating the possibility of direct and intuitive acquisition of ineffable knowledge or power
"There might be deck X that is way too powerful, even though all the decks people can come up with for the card clearly suck." is not an argument.
So are Force of Will and Swords to Plowshares. Fuck, you think Land Tax is opressive, have you people even heard of Stasis or Counterbalance or Chalice?Land Tax is oppressive, in my opinion.
That's fine. There doesn't need to be. I'm not sure who suggested that there did.Therefore, while you can argue this point with me all you want, the point you can't argue is that this isn't a unanimous feeling among the magic community.
For my confessions, they burned me with fire/
And found I was for endurance made
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