If you could get Counterbalance or Stasis up and running on turn 1 for a two or three card cost they'd be banned also.Originally Posted by TheInfamousBearAssassin
Chrome Mox, Forsaken City, Stasis. Do you think Stasis should be banned now?
Only if you can demonstrate a clear advantage that the playing player has gained by the play. There's no lockdown based on that combo that can't be easily avoided, and the tempo is equally restricted for both players since the "free" mana that maintains the Stasis costs a card each turn to play.
An effective Stasis needs to burden the opposing player more than the player who played it.
With Land Tax there are situations in which 90% of the decks are going to be operating under a huge burden if the deck that played it is well constructed.
Edit: of course if you could figure out how to get Stasis and Land Tax in play by turn 2 with only a Forsaken City as land you'd probably have a totally degenerate deck in the offing.
And you just set x to 0. Good job at generating massive amounts of card disadvantage for a non-cantripping Peek. I think we can do better than that.
Land Tax is strong, no doubt. In MWA it can raise threat density to massive amounts simply by being triggered once or twice. Having 6 non-threat cards taken out of your library is never something to sneeze at.
However, is it TOO strong? I don't really see it warping the format without serious help. SERIOUS. Help. The kind of help that probably has not been printed yet. At best it can be an Ancestral Recall a turn. That is broken; however the engine can be shut off by Pithing Needle, a readily available card to all colors. At worst it just means that slower decks need to run Needle SB, just like some decks use Crypt SB vs Thresh.
Team Multi-Grain - We're wholesome.
What that play just did was take 3 basic lands and exchange them for whatever the best 3 cards left in the opponent's hand on turn 2 were. Then turn 3 you get to pull 3 more basic lands out of your deck. Assuming you had a second land in hand turn 1 then you've twisted your opponent for his 4 best cards on turn 2. All of this under potential Force of Will protection.
Edit: Turn 1 you drop Land Tax and no land. Turn 2 you go get 3 basic lands to fuel your Abandon Hope. That's the premise.
How do you plan to pay for Abandon Hope? As Cait_Sith stated, there's an X in its casting cost.
"I can't break card X"
"Therefore card X cannot be broken"
...is not exactly the pinnacle of logic and reason either.
Let's assume he meant Last Rites and move on from there.
My apologies. Good point, I missed the X in the casting cost and just saw the X discard.
Use Last Rites instead and the possibility of a broken opening is still there. It does have a 3CC so it becomes less probable on turn 2.
Any card that has a significant discard cost to balance off its effect becomes much cheaper to play with Land Tax in play.
QFT. An even worse approach is "I don't want to break card x because it would defeat my thesis that the card is bad, so I'll create skewed hypothetical scenarios which appear to support my hypothesis rather than make the effort to examine the matter objectively.
That's really the problem I have with the article. It feels more like a propoganda machine than a competent analysis. You know what would have made for a far more interesting read? If you approached the subject by actually trying to break Land Tax - using some creativity to come up with different lists which may be able to use it to its fullest potential, and then analyzing a few scenarios against specific matchups. Then if Land Tax proved ineffective, you would have a far more compelling illustration as to why that's the case.
A lot of people have tried to come up with competitive Land Tax lists. No one has ever seen a Legacy list that's good. I'm surprised such hollow and emotionally motivated arguments are being used to attempt to refute my points. It's obvious to everyone I never appealed to my deck design abilities to find this card fair. It's especially immature to accuse me of this when none of you have designed or even discovered any viable ideas for making the deck work.
Accusing me of propaganda is insane. I have no interest in misleading the community. My article is a rational analysis of the card's power level. You would have to have a severe aversion to logical reasoning to come to such a stupid conclusion about my intentions.
Let me go over this carefully for you:
1) If Land Tax is good, it's either good in the early game or the late game. We can split up these scenarios and look at them indepedently. The late game scenario is more trivial since control decks already utilize those kinds of cards, and we can compare them. The late game scenario is also tangential since the DCI claims it's the early game that is the problem.
2) There are only a few good ways to get Land Tax active in the early game. They all involve using artifact mana to cast it, and using the opponent's first land drop to get it going. I have looked at that situation comprehensively, and tested it's implications against the standards of the format.
3) I make many optimal assumptions about the Land Tax deck:
- The inconsistent manabase gives them exactly what they need. The manabase necessary for such a deck is inconsistent regardless of how you design it, since the more artifact mana you add the crappier your draws are, but the less you use, the less likely it is you will activate an early Land Tax.
- The consistency of the deck is magically secured. All of the designs for this deck require the use of many narrow and otherwise weak cards in order to support the engine and make it work. Some of the best archetypes in magic ever have found it impossible to achieve this result against the diversity of Legacy; it is very presumptous to say it's even possible for Land Tax to do this. In the interest of this question I assume that somehow the bad cards and weak manabase come together to form a good deck.
- They draw all the cards they need without having to topdeck them. There are a lot of problems with adding draw/tutoring. They will require even more tempo investment and make it harder to find the right color mana.
- The opponent does not counter any spells, destroy mana, or combo off. This increases even more the distance from the upper bound that real situations would resemble.
- They have the right kind of disruption against all decks. Any control player in this format will tell you this is impossible, but it's useful for testing the limits of the deck's strengths.
In these scenarios, the Land Tax deck does not overpower the other decks, and it is not degenerate. In realistic scenarios where interaction and the huge problems with inconsistency in the deck arise, it is unlikely that some magical technology exists in card pool that can fix such fundamental problems. If it did exist, other decks would be using it since it would be able to compensate for the manabase and number of dead cards in this deck.
This is not a difficult chain of reasoning and I'm surprised it is giving many of you trouble. I have conducted an objective investigation and there is no evidence to the contrary. Accusing me of it is inappropriate here and irrelevant to whether or not the card is ban worthy.
None of us have bothered to write an article about it either. If we were going to, I imagine we would show due diligence by basing our writings upon relevant data as opposed to rhetoric and hyberbole. Again, my problem with your article is not the assertion that Land Tax isn't ban-worthy; it's the lazy presumptuousness of the way in which you qualify your argument.
Thanks for taking the time to do that here, since you failed to do so in your actual article.Let me go over this carefully for you...
That was a summary of what my article is about. I have no problem explaining it again, but it is all in the article. I suppose if you approach what I say from the wrong angle it might be frustrating, but I can't control what assumptions you make about this question before you read my investigation of it. If I'm being presumptous, it's about the open-mindedness of my readers and their logical discipline.
You accuse me of being egotistical, deceptive, and dishonest in my attempt to argue for the return of this card to the format. There are plenty of ways to address the problems by article has, but you don't have to attack me.
No, your recurring presumptuousness is about the idea that your reader will take your personal opinions as irrefutable fact, which is misrepresentative and harmful to their understanding of the format.
I'm not attacking you, I'm attacking the way in which you present your arguments. I have not once said that I think you're a bad person, or made any other attacks upon your character. I have provided criticism of your writing, because, as far as I'm aware, that's is this thread's primary purpose.You accuse me of being egotistical, deceptive, and dishonest in my attempt to argue for the return of this card to the format. There are plenty of ways to address the problems by article has, but you don't have to attack me.
Machinus:
You personally are not being attacked. Your ideas are. I happen to agree with you that Land Tax isn't particularly good. I believe Zilla does as well. Our issue lies in how you presented your arguments.
Incidentally,
This is pretty borderline.You would have to have a severe aversion to logical reasoning to come to such a stupid conclusion about my intentions.
When in doubt, mumble.
When in trouble, delegate.
If there are problems, then I'd like to understand them and do something about them so I can be more effective as a writer. I would like to know what they are, specifically.
However, I'm not willing to consider anything people want to throw at me. My skepticism about this comes from the objections people have, and what they say. It's ludicrous to suggest I'm getting some benefit out of this other than informing the community. I am aware that I have more interest and concern about B/R issues than many other players, but this is because I enjoy playing this format and I want the best for it.
I am not trying to force my opinions on anyone. I did some work with this card, and went to the trouble of writing about what I found. It's out there for people to analyze for themselves. I have started the empirical investigation of this card's appropriateness in the format and I want to read more of it.
I have been thinking about Legacy's B/R since the format was created so I definitely have suspicions about which cards do and don't belong, but I based my conclusions here on the considerations I listed in the article. My position on this card for some time was that it should come off, but I didn't say much about that until Forsythe made serious and untenable claims about this card that were necessary to refute. That is a narrow objective but I think I have done that, as well as provide a much more comprehensive basis for making the decision about it.
Wouldn't empirical investigation involve creating lists and testing them?
When in doubt, mumble.
When in trouble, delegate.
Machinus, at Salvation that article would not have been printed in that state. To be frank, it was barely a rough draft. Note that I'm not trying to make a comparison about the quality of one site or another, or even your skills. I just know that my work is not going to be weak simply because I get the benefit of all of the current writers chiming in with opinions for atleast a week before any of you guys get to see it. We all go through a lot of drafts. It's not a perfect system, but it is a strong safety net.
I know you guys get paid for your work, and I suspect that you only get an editor. So maybe the four of you could bounce your stuff off each other before it's inked.
BTW, Barnello, I freakin' hate you for jumping ship. Your style is really top notch, and it sux ass to lose you after one measly piece. You better advise me when I get something to write again.
Why, because I exclude the possibility that your decklist is broken? I still haven't seen it.
No. If my intention was to prepare the Land Tax deck for a tournament, then that would be a lot more useful. The goal here is to examine the early game strength of all decks based on early Land Tax activation. By dividing up the possibilities of the deck's strategy and examining only the relevant ones, this restriciton provides enough information about the tempo development of the deck to see clearly how it performs.
Using a list would actually have been worse, since closing off any design possibilities only weakens the hypothetical deck. By making only the necessary assumptions the deck retains the maximum amount of strength (even an unrealistic amount), and this serves to demonstrate just how un-degenerate and un-oppressive the deck really would be, since even in those scenarios it is not problematic.
I thought it was solid work. Well done.
Land Tax's inclusion on the Banned List looks so damn out of place. It's embarrasing that it's even there.
I see, so there is no chance that a player would do this...By dividing up the possibilities of the deck's strategy and examining only the relevant ones, this restriciton provides enough information about the tempo development of the deck to see clearly how it performs.
Tap Plains (or Mox)
STP at Goblin Lackey
...among those possibilties. Because, ya know, I heard that STP is a pretty good card, and just might make it into a deck like that.
Your examination was ridiculous, man. Just admit it, learn from this, and adapt.
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Reply With Quote