Combo is seriously powerful. However, I recall everyone was screaming about CB/Top+Tarmogoyf a while back. People will wisen up.
This. 99% of people in this thread latched onto the word "combo" and thereby totally missed the point of the article, which is that decks that show up to a tournament expecting to win creature wars are going to be outgunned by all the decks that show up and don't give two shits about getting into creature wars. Sure, combo is one of those, but there's also Enchantress, Lands, Natural Order into something that can't be blocked and wins in two swings, Reanimator, etc.Originally Posted by Nightmare
Perhaps this is just me, but I consider "Enchantress, Lands, Natural Order...Reanimator, etc." to be forms of combo (some more dedicated than others). Enchantress and Lands are combo-prison decks. Natural Order and Reanimator are combos for game-breaking bombs and silverbullets of magnitude. Not all combos are equal, of course.This. 99% of people in this thread latched onto the word "combo" and thereby totally missed the point of the article, which is that decks that show up to a tournament expecting to win creature wars are going to be outgunned by all the decks that show up and don't give two shits about getting into creature wars. Sure, combo is one of those, but there's also Enchantress, Lands, Natural Order into something that can't be blocked and wins in two swings, Reanimator, etc.
The discussion should highlight the diversity of combos, and the difficulty in finding appropriate answers to them all simultaneously (which, only some forms of permission can do with consistency). This will edge out several large strategies in general, as they have no way to interact with the diversity of the combos played in Legacy.
peace,
4eak
This is a very good point, IMHO. I know one shouldn't quote oneself, but It's easier than to rewrite the whole thing with different words: here I made a similar point.
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Maybe. But they're totally non-interactive in different ways. Storm combo doesn't care if you attack because attacking won't win the game fast enough anyway. Enchantress and Lands both make it so you can't attack, while NO and Reanimator make attacking irrelevant because you're extremely unlikely to win a race against something that fat and that fast.
EDIT: Never mind, actually read your post instead of skimming it. Even so, fair decks in Legacy are at an inherent disadvantage because of all the unfair things you can do and all the ways you have to stop the fair decks from doing their thing.
I'm located 2 hours south of the New York border, 20 minutes from New Jersey, and about an hour away from Delaware/Maryland. The Philly-area Legacy scene sucks but I can at least find a small local tournament if I want. In NY there is a monthly tournament that regularly gets 80 or more people, and they are starting a league of sorts in June where you can qualify for a bigger tournament next year. Your list looks impressive though, but you still sound arrogant.
How did you find that search feature? I tried searching their website for like 10 minutes and couldn't find it. Their interface for searching tournaments is horrible; I don't want a map that takes forever to load, I want a fucking list where you can search by format or something...
I suppose that depends on what your definition of an "advanced" meta is. Are you sure it's not just a stagnate meta? It sounds like it's just the same 20-40 people playing the same tournament over and over with the same results.
Lately around here we've been having monthly tournaments of 80 to 100+ people. More people, more teams, more innovation, a few people keep consistently placing well, but the meta shifts all the time.
Get over yourself!!
The Dutch meta is not the world's most evolved, such a stupid thing to say as if Madrid didn't just take the cake!
As if there are not Legacy tournaments everywhere with results posted almost instantly for anyone to view or discuss online at anytime-more tournaments firing does not = higher evolved meta. By your definition MTGO is the world's most evolved meta as more dailys will fire than any Country could hope to compete with, while also being easy to attend-no flights,trips just log n play-.
Lolz @ more powerful than any VINTAGE...Ant does not play 4 Demonics. Infernals are worse. Sure Vintage does not get 4 Brains,Mysticals,Petals,Led, but they get Tinker,Recall,Y Will-possibly best card in combo-,Bargain,Necro,Jar,Sol Ring,Mana Crypt/Vault,Time Vault,Timetwister,Desire,Windfall,Mana Drain,etc.
AnT is very powerful, But it is not alone by and far the best deck in the format.
Last edited by menace13; 04-07-2010 at 12:17 PM. Reason: spelling was under the influence
Meh, Zoo's been putting out a lot of results. I wouldn't have such a problem with this article if it had been supported by facts, but instead he's just making the claim, "You can't afford to have a bad combo matchup" in spite of recent events.
I'd say the myth is actually the opposite: The MYTH is that you have to be able to do something broken or stop something broken in order to see success in Legacy.
When Zoo and Goblins and to a lesser extent Ichorid, which all have bad storm combo matchups but pretty good matchups against most of the rest of the field, are putting out results (although Ichorid doesn't have any results, I'm just humoring the author), you have to rethink your claims about what must and what must not happen in order for a Legacy deck to be successful.
Zoo and Goblins haven't been doing that great -- they make up like 15-20% of the metagame and only have about that much Top 8 representation, but that's certainly respectable with a >50% win ratio and a pretty conclusive demonstration (Madrid) that Zoo can win over the long haul.
I maindeck Swords to Plowshares all the time. And no, I don't think Goblins is out of hand just because I'm packing some maindeck hate that's dead in a number of matchups.
Yeah I re-read it and it does come off as arrogant. Sorry about that. I'm not trying to say 'we are better look at the numbers, your opinion means nothing, i am god all i say is true'. I meant to indicate that we have a very avid Legacy community in The Netherlands, which came to a point where Storm combo turns out to be the best deck; where decks like The Rock can pack all the combo hate they want: we tried Orim's Chant, Duress, Thoughtseize, Ethersworn Cannonist and Gaddock Teeg all in the same deck and still lost to combo. Edit: check out the combo-hate I played in The Rock when I ended up in the top8 at the Dutch Nationals. Guess to what deck I lost. Yup, combo...(incidentally, notice the 3x ANT in the top8)
Go to webapp.wizards.com and press 'events' on the left.
The meta changes like crazy lately, but one thing remains the same: the power of ANT. Somehow we can't seem to create a balanced meta where it isn't (multiple times) in every top 4/8.
Have you ever tried building the same consistent strong ANT deck Legacy has for Vintage? I did: it's impossible. Infernals are worse than Demonic Tutor, I know that, but with LED, you're basically running 4 Black Lotus and 4 Demonic Tutor. It's that broken. There's no way a Vintage Storm deck can be as strong as Legacy ANT. Try it. If you find it, please send me a list.
Those are 4 cards that, for instance, can tremendously help a Control deck hold off an Aggro deck. But because of the speed of Combo, you cannot rely on merely 4 hate-cards. You need ALOT more, because only 1 won't cut it, and you also need them in your opening hand right away, so you have to mull to them.
If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it's probably delicious.
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Stop comparing Vintage ANT to Legacy ANT. Vintage ANT is worlds beyond Legacy ANT in terms of sheer power; there is really no comparison. If you have trouble differentiating between the two, try casting Yawgmoth's Will some time.
Suddenly, Fluffy realized she wasn't quite like the other bunnies anymore.
-Team R&D-
-noitcelfeR maeT-
There are three decks I'd ever consider playing in this format - Zoo, Dredge, and whatever the best Storm deck is.
While, sure, the Zoo vs Tendrils matchup is pretty bad, Zoo smashes every other deck in the format (except Lands, I suppose, but even that matchup doesn't really scare me).
I do agree that the format is not truly wide-open (in fact, I made a claim a while back that I believed Legacy had fewer tier 1 decks (and even fewer truly competitive decks) than Standard and Extended. That's not the case right now, since both Standard and Extended are one (Jund) or two (DDT and Zoo) deck formats).
This is what I posted on the SCG forums, and nobody cared there either:
"@ the author:
How long have you been playing Legacy, and about how many tournaments have you played in? I see several things wrong with your article:
1) Your opening statements.
"There is a persistent myth that Legacy is a wide-open format with dozens of different strategies and decks, and that you can play more or less anything you want. That claim is just not true."
I cannot think of a format more wide open then Legacy, with at least 11 archetypes being capable of winning any tournament with 30 or more players. Compare this to Vintage (Oath, Tezz, Dredge, Workshop) or Standard (often a Rock, Paper, Scissors). There are so many engines and non-linear strategies in Legacy that you are dead wrong. You literally can play anything you want.
"The best Legacy decks are deliberately configured to interact with their opponents as little as possible"
This is an odd thing to see you write, if only because you advocate Counterbalance later in the article. While the Counter-Top interaction is unfun and time consuming, it is interaction. Counterbalance decks often run disruption in the form of Daze, Force, Stifle, Spell Snare, Wasteland, Fire/Ice. These are all very interactive cards.
2) You say attacking is miserable. Opposite of Vintage, Legacy is the format where creatures can be played. Lands is currently the poster deck for dealing with attacking creatures. Lands is designed to crush aggro decks like Zoo, Goblins, Merfolk, and to lesser extents Elves, Affinity and other sub tier decks.
Early in the article where you propose ANT plays Sea, Tutor then goes off turn two, while a Zoo player drops a Nacatl. Yes, the Zoo player was never in this game, but the same is true for any deck that didn't have Force or Daze in it's opener. Imagine a situation where the ANT deck can't cast Ad Nauseam until turn 3. The Zoo player casts Nacatl, casts another creature and attacks for 3, and on it's third turn attacks for 5-6 and has 1, or hopefully 2, burn cards in hand. This leaves the Ad Nauseam player less than 10 life to find enough Storm. Most matches find a balance of these two extreme opposites.
3) Your view on Legacy control decks.
"Non-Counterbalance control decks could conceivably become a pole... before setting up Counterbalance-Top and essentially locking the other guy out completely" I didn't want to copy 2 paragraphs there, but I'm now talking about those two.
Since the inception of Legacy (Then type 1.5) as a format, there has been a control deck, Landstill, that has filled all the rolls you correctly identify need to be filled. Landstill has answers to aggro decks (Swords, Explosives/Ruins, Wrath of God, Humility), enough countermagic to stop combo decks (Force of Will, Counterspell), and enough card advantage engines to stay competitive in the mirror (Brainstorm, Fact or Fiction, Jace, Eternal Dragon), as well as enough lands to play all of these cards, typically 23-24 and Dragon.
Landstill outclasses Counterbalance as the premier control deck of Legacy for a few reasons. First, to win the game Counterbalance needs to resolve a Tarmogoyf and keep him around long enough to attack the opponent to death. A control deck should never have to rely on vanilla creatures to win games. The Control Deck Finisher Hall of Fame (CDFHOF for short) includes Serra Angel, Morphling, Blinding Angel, Exalted Angel and Baneslayer Angel. These creatures all outclass Tarmogoyf (relative to their time periods in some cases) by leaps and bounds. Morphling has shroud, and all the other ones have huge toughness, flying, and some way to mitigate the aggro deck's momentum (lifelink, skipping combat). Tarmogoyf just attacks on the ground.
Next, you attack Fact or Fiction. Control decks in Legacy have a plan. Survive until you have 4 lands, then cast 4cc spells that win the game (Wrath of God, Humility, Moat, Elspeth, Jace). Fact or Fiction is also one of these cards. Almost always, it reads "3U, Instant: Draw 4 cards." Sometimes 5. This has the added bonus of many people not understanding how to seperate FoF piles. If you're creating piles and you aren't conscience about the fact that the Landstill player is playing Crucible, Academy Ruins, Cunning Wish or whatever, you'll end up giving them lenient piles.
Control decks should never lose to aggro decks, and Counter-Top has the painful ability to lose to a turn 2 Pridemage. Daze can be played around, and Force of Will costs the deck extra cards to deal with single attackers. Counter-Top isn't a solid control deck, it's that hybrid Aggro-Control. It boils down to a heavy reliance on the combat step, something that a control deck shouldn't have to do (though, many do. As I said before Legacy is the format of creatures and attacking. Mishra's Factory has probably won thousands of games for control players everywhere.)
To recap:
Decks don't need Force of Will to be playable in Legacy.
Attacking is a viable strategy in Legacy.
Counterbalance is not the be-all-end-all of Control strategy.
Combo decks are not overpowered. Chalice of the Void, Daze, Force et. al. keep these decks in check.
Thanks for reading."
"Michael opens with Lotus Petal, Academy Ruins, Phyrexian Dreadnaught, and Stifle. I Force of Will the Stifle, but he has Force of Will backup. I Ponder on turn one and again on turn two, but fail to find a Swords to Plowshares before he has smashed me twice. " That's losing to Mike Sanchirico.
Team Bad Guys.
I may have also come off as a dik, my apologies, tone is very hard to read into online and i am not that way at all. Also you Dutch do play a hella lot of Eternal.
Vintage has 2 storm archetypes, although many decks use Tendril,Moxen and Y Will-Drain Tendrils and TPS(ANT is slowly gaining popularity) are the most popular.
TPS:
http://www.deckcheck.net/deck.php?id=33877
Drain Tendrils:
http://www.deckcheck.net/deck.php?id=33954
Looks pretty powerful, to me at least.
Agreed one does need more than 1 Piece of combo hate or varied strats to deal with it( too many ways to answer just 1)
This.
Madrid was made up of
3 Combo (2 ANT, 1 Reanimator)
3 Zoo
1 ProCountertop
1 ProBant
Zoo is just too good right now to make such a claim! Combo is strong and all over the place, but it is not as format warping as some claim it to be. Sure, once a deck gets played you need to pack hate. Fist people cried about CB/Top. Then they started packing Grips and now its actually fine. Obv you will have to adjust decks to the meta, if people see 20% combo and don't prepare for it they DESERVE to loose.
The article is in contradiction with recent results.
That said there is a few things in the thread I wanted to point.
1- While it's easier to hate on Zoo and to know how to play against it, it also gives the pilot an easier ride, specially through long tournaments. Crafting piles or trying to stay alive or even playing long, drawn-out games all day long can exaust a player. It's a double edge sword: You get fast rounds, time to relax and eat and light decision-making sprints, while the broken non-interactive players are busting their heads every single turn.
2- Shouldn't resourceful hard-to-play decks with mindnumbing decision trees reward those who master it instead of choosing the "play dudes and attack" strategy?
3- The idea that combo cards are introduced into legacy faster than cards for other archetypes is false. Zoo is fetchlands+ old burn+ duals + Alara beaters. Pridemages, Nacatls, Lions, KotRs, Path to Exile. Add BBE and Baneslayers and you are playing Standard.
4- The "everything is combo" stance is as useful as "Every card is a Timewalk". OMFGBBQ Combo is running rampant!!! Two of the main "combos" in the format must be Nacatl plus Fetchlands and Counterbalance plus Top.
Treat things for what they are, shall we? If so many decks are screwing with the combat phase but Zoo is still a powerhouse (as shown in actual tournament results), does that mean it's inherently broken? I guess not.
FeFe Team: Legacy in the Southern Hemisphere.
Ridiculously true.
I know that the author plays combo so this doesn't really apply, but I keep thinking about this (as it applies to combo, aggro, and control):
"Dear Professor Oak,
Squirtle is way broken. Please nerf him.
-Charmander
P.S. Bulbasaur is fine."
I don't know if the author is right or wrong, but it was a fun read.
I think recent results are affected by the type of player attending the 5k events (Standard players with a borrowed deck). I'm not the guy, but I wonder if anyone has bothered to look at recent results with the 5k events ignored. Even then, when you get Goblins winning and plenty of coverage to tell the world about it, more players are going to be packing that deck. So it is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
-Imported Standard players can't be bothered to learn strange/difficult Legacy decks.
-Few strange/difficult Legacy decks arrive at the tournaments.
-A more recognizable linear deck takes the trophy.
-Readers pay attention to this.
-More people play those decks in all tournaments.
-Few strange/difficult Legacy decks arrive at the tournaments.
...and so on...
Also, there are non-dedicated hate cards that play only a minor role by themselves, but a major role taken as a whole, which can and do make "unfair" combo matchups winnable. You just need a lot of them.
Counterbalance
Wasteland
Stifle
Chalice
etc.
I suggest to Skeggi that he make up something original to take down ANT, but only as a side effect. A need of this sort is a perfect opportunity to create a new deck. I would love an opportunity like that.
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"Governing is too important to be left to people as silly as politicians."
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The point of the article was not "the sky is falling look out for the combo decks!" The point was that the non-Force aggro decks are totally kold to a million archetypes and there's very little they can do about it. Are you seriously going to maindeck Gaddock Teeg? Are you going to cut some of your one drops that you aren't playing enough of anyway, or Pridemage? Or are you just going to cut Bolt or Sylvan Library? Do you know how minimal Teeg's impact on the game actually is?
I'm not real sure where everyone got the idea that Chalice at zero automatically kolds Tendrils, but, like, it doesn't. Getting to five with Rituals and Tomb isn't that hard. Neither is finding Hurkyl's Recall or Burning Wish or whatever. Doomsday piles can be constructed that skip it entirely. Chalice at one is harder to beat and it still isn't super difficult.
More than twice as many people played Zoo in Madrid than played Tendrils. Yes, obviously some of them made top eight. Where they lost to the combo decks.
The format is not remotely close to equilibrium because of how underplayed Tendrils is. It's interesting that in the only region where it is a significant portion of the metagame (the Netherlands) it is crushing it.
Because it was only 6% of the day one metagame so it only grew to 10%.If combo is as strong as some claim why didn't it make up more than 25% of the GP Madrid day 2 metagame?
This is very well said.
edit:It's pretty hard to build a metagame foil for a format where there are multiple totally broken linears plus Counterbalance plus Daze aggro decks. It's way more effective to just execute your own powerful gameplan instead, which was sort of the point of the article that I probably should've stated better.A need of this sort is a perfect opportunity to create a new deck.
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When in trouble, delegate.
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