[Free Article] Dazed and Confused

[Rico Suave]

Dazed and Confused

[Cthuloo]

Still have to read the whole article, but...

A month ago, I was oblivious about Legacy. [...]

You know what I think about?

Why in the WORLD is every single person’s deck SO BAD.

And of course something that can't be missing

Combo is still the best, always has been the best, always will be the best. Why are people putting Wild Nacatl and Lord of Atlantis in their decks when there are multiple ways in the format to kill you on the first turn of the game.

I'm sick of reading this kind of arrogant statements, and I'm sick of pro/semi pro/wannabe pro regarding the legacy community as idiots. I almost lost the will to read the rest of the article after the first few sentences.

Edit:

Ok, finished to read the whole article. The only thing this has taught me is that one month is not sufficient to understand Legacy. It also has irritated me to the point that I'm probably going to smoke to calm me down.

[Hanni]

Wow is that guy retarded. I'm not sure who he is, but he clearly knows nothing about Legacy. Sure buddy, you go ahead and make a deck with 29 lands in the Legacy (and I don't mean Lands.dec), and skip running fetchlands and duals to avoid that garbage deck that runs Stifles, Wastelands, and Dazes. lulz

This was the most ignorant article about Legacy that I've read since... well, since ever.

This guy is/was clearly Dazed and Confused.

To anyone who hasn't read this yet, don't. Not only will you waste your time, you will become much dumber after reading it.

[Grollub]

He does have a point tho, Legacy decks tend to be fragile to mana disruption due to excessive usage of cantrips to smooth out the gameplan. This is partial one of the reason I think MUD is a slumbering beast...

But yeah, he does come off too condensending(sp?).

[leander?]

Haha, that guy is retarded :D

[Nessaja]

Horrible writer, he has a point about the fragile manabases, but the comparission he makes towards standard decks having more lands just doesn't apply. Legacy has an entirely different curve then standard decks do.

[pippo84]

LOL!

I should have listened to Hanni's suggestion to skip reading this article.
It's real garbadge.
Has he ever played Legacy?? Really, has he ever attended at least one tournament?

A really arrogant person. Don't like duals, wastelands and fetches? Don't play them! I'd like to play against him playing a deck of 29 basic lands and see where he goes..

And all the points of Nacatl and Merfolk.. OMG..

The author is really Dazed and Confused..

[paK0]

No wonder a lot of people misunderstand Legacy when they get their information from crap like this.

[MMogg]

He does have a point tho, Legacy decks tend to be fragile to mana disruption due to excessive usage of cantrips to smooth out the gameplan.

Yes and no. It is true that Legacy manabases are far more fragile than Standard, but at the same time, the chance of running into a deck built around exploiting that weakness is less than the chances of losing by using a piece of garbage basic land manabase out of fear of such exploitation. Also, you know, you can play intelligently and not walk blindly into Wastelands and Stifles. Not that you can always do so, but format knowledge can increase your chances of avoiding disruption exponentially.

[Nidd]

I felt my brancells dying while I read that piece of crap. Seriously, has that dude ever played in a big tournament with his oh-so good ANT with 8 Fetches, 2 Duals and 10 Basics?

[Piceli89]

Ban this topic, no one should ever waste their precious time reading that shit, and this also applies for the 90% of the articles about Legacy on "Channelfireball", written by perfect Legacy strangers or "I-know-10%-of-the-format-but-i-still-write-because-imma-pro".

Seriously, go on talking about Jund and Eldrazi, leave us the good stuff.

[overpowered]

A poorly constructed article that quickly degenerates into him bashing a format he barely understands.

[danyul]

Yeah, the article was bad. Yeah, he doesn't really know what he's talking about at all. Yeah, I'll echo all the hate above. But did anybody else find his "super awesome" story at the end entirely unawesome? That was the let-down icing on the let-down cake for me.

[markbris]

haha, what a moron. thats all i have to say

[morgan_coke]

The land counts in Legacy are lower in part because the CMC of spells you actually pay mana for generally stops around 2. Also, about half the decks in Legacy have some form of land recursion, making LD a largely tempo-based strategy. That said, the author does have a point about the level of greed in most legacy manabases. It's a bit high. Basics aren't sexy, but they are necessary, and in something like 70% of Legacy decks they should be played in greater numbers.

However, the manner in which the article was written, and several massive comparison fails/format understanding fails make it fairly bad at actually communicating it's core idea in a manner likely to be well-received by the reader.

[zalachan]

..when there are multiple ways in the format to kill you on the first turn of the game.

I stopped there. Seriously.
Why do all the standard pro wannabes even bother with legacy? All they know about is "the Flash fiasco", "Reanimator is orgasmic good" and "get those duals for cheap, dude" stuff.
Ignorant pricks..

[Finn]

I actually agree with the author to a certain degree. He foolishly thinks he understands something that he does not have the background to see clearly. But there is actually an angle there. Legacy deck builders and the players who pilot those decks are constantly overstepping their safety zone to access better spells.

1. 4 color Landstill - was great for awhile. Nick Trudeau was tearing up the place over and over despite the paper thin manabase. Oh, then someone figured out he had been cheating to get proper lands all along.
2. Team America - played some really powerful spells, no basics, and was so thin on everything that it actually made Extirpate look attractive
3. New Horizons - I know it is all the rage. But it is a house of cards and will not last - for all the same reasons.

What the author does not have the familiarity to understand is that this is cyclical. It happens over and over in this format until the people playing the deck eventually abandon it due to inconsistency and hate. It is good to push the boundaries of what you can get away with. That is intelligent deck design. Good decks play good cards. The holes in your design (manabase is easy to spot and easy to take advantage of) only come to bite you in the balls when someone else calls you on it with a deck designed specifically to exploit this weakness. But until they sit across from it, the over-reaching decks will continue to pursue their Plan A successfully.

Want a deck that will be a perennial performer? Figure out a way to make it strong with as few colors as possible. It opens up doors.

[yankeedave]

Want a deck that will be a perennial performer? Figure out a way to make it strong with as few colors as possible. It opens up doors.

This is basically what I said in the Comments section of the artcle. I could see his point, but he needs to provide decks that meet all of his stringent roles that he wants a deck to win. PV and Manuel Bucher always talks about this when discussing Legacy. They want a deck that either wins on the first turn or stops decks winning on the first turn, and have a good long game, so they play Counterbalance decks. At least they provide an idea of what they want to see played, rather than just call Legacy decks shit and not give any alternatives.

[DrJones]

While the article is not very professional, I think there are some lessons that could be extracted from the mess rather than dismiss it entirely. For example, I have to agree with him in some points.

The first one, is that Ponza is awful.
The second one, is that combo decks should be playing with Force of Will themselves.

The rest of the article is about how Merfolks is a bad deck, however, what I think it's happening here is that he doesn't realize that Merfolks is a meta-deck, that's it, a deck designed to prey on vulnerabilities self-imposed by the other decks in the format.

He is saying that all other decks bad because they make merfolk good with their design choices. It's true that if players chose to play less fetchlands and more lands they would get better results against current merfolk decks, but it could also mean that merfolk decks, being a meta-choice, would adapt to prey on a different set of vulnerabilities (mostly, there are people still playing Suicide black in legacy, for example).

I can identify with him because I remember when the difference between the North American Vintage metagame and the Spanish metagame (which is one of the countries where most people play eternal) meant that the North American top decks were terribly underperforming against the spanish meta (Phyrexian Negator for example was unexplicably popular in USA), it's easy to call them bad if they consistently show poor results in your meta because they are designed to fight wrong battles.

The author of the article wants to say (in an unpolite mood proper of reckless youngsters) that if in a given meta, only a meta-specific fish deck causes trouble to fast combo decks, combo decks should adapt so that thosee fish decks become "fish out of their bowls" decks, and he suggests some specific changes in the mana base to achieve that:

· Daze is worse if you play more lands
· Stifle is worse if you play less fetchlands
· Wasteland is worse if you play basics.

He doesn't include a graphic with statistics about the gains in resiliency minus loss in consistency of that mana base, which would have given more weight to his analysis, though.

[Vacrix]

It sounds like he is whining about nothing in particular but the format itself. Daze is really good, but so is FoW... Combo players are all doing it wrong... but somehow combo is still the best choice. Combo players lose to Daze? Wuttt?? I beat Daze all day long. What I don't beat is FoW.