As a brief sidestep, i seem to recall reading that each precon comes with 3 generals. Each precon will have the regular playable card general, and a foil oversized copy of each one.Originally Posted by Barook
So if you want you could use the oversized copy as your general from the command zone, but still have a regular card for when the guy playing Vendillion Clique with 30,000,000 counterspells hinders your general to the bottom of our library.
Team Albany: What's Legacy?
You cannot know the sweetness of Victory, without first dwelling in the agony of Defeat.
Am I the only one that absolutely, positively hates that they printed this?
It's narrow, and cool, and if it couldn't counter ITSELF it'd be great. But the combination of no color requirement and that Mental Misstep from player A can counter Mental Misstep from player B just turns the game into even more of a crap shoot. And if some poor sap isn't running it, and gets his Nacatl countered by it...I mean, really. It's just stupid.
Players: We want more interesting interactions! Faster games, more decisions! YAY!
WotC: We heard you like metagaming, so we put more meta in your metagame, so you can metagame while you metagame.
Player: So, you just printed a card that we all have to play 3-4 of, basically? That, if we both draw them in our opening hand, is a complete wash?
WotC: PHYREXIAN MANA! WOOOO!
Seriously. Fuck this card. If it read "counter target spell with CC=1 that is NOT Mental Misstep" or "counter target spell with CC=< 1" (with a cost of pUpU, it would be much better. More powerful as the latter, but 4 life for a stupid free counterspell that CAN'T hit itself is a more appropriate cost. I would be perfectly ok with WotC if they just banned this in Legacy right out of the gate.
I swear to God, people hated Daze as much as you hate this card. Back in the day, the format was dominated by Daze.dec (namely Tempo Thresh) and people kept talking about playing around Daze. I see this card as the 'new' Daze, not in functionality, but rather, forcing the format to think about 'how to play around Daze/Mental Misstep'. It forces some decks to redesign, and others to incorporate this card as a natural 4-off.
I personally like what WotC did here. And they clearly knew the implication of this card in Legacy. They are not blind to a very popular format, unless they have a supremely low IQ score.
Decks that I care about:
Steel Stompy
UWx Landstill
Dreadstalker
DDFT (10% practice)
Mangara on MWS? You must be masochistic. -kiblast
This card encourages uniform threats. I'm thinking Zoo, Burn, Sligh - all have cards which don't mind being countered for 2 life.
Only time will tell how this shakes up the format. Remember Lorescale Coatl? I still read that thread from time to time for shits and giggles.
A book about the dark side of Legacy: "Magic: The Addiction" // Conversations with Magic players: "Humans of Magic"
Can we talk about how many good cheap Blue cards a deckbuilder needs to decide over?
Brainstorm
Ponder
Stifle
Force
Mental Misstep
Daze
Spell Pierce
Spell Snare
Building Legacy decks is hard after this printing, as Misstep forces everyone to start from the ground up! Very exciting format, imo
I'm so glad I'm a blue player. These kinds of deck decisions are what I play this game for. The card is clearly absurd -- the question is, how does one best use it? For example, a UWb Landstill player is going to cast his Missteps much differently than a Tempo Thresh player, and he'll cast his differently than a CounterTop player. I foresee may interesting, skill-testing scenarios popping up, such as:
You're playing New Horizons (why, I have no idea, but let's use it as an example) and facing off against Zoo game one. Zoo man got a quick start and have 2 lands on turn 3 after you Wastelanded one last turn. You're at 14, having taken a Nacatl to the face twice now. They have Taiga and Savannah up, then tap the Savannah for another Nacatl. You have FoW, Misstep, Knight, a fetch, and Brainstorm in hand. Do you Misstep the Nacatl and hope they don't have a Lavamancer? If you do, how do you pay? Paying 2 life can hurt against Zoo, but if you pay normal mana you can't brainstorm this turn and fetch away the junk. If you cast the Misstep, you're only other guaranteed blue card is Brainstorm for FoW, and if that whiffs after casting you can't Force their Goyf/Knight/Choke. If you let Nacatl resolve, can you afford the life loss until you can play Knight to stabilize?
There's no right or wrong answer to these, it all depends on context. It makes decisions in both play and deckbuilding difficult, and even nonblue decks are wondering how to adjust their sideboard or even mainboard to either improve combo matchups or fight Misstep with Misstep.
Is anyone else a little worried about Dredge running this to stop Pithing Needle or Relic of Progenitus postboard? Seeing them with Leyline of Sanctity was scary enough.
wait what? you mean every deck playing a free hard counter that doesnt cost tempo or CA is a fun thing? OH BOY...
I will make use of every tool that fate presents.
Weird, an SCD thread for a card that doesn't suck. That's rare.
I'm not seeing the big changes to Legacy here. Once the new card smell wears off, I think MMS will mostly be consigned to a sideboard card in non-blue decks (maybe). Most decks don't want to take the hit to their consistency / strategy; like MMS in Goblins seems thoroughly bad... You're trading a card for a 1 cmc spell on the stack, that's it. Maybe B/W, B/G or something that will play it -- maybe.
As a lover of blue decks, there it seems fairly exciting. Being able to interact on the draw and not having to Force and lose a blue card, for instance, seems totally awesome. Even on the play, it will be nice to be able to drop a land, fetch, Ponder and be able to get their Nacatl, Vial, Lackey, etc. without trading your land drop to Daze.
For me, I'll start with something like this and see how it goes.
4 Brainstorm
4 Ponder
4 Force of Will
4 Daze
3 Mental Misstep
3 Spell Snare
3 Thoughtseize
4 Ghastly Demise
1 Engineered Explosives
4 Nimble Mongoose
4 Dark Confidant
4 Tarmogoyf
4 Wasteland
4 Polluted Delta
4 Misty Rainforest
3 Underground Sea
3 Tropical Island
(An archetypal Bardo Blue Deck.)
Anyway, I don't see why "every deck" would want to play something like this.
I'm in the same camp as you; I think it's SB material for non-blue, but I love it in blue.
This is exactly true. Add Sensei's Divining Top to that list, too! There are many more good one-drop blue cards than one deck can possibly run, which makes deck building interesting. After Brainstorm and Force of Will, what other cards are auto-includes? What is the right mix of Daze, Mental Misstep, Pierce, and Snare? Very interesting.
This is exactly right. I think Mental Misstep will see a bunch of play in blue decks alongside some mix of Daze, Force, Counterbalance, Spell Pierce, and Spell Snare, and very limited play in non-blue decks.
Mental Misstep is a very well thought out and interesting card for Legacy. It's very good, and it will make people think in much the same way Daze influences decisions, but it will not completely reshape the entire metagame.
InfoNinjas
The thing is, you can play around Daze by leaving a mana open. That's a fairly common resource to have, and the decision to play around it or go for the glory by tapping out is informed by your opponent's board (island or no?). Mental Misstep you can't play around except by running Duress/Thoughtsieze, or running countermagic of your own (now something everyone can do, due to the existence of...Mental Misstep).Back in the day, the format was dominated by Daze.dec (namely Tempo Thresh) and people kept talking about playing around Daze.
My point wasn't that a "free" counter that is severely limited but extremely powerful, in this format in particular, is bad. It's obviously not, as Force of Will is fairly ubiquitous and almost single-handedly keeps hyper fast combo decks in check; as well, Daze/FoW basically allows aggro-control to exist at all. My problem with MM is that it requires NO sacrifice during deckbuilding other than finding 4 extra slots, no sacrifice during play other than two life, and basically requires decks that rely on their first turn, one-mana play to actually do something significant to either run it or be consistently pushed back a turn.
Sure, it'll be interesting to see if the existence of this thing forces the meta to trend towards 2cc, instead of one, but the fact that EVERYONE can use it and it can counter other copies of itself means that it's just a dumb luck, arms race type of card. At least with Force of Will your deck needs to be composed of some blue cards, and Daze requires you to run Islands, and BOTH have significant drawbacks/costs during play.
So, when the full spoiler for NPH got released, Mental Misstep jumped to hype-rspace at a speed not seen since...well...since I can remember. People are calling this card the death and rebirth of the format, the New Tarmogoyf, and various other things that are so obviously overblown, it's painful.
So I want to get this out there now: Mental Misstep is not the Jesus Christ of Legacy.
When do you want Mental Misstep - as in, under what circumstances is the card actually good?
When interaction is worth two life and a card.
But when is that?
1) Extreme detriment to your game plan. The scenarios that fall under this heading are, "cards that beat me or make life prohibitively difficult" (Aether Vial vs. Counterbalance) or, "cards that are good at every point in the game and are always worth countering" (topdecked removal versus creature-light decks). Let's address these separately, as they aren't exactly the same.
a) Cards that beat me or make life prohibitively difficult: The obvious offenders here are Aether Vial and Sensei's Divining Top; the former invalidates counters in blue decks and the latter is half a Counterbalance lock. There aren't currently ideal answers to either of those cards: Vial has Needle and Disenchants, and Top has Needle and Grip. However, in Vial decks, Vial is often the only artifact or enchanment, making Disenchants bad as they hold little value outside of their ability to answer one four-of in the opposing deck. Needle is a better solution as Vial decks often have Wasteland, and potentially other cards like Mangara, Jitte, or Siege-Gang Commander to name, but it is itself easily answered and its loss means the cards you feared will be active again. Similarly, Needle and Grip are decent against Counterbalance decks of various stripes (both more so against Thopters than NO-Bant versions), but are still narrow answers that are not exactly ideal against other decks - Grip, for example, is much worse against Affinity than something like Nature's Claim, simply because Claim is far cheaper to cast and is therefore better at helping you stabilize in the critical early turns.
In order for you to want to run Mental Misstep over other answers in this case, you need to (a) run it in conjunction with other cards that can answer resolved 1cc threats, and (b) the cocktail of Misstep and your other answer(s) needs to have better utility across the rest of your weak matchups than your current cocktail of answers. Misstep is a lot like a Leyline in that it's at its best in your opening hand but loses a lot of value as the game drags on. If its only job is to answer one or maybe two important targets in your opponent's deck, drawing one in the midgame is probably not going to be very hot.
b) Cards that are good at every point in the game and are always worth countering: Tops and removal spells are the standouts here. One player having an active Top puts that player very far ahead of his Top-less opponent, even when he doesn't have rafts of fetches; the ability to sculpt draws is just that good in this format. Similarly, if you're Team America and your opponent rips a Swords to nail your freshly played Tombstalker, you kind of want to do something about that. Unfortunately, the lion's share of a tempo deck's counters are conditional, making the threats it starts to drop in the mid- to late-game vulnerable to Legacy's very cheap removal. Furthermore, losing a threat gives the opponent time to recover: part of the attraction of the tempo deck is that you one-for-one your opponent a ton, put them behind, and then slam a clock that is so fast, your opponent doesn't have a chance to recover. If your dude gets Swords'd, it opens a window for your opponent to catch up and start beating you with cards that aren't individually weak and crappy. In cases like this, Mental Misstep is attractive as another way to safeguard your game plan.
2) Versus "Linchpin" cards that cannot be easily neutralized otherwise. Situations like this are exemplified by decks using Dark Ritual: combo decks where the things getting cast off of Dark Ritual are scarier and harder to answer because the mana boost gives the combo player more flexibility. In other words, it's easier to nip things in the bud early, and Dark Ritual, cantrips, Breakthrough, and anti-answer cards like Chain of Vapor and Deathmark are all in this category. Usually, they herald worse things to come, and countering them can buy you a turn or two to set up better, longer-term answers you wouldn't have time to set up otherwise. Non-blue aggro decks and slow Counterbalance decks benefit the most from this, the former because they are generally interaction-light but can race if given time, and the latter because they are interaction-heavy but need time to set up. However, again, Misstep is not a solution in and of itself, but needs to be part of a suite of cards: more permanent answers along with backup plan answers in case you don't have Misstep in hand when shit hits the fan. An anti-combo suite of Misstep, Mindbreak Trap, and Canonist can be solid in a deck like Zoo, but probably not worth it since the sideboard space you consume is not worth the percentage you're buying against a relatively uncommon deck type plus the percentage you're losing across non-combo matchups. Misstep on its own is unlikely to be sufficient against a lot of decks, simply because drawing it a turn too late is no better than not drawing it at all: you'll be dead, or the damage will be done and you'll be well on your way to dead.
3) Misstep clearly outclasses part or all of some of your current sideboard cards across a wide variety of deck types. When people start nutting themselves over Misstep, they usually do it by listing all the cards it counters. However, the appropriate question is, given your deck, how many of those are actually worth countering? If you're Zoo, do you really care about countering Swords, Bolt, Lackey, or Lavamancer? No, because you're either resilient to those cards, or already have answers to them. In this case, Misstep isn't helping you enough that it justifies the slots it takes up. But you do care about countering Breakthrough, Dark Rit, Glimpse of Nature, and Top, because those cards are all bad for you in one way or another.
The answers to the following questions need to be true in order for Mental Misstep to be the best card for the job:
1) Do you expect to see the cards you want to counter often?
2) Are these cards damaging enough to you that you need an answer for them?
3) Is a counterspell a better answer than other available hate cards? In other words, is the damage caused by your Misstep targets severe and likely irreversible?
4) Does adding Mental Misstep to your sideboard to address these cards reduce your post-board percentages against other decks more than it improves your post-board percentage against the decks you're fighting with it? In other words, would you be better off sacrificing points in one matchup to gain more points across a greater number of other matchups?
If all of the above are true, and if you can capitalize on the turns Misstep buys you, Mental Misstep is worth testing for your sideboard.
Note that the, "What if he doesn't draw his hate cards" argument is exacerbated for Misstep because it is a counter; you always need to have it before the cards you want to answer. Cards like Grip have wide windows where you can draw them, ranging from your opening seven up to some point where your opponent's resolved spell has put you far enough behind and him far enough ahead that you cannot recover even if you drew your hate. Misstep does nothing to a resolved hate card and is therefore almost certainly only effective as part of a mix of answers designed to address some card. That has implications both for sideboard space consumed and comparisons to the hate cards it compliments.
I have a feeling a lot of people are just going to jam four Misstep into their 75s for Providence and then are going to lose a bunch because they have these four cards that don't really help a lot in their problem matchups and divert space in the sideboards away from what would have been better answers. Shiny new toys are shiny and new, but people need to THINK about them before dying of an overdose of orgasmic bliss.
What I do think, though, is that Misstep does a lot for blue decks, especially slower ones that want ways to interact early but can't necessarily afford to bounce lands for Daze, and tempo decks looking for another solid counter. This card does far more for blue than for non-blue decks.
Everything in this post is awesome. I pulled out a few key points AggroZombies made for emphasis. What it comes down to is this:
Does Mental Misstep give you the most bang for your sideboard slots against a few specific decks,
--or--
Is Mental Misstep good enough against enough different decks to be worth the sideboard slots for a slight improvement against many decks?
Additionally,
Does having Mental Misstep in your 60 card deck (before or after sideboarding) improve your matchup, or dilute your deck? Goblins, for example, would probably rather have another threat instead of a reactive counterspell against opposing removal, and would probably have a more directed and powerful answer to combo instead of a card that is good but not amazing against a difficult matchup.
The decks that are really going to profit from Mental Misstep are the blue aggro-control, tempo, and control decks that want to tap out for Ponder and still be able to interact on the first turn without picking up their only land. Note that these decks already have access to Daze, Spell Pierce, Spell Snare, and Force of Will, so Mental Misstep is an upgrade, not a completely new animal.
InfoNinjas
Fixt. =/
I can't think of any reason why this is true. Any deck can play it. If you wanted to state that this card does more for blue decks that also don't splash into appropriate colors to shore up their weakness to specific 1cc threats, then yeah, I'd agree with you, but then again you could just replace "blue decks" with "decks" in that sentence and it'd be just as true. It's lazy deckbuilding that is then invalidated due to other peoples' lazy deckbuilding, and it all just ends up being dumb. Your point about watering down the strategy is well-taken, and again, I'd accept that as a valid reason for running it or not IF IT COULDN'T COUNTER OTHER MENTAL MISSTEPS.This card does far more for blue than for non-blue decks.
For example, say you're a Landstill player. This card is obviously pro as shit, since it lets you answer t1 Aether Vial regardless of turn order, so you play it. It answers important early plays without costing you an extra card in hand (saving your Forces for something important), or a land in play (letting you get your win conditions/card advantage/counter wall) up earlier. It lets you MUCH more consistently drop a t2 Standstill without having to worry about whether or not your manlands can race that Lackey or that metric fuckton of artifacts TezzAffinity just dumped on the board. In short, it makes your aggro and combo matchups tons easier, so you play it. It's not a hard decision.
Now, say you're a Belcher player. This card obviously wrecks you, so you'll likely need to play around it with your current list (you can't think of how, because you can't play around it), change up your decklist to be more resilient to it, thus watering, and slowing, it down (Xantid Swarm lol?), or run it yourself. Except that the best way to one-up those smart ass people who think they've got great anti-belcher tech is to either just play like it doesn't exist and hope they don't draw it, slow the deck down to use mostly 0, 2, and 3cc accelerants, or RUN IT YOURSELF.
Any deck that exists now, or will in the future, that either heavily relies on 1cc spells, or has a hard time answering 1cc spells, will run this or will play like they don't care it exists and cross their fingers. Some decks may slow down, use more 2+cc threats, but if they don't run this they'll get run over by the decks that didn't get the memo and still play Wild Nacatl or Lackey turn 1. So then, you've slowed down your deck and you STILL have to run it to play against the downs-ey motherfuckers that can't be bothered to pay attention to the format they're playing in.
WotC gave us all a cracker, knowing precisely what we're all gonna do on it. I'll eat the damn thing, but don't try to convince me to be happy about it :(
Edit: I realize I'm sounding all doom and gloom, but I'm not. I'm just angry that this either wasn't thought about during development or the developers just didn't care. I'm sure the MMS "impact" will be much less drastic than my tone suggests, but the principle of it is from where my complaint arises.
Aside: see, Max, THIS is why I wasn't going to c/p.
Anyway, to address your post:
What you're assuming involves people just jamming Missteps into their decks indiscriminately because everyone has to run Missteps, right? Let's all run reactive 1cc counters whose in-game functionality is actually surprisingly similar to that of the Leylines! But look, once the format calms down and people realize that sideboarding an inappropriate card so that you can win counter wars with people who inappropriately side in Misstep against you is bad, they'll drop the Missteps.
EDIT: As a Zoo player, I will happily have my turn one Nacatl Misstepped all goddamn day. In fact, I will happily pay my opponents five dollars to side in 4 Misstep against me instead of 4 Relevant Sideboard Cards.
... Is filled with much awesome. That's very thorough way of saying, "Chill out everyone." Well done.
This is not like leylines at all. There are no leylines that have such broad ranging effects. Also topdecked leylines are bad and so are multiples. Topdecked misstep is fine as I'll just use it on the opponents late game brainstorm/ stp / any 1cc. It's insane. Multiple missteps are also fine, the card is ridiculous.
Mental Misstep is far more broad ranging than (pick your sideboard card of choices, including Leyline, Red Elemental Blast, Xantid Swarm, etc), but far less effective at shoring up bad matchups. Mental Misstep is good in more scenarios than most narrow sideboard cards, but not as powerful as most sideboard options. There are no wrong threats, only wrong answers. Mental Misstep is good at what it does, but it's a reactive answer. There are lots of proactive threats and proactive answers that are more effective at beating your bad matchups than Mental Misstep in the sideboard.
Mental Misstep is amazing in blue as a supplement to the rest of blue's cheap countermagic. It is good, but not amazing, in non-blue sideboards. Mental Misstep will see tons of play, and it may reshape the metagame somewhat. It will do that, however, in blue aggro-control decks, not in Zoo, Goblins, Affinity, etc.
InfoNinjas
Mental misstep weakens swarm strategies like folk, gobs and affinity where every dude counts. Mental misstep will be fighting heavily for slots against daze and pierce in folk, as you need to maintain threat density. What it is absolutely busted in is good cards.deck like zoo, bant or countertop. Where you drop a huge threat, protect/burn everything else and ride it to the win. Zoo is a huge gainer from this and post board, has a very very good chance of beating storm between missteps, teeq and traps. Saying that it won't be good in zoo is inaccurate. It is insane in zoo MD.
I see quick zoo making a huge comeback. By misstepping say a brainstorm, zoo can slow combo by that all important 1 turn, allowing it to finish the opponent off. A quick zoo list with steppe lynx, price of progress, fireblast protected by mental misstep is scary. Other than messing with combo, being able to keep your 1 drop alive/answer an opposing vial is huge for quick zoo. Allowing it to go sligh safely!
No, Misstep is almost exactly like a Leyline. You always have to have it before the card you want to counter; if your goal is to counter a potentially important turn one play, you need to open with your Misstep or the card loses a ton of value. If you're just siding it in to counter Missteps and random 1cc cards, you're doing it very wrong (and are probably the type of person who thinks Extirpate is a good card).
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Reply With Quote