Blue needs a Nerf

[Gheizen64]

I really like Blue. I really do. It's important for the health of the format, since Blue is the color that tends to keep all the unfair things in check. I don't want Brainstorm to be banned or any other Blue spell. I would like Red to be brought up to par with the other colors.

Let me put it a different way, have you ever drafted the core sets? How often do you play Red as your main color?

...

Yeah... that's what I thought. The color is so low on playables that is almost always relegated to splashing. This isn't proof that Red is mega terrible but I do think it is a symptom of a larger problem. Red's creatures are almost always worse than the other 4 colors, its non-burn spells are mostly unplayable. Red has shallow, boring mechanics. The problem is only compounded when you get to Constructed because stuff like Canyon Minotaur and Fireball are not respectable in 60 card decks.

Part of the reason for this situation was also WotC saying: "Land destruction is not liked by players so we printed a 5 mana stone rain in place of it". No wait, it's worse, since it let your opponet choose the land. Red doesn't have a lot, land destruction and especially nonbasic hate was a big part of it that has been removed from his pie for "unfun" reasons. Red has amazing artifact hate, and amazing artifact hate has been printed lately (smash to smithereen for example) but Legacy don't have that many artifact to justify artifact hate beside some Shattering Spree in sideboards.

So what's left for red? Burn. Rituals. Tutors. Rituals are largely unplayable beside storm combo, and WotC can't print another really good ritual without storm being buffed big time (unless they're smart about it... like discard random card as added cost). Tutors have a similar story, they won't print an abusable tutors and they shouldn't. Also tutors don't really feel red. New burn won't top bolt (they reprinted shock in M12...), and even with 20+ effective lightning bolt burn is a T1.5 deck at best and it's hated extremely easily. Red creatures is where they could push, but they haven't in ages if the best creature is still Lavamancer. Red hosers are also another place they could push, but the hoser red got in M11 was this:



Yeah, it's funny.

[Fsk]

I would challenge that Thoughtsieze/Inquisition of Kozilek/Hymn to Tourach are just as powerful as Force of Will/Daze/Mental Misstep

I dont agree with this. With the format being tempo oriented the mana advantage provided by MM make it a lot better than thoughtseize.

Imagine this card :

Thoughtseize Mistep 1
Sorcery
Pay 2 life.
Choose and discard a nonland card from your opponent hand.
Add 2 to your mana pool.

You will tell me it is overpowered. But somehow it is on par with MM. (Yes MM only hit 1cc but it is avaible on the draw)

[Richard Cheese]

I just want Black Vise back.

[MDB]

Ban Brainstorm, Unban Black Vise

/thread ...iou dci...

[Koby]

red getting shafted

On the same token, they said that discard, land destruction, and counterspells were "unfun". So what does WotC do? Print 1 mana Inquisition, Print 1 mana Mental Misstep, and Print 4 mana Demolish variant #18. :(

At least Combust is better than the M10 red hoser, compare:
vs.

*shrug*

EDIT:

Black Vise isn't even that good now. You're welcome to try to design a good deck with Vise. You'll get decks that win against standstill decks and do mediocrily against anything more midrange like bant or TA. There's a topic about it in this page, if you want you can take part in it :p

You're not thinking creatively enough. Prosperity still exists, as does Temple Bell and Howling Mine. then again, the former is a blue card, and self-defeating for this discussion of blue needs a nerf.*

*In reality we need a powerful blue hoser. Something along the lines of Warmth but that punishes blue spells, or activated abilitys *Coughcough*Jace*cough*

PPS:
We should write Mike Turian a community note. He has this to say:

What is your favorite card? Wasteland. I love all non-blue Magic cards but I have a special place in my heart for Wasteland!

[Gheizen64]

I just want Black Vise back.

Black Vise isn't even that good now. You're welcome to try to design a good deck with Vise. You'll get decks that win against standstill decks and do mediocrily against anything more midrange like bant or TA. There's a topic about it in this page, if you want you can take part in it :p

[dahcmai]

I think it's time for Necro. Blue won't dominate after that.

lol all kidding aside, it is getting tiring seeing only blue anymore. Personally, I play either combo or control so I like blue a lot, but there's nothing but combo, ten million decks with KOTR and friends in it, ten million variants of blue based control, and that's really about it. Painter is a nice change of pace, but they don't seem to want to reprint Imperials so you're not going to see it much. Same goes for Aluren.

Discard just isn't as good as it used to be with all the efficient draw we have now. Hymn hurts the most, but they won't even think about making another card close to that power level. "It's not fun, whah.."

It still kills me with all the whining about "I hate getting my spells countered" they would go and print one of the best counters ever that control players have wanted for ages. Answer first turn crap on the draw? Everyone who loves control was like "Holy Shit, sign me up!" They didn't think that one through real well obviously.

They really should just give white a singular amazing card for beating control. White has an extremely versatile card pool to choose from to counter any meta changes with ease. It's got great stuff, it just has no serious bomb ala goyf/confidant. White has Swords...crickets...chirp chirp... Make it double white so it just doesn't go and get splashed into everything and call it good. That color needs something anyway. Super banding, who cares.

Would be nice to have a mono-color deck back in the running. Death and Taxes is fun as hell, but it's no super power.

Survival would be nice. I still don't know why people had such a hard time against that.

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

I think the problem with blue, if you feel that it's problematic (and the argument is there) is just Brainstorm. Force really isn't that great a card; I mean it's very good, but it's not particularly unfair.

Brainstorm is unfair. And by an order of magnitude more than most unfair cards. I mean most overpowered cards are underpriced by one mana essentially. Those that are underpriced by more are generally on the higher end of the mana curve anyway.

Tarmogoyf would not get a lot of play at 3cc, Knight wouldn't at 4. Bob at 3 is worse than Phyrexian Arena. Hymn at 3 is verging on trash. StP at 2 is "meh", jockeying with Journey to Nowhere and Temporal Isolation. Deed at 4 is a bad Disk; Vindicate at 4 is barely better than Befoul. Incinerate is lucky to show up once a year in a burn deck but Bolt is still heavily played;

I'm pretty sure Brainstorm would still see significant amounts of play at two mana. It's not really a card like Ponder or Preordain or Impulse that just lets you dig for one particular card; it's most of a free mulligan sans the card disadvantage. No other spell in the game, as far as I'm aware, does this for less than three. Compulsive Research, Thirst For Knowledge, and even Probe all saw tournament play. Brainstorm is about on par with that. I can't think of any other card in Legacy that's a borderline or Standard-playable 3cc sorcery printed as a 1cc instant. For Brainstorm to be fair, it'd need to be part of this cycle;

Gainstorm
G
Instant
Search your library for up to two basic land cards. Put one of those cards onto the battlefield tapped and the other into your hand. Then shuffle your library.

Banestorm
R
Instant
Destroy target land.

Wanestorm
B
Instant
Target player discards a card, then discards another card at random.

Danestorm
XW
Instant
Put X 2/2 white Scandinavian tokens onto the battlefield.
Did you know white has really bad instants and sorceries for this exercise? You could also imagine a 2cc instant Wrath of God here I guess.

[Tacosnape]

The problem with printing spells that stop Blue or unbanning cards that stop Blue or suggesting cards that beat blue is that they'll just be run ALONGSIDE BLUE.

Survival's the perfect example. What was one of the top decks in Legacy when it was legal? U/G Vengevine Survival. Sure, there were some G/W lists, and a G/B here or there, maybe a mono-green, but there was also a ton of blue. And that was then. This is now, in the Mental Misstep era. I've played against a few Intuition/Vengevine/Madness decks since then, and like every other deck it can just win off the back of being able to tap out every turn and have 12 cards in the deck that disrupt your shit.

Stoneforge Mystic's another example. It's a great white card. It's pretty good against blue, especially now that Batterskull exists. What does Owen Turtenwald do? Stick it in a blue control shell and top 8 a Grand Prix.

Aether Vial supposedly beats blue if you resolve it, right? Except that the primary deck that runs it is also mono blue. Seems good.

You get my point, right? There's very little you can unban, print, etc. that can't just be splashed into blue and be better. Most cards that beat your opponents' blue don't also kill your own.

[NecroYawgmoth]

Oo... I want a playset Banestorms then =D

[Tacosnape]

...And all of those ridiculous brainstorm rhyme cards would splash quite well into blue. Just saying.

[DukeDemonKn1ght]

You get my point, right? There's very little you can unban, print, etc. that can't just be splashed into blue and be better. Most cards that beat your opponents' blue don't also kill your own.

I feel like Taco's assessment of the situation is pretty similar to my own, and I wanted to repost part of my previous post, because it got subsequently buried in people's top-5 lists and all that whatnot. Here's what i was sayin':

I think [the best] solution(s) would be to start printing brutal color-hosers again (with the nastiest ones only affecting blue decks, and ideally providing a symmetrical effect so blue decks can't sideboard them effectively, ie more like Choke less like Llawan), and most importantly WotC needs to find ways to print powerful spells in other colors. I truly believe that the problem right now is not that blue is broken or unfair; it's just the best color when considered from a wide perspective. This is because, for example, while blue gets effects like countering spells and drawing extra cards, white gets effects like preventing damage and gaining extra life. (The preceding sentence is a hyperbole, but you get my point.)

I think also, an important point to make is that there should be more powerful cards printed that are not so easily splashed into decks of another color. For example, if Tarmogoyf costed instead of , it would be much harder to just stick it in any deck where you need a dumb undercosted beater; if Dark Confidant was then you wouldn't be able to just be like "well I have a low curve and I wouldn't hate drawing extra cards, guess I can justify a black splash with a couple sideboard cards." I don't think that they should stop printing powerful cards that only require one colored mana, but if there were more incentives to play cards that required two or three colored mana, I think we would have a format that looked a lot less like "Blue, splashing x and maybe y."

Also, we just need some good blue hosers. And they need to either have a symmetrical effect, or not be easily splashable (in addition to probably needing them to be counter-proof.)

[Hanni]

Blue's the best color in magic, get over it. Blue isn't unbeatable, and if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. It's not like there is only 1 competitive blue deck in the format. In fact, there's so many different variations of blue that it's not even funny. Take your pick, or go build a deck that beats up on blue... and yes, you do have options. Zoo and The Rock are both pretty good anti-blue decks the last time I checked...

[dahcmai]

That's why I mentioned making a card that's WW for a cost. Splash that and you deserve it. Moat and Humility are still problematic to splash into blue (though it's done), you still have a heck of time getting the mana under duress. (lol cute pun)

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

...And all of those ridiculous brainstorm rhyme cards would splash quite well into blue. Just saying.

So? I'm pretty sure it would be correct to play 4-5 colors in most decks at that point. I mean StP is probably the closest to undercostedness/versatility compared to Brainstorm, and that gets splashed for all over the place. Goyf as a third. Manabases can be pretty flexible when there's ridiculously undercosted stuff.

I mean I think there's a legitimate argument for banning Brainstorm, although I don't think the case is remotely clinched yet.

[FieryBalrog]

There are two reasons why at any given time, Blue is probably the best color in the format. (I mean when Blue sucks in Standard for a month, it is BIG NEWS. When no one plays green in Standard for 2 years, no one gives a crap).

One is RG gave Blue the best slice of the color pie pretty dramatically. The boons are the obvious demonstration of this since they are supposed to represent the essence of each color.

On top of raw card draw which has been de-emphasized since then, counterspells are the best answer card in the game because they can you gain tempo while dealing with any other card type, especially sorceries (which the other colors have absolute shit to answer, except discard, which is way worse as an answer). Card filtering is a powerful ability that WotC continually underrated. Even bounce was underrated forever because the concept of tempo wasn't well understood. Also, the synergy between the blue mechanics was tremendous in a way that entirely escaped, for example, White for the longest time.

The second is that WotC has an institutional love for pushing the color. It's their baby. The best example of this is Jace, because his brokenness has nothing to do with the color pie distribution. It's the fact that they deliberately pumped him full of steroids because they wanted a marquee Spike card, and Spike loves blue (if you wanted to compete, you either learnt to love Blue or quit the game). And this isn't a random bias. The developers at Wizards are mostly pro-tour types who grew up playing High Tide and Tinker. It's just a self-perpetuating phenomenon.

P.S. I agree Red is by far the weakest and most one-dimensional color across basically all formats right now. OK fine it beats out White in Vintage because white is a cripple in that format. Isn't it great that Valakut decks in Extended- a card that only works with mass Mountains- refused to run more than a couple of red cards.

[Hitman82]

In a format as wide open as Legacy, you have to be able to add a level of consistency to what you're trying to do. There's two parts to winning a game: 1) Advancing to your own endgame and 2) Stopping your opponent from reaching his. Brainstorm is the best card in the format at achieving 1 and Force of Will is the best card in the format at achieving 2. Decks with those two cards in them will always be stronger than decks without because possessing those two qualities reduces the variance you experience in both your deck and the format.

All you'll do if you get Brainstorm banned is make the format less enjoyable since it becomes more luck-based. Seeing more cards and stopping your opponent from killing you are desirable qualities in Magic. You can't balance the colors since white, green and red got the shaft from the start. Nobody cares about gaining life, pumping creatures for a turn or burn. Wizards isn't going to reinvent the color pie. The flavor's are going to stay the same and blue will always be the best. Sorry to break the news to you. If you get Brainstorm banned, blue decks will still be the best decks. The format will just be a little less fun and little more frustrating since you're increasing the variance.

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

I think we also need to see how this metagame settles down though, because I think right now it's a little retarded. First of all people are obviously way over-rating how good Batterskull is, and still drastically underestimate Mental Misstep.

I mean what's going on with Mental Misstep right now is just insane to me. It's basically like Wizards printed this card;



And all anyone could say was, "Gee, blue wins again lol", "Wow what a great blue card", "I really wish I was playing blue so this would boost my Vedalken Shackles."

You don't need blue to play it. Really. Just, you know, go ahead and play it in your aggro deck. It'll be fine. Really.

Just play fucking Mental Misstep in your aggro decks. It's okay, you can pay two life. It's pretty much worth free counterspells. Just do it. Grow a pair. Come the fuck on.

[Forbiddian]

Sounds like a lot of fun on Isochron Scepter. Exactly the type of game I'm sure WotC would like to promote.

Wow, you sure take hypothetical card suggestions seriously!

@Topic: Blue has always been the best color in Magic, I don't know why people are suddenly realizing that it has more than 1/5th of the color pie.

[dragonwisdom]

enchantment costs double red (so you can't splash easily)

Blazestorm can't be countered.

During each player's upkeep, reveal his or her hand.

Blazestorm does damage equal to the number of blue cards in hand.

or instead of an enchantment you can make this a 2/2 goblin creature that gets plus 1/0 if any land could produce a black or green mana (so you don't have to run dual lands, for new players.)

They could try adding serious land destruction to red instead of the junk they have now. Perhaps a red sinkhole that can't be countered.

anyway some ideas