Guys, I made the solution
Originally Posted by Humphrey
It's funny because every retard and their mother that's too lazy to form a coherent argument will just accuse anyone who even broaches the topic of whether something is too powerful of "whining."
For my confessions, they burned me with fire/
And found I was for endurance made
I think we can only chuckle until December 20th. I'm fairly sure that whiners will have their way again.
It makes no sense to me though. Banning Brainstorm would be like banning basic lands in my opinion. It's just a cantrip. It's the best out there but it's plain and simple. This is the game, I mean it's just basic functionality. With the same logic I can whine about Lightning Bolt being broken for dealing 3 damage with 1cc or Duress or even the vanilla Counterspell for not letting your opponent play. Dual lands are also quite unfair because they can produce two colors without any drawback. Mother of runes is broken because it makes all your creatures removal-proof. Birds of Paradise is broken because it can both carry equipment and is a City of Brass without drawbacks. Don't get me started on Tarmogoyf, FoW, Snapcaster or the likes... Hurloon Minotaur seems fair on the other hand. I'm glad I can still play with my old cards in an eternal format.
I'm trying to find words to describe how proposterous that sounds to me but I'm failing. So I'll just stop here. Brainstorm will get banned anyways.
The arguments have less to do with what sounds abstractly preposterous to you, and more to do with the actual dominance of tournaments. So without Duress dominating top 8s, it's going to be hard to take this line of thinking seriously.
For my confessions, they burned me with fire/
And found I was for endurance made
Vendilion Clique
@ the "Whiners":
Last time I checked, Brainstorm doesn't let you tutor through your entire deck like Survival of the Fittest or Mystical Tutor. It also doesn't utterly cripple storm combo decks and weaken aggro decks for 2 life like Mental Misstep.
You won't weaken blue in the way you want. You'll STILL see people playing blue because they don't want to LOSE to some combo deck that kills you on turn 1 or drops a giant monster by turn 3 or 4. People will replace Brainstorm with Ponder, and then what? Ban Ponder? Force of Will? What next? Should we ban Force of Will because it's dominating the top 8? (oh please god someone say yes)
Go on. Ban Brainstorm. Set the same precedent that was set for Modern. Just stop pretending you have yet to make a valid argument because you haven't.
I think the reason people play blue is pretty clear. It has nothing to do with the existence of combo and everything to do with the fact that blue is the color of consistency. In a game like Magic where randomness is a large component, having the ability to get what you need when you need is game-winning. As blue has the most powerful draw and hand-shaping cards, blue decks are more consistent than other decks and therefore are stronger on average.
That's why banning Brainstorm is the correct move if Wizards wants to weaken blue. Consistency is power in Magic, and no other card in Legacy increases a deck's consistency more than Brainstorm. Now, the question is of course, does Brainstorm warrant a ban? If blue continues to dominate, then the answer is clearly yes.
Even with a Brainstorm ban I doubt the number of blue decks will go down in numbers. Only thing that would lower the blue decks would ban all the blue duals!
Zoo is more consistent than most blue decks. Burn/removal, lands, dudes. Hell, BURN is more consistent than any deck. Burn and lands. Clearly consistency alone isn't enough.
Combo is the clear reason people play blue. They get some consistency from Brainstorm and Force of Will to stop broken combos so they can actually play beyond turns 1, 2, and 3.
That just isn't true. Decks without counters get fucked by combo decks and if we didn't have strong blue decks we'd only have combo decks and shitty pure-combo-hate decks.
This is starting to feel like a strange deja vu. Like we are running in circles.
Each, literally each time B&R list update comes around we have another thread of something that needs to be banned. People already forgot Show and Tell cryings, or even Natural Order? That happened only month ago...
Give it a rest. We are playing eternal format to play powerfull cards. Brainstorm is the pillar of legacy, yes IT IS A SACRED COW. It's what makes people want to play legacy.
Last edited by Pippin; 11-09-2011 at 03:58 AM.
There. fixed.
Having a nostalgia reason is not a good reason to keep an overpowered card in the format.
Starting to think I need an Upvote in this forum.
Tinkering with some crafting theory. Here
Fixed again...check the vote
Just because I've seen a few posts on the theme of "somebody in an SCG top 8 match made a stupid play mistake LOL", I want to chime in with a quick bit of perspective before going back to the actual topic :)
I like Legacy. A lot. I play Legacy, and I judge Legacy. I hit up a lot of SCG events, and I'd be willing to bet that I'm the only person in this thread who's both A) won money at an SCG Legacy open and B) been the Head Judge of one (on a different weekend, obv. -- and no, I don't work for them, I was just the local L2 who got asked to do it that weekend). So I've seen those events from a couple different but useful perspectives: I've been one of the guys trying to grind into the money late in the day, and I've been the guy watching those guys from a few feet away.
And one thing I can tell you, from that experience, is that an SCG event is a loooooong weekend. Those guys in the top 8? It's 10PM or so local time, and they've been playing competitive matches every waking hour since 10AM the previous day. This may well be their 20th match of the weekend. So of course there are going to be some silly errors; nobody, at least nobody who's not a robot, is perfectly fresh and on top of everything at that point.
In Nashville I played in the Legacy after working as a judge for Standard, came in 18th on horrible breakers, and you know what? I nearly punted my final match. Not because I was a bad player, but because I was absolutely exhausted. I made a stupid mistake, failed to see a pretty obvious game-winning play, and a match that should have been 2-0 suddenly was going to three games. If that had been on camera, I'm sure someone in a forum would've been blasting me as an idiot. But the folks watching at home probably would've had a good night's sleep and an easy relaxing weekend to keep their minds alert; I sure hadn't.
So don't be too hard on the folks you see on camera in those Legacy opens; they've had a much longer and much more tiring weekend than you have, and if you were in their shoes you wouldn't be playing perfectly either :)
As for Brainstorm... meh. Blue is very, very good in Legacy, but it has to be to keep the ban list as small as it is, and anyone who knows the format knows that. People who don't know the format can, happily, learn (and learn how to beat blue -- it ain't that hard).
So -- and of course, I know as little about upcoming B&R changes as the next guy, since I don't work for WotC, and as a result this is purely my personal opinion as someone who knows and likes Legacy -- I wouldn't put too much stock in some people on Twitter. Yeah, #banjace was a thing, but to be perfectly honest Jace was too much for poor Standard, so I don't think this should be cause for worrying about the future of Brainstorm. And anyway, right now the format's still adjusting (slowly, as Legacy always does) to the departure of Misstep and the printing of Snapcaster; it's way too early for any kind of serious speculation on whether bans are needed.
I couldn't say up or down whether or not I think Brainstorm needs to be banned. However, I'd have to say that every time these banning debates occur, one of the arguments is that we haven't given the format enough time to adjust. I used to think that this made sense. A few weeks ago, a friend of mine asked me about Legacy, and made a comment about how he didn't think that sets affect the format too much. At that point, it came to my attention that Legacy actually is heavily effected every time a new set comes out. At least, since I've been playing Magic (since Ravnica), I can't think of many sets that have come out that didn't have a significant impact on Legacy.
So, I guess I'm asking why we should be expecting the format to ever adjust to anything when there are cards like Delver of Secrets, Snapcaster Mage, Mental Misstep, Dismember, Batterskull, Green Sun's Zenith, Necrotic Ooze, Emrakul, Vengevine, Jace, Iona, Spell Pierce, Knight of the Reliquary, Progenitus, Ad Nauseam, and other format changing cards being printed every three months or so. Looking back at the last few sets (and I could go on,) it seems like only Alara Reborn and the Shadowmoor Block didn't bring cards that have seen heavy play in decks that people would consider High Tier (Edit: Painter's Servant, Qasali Pridemage, actually--it just took a second). And that's not including when they decide to ban or unban cards to mix up the format.
I'll leave these here (last 3 months)
Lets ban Show and tell thread
Lets ban Fetchlands thread
Lets ban Natural Order thread
before that it was Mental Misstep, Force of Will, Vial, Lackey... you get the point.
When looking at this thread it looks like the cry for bannings norm is each one/two months. By my subpar prediction skills I see Dr. Jones making thread about banning Force of Will somewhere in next 3 months.
My prediction for next months card to ban: Green Sun's Zenith.
You may care to notice that neither me not iba nor a lot of others that are for a possible ban of BS were for the ban of NO, SnT and MM (or fetchlands for that matter lol). In fact, i was completely against the ban of MM, but it got banned, while i reckon a lot of sourcers were for it. I'm also always been consistently against any banning of Lackey, FoW and Vial, for reasons i've stated times and times again. You may also not care, but i am one of the few advocate for a more aggressive unban policy, see my posts on the threads of the "B&R" challenge where we debated that Vise was completely safe to unban alongside Tax, Twist and other cards.
But i guess it's easier to dismiss everything as "whining" whereas you and most other people that accuse others of whining aren't offering any real argument for your position while i and other do and all i'm getting as answers are is "BS is needed because it's skill intensive" (proven false) "BS is needed because it save us from combo winter" (proven false ) or "BS is good for nostalgia reasons" (this isn't even an argument".
So yes, categorize me in the "whiner category", point me with your finger while you laugh with your friends, because in my eyes the only whiners here are all the idiots that post one liners of "OMG idiot you can't ban BS" and "this is legacy, go play modern if you don't want to play with good cards".
/end rant
Well, my point about the metagame being "slow" to adjust mainly boils down to a couple of things. One is that Legacy is not Standard; if you follow the SCG series, you can predict week-by-week what people will be playing in Standard, because this week's field will be tuned to tear apart last week's top 8. In Legacy, though, players are less quick to change what they're doing. Partly this is because it's much harder for the average player to significantly alter a Legacy deck, and in some cases even just a Legacy sideboard, that quickly (cards are neither as cheap nor as plentiful). Partly it's because Legacy has historically been diverse enough that I think people wait a bit longer to see if a new innovation will take root, or if it was just a one-shot success.
I think we can see that in the results of the last couple SCG Legacy events; everybody knew, as soon as it was spoiled, that Snapcaster was going to be good. Heck, people were debating whether it was the best two-drop ever printed, and the only question was which deck would do the best job of abusing it. After a few events' worth of results, we had a good idea about that and people started adjusting for it (witness the sudden plethora of Surgical Extractions, for example).
What we're seeing now is the reaction to Delver; there was plenty of speculation that the card would be good, of course, but it's taken a while for it to sink in just how good Delver is in tempo/thresh decks. The GP weekend was kind of a coming-out party, and then the next two SCG events proved it wasn't a fluke. So now people are taking it seriously, and I expect that by SCG St. Louis, or Charlotte the week after, we'll be seeing the adjustments. FWIW I wouldn't be too surprised to see as many decks packing Engineered Explosives in those events as have been packing Extraction the last couple of weeks.
The other thing is that I think we are finally seeing a genuine transformation of the way competitive Legacy works. Specifically, it's becoming a much less risk-averse format.
For years, serious Legacy events with significant prizes or prestige on the line were rare enough that -- with the format being as diverse as it is -- pinning your hopes on new technology was a bad idea. Sure, it might pan out, but just as likely it could fail miserably, and when are you going to get another chance? Much better to stick to what's known and battle-tested, and just make small refinements here and there. But now... there's thousands of dollars being handed out nearly every week. So you try something a little riskier. If it doesn't work out, oh well, there's always next weekend.
In other words, I don't think WotC's suddenly printing more Legacy-playable cards than before; I think players are more incentivized to find new Legacy-playable cards, because the risk of it blowing up in your face is much reduced, at least in the US (Europe's metagame, notably, still seems to evolve much more slowly, which may offer some support for this point). That's a huge change to the way Legacy is played, and I don't think anybody has managed to adjust to that one yet :)
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