No
Yes
I'm not complaining about those aggro decks losing to blue, I was just refuting the statement somebody made that they "push blue's shit in."Originally Posted by snappingbowls | ಠ_ಠ
I'm aware LED won't get banned - people have been crying for that card to be banned since 1.5 split off from Vintage afaik, and there has never been a reason to ban it other than people crying. I just find it absolutely mind-explodingly stupid that somebody would suggest a ban on LED to fix blue dominance.
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If you ban LED then you ban storm combo and without that aggro can dedicate everything to beating control decks. How do you not get that? I don't think he was even realistically suggesting it he was just saying that would be a more efficient way to get more people to play aggro than banning Brainstorm.
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This is a fucking sexy top 16.
Yeah, there's a dominant deck. Yeah, it's blue, and it's running Brainstorm. It doesn't seem degenerate to me, it just seems strong. 8/16, 3/8, 2/4, 1/2 of the decks in that top 16 ran Brainstorm. And one of those in the top 16 was Storm combo.
It's one tournament. Take it for what it's worth. But I think the solution, if there is one, is printing some stronger cards in the weaker colors, not banning Brainstorm. Unbanning Survival and Land Tax would go a ways towards that.
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I know I've said a good bit here already, but this has been suggested before, by others too. I think this is the most sensible route to go. Put good cards in colors other than blue. Can we get a good red card that isn't a Lightning Bolt? How about something in white that isn't StP v3? Surgical was nice but nowhere near maindeckable, plus it's blue too... Where's our red 2 drop?!
Basically, give people a reason to not play blue!
I'm well aware of that interpretation, I just think the argument is retarded. Aggro wouldn't be the only archetype with free sideboard slots if storm got banned.
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1. Does your brother know you stole all his nutrients in the womb?
2. Is he mad at you for it?
Since some people are having trouble keeping track of which thread they're posting in;
In order to take you seriously, I need to hear something from you that I didn't hear from people that didn't think Skullclamp needed banning in old Type 2, people that didn't think Flash needed banning when Hulk-Flash was the only sensible deck to play, people that didn't think Survival needed banning during the Vengevival days or people that thought CawBlade was reasonably balanced in Type 2.
I get it. People feel bad about the idea of banning cards. The very idea of saying, "You can't play that, it's illegal" to them stinks of uniformed men goosestepping around bonfires that used to be libraries.
Well, get over it. Gardens need weeding. As Wizards noted long ago, cards never needing to be banned means they're just never pushing the envelope- that or they're being timid and allowing boring and solved formats to exist, for diversity to be stifled in order to avoid the embarrassment of admitting a mistake, a miscalculation.
Is there any reason that I should believe that your opinion derives from anything other than a knee jerk aversion to bannings, then, and that you are not in fact the exact kind of person that will protest any banning in any format ever and dismiss those who are pointing out existent problems as mere "whiners", "provokers", "agitators", or whatever conclusory term you're using to-day that shortcuts the need for deep thought?
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Flash and Skullclamp were obnoxiously dominant. They only allow for one play style too. The decks that play those cards are restrictive because they are focused solely around those cards and abusing them. I'm basically just repeating myself now but the card does nothing broken, is only really, really good with fetches and at the end of the day does nothing worthy of being banned. Basically the only arguments I'm seeing against it are that "its too good" or that lots of decks splash blue. These don't hold water in my mind. I haven't been dismissive of anyone's arguments, I'm critical of them though, as they all seem to rotate around the thought that people splash blue easily in a format with fetches and duals and that they they're tired of playing against Brainstorm.
Putting and deep thought into banning Brainstorm will absolutely lead to the understanding that it does nothing worthy of being banned. The card does nothing game breaking (I'm assuming you've played against clamp and flash) playing against any Brainstorm deck is nothing like playing against a clamp deck or flash deck.
Yes, that's a significantly less degenerate top 16 than a lot of others we've seen.
Also who actually thinks Land Tax would be a playable card, because they're wrong.
Wizards might take some effort to try and print some cards to color balance Legacy out a bit. Who thinks that's actually likely, though?
For my confessions, they burned me with fire/
And found I was for endurance made
I mean it's a utility spell. That's all Skullclamp was ultimately, too. Decks running Skullclamp didn't combo out with it to kill you, not the good ones; they just used it to draw cards and killed you with something else.
The same is the case with Jace and SFM in Type 2. Or for that matter cards like Ancestral Recall, Library of Alexandria, Time Walk. Were Time Walk legal I doubt many decks would focus around it as a combo; they would just run it to take advantage of cheap extra turns. Throw Strip Mine in there too.
To say that a card is merely utility, then, I don't think is sufficient to say that it can't be banned or shouldn't be banned. There may be more room to allow for its use; I'm sure that if 50% were an unusually low penetration of Dredge into a top 16, and 66-75% were more the norm, people would be unhesitant on the whole to ban Bridge; Brainstorm (among other cards) would and does get more leeway. But that probably doesn't and shouldn't extend to an endless tolerance.
For my confessions, they burned me with fire/
And found I was for endurance made
Scullclamp was insane in standard... it was combo or affinity with clamp as the only available archetypes. However I would very much like to see what unban of Skullclamp would do.
Skullclamp type 2 was Elf-and-Nail, Goblins, and Raffinity with W/G Control as a bad last alternative. Unless you count Elf-and-Nail, there wasn't really a combo deck. Raffinity and Goblins had combos inside the deck but were basically still aggro.
For my confessions, they burned me with fire/
And found I was for endurance made
The recent results from the SCG Invite and Legacy Open suggests that the format is balancing out. There was a healthy mix of decks and while UW won, it wasn't as if Zoo didn't put up a good fight in the finals (losing 2-1).
Regardless of recent finishes, if WotC doesn't ban Brainstorm on this upcoming cycle, then I find it hard to believe that they will ban it in the next year barring some absurd new printing.
I'm thinking that Skullclamp alongside Glimpse of Nature in Elves combo would be pretty intense, as in burned a hole in your pants intense. Having Glimpse of Nature 5-8 would be pretty hawt to me...
EDIT: I'm pretty sure it would push Bitterblossom up in power level, too.
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Yes, i did put the elves as combo as well as the goblins, Goblinbidding
TBH elves with skullclamp imo wouldnt be much of a problem, its also a creature based combo deck. So removal is still relevant against them. Skullclamp would also give aggro some more card advantech, Maverick might be scary with it thought.
I follow what you're saying, and I think this is fair. I do think though, since we're talking about banning, that Skullclamp isn't comparable to Brainstorm in terms of power level. Clamp adds pressure, makes normal blocks hugely unfavourable for the defending player, lets you literally sac one toughness dudes for two cards and most of the time nets you 2 cards a turn. So yes, I think your suggestion that just because a spell is a utility effect and not a game breaker does not make it off limits for banning. However, conceding that point I still don't feel Brainstorm is as bad as Skullclamp was or as bad as Jace was in standard (even though Jace was more than just utility, he was also a win-con).
As per your Dredge example, the only thing holding that suggestion back from really hitting home with me is that Dredge is usually hated on for not being very interactive at all and (I don't think I'm being too bold, it seems many people feel this way) that generally most people really, really don't like playing against Dredge. I don't feel there is the same stigma towards Brainstorm. Now, that was me being subjective, I really do think most people don't like getting paired against Dredge. If Dredge did have the numbers you suggest than I think more than anything people would just bite the bullet and MD Crypt.effect. Brainstorm doesn't kill you without ever casting a spell and flipping the top half of your deck into your graveyard then magically generating a dozen or more brain eaters from out of nowhere.
Again, dangerous territory for discussion: saying what is fun and what isn't. I will always be biased towards keeping Brainstorm as I very much love playing my blue cards. Just as I'm sure there people who very much love Dread Returning Flame-Kin Zealots. For me, the difference is (in respect to function of the deck vs. function of BS) that one is much more widely disliked than the other.
The latest results look in fact promising. Especially the fact that SCG Grinders finally pick up non-blue decks that just smash u-based good stuff midrange strategies is something I find heartening (knowing how many people tend to just play whatever the ringers favored last time). Considering how blue the meta is at the moment (and how hard that makes it for combo to perform), there was probably rarely a time as well suited as right now to play non-blue decks in Legacy.
As to the whole Skullclamp thing, Skullclamp is not utility, it is an engine. T2 Skullclamp decks were all built around a bunch of 1-toughness guys that you didn't mind getting rid of to draw cards. If they didn't find a Skullclamp, they played as kind of fair aggro or ramp decks and all was well. If they found a Skullclamp, though, the whole deck rapidly become an interlocking draw-engine similar to what Elves tries to do with Glimpse of Nature. Just because they didn't cast a storm spell to finish it off doesn't mean drawing a dozen cards a turn and plopping them into play isn't (essentially) a combo-kill. In the example of Affinity in particular, the deck definitely hard-transformed once it hit a Skullclamp and turned from a cheap rush aggro-deck into a two card combo drain-deck (winning with Disciple-Ravager was just so much easier than anything else once you started clamping).
/edit: Here's how you recognize utility: If you remove that card from the deck, the deck will essentially still function along the same lines (think Ancestral Recall, Brainstorm, Grim Lavamancer or Cunning Wish). Here's how you recognize an engine: The deck has a significant core of cards devoted to interact favorably with the engine and getting the engine online means the deck suddenly can do something totally different from what it would be able to do without the engine (think Necropotence, Survival of the Fittest, Skullclamp or Cloudpost). Just because two cards cause the same thing to happen (drawing cards in this case) doesn't mean they have the same functionality as far as deckbuilding and gameplay are concerned.
That doesn't mean I disagree withyour point here, though: utility cards can be too strong and need banning (just imagine Ancestral or Time Walk being legal) even if they don't happen to work as an engine. I would claim there's a higher threshold for banning them, though, as they are unlikely to create a single deck or strategy that is more powerful than every other and therefore rarely threaten strategic variety. The problem with utility on the powerlevel of Ancestral or Walk is that these cards very rapidly lead to extremely degenerate gamestates especially when chained together which isn't all that much fun.
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All the discussion around banning Brainstorm, and GW Maverick was the best performing deck from september, october and november, according to the points system used by TS.
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I find the people who say Wotc will never ban BS because a utility card drawer is innocuous need a better argument (not to dismiss any of the other claims but just this one specifically).
Modern recently had Ponder and Preordain banned, as well as SDTop previously, Vintage has BS and Ponder restricted.
Wotc absolutely 100% has a history of banning and restricting cheap card drawer/card selection spells.
Also the dismissal of SCG as just a giant echo chamber of no innovation seems a little absurd as well. Like they have been holding multiple tournaments with 200+ people in attendance. What sort of barometer is good enough? are there lots of other giant tournaments going on that should be used instead? What size of tournament would be good enough to satisfy you in regards to what is a successful deck?
I don't think anyone is suggesting that SCG results are irrelevant by any means. They're simply not the end-all be-all barometer for what is and is not viable in the format. Obviously "no innovation echo chamber" is hyperbolic, but there's some truth to it.
The same top level players do well in almost every event, and those players and their friends are choosing to play a particular subset of decks, and so are of course doing well with them.
I suspect that if those same players chose to tune and sleeve up Maverick for a few events, it would start looking to some people like an unstoppable force in the metagame that can only be fixed with a ban, and then we can be having this same discussion about Green Sun's Zenith next month, like Brainstorm this month, and Show and Tell last month, and on and on and on.
Or we can accept that, over time, the Legacy card pool is deep enough to adapt to almost any "dominant" force available to it. If that actually proves to be untrue for more than a few months, then maybe action is necessary.
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