Brainstorm
Force of Will
Lion's Eye Diamond
Counterbalance
Sensei's Divining Top
Tarmogoyf
Phyrexian Dreadnaught
Goblin Lackey
Standstill
Natural Order
People should keep this in mind. Not everyone struggles with certain decks. Go figure the reasons. It feels a bit silly to read americans complaining about decks that have not caused problems in Europe even when they have been played extensively for many years. Of course Griselbrand is a new toy and stronger one as well, but it's not like Show and Tell is any way unstoppable. It is powerful, of course, but this is an eternal format and I tend to think that powerful plays belong here. It has pretty much always been the goal of a S&T deck to win the game after the sorcery resolves. Griselbrand did not change this. It just gave S&T a new target which is not optimal in every matchup, a typical characteristic for a Show and Tell target. Not so long ago people were literally crying for Hivemind.dec to be banned because they thought it is basically impossible to win because they have Emrakul AND Hivemind, two threaths that needed different answers. Look at the absence of the deck nowadays. Everybody was dead wrong about the necessity of bannings and people adapted to the situation.Originally Posted by TooCloseToTheSun
In the states people seem to be slower to catch up on certain things, like GW being a real deck. Maybe I have too much faith in the SCG players, but I'm sure they will handle this.
Also a point regarding deckbuilding: if you complain that deck A can't beat deck B, you're basically complaining that nobody has built a deck for you that can compete with a deck that someone else has built, and for some reason you think that's unfair. Think about it for a while. Then go an build a deck that actually can compete in your meta. It will not be easy, but why should it be? Magic is about playing the cards you think will be the best, and I think that it's often a false assumption to think that someone else already found the best configuration for you to follow. This could be the case in some corner cases, but if you want to play for example disruption and threats, I think there's plenty of ground to explore and build yourself.
I realize not many do this. Instead they browse the web to find lists. Look at the pros. They have the habit of actually bulding new decks and winning with them. That is how you conquer the metagame. It's not about picking up a deck from a ready-made selection. Sometimes the metagame solution doesn't even exist within the known decks.
Some of my friends sell records,
some of my friends sell drugs.
Stop complaining guys. If you need a good deck vs SneakAttack go take a look in following Threads:
http://www.mtgthesource.com/forums/s...empo-Thread%29
http://www.mtgthesource.com/forums/s...trol-Thread%29
http://www.mtgthesource.com/forums/s...terTop-Thopter
and decks that still put up a fair fight:
http://www.mtgthesource.com/forums/s...8-Deck-Merfolk
http://www.mtgthesource.com/forums/s...empo-Thresh%29
http://www.mtgthesource.com/forums/s...432-DTB-Dredge
And now let me play with my fav. pet-deck and stop this crying. Once and for all.
Hear hear, and gimme back my favorite pet decks like Survival and Flash!
Excellent post. Very well said. :)
I'mma pick your post to respond to because it's actually pretty intelligent and contains real content, unlike most of the anti "Ban SnT" arguments thus far. Note that I did say "1-Spell Combo" and not "1-Card Combo."
My question is, what's the Scissors?As long as the tempo archetype retains its positive matchup against combo, I don't really see a huge problem yet -- we still have a healthy rock-paper-scissors dynamic going on.
Sneaky Show is the Rock in this equation. RUG Delver is Paper.
Maverick is not Scissors. It's barely favored against RUG Delver if at all. And Sneaky Show will beat RUG Delver slightly more often than Maverick will beat Sneaky Show. Maverick's got an out to everything and a fantastic matchup against large diverse fields - But as long as everything's all RPS'y, it's becoming a less attractive choice.
There's probably a scissors. Nic Fit, maybe? I don't know anything about that deck. UW Miracles? Then we've got a format where every deck packs Brainstorm and Force. Yaaaaay.
The point is, every single deck being designed right now has to design around Show and Tell. It's doing to the format what Goblin Lackey was in its heyday - The only difference being, there were like twenty answers to Lackey. There's only about six to Show and Tell, and a couple colors don't have one.
Every deck being designed right now has to be designed around show&tell is a ridiculous notion. If you want your deck to be competitive you have to build your deck with consideration for the meta not one deck, then after you've come to a point where you have game against a good portion you focus on the decks particular weaknesses. Building a deck around hating one archetype is a sure way to end up here in this thread demanding a banning.
Rock, Paper, Scissors is an antiquated device used to describe basic archetypes. It doesn't really work anymore, please stop using it. There are way more than three playable decks in legacy right now.
Ever single deck being designed right now doesn't have to be designed around show and tell, that is just ridiculous. Deck builders should definitely keep show and tell in mind when building a deck, but they also need to think about every other popular deck when putting something new together. Hell, I would argue that the RUG match-up is more important right now when building a new deck.
One last thing, since you are complaining about the lack of content in the anti "Ban SnT" arguments, why don't you let us know why you are so adamant it be banned. And don't just say things like it's format warping or lack of design space (read: I can't play insert shitty deck here).
A founding member of Team Bluff the Lotus - Bringing the crazy from Bob's Baseball Dugout
I guess I'm just not understanding what's wrong with having to build decks with a certain card, cards, or archetype in mind. This has been happening since forever. Sure, Goblin Lackey was the original back in 2006. But then there was Counterbalance until people finally adjusted to that. Then there was SFM. Right now it's Delver.
For the same reasons why Mystical shouldn't have been banned, why Time Spiral hasn't been rebanned, and why SNT Hivemind didn't cause the sky to fall last year, is because its not warping the format in a destructive manner.
Back in 2006, playing a G/W Aggro deck was unheard of. You just didn't play decks that didn't interact with combo back then. The top 3 Tier 1 was Goblins, Thresh, and Solidarity.
I fail to see why G/W Aggro decks should ever be good against combo. You give up points in that matchup to be better against other matchups. I also think that the 7/8 Top 8 placings Maverick made not that long ago disprove the notions that Maverick doesn't have good matchups vs Stoneblade and RUG Tempo.
Bans should only ever be considered when something is undoubtedly and unquestionably overpowered and dominating the format, like Flash was. Even Survivals ban felt too pre-emptive. And SNT isn't even close to putting up Survival Vengevine numbers yet.
Why Show and Tell does not deserve to be banned:
) Weakness to Discard-Spells in general - targeted and random
) Weakness to permanents that can be dropped via Show and Tell itself
) Weakness to lands that can be dropped by Show and Tell itself
) Weakness to creatures that can grab lands that can be dropped by Show and Tell itself
) Partial weakness to ressource-denial strategy
) This deck does lose to itself from time to time
) Show and Tells main-enabler are getting hit by most of the Counter-Balance-Curves
SneakAttack is def. a good combo.deck. But in Legacy's (recent) history good combodecks were ever-present. Even though they were not wide-spread they were played. The different types ranged from TES,ANT,TNT over HighTide to DDFT. All these decks were not fair to random-kiddie.deck. So is Show and Tell. But once youve started to build decks and sideboards with these decks in mind they weren't as frightening as earlier. A Tendrils for 20 in Turn1,2,3 hasn't been too fair aswell,and wait, how many answers do we have to a Tendrils for 20? Right - Stifle? And you complain about the lack of answers for Show and Tell? Ill, again, wirte some down here:
Thoughtseize, Hymn to Tourach, Ensnaring Bridge, Humility, Knight of the Reliquary, Karakas, Gaddock Teeg, Thalia Guardian of somewhere(+Wasteland), Wasteland+Daze+Stifle, Extirpate, Pithing Needle, Qasali Pridgemage, Maze of Ith, Counterbalance, Flusterstorm, Silence, Hive Mind, Sigarda+Mother of Runes,Ichorid+Cabal Therapy+Bridge from Below
Yes, all these cards do not win vs SneakAttack, because SneakAttack can defend itself versus various strategies, but what deck can't do that. All these cards put up a good fight against SneakAttack and can beat it easily. This deck is not broken by far. It's just good. But it is so easy to beat, it's just ridiculous to see so many people whine about a deck that...wait? It won like 2 SCG Open and a BOM, but hey, it didnt win them but only placed very well. Hmm... I could have bet Maverick placed same or better during the last half year.....Not sure though...
Greetings
Amen.
I'll go a step further and call out that the assumption most people make when calling for a banning is that a particular deck or decks "should" be viable. Magic is a game which rewards players for identifying community trends in deck selection and exploiting those choices. The result is that decks tend to rotate in and out of popularity. Hence, while Maverick was popular several months ago, it would stand to reason that strategically minded players would recognize Maverick's success and shifted toward a deck that has a positive matchup against Maverick.
I believe this thread sees a disproportionate number posts calling for the banning of Brainstorm & Show and Tell. Brainstorm has been debated to death. The reality is that yes, Brainstorm is awesome and is the primarily reason why Blue is the most competitive color in Legacy. However, banning it doesn't solve any problems. Non blue decks do not suddenly become more viable because Brainstorm is banned. Preordain, Ponder, and Top still exist giving blue access to ample Library manipulation which is the true power behind blue (along with Delver and Jace). Banning Brainstorm also seems counterintuitive to the notion of Legacy. Eternal formats are ones in which players have access to the most competitive cards the game's history. Given that all cards aren't competitively equal, there will always be a color and a group of cards that emerge as competitive relative to the rest of the card pool. Its just a reality of this format. If you want to play a pet deck or whine about how certain colors or decks are competitive consider this:
What rule or notion makes you believe that certain strategies or colors should be more viable?
As a preempt to this, you have no basis for these claims because non exists. There is no external or objective set of strategies that should exist in Legacy at any given time. Its a competitive event and the most successful strategies will rise to the top. The trick is balancing those strategies to ensure that parity exists.
Parity exists at the top tables; RUG, UW Stoneblade, UW Miracle, Show and Tell, Dredge, Pox, Maverick, Burn etc. Even if some or most decks run a similar core set of cards those decks are still distinctly different from one another. Legacy is not like the Stoneblade Standard of a few years ago where that was the only viable decks were color variations on the original UW deck. That Standard environment represented a complete lack of parity while Legacy seems to be brewing with it. There is a misnomer with the assumption that a particular deck should be viable. Rather than using the standard that a particular deck should be viable, the standard ought to be whether other decks are viable. In this instances, multiple distinct decks are viable right now so it seems hard to argue that a banning is necessary.
If one is calling for the banning for Brainstorm because one feel as though you must play it in order to be competitive, consider a few things:
1. You don't have to play Brainstorm. Burn, Dredge, Maverick, Pox, NicFit are all competitive decks that do not require you play Brainstorm. Even if one of those decks has a bad matchup against a Brainstorm deck, its not true against all of those decks.
2. The argument for banning Brainstorm because it must be played is based on the frequency with which the card appears. Given that statement as the basis for banning the card, then dual lands, Wasteland, & Tarmogoyf should be on the block well before or right along side Brainstorm. All of the aforementioned appear with nearly - greater frequency than Brainstorm and are more ubiquitous in their use throughout Legacy. Again, Brainstorm is the best at what it does. If Brainstorm is banned, we're back here in six months having the same discussion about Top, Ponder, and/or Preordain.
3. If you don't like that blue is the most competitive color in Legacy and would like to see that changed, you are hedging your personal opinion against the notion of Legacy. Legacy was created and is maintained as the format in which a player can use the most powerful non-powered cards in the game. Since the card pool includes nearly 100% of all the available cards, the ones that see play are going to be the most strategically useful and therefore the most competitive. Spanning back, blue is the most competitive color in the game. That's just a fact. If you don't want to play Blue because you don't think you shouldn't have to in order to be competitive, tough shit. There are non blue decks that are viable and the reality is that blue, on balance, has the best cards. Even if blue wasn't the most competitive color, we'd see people complaining that (insert new most competitive color) should be depowered because "I shouldn't feel as if I have to play that color".
With regard to Show and Tell ---
I'm torn on this. I'm 100% with Hanni in that I believe the Survival of the Fittest ban was preemptive. However, I'll go as far as to say that I believe the banning of Survival of the Fittest was inevitable and for the same justification I believe Show and Tell will get banned as well.
WotC has been on a kick of creating powerful permanents for the last five years. The primary focus of these permanents has been absurdly powerful creatures. I don't see this trend decreasing anytime soon. As a result, even if Griselbrand isn't the creature that pushes Show and Tell past the tipping point, it certainly continues the trend toward it. I think the moment will come with a creature is printed that is too powerful once on the board and as a result, they'll ban Show and Tell. Griselbrand hasn't been around for too long, but functionally having Necropotence on a stick as early as turn one or two seems absolutely absurd to me. I'm not claiming that the DCI will ban Show and Tell as a result. Analyzing past tendencies with the DCI and Survival however, makes me believe they will ban it.
While Legacy doesn't have the Vintage equivalent of a "cast me and win spell" such as Tinker or Yawgmoth's Will, Show and Tell is starting to fell a little bit like the aforementioned.
Show&Tell feels like "I win" because there is a lack of preparation. That is why it is being played, the same reason maverick dominated, it is taking advantage of the meta. When people get complacent this is what happens, or incompetence. When people start realizing BUG and Rock type decks handle this archetype the dragon will go to back to bed. I hate spoon feeding people as if they are children. Black is really whats needed to keep rug, mav, uw in line too but people are slacking. Seriously, anyone can pick their favourite 2 color combination and add B, build a deck and see how it works for you. Hell, just B/x might even be enough.
Black would certainly do, mind you. Discard good again against blue-based combo? That'd do wonders for black as a primary color.
I guess I don't understand why a card has to be format warping or beatable as the only acceptable reasons for banning. Telling people to evolve, to play certain decks, to just PLAY MAGIC (which by the way is an asinine response) isn't productive.
I don't think it should be arbitrary of course, and I think certain cards are format defining and therefore relatively untouchable (FoW, STP, Brainstorm, etc.), but format diversity is something that most people agree is valuable. I don't know why everyone is comparing a possible SnT banning to Survival or Flash when it would be more valuable to compare it to Mental Misstep.
MM was beatable, obviously. But it restricted design space and it made blue decks better when the goal of it was to make other decks more competitive against blue decks. And while SnT is nowhere NEAR as played as MM was, the effect is arguably significantly more powerful, and still restricts design space. A lot of people think that is a justifiable reason to argue in favor of bannings.
This entire post is wrong. The reason mental misstep was banned was due to its ubiquity, that is not the case with show and tell. Mental Misstep was being put into every deck (even goblins), decks were not built around it. As with the banning of survival, banning show and tell would be banning of decks.
Show and Tell does not restrict design space. I think what you mean to say is that people can't play shitty decks that have no way to interact with sneak and show. That is not what "restricting design space" means. That phrase is used to describe how (in the MM era for this example) you needed to be playing 4 MM, that basically took away 4 slots of your deck automatically, so less space to design.
Also, how is the current legacy environment not diverse.
A founding member of Team Bluff the Lotus - Bringing the crazy from Bob's Baseball Dugout
If you don't set a precedence to only ban obviously broken cards, what happens to the format over time? A case could be made to ban a buttload of cards if you set a precedence to ban highly played cards, cards that require you to alter your deckbuilding to deal with them, etc. Legacy is an Eternal format that was designed to be played with lots of powerful cards, minus the overly broken ones like the P9 and such.
If you can't play a standard aggro deck because the big bad combo monster has come out to play in response to said aggro deck putting 7 players in a top 8... and you wanna cry about it... maybe you should consider Modern. This format shifts, changes, and adapts over time to poular strategies. Merfolk was a response to Counterbalance. Maverick was a response to Merfolk. Now SNT is a response to Maverick. Get over it.
Restricting design space... your point? Delver restricts my design space by forcing me to run efficient spot removal in enough amounts to see one early in the game. Counterbalance forces me to have an answer for it, or to build my curve out of the efficient 1cc-2cc range to play around it. Vial forces me to have answers or my entire countermagic gameplan becomes invalidated. Maverick forces me to have a buttload of creature removal + card advantage or kill them with a combo before they kill me, because I cannot compete in the red zone. Do you see where I'm going with this?
I fail to see how SNT is any different from all of the other various combo decks that Legacy has seen throughout the years. It beats vanilla aggro decks. It loses to aggro/control. The card pool has changed, the hybridization has blurred the lines a bit, but the general paradigm remains the same. Show me that SNT in the current meta is more opressive than the other combo decks were during their times in the older metas, and maybe I'll give you a cookie.
When SNT turns the format into SNT decks vs hate decks, we have a problem. When SNT consistently beats the decks that are supposed to beat it, we have a problem. When SNT is consistently putting 4+ players into top 8's, we have a problem. None of those are the case. I've got 99 problems but an SNT ain't one.
I dream that every day I wake up for this to be true.
West side
Find me on MTGO as Koby or rukcus -- @MTGKoby on Twitter
* Maverick is dead. Long live Maverick!
My Legacy stream
My MTG Blog - Work in progress
Unban:
Survival of the Fittest
Goblin Recruiter
Mental Misstep
Mystical Tutor
Mind's Desire
Earthcraft
Frantic Search
Mind Twist
Land Tax
Yes, it will be ok. The first 2 months will be utter chaos, but there are enough checks to make it work.
Last edited by DragoFireheart; 05-31-2012 at 06:30 PM. Reason: Included card(s).
Drago,
Although your suggestions are bold and may be considered stupid, I would have to agree.The unbannings would strengthen all of the tier1/1.5 decks, there is something for everyone in there and as such prevent one from dominating the others. The issue is unbanning them all at once is unlikely to happen, banning them one at a time could disrupt the balance, so the question is: what is the safest order of cards to be unbanned?
I'd break Survival again in a day^^
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