All B/R update speculation.

[DragoFireheart]

Dear Hasbro,

I promise to start buying your sealed product if you let me play with Gush and Brainstorm together as 4-ofs.

Sincerely,

Brandon

- I really don't understand why, short of some power cards, Vintage doesn't have a shorter banned list.

WotC should make a new format where the only banned cards are:


Amulet of Quoz
Bronze Tablet
Chaos Orb
Contract from Below
Darkpact
Demonic Attorney
Falling Star
Jeweled Bird
Rebirth
Shahrazad
Tempest Efreet
Timmerian Fiends


And have no restricted list. Give the format some cool name like Arcanum or something. I'm curious as to what sort of degenerate crap could happen. Anyways, back on topic...

I don't see anything being banned in the near future. The format looks fairly stable and varied. Thoughts?

[mini1337s]

- I really don't understand why, short of some power cards, Vintage doesn't have a shorter banned list.

WotC should make a new format where the only banned cards are:


Amulet of Quoz
Bronze Tablet
Chaos Orb
Contract from Below
Darkpact
Demonic Attorney
Falling Star
Jeweled Bird
Rebirth
Shahrazad
Tempest Efreet
Timmerian Fiends


And have no restricted list. Give the format some cool name like Arcanum or something. I'm curious as to what sort of degenerate crap could happen. Anyways, back on topic...

I don't see anything being banned in the near future. The format looks fairly stable and varied. Thoughts?

Does it really need to be an official format like 2 dozen people in the world can play it competitively?

[Lord Seth]

I don't see anything being banned in the near future. The format looks fairly stable and varied. Thoughts?

Bannings seem very unlikely.

Though if they were to ban something--and again, I don't think they will--it'd probably be Brainstorm, Show and Tell, or Sensei's Divining Top.

[DragoFireheart]

Does it really need to be an official format like 2 dozen people in the world can play it competitively?

- Maybe not, but It'd still be a neat to see how degenerate it would become.

Bannings seem very unlikely.

Though if they were to ban something--and again, I don't think they will--it'd probably be Brainstorm, Show and Tell, or Sensei's Divining Top.

- Specifically, Show and Tell, then Brainstorm, then Sensei's Divining Top, in order of which is most likely to be banned first.

[Hanni]

You're talking about GW Survival, not Maverick, and in that case it's not Miracles which did anything, it's the banning of SotF. And as people have pointed out, the format is much different nowadays. Survival is more than safe in this environment, and might provide some much needed fresh air to the current strangle-hold brainstorm has on the format, if it didn't become just yet another brainstorm deck in the first place.

Since Brainstorm is too much of a precious babe to get banned despite bringing 7 or 8 out of every top 8 for ages, might as well encourage some other stuff, right? Or no?

No, I'm talking about GW Maverick. GW Maverick put 7 out of 8 players into the Top 8 of an SCG a little while back, before Miracles hit the scene. There's a thread for it in Format & Article Discussion somewhere.

And there's a big difference between Brainstorm being in 7 decks out of the top 8, when each deck is a completely different deck, and 7 out of 8 decks being nearly identical card-for-card.

[Koby]

No, I'm talking about GW Maverick. GW Maverick put 7 out of 8 players into the Top 8 of an SCG a little while back, before Miracles hit the scene. There's a thread for it in Format & Article Discussion somewhere.

And there's a big difference between Brainstorm being in 7 decks out of the top 8, when each deck is a completely different deck, and 7 out of 8 decks being nearly identical card-for-card.

Let's use real facts. SCG Baltimore from March 2013 only had 6 Maverick decks.

There have been many times when Brainstorm was 100% in top 8. You keep harping on how bad Maverick is for the format when it takes a majority of ONE tournament; one that was saturated by Blue decks. It's not the end of the world when a meta deck beats the expected meta. I swear I've seen you say this thing for weeks like a broken record. Call it an anomaly.

Meanwhile, week after week, SCG T8's are 7/8 Brainstorm decks of varying shades of blue.

Nov 4th, SCG St Louis - 7/8 Brainstorm decks in T8 - non-BS deck: Deadguy Ale.
Nov 11th, SCG Dallas - 7/8 Brainstorm decks in T8 - non-BS deck: Goblins.
Nov 18th, SCG Seattle - 6/8 Brainstorm decks in T8 - non-BS decks: Maverick, The Rock
Dec 2nd, SCG Baltimore - 7/8 Brainstorm decks in T8 - non-BS deck: Dredge
Dec 9th, SCG Las Vegas - 7/8 Brainstorm decks in T8 - non-BS deck: Elves
Dec 15th SCG Invitational - 7/8 Brainstorm decks in T8 - non-BS deck: Elves
Dec 16th SCG Los Angeles - 5/8 Brainstorm decks in T8 - non-BS decks: Aggro Loam, Lands, Zombies

The one outlier is all you focus on, and it's not the most important point at all. You're missing the forest for the tree.

[Aggro_zombies]

No, I'm talking about GW Maverick. GW Maverick put 7 out of 8 players into the Top 8 of an SCG a little while back, before Miracles hit the scene. There's a thread for it in Format & Article Discussion somewhere.

And there's a big difference between Brainstorm being in 7 decks out of the top 8, when each deck is a completely different deck, and 7 out of 8 decks being nearly identical card-for-card.

I'm not sure what you're expecting, given the relative dearth of Tier One or Tier 1.5 decks without Brainstorm.

[DragoFireheart]

LET IT GO!

There have been many times when Brainstorm was 100% in top 8. You keep harping on how bad Maverick is for the format when it takes a majority of ONE tournament; one that was saturated by Blue decks. It's not the end of the world when a meta deck beats the expected meta. I swear I've seen you say this thing for weeks like a broken record. Call it an anomaly.

Meanwhile, week after week, SCG T8's are 7/8 Brainstorm decks of varying shades of blue.

Nov 4th, SCG St Louis - 7/8 Brainstorm decks in T8 - non-BS deck: Deadguy Ale.
Nov 11th, SCG Dallas - 7/8 Brainstorm decks in T8 - non-BS deck: Goblins.
Nov 18th, SCG Seattle - 6/8 Brainstorm decks in T8 - non-BS decks: Maverick, The Rock
Dec 2nd, SCG Baltimore - 7/8 Brainstorm decks in T8 - non-BS deck: Dredge
Dec 9th, SCG Las Vegas - 7/8 Brainstorm decks in T8 - non-BS deck: Elves
Dec 15th SCG Invitational - 7/8 Brainstorm decks in T8 - non-BS deck: Elves
Dec 16th SCG Los Angeles - 5/8 Brainstorm decks in T8 - non-BS decks: Aggro Loam, Lands, Zombies

The one outlier is all you focus on, and it's not the most important point at all. You're missing the forest for the tree.

He has a point Hanni. Hell, look at the DTB list: over half run brainstorm.

[Hanni]

The one outlier is all you focus on, and it's not the most important point at all. You're missing the forest for the tree.

I'm not sure what you're expecting, given the relative dearth of Tier One or Tier 1.5 decks without Brainstorm.

He has a point Hanni. Hell, look at the DTB list: over half run brainstorm.

I wasn't focusing on one outlier, I was pointing it out in relation to someone saying that Maverick was underpowered and needed a boost, when the only reason its down right now is because of Terminus. You're missing my actual underlying point, which was in relation to Survival:

Just because Miracles came along and knocked Maverick off its high horse, doesn't mean giving it an engine like Survival is just automatically safe these days.

EDIT: I would love to build/play Survival Gravevine though, with some hot Lotleth on Squee action too.

[(nameless one)]

He has a point Hanni. Hell, look at the DTB list: over half run brainstorm.

Legacy = 50 Shades of blue.

[Jamaican Zombie Legend]

Responding in this thread, since I saw another method of the "Chains-Bear" in one of the spoilers, and my post will veer heavily into the "Ban Brainstorm" territory. Might as well segregate that talk in the correct thread, eh?

Or they could just print stuff that sees heavy maindeck play and discourages Brainstorming, just like DRS puts a damper on GY-heavy strategies.

There's a few problems with doing that:

-Brainstorm is a lot harder to target than graveyard interactions are because it is a lot more narrow an effect and the ability to deny either drawing cards or placing them on top of your library is not as widely dispersed in the color pie as graveyard hate is. Any potential Anti-BS-Bear could be poorly targeted either in effect or in color/mana-cost, hitting other strategies with collateral damage, or not getting the hate innto the right hands. For instance, "Chains-Bear" hurts decks like Enchantress and Elves more than a lot of the decks that pack Brainstorm. U/x/x Tempo is usually stuffed with removal and counters, so while it's a pain to deal with, it doesn't invalidate their strategy completely. And a hypothetical "Chains-Bear" would likely be Black, meaning it would fit in all the Black decks with creatures in Legacy. Yeah...all of those.

-When you nuke a graveyard, you're actively stopping a deck from following through on its strategy (or one of their strategies). When you lay down a hate piece for Brainstorm (or other cantrips) you're mildly inconveniencing them, being a speedbump that may not even be necessary. It's a cantrip, oil for the machine. Very effective oil, but not really an integral part of the machine. All the decks that run Brainstorm could survive in a world without BS. Sure, they'd be less efficient, and couldn't be as greedy with their builds, but they would still exist in some form. Graveyard decks without their graveyard don't exist. Stack decks that get throttled on the stack (by, say, Teeg, Canonist, Thalia, 3Sphere) fall apart if they can't unthrottle the stack.

-Making something maindeckable in the vein of Deathrite Shaman that could fight Brainstorm would be absurdly difficult. Shaman, for one green or one black mana gives you mana fixing, mana ramp, targeted gravehate, a reach/win-condition, and maybe even life gain if you need it for some reason (perhaps to make Storm players sad that they have to count to 11 instead). And the 1/2 body is also not insignificant. To make something like that to stop Brainstorm...jeez, I don't know where to start.

This is more fuel for the "Ban Brainstorm" flames, I would think. When people suggest that things be printed to stop one prolific, format-warping card in the way that other entire zones/strategies are disrupted...well, that suggests there's something up with that one card. And given that said card shows up in almost every "over-archetype" (i.e. combo, control, tempo), it may be time to take it down from the pedestal and put it out to pasture. Ponder and Preordain will be fine enough, it's not like we're asking Blue mages to make do with Portent and Serum Visions.

[Zilla]

And given that said card shows up in almost every "over-archetype" (i.e. combo, control, tempo), it may be time to take it down from the pedestal and put it out to pasture.

It could be argued that Brainstorm is fine precisely because it enables almost every archetype. When you have a diverse format where every major archetype is flourishing, what exactly is the problem?

[Gheizen64]

It could be argued that Brainstorm is fine precisely because it enables almost every archetype. When you have a diverse format where every major archetype is flourishing, what exactly is the problem?

You really think that Brainstorm gone would reduce the diversification of decks? I'm seeing almost every deck has to be blue nowadays to be viable, that's not a testament to diversity, that's a testament at how one shell can contain everything.

Take this list as an example:

Creatures [13]
1 Vendilion Clique
4 Dark Confidant
4 Deathrite Shaman
4 Tarmogoyf

Instants [9]
1 Daze
4 Abrupt Decay
4 Brainstorm

Sorceries [9]
2 Ponder
3 Hymn to Tourach
4 Thoughtseize

Planeswalkers [6]
3 Jace, the Mind Sculptor
3 Liliana of the Veil


Lands [23]
1 Forest
1 Island
1 Swamp
1 Tropical Island
2 Bayou
2 Misty Rainforest
3 Underground Sea
4 Polluted Delta
4 Verdant Catacombs
4 Wasteland

If Brainstorm didn't exist, would you still run blue? Would you still splash a color for conditional countermagic and trade that for a more risky manabase? Would you add red for bolts, black for hand disruption, white for creature removal? Blue is too catch all in my eyes, ponder is a fine card that fix your hands without invalidating discard and wastes nearly as much.

[FieryBalrog]

It could be argued that Brainstorm is fine precisely because it enables almost every archetype. When you have a diverse format where every major archetype is flourishing, what exactly is the problem?

Well firstly, with the death of Zoo, it's hard to say aggro is a real archetype in Legacy, and of course, RUG is not an aggro deck. With the death of Maverick, there's no real mid-range decks anymore, barring some BUG Jace decks that lean more towards mid-range than Control. But frankly, that's one of the most boring ways to say mid-range exists, because it's really just yet another Jace deck, now brought to you by Deathrite Shaman.

The problem is starting almost every archetype by pairing BS with FoW (since the interaction between BS and free counterspells is very strong, and BS helps make FoW work in more ways than one). Then realizing that FoW takes 18+ blue cards to run effectively, and ending up with a solid blue core that pulls from a very small pool of cards ( other cheap countermagic, Clique, Jace, Ponder...) Sometimes you can take the exciting step of not running FoW and just running Jace & friends instead.

You can tilt into any archetype you like; but how you get there is very restricted. The blue duals obviously all cost 2-3x most of the others, but in fact if we were to price them based purely on how much they were played (successfully) in Legacy, then: Badlands & Plateau would be about $1, Tagia about $5, Scrubland and Bayou about $30 thanks to Esper and BUG decks, and Savannah at $30 because of people clinging onto Maverick or playing Bant for whatever reason. Obviously made up numbers but I'm pretty sure you can correlate them to how much these lands get played.

FoW is a fair card. Brainstorm isn't; apparently, if a draw 3 card isn't Ancestral Recall then it's fair in people's eyes. The idea that Brainstorm is somehow "inherently" fair just because... well, just because, is kinda dumb. Brainstorm was widely touted as one of the best cards in Vintage in the time before it got restricted, and people obviously know that it's powerful; but it's supposedly OK because it's effect isn't an immediate bomb on the game.

But the massive, massive edge it gives in flexibility and consistency isn't fair to decks without it. Personally, I don't care that much outside of a theoretical basis, because I just play EDH almost all the time now, and though blue is even stupider in EDH than it is elsewhere, the format is casual and largely self-regulating which mitigates that almost completely if you have a decent playgroup.

[DragoFireheart]

FoW is a fair card. Brainstorm isn't; apparently, if a draw 3 card isn't Ancestral Recall then it's fair in people's eyes. The idea that Brainstorm is somehow "inherently" fair just because... well, just because, is kinda dumb. Brainstorm was widely touted as one of the best cards in Vintage in the time before it got restricted, and people obviously know that it's powerful; but it's supposedly OK because it's effect isn't an immediate bomb on the game.

Brainstorm Legacy != Brainstorm in Vintage.

Jace is legal in Legacy but was banned in Standard when it was in the legal set. Therefore, JTMS Legacy != JTMS Standard.

Trinisphere is restricted in Vintage but not banned in Legacy. Therefore, Trinisphere Legacy != Trinisphere Vintage

You don't understand that cards legal in different formats also have different power levels. Therefore, comparing the impact a card has in one format is pointless and meaningless. Also, MUD has warped Vintage and unbanning Brainstorm in Vintage might be worthwhile.

[GexxX]

Seriously? Brainstorm AGAIN?!
Aggro is dead, huh? The meta-games shifted a lot during the last two or three months and will keep doing so. With the print of DRS bug decks got more popular, but considering the period of time they have been popular you're just crying about the hype of a new and exciting card. Please stay calm and wait a little. With the next set released there might be something completely different coming up.

@FieryBalrog:
Please be a little patient. I know it's the nature of magic players to complain about their favorite archetype being to weak, but considering the amount of people playing a certain Deck and the percentage of them playing it well will not differ all to much when you look at blue and non-blue decks. The math has been done before and I am sure nothing has changed. A lot of people just enjoy blue Decks, and probably not for their achievements but the versatile options of plays.

I predict a rise of combo once brainstorm got banned. That's the day I'll join the crwod of people saying aggro is dead.

[Lemnear]

I predict a rise of combo once brainstorm got banned. That's the day I'll join the crwod of people saying aggro is dead.

I'm amazed by this sentence considering your signature. As a combo player you should know that Banning Brainstorm would hurt combo archtypes more than anything else. I'm sure this was mentioned about 6 Times before in this thread

As I told a few Pages ago: This threads topics and arguments endlessly repeat

[Gheizen64]

Seriously? Brainstorm AGAIN?!
Aggro is dead, huh? The meta-games shifted a lot during the last two or three months and will keep doing so. With the print of DRS bug decks got more popular, but considering the period of time they have been popular you're just crying about the hype of a new and exciting card. Please stay calm and wait a little. With the next set released there might be something completely different coming up.

@FieryBalrog:
Please be a little patient. I know it's the nature of magic players to complain about their favorite archetype being to weak, but considering the amount of people playing a certain Deck and the percentage of them playing it well will not differ all to much when you look at blue and non-blue decks. The math has been done before and I am sure nothing has changed. A lot of people just enjoy blue Decks, and probably not for their achievements but the versatile options of plays.

I predict a rise of combo once brainstorm got banned. That's the day I'll join the crwod of people saying aggro is dead.

Combo not having BS would make it much more vulnerable to discard. Some combo decks, like SnT and Sneak and show, would downright die to discard if not because of Brainstorm.

The combo argument is old and has been proven wrong multiple times. It's why i don't bother anymore to discuss here, everything has already been discussed to death and beyond, and still some people arrive from nowhere and present the same ideas times and times again. At this point only an eventual unbanning would clear the debate, but that will probably be never the case and legacy will continue to be a format dominated to blue like it had since the split (before the split it wasn't).

[Mr. Safety]

The first fundamental principle of variance is that every deck can be improved by adding in cards that reduce variance or increase card quality.

Read that somewhere...

In legacy, you have the best tool for reducing variance available: Brainstorm. You also have the best selection of rock-solid mana-base construction (almost pain-free fetch-dual mana fixing.) Why wouldn't you avail yourself of Brainstorm given these two statements? In a nutshell: it makes my deck better, therefore I should play it.

I think Brainstorm is great, but I am by no means a die-hard 'blue' player. I'm not calling for it to be banned, nor am I saying it doesn't have a big effect on the format. It just 'is'. I think what is holding the format back (which I think is nicely diverse ATM, so not by much) is the lack of a similar card quality fixing card in other colors. I would argue that Sylvan Library is close to the same power level of Brainstorm, and could be argued is better. Slower, yes, costs more mana, yes, can't be activated at instant speed, yes. But it's still my library manipulation of choice. And that's what it boils down to: choice. Brainstorm gets play because people choose to use it, period. Because it's legacy and Brainstorm is badass. Because ripping a Brainstorm into a Force to counter Infernal Tutor makes you feel like a boss.

Me? I want Mind Twist and Black Vise legal. Lets see what the format does with some outdated 'overpowered' cards.

[FieryBalrog]

I would argue that Sylvan Library is close to the same power level of Brainstorm, and could be argued is better. Slower, yes, costs more mana, yes, can't be activated at instant speed, yes. But it's still my library manipulation of choice. And that's what it boils down to: choice. Brainstorm gets play because people choose to use it, period.

Yeah, man. It's just, like, a matter of taste. You know, some people like the Stones, some like the Beatles, man.

Seriously? Brainstorm AGAIN?!
Aggro is dead, huh? The meta-games shifted a lot during the last two or three months and will keep doing so. With the print of DRS bug decks got more popular, but considering the period of time they have been popular you're just crying about the hype of a new and exciting card. Please stay calm and wait a little. With the next set released there might be something completely different coming up.

Aggro's been dead for a hell of a lot longer than 3 months. Mav wasn't an aggro deck. Zoo died summer of '11.

Brainstorm Legacy != Brainstorm in Vintage.

Jace is legal in Legacy but was banned in Standard when it was in the legal set. Therefore, JTMS Legacy != JTMS Standard.

Trinisphere is restricted in Vintage but not banned in Legacy. Therefore, Trinisphere Legacy != Trinisphere Vintage

You don't understand that cards legal in different formats also have different power levels. Therefore, comparing the impact a card has in one format is pointless and meaningless.

Not only is it not "pointless and meaningless" (there are plenty of things you can learn from comparing across formats), it was only one small shard of my argument, not the central pillar on which I built everything. I have no idea why you fixated on it.