Yes.
No.
As much as you might be right on your other points, this one is strange. There's already someone who pre-emptively bans the card right now. It's called R&D and just becasue they are more than one person doens't mena nay difference in result. Also, preempitvely preban-antiprint Disco inferno is good idea.Originally Posted by dontbiteitholmes
Show and Tell isn't format dominating, it's format defining. Sure, it doesn't win every tournament, because it IS beatable, but that single card dramatically affects what decks can be played in the format in a way not other card does.
If you don't think that's a problem, fine, but the problem with show and tell has never been and never will be dominance, it's always going to be it's defining effect on the format.
Show and Tell is the engine for some of the best combo decks. If you banned it then other combo decks would pick up as much slack as they could and I believe the end result would be that combo in general becomes weaker and less represented. Currently people choose their combo-interactive cards to deal with S&T, Storm, and potentially rogue combos. Without S&T they will have more slots for Storm/Elves/rogue stuff and those decks become harder to win with.
Combo decks are not dominant at all right now though. We have a pretty decent mix of the big three archetypes with control being the least represented. Removing S&T doesn't allow for any new decks to become playable, it just kills ~2 current decks so that Storm becomes the only top-tier combo deck. That removes diversity.
What deck is it that you think S&T is keeping out of legacy? The only deck(s) I can think of that it invalidates are inferior combos. If what you want to do is play a deck built around some weaker combo then I don't think it's fair for you to say no one should be allowed to play with their S&T combo of preference.
First, recognize that I'm coming from this position as a combo player. I just played ANT at GP DC.
Creature decks that aren't backed up with discard or countermagic. The closest thing we have to an aggro deck in the format is Jund or RUG, and that's disappointing. Either Zoo or Maverick should be able to exist as a deck. Historically those decks have had a negative matchup against combo, obviously, but they've had some tools. As the combo decks have gotten better and faster, the hatebears have gotten better too. The problem is that the best non blue or black hate bears, while viable against most combo decks, don't do anything reliably against Show and Tell. Thalia, Gaddock Teeg, Ethersworn Canonist, these cards have to have everything go right for the creature player in order for them to be particularly relevant. It's a combo that, because of it's flexibility, cannot be effectively sideboarded for. The only way to beat it with a creature deck is to go all out and build your deck around beating it, which is essentially what Death and Taxes is.
If Show and Tell were banned, those decks that simply don't exist at all now would come back as decks that simply have a bad combo matchup. They wouldn't suddenly dominate storm or reanimator, but they would have a much better winning percentage against those decks than they do against S&T.
Now, if WotC doesn't want to ban Show and Tell, I suppose you could print some better hate bears. I'm sure you could do a white or green hate bear that said something like "Permanents cannot enter the battlefield unless they are cast from a players hand". If they didn't want a negative interaction with fetchlands, they could go with Non-Land permanents, or maybe hating on fetches could be interesting as well.
Beyond all that, which is my primary reason for thinking the card is format defining, having a combo deck that consistent and fast in the format stifles creativity. As recently as 2 years ago, random brews could top 8 or even win a star city open. Now the speed and interaction of the format is legitimately shrinking the available card pool. You really need to build with Delver of Deathrite if you're playing a creature deck. That's not objectively bad, but in my subjective opinion I miss the actual diversity we had in the format back when you could face 9 totally different archetypes in a SCG open, now it's just 4 delver decks and 2 deathrite decks and 3 show and tell decks. Whee! Obviously the decks I'm saying I miss here aren't great decks, they aren't pillars of the format or anything, but my personal preference is to play in a format where (pulling numbers out of my ass) the dominant decks take up ~70% of the format and there's 30% or semi-viable random things instead of a format where the dominant strategies take up 85-90% of the field. I'd recommend banning show and tell based on my initial argument, not this one, this is just a fringe benefit of what I think would happen if it were banned.
TL;DR: Show and Tell is the combo deck that creature decks have the least ability to sideboard against. Other combo decks can be sideboarded for by non-blue and non-black decks, but not show and tell, and that's why the card is format defining.
Never seen this card played so I never knew it was here. Only time I saw it was when it was pitched to force.
Like Death and Taxes? That deck is not built specifically to beat S&T, why is it so hard for some people to accept it as a good deck. I think S&T in particular has tons of permanents that people have used as sideboard cards or metagame maindeck choices. We've all seen the hilarious plays where the non-S&T player reveals their card and it completely screws the Show and Tell player. imo it wouldn't make any sense for whichever non-blue non-black aggro decks you are talking about (I assume you mean Goblins) to have an awesome combo matchup. Who cares if that deck has weaker sideboard plan for S&T? They have their own gameplan to worry about and they have their own matchups that favor them.
I don't think it's a bad thing to expect all decks to either race combo or play some cards that interact with combo. Not every matchup should be 50/50 and fast combo decks beating creature-based aggressive decks is normal and expected.
The problem isn't that there aren't any answers that can beat show and tell, it's that there's no single hate card for the diversity of Show and Tell. Sure, when the show and tell player puts in Emrakul and you put in Sower of Temptation, that's awesome, but when they put in Omniscience and you put in Sower, it sucks. Just last week I put in Humility and my opponent put in Hive Mind. Remember when Goblins used to sideboard Angel of Despair just to beat show and tell? And how they stopped because even that wasn't doing it? I've watched show and tell put in omniscience, the opponent put in Angel of Despair, and then the S&T player cunning wished for trickbind and won anyway.
The only way Death and Taxes is able to beat S&T is because they essentially have a 15 card sideboard against the deck in the main. You can fight Show and Tell with cards like Managara and Karakas, Sneak Attack with Phyrexian Revoker, and all the cantrips with Thalia. It takes an overwhelming hate bear deck to make that matchup even remotely winnable. D&T isn't an aggro deck, it's a prison deck.
My point is that there's an entire class of aggro decks whose interaction is solely with your life total that has been completely eliminated from the format. Maverick, Zoo, Burn, and to some extent Goblins. This entire theater of decks has been removed from the metagame, and I think the metagame is worse for it. Yes, combo decks should beat fast aggro decks. It's important to keep aggro decks from taking over the format that combo be favored in the matchup. However, when the combo decks force the aggro decks out of the format entirely, I personally consider that a bad thing. We had a healthy and interesting format when Zoo was trying to race Storm, and sometimes accomplishing that, but now the Zoo decks just don't have a chance. The pendulum has swung too far in the combo players direction, and the tempo and midrange decks in the format are giving us the illusion of a diverse metagame when it's really just delver vs deathrite vs show and tell.
When Pat Cox and Kenny Mayer give up on Zoo, that should tell you something :)
Who the hell cares?
At risk of you writing me a novel, no player should have the option to ignore opposing interaction altogether by nature of their deck choice. Zoo is a less interactive deck than Tendrils or Show & Tell. Both combo decks care about what their opponent is doing, or they wouldn't play 7-8 maindeck protection spells with half a board dedicated to antihate. Zoo is the 75 best burn and dorks in MtG.
More importantly, this thread is about TNN.
Great success!
But Maverick has ways to deal with S&T decks. Its problems are bad match-ups in Jund, BUG Shardless, Storm Combo (at least on the draw), Elves and good ol' Miracles beating the shit out of creature decks. As long as Miracles is a DTB, creature beatdown decks without discard or counters are pretty much boned. As you said - D&T is a creature-based control, not an aggro deck.
Pure aggro decks are pretty much dead because
a) combo in its current form is too fast to race reliably and
b) Super-Wrath of Gods foris a thing.
S&T would be a minor offender at best. And I'm still waiting for a red-based hatebear that nukes a player for the highest converted manacost of permanents they control. A flying spagetti monster would be significantly less impressive if they took 15 to the face.
Hahahaha I would love to cast that in Legacy just to see the look on my opponent's face.Hit them for 20 style points.
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Rest in peace, Grandpa Morphling.
Nemeses Slain:4
Would you understand my argument if I said that that is an important part of what I like about combo like Show and Tell? Having multiple lines with the card is what makes it interesting and playing cards that answer only some of those S&T plays is what makes choice important in deck building/sideboarding/playing.
It's like playing against the Griselbrand/Oath/S&T decks in vintage. Sideboarding to hate out their plan is really hard because they have ways around basically any of your hate cards. But I wouldn't want it any other way because it means that our decisions matter and it makes the match more skill intensive or at the very least more interesting and fun and that's what I really want from a game. S&T in legacy works the same way; having one binary hate card that wrecks your opponent's game plan is boring as hell. S&T hate cards do exist in many forms, there just isn't one that works in 100% of cases.
Well I think the truth is that those kind of simple aggro decks just are not good enough. Aggro exists in the form of Tempo now and Threshold has proven its incredible resilience in ways that old aggro decks like zoo and goblins never could. Those decks just are not interactive enough to cut it nowadays and I think some of that needs to be attributed to the growth of Legacy's playerbase. I would argue that the format has never been closer to being "solved" than it has been in the past year or two and if we had this many people playing and building legacy decks years and years ago that Zoo may have stopped being a viable deck even earlier.
You definitely make an important point when you say that Zoo could have raced a storm deck in the past. I don't believe that Storm has gotten much faster since then though and that indicates (imo) that Combo is not what's keeping Zoo-aggro out of the top tier of decks. Surely the rise of midrange decks (and creatures such as TRUE NAME NEMESIS, oh my god it's almost as if I managed to get this post on-topic, not really though) has had more of a stifling effect on low-cmc animal beatdown.
edit: apologies for getting so incredibly off topic
This is an important thing to remember. It's easy to say "this card/deck is really powerful and because other decks aren't as good, it's keeping them out." But you have to stop and ask yourself, is it really that card/deck doing it, or is it just because those other decks aren't that good, period?
I mean, that was part of the rationale for the banning of Wild Nacatl in Modern. Supposedly it was such a goshdarn great card for aggro that there wasn't a reason to play any aggro deck without it. So it got banned, and... well, still waiting on all those other aggro decks to be good. Affinity is Tier 1, but it was decent even before the Wild Nacatl ban. Turns out, the decks that Wild Nacatl was supposedly keeping out weren't that great to begin with. Considering how much Legacy players make fun of the Wild Nacatl ban, I find it amusing for them to turn around and then ask the same sort of thing be done to Legacy.
I don't get all this hype about TNN. I played against it twice last nite, and won two matches 2-0 and 2-1. I think I killed like 3 TNNs between Golgari Charm and Liliana of the Veil.
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I sided it out vs. combo 3 times yesterday. It was good vs. Jund but only because my opponent was retarded. I put it behind clique and trygon predator ... predator was beast mode.
But you cannot kill Show and Tell with Golgari Charm!
*popcorn*
As a fast zoo zealot who worships at the altar of Price of Progress, I feel I should address this point. I played what was basically Goyfsligh for an extended period in Legacy and did extremely well with it, including beating up combo (I had an undefeated record against storm, for example). However, that was Pre-Avacyn Restored. That set introduced Terminus and the Legacy Miracles deck, which is possibly the most miserable non-combo matchup for Zoo imaginable. Getting Wrathed for
Pure aggro decks are pretty much dead because
a) combo in its current form is too fast to race reliably and
b) Super-Wrath of Gods for
S&T would be a minor offender at best. And I'm still waiting for a red-based hatebear that nukes a player for the highest converted manacost of permanents they control. A flying spagetti monster would be significantly less impressive if they took 15 to the face.
However, the second problem was/is Griselbrand. Sneak and Show was always a scary matchup, but giving the deck the ability to drop a 7/7 lifelinker into play randomly made it even worse. It was sometimes possible to win past a blocking Emrakul or Progenitus - Griselbrand makes this damn near impossible. The proliferation of Sneak and Show as a result of this printing is problematic as (as was mentioned earlier) most traditional hate that Zoo can field against its usual arch-foes (Storm, Dredge, ReAnimator, Spiral Tide) doesn't do much against Sneak. The problem was compounded with the printing of Omnicience/Enter as these decks often avoid the occasional blowouts you could get with narrow hate against Sneak (they ignore Karakas, Gilded Drake, and Pithing Needle and can answer things like Angel of Despair easily). These decks are not only hate-resistant but also avoid the life dependency that Storm has, and are faster than Spiral Tide.
I tried to resurrect fast Zoo early this year, but faced with multiple Omnitell and Sneak players along with multiple Miracles players I was auto-losing half my matches or more simply due to those matchups. To (finally) get back on topic, the presence of TNN is simply another nail in a coffin that is already locked up pretty tightly. Not only is it a wall against Zoo, but it improves decks that were already hard matchups (Stoneblade with Mystic, Supreme Verdict, and Snapcaster + STP was rough to begin with). Lastly, it bends the meta in favor of both Terminus.dec and SnT-based fast combo which ignores most hate and isn't life-dependent. Both of these decks crush you, and the TNN-based midrange decks aren't exactly easy either. There are precious few good matchups for Zoo or any other aggro deck in today's meta.
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In a format as efficient as Legacy, I'm not sure there is a good reason to stick to a pure aggro strategy like Zoo. Creature decks like Goblins and Death and Taxes can afford to fill their deck with mana denial. Merfolk and Delver decks can fill theirs with taxing countermagic, the latter's efficiency is so good that it can afford to run a lot of countermagic. The slight speed boost that Zoo has over these decks is just not enough to warrant skipping out on the various points of interaction that you'll be missing out on.
For a Zoo deck to be good, it would have to be far faster and much more consistent than its hybrid counterparts. Even then, it's far more likely that any new, efficient cards that might be good in Zoo will instead be incorporated into a hybrid strategy. The best way to prevent that from happening is to make efficient, aggressive-oriented cards with very strict color requirements. Think Wild Nacatl or a Deathrite Shaman but in Zoo colors. Imagine a Granger Guildmage that was actually really good. It'd be tough to do, and if you get it wrong then you'll likely just be adding another efficient beater to the tempo arsenal.
Sorry, that was a bit off topic. True-Name Nemesis sucks. :)
There are alot of things going against zoo at the moment for sure. That said if there were two more one drops on the level of nacatl it would be good again I think. As others have said it was really the increase in effeciency of control that killed zoo but ramping up the effeiciwency of zoo would somewhat counter this. If you are as much of a wild nacatl fanatic as me I think the best way to play it is in a 4 color delver deck. I don't think the deck is better than the other delver decks but it is better than naya zoo in the current meta. Also true name is stupid.
To all the people who said that TNN would kill RUG, check out the legacy decks that have been doing well since TNN was released:
http://tcdecks.net/metagame.php?form...&fecha=2013-11
RUG delver's best month by a LOOOOONNNNGshot
I really wish they hadn't printed this card (or if they had it should have been white), but it absolutely should not get banned at this point. I don't think it's even in the top 5 most bannable cards in Legacy.
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