That's still not as functional as calling affinity artifact aggro. "Robots" in particular I think started getting applied to affinity when modern affinity started being a thing. Not as quirky as something like Tin Fins, but still requires one to know something about MtG like how the Robots in affinity is just a colloquial term to characterize how affinity is an artifact creature heavy deck.Originally Posted by UnderwaterGuy
In regards to Legacy:
There was a joke that Myr and artifact creatures in general were essentially robots when Mirrodin was the new block. And the artifacts went from rusty brown to sleek silver at that time. Hence, robots.
"Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."
"Politicians are like diapers. They should be changed often and for the same reason."
"Governing is too important to be left to people as silly as politicians."
"Politicians were mostly people who'd had too little morals and ethics to stay lawyers."
To be clear, even though I rambled at length, I genuinely don't think anyone should stop naming decks. Call it whatever the fuck you like. I just understand why someone would make an argument against, is all.
It's sort of the "Old Boat" argument, I suppose - if you start replacing boards on a boat when they wear old, at some point you've replaced 100% of the boards on the ship. So, when did it stop being the same ship?
Yes, there is a continuity to be mindful of as well. I guess I don't see anything wrong with stopping to poke your head up once in a while and seeing if the same labels still apply.
Let's see if I remember my MtG history without leaning on Google. The example in jest I gave earlier with "The Solution" -- actually IIRC, The Solution was the deck *before* it was called Goblin Trenches. The difference being, 4 or less bad cards came out for 4 or less Goblin Trenches. That's the Fucking Short Version of the story, but it's more or less what happened; The Solution was supposed to solve the format by being draw spells, counters, Wraths, more counters... but poor little Lightning Angel just wasn't a solid enough wincon on her own. Someone somewhere (maybe Zvi, shit I dunno) noticed Goblin Trenches; Trenches quickly came in over whatever was the worst card in the deck, and suddenly "The Solution" was now "Trenches". So the door has swung both ways, really -- changing one card can transform the deck's identity, whereas removing every card with Threshold on the text box doesn't preclude the deck from being called "Canadian Thresh".
It's just funny, is all.
Nimble Mongoose says "hay! I know y'all are all crushin on blue 3/xs these days but come on"
Yeah yeah yeah w/e w/e w/e Mystic Enforcer or gtfo
To be fair, it's really hard to care about target Nimble Mongoose.
The proper plural must be "hall of fames." You wouldn't say Halls & Oate, now, would you?
This paragraph contains several things that are true but more that is stupid.Deck names matter. They provide a tool that allows for efficient communication of a lot of information. If you tell someone you’re playing RUG Delver in Legacy, you managed to compress a lot of information into very few words. If you tell someone you’re playing Esper Control in Standard, they can immediately get a pretty solid picture of your deck as long as they have a reasonable handle on the format.
Names are a tool for communicating information- but not in the way Kibler thinks. What, after all, function do the names "Brian Kibler" or for instance, oh, "France," or maybe, "Magic: The Gathering" serve? They certainly don't give us much to go with if we come in blind. But these are all names that everyone is presumably fine with. No one is lobbying to change the name of "France" to "Land of smelly-cheese eaters," or Magic: The Gathering to, "Collectible card game where you develop mana over turns to summon monsters while pretending to be a wizard," or Brian Kibler to, "Somewhat runty famous Magic player with lots of opinions and big teeth."
We can understand that a name is distinct from a description, and in fact if we think about it that makes sense. Someone else, after all, might disagree with my assessment that Mr. Kibler has big teeth, but we can all agree on calling him Brian Kibler despite this disagreement. Or someone might only play TES and not understand what these "creature" things are, but they still understand the game of Magic.
So, then, we can surmise; names exist as a way to clearly distinguish a potential subject in language. In fact let us go a step further, and say that their being of no value as a descriptor is actually a positive indicator of a good name. We in fact run into all sorts of problems when we try to add value to names. People who are fine with calling Brian Kibler Brian Kibler might not be if he were to change his name to Best Magic Player Ever. If we look at where names cause problems, as in Macedonia/FYROM or Republic of China/Taiwan for instance, it's because there's a disagreement over to what a name refers. So too we see in Magic deck names; RUG Delver, for instance, could refer to two decks, at least, RUG Tempo, which utilizes Stifle as part of a mana denial package, and RUG Counterbalance Delver. The only reason we presume it is not the latter is because that deck has fallen out of favor in the past year or two, but if both decks were popular we would run into confusion. If you say "Esper Control," because the words there can refer to so many different decks, you have to then specify in what format, and probably ultimately some of your key cards (for that matter, "Esper" only works as a descriptor if the other person is familiar with the Alara shards.)
By contrast, if a deck like Death and Taxes were called Mono White Hatebear Weenie, or something like that, you couldn't include the green splash from the BoM tournament, which you can if you have a more individualized name. There may still be a discussion of whether that deck is really D&T or what defines D&T as a deck, but there is more freedom to discuss that organically in terms of the deck's goals and methods, rather than based on an arbitrarily narrow descriptor. So too we see with Team America, a name that has stuck around- unlike RUG Thresh which became RUG Delver- as different cards have been printed that have altered its strategy and replaced others. Remember that when Team America first saw play it ran Stifle + Sinkhole and there was no Deathrite Shaman, no Delver, no Abrupt Decay, no True Name Nemesis.
So, yes, I am afraid I must respectfully disagree with slightly runty white Magic playing guy with big teeth.
For my confessions, they burned me with fire/
And found I was for endurance made
^GG thread.
On a more serious note, I think Kibler is possibly the worst player in the Hall of Fame. It could be my bias towards him considering he's a condescending, asshole, cry baby, but it's just my opinion so take it for what it's worth.
Team Hammafist-We don't take kindly to those who don't take kindly."Got any trade boogas?"
Thank you IBA. VERY well put.
I think there is nothing wrong with having quirky deck type names but there should be a (central) place where one can look them up and get a (short) description or at least a bunch of good example deck lists. A wiki would be better than just a forum where you have to browse through most of a thread with 90+ pages.
It is not always easy to describe the whole deck in its name so you have to start using code names.
Btw "BUG Delver" doesn't say much except the colors and that there is a playset of Delvers in it (which are basically in almost every deck at the moment) and "Team America" has been more than just "BUG Delver" in the past, I guess. Same goes for "Canadian Thresh" over "RUG Delver". "Canadian Thresh" was there long before WotC spit out Delver.
Where do those quirky names actually come from? From the "inventor" of the deck or from the community or what?
Most of the names come from the decks creator(s), but in some cases it's more community based.
This forum does have a search function and most threads have pretty good primers with a little background description on things like where the deck got its name.
Team Hammafist-We don't take kindly to those who don't take kindly."Got any trade boogas?"
Learn to love it, bitches.
I think the biggest thing is the deep seeded emotional understanding that the right play is the right play regardless of outcomes. The ability to make a decision 5 straight times, lose 5 times because of it, and still make it the 6th time if it's the right play. - Jon Finkel
"Notions of chance and fate are the preoccupation of men engaged in rash undertakings."
Ironically, every time I saw "BUG Delver" in this thread I was confused; it wasn't until someone mentioned that it's another name for Team America that I understood what they were talking about.
I have a lot of firsthand experience with reactions to non-descriptive/personal decknames, actually. I think there are a lot of Legacy vets even who never wanted to call my sliver brew "Meathooks", opting instead to refer to it as "Countersliver" despite the fact that it operated differently from Countersliver in the past (much more tempo, less control), didn't splash black, and was originally designed specifically as a metagame foil to Vial Goblins. For me personally, it always made me happy to see a deck I helped design and refine put up numbers with the name I gave it, but beyond that I never really cared one way or the other whether people said "Meathooks" or "UWg Countersliver" or "UWg Tempo Slivers" or whatever.
Team Info-Ninjas: Ambition is a poor excuse for not having enough sense to be lazy.
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No, it's bullshit and it's always been bullshit. You know how you can tell? This asshole has the honest-to-fucking-God-brass-balls to then list Caw Blade as a good example because I guess you can "figure it out."
Hey news flash, Dan Brown, people don't stay up late into the night cracking musty tomes to decipher the hidden riddles behind names. I didn't uncover the lost Library of Alexandria to find the etymological root of "Brian Kibler" back to the Old Prussian for, "One whose teeth jut most prominently." If I need to know something I fucking Google it. Not a goddamn deck on that list you couldn't learn about if you had the technological know how and patience of a fucking nine year old.
Including fucking Caw Blade. Caw Blade! I had no fucking idea what that deck did the first time I heard the name- it certainly didn't occur to me, "Oh, let's see, caw is a sound a bird makes and blades are like swords so- I've got it! It's a deck built around Jace and Batterskull!"
If I had sat down like Edward Nygma was holding the fucking deposit at Ft. Knox ransom, I probably would've assumed, "Oh, bird, like Birds of Paradise, and blade like sword- they're talking about those bad R/G aggro decks that ran Birds of Paradise into turn 2 Sword of Fire and Ice that were everywhere after Affinity got banhammered."
Thanks for the clue, fuckhead.
It's all just projection. When Kibler or the assholes at SCG bitch about Legacy players being exclusive with their deck names it's all just horse shit, they mean it makes them feel ignorant to not understand the Legacy metagame so rather than fucking inform themselves they want other people to stop using discrete names and only bland descriptions so they can be part of the conversation without doing any work. If Brian Kibler demanded that physicists start calling neutrinos "really fast moving non-interactive very tiny things" and historians refer to Napoleon as "short angry French guy that conquered places," his assholery would be obvious, right?
For my confessions, they burned me with fire/
And found I was for endurance made
Oh, I'm not saying Kibler is right - I'm not sure how you gathered that from my post. I honestly didn't even read his article. I just don't care one way or the other if people want to refer to a deck by a descriptive name or a discreet, arbitrary one.
It just seems dumb to have a horse in this race at all because a race about the names of collections of pretendy-fun-time wizard cards seems dumb to me.
Like, if you see a deckname you don't recognize, look it up. It works for both types of decknames.
Team Info-Ninjas: Ambition is a poor excuse for not having enough sense to be lazy.
My Videos: Chiron Beta Prime, Flickr, Re: Your Brains
I mean I did look it up. That's my point. I didn't know what Caw Blade was, so I looked it up.
The point is that people who insist on not using the names of Legacy decks don't apply that to the format they play regularly, they just get personally disgruntled at not getting references to the Legacy metagame and act butthurt like there's some objective basis for their rage.
For my confessions, they burned me with fire/
And found I was for endurance made
I think the idea of a Magic: the Gathering Hall of Fame is already laughably ludicrous as it is, but that's a whole different topic all together.
And SCG's lackey-grinders - or SCGs in general - don't have a say in our format, god dammit. There's no false sense of entitlement here, folks; you name the deck something decent and it sticks, cool. If not, oh well.
Right.
What are we arguing about, again? It seems like we agree.
Team Info-Ninjas: Ambition is a poor excuse for not having enough sense to be lazy.
My Videos: Chiron Beta Prime, Flickr, Re: Your Brains
I was also amused by his assertion that Caw Go and Caw Blade are good names because they "provide provide information about the contents of the deck while not falling into the trap of using a generic color combination descriptor." I had to actually watch the deck tech to put together that it was a deck based around Squadron Hawk and JtMS. Its not blatantly obvious that Caw = Squadron Hawks unless you have some A Priori knowledge so the name is equally as obtuse as any other random deck name that's not something like RUG Delver. He's been guilty of bad deck names numerous times, another one that springs to mind is Bladebreaker, which only tells you its a deck designed to beat Caw-Blade (again requiring A Priori knowledge) but it says nothing about the deck being R/G Midrange. So in my opinion he is a massive hypocrite, he's designed plenty of decks with obtuse or semi-obtuse names so why do those get a pass but things like Tin Fins and Solidarity are bad?
If he ever actually played a Legacy tournament or two he might actually learn something, or if he just spent an hour or so doing some research he'd be fine. But no, he'd rather spend upwards of two hours raging out through an article that actually got premium coverage (? I don't really remember).
This tells me that he tried to play some Legacy, got absolutely curb stomped by real magic players, and threw a temper tantrum.
*Golf Clap*
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