Brainstorm
Force of Will
Lion's Eye Diamond
Counterbalance
Sensei's Divining Top
Tarmogoyf
Phyrexian Dreadnaught
Goblin Lackey
Standstill
Natural Order
Maybe it's just symptom/cause or tree/forest, but I think the day that blue got counterspell and card draw as its identity is the day that blue became the best color. That's what this game is. Cards and spells.
As far as format penetration goes, aren't the dual lands just as guilty? Pretty powerful when paired up with fetch lands. Almost as powerful when paired with Brainstorm. Pretty mundane card once you get two dead draws for your efforts. Why not ban fetches? If format penetration is your justification, what say you to this?
Originally Posted by GreatWhale
Blue being the best color has certainly been an issue since day 1; but it is fallacious to say that therefore blue has always been dominant to the extent it is now. In the past, the colors were much closer to balanced.
Even now we're seeing a steady year-to-year increase, not decrease, in blue's performance.
For my confessions, they burned me with fire/
And found I was for endurance made
This is true, and a problem I agree should be mitigated. But Brainstorm has been with us since the beginning, so it seems like an unusual place to lay blame. There was a time when Legacy wasn't like this, as you've illustrated with your data. Comparing the card pools then and now outlines the real threats. Cheap and effective blue based creatures allow for blue to move out of its supportive role into the main combative force in decks. Turning around and blaming Brainstorm just comes across as misplaced vengeance.
If it's a problem of over-dominance in blue, it makes sense to ban the almost ubiquitous over-dominant card, I think, rather than trying to tackle the problem piece-meal. Any one other card doesn't do it. What do you want instead, banning Delver, Jace, TNN and SnT all in the same update? I think that's more drastic.
For my confessions, they burned me with fire/
And found I was for endurance made
Yep, but any other solution would be like when the people of DCI blindfolded themselves with scarves and then thrown the darts against a wheel of fortune.
"Hymn to Tourach!"
"Strip Mine!"
"Zuran Orb!"
"Demonic Consultation!"
"Mana Vault!"
"Dark Ritual!"
"Hypnotic Specter!"
Not that the above cards are crappy, but seriously, it doesn't take a genius to realize that Necropotence is also a bit too potent.
I'd love if BS would gone. Maybe then I may once again play some creatures, geddons, swords and plowshares.
I'd actually be interested in seeing how much of a boost Thoughtseize and Co. would get w/o Brainstorm around. I'm pretty sure that mana-free counterspells are just better than targeted discard, but w/o BS undermining them further, I wonder if Thoughtseize would be good enough that one could explore decks that splashed black for their combo disruption (rather than ran 16ish blue spells to support FoW).
The proper plural must be "hall of fames." You wouldn't say Halls & Oate, now, would you?
Thoughtseize's performance seems to be inversely related to the penetration of Brainstorm in a field to some degree, both times I did the data. And discard in general, Hymn included.
For my confessions, they burned me with fire/
And found I was for endurance made
If I got a swing of the hammer:
True-Name Nemesis
Emrakul, Griselbrand, Omniscience, Enter the Infinite, Jin-Gitaxias (or Show and Tell. I'd rather do it his way because banlist length be damned and this is the better way)
Leyline of Sanctity
Most are probably wtf about the Leyline, but consider: It's a card that, for no mana/tempo investment whatsoever immunizes degenerate A+B type combo decks to their natural predator - discard. It invalidates red's only chance of doing jackshit to the combo deck - racing it while bolting their face. It basically does the opposite kind of work from Force of Will and Abrupt Decay, which act as safety valves against broken stuff. It acts as a rupture in the plumbing, drowning the playerbase in sewage.
I don't really hate Brainstorm that much. I kinda hate that it's an instant, but the effect - meh, let the blue players have their fun. Still, I can't deny that it'd be interesting to see what a format without Brainstorm would look like. Ponder and Preordain should be strong enough cards to ensure that strategies don't truly die. Except a certain blue-based brick-or-drool deck...
Shrout's latest article has the perfect line for legacy: "The reality is that no one in Legacy is playing fair at all."
I may not agree with PirateKing's assement that the shrinking color pie is objectively a bad thing, but I think he basically has the right idea with ban targets - that blue's growth as a share of the metagame is a result of Delver and TNN rather than Brainstorm. I also see your point, which is that the DCI has a stated preference for banning enablers'(Necro, Survival) rather than the actual perpetrators (Donate, Vengevine). However, the difference in this case is that Brainstorm is not a unique enabler. The cards I mentioned earlier are indeed worse than BS. And that hasn't stopped one of them (Preordain) from taking plenty of what would be Brainstorm or Ponder slots in Vintage. Banning Brainstorm would only slow most of the decks that would lose it down and make them less consistent without enabling new nonblue decks to rise to the top. As long as the top decks retain their creature and counter bases alongside workable manipulation/draw spells, they will be the best decks. They'll just be worse best decks without Brainstorm.
This is why I'd prefer to liven the format up with unbannings that raise the power of nonblue colors rather than with bannings of blue cards.
I disagree with Leyline, and I would add Delver of Secrets to the list if you're keeping Brainstorm and axing TNN.
Leyline - is a committed sideboard card that allows decks to protect themselves. This isn't a "win" card, it's a, "don't lose" card. Such cards should not be banned. They represent the "solve-me" aspect that many players say is the objective of the game. That they nerf discard, storm combo (sans EtW), or allow combo to stay unmolested means people should be packing some form of enchantment/permanent removal/bounce not that difficult in any non-mono black/red deck.
TNN - should be banned because of lack of interaction. But lack of interaction is a problem due to it being an aggressively costed blue creature. Delver is also an aggressively costed blue creature. What's good for the goose, is good for the gander. Making blue an aggro color is a mistake, and with that posit, as is Delver a mistake that should be neutered, by banning.
But the different brainstorm decks vary from each other a lot. It supports aggro, control, midrange and combo equally, which is why the format is not boring at all although a vast majority of the decks do run the same 4 cards. If your argument is that decks should "differ in their entirety" you also have to go for FoW, because most decks start with 8 not with 4 cards.
Currently playing: Elves
Would that be the case without the card-filtering of BS, though? Part of Force's power is precisely because of BS being able to find either it or another Blue card for it. It doesn't always work, but that's an insane interaction.
Not sure if it would. Maybe not. My point is that just because there is dominant color/shell does not mean the format is bad to me. The format is very fun and diverse (although we have TNN surprisingly - still think it was better before).
I suppose wizards wants that for limited and standard. But isn't the nature of eternal formats that the best cards in history of magic are played. I guess people play vintage because they want power and tutors and people play legacy because they want brainstorm and force of will. Nobody can realistically expect a balanced color wheel from all magic history and again that is really not the point. As long as the format is fun and diverse (in the sense of different archetypes not cards/shells being equally distributed among the colors) it is fine.
If you start banning for the sake of a balanced color wheel, you don't have to stop with brainstorm I think and there is always the danger of "screwing" the format with some crap combo deck taking over completely. Why fix something that ain't broke? Or in other words what is it about the format that you do not enjoy? Many people seem to enjoy it and there is still modern (which I also enjoy) if you want to go eternal without blue.
Currently playing: Elves
I see your point, but I recognise that Brainstorm reduces variance to a point where it's almost invalid outside the mirror and extreme corner cases (see also: BBD in the last SCG Invitational).
Having the format funnelled into a dominant color also exacerbates the financial barrier to entry issue i.e. everyone in the format now needs the same limited number of (blue) staples/duals/fetches/etc.
The process of considering a ban should first begin by establishing a point of reference. Some time in the format's history when all was well, and use that as an anchor when reviewing the present state of the game. Treat this as a personal journey for discovering what kind of format you wish Legacy to exist as. For me it's around the early days of Dredge as a deck. I remember thinking that the game was good and was only going to get better. So when I say the format is bad now, the changes I want would be to return to that era. And in doing so it clearly outlines a then/now pool of cards to single out as the malicious source. Hence my reluctance to cry for Brainstorm's abolishment.
The good days were tempo decks running Werebear and Nimble Mongoose, using Brainstorm, Force of Will, Daze and Stifle as their blue core.
Additionally, for those citing the enabler argument against Brainstorm: the only thing it's enabling is card advantage through card selection, which is not a combo. Card advantage will always be sought by players for good reason, and like it or not, blue is the color to go to. There is no more of a combo here than to say Wasteland enables the combo "tempo" and lands enable the combo "spells".
This is one of the things I like about legacy. I don't mind a bit of variance, but I hate being at the mercy of topdecks the way you are in modern and standard. Cards like brainstorm add another layer of decision-making that affects the outcome of the game, and that's a good thing, especially for players like myself with magic hands capable of bricking every draw.
The real issue here isn't brainstorm; rather, brainstorm's ubiquity is a symptom of the change in game design principles that has taken place since NWO. Blue is now able to have its cake and eat it too, so to speak, and it would take many, many bannings to try and get the format to a balanced state colourwise. Even worse, there's the potential for it to ruin the format by powering up combo. There's a limit to how hard you can nerf blue before legacy breaks.
Long story short is, cards like TNN and delver are what is pushing blue over the edge. You can't have good tempo decks without powerful creatures, because you need threats that are capable of closing the game out themselves. Right now, tempo decks are the best decks in the format, because the power of creatures is at an all-time high. The natural beneficiary of this is blue, because it's the colour with counterspells. Even better, TNN shored up the poor midrange matchup for blue based decks, by giving them a threat that always connects, no matter how cluttered the board state. The draw is good because it smooths out your consistency, but its ubiquity is a symptom of the real problem, not the cause.
But this isn't exactly new, and I'm fairly certain many players correctly predicted that this would happen. It's the logical result of the crazy creatures we've been getting, and frankly, I'd rather have brainstorm in the format than both TNN and Delver.
Why is blue being the best color an "issue"?
It isn't just the "best", it's virtually the only color that matters in Magic. The other 4 colors are nothing more than blue's support team and can rarely stand on their own. This is an issue when competition is all being funnelled into one color slice; card overlap often times will lead to strategy overlap which creates a bland environment.
There are currently 299 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 299 guests)
Reply With Quote