All B/R update speculation.

[Phoenix Ignition]

Well this is a shame. Guess I'm waiting until the September update. In the meantime I'm sure I'll still turn on an SCG stream from time to time to laugh at the hilarity that is two decks hitting each other with equipped true-name nemesises.

[Darkenslight]

From what tournaments are telling me this is easily the most open Legacy's ever been, I have no idea what the issue is except for, "BLUE!!!!!!"

When a single color has in excess of 75% of the Top 16 of the vast majority of tournaments, that usually means something has gone wrong. However, the fact is that there are a vast number of viable decks, ranging from hard-aggro strategies, such as Burn, to hard-control decks, such as Miracles. Really, the primary issue is the strength of Blue as a color, with cards that are 15+ years old.

[Julian23]

I think everyone can agree that an arguement that is solely based on the dominance of a single colour is pretty much just as valid as one based on odd collector's numbers cards being more represented than even ones.

[btm10]

I think everyone can agree that an arguement that is solely based on the dominance of a single colour is pretty much just as valid as one based on odd collector's numbers cards being more represented than even ones.

Apprently this isn't something everyone can agree on. But we should.

From what tournaments are telling me this is easily the most open Legacy's ever been, I have no idea what the issue is except for, "BLUE!!!!!!"

Which is the reason to discuss unbannings, I think. At worst we can revert to a very healthy metagame by re-banning the offending card(s). I realize this is directed at the people who wanted something banned, but still.

[Adryan]

I'll just copy/paste what i wrote 4 months ago on MTG Salvation.



My feeling is that they just care for Modern, and that's all. If nothing changed for the last 2 years, nothing will change for the next 2 years too.

So you remain with 2 ways you can follow:
Do you like play to play with/against Branstorm, in a stagnant format with 85% blue-based decks with a "set in stone" banlist?
Yes -> Play Legacy.
No -> Play Modern.

Please explain why Legacy is more stagnant than Modern. If i remember correctly the release of TNN a while ago made this format a lot different. I would say Modern is more stagnant than Legacy.
There's Pod, BGx, Splinter Twin, Affinity and then the rest for guys who don't know what the good decks are.

In Legacy there is every archetype competitve, so you can win a tournament with it. If you dislike creatures and want to cast spells, well good luck being competitve and winning a tournament. Spoiler: Storm is not good in Modern. T1 Relic out of many decks is such a huge pain in the ass and so on.

If you somehow dislike Brainstorm ( i really can't understand that feeling because it's a fun card and reduces variance) there are still a lot of good choices. I mean the fact that a version of Death and Taxes (the 4 Spirit/ 4 Arbiter/ Ghost Quarter etc.) is favored against all forms of Combo except fast Combo and Creature Combo tells a lot of how awesome Legacy is. Mono White favored against Combodecks lol

A fun format is a format where every archetype and playstyle is competitve and can make you win a tournament. The fact that a color is more played than the others should not make for a worse playing experience.

[sjmcc13]

When a single color has in excess of 75% of the Top 16 of the vast majority of tournaments, that usually means something has gone wrong. However, the fact is that there are a vast number of viable decks, ranging from hard-aggro strategies, such as Burn, to hard-control decks, such as Miracles. Really, the primary issue is the strength of Blue as a color, with cards that are 15+ years old.

And since allot of those decks are 3 colors, 75% of the decks containing blue is not that bad seeing as it is in 6 of the 10 3 color combinations. blue is a very common colour, but allot of that is because it is the best support color in the game.

If you want to complain about a color being to strong, you need a much deeper analysis.

you need to look at not just how often the each color shows up, but also how often it each color is the primary focus of a deck, and how often it is just support.
and you need to do this for all 5 colours to show the discrepency.

you also need ot look at the different archtypes and do the same colour analysis on them, because tournament results are affected by player biases, and is allot of players are hung up on a specific card/stratagey (like say Delver) then it is going to show up in more succesful lists then a card/stratagey that is not as popular but just as strong will.

[sdematt]

I'm actually more excited when new sets come out in hopes that they release new cards to shake up Legacy since they seems to be SUPER FUCKING SLOW when doing sweet dick all to Legacy. Shake this up. Vintage has gotten more action than us. VINTAGE.

-Matt

[LOLWut]

Survival of the Fittest is a very cool card but I do think it's a little too strong (there are a couple legal cards that I think are too strong as well but that's another argument). I don't mean to turn this into a shitty card creation tangent, but I think the way to go is a "fixed" Survival. Not a creature like Fauna Shaman though; make the enchantment cost , or make the activated ability cost , or exile the cards instead of discarding them, or give it a cumulative upkeep, or something.

[btm10]

I'm actually more excited when new sets come out in hopes that they release new cards to shake up Legacy since they seems to be SUPER FUCKING SLOW when doing sweet dick all to Legacy. Shake this up. Vintage has gotten more action than us. VINTAGE.

-Matt

I think there are two (main) explanations fort this. First, some new, narrow cards like Dreadbore see minor play in Vintage but not in Legacy largely (I suspect) because more Vintage decks are 4 or 5 colors, largely driven by the restriction of Brainstorm and Ponder, meaning that fetch-light manabases with rainbow lands are more viable, so it's easier to splash a whole color to cover one weak point. This represents a relatively small number of decks (5c Stax, recent Keeper/5cc concoctions), but they add up. The other thing is that in Vintage a lot of decks have abundant colorless or off-color mana, meaning that 3 or even 4 can represent playable costs for a typical deck, especially if the card is blue or an artifact (in which case the cost can be even higher). Add in the smaller amount of removal (and fewer creatures overall) and fragile hatebears like Spirit of the Labyrinth or expensive creatures with powerful effects like Restoration Angel also become more viable. Also, the bar for a narrow artifact or narrow piece of artifact hate is much lower in Vintage than in Legacy (I'm thinking Trygon Predator, but I'm sure that there are other examples).

[Lord_Mcdonalds]

Survival gets unbanned when brainstorm gets banned
#callingit


....would happily make that trade every day of the fucking week

[maharis]

Miserable. 3 year anniversary of Delver coming up though!

For real. It took them just over a year to can DRS from Modern. God forbid a non-blue card dominate a format.

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

I think everyone can agree that an arguement that is solely based on the dominance of a single colour is pretty much just as valid as one based on odd collector's numbers cards being more represented than even ones.

Then you are extremely bad at paying attention to the world around you.

[Julian23]

Honestly, IBA, you have a reputation for arguing emotionally instead of factually. I couldn't care less about your opinion on this.

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

From what tournaments are telling me this is easily the most open Legacy's ever been

Is this like... a joke?


A few narrow midrange strategies with basically interchangeable parts, a couple combo decks, one control deck, almost all of them running the same basic blue shell; the same fringe strategies that are empirically not good but people will convince themselves to gamble with regardless because once in a while they make it through the Swiss rounds somehow (burn, infect, affinity, belcher, oops all lands,) almost no change in the past year in the metagame, barely any changes in the year before; all those changes pushing towards more splashable, interchangeable parts pushing towards de facto format homogeneity where "diversity" occupies an ever smaller slice of the decklists.

This format is staid, stagnant and boring.

There's always a certain type of player who likes solved formats because they involve very little work, though, and will accuse those who want more of a challenge of "whining" or being noobs or whatever. Usually the same type that don't want to ban the obviously-need-to-be-banned cards like Flash or Mental Misstep in Legacy, Skullclamp and Jace in Standard. Brainstorm these days.

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

Honestly, IBA, you have a reputation for arguing emotionally instead of factually. I couldn't care less about your opinion on this.

This is a nonsensical complaint for two reasons.

1) What a format should look like, what's fun, etc., etc., are emotional questions, not factual ones.

2) I am pretty consistently the only person that is willing to compile and post data backing up claims of dominance etc., at least since the Hatfields stopped writing articles.

[Barook]

I think everyone can agree that an arguement that is solely based on the dominance of a single colour is pretty much just as valid as one based on odd collector's numbers cards being more represented than even ones.

I don't know about that one. The official reasoning behind banning Mental Misstep wasn't just "ZOMG 56 card decks!" as it was stated by other sources, but blue domination:

Legacy

Mental Misstep is banned.

Force of Will has long been thought of as a card that helps keep combination decks in check in Legacy and Vintage. However, it doesn't directly help decks that aren't playing blue. One idea that was floated was creating a similar card that could be played in nonblue decks. When Phyrexian mana was designed, it was an opportunity to create such a card. R&D wanted a card that could help fight combination decks, and could also fight blue decks by countering cards such as Brainstorm. Clearly printing a card like this has a lot of risk, but there is also the potential for helping the format a lot. The risk is mitigated, because if it turns out poorly, the DCI can ban the card.

Unfortunately, it turned out poorly. Looking at high-level tournaments, instead of results having blue and nonblue decks playing Mental Misstep, there are more blue decks than ever. The DCI is banning Mental Misstep, with the hopes of restoring the more diverse metagame that existed prior to the printing of Mental Misstep.

The better question is why the don't ban anything anymore despite blue being more dominant than ever before thanks to a bunch of horseshit cards. Color dominance is a ban consideration.

Probably they don't really care about Legacy anymore aside from tossing money rares into supplemental product which "shine" with "great" design like TNN or Council's Judgment.

[Michael Keller]

You know what the funny thing is about Legacy? ...

There are thousands of Magic cards people can use, but choose not to use them because we're living in a society of the blind leading the blind. Social media and the Star City Games Open Series have effectively destroyed ingenuity - for the most part - and brainwashed newer players into making mindless deck-choosing decisions.

I get the wallets for some folks might not be as thick as others in the cash department, but honestly that's no excuse. In fact, that should be the most challenging and rewarding aspect of playing Legacy: to innovate, build and succeed with a reasonably cheaper deck. I won tournaments for years with obscurities. If I can do it, so can anyone else who's willing to apply themselves.

The cards are there, but the ambition isn't.

[Phoenix Ignition]

Probably they don't really care about Legacy anymore aside from tossing money rares into supplemental product which "shine" with "great" design like TNN or Council's Judgment.

This makes the most sense, honestly. The only money they can make off of Legacy players is by printing cards that are obviously designed for legacy, which generally will mean they are too good for the cash cow Standard, or be completely irrelevant to it. That mostly means that no Legacy players are going to be cracking packs open to get their cards, since singles are so much cheaper and probably not in high demand by the hordes of Standard players anyway.

So, print shit that causes nothing but headaches, True-Name Nemesis for example, and after people languish about how they're going to deal with something that stupid, print another mostly casual set of cards with a couple big cards obviously targeted to shut down that card [cards]Council's Judgment/cards]

[maharis]

You know what the funny thing is about Legacy? ...

There are thousands of Magic cards people can use, but choose not to use them because we're living in a society of the blind leading the blind. Social media and the Star City Games Open Series have effectively destroyed ingenuity - for the most part - and brainwashed newer players into making mindless deck-choosing decisions.

I get the wallets for some folks might not be as thick as others in the cash department, but honestly that's no excuse. In fact, that should be the most challenging and rewarding aspect of playing Legacy: to innovate, build and succeed with a reasonably cheaper deck. I won tournaments for years with obscurities. If I can do it, so can anyone else who's willing to apply themselves.

The cards are there, but the ambition isn't.

I agree with you to a point. There may be thousands of cards in the legacy pool, but there are only so many playable ones. With how tight and optimized certain lists are, it's very difficult to come up with a brew that can be even occasionally successful in a given metagame.

A legacy deck has to have plans against a Storm player trying to go off turn 2; a player going t1 Island, t2 City of Traitors, Show and Tell; a turn 1 flipped Delver with Daze/Wasteland backup; a Stoneforge in play and a Batterskull in hand. That considerably narrows the pool of cards you can choose from and open slots in a given deck

[Adryan]

This is a nonsensical complaint for two reasons.

1) What a format should look like, what's fun, etc., etc., are emotional questions, not factual ones.

2) I am pretty consistently the only person that is willing to compile and post data backing up claims of dominance etc., at least since the Hatfields stopped writing articles.

Even in science where people put lots of effort in and many years of hard work, they don't argue emotional. So why should we do that in a card game? I would really like to know when Legacy was more wide open than now, with data that supports it.

Avoid personal attacks please. Thanks. -zilla