Brainstorm
Force of Will
Lion's Eye Diamond
Counterbalance
Sensei's Divining Top
Tarmogoyf
Phyrexian Dreadnaught
Goblin Lackey
Standstill
Natural Order
It's a question nonblue players have needed to ask for forever.
Elves needs to balance it's pieces. It's doable with ponder/preordain equivalents, no brainstorm needed. The cards themselves most certainly aren't equally effective.
And other decks don't have to suffer through these? Also not like Brainstorm is the only cantrip in existence, manaflood/screw is easily manageable with Ponder/Preordain.
What does the strength of Elves' Storm matchup have to do with it's quality as a deck?
Originally Posted by Lemnear
Bargain is vastly inferior to necropotence. Necropotence is a draw 14 for BBB whereas bargain costs infinite especially off of infernal tutor.
If you ban brainstorm cruise is still a gigantic problem. So you don't have BS anymore. Replace with preordain and still keep ancestral recalling yourself with cruise and not having to put the cards back. Treasure cruise is a mistake on the level of skullclamp, SFM, JTMS, etc. etc. it's nuts in every format with fetchlands. It's wrecking face in modern without brainstorm and in vintage where you get that lone brainstorm. Remove brainstorm here but not cruise? Cruise would continue to warp the format around itself still. It is an obscene magic card that shouldn't have seen print but WotC fell off their rocker.
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Originally Posted by Vacrix
Nonblue-midrange decks dont have the disparity in card relevance that you get between having SnT/Entomb vs not having SnT/Entomb. Yes, all decks can get thoughtseized, but when a small portion of your deck is very disproportionately more relevant, it stands to reason that without an ability to protect that, the deck becomes much less viable. Thats my point: combo decks without brainstorm become a lot less viable, just like people argue nonblue midrange isnt as viable in the face of cantrip-cores right now. banning brainstorm or not pretty much boils to what decks you think should be in tier 1.5 vs 2.5, especially since delver, the deck everyone points to as the example of why cantrips are bad, would be solved by just axxing delver itself.
ponder/preordain cant get a land out of my hand to get me hellbent, it also cant let me see multiple needed pieces of my combo like if i need Omniscience AND Enter the Infinite. if elves want to see multiple new cards, they have glimpse of nature or just the backup plan of beating people to death if things arent quite balanced to combo, thats the vague sort of "general" effectiveness of on-board synergies that elves has in comparison to other combo decks that ive mentioned
i really dont think preordain/ponder fixes a manaflood quite as well as a brainstorm, but i suppose theyre all pretty fair at finding lands
because elves was offered up as some example of successful combo with no brainstorm, but in reality it just isnt as fundamentally strong at being a combo deck as a deck like storm, hence the worse matchup; and with glimpse, NO, and GSZ, its not as though elves doesnt have its own strong core of card filtering/fixing.
It's not clear that Treasure Cruise is dominating Modern at this point. It's in the most likely top 8 list in the form of UR Delver, however it's not in the next 4 lists (RDW, UWx Mid-range, Birthing Pod, Twin Exarch. It's not in Affinity or Scapeshift either. It's not in Zoo.
It's in one list that will soon be the #1 target for hate in the Modern meta if things continue as they are. It's not powering multiple lists to dominate over the others.
I think it may be overpowered for the metas it is in play in but at the moment Modern is not clearly displaying that trend. UR Delver is OP at the moment.
Elves wins though blunt force. Tinker, Demonic Tutor, Recall on Steroids, Repeatable recall (At 6 mana) and a land that taps on its own for more mana that any other in the format. You do not need filtering, you just go around it with seeing a massive amount of cards. "Shit I need X, I will just use combat tricks to hold you off while I draw 3 cards a turn till I find it." You just take the most broken things you can, put them together and go to town. But that I am sure is news to no one. Also to say its not a deck with Brainstrom, well you give me Tinker, two flavours of Recall and Academy and I am sure I would not need Brainstorm either.
To say Elves needs to balance it's pieces is like saying to someone you need to learn how to play the deck, every dam deck with more options than "Tap dood, pimp slap guy in face" (Read: every deck in this format) needs to balance its pieces. The comment is silly. As a combo deck also you need to know what your doing, as is the same for any other combo deck. Personally the only thing I can see that Elves loses by not playing Blue is that you can not get away with a 14 card mana base... Oh wait, you can, we did it for years only changing to the 19/20 mana base thanks to the changing of game rules that made running 4 Cradle a thing.
Edit: Oh and DRS helped add to the mana base.
Think Dig Through time and Cruise will get restricted in vintage or Thirst for Knowledge unrestricted.
Seem strange in modern that Ancestral Vision is banned but cruise isnt. Modern doesnt even have the good Cascade cards.
Kinda strange to have more powerful spell legal then the similar banned cards.
Ancestral Vision has long been thought of as a card that has little business being banned. It's not as much of a joke as Golgari Grave-Troll is, but as I've said Golgari Grave-Troll would do so little in the format that the main reason to want it unbanned is on principle. Ancestral Vision might at least boost some decks that are in need of a power boost.
But yeah, it is rather amusing for Ancestral Vision to be banned, but then for them to print Treasure Cruise, which is much better and goes into more decks (Ancestral Vision is really limited to control decks). If they do decide to ban Treasure Cruise, it'd be nice if they'd unban Ancestral Vision at the same time.
Their whole B&R management is a farce: Banning combo and control cards from the start, but let Nacatl + Tarmogoyf + BBE + Thoughtseize + Liliana run rampant for years. Keep Black Vise banned but print Delver (for the 3 damage tick in mana denial-strategies). Keep Gush banned because it would be absurd in Tempo but print TC. Keep Bargain banned for power reasons but print Griselbrand which is much easier to cheat on the field. The list goes on and on
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Who said that about Ancestral Vision and when? If you're talking about the comments mentioned here, he said nothing about Ancestral Vision. He did mention Green Sun's Zenith (alongside Seething Song, Jace, and Stoneforge Mystic) as stuff that have made a grave for themselves concerning Modern, but nothing about Ancestral Vision.
It is comical to see the better Treasure Cruise be legal while Ancestral Vision is banned, but I don't think Ancestral Vision should be banned anyway.
Dig is far from broken, why would it get banned?
Thing is, those aren't really as comparable because they do such different things. Treasure Cruise basically is a better version of Ancestral Vision, which is why the dissonance of Ancestral Vision being banned is especially notable.
Note that I'm not arguing for a ban on Treasure Cruise yet. But if Wizards of the Coast actually thinks Ancestral Vision is so overpowered it needs to be banned (and I don't think it is), it's rather humorous to print what amounts to a better version of it into the format.
What I also find funny is the reaction to TC being "everywhere" and talk of bans when its numbers aren't even close to BS. Also, the commentators for eternal weekend talking about how brainstorm wasn't the best card in delver anymore was pretty humorous.
If powerlevel or color diversity isn't a reason for a ban anymore, I think we should just unban demonic tutor and call that a pillar of the format. I had more fun playing with that card than brainstorm.
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