Brainstorm
Force of Will
Lion's Eye Diamond
Counterbalance
Sensei's Divining Top
Tarmogoyf
Phyrexian Dreadnaught
Goblin Lackey
Standstill
Natural Order
Not having Awesome is huge dude. And i could play RB Pyro/Delver! Discard goes better with pyro anyway.Originally Posted by Lemnear
This x1000000.
Delver is, to me, doing more damage to the Legacy meta than anything else right now. I don't really care if one color or card is pervasive, as long as there are a variety of viable strategies. The problem with Delver is that it's a build-around card. It requires a certain type of shell to work, but it's so good that it's worth working within those constraints for. You can't run a bunch of support creatures or hatebears, so you run counters to protect Delver. You need to guarantee Delver's going to flip, so you run a bunch of cantrips. Add some burn or cheap removal to keep things out of Delver's way, and you've got a deck.
We now have four of the format's top decks based on the same shell, and they all play so similarly that it just makes the format boring. The last big event I went to felt like Standard. Just staring across the table at the same cards in every matchup.
At least when everyone was bitching about Tarmogoyf being ubiquitous, it was because people were dropping it into basically everything that wasn't storm combo.
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."
This was exactly what my post was supposed to say, but you explained it much better.
1 mana to draw three straight up, a 3 power beater, and Hallowed Burial are all too strong to me.
In terms of how good a card is, I'd ban Brainstorm
In terms of how uncolor-ific a card is, I'd ban Delver of Secrets.
In terms of how unfun a card is, I'd ban True-Name Nemesis (even though he's not seen a ton of play recently, he sucks to play against everytime)
In terms of how retarded a card is, I'd ban Show and Tell.
Treasure Cruise also probably deserves the axe, but I don't think it offends any dimension more than any of the previous three cards. I can see them banning it, if simply for the sake of preserving Brainstorm.
http://www.tcdecks.net/mostplayedcar...s=10&anio=2014
I'm still amazed how someone can look at a list like this and conclude that the 15th most played card is the problem. There are 5 blue cards ahead of it while there isn't even a non-blue non-land card in the top 10.
If the only blue ban is Treasure Cruise it'll be a slap in the player bases's face by a company that just doesn't give a crap about them.
If they're paying attention to Legacy then they know that Brainstorm and Delver of Secrets are the meta-warping cards, one long-term and one of the last couple of years.
If they somehow come to the conclusion that "oops Treasure Cruise is too good but nothing else is wrong" well that means they're either very dense and unimaginative about their own product or they're slapping the players.
Even if you ban delver, it doesn't change the fact treasure cruise/dig are remarkably powerful cards and vice versa
Brainstorm has been the best/most played card in the format for a while but that argument has been done verbatim so there is little point in discussing it I feel
I wouldnt expect a SCG author to call for a Brainstorm ban despite it being obviously better than Cruise (900 to 300 most played, played across archtypes, etc. etc.) 2 weeks before GP Brainstorm which SCG is hosting.
If you ban Delver, the delver variants become more varied. Each color group no longer has an efficient one-mana beater, and no longer needs a critical mass of spells.
If you ban Treasure Cruise, people play the next best cantrip in its place, and nothing really changes in the format. All that Cruise has done is change which Delver flavor is on top.
224 out of 293 decks (or 76.45%) ran Brainstorm - compare that to ~73% Mental Misstep during its heydays, which was banned because it made the format too blue and went into every deck. Brainstorm just surpassed that.
Both Brainstorm and TC are ban-worthy and need to go down the road, but I see TC as the more urgent problem. While blue decks lose some really dumb interactions and can't semi-mulligan each time, they would replace Brainstorm with another cantrip and still be good to go due 4x Ancestral Recall.
I wonder, are there any seriously powerful non-blue cards that can be unbanned to balance the power of the delver-goodstuff shell if WOTC are unwilling to ban brainstorm? I feel like even if they go ahead with Cruise and do nothing else (which seems likely) it'll just go back to what it was before Cruise, which wasn't good either.
People should ask them on Twitter until someone's answers them (@wizards_magic for Wizards offical page, @ErikLauer who's responsible for the management of the B&R list, or @mtgaaron since he seems like one of the few people how actually gives a crap about questions.)
If this farce continues, people should call them out on it.
We should ask for the unbanning of Bazaar in exchange for a TC banning.
I guess unbanning Black Vise would help. But most Delver decks aside from BUG wouldn't realy care because they can drop their hand so quickly now. U/R Delver could probably play Vise themselves?
I am not sure if banning Delver would solve any issues. Perhaps it will but in my eyes, the biggest warping card is Brainstorm. Banning Brainstorm nerfs Delver anyway, people would have to use Ponder to flip it, perhaps drawing a not so good card. I simply don't understand the reasoning of "it's already so long in the format, it will never be banned". That is a very wrong reasoning...
Unbanning Vise either wouldn't do jack or would do stupid things in a Delver shell because people WILL have large hands when they can't play their stuff.
Lovely list there. I don't hate Delver as much as many seem to - it might do bad things to the meta but I don't cringe every time I see it played.
Show and Tell I'd rather ban the stupidest targets so S&T and Reanimator get back on plans where the creature gives them a huge advantage or needs a specific boardstate to be insta-win instead of just winning then and there almost no matter what.
Banlist shortness shouldn't really be valued, IMO. Whether the list is long or short doesn't make one bit of difference on whether the format is fun to play or not, but stupid cards being there or not does.
To all the people who want to ban Brainstorm because of the numbers it is played: Then what? A new card comes and takes the place of the most ubiquitous one. Should that be banned next? As it seems, there's always the most popular card in a format. You should be happy that in legacy it's apparently a cantrip instead of some truly oppressive shit. Cantrips help you to build your deck more consistent. They come in all flavors and there can be seen some hierarchy among them. How exactly is it any better if people auto-switch the Brainstorms to Ponders and Ponders to some lesser cantrips? It's highly unlikely that players will stop using cantrips in vast numbers in the case of a ban.
It also seems that some of you clump storm, miracles tempo decks as one just because they share among other things a specific cantrip. That's technically correct, of course, but the implications and conclusions are plain stupid.
Some of my friends sell records,
some of my friends sell drugs.
You aren't quite getting the point. It isn't that people don't like others playing cantrips, it's the quality of that specific cantrip in conjunction with fetchland.
With that being said, perhaps WotC should run a policy where if a non-land card shows up >50% of all possible slots in all top 8's of all registered tournaments w/attendance of >129 players or so for more then 1 year, it'd merrit an auto-ban. This year FoW gets banned? Perhaps next year, some broken-ass combo card (b/c FoW isn't there to keep it in check anymore mayhaps) and so on. The meta would change regularly and problems'll be fixed by WotC if the community doesn't manage to fix it themselves.
Anywho - death to Delver, FoW, Daze, Brainstorm and Ponder! That's a solid 20 I see in roughly 50-75% of my matches at the moment. So boring!
Uh. Brainstorm is an indicator of the format's blueness. The canary in the goldmine, so to speak, because it's so absurdly ubiquitous. The question is not about if there's a most played card. It's about:
1. Brainstorm itself. The card is busted. Strong card selection spells like Ponder, Preordain and GSZ are a category behind.
2. Brainstorm's strength and versatility encourages everyone to play blue. This is a problem because of the starkly limited supply of blue lands and because ubiquitous cantrip shells homogenizes play patterns a ton. All the fair blue decks, despite being very different in strategy, play somewhat similar in individual situations. This would happen less if other colours stood a more even chance. ie. Shardless and Jund feel different despite similar strategy. Elves and Storm feel different to operate despite the underlying operations of make mana, draw shitton of cards, cast busted spell that will kill you being very similar. Or take more Prison-style builds of Miracles vs. D&T. Very different feel. The Shardless, Miracles, Storm will inevitably feel more similar to each other than Jund, Elves, D&T.
3. Brainstorm actively counteracts things like discard that could traditionally be used by other colors to offset blue's consistency advantage for no real investment and enables pretty disgusting unmulligans that weaker card selection spells like Ponder, Preordain and GSZ just can't, or are way slower or more conditional to do (Ancestral, Confidant, Elves' draw engines).
Honestly? Delver should have never had flying as efficient as it is. Color really doesnt matter except in terms of the card pool available to supplement it, but an evasive 3 power 1 drop in any color means that most spot removal cant trade favorably with it, and most legacy playble 1 drops cant block it. This then means that the possibility of them overextending into a terminus or other sweeper unlikely.
As someone who defended TNN's right to remain unbanned, I should say that Delver comes down two turns earlier with the same power once flipped, and typically TNN is rarely the only creature on the board, making sweepers much more viable.
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