All B/R update speculation.

[Gheizen64]

Copying for new page, if it's too big a mod can cut it and i'll just link the post:

I played GW Survival myself, was upset as it got banned, but over the years I realized why it was still the right thing to do. I call bullshit if you list cards and argue how they damage Vengevine, but in fact would be likely played alongside Survival if it was legal. Your whole argumentation stretched over two threads simply ignores this possibility and roots soley on "Survival is fair because we have outs to returning Vengevines!" but gladly dodges the fact that GW Survival was so good, because it had an excellent aggro plan B if your opponent shuts down your graveyard, in form of hardcasting a flurry of KotRs and Vines

Ok i'll try to be more specificly clear. Playing every creature + Survival isn't an actual plan, so you have to actually choose which creatures goes in an actual survival list. If you're arguing that every good creature go in survival lists you're just wrong, because survival as a simple tutor in goodstuff.deck is worse than GSZ. It's way slower (1GG to fetch the first creature), not as versatile as GSZ for getting both accelleration and threats quickly, and require you to have a creature in hand to start. Those are all important points.
The strenght of survival is the ability to be an engine, with Vengevines, and Retainers/Ooze. You can make the survival plan your primary or secondary plan of the deck, but it's harder to make it secondary because of the amount of slots and sub-optimal cards it require, unlike the blue shell for example, that don't make you play "bad" cards at all.
So you can't simply take generic Maverick.deck and put Survivals in it, you have to put also the engine within it, else Survival isn't worth it.

And here come the first point: you're sacrificing slots for survival. Simply because survival isn't worth it unless you cheat vengevines, or legends, or oozes.
And this bring also a quick consequence: your aggro plan is obviously not as good as a really good aggro decks, since you have several 4 cmcs (don't take me wrong, Vengevines are really good, but playing multiple 4cmc cards is not something you want to do in disruption-light decks, or against delver/burn decks) and legends, and 1/1s to trigger out VV. So you can't just play Maverick and add Survivals, you have to sacrifice a consistent amount of slots to it, making your "B" plan of beatdown worse. This isn't Vault/Key level of compact obviously.

Even if GSZ is one-shot, the greater amount of flexibility, much cheaper mana cost, and the ability to work without other specific cards in your hand put it far and above Survival as a "fair" tutor. It's the ability to double as an engine to cheat things into play that make Survival a strong card, without it, it's nothing amazing. And thanks to its speed, GSZ is better at getting answer creatures like Ooze or Qasali. Ooze is especially egregious. With survival, to remove 1 card from a grave with Ooze it cost 1GG+discard a creature+1G+G. If you want to get a cheap answer, survival isn't clearly the best choice here.

If your survival recurr plan is shut off via RiP for example, you don't only have 10+ bad draws in your deck, but you've probably also lost a mana + cards investment. Your "plan B" of aggro is nowhere as good when a big chunk of your deck are now subpar (Walla, Memnite, hardcast VV, Retainer) or simply uncastable cards (Iona/Devourer, Elesh but she's actually just 7 mana so castable if you get Cradle). Also, other decks "aggro" plans are now considerably faster or stronger with Delver, TNN and Pyromancers around, so by relative power levels, your beatdown plan get even worse.

Also, just for a mental exercise, what do you cut from a Maverick List to fit 3 VV, 1 Walla, 1 Memnite, 1 Retainer, 1 Elesh Norn, 4 Survivals? That's 11 cards. The Ooze shell is similar, but slightly slower and Devourer is crap by itself compared to Iona/Elesh which are sometimes hardcastable. You could probably cut the punishing fire suite, that's 4 cards. Then moms? A zenith or 2? It's easy to see why your beatdown plan can't be as good as actual non-survival lists.
Opportunity cost is absolutely relevant for SotF.

Punishing Maverick; Fabian Gorzgen

Spells (22+13=35)	Lands (25)	Sideboard (15)
2 Aven Mindcensor 1 Birds of Paradise 3 Deathrite Shaman 4 Knight of the Reliquary 4 Mother of Runes 1 Noble Hierarch 1 Qasali Pridemage 2 Scavenging Ooze 3 Stoneforge Mystic 1 Gaddock Teeg 1 Batterskull 3 Punishing Fire 4 Swords to Plowshares 1 Umezawa's Jitte 4 Green Sun's Zenith	1 Dryad Arbor 1 Forest 1 Bayou 3 Grove of the Burnwillows 1 Horizon Canopy 1 Plateau 2 Savannah 2 Taiga 1 Thespian's Stage 3 Wasteland 4 Windswept Heath 3 Wooded Foothills 1 Karakas 1 Dark Depths	1 Null Rod 1 Pithing Needle 1 Tormod's Crypt 1 Ethersworn Canonist 1 Phyrexian Revoker 1 Reclamation Sage 2 Choke 2 Engineered Plague 1 Oblivion Ring 2 Enlightened Tutor 1 Gaddock Teeg 1 Bojuka Bog

Or a non-punishing variety:

Maverick; Noel Thompson

Spells (24+13=37)	Lands (23)	Sideboard (15)
1 Birds of Paradise 4 Deathrite Shaman 4 Knight of the Reliquary 4 Mother of Runes 2 Qasali Pridemage 1 Scavenging Ooze 1 Scryb Ranger 3 Stoneforge Mystic 1 Gaddock Teeg 3 Thalia, Guardian of Thraben 1 Batterskull 1 Sylvan Library 3 Abrupt Decay 3 Swords to Plowshares 1 Umezawa's Jitte 4 Green Sun's Zenith	1 Dryad Arbor 1 Forest 1 Plains 2 Bayou 4 Savannah 2 Scrubland 1 Tower of the Magistrate 4 Verdant Catacombs 3 Wasteland 3 Windswept Heath 1 Karakas	1 Scavenging Ooze 2 Engineered Plague 1 Crop Rotation 1 Krosan Grip 1 Swords to Plowshares 1 Gaddock Teeg 1 Thalia, Guardian of Thraben 1 Life from the Loam 4 Thoughtseize 1 Toxic Deluge 1 Bojuka Bog

Again those list are incredibly tight. If you remove too many creatures, you may have too little for survival to work efficiently, if you remove removal spells, you lose in flexibility and the ability to answer troublesome permanents. And it's not even only that, but if you for example remove Mom, your beatdown plan is considerably worse and more subsceptible to removal, even if you gain the ability to go off with Vengevines etc...



To get more in the specifics with your post:

I call bullshit if you list cards and argue how they damage Vengevine, but in fact would be likely played alongside Survival if it was legal

I said why those cards would NOT be played alongisde Survival. If you want to tell me that Delver, Pyromancer, or TNN would be played alongisde survival, then i think you're off a bit. I explained why in my previous post that you evidently skipped:

True-name nemesis, an absurdly strong wall against VV, pratically unbreakable with any equip. Not as good in survival decks because of the mana intensive requirements, and it isn't worth paying 1GG and discard a card to tutor for it.
Containment Priest, a 1W 2/2 flash, that while good vs a lot of the meta, simply exile 3 creatures on cast vs Survival. A good silver bullet for survival decks, but shut off the VV engine, making it really situational.
Delver of Secrets, aka the strongest cheap beater ever printed. On offense, it ignore your vengevines, posing an actual clock when coupled with burn, and on defense it trade with a Vengevine. In Survival decks this is useless because you want to run as many creatures, where delver want a lot of spells, and want to be casted T1, not tutored for.
Young Pyromancer, an almost infinite supplier of token blockers vs non-wonder vengevines variants. Again, this card is bad in survival because it sinergize with spells, not other creatures.

And i also said that while some new creatures can obviously be played in Survival, they're better in non-survival decks or good against survival, something that you seems to again have skipped completely, with each card with an explanations on why i think those cards are a relative loss in power level for survival, and not a gain:

Deathrite Shaman, the strongest mana elf ever printed, and widely played, with the ability to remove your vengevines in response to madness triggers. This is actually good in survival decks, but much moreso against it.
Batterskull with Stoneforge Mystic, allowed for midrangey/control decks like Patriot, to lay down extremely fast 4/4 vigilances lifelink to effectively block Vengevines, especially coupled with the bounce ability. This is also actually good in survival decks, but more against it.
Thalia, Guardian of Thraben , basically made D&T a competitive deck, and combined with any equipment from SFM it can block Vengevines all day long. Again, a card that is good in Survival because it encourage you to play creature, but not as good as in other decks because it slow down your survival if you play it before SotF, or come down usually too late if you tutor for it. This is probably the most debatable creature of this list however.

So i can safely say that your calling "bullshit" should be a bit more argumented because to me, all those points about those creatures i presented seems pretty strong. Or if you want to show me a Pyro, TNN, Delver Survival list, then go on, i'd be honestly impressed if you managed to get a good list because the conflict between what those cards want and what survival want seems insurmountable to me to be honest.

To answer another point from your post more in detail:

Your whole argumentation stretched over two threads simply ignores this possibility

But this is clearly not true, because i didn't ignore the possibility of Survival playing new craetures, i simply proposed reasons for why playing a lot of the new best creatures along vengevines isn't good at all, basically:

- Survival as a plain creature tutor isn't worth it for some of them because of the mana constraint and time constraint
- opportunity cost is too big because you want to run a lot of creatures with SotF, but a lot of spells with some of those creatures
- some of those creatures are actually incredibly fast and cheap win conditions that want you to protect them with your spells, not to play other creatures

So you can see i never ignored this possibility. In fact, it was the whole point of my post: Survival is getting relatively worse because there are more creatures worse with SotF getting printed, than creatures good in Survival decks. This has been the case for the largest part of Legacy history before the printing of vengevines, another point that you seems to have skipped, cue RecSur, Tradewind Survival, and Tool and Tubbies decks which were faded out by Blue tempo variants and other combo decks, until VV got printed at least.

... and roots soley on "Survival is fair because we have outs to returning Vengevines!" but gladly dodges the fact that GW Survival was so good, because it had an excellent aggro plan B if your opponent shuts down your graveyard, in form of hardcasting a flurry of KotRs and Vines

Again, this is not what i said at all. What i've said is that the plan of returning vengevines isn't as good as before because of the new factors existing that weaken the vengevine beatdown plan. This is a matter of opportunity cost, if your combo plan isn't as autowin as it used to be, the trade for losing consistency, options and redundancy get worse. And in turn this make survival as a card worse. For example, Delver burn decks are now often faster than straight Vengevine beatdown which win around T4.
I also never dodged the fact that survival was also an aggro deck, i simply posited that that "plan B" by today standards is much worse than it was because (a) decks now have new, extremely efficient threats that don't fit in survival decks, and (b) that survival decks, by concession of fitting a consistent engine in them, have already a worse aggro plan compared to conventional Green based aggro decks like maverick. Your "excellent" plan B, is not "excellent" anymore by modern standards, it's simply a plan B. Probably around Elves! beatdown plan.

Those things are all pretty clear when you start brewing with survival. The opportunity cost isn't negligible, in fact, it's big by modern legacy standard. And to be honest that's what i like the most from Survival: the fact that you can't play goodcards.deck with it, but you have to build around it consistently, using Vengevines or abusing the graveyard in other ways (Like welder TnT which was one of my favourite legacy decks). You can't play URg burn delver with survival, or miracle Survival, or storm survival etc... The decks enabled by survival are by far and large decks defined by the card itself, completely NEW decks in the current legacy metagame. You will have some similiarity with Maverick lists, or stompy lists, but a vast amount of card would be different, and this is a huge breath of fresh air for the metagame.
To add on this, a lot of cards that are good against survival are also the kind of cards you can easily play maindeck because they hit a lot of different strategies: needles, Containment priests, Oozes, DRS, Wear//Tear, Spell Snare etc...

EDIT:

Edit:


That is too easy. Take a more honest look at your examples:

Turn 2 AN: costs 5 mana - if countered, you lose - if it resolves, you likely going to win via combo

Turn 2 SotF: costs 2 mana - if countered, you just smash faces with creatures which get more powerful with WotCs continuous power creep - if it resolves, you likely going to win either via combo or with creatures which get more powerful with WotCs continuous power creep

Fact is: every deck with more than 16 creatures is better by running Survival, as every Dark Ritual deck would be better by running Necropotence, as any Countertop deck would be better by running Tinker, as any anti-creature control deck would be better by running Oath, as any combo deck would be better running Demonic Tutor. That is degeneration. That is that makes WotC ban cards

First this isn't necessarily true. Blue-based decks, even if they were to run 16 creature, wouldn't still run survival. Example? 3 TNN, 4 SFM, 4 Delvers, 3 SFM, 2 Snapcaster mage + blue shell.
D&T would just probably run 4 Containment priest or something else main and ignore survival. Would Elves! run survival? It's probable but it wouldn't be the main strategy of the deck.

Second, even in creature heavy lists like Maverick, running survival has an opportunity cost: you'd have to cut removals, or utility creatures like Mom. If the meta get too hostile for it, it's possible the opportunity cost isn't worth the possibility of the combo anymore, and survival may actually be just detrimentals for those decks.

Third, how many 16+ creatures lists are dominating the format? The format has been dominated for years by blue strategies, and for good reasons. Even if a survival lists managed to get on top of the format by crushing all "fair" decks, it would still have unfavourable matchups against a lot of combo decks, be them SnT or storm, because you aren't disrupting a lot when you run 4 survival + 16 creatures.

And finally, the argument you just said is way more true for brainstorm than for survival. Every combo deck that run blue is better with brainstorm, every dark ritual deck that run blue is better with brainstorm, every anti-creature deck that run blue is better with brainstorm, and any countertop deck is better with brainstorm. So no, i don't think that could count as a reasonable argument for banning/keeping banned a card.

[Gheizen64]

Regardless of format Penetration, Force must stay.

This should be obvious to everyone unless we want modern 2.0 with 60+ banned card list.

[testing32]

Regardless of format Penetration, Force must stay.

Agreed. I want there to be a cost to playing force though. If you want to beat combo play force, but you give up something to aggro/midrange. Currently the format is "play bs and force with no draw backs".

[Dice_Box]

Agreed. I want there to be a cost to playing force though. If you want to beat combo play force, but you give up something to aggro/midrange. Currently the format is "play bs and force with no draw backs".

I disagree. Striping yourself of two cards to stop one is a larger cost than people think. At least is was before TC. When I was playing Jund, having something Forced was normally advantageous not problematic. The tempo loss is something you give up in Midrange games and that is why they are often sided out.

Also, the other cost is the one very few people see, the inability to play some cards in your hand when your low on cards. Even if you do not have a Force in your hand, knowing you might need to keep a card to pitch to it is a skill in of itself. You have to hold cards you can otherwise play just on the chance you may draw a Force. That is something few people foresee and I have seen people get caught out on this time and time again. If you do not keep that card in your hand, you might draw dead and if you do keep it in your hand, you risk tempo loss for a pay-off that may never come.

[Gheizen64]

Agreed. I want there to be a cost to playing force though. If you want to beat combo play force, but you give up something to aggro/midrange. Currently the format is "play bs and force with no draw backs".

The cost of playing force is playing 16+ blue cards, and having to lose card advantage. Force is fine. If it feel like it isn't it's because of Treasure cruise and BS probably.

[Quasim0ff]

Agreed. I want there to be a cost to playing force though. If you want to beat combo play force, but you give up something to aggro/midrange. Currently the format is "play bs and force with no draw backs".

Force, as a card, is pretty terrible. The only thing it does is limit haymakers to run the game.

[testing32]

The cost of playing force is playing 16+ blue cards, and having to lose card advantage. Force is fine. If it feel like it isn't it's because of Treasure cruise and BS probably.

We are all agreeing here. Currently the cost of playing force is almost zero because of the ability to shuffle it away or regain the lost card advantage with TC. This observed through the inability of other decks to punish the blue decks for running force.

And running 16+ blue cards isn't a drawback right now. That is what you should be doing anyways.

[Barook]

Force is fine, but it certainly wouldn't hurt other colors to get in-color answers to prevent the broken, too, e.g.:

Ruler of Law
Creature - Human Cleric
You may exile a white card from your hand rather than pay Ruler of Law’s mana cost.
Flash
Each player can’t cast more than one spell each turn.
1/3

Force is a necessity because other colors lack the tools to fight the broken. That's one approach to make running FoW (and therefore blue) less of a necessary evil, since other card quality engines have a high chance of getting incorporated into a blue shell.

I wouldn't mind more (defensive) pitch cards as long as they offer interesting trade-offs.

Take a look at Thragtusk back when Innistrad was in standard. If you ran green, you ran Tusk. But it didnt hurt the meta:

Isn't Thragtusk considered a mistake by Wizards? The printing of Lifebane Zombie is a direct result of them fucking up.

[Benrobnu]

Agreed. I want there to be a cost to playing force though. If you want to beat combo play force, but you give up something to aggro/midrange. Currently the format is "play bs and force with no draw backs".

There's a very real cost to playing FOW, it's often your worse card in non combo matchups. I've long been of the opinion that modern would be a lot better with force of will in it and a slightly looser band list. (Blazing Shoal and Seething Song...)

[JamieW89]

Some terrible hasty data with bad deck classifications etc.
The percentage is the r14 contention (33p+) penetration compared to the day-2 penetration (1% day2 and 2% r14=+100% and the other way around is -50%). So it should give an idea how well the deck performed during day-2, although there are several other factors not taken into account as well as my deck classifications being very bad, I just wanted to give an impression.

FoW Combo +130% (Reanimate, SnT variants)
U Control +104% (Miracles, Landstill, Golddigger)
U-Blade +36%
Prison +18% (Lands, MUD, DnT)
Delver -22% (Included Grixis Tempo, but apparantly this doesn't play Delver, so the real result is worse. UWR did score well.)
Non-U Combo -28% (Elves did score positive, but jank like Belcher, Dredge, Painter etc scored really bad)
Non-Delver Aggro -52%
Storm -62% (Surprising, seemed well positioned)
Bgx, Shardless, Mav -63%

According to this the blue non-delver decks, UWR Delver, Elves and prison decks performed well on day-2 whereas most delver decks and non-prison non-blue decks performed bad.
This supports the idea that current legacy mainly supports blue decks, elves and anti-blue (prison) decks. These blue decks are, however, not uniform at all. Combo, control (with and without permanents), Tempo and Midrange variants all scored well within blue.

As for variance within Delver variants:
UWR +49%
BUG -20%
UR -34%
RUG -100%

[rlesko]

I like how everyone is using the fact that people are main decking pyroblasts as a reason to hate on brainstorm. Newsflash: this was for Treasure Cruise. Brainstorm has been around for years without main deck narrow hate like Pyro. It was a meta call because the UR mirror match often comes down to who resolves TC first.

Bye

[testing32]

I like how everyone is using the fact that people are main decking pyroblasts as a reason to hate on brainstorm. Newsflash: this was for Treasure Cruise. Brainstorm has been around for years without main deck narrow hate like Pyro. It was a meta call because the UR mirror match often comes down to who resolves TC first.

Bye

ummmm.... miracles was running 2 md pyroblasts b/f TC was printed.

[iGrok]

I think that's in part because non-delver blue decks beat delver. Like I was saying yesterday, the best deck in a vacuum won't win the tournament, whatever beats it will.
So stoneblade/miracles do much better than delver day 2, even though delver is stronger against the day 1 field.

Edit: I'm pretty sure miracles was running 1 red blast main not two before cruise, and it was the only deck doing that - which makes sense the deck with the best card filter. The real worrying thing is the hydroblasts imo

[Gheizen64]

I like how everyone is using the fact that people are main decking pyroblasts as a reason to hate on brainstorm. Newsflash: this was for Treasure Cruise. Brainstorm has been around for years without main deck narrow hate like Pyro. It was a meta call because the UR mirror match often comes down to who resolves TC first.

Bye

Red blast were played because of the fact that the blue shell was the most played by far: TC isn't even the best card in said shell, i'd hate for it to getting banned because it revived a archetype that had been dead for years (super fast aggro), even if in blue. And you're welcome to come back any time.

[EpicLevelCommoner]

Isn't Thragtusk considered a mistake by Wizards? The printing of Lifebane Zombie is a direct result of them fucking up.

If it is/was considered a mistake by WotC, then I doubt WotC actually knows what they're doing when it comes to banning/unbanning cards.

A card itself cannot be oppressive unless there are literally 0 tools to fight against it, and at that point one has to wonder how it even saw print. It's the combination of cards within a shell or deck that is oppressive. And while we cannot just ban the entirety of the Delver shell (Force of Will being the necessary evil here), we can at least cripple it without causing splash damage to more diverse archetypes (Brainstorm being one of the better "glue" cards in Legacy for a variety of archetypes).

That is why I advocate a ban against Delver itself: it hurts the most popular blue archetype without causing splash damage to things like Storm, Miracles, S&T, High Tide, etc.

[rlesko]

ummmm.... miracles was running 2 md pyroblasts b/f TC was printed.

Some builds were doing it, but that is one deck with the most card selection in Legacy. By nitpicking my statement, what were you trying to prove?

[testing32]

Some builds were doing it, but that is one deck with the most card selection in Legacy. By nitpicking my statement, what were you trying to prove?

You said that no one was main decking blasts before TC. I was mearly pointing out that was not the case.

[rlesko]

Red blast were played because of the fact that the blue shell was the most played by far: TC isn't the best card in said shell, i'd hate for it to getting banned because it revived a archetype that had been dead for years (super fast aggro), even if in blue. And you're welcome to come back any time.

I'm not saying TC was the best card in the shell, but its probably the most back breaking if it resolves.

[rlesko]

You said that no one was main decking blasts before TC. I was mearly pointing out that was not the case.

Point taken, my point was all these delver / stoneblade strategies now including Pyroblasts maindeck isn't suddenly because they realized brainstorm was good. Its to make sure your cruise resolves or to stop your opponent from cruisin'

[jafar]

I would just ask WOTC to print this:

"Rage of the granny treefolk"



Instant

Split Second

Counter target noncreature spell.

Blue has efficient beater? Give to the poor colors an efficient counterspell FTW!

Bye