All B/R update speculation.

[LeoCop 90]

The whole discussion inn this thread can be summed up in 2 groups:

- people that don't care about brainstorm being played in 90% decks and don't care about blue being played in 90% decks. These people mostly like the format as it is.

- people that are sick of seeing brainstorm, blue decks, care about color diversity, and would like to see bannings and/or unbannings that give life to non brainstorm,non blue decks or revive older decks.

I am in the second group, i think that the format stinks right now.

[Quasim0ff]

It can also be stated like this, though:

People that see the diversity that brainstorm brings.

People that don't.

[YamiJoey]

The whole discussion inn this thread can be summed up in 2 groups:

- people that don't care about brainstorm being played in 90% decks and don't care about blue being played in 90% decks. These people mostly like the format as it is.

- people that are sick of seeing brainstorm, blue decks, care about color diversity, and would like to see bannings and/or unbannings that give life to non brainstorm,non blue decks or revive older decks.

I am in the second group, i think that the format stinks right now.

1) People who's main concern is variety of decks, regardless of colour.
2) People who cannot see past a deck's colour, and into the whole range of decks that 'Blue' consists of, being hardcore control (Miracles), midrange (Stoneblade), tempo (Delver), combo (Omnishow), and aggro (Merfolk).

It's almost as if you could frame both ideas to be silly, and both to be the only obvious choice by your wording (but not almost). It's almost as if your bias wasn't obvious from the way you described them (but only almost).

The two main categories are:

1) People who are sick of seeing T8's that have 20+ copies of the same card, and are playing a format that REQUIRES Force of Will to be even remotely playable. The non-Force decks are preying on the Force decks, not the Storm decks.
2) People who don't care about the specific lists, so long as there's a variety of playstyles catered for. The only problem for these people is the lack of a real hardcore aggro deck. Delver is a tempo deck, and Merfolk is an aggro deck with the protection of a tempo shell (4 Daze, 4 Force, and often Pierces and Wastelands is a tempo deck). They fill the aggro slots because they have to.

I think the real issue, is that the format is so heavily swung towards "If people stop playing Force of Will, people start dying on the first turn of the game". We don't need Brainstorm hate, we need better combo hate in more colours. DnT does well without Brainstorm because:

1) Force of Will is bad against it for 10,000 different reasons.
2) It has hate for combo in the maindeck, with ways to ditch its dead cards in G2 for things that do stuff.
3) It is able to get free wins from cards like Wasteland and Port into Thalia, which mean "you never get to kill my 2/1 or cast any relevant Spells".
4) It is able to slow players down with Wastes and Ports so that it can survive a dodgy draw with highly interactive decks, so that the opponent can't shut the door very easily.
5) It is able to close out games with an alarming speed of a control deck once it needs to. (Crusader with a Sword on it? Hero of Bladehold and your random hate bears? Whatever you need.)

If we had Black, Red, and Green versions of cards like Thalia, I have absolutely no doubt we would see a rise in those colours being played without Brainstorm. People seem to forget that Elves and DnT are real decks, and that Jund did quite well for a while very recently. Burn is also a very real deck. Cruise was not as integral to its success as some may believe, the deck is just absurdly fast, and has cards like Eidolon that just make some decks fold.

[Blastoderm]

Of course, but other options would come to the fore. I could see a mixture between ANT and TES being the storm deck of a possible "post-BS" era. Summing up: It would be still a valid choice. Nonetheless, let's not turn this discussion into a deck development thread.

Agreed. I like TES more than ANT simply because of Burning Wish.

[Barook]

@YamiJoey: D&T would be a Top Tier deck instead of "just kinda there in the DTB sometimes" if it had more consistency.

And please don't mention D&T and Hero of Bladehold in the same sentence. It makes you look foolish.

It can also be stated like this, though:

People that see the diversity that brainstorm brings.

People that don't.

Let's go deeper - what decks would stop existing if Brainstorm was banned? Not "this deck got a little bit worse", but in a full-blown "this decks has become 100% completely unplayable".

Some People claim that it promotes aggro, control and combo equally.

But Brainstorm doesn't bring diversity. It brings a 56 card deck meta.

[CabalTherapy]

Agreed. I like TES more than ANT simply because of Burning Wish.

Never said this.
But since they won't ban BS, TES will be always inferior to ANT. Just a sidenote here.

I see, it is time for me to backtrack from this forum.

Edit: Thought about "forum" as an umbrella term for non-deck-development discussions.

[ahg113]

I'm pretty sure Delver is the culprit here not brainstorm....I'm all for banning brainstorm but I would be sad to see Storm get worse because of it.

Delver (red), Snappy (red), V.Clique (black) & TNN (white) it's a whole rigmarole. Blue shouldn't have quick, effective beaters. Add quick beaters, plus filter, plus counter spells- whole lots of broken from the non-smurf orgy crowd. With folks saying ban less, welp 1 brainstorm is less than 4 creature cards (which are dumb cause turn dudes sideways is lame, yay spells).

[iamajellydonut]

I see, it is time for me to backtrack from this forum.

From this thread.

[Lemnear]

There is no tax aside from the fact that you have to play 20+ creatures in a shell? Please. Reanimating shells are far more compact with ent/discards/reanimating spells and 10+ cantrips/tutors plus blue shell to protect instead of playing mana elves, pridemages, retainers etc... And they're not obliged to reanimate legendary creatures either (even if every reanimating target they printed lately was a legend).

Yeah WHAT A TAX for Elves or Jund to run ~16 creatures *eyesroll*. Getting a card quality engine AND a combo layout for adding 6 cards is suuuuuuuuch a tax for those decks /sarcasm

Also the cognitive dissonance in defending BS but attacking Survival for havign the sin of dominating the format far less, for far less time, it's just... i can't

Where did I use Survival to "defend" Brainstorm? Where did I talk about dominance? Talking about dishonesty, lol. Stop putting words in my mouth, fella

Kill a shitload of decks ?!?! Axing BS wouldn't remove any deck from the format since extremely good BS replacements already exist. It would just nerf those deck, not magicall make blue disappear from the format. Dishonesty at its worst.

Build me a proper working Miracles, SneakShow or Tempo.dec w/o Brainstorm before coming up with that bullshit. Talking about a "nerf" here is laughable. Swallow your own dishonesty.

[Lord_Mcdonalds]

I don't even think Delver is the best blue deck, that title belongs to miracles.

Omni-tell

It's also completely blue as well

Standard has access to BOTH Thoughtseize and Duress. And while pretty popular, they don't ruin the format

So you are just ignoring the fact for a solid year Thoughtseize dominated standard, also duress will at best be a sideboard so long as creatures are the best thing in standard, which they likely will

[Ellomdian]

Cost of blue duals doesn't help. The throngs of people quitting and selling their Tundras because their beloved fucking cantrip got banned should help lower the price.

Because it's the legions of Legacy players cuddling with their Brainstorms at night that drove the cost of Duals up, not a significantly increased demand due to a crazy-popular Casual format.

The rise of EDH/Commander had more to do with breaking open the market of cards people had been hoarding for a decade than any single result or printing in recent Magic history. You don't see casuals with playsets of FOW just chilling in a Binder any more - they've sold and traded them away to get the latest 3-color 7CMC Win-More card that their playgroup is going to loathe.

Legacy is actually (frighteningly) more accessible, even with $200 lands. They reprinted ONS fetches, many staples are (relatively) recent printings that appreciated in value only after a tank when they rotated from Standard. Hell, FOW has been stable for long enough to be devalued just due to inflation.

What's your argument here? I'm interested to hear it, but it's not at all obvious a priori that Survival is too good now. I actually think adding a Survival deck to the meta would be a great foil to Miracles because it would get around the aspect of Terminus that's most punishing - putting creatures in a zone where they can't be easily accessed. It's not likely to displace GSZ from decks like Elves, so it wouldn't be 'they only way to do creatures', and it's also very easy to disrupt with a litany of cards that already see a ton of play.

I believe that Survival, much like Oath and Show and Tell, is a card that already has already demonstrated a significant power level in Modern Magic and that only improves over time due to design limitations. Vengevine Survival was a deck much like Flash-Hulk; it was simply (admittedly, at the time) the most powerful thing you could be doing in the format. Don't get me wrong, I would love to see it come off the Banned list for a cycle just to see what it did, but I am also in favor of Academy coming off for the same reason.

The problem with survival is the way wizards currently designs cards, with creatures being given stronger and stronger effects at the expense of spells, it would be a matter of time before there is another 'vengevine' that comes along and breaks the card in a new way.

Show and Tell can probably go for the same reason listed above.

I've just been kind of quietly waiting for WotC to print the card that Straight-Up Usurps Emrakul and Griselbrand in the SnS builds. People forget that in the bad old days, and by that I mean pre-Innistrad, some of the best creatures you could cheat into play were stuff like Akroma and Progenitus. Go look at old lists before they printed the 2 most dumb big creatures of all time - it's kind of stinky. There's a real chance it happens this fall, and it's terrifying...

1) People who are sick of seeing T8's that have 20+ copies of the same card, and are playing a format that REQUIRES Force of Will to be even remotely playable. The non-Force decks are preying on the Force decks, not the Storm decks... I think the real issue, is that the format is so heavily swung towards "If people stop playing Force of Will, people start dying on the first turn of the game".

...

We don't need Brainstorm hate, we need better combo hate in more colours. DnT does well without Brainstorm...

How, exactly, does your theoretical GWR Lovefest Hatebear deck stop ANT or Belcher T2 on the Draw? Because, knowing that FoW does not exist in the room, it's really hard to justify not just doing the most broken, fragile thing that you can, and hoping that you have better luck in your first 10 cards than the rest.

Also, Newsflash: Prison and Denial strategies are good against Cantrips. That seems to be a big part of why the Brainstorm Bloodlust is a NA centric philosophy - if you play Legacy in other regions, the strategies that are better against those decks (and DnT is the most visible) are played more often.

[Kanti]

Build me a proper working Miracles, SneakShow or Tempo.dec w/o Brainstorm before coming up with that bullshit. Talking about a "nerf" here is laughable. Swallow your own dishonesty.

Not to change subjects too much, but you are someone who beleives banning BS would not do much as lists would just replace it with SDT/Preordain (you think SDT because it's better in a vacuum, I think Preordain/XSpell because spells feed DTT). This being the case I don't quite understand what you're asking this guy, to build you a hypothetical list, when you are one who has made repeated posts about how the decks you just referenced would do just fine without BS (barring Miracles for obvious reasons, replace that with UW Stoneforge obviously).

I too beleive that most decks would be fine without BS, and would still be on top of the food chain. I have read repeated posts by you on this subject, yet here you are asking someone to build you a "proper" list?

[Ace/Homebrew]

The rise of EDH/Commander had more to do with breaking open the market of cards people had been hoarding for a decade than any single result or printing in recent Magic history. You don't see casuals with playsets of FOW just chilling in a Binder any more - they've sold and traded them away to get the latest 3-color 7CMC Win-More card that their playgroup is going to loathe.

Legacy is actually (frighteningly) more accessible, even with $200 lands. They reprinted ONS fetches, many staples are (relatively) recent printings that appreciated in value only after a tank when they rotated from Standard. Hell, FOW has been stable for long enough to be devalued just due to inflation.

EDH is very much responsible for the inflated cost of cards like Doubling Season, Mana Reflection, and Azusa, Lost but Seeking (not sure why all my examples are green). The biggest impact EDH has had on card prices is on obscure foils (Reflecting Pool, Consecrated Sphinx, Hallowed Burial).

No one who had previously been hoarding Force of Will is going to trade down for Tooth and Nail plus forty dollar-rares. Chances are value-hoarders who got bit by the EDH bug are using their valuable cards in their EDH decks. A tiger never changes his stripes and value-hoarders don't give up cards without getting back value.

Also EDH is by far more accessible than Legacy by it's nature as a casual format. If you cannot afford an Underground Sea in EDH, you use Watery Grave. Or Darkslick Shores. Or you cut a swamp and island in half and staple them together (Who cares? It's EDH...). That is not truly an option in Legacy. You can build an entire casually competitive EDH deck for the cost of an Underground Sea.

[Zombie]

There is no cognitive dissonance, Survival dominated with a narrow range of deck types.
Brainstorm works in and enables a broad range of deck types, Unless you have a reason to not run it, adding 4 BS blue Duals and fetches will improve most decks, but without the shuffle effects it is nowhere near as good.

Please tell me how different a deck that durdles a really long time to cast a big spell that f***ing kills me is from a deck that durdles less turns to cast a big spell that f***ing kills me is.

Survival got used:
In GW midrange beatdown decks with fat stuff
Bant-colored evasive beatdown decks (~=fish), some integrating a combo finish
UG tempo-oriented decks
Ooze-centric combo decks
Elf Survival was a thing

Right now, we see serious play of these with cantrip cartel:
2-3 varieties of Delver tempo
2 real control decks
2 serious combo archetypes

I grant, control survival probably wasn't a thing. But basically every strategy on Earth that worked with creatures was supported with Survival. And even then less people opted to use this supposedly broken engine than opt for the cantrip cartel as their consistency engine now. Far, far less.

[sjmcc13]

Right now, we see serious play of these with cantrip cartel:
2-3 varieties of Delver tempo
2 real control decks
2 serious combo archetypes

you are saying we have 6-7 decks, just looking at the decks that are placing on MODO and using Brainstorm recently :
RUG Delver
BUG Delver
Shardless BUG
UR Delver
URW Delver
Infect
Grixis Pyromancer
UWR Stoneblade
Miracles
Reanimator
ANT
OmniTell
There is also Dedge, Elves MUD, and Death and Taxes as options that do not use Brainstorm
Now to many those decks look to similar, but each is a different deck, that plays differently. Even among the delver decks. Yes they tend to have a common core, but the rest of the deck greatly affects how they play out.

Also, none of the successful decks are designed to durdle until they kill, pretty much every deck includes interaction both to stall, or to prevent you from stopping the kill.

Though the great thing about legacy is the range of competitive decks is allot larger then most people realize, as to many people forget that the decks in the top 8's are heavily influenced by what is popular, and that turns into a bit of a self feeding cycle.

[Anen]

Survival everywhere ! Survival Goblins, Survival Merfolk, Survival Recruiter, Survival and Taxes, Survival Blade, Survival Suicide.

Am I missing a deck?

[Lord_Mcdonalds]

Survival dredge and survival landstill

[Barook]

So you are just ignoring the fact for a solid year Thoughtseize dominated standard, also duress will at best be a sideboard so long as creatures are the best thing in standard, which they likely will

Standard has access to BOTH Thoughtseize and Duress. And while pretty popular, they don't ruin the format.

Emphasis mine. Standard is low-powered garbage to the point where they have to run Silumgar's Scorn because they have no Counterspell.

Maybe I chose the wrong example to showcase it better - I'll give you that. Modern is closer in powerlevel to Legacy than Standard and only 27% of the decks run Thoughtseize, ~14% Inquisition and Duress isn't even listed. That's hardly dominating.

And I haven't seen discard pushing out nonblue decks which can't run Brainstorm out of the format.

[Lord Seth]

Omni-tell

It's also completely blue as well



So you are just ignoring the fact for a solid year Thoughtseize dominated standard, also duress will at best be a sideboard so long as creatures are the best thing in standard, which they likely will

Thoughtseize didn't dominate Standard for a year (I assume you're talking about RTR-Theros Standard). Monoblack Devotion dominated Standard. Yeah, Thoughtseize was part of its strength, but saying "Thoughtseize dominated Standard" for a year is like saying "Pack Rat dominated Standard" or "Gray Merchant of Asphodel dominated Standard" or "Nightveil Specter dominated Standard." They were all key pieces of the deck, and if you took one of them out the deck would've lost quite a bit of power (maybe not Nightveil Specter so much, but it also was played in Monoblue Devotion so it was in both the #1 and #2 deck).

If anything dominated that Standard season, it was Mutavault. That card saw about as much play as Brainstorm is seeing right now in Legacy.

[Lord_Mcdonalds]

Thoughtseize didn't dominate Standard for a year (I assume you're talking about RTR-Theros Standard). Monoblack Devotion dominated Standard. Yeah, Thoughtseize was part of its strength, but saying "Thoughtseize dominated Standard" for a year is like saying "Pack Rat dominated Standard" or "Gray Merchant of Asphodel dominated Standard" or "Nightveil Specter dominated Standard." They were all key pieces of the deck, and if you took one of them out the deck would've lost quite a bit of power (maybe not Nightveil Specter so much, but it also was played in Monoblue Devotion so it was in both the #1 and #2 deck).

If anything dominated that Standard season, it was Mutavault. That card saw about as much play as Brainstorm is seeing right now in Legacy.

In raw numbers, sure mutavault saw a lot more play, but Thoughtseize was apart of the two most dominant decks in that standard, esper and monoblack, decks like boss sligh existed to exploit the fact those decks relied on Thoughtseize to pick apart their opponents hand.

Admittedly part of it was because Thoughtseize as a card was much more powerful then anything else in standard (card wise or what you could be doing) at the time, but that kind of makes my point.