All B/R update speculation.

[Admiral_Arzar]

But can Zoo or Affinity or Boros (?) ever beat a bolt, a plow and a snapcaster mage? Or a Stoneblade deck, or even a bug deck with Decays and Delvers and Liliana? No.

So saying "ban terminus and those decks come back" is blatantly not true.

I would take speed Zoo against slow ungainly BUG or Jund decks any day. Fast beats + Price of Progress is not something those decks are designed to deal with. Zoo was always solid against tempo because you have a ton of threats and unlike most decks you have a million removal for Delvers and can just race their aggressive draws. Stoneblade with SFM + Batterskull, TNN, AND Snap + STP is pretty horrible though, and Miracles is stone-cold unwinnable. Heck even Storm didn't scare me in my speed Zoo days, I never lost a match to ANT or TES. Sneaky Show on the other hand is fucking awful, Zoo can't race a fast Griselbrand.

Very thorough analysis of decline of Goblins

I would add one thing to your very thorough list. The printing of Delver made tempo matchups more difficult for Goblins. In the past the deck could just chump Goyf until kingdom come while building card advantage and eventually overwhelming the tempo player. With Delver there is now a fast evasive threat that can put Goblins on a clock backed up by removal.

[Stevestamopz]

Goblins decline went as follows

1) SFM

Jitte always destroyed Goblins, with SFM you got a Demonic Tutor that could block Lackey if you were on the play.

2) Batterskull

Now instead of jitte you could get a life link wall with flash that made profitable combat difficult. Goblins lethal piledriver fueled attack is destroyed by Batterskull.

3) DRS

Decay is nothing against Goblins, a Goblin deck can almost always beat 1-for-1s. But the fact that 1/2 the decks were playing a Norwood Ranger made Lackey totally unreliable.

4) Show and Tell / Reanimation targets going from great to retarded

Goblins could race Empyrial Archangel, Inkwell, Jin Gitaxius, sometimes even Iona with a couple of Vials. With the next generation of R&Ds peyote induced abortions like Griselbrand, Emrakul, Elesh Norn, Omniderp, goblins stands no chance.

I don't think TNN is particularly a problem more so than say a resolved Knight. Both crush most Goblins in combat, TNN can't even block Piledriver. It's the equipment attached to said TNN that makes the game unwinnable. It certainly didn't help, but I think the DRS and SFM in a deck like Shitblade are the bigger problem for goblins.

A Brainstorm banning would help Goblins, all the 2 card combo decks would lose some consistency, the blue tempo decks should be good match ups for goblins, vs. combo game 2 spot discard would have more impact.

All valid points although I maintain Stoneblade/Deathblade is a pretty even matchup. Batterskull/Jitte all die to Tin-Street Hooligan and you just board out Lackey. Why Deathrite is a 1/2 I will never understand but whatever. Decay is good because it takes out your Vial, whilst also never being a dead draw. Must be nice...

I should have expanded on True Name- It's not so much the card itself - as you said, we can Piledrive right through it- it's the format's response to True Name; Golgari Charm, Zealous Persecution, Marsh Casualties and even E.Plague all see play because of it, all of which are ridiculously good against a sea of 1/1s.

Brainstorm being banned would be nice, but I don't think it will or should happen. As for ponder/preordain/dtt, I wouldn't be sad to see them go.

[maharis]

The problem nonblue decks face isn't really confined to a single card. But if I had to pick two, I would pick Counterbalance and Show & Tell.

Most players know how to play around a wrath effect from a control deck. But when that control deck can counter all your refills for free, you have little choice but to pray they don't have it and just jam.

Goblins, incidentally, can beat this with Cavern/Vial and Matron/Ringleader. However, its lack of meaningful disruption in favor of critical mass of goblins makes it a big dog to other control decks and combo decks. Couple that very unfavorable outlook with a couple 50/50 matchups and you have a recipe for a deck that simply is not good enough to match up.

A deck like Deadguy Ale can do well occasionally because it can play more disruption, sometimes attached to its creatures (Thalia, Tidehollow for example). Even Zoo has access to disruptive cards like Thalia, Eidolon, Gaddock Teeg. But with weaker consistency tools, if something goes wrong, or a couple opening hands are dodgy, it's lights out.

That removes the incentive to not play blue, even with maindeck blasts and chokes at different parts of the format. You need the consistency to keep up, and by the time you add 8 cantrips, you might as well add 4 forces and a couple other counters and a Strix or two to your deck and voila. That way you can beat Show & Tell easily, since there's so few good ways to interact with it in the Zoo realm.

[Kanti]

@sjmcc13: Cost is hardly a reason on MTGO where switching decks is cheaper. And guess what, the blue percentage is in general even higher than in Paper.

Good deck will get good results. See: Lands and Loam this GP. Despite low numbers, they placed pretty high, simply because the deck IS powerful and plows through this kind of field, partly due to lack of proper SB hate against it.

Miracles might have sheer numbers in the meta, but when the sole two Miracle decks placing in the Top 8 make it to the finals of a GP twice in a row, then it isn't much of a coincidence, either.

I'm not sure there was lack of proper sb hate against Loam, or even md hate vs them. It's kind of like when someone said earlier that they were disappointed that DTT was so poorly represented in this GP.

Was it though? Is DTT poorly represented when RUG decks are dropping Mongoose for DRS just to hate on the gy?

[Zombie]

The problem nonblue decks face isn't really confined to a single card. But if I had to pick two, I would pick Counterbalance and Show & Tell.

IMO, it's not just Counterbalance. It's the mix of CB, Terminus and the threat of Entreat just killing you then and there while Miracles can keep their mana up for all of your turn and just dump lethal to the board EOT. You can beat Terminus, you can beat Counterbalance. It's not especially hard. It's fucking hard to reliably do that while racing the inevitability of a lethal Entreat.

[MGB]

Look, aggro decks can beat Stoneforge Mystic, Batterskull, and True Name Nemesis. All of these are medium-power permanents that an aggro deck can go around, or over the top, or just remove with removal spells.

The fact that a 1-mana instant speed Hallowed Burial exists in this format is just insane for aggro to deal with. The *only* way to compete when something like that is being played is to have extreme card advantage to compensate. The only real card advantage aggro builds are decks like Goblins with their Ringleader cards, or Elves with draw engines. That really restricts the amount of aggro you can play because to compete with Terminus you *must* have a draw engine of some kind.

Whereas if Terminus was not being played, but Batterskull, TNN, Stoneforge, and Deathrite all were, aggro decks without much card draw could still compete by going bigger, going around, or just drawing their artifact removal / -1/-1 effects.

[Quasim0ff]

IMO, it's not just Counterbalance. It's the mix of CB, Terminus and the threat of Entreat just killing you then and there while Miracles can keep their mana up for all of your turn and just dump lethal to the board EOT. You can beat Terminus, you can beat Counterbalance. It's not especially hard. It's fucking hard to reliably do that while racing the inevitability of a lethal Entreat.

Yeah, that's how every miracles game goes. It doesn't take skill at all, you just register the deck and you're set.


:violin: :facepalm:

[MGB]

Yeah, that's how every miracles game goes. It doesn't take skill at all, you just register the deck and you're set.


:violin: :facepalm:

When you're playing the best deck in the format, it takes less skill to win... by definition.

[Gheizen64]

At this point, i'm of the opinion a brainstorm ban wouldn't do shit. The problem is twofolds:

- people at this point are extremely entrenched in their position that BS is what legacy is, even if it wasn't always the case. Mostly new players adapting the best deck and convincing themselves the format was always 80% blue to make their reasoning sound better, ignoring completely the history of the format which for a period had fucking goblin lackey on the chopping block
- blue would still remain by far the best color, and we would just lose miracle for stoneblade variants

Now, i have an issue with that first point, since i was a TnT player for a while (survival deck). When survival was axed, no one cried for it as a centerpiece of the format, defining decks since its very beginning. I understand that the central difference here with BS is that BS was more or less considered always one of the best cards of the format since the start, while survival was mostly T1.5 T2 decks for the longest while until Vengevine was printed.

When WotC printed MM, they said they printed it to try to curb the blue dominance in the format, by giving non-blue decks a way to contrast combo. This had its risks, but, as they said, they could always ban the card if it proved too good, which it did. Now, why can't they do the same for a card like Survival? Unban it, see if the format degenerate too much under it (i'm of the opinion it wouldn't) and if it do just reban it. If we can't curb down the cantrip cartel power because of nostalgia reasons, at least give us another pillar. Recruiter and Survival are the only two cards i see on the list that imho could create a new pillar moving the focus aside from the cantrip cartel a bit without degenerating the format like other pillars would (Workshop/Bazaar/draw7).

As for the ones who inevitably say that Survival is a rpoblem because it always get better. This is absolutely not true. You know what's a card that actually get better? Show and tell. The reason should be easy to see: show and tell cheat mana costs. As such, before show and tell was a ritual for 9, then for 10, 12, now 15, and it cheat cards that essentially say "you win the game".
Survival on average don't get better, it remain on par with the rest of the format as better creatures are printed, because, with only one exception (Being vengevine) it's a repeatable tutor, but can't cheat mana costs. It's a consistency engine, similar to GSZ, with less versatility (can't ramp), more susceptible to hate, with a combo included (that's 6-7 cards dedicated ASIDE from Survival itself), and more long-term power. Honestly, i think at this point, SotF decks would just run 1-2 Vengevines, no shit like Walla or Memnite, and the retainer + iona/Grizzly combo as an hate option for decks like Omnitell, with the rest of the deck playing like a midrange Jund/BUG deck/WBG deck.
On the other hand, new creatures that get printed tend to be better in decks that don't run survival than with it. Examples? DRS and Prowess/Pyro creatures are creatures that go better in spell based shells than creature based ones like SotF. Same is true for Delver of secret, Snapcaster and arguably Clique. SFM is sort of a mixed bag as it is effective but incredibly slow to chain tutor. Taxing creatures are usually not something you want to run alongside SotF since those decks play little colored sources and can't chain effectively. Etc... Survival being banned on the "it would only get better" premise make NO sense since Show and Tell and reanimate spells, which actually GET better as time goes on since they cheat mana costs, still exist and thrive in the format.

All this said #unban SotF #unban Vise # unban Twist # unban Earthcraft # unban Recruiter

[JDK]

The Goblins player ended up with 24 points after he'd played all of day 1 and 2. 9th placed Andrew Rayner had 37 points. I thought the whole "missed on breakers" thing was a joke... but obviously not. At best that means the Goblins player went 8-7 at the end of GP Lille. That's not even close to having made top 8.

Yup, you can pick those in the lower places to prove your point but you still don't want to see the ones in higher finishes. Oh well. Reading whole sentences/posts is so difficult.


Who doesn't dream of the old glorious days of Team Italia and Boros, right?

[Koby]

SDT and DTT are powerful, and enable some really clever decks that already run Brainstorm, Ponder, and fetchlands.

How does the saying go:

Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It's certainty.

If we run the numbers, the most successful decks run the cantrip cartel, with blue fetchland being the most abundantly played. There's logic to call for these to get banned, as odd as that sounds. It also improves tournament logistics by speeding up normal play. Next is Brainstorm. I don't need to add much to this. Incidentally, Force of Will follows Brainstorm, but this keeps unfair decks in check actively and directly. Then, there's Ponder. Finally, Wasteland and more blue fetchlands if we count them individually.

Basically, the discussion should prioritize what the Legacy format should do with Brainstorm and fetchlands over DTT and SDT.

If a ban were to take place, there are a handful of viable options to unban that shouldn't be on the current list.

[Quasim0ff]

When you're playing the best deck in the format, it takes less skill to win... by definition.

Are you familiar with control decks?

[maharis]

I don't disagree that SFM/Skull, TNN, DRS are all beatable cards for an aggressive creature deck. However:

That really restricts the amount of aggro you can play because to compete in Legacyyou *must* have a draw engine of some kind.

Fixed.

There are only two viable decks in Legacy that lack some sort of engine: D&T and Burn. (And you could argue that D&T at least has Stoneforge Mystic)

Three-fourths of the format plays Brainstorm + buddies.
Elves has Glimpse/Visionary/GSZ.
Dredge is all engine.
Painter has Recruiter and Top.
Midrange decks (Jund, Maverick, Deadguy) play Bob/Sylvan/Top.
Nic Fit plays Top & GSZ (If it doesn't just play brainstorm)
Tezz has tezz/jace/strix.
Lands and Loam have Loam/Gamble/Looting/more.
Even Merfolk has Silvergill Adept. MUD has staff/metalworker.

Further, the closest thing to a viable all-in aggro deck in Legacy is Infect, and that deck plays Brainstorm + buddies. (Actually, burn does a good job of carrying the aggro mantle, but definitely has a combo-ish quality to it that makes it not quite apples-to-apples).

Draw/quality engines are a requirement to have a competitive deck in this format. One particular engine is so good that the format is completely warped around it. But leaving that aside for a moment, even if Terminus wasn't around, the ability for Zoo decks as they are traditionally known to recover after STP-snap-STP into Wrath or Verdict is very low. And of course that still doesn't do anything about their combo matchup.

Now you let control decks do that and then deploy Counterbalance, you're just asking for a nightmare. Yes, taking top makes CB less good, but look at the non-blue decks listed above that use Top as their avenue to compete on CQ. You're still nowhere.

[Stevestamopz]

Yup, you can pick those in the lower places to prove your point but you still don't want to see the ones in higher finishes. Oh well. Reading whole sentences/posts is so difficult.


Who doesn't dream of the old glorious days of Team Italia and Boros, right?

Erm right.. whatever you say dude, that was the only Goblins deck to make day 2. Pretty hard to pick and choose from a sample size of... 1.

[CutthroatCasual]

When you're playing the best deck in the format, it takes less skill to win... by definition.

Maybe in Modern. In Legacy, someone that knows their Tier 2 deck inside and out vs. someone that picked up a DTB last week, I would bet my money on the Tier 2 deck (unless it's obvious jank.) Why do you think you see the same names associated with the top decks Top 8'ing events? Surely it's not because they know how to play their deck and instead because they're playing the best deck.

[maharis]

At this point, i'm of the opinion a brainstorm ban wouldn't do shit. The problem is twofolds:

- people at this point are extremely entrenched in their position that BS is what legacy is, even if it wasn't always the case. Mostly new players adapting the best deck and convincing themselves the format was always 80% blue to make their reasoning sound better, ignoring completely the history of the format which for a period had fucking goblin lackey on the chopping block
- blue would still remain by far the best color, and we would just lose miracle for stoneblade variants

Now, i have an issue with that first point, since i was a TnT player for a while (survival deck). When survival was axed, no one cried for it as a centerpiece of the format, defining decks since its very beginning. I understand that the central difference here with BS is that BS was more or less considered always one of the best cards of the format since the start, while survival was mostly T1.5 T2 decks for the longest while until Vengevine was printed.

When WotC printed MM, they said they printed it to try to curb the blue dominance in the format, by giving non-blue decks a way to contrast combo. This had its risks, but, as they said, they could always ban the card if it proved too good, which it did. Now, why can't they do the same for a card like Survival? Unban it, see if the format degenerate too much under it (i'm of the opinion it wouldn't) and if it do just reban it. If we can't curb down the cantrip cartel power because of nostalgia reasons, at least give us another pillar. Recruiter and Survival are the only two cards i see on the list that imho could create a new pillar moving the focus aside from the cantrip cartel a bit without degenerating the format like other pillars would (Workshop/Bazaar/draw7).

As for the ones who inevitably say that Survival is a rpoblem because it always get better. This is absolutely not true. You know what's a card that actually get better? Show and tell. The reason should be easy to see: show and tell cheat mana costs. As such, before show and tell was a ritual for 9, then for 10, 12, now 15, and it cheat cards that essentially say "you win the game".
Survival on average don't get better, it remain on par with the rest of the format as better creatures are printed, because, with only one exception (Being vengevine) it's a repeatable tutor, but can't cheat mana costs. It's a consistency engine, similar to GSZ, with less versatility (can't ramp), more susceptible to hate, with a combo included (that's 6-7 cards dedicated ASIDE from Survival itself), and more long-term power. Honestly, i think at this point, SotF decks would just run 1-2 Vengevines, no shit like Walla or Memnite, and the retainer + iona/Grizzly combo as an hate option for decks like Omnitell, with the rest of the deck playing like a midrange Jund/BUG deck/WBG deck.
On the other hand, new creatures that get printed tend to be better in decks that don't run survival than with it. Examples? DRS and Prowess/Pyro creatures are creatures that go better in spell based shells than creature based ones like SotF. Same is true for Delver of secret, Snapcaster and arguably Clique. SFM is sort of a mixed bag as it is effective but incredibly slow to chain tutor. Taxing creatures are usually not something you want to run alongside SotF since those decks play little colored sources and can't chain effectively. Etc... Survival being banned on the "it would only get better" premise make NO sense since Show and Tell and reanimate spells, which actually GET better as time goes on since they cheat mana costs, still exist and thrive in the format.

All this said #unban SotF #unban Vise # unban Twist # unban Earthcraft # unban Recruiter

This is a very good post. Great breakdown of why Survival should be unbanned. (As long as Brainstorm and S&T remain unbanned, of course).

All Survival combos are beaten by already-popular options like Pithing Needle, Deathrite Shaman, Rest in Peace, Grafdigger's Cage, Scavenging Ooze...

Actually, Survival in particular is really good against Terminus, which wouldn't be the worst thing ever.

I wish I could find my post in the Khans thread where I said that Prowess was going to be stupid good in legacy, even though it's "only" a combat effect. That should've been obvious.

WoTC could've done something for the non-blue wedges that wasn't just unplayable-even-in-standard dreck, though. The best they could do for Rock was Outlast??

[rufus]

... MUD has staff/metalworker. ...

I think you mean staff + cloudpost. Metalworker + Staff is closer to a win con.

Dragon Stompy seems to be decent for being 'engine-less' but it's also notoriously unreliable.

IMO, more generally, if 4x Silvergill Adept qualifies as an engine, then the definition so so broad as to be useless.

[maharis]

Maybe in Modern. In Legacy, someone that knows their Tier 2 deck inside and out vs. someone that picked up a DTB last week, I would bet my money on the Tier 2 deck (unless it's obvious jank.) Why do you think you see the same names associated with the top decks Top 8'ing events? Surely it's not because they know how to play their deck and instead because they're playing the best deck.

Julian is one of the best Elves players in the world and the matchups got so bad that even he abandoned it (Though I say this without knowing what he played in Lille).

It's simply foolish to think that your expertise in your Tier 2 deck will mean anything against the increasingly powerful and consistent Tier 1 lists. You can of course play what you want and possibly get lucky, but the top 8 data speaks for itself in terms of what rises to the top.

[Stevestamopz]

This is a very good post. Great breakdown of why Survival should be unbanned. (As long as Brainstorm and S&T remain unbanned, of course).

All Survival combos are beaten by already-popular options like Pithing Needle, Deathrite Shaman, Rest in Peace, Grafdigger's Cage, Scavenging Ooze...

Actually, Survival in particular is really good against Terminus, which wouldn't be the worst thing ever.

I wish I could find my post in the Khans thread where I said that Prowess was going to be stupid good in legacy, even though it's "only" a combat effect. That should've been obvious.

WoTC could've done something for the non-blue wedges that wasn't just unplayable-even-in-standard dreck, though. The best they could do for Rock was Outlast??

I agree with all of this and Gheizen64's post.

If Show and Tell exists, please tell me why Survival is Banned? Is turn 1 on the play Emrakul more fair than Survival?

topkek

[Richard Cheese]

I don't think it's a matter of restoring a particular deck or archetype...personally I just miss the rock/paper/scissors feel of the format from several years ago. Maybe it's just rose-colored glasses, but to me every deck in that period felt like it had good and bad matchups, whereas now it feels like the format is mostly dominated by 50% decks. It makes metagaming feel a lot less important than practice/familiarity. I'm sure that's a huge plus for some people, but for those of us that get bored of a deck after a few weeks and just enjoy playing a variety of matchups, it's taken a lot of enjoyment out of the format. In Jersey I expected to play against Miracles, UR Delver, Elves, Sneak/Show, and Burn, and I did exactly that. The only surprise match of the day was Dredge, and getting to sit across from someone playing Nic Fit.