Brainstorm
Force of Will
Lion's Eye Diamond
Counterbalance
Sensei's Divining Top
Tarmogoyf
Phyrexian Dreadnaught
Goblin Lackey
Standstill
Natural Order
There's also the oft-repeated (and true) problem that banning Brainstorm (alone) is the worst of both worlds - you make all sorts of conditional cards worse AND you do nothing to break up the critical mass of cantrips that makes chaining cantrips into Dig possible.
Not necessarily. Fun is highly subjective after all.Originally Posted by porcupinetreeman
For some people it might, but for others it would make the format less fun.
I lean towards a Brainstorm ban myself, but how in the world can you claim banning Brainstorm is the "only option" for helping the format when banning Dig Through Time is such an obvious option?
I just played against a deck on MTGO with maindeck Chalice, Trinisphere, and Choke. And another game earlier that T1 Chalice shut me out completely. You either have FOW or scoop with so many cantrips.
Let's see how deeply Chalice decks penetrate the format in the next few months; perhaps that will point Wizards to a solution. Either play Brainstorm & friends, or Chalice & friends. Not even a rock/paper/scissors format anymore at that point.
DTT has to go, but that doesn't mean that BS and the cantrip shell isn't ban-worthy, either. I wouldn't mind DTT, BS and Ponder gone to weaken the blue shell. Think of Wizards' retarded ban strategy for Modern what you want, but as for preventing blue cantrip shells from dominating, it certainly worked wonders to ban Ponder and Preordain. And they were smart enough to ban DTT alongside TC instead of leaving it alone to let the format rot.
A world where people don't get away so easily with running crap like REB maindeck nearly unpunished? I would be very okay with that.
Running conditional cards should come at the price of being useless in certain situations (e.g. Choke in Sylvan Plug). With Brainstorm, this price is way too low. Jamming conditional cards with Brainstorm into a deck is easy mode deckbuilding. Nonblue decks don't have said option. So either you're don't get the advantage of running conditional cards, get severely fucked over for using them from time to time or you adapt a blue core to fully utilize them.
People claiming this is a good thing makes me cringe.
I really wonder how many times we have to go through the ever same bullshit without you just thinking one step ahead of how every blue deck would look like if you build those under the credo of "no conditional cards" and seriously claim it doesn't basically build itself.
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Can't be any worse than the current bullshit.
It can; I won't repeat all the stuff written in regards pointing that out.
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How is making conditional cards not work as well in any way bad?
"Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."
"Politicians are like diapers. They should be changed often and for the same reason."
"Governing is too important to be left to people as silly as politicians."
"Politicians were mostly people who'd had too little morals and ethics to stay lawyers."
As an outside, and unfamiliar reader, this comment is full of weak. Criticizing only because I'm unsure what your point/counter argument is. I agree bstorm is the devil, and if not bstorm (and dtt) then the axe should fall on the creep, miscolored u-men- delver, snappy, tnn, & clique.
Why should one color specific spell reward traditionally sub-optimal deck building strategies? Why should a color that was traditionally not a quick aggro color get Power:cost efficient creatures?
I guess by fun I mean diverse.
Yep, nothing.
You are excused. Its just that I'm fed up repeating stuff every two weeks which Barook & needless are unable to argue on, but remain silent for a week or two just to threw out their initial statement once again that Legacy would be Color Equality Magic Christmas Land for 20+ Decks to Beat without Brainstorm (and Ponder) which is total bullshit and I'm plain sick of outlining why Zoo wouldn't make up a return; why Miracles doesn't get "slightly nerfed" but killed; why Sylvan Library still wouldn't be the best card selection around; etc. If you interrested in details, browse through the last ~25 pages for several full circles of discussion.
I'm not on their level to plain copy & paste the same crap over and over again.
To your question: Its narrow-minded to argue that only Brainstorm has this effect on greedy, conditional deckbuilding and every fetchland in Legacy is the proof of decks "cheating" to get away with 1 or 2 Basics against the policeman Wasteland, just to name the most remarkable example. Brainstorm/Ponder do not "reward" conditional cards, they make them playable. This is a point I'm constantly arguing with Barook & Co..
Do you think Terminus would be even playable without Brainstorm? Barook does and I think thats ridiculous. Would Stifle/Daze be playable without Brainstorm to get them out of your hand at certain points of the game? I doubt it. Brainstorm/Ponder make such conditional cards and decks playable and it's outright hilarious to argue again and again that banning Brainstorm/Ponder has no critical effect on cards/decks like that.
As Barook was once again dodging questions, I repeat it for you ahg113: How would you build blue decks without Brainstorm/Ponder or conditional cards? Can you build more than 1 straight obvious blue shell to mimic the diversity blue offers atm in Aggro/Control/Combo?
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The biggest problem is that you homogenize and consolidate the major archetypes. Delver probably gets limited to RUG and the hyper-aggressive Ur/Grixis builds that aren't interested in getting to the midgame where soft counters lose effectiveness and removing a two-toughness creature is easy. Control just goes to Esper Mentor with CounterTop (UWr is possible but less likely) with the full 4 each of Snaps and Plows to team up with Verdict rather than Terminus. Combo aside from Belcher/Oops/Spanish Inquisition gets worse, though Omni likely survives in weakened form thanks to Dig. The nonblue meta share likely doesn't move or even falls as people start replacing some number of cantrips and conditional answers with more unconditional business like Abrupt Decay or Lightning Bolt and the meta share of turn 0-1 combo rises. The fate of Lands, Loam, and Dredge are pretty tightly intertwined - my guess is they get better for about six months while people skimp on Graveyard hate and then go into steady decline as people go up to 4-5 SB slots from the 2-3 that are most common now, and replace crap like Surgical Extraction with unconditional options like Rest in Peace, Ravenous Trap, and Leyline of the Void. MUD and other Chalice decks have a similar fate and may mirror the rise and fall of Graveyard strategies as they require specific answers (usually artifact removal) that people will briefly skimp on before just running an adequate number of. A fall in the number of Dazes is matched by a close rise in the number of Counterspells and Spell Snares. Chain-cantrips-into-Dig remains the best strategy.
In short, some things change, but the meta becomes less diverse overall. Blue is still the best color by a wide margin, and "fair" nonblue decks may even get worse.
To answer Lemnear's question: I think blue decks would look like something in the vein of shard less bug. A deck where, aside from discard, all the cards in the deck are good whenever you draw them. That deck is only okay right now, because goodstuff decks don't really make sense in legacy, where most decks are allowed to just draw better stuff with one tap of an island. Sure, shard less plays brainstorm, but it's actually pretty underwhelming in that deck (it's pretty weak when you cascade into it.
For the record, I'm pretty nonchalant about the banning of brainstorm...i couldn't care less, but for the sake of the thread I though I would say that banning brainstorm would not kill blue decks, just change them.
Well, first off, I disagree with you that a blue deck should be able to do all of those things, or at least all of those things well. In this Utopia (secular) where colors are balanced, there's trade off, so blue would be able to do control and combo with help, but not aggro (4 referenced offenders named, old fish is fine). Just like currently, green does aggro, lil combo (elves), but not much control (city of solitude, elephant grass, and?). This excludes obvious printed hate like choke, combust, red/blue blasts, karma, gloom, lifeforce, deathgrip.
Saying conditional cards are unplayable is a fact of life. I'd love it if some cards in other cards were playable, but for circumstances they aren't. There's no panacea like b'storm in other colors to just make these fringe cards playable. The gripe lots of people have with bstorm is the opportunity costs it eliminates for these conditional cards, such as Stifle.
Tangent on example of the given conditional card Stifle:
Stifle is used as a 1-mana Stone Rain more often than not. If it were used to nullify a Griz trigger, or Top Spin, or storm trigger, it'd be fine and used as the corner case sb card that makes sense. But because it's blue, pitches to FoW, and there's no penalty for running it, spam everywhere. Bind isn't as versatile, costs 1 more, but replaces itself and gets no play. If that were a blue card, I'm sure it would see play in Legacy, just like Squelch sees (some) play in Modern. Stone Rain is not a playable card (unless you wanna get cute and break a Energy Field). Why does the LD color have an unplayable hallmark card, but the library manipulation color get a fetch-wasteland killer for U? Oh, because new players don't like LD, LD isn't fun, blah blah blah. But blue is now the best LD color.
A lot of the argument is based on blue has almost all of the toys, and blue mages want to keep them. Since WotC hasn't provided the other four colors impressive toys of their own, or toys that blue just doesn't co-op (monastery mentor, drs, YPyro) it makes sense to take something away from blue. That's the crux.
Or, how about, we change the starting hand-size? If you have a blue cantrip deck you start with five cards, and if you have a non-blue deck, you start with 8. To be verified by a judge. That way everybody is happy. You keep your card, we get the card selection*.
P.S. - Listening to NPR, this story is on the radio, I'm gonna be busy for the next 30 mins.
Hold on a second - where did I say Miracles remains playable with Brainstorm gone? We have been over this before - Miracles would be replaced by UWx Stoneblade - which is a good thing. The deck is pure cancer and Terminus puts severe restrictions on how to build creature-heavy decks - either you have countermagic, run Vial (like D&T or Goblins) or you're at the mercy of their 1-mana Super-Wrath of Gods. Having to deal with combo and Terminus is way too much. And no, Zoo would not come back with Terminus gone. I don't know why it gets always get dragged back into this discussion as poster child. I don't think most people give two shits about Zoo, at least I don't.
Stifle basically only sees play in certain Delver variants and is a fringe card in Infect. But that's exactly what I'm talking about - powerful effects, but with the drawback of being useless under certain conditions. As for Daze, take a look at Pauper - sees play in Mono-U Delver, even without Brainstorm in the same deck. It's just not an auto-include like in Legacy Delver variants.
Knocking down the power level of blue decks to a more reasonable level, and thus evening the playing field a bit, would be the end goal. Blue would still be the best color and without a doubt, deck construction would start with something like this, assuming DTT, BS and Ponder are gone:
4x FoW
4x Preordain
4x Serum Visions
(Yx Gitaxian Probe)
Blue would still be in very good shape, but at least their power level would take a hit. Wizards even argued for Modern that too many quality cantrips are a bad thing because they make games play out the same all the time, and thus the format boring. Legacy is stale as a fart right now. Even you recently freaked out when you realized that many of the top decks run the same shell of FoW, BS, Ponder, Probe, DTT (and Preordain), only swapping wincons within the decks.
And no, 4 out of 5 decks running a BS-based cantrip shell isn't diversity. It's an illusion of diversity at best.
As I provided the answer how blue decks would be build, now answer the following question: How many decks can you build outside of a) blue-cantrip shells, b) Prison (either D&T (dying thanks to DTT, see link above), Lands or Chalice-based decks like MUD/Aggro Loam) to fight blue cantrip shells or c) the few nonblue combo decks that ignore your opponent (Elves, Burn) and then hope that they're actually viable?
Last edited by Barook; 08-02-2015 at 02:46 PM. Reason: Typos
That's what I thought you would say, though I can scarcely believe you just did. This ▲ right there is the most illogical unfounded collection of sentences I have read since just before the ban of Cruise. And since I already responded to this exact silliness then...
"Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."
"Politicians are like diapers. They should be changed often and for the same reason."
"Governing is too important to be left to people as silly as politicians."
"Politicians were mostly people who'd had too little morals and ethics to stay lawyers."
I wish wotc would say like; "ok, we're gonna ban brainstorm for 6 months in legacy, let's see what happens." There's just so much blustering on both sides it'd be nice to get some data and not conjecture.
It's also kinda strange the players seem to know significantly more about legacy than wotc does. If they don't care, which is what it seems to look like, then why don't they give up the reins to someone who does?
It could be interesting to apply a community-based approach, as in letting non-DCI tournaments in a controlled setting have access to legacy-acceptable banned cards, or taking certain cards and putting them on the banlist and seeing what the meta creates while also responding to cards that are deemed hard to fight. Trying to actually calculate numbers and meta-analysis on the argument of banning can solve many things, but who wants to sit in a room where every deck feels broken?
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