Brainstorm
Force of Will
Lion's Eye Diamond
Counterbalance
Sensei's Divining Top
Tarmogoyf
Phyrexian Dreadnaught
Goblin Lackey
Standstill
Natural Order
Originally Posted by wcm8
Just going to post the gatherer text for Recruiter:
"When Goblin Recruiter enters the battlefield, search your library for any number of Goblin cards and reveal those cards. Shuffle your library, then put them on top of it in any order."
The anti-cheating part of the card is already there, just saying.
Okay, fair enough. There *is* still the problem of cheating related to deck manipulation in general, especially when it involves stacking multiple cards and shuffling the remainder. People still manage to cheat when there's a shuffle involved even when it's only for a fetch land activation, so Recruiter being legal could make it even easier for these sort of unscrupulous players to use actual sleight of hand "magic" tricks to their advantage in a legacy tournament. This is part of why Wizards' design team has aimed more towards creating new cards with Scry + Draw instead of Shuffle + Draw, as it reduces the time involved with physically shuffling a deck and the problems associated with shuffling in general.
I just think that a 'fixed' version of Goblin Recruiter should put a numeric limit on the number of Goblins that it could stack, say maybe 2 or 3 (perhaps more if it had a higher cmc). It'd still be really good with Goblin Ringleader as you could chain them together, but at least this way it would make it so the trigger would be more quickly resolved and also maybe reduce the opportunity for 'magicians' to work their 'magic'.
In a way I agree, but fetchlands are legal, Brainstorm is legal. My point being that just because there are some bad eggs out there that will cheat, we can't use them as the baseline for what the average player will do. I feel dirty when I Magus of the Moon someone out of the game, let alone stacking Mindbreak Trap with my Recruiter - which I don't see how you could do to begin with seeing as you would flick all the Goblins out of your deck and onto the table you're playing on, but I digress.
I'll accept a fixed Recruiter when we get a fixed Deathrite Shaman or True Name Nemesis
Takes a while. Have only 3 Elves raps to far released
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I play Lands, and Miracles (without Mentors - still a viable and popular deck) is the only non-combo in the Meta that doesn't bombard me with a barrage of threats. Every other "control" deck (Blade, BUG, D&T, etc) are constantly throwing threats after me. Against (non-mentor) Miracles I tend to board out Maze, Chasm, Tabernacle, and most of my Punishing Fires. I would never do this against Legacy's other "control" decks - they are key players in those matches.
So (for the umpteenth time) it's not strictly about having creatures. It's about the style of play and the ability to switch to "beat-down" mode when required. Most "control" decks in Legacy can go aggressive very comfortably. Mentorless Miracles is the only deck so committed to control that it cannot. If you can't see this, all I can say is trying playing Lands or Enchantress for a while.
It's not about being blue or not - Prison is all about pro-active control. Chalice pro-actively counters all spells of the chosen cmc. CB requires the control player to react to spells on the stack - otherwise it's erratic and not very good.
Again, it's about pro-active control like mana-denial. Also RGCL is considered combo/control because it can very easily play a non-combo style game. RUG Lands technically can combo it quickly, but in practice this is the exception and not reliable. Hence RUG Lands is considered a pure control deck (of the prison variety) even though it does play blue.
Incidentally, Stasis is also considered a prison deck, as might a MUC deck which leans heavily on Back To Basics, Standstill, and Propaganda. Prison is all about pro-active control elements.
You don't have to agree with all this, but you could make at least an attempt to understand it. Summarising this position as:
"creatures = not control" & "prison = non-blue control" is wholly unsophisticated and a bit of a straw-man too. It's also frustrating when I explain this over and over but you come back with the same tired bullshit.
TLDR:
Pure control decks are decks which struggle put up a clock they way Zoo and Affinity have trouble playing the controlling role.
Prison decks are control decks which rely heavily on pro-active denial.
Colour is not a defining factor.
Supremacy 2020 is the modern era game of nuclear brinksmanship! My blog:
https://fieldmarshalshandbook.wordpress.com
You can play Lands.dec in EDH too! My primer:
http://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/t...lara-lands-dec
I've always liked the Flores classification when discussing decks from his Finding the Tinker Deck article. Lands isn't a Weismann deck as much as it's a Prison/Tinker deck.
I feel like that combo is far too slow, clunky, and vulnerable to fuel a dedicated combo deck. It might work as a finisher in Enchantress, or in a tool-box bant of control deck as you suggest. I seriously doubt such a list would be OP though!
Combo is ~20% of the meta! Combo is exactly the play-style that needs more (or better) options!
Unless you are biased against combo. Some players seem to think Legacy would be better if it were overwhelmingly populated by fair decks, and that combo should exist only as fringe decks or tier 2 tier or tier 1.5 pet decks.
Do you want Earthcraft to stay banned because you think it will spawn a dominant oppressive deck, or because it will spawn a deck you do not like? I believe the banned list should not be used to promote one play style over another!
Will this make Elves (currently struggling) OP and dominant, or will it simply lead to some un-fun feel-bad losses? I think Elves could use the boost (as could combo in general) and I imagine Elves will still have enough poor MUs to keep it in check.
Supremacy 2020 is the modern era game of nuclear brinksmanship! My blog:
https://fieldmarshalshandbook.wordpress.com
You can play Lands.dec in EDH too! My primer:
http://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/t...lara-lands-dec
It's not really combo though, it can be...but otherwise it's 1 card (and a single Trop). The previous example was Esper Mentor, but it could just as well be miracles right; there's not a huge difference between 4x SDT/4xCB and 3xSDT/3xCB/2xET or 4xSDT/2xCB/2xET, then they change one of their ~4 basic Island to Trop and all you'd need to do (if for some reason you wanted to) is make 1 cut for Earthcraft. Take every piece of SB hate ET can find and you're basically running 2 additional copies. Does it power up Mentor decks even more? Probably not appreciably, but there's also no real cost. Assembling Mentor + SDTx2 ends games quickly (which is a plus), but if their boardstate is Mentor/SDT + cantrips under Earthcraft no one wants to navigate through that turn (much less even attempt to rewind the board state). Earthcraft is one of those cards that's probably closer to the dexterity/ante/conspiracy bracket where they're not so much banned as collectively chosen to treat as if it were never printed.
TIL that Countertop making my cards uncastable is Control and Chalice making my cards uncastable is Prison. 20 power of Angels pulled from a Miracles player's ass for the win is also somehow very different to using Marit Lage or Mentor or Craterhoof Behemoth for the same. Those same Angels utterly taking over an empty board is also very different from doing it with a Mentor or a lategame ETW.
I learned so much today.
Too much effort. Just cast Show and Tell.
I can't disagree with you there... I'll just run Mind Shatter instead.
Counter Ballance doesn't make your spells uncastable without a Top activation or similar response. In fact often they are not uncastable, as (unlike Chalice) this reactive response might fail. How can you not realise this. Presumably you do play Legacy, but even if you dont I've pointed to this difference twice!
But it's a big difference. If you have CB + Top in play, I can dance around it. I "force" shuffles by wasting your fetchlands. I can bait you with one spell only to drive another through with a different cmc. I can try to push spells through in response to your activations or when you've otherwise been spending your mana. Sometime I can cast and pray - you might not have the required cmc card to block it.
Sometimes this doesn't work. Sometimes I can be hopelessly locked out. But the difference is, I can at least try to get my spells through; and that blocking my spells has a constant resource cost for my opponent. Chalice on one will simply lock me out of those spells completely. No trying to bait or outfox the opponent. No further resource cost for the opponent. That's prison.
Closing out a long game where you've focused entirely on defense is different than taking over the board and putting a clock up in the early or mid stages of the game. Angels don't tend to come down till much later than Mentor. This makes for a different style of play, different strategies, and different types of matches. Mentor can take over a board and apply pressure much earlier than Angels, with consistency. This makes the deck play differently.
If you disagree, back it up.
Lands can consisyently make a 20/20 by turn four - and is frequently faster. Miracles is typically much slower than this (or Craterhoof). And if you would liken Mentor to Marit Lage or Craterhoof, I want what you're smoking. There's a difference between a creature that can potentially run away with a game vs one that can end the game on the spot.
Funny what happens when ignore core elements of my arguments!
Supremacy 2020 is the modern era game of nuclear brinksmanship! My blog:
https://fieldmarshalshandbook.wordpress.com
You can play Lands.dec in EDH too! My primer:
http://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/t...lara-lands-dec
I can't help but disagree here. Mentor + two Tops already basically ends the game (Mentor + two tokens kill from 19 the turn after Mentor is cast if the controller has 5 mana); making the damage actually infinite doesn't change much since even if you have blockers to survive the first attack, the leftover Monks will almost surely be enough to finish the job. from a deckbuilding perspective, trying to 'go off' without Top by chaining cantrips with Jeskai Ascendancy is almost surely easier since it doesn't awkwardly force you into a fourth color or to be Bant. Finally, the complexity of executing any sort of Mentor/Earthcraft combo is no greater than the complexity of the aforementioned Ascendancy combo, or Elves' Glimpse turns, or going off with Spiral Tide, or the turns that Enchantress chains enchantments, or even many combo turns from ANT or TES, and all of these are, and ought to be, permissible.
It's not so much that comparable complexity does not exist, as much as all you really have to do is achieve similar levels of complexity is effectively take a known deck with real cards and change 1 land and put in 1 card (if we can for a moment equate the other 8 pieces of artifact/enchant combo as being effectively the same as 6 pieces and 2 tutors to find them). It shouldn't be done, it's not really advantageous (until sideboard), and you wouldn't really be punished for doing something so arbitrarily unnecessary. This card has for most of its life lacked sufficient build-around requirements in formats whose slots aren't going to power and other vintage must-plays. Is it really worth the risk to help out enchantress? I'm skeptical.
It seems like we're weighing the costs of the unbanning differently. I'd evaluate even the most extreme case with Mentor as a negligible outlier since it just doesn't seem very good relative to any Esper or Jeskai variation, no matter how small the splash. Conversely, I think unbanning Earthcraft makes Enchantress as well positioned as Lands is, meaning that we'd have a top deck where the buy-in is just 3-4 Serra's Sanctum and a bunch of bulk. That's a huge benefit for very little risk.
When's the next B/R?
July 18.
Tusk up.
Because Survival has actual costs associated with it.
1. You need to play a lot of creatures
2. Need to be able to produce a lot of green mana
3. You don't mind adding the price of a Trained Armodon to the first creature you tutor.
You clearly don't want to play it in any tempo deck. Not enough creatures, too slow and never enough green mana. Control decks don't want it. Some midrange decks won't play it, for example you won't run it in Shardless BUG or Aggro Loam. Even Elves doesn't want it, at least the Natural Order versions, because it's too slow. There aren't a lot of decks that fulfill those criteria, clearly it's not the next Aether Vial. Or maybe it is since Vial is only played in three decks: Goblins, Merfolk and D&T. And only the latter is actually good.
The decks that would play Survival of the Fittest aren't particularly scary. As a combo deck, it pales in comparison to Sneak and Show, Infect or Storm. Spamming Vengevines? Slower to setup than most Eldrazi hands which can nut draw and kill you on turn two. Even Grixis and Miracles can go wide. Survival is slow. The meta is a lot faster and more disruptive than it was when SotF was around. Things haven't got any easier. According to TC Decks, Abrupt Decay and Deathrite Shaman are in the Top 10 most played cards in the format. Both are very good against any variant of Survival. Snapcaster Mage wasn't around nor was Phyrexian Revoker or Surgical Extraction.
Survival will certainly be played but it's not out of line with what the rest of the format is doing.
"We are goblinkind, heirs to the mountain empires of chieftains past. Rest is death to us, and arson is our call to war."
Nor was Griselbrand.
Exactly. Why dick around with 1G turn 2 and then GGG next turn to attack for 16 when you can go 2U make a 7/7 flying lifelinking bargain
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