This article is going to serve both as my personal eulogy for The Mimeoplasm, and provide my thoughts on the EDH banlist update overall, with special focus given to the future of the format, and why alternative plans (such as local banlists) won't work.
For the record, before I get started, I want to state that aside from my knee-jerk rage impulse, I do believe that Primeval Titan is a good ban on power-level terms, -however-, there are many things that I would ban on those same terms before Primeval Titan. I'm looking specifically at Kiki-jiki, Consecrated Sphinx, and Tooth and Nail here; although, there are probably at least a dozen other choices if I really thought about it.
I'm going to begin by providing my Mimeoplasm list. This is, or rather was, my baby. I tuned the everliving hell out of it, tweaked, revamped, re-imagined., re-built. It went "back to the drawing board" at least five times before I was finally happy with it. Without further ado, Mimeoplasm:
1x The Mimeoplasm
1x Reanimate
1x Imperial Seal
1x Nature's Lore
1x Farseek
1x Demonic Tutor
1x Farseek
1x Yawgmoth's Will
1x Buried Alive
1x Dread Return
1x Tendrils of Agony
1x Time Warp
1x Living Death
1x Diabolic Revelation
1x Tooth and Nail
1x Vampiric Tutor
1x Crop Rotation
1x Entomb
1x Mystical Tutor
1x Mana Drain
1x Lim-dul's Vault
1x Forbidden Alchemy
1x Survival of the Fittest
1x Phyrexian Arena
1x Food Chain
1x Rhystic Study
1x Greater Good
1x Future Sight
1x Treachery
1x Sol Ring
1x Candelabra of Tawnos
1x Sensei's Divining Top
1x Mana Vault
1x Dimir Signet
1x Golgari Signet
1x Simic Signet
1x Hermit Druid
1x Lotus Cobra
1x Loaming Shaman
1x Eternal Witness
1x Yavimaya Dryad
1x Trinket Mage
1x Wood Elves
1x Mystic Snake
1x Wonder
1x Phyrexian Metamorph
1x Glen Elendra Archmage
1x Dimir House Guard
1x Misthollow Griffin
1x Oracle of Mul Daya
1x Body Double
1x Sadistic Hypnotist
1x Seedborn Muse
1x Lord of Extinction
1x Deadeye Navigator
1x Triskelion
1x Mikaeus, the Unhallowed
1x Draining Whelk
1x Primeval Titan
1x Consecrated Sphinx
1x Sheoldred, Whispering One
1x Tidespout Tyrant
1x Woodfall Primus
1x Jin-Gitaxias, Core Augur
1x Snow-Covered Forest
1x Snow-Covered Swamp
1x Snow-Covered Island
2x Forest [to be replaced with future duals]
1x Petrified Field
1x Bazaar of Baghdad
1x Deserted Temple
1x Vesuva
1x Strip Mine
1x Reliquary Tower
1x Alchemist's Refuge
1x City of Brass
1x Reflecting Pool
1x Command Tower
1x Cephalid Coliseum
1x Gaea's Cradle
1x Cabal Coffers
1x Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
1x Underground Sea
1x Tropical Island
1x Bayou
1x Polluted Delta
1x Misty Rainforest
1x Verdant Catacombs
1x Breeding Pool
1x Overgrown Tomb
1x Watery Grave
1x Tainted Isle
1x Tainted Wood
1x Yavimaya Coast
1x Llanowar Wastes
1x Underground River
1x Woodland Cemetery
1x Drowned Catacomb
1x Hinterland Harbor
The 2x Forest were probably going to become Guildgates for Golgari and Simic, at least until they printed something better. It should be noted that this is my final list, as in, I hadn't yet bought the Bazaar, Candelabra, or Seal for the deck, and they were currently other cards. However, this is how it would have looked if I'd sunk that last final commitment into it (something I'm glad I did not do, now).
I could talk about how this list is literally perfect for me. It controls, it ramps, and it combos. Those are the three criteria that I look for in pretty much any deck that I play. I enjoy those styles of decks. I could talk about how the deck works, but odds are, if you're reading this, you probably know me. And if you know me, you've probably played EDH with me, so you know how it works in general.
If you haven't, assume that it's going to ramp and control the game until it can pull off something retarded. Also assume that it's resilient enough to handle most disruption. It could combo through some pretty ludicrous board states.
In short, it was broken. Really, honestly, and truly broken. I'd argue that it fell on the "light" side of broken -- as good as it was, it wasn't going to stack up too well to the REAL piles of broken that run around in this format. I'm looking at you, Five-Color combo and Mono-black Ad Nauseum storm. But for me, it was broken. For our area, it was broken. It was exactly what I wanted to play.
I've been playing since Urza's Saga, although only competitively since Shards of Alara. I have a pretty damn deep card pool, and I have the resources and personal will to be able to expand my card pool to basically whatever I need it to be within reason. I have a slight character flaw where for some reason I have no problem spending ludicrous amounts of money on what are basically aesthetically pleasing pieces of cardboard. Whatever, we all have our vices. Some of us have more than others (shoutout Kyle).
What I'm saying here is that I am in a different class of EDH player from most. EDH gets a lot of fire because it's a ""casual"" format, when in reality it ends up playing more akin to singleton vintage. The ""casual"" players get very angry about the broken nature of the format, and insist that it should just be huge durdle decks battlecruisering their way across the field, while lumbering along at something approximating a Nic Fit mirror (aka two hippos fighting underwater in slow motion. I love that quote). I personally don't enjoy that kind of magic, as shocking as this might be to those of you who are reading this. If it's taking 10 years for anything to happen and the board state is stalled, you're doing something wrong, not something right. Setting that style of play on high and praising it is the first mistake that the EDH format as a whole has made. Sitting there for four hours while four players durdle their way to the finish line is not where I want to be. I fall much more on the side of singleton Vintage, and that is enjoyable magic to me.
I've had the privilege of having a playgroup that shares my opinions. We've got some pretty stupid decks locally, and our collective powerlevel is approaching (but not over) 9000. Mimeo was arguably one of the most powerful of the lot, but when you've got stuff like a pretty close to fully evolved Zur deck, a Kozilek deck that actually has a Mishra's Workshop, Sisay complete with Loyal Retainers, Riku built for combo, Oona built for combo, and so on...it gets awesome pretty quick. I've had a lot of really awesome games with these decks, and I will carry those memories with me into the future. Our games almost never ran too long, but the games where one person just "goes off" are thankfully rare as well. Our decks are largely in-step with each other; if one tries to go off, odds are there's an answer. And if there isn't that game, you just shrug, scoop 'em up, and play again. Thrive in the brokenness. It's a way of playing the game that people have largely forgotten as Vintage has become further and further submerged from the mindset of most players. I'm fairly sure that most of the people towards whom the banlist is directed / constructed with in mind don't even know what vintage is as a format.
So yeah. This brings me to the banlist.
Last night, the EDH Rules Council, consisting of Sheldon Menery, whose name I probably misspelled, as well as other vairous assorted, fairly intelligent people (a lot of whom are actually L4+ judges, I believe), decided that Primeval Titan was NOT too good. They didn't ban him because of power level. They banned him because of this:
"We're going to look at any strategy that we feel is over-represented. As mentioned in the philosophy document, we want diversity in the format. I'd much rather hear someone say "Ooh, that card I never heard of is kind of cool" instead of "Oh, that card. Again." And banning PT doesn't hose the ramp strategy, it just brings it back toward the middle a little bit."
This is the new, revised, updated philosophy behind the EDH banlist. There are a whole lot of ways that this is a horrible thing, but I'm going to start with the simplest: the precedent.
The precedent that this sets is that any card that is a format staple is subject to a possible ban, at any time, because it's too common. At best, this statement encourages unusual card choices and promotes deck diversity, even if the overall goal of the general is largely the same. At worst, it undermines the entire competitive spirit and reduces the format to kitchen table Magic.
This philosophy is, at its core, anti-competitive. Any competitive player (hey, magic. How are you doing over there!?!) is going to naturally want to improve their deck. It's just the way the competitive impulse works. You always strive for betterment. At some point, this impulse will naturally reach the same conclusions as other people who are also trying to make their decks better.
Every green EDH deck is made better by adding a Primeval Titan.
This is a true statement. I can't honestly think of an EDH deck that has green in it that would -not- be made better with a Primeval. Even hardcore tribal Elf or Thallid decks are improved by his presence. Maybe I should say His Presence. It thins on coming into play and on attacking, and if you have any powerful lands to access (Gaea's Cradle, Coffers, etc), it tutors them up and put them into play for you. If you're really nice to it, He'll even make you a sandwich while you play. He seriously does everything.
But look at the format. Primeval Titan is far from the only card like this.
It's been said that every EDH deck starts with a Sol Ring.
This is also a true statement. I can't honestly think of an EDH deck that does NOT run a Sol Ring (although apparently they exist). Some may use it better than others, I'll grant, but everyone runs it. It's 2 mana every turn for the rest of the game, with a simple 1 colorless down payment. It actually nets you a mana the turn you play it! It's banned in every format except Vintage, and it's restricted there. What does this say about the power level of this card?
Every black EDH deck is made better by adding a Demonic Tutor [Vampiric Tutor] [Imperial Seal].
And on, and on, and on. Every color has these. I've got some interesting stats for you. This thread on Salvation: http://forums.mtgsalvation.com/showthread.php?t=388001 contains the 200 "best" cards in the format, as decided by a script that went through 1065 submitted EDH decks and picked out the cards that appeared the most often. I'm just going to list the top 20 here:
746 Sol Ring
499 Lightning Greaves
395 Sensei's Divining Top
362 Solemn Simulacrum
334 Demonic Tutor #
319 Eternal Witness #
289 Skullclamp
285 Darksteel Ingot
271 Phyrexian Arena #
244 Oblivion Stone
229 Expedition Map
229 Swords to Plowshares #
229 Swiftfoot Boots
229 Primeval Titan ************
223 Acidic Slime #
218 Caged Sun
214 Austere Command #
205 Cultivate #
202 Diabolic Tutor #
200 Duplicant
Notice Primeval Titan's place on this list. Even when you take into consideration the color split of the 1065 candidate decks, it's still pretty far down there. And look at all of these other staples that appear in basically every deck that can run them, marked with an #. If you go down the next 20, you see this:
200 Beast Within #
199 Sun Titan #
196 Phyrexian Metamorph #
195 Path to Exile #
195 Coalition Relic
190 Mystical Tutor #
189 Vampiric Tutor #
184 Damnation #
183 Enlightened Tutor #
183 Kodama's Reach #
176 Gauntlet of Power
174 Hinder #
174 Sakura-Tribe Elder #
154 Oracle of Mul Daya #
154 Yavimaya Elder #
154 Crucible of Worlds
154 Trinket Mage #
154 Extraplanar Lens
153 Rite of Replication #
151 Fact or Fiction #
How long before all of these cards are a thing of the past? Probably a good while if we're being honest here. However, everyone should just get used to the idea that ANY of these cards (or others further down on the list) could get banned at any time without adequate reasoning or explanation, but rather simply just because "they're too common and we want EDH to be diverse, goddamnit."
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As I see it, this banlist update was largely inevitable, because of two primary concerns:
1) This format, as others, is ruled by a vocal minority.
People have been spewing vitriol about Primeval Titan for months, complaining about how it ends games on resolution and so on. Now Primeval is banned. I don't see this as a coincidence, and it reminds me an awful lot of Survival in Legacy. Did Survival really need to be banned? Probably not. The meta likely could have adapted, and Survival would -possibly- still be part of the format today. I'm not sure that it would be, but possibly. One of the main arguments behind banning Survival, namely that it gets closer to being broken with every printed creature for the rest of the game, holds true. All tutor engines are only as good as the cards they can find, after all. However, I largely blame the speedy ban of Survival on the vocal minority headed up by Evan Erwin, who screamed bloody murder until Wizards listened. This is just the way people work, however, and while it pays to be aware of it, there is little one can do about it.
2) This format is defined by a dichotomy at its core.
I think that this was actually a trichotomy at one point, before French split off. You have three main subsets of people that play EDH: those who play casually, those who play 1v1 competitively, and those who play multiplayer competitively. Note that I don't mean competitive here in the sense of sweeping tables on turn three necessarily. I'm using the term in the sense that you are playing competitively if you want to play a tuned, powerful list. Casual players are perfectly content sitting there with their Doubling Seasons and Primordial Hydras. Competitive players can do better things with Doubling Season, and will actively try to replace their Primordial Hydra in their endless quest to improve their deck.
As I said, French already split off, so let's excise the 1v1 players from the discussion.
The Casual vs Competitive debate has raged in a lot of games, and EDH as a format of Magic is certainly no exception here. I've been on both sides of the argument at various points in various games. There was a long time where I actively chose to play with a group of people that I just enjoyed playing with during Burning Crusade in WoW. Despite being competitively-minded myself, I chose to align myself with a group of casual players, and I eventually got bit in the ass for it due to a conniving member that joined later and just hated my guts, apparently. So you might say I'm biased against casuals. But I certainly understand the appeal of being content with where you are, of playing at a lower-level and not having to put the effort in.
But Casual players should not be making policy for Competitive players. Casual players often utilize their own banlists anyway, as anyone who's ever payed at a kitchen table will tell you. Casuals tend to get angry at specific cards that they perceive as unfair (whether they actually are or not) and ban them irregardless of the official banlist, whereas Competitive players will just grit their teeth and find a way around it. Shaping an official banlist with the Causal players in mind is a horrible idea, because you're comparing apples to oranges.
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So to sum up to this point, this is a bad ban in two ways: it caters to a casual crowd, and it sets a dangerous precedent that any EDH staple could be banned at any time, with the only provocation being that of a vocal minority, virtue of the fact that it's a staple by definition.
I will concede that it's not a HORRIBLE ban by power-level considerations. I believe that there are cards that are worse for the format that are currently unbanned, and I also believe that there are a lot of answers to the Primeval Titan problem that just simply don't see play, or as much as they should, at any rate. There are also those players who use Primeval Titan in a fair manner, and although this is a dangerous argument because of the extent to which it can be applied, it's worth mentioning. Obviously, the Mimeoplasm deck I presented above is not one of those decks. However, there are plenty of EDH decks that have one or two utility lands at most to get with him, and then he proceeds to just get basics or other harmless lands if he happens to stick around for more than a turn.
Okay, now, for the actual philosophy document itself.
There are a few more passages here that I would like to highlight:
"The Rules Committee's goal for Commander is for it to be different than other Magic games. Where competitive formats seek to balance the playing field for all styles and strategies, we want to encourage a style of game that is more open and directed towards all players having a good time regardless of who wins. This is summarized as: "Create games that you'd love to remember, not the ones others would like to forget.""
For me, the games I love to remember are those that would probably horrify other people. A recent example comes from the EDH tournament that Lycoming College's playgroup hosted. In the winners' pod, I was matched up vs Ulamog (with Workshop), Oona (with Candelabra), and budget Rafiq (without Eldrazi Conscription, but with Sovereigns). Ulamog has at least one infinite combo in it, and Oona has Palinchron, which is all I really need to say about that. These are serious decks. Ulamog ended up getting somewhat mana-screwed, but I was quickly public enemy number one, even after Ulamog had me on virtual lockdown courtesy of a fast Relic of Progenitus. Most of the game was all three of them ganging up on me. Rafiq was doing more of the damage, with a Primeval equipped with Sword of Feast and Famine, Lox. Hammer, and Greaves. I still won, after having to try to go off with something like four different combos, and through Rafiq who had drawn something like 30 cards off of a Consecrated Sphinx. I had to Tendrils someone just to stay alive. Etc. This is a game that I'll remember. It was awesome. For me, EDH decks being broken and acting like singleton vintage ARE the games I love to remember.
I will note here that the RC is doing a good job of keeping the "griefer" cards largely out of the format. Stuff like Upheaval, Sway of the Stars, Shaharazad, and Biorhythm should never be unbanned, because all Magic players have a troll lurking in them somewhere. Worldfire is questionable, but probably should be banned. There are a few other cards in this vein, too, like Decree of Annihilation and Obliterate, which should be added.
Again, though, the problem here is the philosophy behind this blurb, not the blurb itself. On the surface, what Sheldon is saying here makes perfect sense and is quite reasonable. But the last sentence, as a summary of the paragraph, elucidates the subjective problem here. There is an assumption that the RC can somehow guess how people want to play their EDH games. And maybe I'm the one that's in the minority here. It's always a possibility. But I know that my vision of the format and the RC's vision of the format no longer match.
Here's Sheldon's description of the reasons why a card might get banned:
"
* Creates Undesirable Games / Game Situations. Some cards produce the kinds of games we'd like to avoid, and we see them as creating a negative experience for a majority of the player base. They tend to be anticlimactic wins out of nowhere, unexpected combos that end an otherwise enjoyable game, or creating situations which completely take play of the game away from the other players. This includes some cards that have a casting cost far too low for their effect or whose abilities simply break the format at any cost.
* Warps the Format Strategically. Commander decks are about variety, and if a strategy becomes sufficiently omnipresent that the games become very similar even across different playgroups, we may need to try to rein in the presence of that deck.
* Produces Too Much Mana Too Quickly. Commander is a format about epic plays, but the turn 10 epic play happening on turn 3 is deflating. Limited acceleration is good, but we don't want the format to turn into "who can go off earliest," so we rein in large quantities of early mana.
* Interacts Badly with the Structure of Commander. Magic is not designed with Commander in mind, and the different rules, especially the presence of the commander in the command zone, can create degenerate or unfortunate situations. This is also why some cards are acceptable as one of the 99 but not as commanders.
* Creates a Perceived High Barrier to Entry. Because it's a non-competitive format, we don't want players to feel as though they need to spend a great deal of money to be able to play. It is not sufficient for a card to simply be expensive—expected ubiquity and the availability of suitable replacements are also considered. This rule is mostly invoked for cards fifteen or more years out of print and is unlikely to impact the list further.
"
Let's look at this piece by piece.
Bullet 1: Kiki-jiki, Power Artifact, Food Chain, Palinchron, Mindslaver, etc. Not an exhaustive list, but it's a start. There are a ton of these.
Bullet 2: This is reasonable, and I have no problem with it.
Bullet 3: Sol Ring, Mana Crypt, Mana Vault, Grim Monolith, Sol lands, Workshop, Azusa, etc. Obviously Black Lotus and the Moxen need to remain banned, and would be the more egregious offends in this category. But the fact remains that even without Primeval Titan, this is an impossible category to control. The only way to control this is for the other decks in the meta to actively adopt methods of controlling ramp strategies inherent within them, and most of the ways of doing this are widely regarded as "un-fun," thanks to a decade of propaganda by WotC. Looking at you, Stone Rain.
Bullet 4: Again, I'm fine with this. Most of these are fixable via simple errata, like Riftsweeper. I don't see a lot of cards that fall under this category as needing banned. Banning certain legends as generals is perfectly understandable and necessary.
Bullet 5: Oh, where do I start. Bazaar, Workshop, Imperial Seal, revised Dual Lands, Candelabra, Moat, P3K cards, etc. Note that this bullet is only applicable to Casual players. It's an explicit warning that those of us who have access to these cards may lose them at any time, if they start to be perceived as necessary. You can obviously make an argument that Imperial Seal is not necessary. You can run Vampiric Tutor, Cruel Tutor, and a host of less attractive options. But if you want the best list you can ave, you probably need a Seal at some point. I think that the only cards that are actively in danger in this category are the Revised duals, as those are ubiquitous enough to be seen as a barrier to entry. People try to play without them, but if you're running 3 or more colors, it becomes a losing proposition very quickly. There are a lot of cards that have no replacement (see Moat, Bazaar, and Workshop), but I don't think they're in any immediate danger just because they aren't seen as being necessary to play the format.
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So, where do I go from here, and what's my message?
Well, Sheldon has this to say:
"We believe that both official Commander and local variants can successfully coexist. What works in the broader audience may not resonate around your local game shop or kitchen table. We encourage you to modify both philosophy and banned list locally to suit your own needs while being aware that when you travel outside your local area, perhaps even on the other side of town, you'll need to be ready to play with the official rules, including the appropriate spirit. Likewise, when new players enter your playgroup they may have expectations closer to this official philosophy, and it will usually help the transition to discuss why they/you do things a particular way."
Absolutely not. Something a lot of people have been suggesting on my Facebook is that we should create our own local banlist. There's a massive problem with this: people have subjective biases and are not going to be able to objectively accept why a card needs to be banned. One of my locals has Imperial Painter built, and loves it to death. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that he would kick and scream until Painter's Servant was unbanned in our local meta if we were to look into this as an option. Or the hardcore Pyromancer's Ascension fan who would refuse to play unless Panoptic Mirror was unbanned. And so on. Note that these are caricatures based on the actual people -- I doubt that Tyson would care that much about Panoptic Mirror. But every playgroup has people who would. The Kozilek/Ulamog player would want Metalworker unbanned. This isn't even getting into cards that -should- be banned but aren't. Once you introduce the ability to generate a local banlist, everyone who plays in the area will demand input, and the result will either be just plain catastrophic, or will result in hard feelings at best.
Another major problem with local banlists is that our local area is composed of a confederation of something like six unique playgroups, all with wildly different card availabilities and philosophies. What Lock Haven University's group agrees to will likely not be the same thing that Lycoming College's group would agree to, or what Bellefonte's group would agree to, or State College's, or Williamsport's, or Bloomsburg's. At that point you end up having a royal mess of banlists, as you'd need one for each playgroup, and then one for the United Confederation of Playgroup. It would get frustrating and impossible to keep track of, plus, there's the added problem of what happens when you go outside your playgroup. I don't have a deck built because I can only legally play it against four people. I have it built because I have the expectation that I can take it anywhere and play it with anyone. An official banlist is the only good banlist, because it comes from a purportedly objective authority that is not local, we have no impact upon, we don't know personally, and we can blame when something goes wrong.
So, my message:
Stick with the official banlist. It's the only way that we can actually play the game in good conscience, because it's the only way that your decks can be relevant for more than just the local area, which you may or may not stay in. If we constructed a local banlist, and I kept playing EDH, whenever I leave the area, I won't be able to play EDH at that point because my deck will no longer be legal. Official banlist or bust.
Be ready for any beloved/integral/staple card to get banned on a whim for nebulous reasoning based on what someone else thinks of the way the format should be, as opposed to how the format is. There are lists on Salvation that you can read for yourself. If your deck contains cards that are among the best in their color, just be warned that your deck could lose a key piece at any moment.
These two items are facts of life if you desire to play EDH. Short of creating a subset of EDH akin to French with Vintage-style play purposefully in mind (which would be a monumental effort), there are no other options, and the feeling of choice that Sheldon presents in his document is merely an illusion.
For me, this means the end of EDH. I am unwilling to subject myself to the whims of the Rules Council as specified and interpreted by their statement of philosophy, and I am unwilling to accept that cards can get banned for popularity reasons as opposed to power-level reasons. I am further unwilling to commence or partake in the shitstorm that would occur if we tried to make a local banlist, and I currently have neither the time, the interest level, nor the influence to dedicate to creating a separate brand of EDH that I would actually be comfortable playing in.
And so, to those of you who carry on, I wish you many great games yet to be played, and an equal number of excellent memories yet to be forged. Enjoy it while you can.
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Of Temporal Thopters
Apologies for the long delay on this article -- I was sick after my last one, and then my muse decided to abandon me. But, she's back now, I guess, so here's a new article!
When Temporal Mastery was spoiled, it sparked a raging torrent of opinions ranging from the traditional "oh, that's just being overhyped and isn't actually that good," to the equally traditional "yeah, I think it really is that good and maybe we should ban it before it sees legacy." The biggest problem with Mastery is the Explore Problem, which states that if you Miracle it on your turn three (when you have two lands in play), you are essentially just "Exploring" -- you're only getting an extra land drop and an extra card from it. To my knowledge, nobody has ever played Explore in a legacy deck, so this would appear to be a problem. Sure, later on when there's actually a board state it can always do work...but you have to prepare your deck to abuse the Explore option as well. Obviously a eck in legacy that wants to use Miracles effectively needs to start with 4x Top. It didn't take long, then, for my thoughts on Temporal Mastery to turn to Thopter Foundry. Thopter decks run multiple planeswalkers in varying numbers, the Thopter/Sword engine itself, Enlightened Tutors, and a host of card advantage and board lock options...they have plenty of things to abuse an extra turn, and they're a deck that already wants 4x Tops in the maindeck. The issue is one of space, which Thopter decks are notoriously short on. Before proceeding, here's what I came up with. Note that I'm not sure how to get card tags to work on a blog, or if that's even possible (I'm guessing it is and I just don't know it).
Temporal Thopters
4x Sensei's Divining Top
3x Thopter Foundry
1x Sword of the Meek
1x Crucible of Worlds
1x Ensnaring Bridge
1x Engineered Explosives
1x Counterbalance
1x Humility
1x Oblivion Ring
4x Brainstorm
3x Enlightened Tutor
3x Force of Will
2x Spell Snare
3x Swords to Plowshares
3x Jace, the Mind Sculptor
3x Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas
3x Temporal Mastery
1x Academy Ruins
1x Drowned Catacomb
3x Flooded Strand
1x Glacial Fortress
2x Inkmoth Nexus
2x Island
1x Isolated Chapel
1x Plains
3x Polluted Delta
1x Scrubland
1x Swamp
2x Tundra
1x Underground Sea
3x Wasteland
//SB
1x Cursed Totem
2x Engineered Explosives
1x Grafdigger's Cage
1x Pithing Needle
1x Tormod's Crypt
1x Phyrexian Metamorph
1x Aegis of Honor
2x Counterbalance
1x Karmic Justice
1x Enlightened Tutor
2x Flusterstorm
1x Force of Will
A few words about the more obviously questionable card choices:
--The M10/Innistrad duals are an idea that came originally from Thomas Tyson, who was using them for a completely different reason than why I have eventually adopted them: availability. He didn't have access to the full range of legacy duals that he wanted at the time, so he substituted. And while they did hurt him due to the large number of them that he was running, we did learn something pretty nifty in the process: they're immune to Choke, which is one of the primary weapons that Maverick has been using effectively to hate on blue decks. As a result, I have adopted that technology for this deck, and have been quite pleased with it so far. Running one of each color combination smooths out the mana a bit while rendering some level of immunity/functionality to Choke. The Chapel probably isn't necessary after testing...it's more there because of the symmetry. It should probably be a Seat of the Synod, to increase the artifact count for Tezzeret, and to allow for the awkward hands where you have white mana and an ET, and you need to grab a blue source. The Drowned Catacomb and Glacial Fortress have been perfectly fine, and I would recommend their adoptation in small numbers in other blue decks -- Stoneblade comes immediately to mind, as I don't believe that the deck that really wants outs to Choke can actually support them (Thresh).
--Inkmoth Nexi and Wastelands. In a deck with stringent color restrictions like this one, running 5 colorless lands can be a little awkward. However, the raw power granted by these lands is worth the risk, especially since some of the risk is offset by running 4x Top. Inkmoths provide a solid backup win condition which can get extremely fast if Tezzeret is involved. Even without Tezz, however, the Inkmoths will slowly chip away until they eventually win, and with Crucible providing inevitability, they -will- get there assuming you can protect them from Swords to Plowshares with Countertop. As for Wasteland, that particular effect is one of the strongest in the game right now. The current boogeymen of the format all run significantly fewer lands than traditional legacy decks have done. Yesterday's enemies, Maverick and Stoneblade, can still be injured by locking them with Crucible, but nothing like the pressure that Canadian Thresh, Show and Tell of various types, and Dredge can feel from even one Wasteland.
--The countersuite took the hardest hit when moving Temporal Mastery into the deck. Traditional Thopter lists tend to run 2-3 more counterspells at the least, and upwards of 4-5 more at the top end. I believe this is offset by both the meta and the sideboard. If you run into a Storm deck, you have 3x Counterbalance (with 4 ETs to find them), 2 Snares, 4 Forces, and 2 Flusterstorms. That's a pretty hefty amount of countermagic, and it definitely allows you to fight toe-to-toe with Storm. That said, you usually want to be locking Dredge down with permanents more than with counters, as Dredge tends to ignore counterspells other than on Breakthrough where X=0 or LED. You don't really want to get into a counterwar with Thresh, but instead be more threat-dense than them. If you stick either planeswalker, Humility, Bridge, Thopter/Sword, or just generally out-value and out-draw them with Top, you're in good shape. Thresh is really obnoxious early game, but it runs out of gas really quickly when it runs into a true stage III deck, and that is a role that Temporal Thopters is really comfortable playing. As for Show and Tell decks, it depends somewhat on the specific variant. If you're vs Sneak Attack, you have Bridge + Humility to annoy them, as well as a respectable enough countersuite to at least make them to fight over your threats. Metamorph from the board also shores up the Show and Tell problem, although if they Show Griselbee things can get sad. Counterbalance is actually amazing here, because the deck runs enough 3s and 4s to fight for both Sneak and Show, as well as being able to Enlightened Tutor in response to the Counterbalance trigger for permanents of those costs. Even if you don't have access to a 3 or a 4, having access to a 1 or a 2 can be a lot of help, as it will aid you in winning counterwars against their Dazes and Spell Pierces. Hive Mind is arguably the easiest of the three, since you have the ability to counter your own Pact trigger (Counterbalance is again amazing here), and the Show/Emrakul plan gets O-Ringed, Humiliated, or Bridged. Dream Halls can be a little awkward, since Counterbalance is basically useless unless it comes down really early and fights their cantrips. All that being said, though, the bottom line is that although the countersuite has been lessened to make room for the Temporals, it is still sufficient, especially considering that there are definitely decks in the meta (Maverick and New Frontiers/Nic Fit) that you absolutely do not want an overload of counterspells against.
--Finally, the Masteries themselves. I feel that as they are the main purpose of this writing, I should elaborate my points about them a little bit more. With 6 Planeswalkers, Thopter/Sword, Tops + shuffles, Enlightened Tutor, and so on, this deck has a -lot- of ways to abuse the extra turn. The Thopter shell also passes the initial test, as well: it is very okay with "just Exploring." If you're Exploring, you're getting closer to dropping one of your walkers, to setting up a board lock, to having enough mana to effectively hunt with Top, or to assembling Thopter/Sword. Furthermore, I believe that IF there is a deck in legacy that is capable of effectively using Temporal Mastery, it is roughly this deck (card choices may vary, but I mean specifically the archetype/core philosophy of the archetype). Would it also work in other situations? Sure. I can think of a half-dozen situations where Mastery would be jaw-droppingly amazing. But guess what -- it's HORRIBLE in 90% of the rest of the situations that the deck containing Mastery would get itself into. Consider the Delver situation which was brought up a lot when the card was spoiled. Ideally, t1 Delver, t2 Delver/Brainstorm, t3 reveal Mastery, flip Delvers, cast Mastery, bash for 12. Your opponent would be so far on the back foot at this point, right?!?! Yeah, he would. But then you have to consider the amount of nut draw that is needed for this to happen, to say nothing of your opponent's interactive abilities. What if the first Delver gets Bolted and the second one Forced? I guess you're okay with that, but then what do you do with the Mastery? At the point at which you add necessary components around Temporal Mastery to make Temporal Mastery good, especially fragile ones like creatures, the card steadily gets worse and worse. You could say that I'm proposing the same thing with Temporal Thopters, but it isn't really the same. Rather than trying to build a Temporal Mastery deck, what I have done is take a deck that synergizes well with Mastery, and added copies of that card to the deck. Temporal Thopters isn't a Temporal Mastery deck, it's a Thopter deck with Masteries. I believe this is the biggest problem with Mastery in legacy, and the biggest obstacle to its adoption -- people want to build Mastery decks, but the very act of building a Mastery deck makes the card bad.
I do believe that a few Terminuses would be a welcome addition to the deck, but I'm not sure where I would put them at the moment. Regardless, they are something that is on the consideration block, at least, although I don't think I would put in more than two. Legacy isn't block, where you can run 20 miracles and get away with it. The deck is also already reliant on using Swords, Forces, O-Ring, or a few other options at keeping Gaddock Teeg off the battlefield, so replacing some of the deck's current removal with Terminus seems like a horrible idea. I believe that once the format implodes on the Show and Tell decks sufficiently, Maverick will return, and I'd rather not have my pants down when that happens.
These are my thoughts -- if you disagree or have comments in general, by all means, let me know. My next article, whenever that might be, will probably involve Veteran Explorer somehow since I haven't written about that on here yet. If you have any questions specifically involving Explorer or the decks surrounding it, I'll certainly do my best to answer them.
Oh, also: how's the length on this one? I had a few people tell me that my last article was way too long, so I tried to keep this a bit shorter.
When Temporal Mastery was spoiled, it sparked a raging torrent of opinions ranging from the traditional "oh, that's just being overhyped and isn't actually that good," to the equally traditional "yeah, I think it really is that good and maybe we should ban it before it sees legacy." The biggest problem with Mastery is the Explore Problem, which states that if you Miracle it on your turn three (when you have two lands in play), you are essentially just "Exploring" -- you're only getting an extra land drop and an extra card from it. To my knowledge, nobody has ever played Explore in a legacy deck, so this would appear to be a problem. Sure, later on when there's actually a board state it can always do work...but you have to prepare your deck to abuse the Explore option as well. Obviously a eck in legacy that wants to use Miracles effectively needs to start with 4x Top. It didn't take long, then, for my thoughts on Temporal Mastery to turn to Thopter Foundry. Thopter decks run multiple planeswalkers in varying numbers, the Thopter/Sword engine itself, Enlightened Tutors, and a host of card advantage and board lock options...they have plenty of things to abuse an extra turn, and they're a deck that already wants 4x Tops in the maindeck. The issue is one of space, which Thopter decks are notoriously short on. Before proceeding, here's what I came up with. Note that I'm not sure how to get card tags to work on a blog, or if that's even possible (I'm guessing it is and I just don't know it).
Temporal Thopters
4x Sensei's Divining Top
3x Thopter Foundry
1x Sword of the Meek
1x Crucible of Worlds
1x Ensnaring Bridge
1x Engineered Explosives
1x Counterbalance
1x Humility
1x Oblivion Ring
4x Brainstorm
3x Enlightened Tutor
3x Force of Will
2x Spell Snare
3x Swords to Plowshares
3x Jace, the Mind Sculptor
3x Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas
3x Temporal Mastery
1x Academy Ruins
1x Drowned Catacomb
3x Flooded Strand
1x Glacial Fortress
2x Inkmoth Nexus
2x Island
1x Isolated Chapel
1x Plains
3x Polluted Delta
1x Scrubland
1x Swamp
2x Tundra
1x Underground Sea
3x Wasteland
//SB
1x Cursed Totem
2x Engineered Explosives
1x Grafdigger's Cage
1x Pithing Needle
1x Tormod's Crypt
1x Phyrexian Metamorph
1x Aegis of Honor
2x Counterbalance
1x Karmic Justice
1x Enlightened Tutor
2x Flusterstorm
1x Force of Will
A few words about the more obviously questionable card choices:
--The M10/Innistrad duals are an idea that came originally from Thomas Tyson, who was using them for a completely different reason than why I have eventually adopted them: availability. He didn't have access to the full range of legacy duals that he wanted at the time, so he substituted. And while they did hurt him due to the large number of them that he was running, we did learn something pretty nifty in the process: they're immune to Choke, which is one of the primary weapons that Maverick has been using effectively to hate on blue decks. As a result, I have adopted that technology for this deck, and have been quite pleased with it so far. Running one of each color combination smooths out the mana a bit while rendering some level of immunity/functionality to Choke. The Chapel probably isn't necessary after testing...it's more there because of the symmetry. It should probably be a Seat of the Synod, to increase the artifact count for Tezzeret, and to allow for the awkward hands where you have white mana and an ET, and you need to grab a blue source. The Drowned Catacomb and Glacial Fortress have been perfectly fine, and I would recommend their adoptation in small numbers in other blue decks -- Stoneblade comes immediately to mind, as I don't believe that the deck that really wants outs to Choke can actually support them (Thresh).
--Inkmoth Nexi and Wastelands. In a deck with stringent color restrictions like this one, running 5 colorless lands can be a little awkward. However, the raw power granted by these lands is worth the risk, especially since some of the risk is offset by running 4x Top. Inkmoths provide a solid backup win condition which can get extremely fast if Tezzeret is involved. Even without Tezz, however, the Inkmoths will slowly chip away until they eventually win, and with Crucible providing inevitability, they -will- get there assuming you can protect them from Swords to Plowshares with Countertop. As for Wasteland, that particular effect is one of the strongest in the game right now. The current boogeymen of the format all run significantly fewer lands than traditional legacy decks have done. Yesterday's enemies, Maverick and Stoneblade, can still be injured by locking them with Crucible, but nothing like the pressure that Canadian Thresh, Show and Tell of various types, and Dredge can feel from even one Wasteland.
--The countersuite took the hardest hit when moving Temporal Mastery into the deck. Traditional Thopter lists tend to run 2-3 more counterspells at the least, and upwards of 4-5 more at the top end. I believe this is offset by both the meta and the sideboard. If you run into a Storm deck, you have 3x Counterbalance (with 4 ETs to find them), 2 Snares, 4 Forces, and 2 Flusterstorms. That's a pretty hefty amount of countermagic, and it definitely allows you to fight toe-to-toe with Storm. That said, you usually want to be locking Dredge down with permanents more than with counters, as Dredge tends to ignore counterspells other than on Breakthrough where X=0 or LED. You don't really want to get into a counterwar with Thresh, but instead be more threat-dense than them. If you stick either planeswalker, Humility, Bridge, Thopter/Sword, or just generally out-value and out-draw them with Top, you're in good shape. Thresh is really obnoxious early game, but it runs out of gas really quickly when it runs into a true stage III deck, and that is a role that Temporal Thopters is really comfortable playing. As for Show and Tell decks, it depends somewhat on the specific variant. If you're vs Sneak Attack, you have Bridge + Humility to annoy them, as well as a respectable enough countersuite to at least make them to fight over your threats. Metamorph from the board also shores up the Show and Tell problem, although if they Show Griselbee things can get sad. Counterbalance is actually amazing here, because the deck runs enough 3s and 4s to fight for both Sneak and Show, as well as being able to Enlightened Tutor in response to the Counterbalance trigger for permanents of those costs. Even if you don't have access to a 3 or a 4, having access to a 1 or a 2 can be a lot of help, as it will aid you in winning counterwars against their Dazes and Spell Pierces. Hive Mind is arguably the easiest of the three, since you have the ability to counter your own Pact trigger (Counterbalance is again amazing here), and the Show/Emrakul plan gets O-Ringed, Humiliated, or Bridged. Dream Halls can be a little awkward, since Counterbalance is basically useless unless it comes down really early and fights their cantrips. All that being said, though, the bottom line is that although the countersuite has been lessened to make room for the Temporals, it is still sufficient, especially considering that there are definitely decks in the meta (Maverick and New Frontiers/Nic Fit) that you absolutely do not want an overload of counterspells against.
--Finally, the Masteries themselves. I feel that as they are the main purpose of this writing, I should elaborate my points about them a little bit more. With 6 Planeswalkers, Thopter/Sword, Tops + shuffles, Enlightened Tutor, and so on, this deck has a -lot- of ways to abuse the extra turn. The Thopter shell also passes the initial test, as well: it is very okay with "just Exploring." If you're Exploring, you're getting closer to dropping one of your walkers, to setting up a board lock, to having enough mana to effectively hunt with Top, or to assembling Thopter/Sword. Furthermore, I believe that IF there is a deck in legacy that is capable of effectively using Temporal Mastery, it is roughly this deck (card choices may vary, but I mean specifically the archetype/core philosophy of the archetype). Would it also work in other situations? Sure. I can think of a half-dozen situations where Mastery would be jaw-droppingly amazing. But guess what -- it's HORRIBLE in 90% of the rest of the situations that the deck containing Mastery would get itself into. Consider the Delver situation which was brought up a lot when the card was spoiled. Ideally, t1 Delver, t2 Delver/Brainstorm, t3 reveal Mastery, flip Delvers, cast Mastery, bash for 12. Your opponent would be so far on the back foot at this point, right?!?! Yeah, he would. But then you have to consider the amount of nut draw that is needed for this to happen, to say nothing of your opponent's interactive abilities. What if the first Delver gets Bolted and the second one Forced? I guess you're okay with that, but then what do you do with the Mastery? At the point at which you add necessary components around Temporal Mastery to make Temporal Mastery good, especially fragile ones like creatures, the card steadily gets worse and worse. You could say that I'm proposing the same thing with Temporal Thopters, but it isn't really the same. Rather than trying to build a Temporal Mastery deck, what I have done is take a deck that synergizes well with Mastery, and added copies of that card to the deck. Temporal Thopters isn't a Temporal Mastery deck, it's a Thopter deck with Masteries. I believe this is the biggest problem with Mastery in legacy, and the biggest obstacle to its adoption -- people want to build Mastery decks, but the very act of building a Mastery deck makes the card bad.
I do believe that a few Terminuses would be a welcome addition to the deck, but I'm not sure where I would put them at the moment. Regardless, they are something that is on the consideration block, at least, although I don't think I would put in more than two. Legacy isn't block, where you can run 20 miracles and get away with it. The deck is also already reliant on using Swords, Forces, O-Ring, or a few other options at keeping Gaddock Teeg off the battlefield, so replacing some of the deck's current removal with Terminus seems like a horrible idea. I believe that once the format implodes on the Show and Tell decks sufficiently, Maverick will return, and I'd rather not have my pants down when that happens.
These are my thoughts -- if you disagree or have comments in general, by all means, let me know. My next article, whenever that might be, will probably involve Veteran Explorer somehow since I haven't written about that on here yet. If you have any questions specifically involving Explorer or the decks surrounding it, I'll certainly do my best to answer them.
Oh, also: how's the length on this one? I had a few people tell me that my last article was way too long, so I tried to keep this a bit shorter.
Sunday, April 1, 2012
On the Death of Legacy
There are many recurring questions in Magic in general. Most of these tend to deal with silly things such as "why does blue get all the cool cards?" Others, however, are a little more serious in nature, such as the endless question of "is legacy dying?"
I'll clarify. I've been playing legacy seriously since shortly before the close of the Mystical Tutor era. I came in during one of these "death cycles," as I shall name it. Reanimator was nearing its zenith, and storm combo decks, utilizing the power of Mystical Tutor, were also rising near to the top. Then, amidst cries to ban the offender (or to reban Entomb, one of the cards guilty of pointing out Mystical's power to the field, so to speak), talk of how legacy was a dying format began to surface. It was in this atmosphere that I entered the format. Talk ranged from the rising prices of legacy staples such as dual lands, which if I recall correctly topped out at like 70ish for Underground Seas, to the enduring question of the reserved list, to the lack of originality in the development of the format's decks -- something which would emerge a few years later through the "hive mind" brought in part or in full by the frequent Open Series, sponsered and masterminded by StarcityGames.
Suddenly and without much warning, Wizards acted, and Mystical Tutor was swiftly removed from the format.
All at once, talk of legacy's impending doom ceased, and aside from the few outcries that Mystical was wrongly banned and that Wizards should have waited longer, the forums were silent. Brewers returned to brewing, and the format as a whole breathed peacefully. The following era was open and balanced...until Caleb Durward broke Vengevine in half, causing the era of Survival of the Fittest. All at once, the unrest returned. Suddently the format was dying again. Prices were outrageous. The Reserved List is clearly to be blamed for all of this. Wizards acted too quickly (again). Etc.
Survival gets banned.
Okay, the format reverts to a blank slate again. The usual decks reemerge, people start to play blue again, and so on. The forums are quiet, except for, again, the dissenters that disagree with Survival's banning. Fast forward a few months, and Mental Misstep happens. The same dance follows, although for once, it isn't as much calls against one villainous deck, but rather against a specific card. The homogenization of Misstep caused an event greater outcry than before, with numerous posts stating that legacy is dead, or near to. Wizards acts, and bans Misstep. Oddly enough, there are fewer disappointed replies to this ban, although some still surface. And the format reverts to an open slate, -again-, although this time, the decks that were prevalent throughout the Misstep era mostly reshape themselves and have maintained through to the current era -- Stoneblade in particular, although precursors of Maverick can also be found. I won't mention Canadian Thresh there, because Thresh hasn't really changed in the last five years. Its popularity has waxed and waned, but it has yet to truly evolve.
Regardless, the period from the banning of Misstep until the present has largely been one of the best times to play legacy that I have yet experienced. The format felt open, like you could brew whatever you wanted and actually have a chance with it. Stoneblade was always a present danger, but it wasn't exactly unbeatable, and it seemed more like people were playing Stoneblade to continue their infatuation with JaceTMS + Stoneforge Mystic than anything truly pernicious to the format. A few months ago, rumblings were heard of a European deck that was becoming something of a boogeyman to the format, known as Maverick. A G/W deck, an oddity since the downfall of Survival, Maverick took the European scene by force, but largely remained overseas. Amercians were slow to shake their addiction to Brainstorm, and while there were brief murmurs of a ban on Brainstorm, the format remained intact throughout one of the higher periods of blue's popularity.
Some short time ago, Maverick finally began to become recognized in the States as a real deck; one which happens to have disturbingly good matchups against blue control/tempo decks, although its combo matchup leaves something to be desired -- lists often sport upwards of 12 cards in their board for combo of various types. GP Indy sees Maverick take a large share of the format, and the Starcity Open at Baltimore in March had an astonishing 6 of the top 8 spots taken by some form of Maverick-style deck, although the Invitational which accompanied it was much more tame by comparison. Many of the lists therein were heavily metagamed for Maverick, as though the pilots respected the G/W menace, but were unwilling to stop playing blue.
Now, it's fire and brimstone again for the format as a whole. The meta has now crystalized once again into several "decks to beat," to borrow the Source's terminology, and all invention is dead. The best one can do now, it seems, is to tune the existing, standing on the shoulders of the giants who came up with the ideas in the first place. There are clearly no more decks to be built, no more interactions to be found. The format has been solved, all possibilities exhausted. Calls for the banning of Green Sun's Zenith have begun, because after all, Maverick has been beating blue decks! My god!
The whole cycle is dumb to watch, and even dumber to participate in. I learned this lesson well when Jund was in standard. Despite being the menace of the format, with one of the higher rates of popularity and thus dominance in standard's history, there was an insane amount of brewing space in the format -- especially during the Shards/Zendikar era before Worldwake came out. The simple fact is this: people are lazy, and unwilling to explore new options. It is easier to take a tier one deck, tune it to your liking (making it worse in the process), and grind it until you are sick of the format as a whole. Innovation is not dead during these periods -- and those who view the format as "dead" are not seeing the big picture. At the risk of turning into a rant about the idiocy of the hive mind concept, I would suggest that the solution to the constant "death cycles" of legacy is to become better at evaluating a format and building decks to attack the weaknesses of those format, while equally constantly exploring possible interactions that could define the next format and catch the established decks off guard. I'll point out my personal legacy deck as an example of this.
The powerful interaction between Veteran Explorer and Cabal Therapy has been present for literally years of legacy development, yet it has never begun to be exploited until now. The question, then, is why not? I believe it to be a combination of the factors discussed above: deckbuilding laziness and a lack of awareness of the existence of the interaction. Maybe somebody noticed it at some point, but they didn't test it long enough and gave up on it. Being dogged in testing is important when evaluating new concepts and attempting to find new engines to build decks around. Regardless, the interaction has now been found, is good, and has been put to use in a solid deck. While it is performing well in Europe, Americans have as usual been slow to adopt Europe's technology. At the same time, I find an interesting phenonmenon with the Veteran/Therapy engine: players know it. Two of my Explorers are Korean -- I've been looking for them since July, and I have only found two thusfar. When I lead with a Korean Explorer, I always announce its English name and ask my opponent if they know what it does. Most of the time, my opponent does know the card, and is aware of what I'm going to do with it. If they know what it is, then odds are they know why it is. Why, then, are players so attached to "the deck," as opposed to exploring other options that are known to be competitve. Is it just sheer laziness? It is often easier to whine about a problem than it is to attempt to do something to fix it.
I believe there are a number of answers to this issue, and I believe that the general legacy player base cannot be held accountable for it. Laziness may indeed influence some brewers who could be experimenting more than they are in periods such as this, where the format has once again crystalized into something resembling a rock-paper-scissors metagame. However, most legacy players in my experience tend to be older. They've played the game for a while, and while they take great pleasure in "their" format, they don't necessarily have the time to innovate because they have other life responsibilities. This is natural, and I believe that there isn't mcuh that can be done about it other than for the more professional players, such as those who routinely top eight SCG events and GPs, to devote less time to tuning "the decks" and more time to brewing contenders for that elusive title. Regardless, I am not one of those players, and I cannot know what they do behind the scenes. I believe that they can be doing more to promote the health of the format, rather than running certain good cards until they invariably get banned and thus shutting off potential future synergies. As for the more practical concerns, I am in the camp that believes that the Reserved List must eventually be abolished if the game is to survive. The price of legacy staples, which Wizards is unwilling to reprint for power-level concerns if nothing else, will continue to rise. Duals will continue to fall apart to age and wear, and collections will continue to sit on shelves and accumulate the dust of those who no longer play or care about them -- although people tend to know better now that their collections are worth money, and will sell when they get out of the game, returning some of those staples to the playing populace. However, the question of whether Wizards will eventually void or find a way around the Reserved List problem remains to be seen, and is not in the players' hands at all, at least so far as can be discerned at this time (cupcakes, anyone?).
My advice for the death of legacy is thus: ignore it. -All- formats undergo periods of "the deck(s)." They pass, one way or another. The next time you're looking at Delver, or Maverick, or Stoneblade, or whatever the It Girl happens to be, try to think instead of how you exploit that deck. Or you can choose to have fun with the format for a while instead, and just play whatever you want and bury your head in the sand. Or, you can also play that deck yourself, and make other people whine about how the format is dying. Any of these options are valid, as are others I haven't listed here. The fact remains that Legacy will not die unless it is through the ending of the format by Wizards, the ending of the format through the unending decay of its staples and costs, or through the ending of the format through the equally undying laziness of its populace, who refuse to find the answers sitting in front of them.
I'll clarify. I've been playing legacy seriously since shortly before the close of the Mystical Tutor era. I came in during one of these "death cycles," as I shall name it. Reanimator was nearing its zenith, and storm combo decks, utilizing the power of Mystical Tutor, were also rising near to the top. Then, amidst cries to ban the offender (or to reban Entomb, one of the cards guilty of pointing out Mystical's power to the field, so to speak), talk of how legacy was a dying format began to surface. It was in this atmosphere that I entered the format. Talk ranged from the rising prices of legacy staples such as dual lands, which if I recall correctly topped out at like 70ish for Underground Seas, to the enduring question of the reserved list, to the lack of originality in the development of the format's decks -- something which would emerge a few years later through the "hive mind" brought in part or in full by the frequent Open Series, sponsered and masterminded by StarcityGames.
Suddenly and without much warning, Wizards acted, and Mystical Tutor was swiftly removed from the format.
All at once, talk of legacy's impending doom ceased, and aside from the few outcries that Mystical was wrongly banned and that Wizards should have waited longer, the forums were silent. Brewers returned to brewing, and the format as a whole breathed peacefully. The following era was open and balanced...until Caleb Durward broke Vengevine in half, causing the era of Survival of the Fittest. All at once, the unrest returned. Suddently the format was dying again. Prices were outrageous. The Reserved List is clearly to be blamed for all of this. Wizards acted too quickly (again). Etc.
Survival gets banned.
Okay, the format reverts to a blank slate again. The usual decks reemerge, people start to play blue again, and so on. The forums are quiet, except for, again, the dissenters that disagree with Survival's banning. Fast forward a few months, and Mental Misstep happens. The same dance follows, although for once, it isn't as much calls against one villainous deck, but rather against a specific card. The homogenization of Misstep caused an event greater outcry than before, with numerous posts stating that legacy is dead, or near to. Wizards acts, and bans Misstep. Oddly enough, there are fewer disappointed replies to this ban, although some still surface. And the format reverts to an open slate, -again-, although this time, the decks that were prevalent throughout the Misstep era mostly reshape themselves and have maintained through to the current era -- Stoneblade in particular, although precursors of Maverick can also be found. I won't mention Canadian Thresh there, because Thresh hasn't really changed in the last five years. Its popularity has waxed and waned, but it has yet to truly evolve.
Regardless, the period from the banning of Misstep until the present has largely been one of the best times to play legacy that I have yet experienced. The format felt open, like you could brew whatever you wanted and actually have a chance with it. Stoneblade was always a present danger, but it wasn't exactly unbeatable, and it seemed more like people were playing Stoneblade to continue their infatuation with JaceTMS + Stoneforge Mystic than anything truly pernicious to the format. A few months ago, rumblings were heard of a European deck that was becoming something of a boogeyman to the format, known as Maverick. A G/W deck, an oddity since the downfall of Survival, Maverick took the European scene by force, but largely remained overseas. Amercians were slow to shake their addiction to Brainstorm, and while there were brief murmurs of a ban on Brainstorm, the format remained intact throughout one of the higher periods of blue's popularity.
Some short time ago, Maverick finally began to become recognized in the States as a real deck; one which happens to have disturbingly good matchups against blue control/tempo decks, although its combo matchup leaves something to be desired -- lists often sport upwards of 12 cards in their board for combo of various types. GP Indy sees Maverick take a large share of the format, and the Starcity Open at Baltimore in March had an astonishing 6 of the top 8 spots taken by some form of Maverick-style deck, although the Invitational which accompanied it was much more tame by comparison. Many of the lists therein were heavily metagamed for Maverick, as though the pilots respected the G/W menace, but were unwilling to stop playing blue.
Now, it's fire and brimstone again for the format as a whole. The meta has now crystalized once again into several "decks to beat," to borrow the Source's terminology, and all invention is dead. The best one can do now, it seems, is to tune the existing, standing on the shoulders of the giants who came up with the ideas in the first place. There are clearly no more decks to be built, no more interactions to be found. The format has been solved, all possibilities exhausted. Calls for the banning of Green Sun's Zenith have begun, because after all, Maverick has been beating blue decks! My god!
The whole cycle is dumb to watch, and even dumber to participate in. I learned this lesson well when Jund was in standard. Despite being the menace of the format, with one of the higher rates of popularity and thus dominance in standard's history, there was an insane amount of brewing space in the format -- especially during the Shards/Zendikar era before Worldwake came out. The simple fact is this: people are lazy, and unwilling to explore new options. It is easier to take a tier one deck, tune it to your liking (making it worse in the process), and grind it until you are sick of the format as a whole. Innovation is not dead during these periods -- and those who view the format as "dead" are not seeing the big picture. At the risk of turning into a rant about the idiocy of the hive mind concept, I would suggest that the solution to the constant "death cycles" of legacy is to become better at evaluating a format and building decks to attack the weaknesses of those format, while equally constantly exploring possible interactions that could define the next format and catch the established decks off guard. I'll point out my personal legacy deck as an example of this.
The powerful interaction between Veteran Explorer and Cabal Therapy has been present for literally years of legacy development, yet it has never begun to be exploited until now. The question, then, is why not? I believe it to be a combination of the factors discussed above: deckbuilding laziness and a lack of awareness of the existence of the interaction. Maybe somebody noticed it at some point, but they didn't test it long enough and gave up on it. Being dogged in testing is important when evaluating new concepts and attempting to find new engines to build decks around. Regardless, the interaction has now been found, is good, and has been put to use in a solid deck. While it is performing well in Europe, Americans have as usual been slow to adopt Europe's technology. At the same time, I find an interesting phenonmenon with the Veteran/Therapy engine: players know it. Two of my Explorers are Korean -- I've been looking for them since July, and I have only found two thusfar. When I lead with a Korean Explorer, I always announce its English name and ask my opponent if they know what it does. Most of the time, my opponent does know the card, and is aware of what I'm going to do with it. If they know what it is, then odds are they know why it is. Why, then, are players so attached to "the deck," as opposed to exploring other options that are known to be competitve. Is it just sheer laziness? It is often easier to whine about a problem than it is to attempt to do something to fix it.
I believe there are a number of answers to this issue, and I believe that the general legacy player base cannot be held accountable for it. Laziness may indeed influence some brewers who could be experimenting more than they are in periods such as this, where the format has once again crystalized into something resembling a rock-paper-scissors metagame. However, most legacy players in my experience tend to be older. They've played the game for a while, and while they take great pleasure in "their" format, they don't necessarily have the time to innovate because they have other life responsibilities. This is natural, and I believe that there isn't mcuh that can be done about it other than for the more professional players, such as those who routinely top eight SCG events and GPs, to devote less time to tuning "the decks" and more time to brewing contenders for that elusive title. Regardless, I am not one of those players, and I cannot know what they do behind the scenes. I believe that they can be doing more to promote the health of the format, rather than running certain good cards until they invariably get banned and thus shutting off potential future synergies. As for the more practical concerns, I am in the camp that believes that the Reserved List must eventually be abolished if the game is to survive. The price of legacy staples, which Wizards is unwilling to reprint for power-level concerns if nothing else, will continue to rise. Duals will continue to fall apart to age and wear, and collections will continue to sit on shelves and accumulate the dust of those who no longer play or care about them -- although people tend to know better now that their collections are worth money, and will sell when they get out of the game, returning some of those staples to the playing populace. However, the question of whether Wizards will eventually void or find a way around the Reserved List problem remains to be seen, and is not in the players' hands at all, at least so far as can be discerned at this time (cupcakes, anyone?).
My advice for the death of legacy is thus: ignore it. -All- formats undergo periods of "the deck(s)." They pass, one way or another. The next time you're looking at Delver, or Maverick, or Stoneblade, or whatever the It Girl happens to be, try to think instead of how you exploit that deck. Or you can choose to have fun with the format for a while instead, and just play whatever you want and bury your head in the sand. Or, you can also play that deck yourself, and make other people whine about how the format is dying. Any of these options are valid, as are others I haven't listed here. The fact remains that Legacy will not die unless it is through the ending of the format by Wizards, the ending of the format through the unending decay of its staples and costs, or through the ending of the format through the equally undying laziness of its populace, who refuse to find the answers sitting in front of them.
Thursday, March 22, 2012
Introductions
Hello all --
My name is Kevin McKee. If you're reading this, odds are you either know me personally, or you know someone who does. I'm the Veteran Explorer guy. I'm also the Oath of Druids guy, the Trinket Mage guy, the Gifts Ungiven guy, and the Havengul Lich guy, depending on the format and what I feel like building at any given time. I would profess to be a competent player of Magic: the Gathering, although I will freely admit that I don't yet have many achievements under my belt in that domain, aside from playing for a moderately long time. I've only been competitive since Shards block, though, so I guess most of that time doesn't account for much in the grand scheme of things. Aside from Magic stuff, I also study mythology's effect via literary theory, listen to almost any degree of metal you can imagine (and some you probably can't), and spend time playing DotA2, Civ5, and Dungeon Defenders with friends. There might be periodic rant posts or days where I need to organize something in my head, so they'll get posted here...but first and foremost, this is a Magic blog.
To me, philosophically, the theory behind a deck is as important as the final list. While I recognize that this is a topic by itself that could span several posts, I'm just going to leave it there for now and keep going forward -- I will likely come back to it at a later date. What this means is that this is not a decklist blog. I will happily post a decklist to go along with whatever topic I'm talking about at the moment, but most of my time will be spent talking about the theory behind that list...why certain choices are made and why other cards are omitted. However, I will not just throw a decklist at you. I'll leave that for the more popular pundits whose technology gets spread far and wide at the slightest mention of a card.
And so, I ask: what would you like me to go into first? Format, archetype, etc. I'll do my best to provide my thoughts on it in a relatively timely manner!
My name is Kevin McKee. If you're reading this, odds are you either know me personally, or you know someone who does. I'm the Veteran Explorer guy. I'm also the Oath of Druids guy, the Trinket Mage guy, the Gifts Ungiven guy, and the Havengul Lich guy, depending on the format and what I feel like building at any given time. I would profess to be a competent player of Magic: the Gathering, although I will freely admit that I don't yet have many achievements under my belt in that domain, aside from playing for a moderately long time. I've only been competitive since Shards block, though, so I guess most of that time doesn't account for much in the grand scheme of things. Aside from Magic stuff, I also study mythology's effect via literary theory, listen to almost any degree of metal you can imagine (and some you probably can't), and spend time playing DotA2, Civ5, and Dungeon Defenders with friends. There might be periodic rant posts or days where I need to organize something in my head, so they'll get posted here...but first and foremost, this is a Magic blog.
To me, philosophically, the theory behind a deck is as important as the final list. While I recognize that this is a topic by itself that could span several posts, I'm just going to leave it there for now and keep going forward -- I will likely come back to it at a later date. What this means is that this is not a decklist blog. I will happily post a decklist to go along with whatever topic I'm talking about at the moment, but most of my time will be spent talking about the theory behind that list...why certain choices are made and why other cards are omitted. However, I will not just throw a decklist at you. I'll leave that for the more popular pundits whose technology gets spread far and wide at the slightest mention of a card.
And so, I ask: what would you like me to go into first? Format, archetype, etc. I'll do my best to provide my thoughts on it in a relatively timely manner!
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