Thoughts on restrictions
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Restricting Gush is absurd. Vintage should be preserved as its own ridiculously powerful metagame. If you can't hang with it just pivot over to Standard. It's funny how you categorized the top three strategies in Vintage because land destruction (technically mana-advantage but not how you meant it) USED to be completely dominant. Players simply had to work around those strategies, so certain land-destruction defense cards that are never played these days used to be ubiquitous. WotC: Your default should be to print a new card or two to even out any given imbalance in the metagame before restricting cards!
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@Evoclipse i really agree with evo's presented things about hate cards. you benefiting from me doing stuff is preferable to me not being able to do stuff.
its much more fun for me to try to beat 3 counterspells a duress and 4 power on the board while playing storm than it is for me to beat you cant cast 4+ drops, you cant target me, you can only cast 1 spell per turn. even when my opp has 3 misteps 3 forces and a mindbreak trap.
down with continuous effects!
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First off, you all realize that a 2/2 creature is just about the easiest thing to remove in a game of magic, yes? Artifact creature is perhaps the only thing more vulnerable. If a 2/2 with a certain effect is ruining your chance of winning, your deck is too narrow or has no effects beyond its spluge-in-your-face-and-win approach.
Secondly, a hatebear shouldn't be wrecking a tournament. They won't always have the right hatebear at the right time. No hatebear beats storm and standstill and eldrazi and oath and shops all in one card. There are wrong answers, but never wrong threats.
If you are complaining about 2/2 creatures ruining a format by virtue of having effects that prevent you from going apeshit on turn 1, well, that's just silly. Null rod, chalice, trini, etc., have all been massively limiting to some strategies. And people bitched about them before. Now 2/2s are having a chance to be playable, and the people that just want to turn 1 storm 10 or tinker into win are crying. Vintage is fun because you get to play all the cards and get to have intense strategies and skillful games....not just because you get to deploy turn 1 haymakers all day.
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@Thewhitedragon69 uhh i actually just play vintage because i get to play t1 haymakers all day. if i wanted to play an intense strategy skillful game i would play legacy or maybe draft.if restricted cards no longer win games i would argue they dont need to be restricted.
the following rant is brought to you by basic lands, basics they die to strip mine anyway, why play them at all
draft the format of creating a cohesive and synergistic deck using a pile of nonsence.
standard the format of change and RnD where you build some sort of strategy and base your deck on it and if you dont like something dont worry itll be gone in a year.
modern the format where you play old standard decks you really enjoyed. unless they were anygood in which case they are banned. also play burn because manabase,
legacy the format of powerful interactions and good cards where you can enjoy the cards wizards doesnt think are reasonable anymore
vintage the format of opps we shouldnt have printed that so lets only play 1 of it alright?
sealed some luck based garbage people have to play at prereleases sometimes.
edh because these cards are cool but bad
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^ I have no idea what this means.
In terms of @Thewhitedragon69's post, I fully agree. There is something completely absurd about all these spell-slingers with access to all the best cards of all time, the very cards that made creatures obsolete and allow decks like Storm, whining endlessly about decks containing 2/2s and 2/3's. I mean, literally every set is filled to the brim with creature removal. Get digging.
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If you are complaining about 2/2 creatures ruining a format by virtue of having effects that prevent you from going apeshit on turn 1, well, that's just silly. Null rod, chalice, trini, etc., have all been massively limiting to some strategies. And people bitched about them before. Now 2/2s are having a chance to be playable, and the people that just want to turn 1 storm 10 or tinker into win are crying. Vintage is fun because you get to play all the cards and get to have intense strategies and skillful games....not just because you get to deploy turn 1 haymakers all day.
If you're complaining about not getting to play Magic, that's just silly. There were cards that stopped you from playing Magic before, and everyone hated those. So look at how silly and inconsistent you all are.
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@Thewhitedragon69 Your post actually highlights one of my points: There is no single Hatebeat that can shut down every strategy, thus with the decks usually lacking tutor effects, it becauses a game of chance. A deck full of hate becomes a "hit and win or miss and loose" kind of matchup, and that is somthing that I find extremely frustrating, no matter if I win or loose.
Of course you can argue that in Vintage, especially with decks running loads of one-offs, this community should be used to it, but if you run the typical Vintage decks of the past (dredge, shops, big blue) you find that they operate pretty stable and redundant. So for me, this silver bulleting is something I never really experienced in Vintage all that much.
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Spin through the old Humans thread sometime. There's nothing lucky about the way the Humans pilots approach the game. They know more about tempo and the mana curve than at least half of the people who've posted in this thread. You shouldn't really be surprised that you're losing to them.
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@ribby I'm not talking about playing against them necessarily, I've played Hatebear decks in the past - but I feel like the lists a few years ago didn't have such a high variance as the power level was lower and you generally played mroe thats that esentially did the same thing. This was before e.g. Cavern arrived.
So let's take Cavern as an example. It is in your opening hand about 40% of the time, and that is something you cannot influence at all - but still it is a huge factor in beating certain openers from blue decks. That's the kind of randomness I don't like."If that Savannah was a Cavern you'd have lost on the spot - but you countered my first two creature and proceeded to win the game the next turn" kind of situations I personally find very frustrating, no matter which end I'm on.
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I can see how that matchup of "blue" vs. e.g. 5-colour Humans can be frustrating when you mistakenly believe it should be won or lost because of stack-based interaction.
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I appreciate it when games are decided by in-game decisions, not necessarily stack-based interaction. As soon as there is decent tutoring in Hatebear strategies (and the white Recruiter is potentially promising) you can count me in.
And please don't reduce my example to the functionality of uncounterability, it was just to highlight that the impact of certain cards can be very hit or miss. This has absolutely nothing to do with card types or strategy. I dislike Belcher for the exact same reasons - opponent has Force T1 I loose, opponent doesn't have the Force I win. Some people might enjoy the thrill of taking a 60/40 chance on turn 1, but for me that is not what I consider fun or interesting gameplay. -
This is the crux of this thread: a perception that "hatebears" (in its various and different forms; Humans, Simians mom, Eldrazi, etc) threatens fun to the point where it can be compared to Belcher.
Ok. That's definitely an opinion.
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Addendums:
Tutoring seems just so wrong. I mean the Humans decks are already behind the 8-ball on traditional card draw. They have to make up for it by recouping card advantage via hard or soft 2-for-1s like TKS, Thalia and Cavern. They are specifically structured to curve out these pieces. You can't ask them to become the clearly inferior tempo deck by saying they should tutor for stuff, just because you don't like their redundancy.
Cavern is an example of the opposite of a hit or miss card. It is one of the developments that pulls this disruptive-creature strategy away from the Hatebears mentality. I guess we could call Savannah a hit or miss card though... That's one way to do it.
Let's not also forget that Humans pilots actually consider things like how to win the game. Mayor of Avabruck is the classic example but @Guli has written many seminal posts about this. They actually have a game plan that involves dealing 20 within a window of their making, it's not just some 60/40 dice roll deck.
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@Smmenen said:
@gkraigher said:
There are other card games that have trump cards for other cards, that is not magic.
Oh really? So, Circle of Protections, etc. are a novel element in Magic?
The very first Magic set was designed with a plethora of trumps for various strategies. Virtually every conceivable strategy was 'answered' in some way shape or form in the early game. Land destruction? Play Consecrate Land. Hand destruction? Here, play cards like Psychic Purge. Reanimation or recursion? Tormod's Crypt. And so on.
That's why Wizards typically designs an answer to almost any strategy in each set. That's why cards like City in a Bottle were created. They created fail-safes to ensure strategic balance.
Far from some external and nefarious force, the very essence of magic is strategy and trump/answer.
rather embarrassing fact that a card like Ponder is restricted in Vintage.
Ponder isn't just restricted because it's a spell count enabler. It's almost a 1 mana impulse. It's absurdly powerful. Imagine how good that is in 2-card combo decks like Oath, which just need to find Oath and Orchard.
From my perspective, what matters for design is cards that increase the number of playable cards in the card pool. (Which I argued here: http://www.eternalcentral.com/so-many-insane-plays-designing-for-eternal/ ) I think Wizards has excelled recently in doing that. It's possible that right now we have a larger playable card pool than at any point in recent memory.
Smmenen - I often find myself agreeing with you, even when its you vs 10 other people. And I can't argue that we have a more diverse card pool now than any other time in Vintage. Especially if you simply count the number of playable cards.
But I have an issue with the quantity vs quality in this. And this is a more abstract concept than simple card pool diversity. As many have pointed out - vintage is about manipulating the stack, drawing extra cards, using individually powerful spells. Its about using cards or combinations that cheat the rules of magic.Vintage has also always been a very slowly evolving metagame. Yet in the past year (year and a half) we've seen more restrictions than in some 5 year periods of Vintage history. We've seen more cards printed that are vintage playable but they are playable for different reasons in the past. When dredge came out those were vintage playable because they cheated regular magic rules and strategies. When mentor came out it was playable because it created a powerful effect. When oath came out it cheated normal rules. And in both cases players built decks and developed strategies to make those cards or effects work.
However lately with the restrictions and the mass printings of anti-vintage effects on creatures it seems like R&D is taking a VERY heavy hand in the shaping of the vintage metagame. I do not like that. Players are not developing strategies, watching them grow and prosper, learning to deal with them and then countering them. R&D is telling us, ''This is what your strategy will be now." And whether this is actually true or not it feels like R&D is saying, "Oh and you aren't allowed to use your old strategies anymore."
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@Khahan said:
As many have pointed out - vintage is about manipulating the stack, drawing extra cards, using individually powerful spells. Its about using cards or combinations that cheat the rules of magic.
You're not wrong, but Vintage is still very much about that. You can play Storm, Doomsday, Oath, Belcher, Tezz, or any number of stack/combo focused unfair decks in Vintage. They didn't go anywhere. They just have competition now from a variety of deck that was previously only on the fringes of the format.
I know that White Bearhaters seems everywhere, but really, Shops just evolved into a new form and diversified. I don't feel like it's taken over a huge share of the metagame. I'm sure Steve will do a metagame breakdown in his next So Many Insane Plays.
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Cavern of souls is not a broken card. In fact the most successful decks do not play it. Of course if your only plan against humans is countermagic you can have a problem, just as if my only plan against MUD is pithing on wasteland and engineered explosives for 2, or playing dread of night against mentor. Cavern changes the way you have to fight tribal decks, just as mental misstep or flusterstorm did with countermagic.
Tendrils of agony also skips countermagic. What is worse, tendrils kills you, instead of putting a bear in play. People just adapted, and we have to adapt to it. It demands other options that just using countermagic, just as dredge does.
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As someone who plays Cavern decks I +1 xouman's statement. Players will have to adapt to beat me or they will continue to get crushed by the cards I'm playing more often than they want to. But it isn't a simple binary of like "I'll run X-hate card that folks have SAID was good vs. Humans and then I'll win." No no no no no. That is a VSL attitude and only works when your metagame is as inbred as that one is. Players are going to have to become smarter deck builders and stop net decking. I can think of no better punishment for a net decker than falling prey to the same deck over and over because he/she refuses to see the holistic picture of the matchup. If beating dredge was just about running more cages and and hate cards then more players boasting that strategy would be crushing dredge. Clearly dredge adapted though with the "cagebreaker" variant. If folks think humans are just going to fall to someone running "more plows" then they are sorely mistaken and in for a rude awakening.
My 2 cents.
-Storm
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This whole thread seems to be an argument between people saying "Hate bears isn't fun to play against" and people saying "What are you talking about? Hate bears isn't overpowered!"
Those two points don't conflict at all
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@ajfirecracker said:
This whole thread seems to be an argument between people saying "Hate bears isn't fun to play against" and people saying "What are you talking about? Hate bears isn't overpowered!"
Those two points don't conflict at all
While what you say is true on both counts, I think people saying either of these are talking about ancillary issues and are missing the mark. Its not about hatebears itself. Its about a seemingly changed philosophy from R&D.
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This thread is a beating. My primary frustration in listening to the non-prison players is that they never want to bend a f'ing inch and actually include removal in their designs (or the decks they copy). It's a 2 toughness man. Removal has scaled with creatures as well over the years. The typical retort is something about how not playing Mental Misstep x X, Flusterstorm and Pyroblast main weakens their 'blue' mirror matchup. Spend some time to think about the benefit of being able to remove permanents. A classic example is @brianpk80 's deck from Champs. He actually decided that removing permanents his opponent might deploy was a priority, instead of exclusively fighting a stack battle. He was rewarded by being able to navigate a field of varied decks because he engineered varied answers into his design. Prison has been a strategy from the inception of the game, it's a shame people cry about it so much. The metric of 'funness' or 'playing Magic' is the worst and most immeasurable out there. If I have fun denying you resources, building my own and locking out your plan on the axis of resources then that's still fun. Someone once said Magic is a zero sum fun game, if I have all the fun I'm fine with that. Orchard, Mox, Oath go isn't much fun for the guy about to be Griselbranded. Measuring how fun it is is a wasteful exercise.
~Sean
@TeamTuskMTG on Twitter
Sometimes caster on Tusk Talk
