Thoughts on restrictions
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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 -
@nedleeds just to be clear, I'm not against the hatebears. I just find them irritating sometimes.
I actually like the variety. -
[Spoiler: Irony, sarcasm and exaggerations may occur in this post]
Here is what I have learned from following this thread:
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'People' apparently prefers playing 'real' Vintage (I'm not sure which category players who play hatebear deck belongs to then, or which Magic game they are playing)
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'Real' Vintage consists of 'People' playing blue decks (please read the first line in this reply before you blow a gasket)
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'People' apparently think that the prison that a hatebear deck can impose on people are much much more unfair and not fun than the prison that an old style shop deck could impose on them. Even though they will be able to play various sweepers and other 'more-than-1-for-1-ones' which they were not able to play against the shop decks of old where there were more sphere effects than a single Thalia.
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'People' knows that the skillset to pilot a hatebear deck is vastly inferior to the skillset 'people' need to pilot a 'real' Vintage deck. The deck building, metagaming, sequencing, curving, and other aspects is waaaaay easier in a hatebear deck (a few 'People' among the 'People' seems to disagree - thank you!
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'People' tend to forget that many of the 'real' Vintage decks can still mop the floor with many of the hatebear strains and the archetype doesn't take up much of the meta
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A broken card potentially belongs in a 'real' Vintage deck. A broken card with a body attached is not broken but unfair/not fun/not 'real' Vintage (unless it is Monastery Mentor, in case it is better categorized with Tendrils than with the hatebears - which per definition makes it ok after all!)
Do you still remember the first line of this reply?
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'People' thinks it is more 'honorable' to lose to a 'real' Vintage deck than being pecked to death by a 2/2 body or two.
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'People' don't want aggro to be wincon in 'real' Vintage unless it smells like Monastery Tendrils or Blightsteel. An exception could be that you sprinkle it with counters (fish) or a few spheres (Slash Panther) - side note: The sphere is not allowed to have a body and be called Thalia
And more general and not linked to this thread, but the first line of this reply still applies:
- 'People' sometimes have a hard time adapting. The 'hatebear'-equivalent deck that everybody hated some years back was Affinity Robots. A deck that failed misserably against either Stony Silence, Nullrod or Rest in Peace (as 'Modular' doesn't trigger). But nooooo, white, like red, wasn't a 'real' Vintage color in those days. So 'people' lost and complained about robots.
Why not just play some hate against the hatebears? I wont insult anybody intelligence by starting to list them, but the list is long and strong. Even with hatebears on the board.
[End Irony, sarcasm and exaggerations]
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@Uvatha said:
[Spoiler: Irony, sarcasm and exaggerations may occur in this post]
Here is what I have learned from following this thread:
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'People' apparently prefers playing 'real' Vintage (I'm not sure which category players who play hatebear deck belongs to then, or which Magic game they are playing)
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'Real' Vintage consists of 'People' playing blue decks (please read the first line in this reply before you blow a gasket)
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'People' apparently think that the prison that a hatebear deck can impose on people are much much more unfair and not fun than the prison that an old style shop deck could impose on them. Even though they will be able to play various sweepers and other 'more-than-1-for-1-ones' which they were not able to play against the shop decks of old where there were more sphere effects than a single Thalia.
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'People' knows that the skillset to pilot a hatebear deck is vastly inferior to the skillset 'people' need to pilot a 'real' Vintage deck. The deck building, metagaming, sequencing, curving, and other aspects is waaaaay easier in a hatebear deck (a few 'People' among the 'People' seems to disagree - thank you!
) -
'People' tend to forget that many of the 'real' Vintage decks can still mop the floor with many of the hatebear strains and the archetype doesn't take up much of the meta
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A broken card potentially belongs in a 'real' Vintage deck. A broken card with a body attached is not broken but unfair/not fun/not 'real' Vintage (unless it is Monastery Mentor, in case it is better categorized with Tendrils than with the hatebears - which per definition makes it ok after all!)
Do you still remember the first line of this reply?
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'People' thinks it is more 'honorable' to lose to a 'real' Vintage deck than being pecked to death by a 2/2 body or two.
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'People' don't want aggro to be wincon in 'real' Vintage unless it smells like Monastery Tendrils or Blightsteel. An exception could be that you sprinkle it with counters (fish) or a few spheres (Slash Panther) - side note: The sphere is not allowed to have a body and be called Thalia
And more general and not linked to this thread, but the first line of this reply still applies:
- 'People' sometimes have a hard time adapting. The 'hatebear'-equivalent deck that everybody hated some years back was Affinity Robots. A deck that failed misserably against either Stony Silence, Nullrod or Rest in Peace (as 'Modular' doesn't trigger). But nooooo, white, like red, wasn't a 'real' Vintage color in those days. So 'people' lost and complained about robots.
Why not just play some hate against the hatebears? I wont insult anybody intelligence by starting to list them, but the list is long and strong. Even with hatebears on the board.
[End Irony, sarcasm and exaggerations]
Short answer?: Because blue players are used to having good matchups across the board and don't think they should have to pony up sb space for a non-"real" deck. This whole argument that hatebears are too strong is ridiculous and I have zero sympathy for blue players whining about it. Period.
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@nedleeds Christ, this again...
When you build your Shops or Eldrazi deck with 10 Thorns, what decks are you trying to beat? The Blue decks. Why would you assume that Blue players should try to beat different types of decks than you and other prison players? Contrary to popular belief, there is NO Blue Cabal that tells Blue players what to play. We don't meet up after the tournament to distribute prizes that we win to every player that sleeved up Gushes. So why build your main deck to beat an archetype that is less than <25% of the field? That's just stupid if you are trying to win a tournament and so is this argument that's based on some comical misconception of how metagaming works.
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@ChubbyRain said:
@nedleeds Christ, this again...
When you build your Shops or Eldrazi deck with 10 Thorns, what decks are you trying to beat? The Blue decks. Why would you assume that Blue players should try to beat different types of decks than you and other prison players? Contrary to popular belief, there is NO Blue Cabal that tells Blue players what to player. We don't meet up after the tournament to distribute prizes that we win to every player that sleeved up Gushes. So why build your main deck to beat an archetype that is less than <25% of the field? That's just stupid if you are trying to win a tournament and so is this argument that's based on some comical misconception of how metagaming works.
+1
@Sean it's really time to move past the restrictions out of Workshops; you've had three in ten years it's going to be OK buddy.
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As a noted Noble Fish pilot I find a war between blue counterspell players and hate bear players to be a bit bewildering.
