As an aside one thing I would not do is look at Mtg Top 8 for pretty much anything beyond basic info- it misses a stupid number of events, especially European ones that are not BOM related. Its most played cards stuff is basically correct of course, but then that tells you what the most played cards are rather than decklists. On that list Chalice is >10 % of course.
The whole point of Legacy is there are large events where decks featuring different strategies there. That might only be one prison deck every 4 SCG top 8s (escluding Miracles), but to me that is a hell of a lot more than Standard and its critter v critter matches. There are over fifty placed decks on Mtg Top 8 with main deck Trinispheres this year alone.
I don't wish to tell players what to play, and as I have repeatedly said it is all very subjective. What I responded to was the very specific implication that the game is better today because it has more interaction- so it was the Standard player evangelising. In fact the post I responded to implied that the game now is better and if you don't like it play another game, which to me was really rather odd.
Sorceries were the point of original discussion, turning it into format bashing is pointless, so unless there is any more stuff about that I will say no more.
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People with belligerent signatures are trying to compensate for something....
How about the number of tournaments? The number of players in those tournaments? I know there's some people trying to break it, and I don't want to diminish their efforts, but the numbers are not remotely close to modern's or standard's numbers. Without a pro-tour and a bigger gp circuit, there's not enough incentive for big teams to "break the format" like they do on standard or modern (I guess modern less so now because there's no PT). Then there's the issue with card availability, even if WotC decided that there should be a PT or more GP's, there's just not enough cards for everyone to play the deck they want to play.
Just to give you a number, just for 2016-2017 there are/have been 21 Modern GPs, there have been (will be) 24 Legacy GP's since 2004 up to 2017, if we just count the ones for 2016-2017 there are just 3, that's seven times more modern GP's than legacy GP's, and don't even try to compare it to standard.
French commander get's played and it's "competitive", note the quotes, people being competitive about someting doesn't make that something competitive, I'm not saying people aren't competitive about the format (Legacy), I'm saying it's not played enough (not enough tournaments, not enough players, and no big pro player teams trying to break it) to be as broken as it would be if it evolved at the peace standard or modern does.
Now comming back to the point, instants and sorcerys are inherently less interactive than permanents, and out of the permanent types, the ones that are easier to interact are creatures and planeswalkers, you might be tempted to argue that instants and sorcerys are better and I would argue they are just more powerful because they are harder to interact with, thus worse from a game design point of view, I'm not saying they shouldn't exist, I'm saying R&D have to be careful about how many and how powerful they make them because they have the very real risk of making the game worse, even if it's objetively more powerful, and R&D knows this, as evidenced with the shift on design philosophy of the last few years, they do make powerful non-permanent spells, just not as many, often or powerful as they used to, and that's ok.
While I'm sure we can all agree that sorcery speed represents a major drop in power level, I think it also "dumbs down" the game. I have seen an argument in another thread that making things sorcery speed forces you to decide if you want to play removal or hold open a counter, and while I think there is merit to this argument I don't think this makes decisions harder. For starters sorcery speed makes the game much easier for your opponent as they don't have to consider the tempo implications of many of their decisions and at the very least do not have to time spells and effects properly to avoid blow outs. This means that sequencing and technical plays are not rewarded as I believe they should be in a game of skill. One of the biggest skill factors with counter spells is bluffing them so that your opponent does not play their most powerful spells which you may not even have an answer for. If you are forced to tap out, you cannot bluff effects. I believe bluffing is essential to the skill side of magic and without it the game, especially constructed and sealed, moves closer towards gambling. Wizards has always been very vocal about how magic is a game of skill and not a game of chance so I feel they should be careful not to keep pushing the new player friendly trend (although I would argue that card prices do much much more to deter new players than complexity, Wizards isn't a nonprofit). Finally choosing between sorceries and a counter spell puts you in a situation where you have to properly guess your opponents hand for counter spells to even be playable. Currently the only real player in standard is negate and that is mostly because of color pie restrictions, and how rare planeswalker destruction is.
I will admit that I might be bias as I find sorceries boring to play with and against. I have also in the past played very instant heavy budget decks at FNM as a way to beat less experienced players who bought teir decks and am frustrated that I got little to no toys. Instant speed spells can be as good as soceries with raw power with the right timing, but now I feel forced to Pay to win.
For context their are 28 instants in this set and 27 sorceries, so my real issue is with traditionally instant speed effects like cancel being bumped down to sorcery speed.
You say it doesn't make decisions harder, it makes them easier for your opponent. Then you describe beautifully how it has made decisions harder. Do I use my removal now, or do I hold my mana open in case my opponent plays something worse? And remember, your opponent also faces the same decisions. It comes down to the ability to read the board state and your opponent.
As for sorceries and instants in general, the last few blocks have been slower. The same was true in Theros. Instant removal that traditionally costed 2 or 3 were raised to 4 and 5 CMC, so people could play and activate monsters. Same with the Eldrazi, it wouldn't be fun if you dropped an 8 CMC Eldrazi, only to have it stopped by cheap, instant-speed removal.
And as for Lunar Force, it's something different. It's weird, but it is a counter that activates prowess on your turn, when you most likely want a prowess activation. And it makes your opponent play around it. In the early game, it could cost them a turn to deal with it. In tempo terms, it can be a 3 CMC Time Walk.
Sorceries lead to more depth in gameplay in forcing the active player to weigh more options.
It, broadly speaking of course, benefits the better players since they generally are more astute in assessing the board and game state.
Except that they are creating more and more creatures with flash and combat tricks. I would be less irked about U and R being hosed into Sorcery speed without G and W getting instant-speed stuff that was traditionally sorcery speed.
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French commander get's played and it's "competitive", note the quotes, people being competitive about someting doesn't make that something competitive, I'm not saying people aren't competitive about the format (Legacy), I'm saying it's not played enough (not enough tournaments, not enough players, and no big pro player teams trying to break it) to be as broken as it would be if it evolved at the peace standard or modern does.
Now comming back to the point, instants and sorcerys are inherently less interactive than permanents, and out of the permanent types, the ones that are easier to interact are creatures and planeswalkers, you might be tempted to argue that instants and sorcerys are better and I would argue they are just more powerful because they are harder to interact with, thus worse from a game design point of view, I'm not saying they shouldn't exist, I'm saying R&D have to be careful about how many and how powerful they make them because they have the very real risk of making the game worse, even if it's objetively more powerful, and R&D knows this, as evidenced with the shift on design philosophy of the last few years, they do make powerful non-permanent spells, just not as many, often or powerful as they used to, and that's ok.
Your argument regarding Legacy doesn't make any sense. There aren't ******* GPs / SCG Opens for French Commander. There ARE those types of events for Legacy. It's not a casual format being played competitively, it's a format being run at high level events for thousands of dollars in prizes. People who play it take it much more seriously than commander.
Also, just throwing this out there, this design philosophy is what brought us Caw Blade Standard. It also gave us the single most broken Modern season in the entire history of the format via Eldrazi, and given that 53% of Day 2 decks in SCG Columbus (Standard) were Bant Company, it seems likely that Standard is also headed down the same trajectory.
I'm obviously exagerating with the french commander comparision, people do take it seriously, but you don't see teams of 15+ pro players spend 2 weeks to a month testing for legacy, do you? And the number of people in any given legacy tournament has a lot to do with how few there are, if you have 3 gp's a year, you can be sure that every legacy player is gonna try to show up to the ones they can, that's not the case with standard and to a certain extend modern, you can argue all you want, legacy is played "competitively" but is not anywhere near modern or standard, not by a long shot (at least seven times less than modern, just to point it out again).
As for your comment on caw blade and eldrazi, sure, those were bad formats, but if you compare them with say... old storm, or combo winter, you really don't have an argument there, the difference is abysmal. Even if we assume the formats you cited are equally broken (I assure you, they are not even close), the difference between playing say.... a storm mirror to a caw blade mirror is abysmal, storm mirror is a race with little to no interaction, meanwhile the caw blade mirror is a highly interactive matchup, the same can be said about eldrazi, those 2 were "broken" because of the lack of diversity in the metagame, not lack of interaction, as opposed to (lets say, even if they are not) equally broken non-permanenet-spell based metagames.
The whole point of Legacy is there are large events where decks featuring different strategies there. That might only be one prison deck every 4 SCG top 8s (escluding Miracles), but to me that is a hell of a lot more than Standard and its critter v critter matches. There are over fifty placed decks on Mtg Top 8 with main deck Trinispheres this year alone.
I don't wish to tell players what to play, and as I have repeatedly said it is all very subjective. What I responded to was the very specific implication that the game is better today because it has more interaction- so it was the Standard player evangelising. In fact the post I responded to implied that the game now is better and if you don't like it play another game, which to me was really rather odd.
Sorceries were the point of original discussion, turning it into format bashing is pointless, so unless there is any more stuff about that I will say no more.
Just to give you a number, just for 2016-2017 there are/have been 21 Modern GPs, there have been (will be) 24 Legacy GP's since 2004 up to 2017, if we just count the ones for 2016-2017 there are just 3, that's seven times more modern GP's than legacy GP's, and don't even try to compare it to standard.
Now comming back to the point, instants and sorcerys are inherently less interactive than permanents, and out of the permanent types, the ones that are easier to interact are creatures and planeswalkers, you might be tempted to argue that instants and sorcerys are better and I would argue they are just more powerful because they are harder to interact with, thus worse from a game design point of view, I'm not saying they shouldn't exist, I'm saying R&D have to be careful about how many and how powerful they make them because they have the very real risk of making the game worse, even if it's objetively more powerful, and R&D knows this, as evidenced with the shift on design philosophy of the last few years, they do make powerful non-permanent spells, just not as many, often or powerful as they used to, and that's ok.
You say it doesn't make decisions harder, it makes them easier for your opponent. Then you describe beautifully how it has made decisions harder. Do I use my removal now, or do I hold my mana open in case my opponent plays something worse? And remember, your opponent also faces the same decisions. It comes down to the ability to read the board state and your opponent.
As for sorceries and instants in general, the last few blocks have been slower. The same was true in Theros. Instant removal that traditionally costed 2 or 3 were raised to 4 and 5 CMC, so people could play and activate monsters. Same with the Eldrazi, it wouldn't be fun if you dropped an 8 CMC Eldrazi, only to have it stopped by cheap, instant-speed removal.
And as for Lunar Force, it's something different. It's weird, but it is a counter that activates prowess on your turn, when you most likely want a prowess activation. And it makes your opponent play around it. In the early game, it could cost them a turn to deal with it. In tempo terms, it can be a 3 CMC Time Walk.
Except that they are creating more and more creatures with flash and combat tricks. I would be less irked about U and R being hosed into Sorcery speed without G and W getting instant-speed stuff that was traditionally sorcery speed.
As for your comment on caw blade and eldrazi, sure, those were bad formats, but if you compare them with say... old storm, or combo winter, you really don't have an argument there, the difference is abysmal. Even if we assume the formats you cited are equally broken (I assure you, they are not even close), the difference between playing say.... a storm mirror to a caw blade mirror is abysmal, storm mirror is a race with little to no interaction, meanwhile the caw blade mirror is a highly interactive matchup, the same can be said about eldrazi, those 2 were "broken" because of the lack of diversity in the metagame, not lack of interaction, as opposed to (lets say, even if they are not) equally broken non-permanenet-spell based metagames.
Im not sure what part of my post you are refering to. The play a counter spell vs removal part?