Survival is still just the best fair deck in the format if it's unbanned. Combo beats it, but Survival decks are more than capable of going into UG for countermagic or BG for discard. When Survival reigned, both blue and black were common colors to pair alongside Survival.
Even if DRS stops you from abusing the grave with Survival (which it can't completely do because it can only activate once per turn as opposed to Survival's as many times as you have mana) it is still a recursive tutor engine. Abrupt Decay can only do so much, because they can still activate Survival in response to Decay. They can just do something along the lines of waiting to get Survival + Gaea's Cradle online and do the whole chain while Decay is on the stack.
RIP is easy to deal with when you can just tutor up any one of the slew of creatures that can blow up enchantments for you.
Delver decks are reaaaally not faster than Survival. I don't know where you are getting that thought from. Survival would eat Delver decks for breakfast lunch and dinner easily. Delver decks are built to keep the game small, but Survival decks can just ignore that with mana dorks, basics, and an over the top plan that wins them the game if not answered.
Deathrite eating a single vengevine doesn't stop the other 3 from munching you up and spitting you out. Deathrite is only really effective against the phyrexian devourer + triskelion + necrotic ooze combo kill as exiling devourer/triskelion means the combo doesn't work.
Survival will always be the best fair deck if it were legalized in legacy. It's a repeatable tutor that warps the format around itself with ease within a month of its unbanning. Hope you like survival mirrors for 3 months straight.
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In a format with Deathrite Shaman everywhere (and a fair bit of Scavenging Ooze), as well as Abrupt Decay being an extremely common mainboard card, how bad could Survival of the Fittest actually be? I feel like it could be unbanned no problem; the way I see it, the worst that could happen is we get a Maverick-esque GSZ/Survival deck with Vengevine as a possible wincon against decks with no grave hate.
Plus, delver represents like 30% of the current meta, and delver decks are just so much faster than anything survival could pull off. Not to mention a good portion of those delver decks run DRS and Decay!
No. Just no lol.
Survival was such a pain in the ass because you had to have the nuts to keep up with it. It was resilient, explosive, and one of the only "fair" decks that played "unfair" due to Vengevine's interaction with the deck. You don't have enough counterspells to stop the survival-rootwalla-vengevine alphastrike. And that's the fair version. The newer cards that have come out since Survival was banned would also be played in the deck. I could also see some cascade-survival-vengevine hybrid taking shape.
Stop with the "survival should come back" stuff. It's busted.
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I mean, hell, we're all on a forum for something that most people would describe as a "children's card game"...do what makes you happy. You are never too old to enjoy yourself.
I played after Survival and Mental Missteps banning. Which of the two were more oppressive to legacy at the time? From what I understand the only way to beat survival at the time was to play survival yourself.
And the best way to beat Mental Misstep was to play Mental Misstep. My opinion would be that Mental Misstep was more oppressive. When blue cards start showing up in decks like Goblins, then you know there's a problem.
I played after Survival and Mental Missteps banning. Which of the two were more oppressive to legacy at the time? From what I understand the only way to beat survival at the time was to play survival yourself.
I think the only decks that were really hurt my Misstep was maybe decks like Storm that got hit hard my Misstep but couldn't run it effectively themselves. Decks like Zoo and Goblins were happy to run Misstep to counter opposing Missteps and to slow down combo decks which actually made them better during the Misstep era than they have been since by a wide margin. There was still a good variety of archetypes from aggro, to control, to combo, and plenty of hybrids.
Misstep just sort of dumbed down the format though, at least imo. You were either running Misstep yourself because you were interested in the effect, or you were running it just to beat out opposing Missteps. Too many games were decided just by one player drawing more Missteps than the other. The access to free countermagic with almost no drawback, as opposed to Daze and FoW's pretty significant drawbacks when casted for free, was just terrible design.
Survival on the other hand actually pretty drastically changed the landscape of the format to where many archetypes were just usurped by Survival because Survival could do what they did better while also doing a million other things because it's a repeatable tutor engine for any creature ever. Survival could out attrition attrition decks, explode onto the battlefield faster than other aggro decks, keep the game small as effectively as tempo decks, go for instant combo kills, and more all while having the ability to freely tutor up silver bullets should the need arise. The Survival shell is so lean that it allowed almost infinite customization which is why we saw the best archetypes at the time basically being different variations of Survival tuned to specialize in one area.
No. Just no lol.
Survival was such a pain in the ass because you had to have the nuts to keep up with it. It was resilient, explosive, and one of the only "fair" decks that played "unfair" due to Vengevine's interaction with the deck. You don't have enough counterspells to stop the survival-rootwalla-vengevine alphastrike. And that's the fair version. The newer cards that have come out since Survival was banned would also be played in the deck. I could also see some cascade-survival-vengevine hybrid taking shape.
Stop with the "survival should come back" stuff. It's busted.
But it's 4 cards out of 60 that they need to even function. Without survival out the deck is just a *****ty UG madness. That's like saying storm is OP because it can have the nuts hand, when in actuality storm often has to spend 3-4 turns sculpting its hand. And a survival deck can't just run 12 cantrips either, then it doesn't have enough creatures to really turn on survival.
Am I so wrong for wanting to see a junk list with explorer, rector, therapy, survival, et. al? T_T
Survival was never a problem pre Vengevine. I don't see why people are talking about all of these different variations of Survival that would dominate the meta. Without Vengevine the card would be fine being legal.
Basically what I am trying to say is that if it going to be a broken version of the deck, it needs the Vengevine engine which requires a whole lot of cards. If they have all of these cards to support the engine, then they can't have as much flexibility to answer all of the threats presented. And if they don't run vine, then they have a powerful card in Survival, but it obviously isn't TOO powerful because if it were, it would've been banned a lot earlier.
Survival was never a problem pre Vengevine. I don't see why people are talking about all of these different variations of Survival that would dominate the meta. Without Vengevine the card would be fine being legal.
Basically what I am trying to say is that if it going to be a broken version of the deck, it needs the Vengevine engine which requires a whole lot of cards. If they have all of these cards to support the engine, then they can't have as much flexibility to answer all of the threats presented. And if they don't run vine, then they have a powerful card in Survival, but it obviously isn't TOO powerful because if it were, it would've been banned a lot earlier.
Have you ever faced the necrotic ooze variant? How about the versions that package in loyal retainers? Those days sucked.
As I said before, a lot of these powerful cards are "fine" in a vacuum but age like fine wine. In time, the tutors and enablers (see: show and tell) have better and better targets. Survival would be ridiculous with many of the cards that have come out since its banning.
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I mean, hell, we're all on a forum for something that most people would describe as a "children's card game"...do what makes you happy. You are never too old to enjoy yourself.
Loyal retainers back when survival was legal didn't have griselbrand either. Loyal retainers back griselbrand? How about no. That, gravecrawler is another sick one with it, and if one thing is certain it's that WotC will keep printing more creatures/making survival better every set. For survival to get worse WotC would have to powercreep legacy like crazy to a point that survival as an entire strategy would be obsolete and I'm of the opinion that that's a very bad plan.
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The GW variants would be incredibly strong with Thalia. Hinders the opponent's ability to cast spells, but once Survival is in play you don't need to cast any spells yourself.
I think the issue with Loyal Retainers + Griselbrand is that you still have more than enough room for other things to do with Survival. If they have Deathrite Shaman out you can still just go for Vengevines. Though actually Griselbrand wouldn't even be THAT good in a Survival + Loyal Retainers version of Survival unless you go Bant for countermagic but the blue count seems like it would be quite hard to justify. You aren't really drawing good spells, so it's practically a 7/7 flying lifelinker.
I just fail to see how this is so incredibly broken in todays legacy. You still need to resolve Survival. Last I knew, Force of Will was still a card. Spell Pierce. Spell Snare. Oh it resolved? Good thing Phyrexian Revoker is a very playable card. Oh there are decks that run 3-4 main deck abrupt decay too? Did someone say Qasali Pridemage? Oh btw, you still have to run a deck that wants access to a pile of green mana. So either you play a lot of basic forests (Forest Too Strong) or a bunch of duals in a format full of wastelands, blood moons, and price of progress.
I would say survival was arguably overpowered before shaman and decay got printed (I actually thought the deck was mostly fair, it just crushed tempo in a very high tempo meta).
I don't think you even have a case now, many decks probably don't even have to change their lists to hate it. Its actually much easier to hate out than show and tell, and sneak attack; two cards that have continued to make me even more pissed survival made the list in the first place as they are way more difficult to interact with.
Shaman and Decay are so easy for Survival to manage.
Shaman can only eat one creature per turn so you just go for the Vengevine/Gravecrawler/whatever route instead of Loyal Retainers/Necrotic Ooze.
If they have Decay you can just activate Survival in response and go through your chain with it on the stack.
RIP is far more of a big deal than Shaman and Decay, but even RIP is easy to beat when you can just tutor for Pridemage or w/e before going through a Survival chain.
Back in the day people who were opposed to Survival's banning were trying to say that we just need to play more Krosan Grip, Extirpate, Leyline of the Void, etc. to beat it. Spoiler alert: those cards were being pretty heavily played and it didn't matter.
EVERY single time Survival is brought up people think Shaman and Decay suddenly make it okay. Hell, Caleb Durward (aka the guy who designed the first Survival + Vengevine deck) did Survival in his banned list video series and clearly demonstrated that Shaman and Decay aren't really a big deal for Survival.
I just fail to see how this is so incredibly broken in todays legacy. You still need to resolve Survival. Last I knew, Force of Will was still a card. Spell Pierce. Spell Snare. Oh it resolved? Good thing Phyrexian Revoker is a very playable card. Oh there are decks that run 3-4 main deck abrupt decay too? Did someone say Qasali Pridemage? Oh btw, you still have to run a deck that wants access to a pile of green mana. So either you play a lot of basic forests (Forest Too Strong) or a bunch of duals in a format full of wastelands, blood moons, and price of progress.
So Survival is not strong enough to be banned and Brainstorm is? Okay, that makes sense.
There's this beautiful magic card called eternal witness that is tutorable via survival in response to abrupt decay. Congratulations you just slowed survival down but didn't stop it.
Show and tell griselbrand is a 2 card combo. Survival into retainers + legendary creature is a 1 card combo because survival puts it all together for you assuming you have at least 1 dude to pitch in your survival deck, which you almost always do because you run lots of creatures in a survival deck (wow what a surprise.)
Blood moon and PoP against survival? Moon is shut off by a single basic forest out of survival, which they almost always run as an automatic 1 of if not more due to wasteland and such. Then they tutor up reclamation sage and blow up moon if they want to. Oh look they just printed another creature good with survival what a surprise. It won't be the last time either.
As for how effective retainers into griselbrand is in survival, the jury is still out on that one. It's hard to do poorly when you have a griselbrand in play to draw 7 extra cards per turn/swing of griselbrand. And as 'just' a 7/7 flying lifelinker that still shuts down a lot of strategies (look at batterskull.)
As for resolving survival? It really isn't that difficult to. Had all those cards you listed back when it was legal. Look at the good they did in terms of stopping it.
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Fauna Shaman was the card that broke Survival. Without it, Survival loses a lot of games where it just doesn't find Survival, or doesn't find it until it's too late. Survival wins approximately zero games where it doesn't find its engine, and Survival isn't like Sneak and Show where it can expend its entire hand and all resources finding Survival and then getting it into play, because it doesn't autowin the instant Survival resolves. Sneak and Show can go down to having nothing left besides Sneak Attack and Emrakul, and being dead on board and they still win. That doesn't work for Survival.
Fauna Shaman gives the deck Survivals 4-8 which, while slower and vulnerable to removal, ensure that you have to deal with a turn 2 engine the vast majority of games you play against the deck or lose. You don't get any more free wins from your tempo deck where they don't draw it and have spend the first 3-4 turns of the game finding it and forcing it into play.
There's this beautiful magic card called eternal witness that is tutorable via survival in response to abrupt decay. Congratulations you just slowed survival down but didn't stop it.
Show and tell griselbrand is a 2 card combo. Survival into retainers + legendary creature is a 1 card combo because survival puts it all together for you assuming you have at least 1 dude to pitch in your survival deck, which you almost always do because you run lots of creatures in a survival deck (wow what a surprise.)
Blood moon and PoP against survival? Moon is shut off by a single basic forest out of survival, which they almost always run as an automatic 1 of if not more due to wasteland and such. Then they tutor up reclamation sage and blow up moon if they want to. Oh look they just printed another creature good with survival what a surprise. It won't be the last time either.
As for how effective retainers into griselbrand is in survival, the jury is still out on that one. It's hard to do poorly when you have a griselbrand in play to draw 7 extra cards per turn/swing of griselbrand. And as 'just' a 7/7 flying lifelinker that still shuts down a lot of strategies (look at batterskull.)
As for resolving survival? It really isn't that difficult to. Had all those cards you listed back when it was legal. Look at the good they did in terms of stopping it.
Lol. All of these scenarios can currently happen in legacy via much more efficient means. Godforbid there be a deck that can reanimate a fat creature! Oh wait... Reanimator.
"Oh look they just printed another creature good with survival what a surprise." Man what a combo. A creature. That gets tutored by survival because it is a creature. What a combo!
Why are people so scared of the loyal retainers combo so much? It's basically the slowest version of Reanimator ever. Like seriously? Sure it's strong, but in a format where you can Show and Derp a 15/15 or a Lifelinking Bargain, your slow Loyal retainers gets laughed at.
Reanimator with a backup plan of just grinding you into dust and not nearly as susceptible to deathrite shaman? Survival is a vastly superior strategy to reanimator. Oh and survival isn't dying to karakas exactly either. But you've clearly made up your mind about the whole thing so I'm done dealing with your shortsightedness.
Fauna shaman didn't remotely break survival. Vengevine is not good with fauna shaman. Shaman is just a card survival can use but doesn't have to. I'd rather enlightened tutor for survival itself than run the creature version that dies to lightning bolt, StP, etc. etc. and e. tutor wasn't in all the survival lists by any stretch.
I'm not scared of loyal retainers. I'm scared of the engine backing it up, which is unstoppable once it gets going. Survival invalidates a lot of strategies/it just kills format diversity. Sounds like a great format.
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Yeah I mean, it would totally suck to have a deck that if you can't answer its main card, you lose in the format. *cough* Show and Tell *cough*
The only difference IMHO is that Survival still functions without its namesake card. Compare this to SnT, Reanimator, etc that are nothing but filter cards and protection. If Sneak/Show can't find Sneak Attack or Show and Tell, what is it doing in the meantime? Durdling. It also wins and loses based heavily on "can you answer this curve-cheating spell?" By contrast, Survival is a functioning Green-aggro deck that goes to the next level with SotF. The deck also out performs any Green-aggro deck because its threats recur thanks to the engine. Vengevines alpha-striking is just dirty when you turn the "negative" of Survival into a free creature. While Decay and DRS have been printed, we haven't looked at Cascading into the engine or another creature (triggering VV independent of the madness trick).
The Loyal Retainers thing also appears crappy until you face it. I recall many games where I actually stopped the VV line of play by running through enough STP's and PTE's only to see them EoT assemble a heartbreaking Iona recursion.
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I mean, hell, we're all on a forum for something that most people would describe as a "children's card game"...do what makes you happy. You are never too old to enjoy yourself.
Survival decks have a back up aggro plan, where S&T decks have nothing at all.
If you can't percieve a relevant difference, I just don't know what to tell you. I guess you could look at data - Survival decks dominated the meta when they were legal. S&T decks don't even come close. Your comparison is a dismal failure.
Survival decks have a back up aggro plan, where S&T decks have nothing at all.
If you can't percieve a relevant difference, I just don't know what to tell you. I guess you could look at data - Survival decks dominated the meta when they were legal. S&T decks don't even come close. Your comparison is a dismal failure.
A "symmetric" drawback. If your deck was not specifically designed to put in fatties, the drawback is almost negligible.
Survival is 1 mana cheaper. Sure. But then you need to dump mana into it to make it do anything. And not only that. It has to be GREEN mana. Survival essentially costs 1GGGGG
A combo deck with an aggro back up plan? Much OP. Very Elves.
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Even if DRS stops you from abusing the grave with Survival (which it can't completely do because it can only activate once per turn as opposed to Survival's as many times as you have mana) it is still a recursive tutor engine. Abrupt Decay can only do so much, because they can still activate Survival in response to Decay. They can just do something along the lines of waiting to get Survival + Gaea's Cradle online and do the whole chain while Decay is on the stack.
RIP is easy to deal with when you can just tutor up any one of the slew of creatures that can blow up enchantments for you.
Delver decks are reaaaally not faster than Survival. I don't know where you are getting that thought from. Survival would eat Delver decks for breakfast lunch and dinner easily. Delver decks are built to keep the game small, but Survival decks can just ignore that with mana dorks, basics, and an over the top plan that wins them the game if not answered.
Survival will always be the best fair deck if it were legalized in legacy. It's a repeatable tutor that warps the format around itself with ease within a month of its unbanning. Hope you like survival mirrors for 3 months straight.
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No. Just no lol.
Survival was such a pain in the ass because you had to have the nuts to keep up with it. It was resilient, explosive, and one of the only "fair" decks that played "unfair" due to Vengevine's interaction with the deck. You don't have enough counterspells to stop the survival-rootwalla-vengevine alphastrike. And that's the fair version. The newer cards that have come out since Survival was banned would also be played in the deck. I could also see some cascade-survival-vengevine hybrid taking shape.
Stop with the "survival should come back" stuff. It's busted.
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I think the only decks that were really hurt my Misstep was maybe decks like Storm that got hit hard my Misstep but couldn't run it effectively themselves. Decks like Zoo and Goblins were happy to run Misstep to counter opposing Missteps and to slow down combo decks which actually made them better during the Misstep era than they have been since by a wide margin. There was still a good variety of archetypes from aggro, to control, to combo, and plenty of hybrids.
Misstep just sort of dumbed down the format though, at least imo. You were either running Misstep yourself because you were interested in the effect, or you were running it just to beat out opposing Missteps. Too many games were decided just by one player drawing more Missteps than the other. The access to free countermagic with almost no drawback, as opposed to Daze and FoW's pretty significant drawbacks when casted for free, was just terrible design.
Survival on the other hand actually pretty drastically changed the landscape of the format to where many archetypes were just usurped by Survival because Survival could do what they did better while also doing a million other things because it's a repeatable tutor engine for any creature ever. Survival could out attrition attrition decks, explode onto the battlefield faster than other aggro decks, keep the game small as effectively as tempo decks, go for instant combo kills, and more all while having the ability to freely tutor up silver bullets should the need arise. The Survival shell is so lean that it allowed almost infinite customization which is why we saw the best archetypes at the time basically being different variations of Survival tuned to specialize in one area.
But it's 4 cards out of 60 that they need to even function. Without survival out the deck is just a *****ty UG madness. That's like saying storm is OP because it can have the nuts hand, when in actuality storm often has to spend 3-4 turns sculpting its hand. And a survival deck can't just run 12 cantrips either, then it doesn't have enough creatures to really turn on survival.
Am I so wrong for wanting to see a junk list with explorer, rector, therapy, survival, et. al? T_T
Basically what I am trying to say is that if it going to be a broken version of the deck, it needs the Vengevine engine which requires a whole lot of cards. If they have all of these cards to support the engine, then they can't have as much flexibility to answer all of the threats presented. And if they don't run vine, then they have a powerful card in Survival, but it obviously isn't TOO powerful because if it were, it would've been banned a lot earlier.
Have you ever faced the necrotic ooze variant? How about the versions that package in loyal retainers? Those days sucked.
As I said before, a lot of these powerful cards are "fine" in a vacuum but age like fine wine. In time, the tutors and enablers (see: show and tell) have better and better targets. Survival would be ridiculous with many of the cards that have come out since its banning.
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I think the issue with Loyal Retainers + Griselbrand is that you still have more than enough room for other things to do with Survival. If they have Deathrite Shaman out you can still just go for Vengevines. Though actually Griselbrand wouldn't even be THAT good in a Survival + Loyal Retainers version of Survival unless you go Bant for countermagic but the blue count seems like it would be quite hard to justify. You aren't really drawing good spells, so it's practically a 7/7 flying lifelinker.
I don't think you even have a case now, many decks probably don't even have to change their lists to hate it. Its actually much easier to hate out than show and tell, and sneak attack; two cards that have continued to make me even more pissed survival made the list in the first place as they are way more difficult to interact with.
Shaman can only eat one creature per turn so you just go for the Vengevine/Gravecrawler/whatever route instead of Loyal Retainers/Necrotic Ooze.
If they have Decay you can just activate Survival in response and go through your chain with it on the stack.
RIP is far more of a big deal than Shaman and Decay, but even RIP is easy to beat when you can just tutor for Pridemage or w/e before going through a Survival chain.
Back in the day people who were opposed to Survival's banning were trying to say that we just need to play more Krosan Grip, Extirpate, Leyline of the Void, etc. to beat it. Spoiler alert: those cards were being pretty heavily played and it didn't matter.
EVERY single time Survival is brought up people think Shaman and Decay suddenly make it okay. Hell, Caleb Durward (aka the guy who designed the first Survival + Vengevine deck) did Survival in his banned list video series and clearly demonstrated that Shaman and Decay aren't really a big deal for Survival.
So Survival is not strong enough to be banned and Brainstorm is? Okay, that makes sense.
Show and tell griselbrand is a 2 card combo. Survival into retainers + legendary creature is a 1 card combo because survival puts it all together for you assuming you have at least 1 dude to pitch in your survival deck, which you almost always do because you run lots of creatures in a survival deck (wow what a surprise.)
Blood moon and PoP against survival? Moon is shut off by a single basic forest out of survival, which they almost always run as an automatic 1 of if not more due to wasteland and such. Then they tutor up reclamation sage and blow up moon if they want to. Oh look they just printed another creature good with survival what a surprise. It won't be the last time either.
As for how effective retainers into griselbrand is in survival, the jury is still out on that one. It's hard to do poorly when you have a griselbrand in play to draw 7 extra cards per turn/swing of griselbrand. And as 'just' a 7/7 flying lifelinker that still shuts down a lot of strategies (look at batterskull.)
As for resolving survival? It really isn't that difficult to. Had all those cards you listed back when it was legal. Look at the good they did in terms of stopping it.
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Survival is green while Brainstorm is blue.
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Fauna Shaman gives the deck Survivals 4-8 which, while slower and vulnerable to removal, ensure that you have to deal with a turn 2 engine the vast majority of games you play against the deck or lose. You don't get any more free wins from your tempo deck where they don't draw it and have spend the first 3-4 turns of the game finding it and forcing it into play.
Lol. All of these scenarios can currently happen in legacy via much more efficient means. Godforbid there be a deck that can reanimate a fat creature! Oh wait... Reanimator.
"Oh look they just printed another creature good with survival what a surprise." Man what a combo. A creature. That gets tutored by survival because it is a creature. What a combo!
Why are people so scared of the loyal retainers combo so much? It's basically the slowest version of Reanimator ever. Like seriously? Sure it's strong, but in a format where you can Show and Derp a 15/15 or a Lifelinking Bargain, your slow Loyal retainers gets laughed at.
Fauna shaman didn't remotely break survival. Vengevine is not good with fauna shaman. Shaman is just a card survival can use but doesn't have to. I'd rather enlightened tutor for survival itself than run the creature version that dies to lightning bolt, StP, etc. etc. and e. tutor wasn't in all the survival lists by any stretch.
I'm not scared of loyal retainers. I'm scared of the engine backing it up, which is unstoppable once it gets going. Survival invalidates a lot of strategies/it just kills format diversity. Sounds like a great format.
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The only difference IMHO is that Survival still functions without its namesake card. Compare this to SnT, Reanimator, etc that are nothing but filter cards and protection. If Sneak/Show can't find Sneak Attack or Show and Tell, what is it doing in the meantime? Durdling. It also wins and loses based heavily on "can you answer this curve-cheating spell?" By contrast, Survival is a functioning Green-aggro deck that goes to the next level with SotF. The deck also out performs any Green-aggro deck because its threats recur thanks to the engine. Vengevines alpha-striking is just dirty when you turn the "negative" of Survival into a free creature. While Decay and DRS have been printed, we haven't looked at Cascading into the engine or another creature (triggering VV independent of the madness trick).
The Loyal Retainers thing also appears crappy until you face it. I recall many games where I actually stopped the VV line of play by running through enough STP's and PTE's only to see them EoT assemble a heartbreaking Iona recursion.
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If you can't percieve a relevant difference, I just don't know what to tell you. I guess you could look at data - Survival decks dominated the meta when they were legal. S&T decks don't even come close. Your comparison is a dismal failure.
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RUGLegacy Lands.dec
RUGBLegacy Lands.dec
RGLegacy Lands.dec
WUBRG EDH Lands.dec
UBR EDH Artificer Prodigy
B EDH Relentless Rats
A "symmetric" drawback. If your deck was not specifically designed to put in fatties, the drawback is almost negligible.
Survival is 1 mana cheaper. Sure. But then you need to dump mana into it to make it do anything. And not only that. It has to be GREEN mana. Survival essentially costs 1GGGGG
A combo deck with an aggro back up plan? Much OP. Very Elves.