I'm going to come out against a lot of the legacy folks and say that my observation is that a lot of high-level modern decks require a greater depth of skill than most legacy ones. There are three reasons:
1) Modern is more synergy based and has a bazillion intra-deck interactions. Watching a really good player pilot Junk Company, Affinity, Orzhov D&T, Grixis control, or any number of other decks gives me a headache. To me, these decks are more complex to pilot than almost any legacy deck. There are triggers everywhere and sequencing is unbelievably critical. Also, you really have to know the other person's deck so you have a pretty good idea of their options. While legacy is certainly complex, I personally find the interactions to be simpler, at least once you're somewhat familiar with the format.
2) Modern's top tier has less overlap. There are a million rogue decks in legacy, but the vast majority of the field is probably Blue-based combo, blue-based delver, blue-based control, and "decks that beat blue decks" like D&T and Imperial Painter. I personally find this easier to play against than affinity, burn, jund, coco, GR tron, merfolk, kiki-chord, ect, which have surprisingly little overlap in lists.
3) Legacy's consistency makes it easier to play in my mind. It seems like delver can always brainstorm/ponder into FOW/daze, flip the delver and go. It can run on 2 mana if it has to. Modern has no brainstorm to grab what you need every time and it has no FOW to act as a free panic button. I see good players overcome this lack of consistency by knowing their deck. It's true that the best modern players will lose to variance more often than the best legacy players, but I feel that the modern player has a greater opportunity to make skill-based gains.
Standard, IMO, is just simple and boring. Super high variance and you're locked into a tiny handful of lists.
As a side note, I'd like to say I think the most skill-intensive format, by miles, is booster draft. Coincidentally, I am terrible at it.
You know these are actually pretty good arguments and backed up with reasoning. I think there's something to be said for the complextity of the restricted card pool, figuring what the most powerful thing you can build and play is without having access to the most ideal cards. I can appreciate the complexity that having some restrictions imposed can create, while still offering a very large card pool that inherently brings complexity and required skill to the table. And highly synergistic decks can be completely nightmarish to figure out an optimal line of play, I can agree with that as well. So I think that in some aspects of skill, you're probably right. I think perhaps that Legacy's strongest element of skill is the extreme focus on the technicals. Because the decks are so focused, consistent, and deadly, there is very little margin for error. In modern, I think there is a softer margin for error and higher variance, but with some decks it can be difficult to find the best play.
Having said that, here's some non-blue based competitive Legacy decks:
MUD, PainterStone, Death and Taxes, Lands, Oops All Spells/Belcher, Elves, Goblins, Enchantress, Affinity (I'm counting this because Thoughtcast has pretty much zero overlap), burn, Pox/The Gate, Dredge (ok, Breakthrough is a card but that's about it) and Nic Fit. Now, not all of these are Tier 1 of course, but some are and the rest are Tier 1.5.
The thing about Force of Will is that if you're playing against it, you have to take it into account. It's not a free panic button, and holding one does not by any means guarantee your safety, but if you're fighting against it, you have to respect it. In fact, there's a whole lot of land mines you have to constantly step around, figure out, and plan against before you ever see them hit the field in certain matchups. A smaller, different pool of these landmines exist in Modern too, of course, but my argument would be that Legacy is equally complex in this regard. Legacy's consistency means that you will come up against your most feared cards and have to figure out how to beat them routinely.
I'm not entirely sold that Modern has more complex decks, but I can agree that the synergy in certain ones can be extremely difficult to make optimal decisions with. The tradeoff is that not making the optimal decision is not as damning as it is in Legacy, which I think still remains one of the most skill intensive format in regards to technicals and raw play ability. Regardless, I think we can agree that while standard has the most competitors, it is by no means the most competitive format, as top level competitive modern and Legacy players have so many more things to play with and take into account than standard.
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I'm not entirely sold that Modern has more complex decks, but I can agree that the synergy in certain ones can be extremely difficult to make optimal decisions with. The tradeoff is that not making the optimal decision is not as damning as it is in Legacy, which I think still remains one of the most skill intensive format in regards to technicals and raw play ability. Regardless, I think we can agree that while standard has the most competitors, it is by no means the most competitive format, as top level competitive modern and Legacy players have so many more things to play with and take into account than standard.
I think we agree on a lot.
Bottom line I think is that both modern and legacy are basically super-complicated. They are also wildly different, not just in the card pool and the decks, but also in the skill set. I see a lot of long-time legacy players who have dipped their toe into modern out of curiosity or because it's easier to find a tournament that fires every week who build something Tier 1, go like 1-4 a bunch of times in a row, and write modern off as a garbage format where luck rules all, where in reality it's just that their legacy knowledge doesn't apply and it's not enough to show up with a top deck. On the flip side, I see a lot of new legacy players build a sub-optimal deck or outright jank brew or borrow something they've never played from a friend, get turn 0'd by a TES nut draw and stomp off saying "yeah, legacy's just Herp, Derp, got force of will???"
In reality they are both extremely difficult to be good at, and it's even harder to be good at both. Add to that, a whole lot of both modern and legacy players are older and therefore have limited time to play (family, job, ect) so it's hard for someone who'd good at legacy to want to invest the time and energy getting good at modern, and vice-versa.
Never said all pros were good at limited, I'm saying there are high level players consistently good at limited while high level constructed players often falter in limited.
No combo in Standard? Well someone should have told me to stop winning with Brain on the Shore...This is even more proof that eternal players don't have more skill. You'll show up at a standard tournament with a tier 1 bant company deck and think you won't be annihilated with a 1 turn combo kill.
The thing with standard is you can't be good with just one deck like in modern and legacy, to be a top tier standard player you need to be familiar with all the decks, and play the right one well at a given tournament. Playing the metagame is an important part of standard. If you show up to a local legacy or modern tournament you're going to face the same exact decks week to week because the format is cost prohibitive. If you go to a bigger event the lack of support means the last big legacy tournament might have been months ago with no idea what metagame you'll fight. Standard the metagame changes week to week and if you want to succeed at the highest levels you have to capitalize on it instead of playing the same deck every week.
Never said all pros were good at limited, I'm saying there are high level players consistently good at limited while high level constructed players often falter in limited.
No combo in Standard? Well someone should have told me to stop winning with Brain on the Shore...This is even more proof that eternal players don't have more skill. You'll show up at a standard tournament with a tier 1 bant company deck and think you won't be annihilated with a 1 turn combo kill.
The thing with standard is you can't be good with just one deck like in modern and legacy, to be a top tier standard player you need to be familiar with all the decks, and play the right one well at a given tournament. Playing the metagame is an important part of standard. If you show up to a local legacy or modern tournament you're going to face the same exact decks week to week because the format is cost prohibitive. If you go to a bigger event the lack of support means the last big legacy tournament might have been months ago with no idea what metagame you'll fight. Standard the metagame changes week to week and if you want to succeed at the highest levels you have to capitalize on it instead of playing the same deck every week.
No, I'm pretty sure I can enter a standard event with any deck I damn well please and fully expect to not die to a T1 combo deck, because there's no such thing in standard. It's not a worry, or something I have to contend with or even consider when I'm building a deck.
The thing about standard is you're at best trying to juggle the meta of what, 4 or 5 truly competitive decks when the format is healthy, and 2, maybe 3 when it's not? Maybe you end up playing against someone that's playing some weird brew they found to be fun on SCG or MTGS, but otherwise the meta in standard is like, 5 decks and variations on those decks. In Legacy or Modern, you have to know how to fight at least double or triple that.
Smaller events not being diverse? If your Legacy event has even 6 players, they're probably all playing 6 different decks instead of the same variations of whatever's popular in standard and maybe someone's trashy homebrew. Larger events being too diverse that you can't prepare for the meta? Isn't that kind of the exact opposite of a format being easy? You can't argue that legacy is an easier, less skill intensive format because the meta is too small and closed, and then turn around and argue that it's too easy because there is no meta due to the large events being too big.
As a standard player the number of decks you have to take seriously is a pretty small pool. Maybe your deck even has a good matchup against two or three of them. So your sideboard is dedicated to fight your bad matchups for what, 2, 3 decks?
Legacy and modern require the deck and pilot to be capable of dealing with a much wider array of threats, and even a tier 1.5 deck will kill you dead if you can't interact with it. And standard is the skill intensive format? I mean, for crying out loud, most websites will practically spell out the current professional standard meta for you, and it's monitored and discussed weekly. Honestly, if you don't know what kind of meta standard is at the given moment, you have zero business playing it and expecting to win. Playing the metagame in standard is just a fact of life. A boring fact that doesn't involve any skill other than reading a tournament report for 30 minutes and going "gee, there sure are a lot of Siege Rhinos running around" or "man, that Stoneforge Mystic chick is pretty popular" or "gee, another week of Bloodbraid Elf/Blightning" or "hey look, it's a deck with 4x Bitterblossom. Again." or "man, nothing has beaten Dark Ritual/Necropotence in three months...." I mean, it's not exactly rocket science. As far as your local meta goes, all you have to do is pay attention to what everyone's playing. Because odds are that while they might change the board out here and there, or tweak the list as new sets come out, unless the deck is just trash, most of them are going to bring something similar next week. If you played during Khan's standard, it was almost a given you were going to be playing against a whole lot of Siege Rhinos. Seriously, the gameplan for half the field was:
"Siege Rhino, you dead yet? No? Siege Rhino, you dead yet?" No? Siege Rhino....."
Seriously, your decision tree for half the meta was:
"Do I have the mana for Siege Rhino?"
Yes?----> Cast Siege Rhino
No?----> Do I have an Anafenza?
Yes?----> Cast Anafenza.
No?----> Wait till I can cast Siege Rhino.
Yeah, real skill intensive. This is definitely on par with Storm Combo, or High Tide, or Tin Fins. Maybe Legacy players could learn a thing or two about mad skillz if they'd start reanimating Siege Rhinos instead of Griselbrand.
A few people have the resources to build a few Tier 1 standard lists at any given time, but I don't see that as not being cost prohibitive for most people. If you can build multiple tier 1 decks throughout a year of standard, you could have bought some of the Legacy decks out there. For the most part you're going to be facing the same decks down every week give or take a few cards until rotation and then it's rinse, wash, repeat. Really, your argument that standard is more skill intensive boils down to "you have to study the meta because it changes?" No kidding. Oooooh, now Nahiri control added in Dragonlord Atarka and so that Nahiri has something to do if she gets to 8!
Go to a large legacy event and be forced to play and adapt to 10 different decks in 10 different rounds, some of which you might have never seen before and then come back and tell me how easy it is. Try and figure out how to configure the sideboard to address the archetypes your deck is soft to, because you don't get the luxury of tailoring your board to hate out specific decks unless the matchup is just that bad. Being good with 1 deck in Legacy or Modern doesn't get you anywhere because if you want to stand a semblance of a chance, you need to be good with several decks, not to play them, but to know how to fight them. To know what to name with Phyrexian Revoker on T2 if you're a D&T pilot. To know what to name on T1 with Cabal Therapy if you're piloting Reanimator. To know the odds of being hit by Force of Will if you're playing Storm combo. To know what decks will kill you dead if you drop to a certain life total with Ad Nauseum. To know that casting an Empty the Warrens for 14 goblins is a bad plan on T1 when Gitaxian Probe shows you a crop rotation. To know how to be able to time your combo so the LED in your hand won't get hit by the Aburpt Decay in theirs before you can use it. What do you need to know in standard? The general shell of 4 or 5 different decks and to play you CITP lands first, with no worries of Wasteland or Stifle? To know that when you pull your three card combo off there's no such thing as a Force of Will that can break your gameplan? Have you ever cast a Duress off of an Underground Sea and then lost the game in response before your duress resolved because your opponent was playing Solidarity and you just spent your Spell Pierce mana and you shoulda seen that coming?
Being a top tier standard player by your definition is:
Familiarity with all the decks (all 5 of them)
Be able to bring the right deck. (This information is basically spoon fed to you if you play regularly at the LGS, or read up on the scene if attending a larger event for 30 minutes)
Being a top tier Legacy player involves:
Familiarity with all the decks (Including but not limited to: Burn, Elves, Goblins, TES, ANT, High Tide, Death and Taxes, Enchantress, MUD, Miracles, The Gate, Pox, Sneak and Show, Tron, Lands, Delver and its 3 or 4 variants, Shardless Sultai, Nic Fit, Reanimator, Tin Fins, Belcher, Oops All Spells, Imperial Painter, Dredge (and LED Dredge), Affinity, and Fish. These are the ones I can come up with off the top of my head, did I miss anyone? If you are not familiar with these decks and their sideboard cards, whether or not they play wasteland, force, or stifle, you are going to miss your Cabal Therapies, name the wrong thing with your Pithing Needles and Revokers, tap out at the wrong time and just DIE, or make any number of other mistakes that will just kill you.
Being able to pilot your deck to win against anything you might face down and sideboard correctly on the fly against a deck you've never faced before. (See above)
I've played a helluva lot of standard and done pretty well at it, I've enjoyed it off and on, sometimes some standards have actually been fun, and it's the format I like to play when I just want to play magic and not think too hard. I challenge you to try and recreate the same results in Legacy you have with Brain on the Shore in standard and then come back and tell me the skill levels are equal.
Oh I forgot, you don't need to play Legacy to make sweeping assumptions on the skill level of the format and its players, "special snowflakes" we may be. But don't make the claim that Legacy players don't have more skill or that Legacy players can't "step up" to other formats. You could at least try the format before bashing its players.
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OP, as someone who plays no legacy, I don't have much insight into that format. however, I believe my explanation for your results may be simple. you only play one deck in legacy, and I bet you haven't really invested in any others. nothing wrong with that.
in fact, I think that sticking with a deck makes you a stronger player in any given format, which I believe is why you suffer from weaker performance in modern/standard. even though you are playing similar decks/ideas/strategies in modern and standard, the fact is that you are playing multiple decks. jeskai and grixis may share some of the same blue and red cards, but those strategies can be very distinct, especially when you take sideboards into consideration.
I will be the first to admit that I have a brewing disorder and I love to make new things and try them out at a tournament with real competition. however, when i brewed every week my tournament performance suffered as a result. i even took a break from competitive magic because i became frustrated that i was consistently not doing well.
I play mostly modern, and the one thing i know for sure is that it rewards you for knowing your own deck inside and out. it is possible to master multiple decks to be sure, but my advice is to pick a deck and stick with it. i have been playing the same modern deck since SOI released and i have prized at every event i have attended so far. same with standard, which i feel is pretty wide open. i play what i know and i stick with it. i see weak points and i try to patch them up. i research decks and how i can beat them with the 60 cards i have mostly locked in and the 15 i can change. it doesn't matter that my strategy may be known/outdated/not flashy, the fact is that i am most likely much better at piloting my deck I've been playing for months than someone else is trying to bring something unexpected to the table without much formal testing.
I experience the same phenomenon. I attribute this to the fact that I find Legacy to be a much more skill intensive/skill reliant format. Yes, there's always the element of luck in Magic, but Legacy is a format where playing a single one mana spell at the exact wrong time can spell defeat by creating an opening. I mean, where else can an opponent make the mistake of casting a 'Goyf on T2, using their only mana, then die to a lethal storm count staring at the Spell Pierce in hand and a tapped tropical island on their field?
Really, Legacy players will punish you for the most innocent of mistakes that, only after you play the format, do you realize how egregious they are. Standard and Modern are more forgiving, making a single error won't typically cost you the game on the spot. Old Standard Jund featuring Bloodbraid Elf/Blightning had a reputation for being an extremely forgiving deck that allowed for multiple mistakes for example. Basically what I'm driving at is that Standard/Modern have more variance. Naturally, the best players in these formats also make few, if any mistakes, but they aren't always able to capitalize on other's mistakes as often or punish them as hard when they do as in Legacy. Also, given that there is less variance in the decks, mean that you're not nearly as likely to show up to an event being the only player packing a given deck, in standard, three or more people may be playing basically the exact same deck as you, which, at that point, the only thing left in your control is how much better you are than them, which is mitigated by how much luckier they are than you. They might not be the best pilot, but they might get paired up against better matchups than you. In Legacy, however, the deck variance is so great it's almost impossible to have a contingency plan for everything you could face in a day. Sometimes you bring Storm and run into MUD, and sometimes you bring Miracles and run into Lands and sometimes you bring Burn and run into Death and Taxes. In standard and modern, you can usually have a contingency plan/sideboard for most, if not all the decks that exist, and your opponent probably has something that they can bring in against you. You face a lot more targeted hate in these formats, and in Legacy, sometimes your opponent just didn't find room in the sideboard for 4x Leyline of Sanctity as you open up a handful of bolts and fireblasts.
TLDR: Hate in standard/modern is more likely to exist against you and target you, mistakes in these formats are not usually game ending and it's more difficult to punish your opponent severely for making them; even if you are the better player, you may not always be able to capitalize on it. In Legacy, the power level of cards is so high, capitalizing on an opponent's mistake more often than not equals a win.
I think it cuts both ways though. I'd compare it to the differences between the Democratic primary system vs the Republican primary system (note: this has nothing to do with the actual policies and positions of each party).
With this year's schedule for the GOP, you could capitalize on a few of your opponents' mistakes and make big gains because of the narrower time frame and the higher amount of winner take all or winner basically take all rules. On the Democratic side, everything is proportional and more spaced out, which means that you can recover from mistakes; it's hard to pull ahead of an opponent, but it's also harder to catch up later in the game. The focus is more on incremental advantage. But there's no reason to say that one side is easier to win than the other.
Likewise, there are often multiple defensible lines of play in Legacy (you may be in a situation where you need to play against two things but you only have the resources to pick one). When you choose incorrectly, it's not necessarily a mistake, in the sense of a poor play. Your opponent's ability to punish you and take a win for you making a defensible choice doesn't mean it requires more skill.
Along the same lines, having stronger hate in a format doesn't make the format more skill intensive. In Standard, you may always have a contingency against your opponent, but they also have a contingency against you.
See, I don't play Legacy to justify the expenditure of my deck, I don't need to.
And on the subject of deck expenditures, well, I'm someone who has a pretty solid number of duals, other expensive staples (Lilianas, LEDs, etc), and random crap that spiked unreasonably since I bought it (e.g. Chains) and I just don't see the need to buy into Standard repeatedly. I just kind of pick an affordable deck that'll do decently at FNM and ride it until rotation. My Modern play is just whatever I can scrape together out of my Legacy collection. I certainly could do better at Standard if I bothered to buy the overpriced rares and mythics that won't be worth anything in a couple of years, and to that end I probably appear to be worse in that format than I really am, but at the end of the day, well, I can just pick up one of the several Legacy decks I built several years ago and rock that if I want to play the format. I can also choose the playstyle and level of interaction I want at a given event simply by varying what deck I play.
Buying into the same competitive level of Standard that I have in Legacy is just a poor decision, and that distorts perception as well.
3) Legacy's consistency makes it easier to play in my mind. It seems like delver can always brainstorm/ponder into FOW/daze, flip the delver and go. It can run on 2 mana if it has to. Modern has no brainstorm to grab what you need every time and it has no FOW to act as a free panic button.
Legacy might certainly look easy if you aren't considering the thought that goes into all those plays. Sure, you can run some decks off two mana, but that doesn't make it autopilot. The number of times I've run rings around bad Delver players would probably surprise you, because I know what a newbie's first instincts are and I can nudge them into suboptimal lines of play. And that's to say nothing of players who mess up their cantrip orders (for instance, I've seen people Ponder before Brainstorm without having another shuffle effect in hand and wind up not getting another shuffle effect), put the wrong cards back off Brainstorm, Force the wrong spells, and generally act like having more powerful cards means you don't have to put as much thought into things.
Another example, this one from personal experience, is Burn vs Miracles. Miracles assembled the Countertop combo and figured that'd be enough to beat me unconditionally, especially since I didn't have a Shusher out. The end result was me playing all kinds of silly stack tricks with the inexperienced Miracles player and forcing through enough spells to kill him (I also managed to slip a Red Blast onto his Counterbalance at one point in a play that one of his friends watching the match berated him after the match for walking into). A more experienced and skillful player would've beaten me in that scenario, but I was able to prey on my opponent's inexperience to eke out a win I surely wouldn't have against a better opponent. It wasn't that his deck failed him. He failed his deck.
The thing you should never forget is that while your cards may be powerful, your opponent also has powerful cards.
No combo in Standard? Well someone should have told me to stop winning with Brain on the Shore...
That's highly disingenuous. The sheer number and variety of combo decks in Legacy dwarfs anything available in Standard. In Standard, you have a few low-tier combos like Brain in a Jar, Eldrazi Displacer/Brood Monitor, etc. In Legacy, combo runs all across the tier spectrum and encompasses many fundamentally different approaches to the game. I'd suggest playing a few matches with Legacy combo decks to see the difference firsthand.
If you show up to a local legacy or modern tournament you're going to face the same exact decks week to week because the format is cost prohibitive.
If you had any experience at all with Legacy events, you'd know that many players who are invested into the format have a wide variety of decks they can bring. As it is, your comments are ignorant to the point that they're the Legacy equivalent of the "just buy the most expensive cards and you can easily faceroll a PTQ without playtesting" canard with Standard.
Personally, for instance, if you sat down across from me, you could be facing down Jund, Burn, Dredge, ANT, D&T, Infect, Pox, Loam, or a few other decks, and that's just what I can play no-proxy. I personally know quite a few players with even broader options.
Legacy might certainly look easy if you aren't considering the thought that goes into all those plays...
I get it. I'm no pro, but I own and have played plenty of both legacy and modern. I need not be convinced of the complexity of either format, and I am not format bashing in any way whatsoever. I'm just saying, from the standpoint of a relatively infrequent and mediocre player, that I do better at legacy. One of the reasons is that, for me at least, it feels less complicated than modern. Others may feel the opposite, and that's cool... it's just an opinion.
On a separate note, delver is one of my favorite matchups for pox... It's amazing how often I can blow someone's mind by taking out every red source in their deck and stabilize at 2 life while they have multiple bolts in hand. This of course doesn't happen much against good opponents, but there you have it.
Twice now you people have deliberately lied about what I said then argued against your own made up lie.
I never said all pros are good at limited.
I never said there were turn 1 combo decks in standard.
You just lie out your nose with a wall of text because you can't make an argument against my actual words. You people doing this are just worthless to the mtgs community.
Standard is more skillful IMO since it's a lot less likely to be blind sided by a competitive brew. If you know the meta and your decks strength's and weaknesses then it's more about player skill on how to sideboard and play the matchup then a flip of the coin.
How is that significantly different from saying Constructed is more skillful than Limited because it's more about player skill than opening good cards?
Standard is more skillful IMO since it's a lot less likely to be blind sided by a competitive brew. If you know the meta and your decks strength's and weaknesses then it's more about player skill on how to sideboard and play the matchup then a flip of the coin.
How is that significantly different from saying Constructed is more skillful than Limited because it's more about player skill than opening good cards?
This is even more proof that eternal players don't have more skill. You'll show up at a standard tournament with a tier 1 bant company deck and think you won't be annihilated with a 1 turn combo kill.
Ummmmm.....pretty sure that's arguing I should have to fear T1 combo kills in standard. I mean, otherwise if you meant that sarcastically, you're making a water is wet argument.
Only bad players blame luck when we all know pros that are consistently successful at limited which is suppose to be the most luck intensive format.
While there's been minimal discussion about Limited in this thread, I'm having trouble figuring out where I addressed skill in limited, other than to illustrate a point that different formats take different types of skill into account, which really, agreed with your statement and elaborated on it more than anything else. Just because I argued against the rest of your post doesn't mean I'm arguing with all of it. The only part of my response to your comment on limited that might have been slightly disagreeing with it, was that I argued that it's important to recognize the impact that luck DOES have in the game, and how good players need to recognize the difference between bad luck and bad plays, and not to alter their playstyle or question their decision making when they run into bad LUCK.
I'm not hiding behind a "wall of text." If you bothered to spend the <2 minutes it takes to actually read my response instead of just calling me a liar, you'd realize that. If I misread or you mistyped something and as a result there's been some sort of miscommunication, then point it out so the discussion can move forward as opposed to just calling me a liar.
The "wall of text" is not "lying out my nose." It's called making an argument with reasoning to back it up, without resorting to five sentence responses, one of which is a false accusation, two of which have minimal relevancy and are at best the result of miscommunication/misreading on one of our parts and at worst lies of your own (but I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt and chalk it up to one of us misreading/writing), and the last two of which are just attacks, with NONE of them being backed up.
I'm sorry that making an argument involves, ya know, words. If they're too difficult for you to read and formulate a response other than "liar, liar pants on fire" it's no wonder you don't play Legacy. Some of those old templated cards can be quite wordy and have more than 4 lines of text without any reminders on them. The only thing worthless in this thread are your petty jabs and comments that have no factual basis to them.
Before you get up in arms and think that my responses are barbed at you for whatever reason and I'm just making up lies to make an argument because I disagree with it, please note:
1) You started this with statements I disagreed with. I'm ok with this so far and all it's going to lead to is us having a discussion on why we feel the way we do. That's a normal, healthy debate. I didn't agree with everything Ashley25746 said either, but I took some time to acknowledge (presumably her) post because it actually had some basis to it, and addressed the points I felt differently on, explained why I felt differently on them, and we're both totally cool.
2) You got a snarkier response because if you're going to dish out blanket statements like:
Legacy players think they're special little snowflakes and tapping a turn 1 land wrong loses the match but they can't come down to modern or standard and perform with any kind of skill.
All the formats take skill and operate very differently, it's just eternal players need to feel special and justify their thousands of dollars spent to themselves.
You should expect that provocative statements will receive a response. If this is the tone you're going to take, don't be so offended when you receive the same tone in response. Seems like a case of someone willing to dish it out, but then not be able to take it. Be glad that I'd rather address it with you than the mod staff because I'd rather provide a reasoned response instead of crying to them with the report button.
Let me know when you're ready to put some thought into your inflammatory statements and back them up with some reasoning other than "liar liar"
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Draft is more skillful than sealed that's just obvious, but it comes down to player opinion. That's why I stated that this was my own opinion based on my own experiences.
The point I was making is that your argument basically comes down to "it takes more skill to succeed in an environment that has fewer options and less variance." In essence, that removing gameplay elements increases the impact of skill, rather than decreasing it. In essence, the less diverse the metagame, the more skill is required. The problem is that's basically saying solved formats are more skillful. The fatal assumption there is that it's assuming that getting knocked out by a rogue deck comes down to variance, when in reality it's just the player being unable to deal with a deck they aren't used to playing against.
It's not bad luck if, say, you packed no graveyard hate and got knocked out by Dredge or Reanimator or Tinfins or whatever if your deck can't otherwise handle them. It's you failing to consider such matchups, or failing to put appropriate weighting on the likelihood of facing such decks.
Not that I completely disagree, but in fairness there is no deck that can have good matchups versus every possible deck that might get paired against you. Your deck / sideboard choices ultimately come down to metagame statistics and predictive analytics, such that you might have picked the "correct" 75 cards to combat the metagame, but that doesn't mean you can't get paired up against a deck that's simply unfeasible to prepare for / a deck that will not succeed against the metagame but happens to be really good against you. So yes, to some extent it can be fairly considered bad luck to lose to those decks.
Overall, however, the more skillful player will have the higher win percentage and thus the higher proportion of top 8 finishes. It's not really any different from how skilled players can construct mana bases that minimize the effects of variance due to mana screw, mana flood, colour screw, etc, except on a more complex scale. A format without nonbasic lands, or with fewer nonbasic lands, isn't more skillful than a format with a wide variety of nonbasic land options, and it's basically the same concept with format complexity.
I wen't 6-1-1 today at the first time ever playing Manaless Dredge, just out of knowing how the deck works and the basics of my possible opponent decks.
This doesn't happen in Standard or Modern, and it's not because of deck optimization, playing "lesser" opponents or other bull***** reasons, but because of the card quality and variety. Legacy rewards you for knowing the rules, knowing the cards and playing tight. Modern punishes you for falling on a bad match-up and Standard is so weak the few strong cards are so unsurmountable it becomes a luck-based race to ressolving a powerful spell.
There are two possible reasons to explain the disparity of your results (other than just luck/variance):
Your Legacy opponents are not as tough as your opponents in other formats.
You yourself are more skilled at Legacy than at other formats.
There are lots of reasons why you might be better at Legacy and unable to convert those skills to other formats. Legacy might offer you a deck of the play style that suits your tastes and inspires you to play your best. Legacy stresses format knowledge and the ability to quickly assess what your opponent is likely to be playing. Also, Legacy emphasises strategy more so than other formats and tactics less so. In Legacy, often your strategy can shift drastically based on what your opponent is playing. On the other hand, some matches have very little in the way of tactical manoeuvring compared to formats that are usually fair deck vs fair deck.
This is even more proof that eternal players don't have more skill. You'll show up at a standard tournament with a tier 1 bant company deck and think you won't be annihilated with a 1 turn combo kill.
So, thinking I won't lose to a T1 combo is wrong, but you're not actually saying there are turn one combos in Standard? What exactly are you trying to saying?
Legacy players think they're special little snowflakes...
Why all the hate? Did a Legacy player shoot your dog or **** your spouse or something? You seem to want to insult Legacy and its players every chance you get. I'm very curious what experiences you've had to bring you to this state.
That's not really this thread. OP already mentioned he plays legacy, his question was why he does better at it, which turned into a discussion of the differences between formats, which led to baiting and some unfair jabs that needed to get addressed, and so now here we are. This isn't a discussion of "which format should I get into" this is a discussion of "why do I do better at Legacy" and to explain that you need to look at the differences in the formats. A good player is more likely to shine in Legacy and Modern, as these formats are much more unforgiving of mistakes than standard is. In standard, it's more about what you're playing, not how you're playing it. In Legacy, I'd say the opposite is true- while bad matchups of course exist, any deck in Legacy is capable of killing you dead quickly if you let your opponent outplay you, even if it's a matchup you're supposedly favored in. Now, please note that this does not mean that skill isn't required to play at the highest level of competitive standard, nor is deck choice completely unimportant in Legacy, it's just that the balance is tilted differently and thusly OP may do better in a format where his play ability and technical shine more than his ability to choose the deck of the week.
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1) Modern is more synergy based and has a bazillion intra-deck interactions. Watching a really good player pilot Junk Company, Affinity, Orzhov D&T, Grixis control, or any number of other decks gives me a headache. To me, these decks are more complex to pilot than almost any legacy deck. There are triggers everywhere and sequencing is unbelievably critical. Also, you really have to know the other person's deck so you have a pretty good idea of their options. While legacy is certainly complex, I personally find the interactions to be simpler, at least once you're somewhat familiar with the format.
2) Modern's top tier has less overlap. There are a million rogue decks in legacy, but the vast majority of the field is probably Blue-based combo, blue-based delver, blue-based control, and "decks that beat blue decks" like D&T and Imperial Painter. I personally find this easier to play against than affinity, burn, jund, coco, GR tron, merfolk, kiki-chord, ect, which have surprisingly little overlap in lists.
3) Legacy's consistency makes it easier to play in my mind. It seems like delver can always brainstorm/ponder into FOW/daze, flip the delver and go. It can run on 2 mana if it has to. Modern has no brainstorm to grab what you need every time and it has no FOW to act as a free panic button. I see good players overcome this lack of consistency by knowing their deck. It's true that the best modern players will lose to variance more often than the best legacy players, but I feel that the modern player has a greater opportunity to make skill-based gains.
Standard, IMO, is just simple and boring. Super high variance and you're locked into a tiny handful of lists.
As a side note, I'd like to say I think the most skill-intensive format, by miles, is booster draft. Coincidentally, I am terrible at it.
These are all just my opinions of course.
Playing and even winning at Legacy doesn't mean you are a good player.
Having said that, here's some non-blue based competitive Legacy decks:
MUD, PainterStone, Death and Taxes, Lands, Oops All Spells/Belcher, Elves, Goblins, Enchantress, Affinity (I'm counting this because Thoughtcast has pretty much zero overlap), burn, Pox/The Gate, Dredge (ok, Breakthrough is a card but that's about it) and Nic Fit. Now, not all of these are Tier 1 of course, but some are and the rest are Tier 1.5.
The thing about Force of Will is that if you're playing against it, you have to take it into account. It's not a free panic button, and holding one does not by any means guarantee your safety, but if you're fighting against it, you have to respect it. In fact, there's a whole lot of land mines you have to constantly step around, figure out, and plan against before you ever see them hit the field in certain matchups. A smaller, different pool of these landmines exist in Modern too, of course, but my argument would be that Legacy is equally complex in this regard. Legacy's consistency means that you will come up against your most feared cards and have to figure out how to beat them routinely.
I'm not entirely sold that Modern has more complex decks, but I can agree that the synergy in certain ones can be extremely difficult to make optimal decisions with. The tradeoff is that not making the optimal decision is not as damning as it is in Legacy, which I think still remains one of the most skill intensive format in regards to technicals and raw play ability. Regardless, I think we can agree that while standard has the most competitors, it is by no means the most competitive format, as top level competitive modern and Legacy players have so many more things to play with and take into account than standard.
EDH: Grand Arbiter $tax, Freyalise Stompy, Mimeoplasm Death From the Grave
I think we agree on a lot.
Bottom line I think is that both modern and legacy are basically super-complicated. They are also wildly different, not just in the card pool and the decks, but also in the skill set. I see a lot of long-time legacy players who have dipped their toe into modern out of curiosity or because it's easier to find a tournament that fires every week who build something Tier 1, go like 1-4 a bunch of times in a row, and write modern off as a garbage format where luck rules all, where in reality it's just that their legacy knowledge doesn't apply and it's not enough to show up with a top deck. On the flip side, I see a lot of new legacy players build a sub-optimal deck or outright jank brew or borrow something they've never played from a friend, get turn 0'd by a TES nut draw and stomp off saying "yeah, legacy's just Herp, Derp, got force of will???"
In reality they are both extremely difficult to be good at, and it's even harder to be good at both. Add to that, a whole lot of both modern and legacy players are older and therefore have limited time to play (family, job, ect) so it's hard for someone who'd good at legacy to want to invest the time and energy getting good at modern, and vice-versa.
No combo in Standard? Well someone should have told me to stop winning with Brain on the Shore...This is even more proof that eternal players don't have more skill. You'll show up at a standard tournament with a tier 1 bant company deck and think you won't be annihilated with a 1 turn combo kill.
The thing with standard is you can't be good with just one deck like in modern and legacy, to be a top tier standard player you need to be familiar with all the decks, and play the right one well at a given tournament. Playing the metagame is an important part of standard. If you show up to a local legacy or modern tournament you're going to face the same exact decks week to week because the format is cost prohibitive. If you go to a bigger event the lack of support means the last big legacy tournament might have been months ago with no idea what metagame you'll fight. Standard the metagame changes week to week and if you want to succeed at the highest levels you have to capitalize on it instead of playing the same deck every week.
No, I'm pretty sure I can enter a standard event with any deck I damn well please and fully expect to not die to a T1 combo deck, because there's no such thing in standard. It's not a worry, or something I have to contend with or even consider when I'm building a deck.
The thing about standard is you're at best trying to juggle the meta of what, 4 or 5 truly competitive decks when the format is healthy, and 2, maybe 3 when it's not? Maybe you end up playing against someone that's playing some weird brew they found to be fun on SCG or MTGS, but otherwise the meta in standard is like, 5 decks and variations on those decks. In Legacy or Modern, you have to know how to fight at least double or triple that.
Smaller events not being diverse? If your Legacy event has even 6 players, they're probably all playing 6 different decks instead of the same variations of whatever's popular in standard and maybe someone's trashy homebrew. Larger events being too diverse that you can't prepare for the meta? Isn't that kind of the exact opposite of a format being easy? You can't argue that legacy is an easier, less skill intensive format because the meta is too small and closed, and then turn around and argue that it's too easy because there is no meta due to the large events being too big.
As a standard player the number of decks you have to take seriously is a pretty small pool. Maybe your deck even has a good matchup against two or three of them. So your sideboard is dedicated to fight your bad matchups for what, 2, 3 decks?
Legacy and modern require the deck and pilot to be capable of dealing with a much wider array of threats, and even a tier 1.5 deck will kill you dead if you can't interact with it. And standard is the skill intensive format? I mean, for crying out loud, most websites will practically spell out the current professional standard meta for you, and it's monitored and discussed weekly. Honestly, if you don't know what kind of meta standard is at the given moment, you have zero business playing it and expecting to win. Playing the metagame in standard is just a fact of life. A boring fact that doesn't involve any skill other than reading a tournament report for 30 minutes and going "gee, there sure are a lot of Siege Rhinos running around" or "man, that Stoneforge Mystic chick is pretty popular" or "gee, another week of Bloodbraid Elf/Blightning" or "hey look, it's a deck with 4x Bitterblossom. Again." or "man, nothing has beaten Dark Ritual/Necropotence in three months...." I mean, it's not exactly rocket science. As far as your local meta goes, all you have to do is pay attention to what everyone's playing. Because odds are that while they might change the board out here and there, or tweak the list as new sets come out, unless the deck is just trash, most of them are going to bring something similar next week. If you played during Khan's standard, it was almost a given you were going to be playing against a whole lot of Siege Rhinos. Seriously, the gameplan for half the field was:
"Siege Rhino, you dead yet? No? Siege Rhino, you dead yet?" No? Siege Rhino....."
Seriously, your decision tree for half the meta was:
"Do I have the mana for Siege Rhino?"
Yes?----> Cast Siege Rhino
No?----> Do I have an Anafenza?
Yes?----> Cast Anafenza.
No?----> Wait till I can cast Siege Rhino.
Yeah, real skill intensive. This is definitely on par with Storm Combo, or High Tide, or Tin Fins. Maybe Legacy players could learn a thing or two about mad skillz if they'd start reanimating Siege Rhinos instead of Griselbrand.
A few people have the resources to build a few Tier 1 standard lists at any given time, but I don't see that as not being cost prohibitive for most people. If you can build multiple tier 1 decks throughout a year of standard, you could have bought some of the Legacy decks out there. For the most part you're going to be facing the same decks down every week give or take a few cards until rotation and then it's rinse, wash, repeat. Really, your argument that standard is more skill intensive boils down to "you have to study the meta because it changes?" No kidding. Oooooh, now Nahiri control added in Dragonlord Atarka and so that Nahiri has something to do if she gets to 8!
Go to a large legacy event and be forced to play and adapt to 10 different decks in 10 different rounds, some of which you might have never seen before and then come back and tell me how easy it is. Try and figure out how to configure the sideboard to address the archetypes your deck is soft to, because you don't get the luxury of tailoring your board to hate out specific decks unless the matchup is just that bad. Being good with 1 deck in Legacy or Modern doesn't get you anywhere because if you want to stand a semblance of a chance, you need to be good with several decks, not to play them, but to know how to fight them. To know what to name with Phyrexian Revoker on T2 if you're a D&T pilot. To know what to name on T1 with Cabal Therapy if you're piloting Reanimator. To know the odds of being hit by Force of Will if you're playing Storm combo. To know what decks will kill you dead if you drop to a certain life total with Ad Nauseum. To know that casting an Empty the Warrens for 14 goblins is a bad plan on T1 when Gitaxian Probe shows you a crop rotation. To know how to be able to time your combo so the LED in your hand won't get hit by the Aburpt Decay in theirs before you can use it. What do you need to know in standard? The general shell of 4 or 5 different decks and to play you CITP lands first, with no worries of Wasteland or Stifle? To know that when you pull your three card combo off there's no such thing as a Force of Will that can break your gameplan? Have you ever cast a Duress off of an Underground Sea and then lost the game in response before your duress resolved because your opponent was playing Solidarity and you just spent your Spell Pierce mana and you shoulda seen that coming?
Being a top tier standard player by your definition is:
Familiarity with all the decks (all 5 of them)
Be able to bring the right deck. (This information is basically spoon fed to you if you play regularly at the LGS, or read up on the scene if attending a larger event for 30 minutes)
Being a top tier Legacy player involves:
Familiarity with all the decks (Including but not limited to: Burn, Elves, Goblins, TES, ANT, High Tide, Death and Taxes, Enchantress, MUD, Miracles, The Gate, Pox, Sneak and Show, Tron, Lands, Delver and its 3 or 4 variants, Shardless Sultai, Nic Fit, Reanimator, Tin Fins, Belcher, Oops All Spells, Imperial Painter, Dredge (and LED Dredge), Affinity, and Fish. These are the ones I can come up with off the top of my head, did I miss anyone? If you are not familiar with these decks and their sideboard cards, whether or not they play wasteland, force, or stifle, you are going to miss your Cabal Therapies, name the wrong thing with your Pithing Needles and Revokers, tap out at the wrong time and just DIE, or make any number of other mistakes that will just kill you.
Being able to pilot your deck to win against anything you might face down and sideboard correctly on the fly against a deck you've never faced before. (See above)
I've played a helluva lot of standard and done pretty well at it, I've enjoyed it off and on, sometimes some standards have actually been fun, and it's the format I like to play when I just want to play magic and not think too hard. I challenge you to try and recreate the same results in Legacy you have with Brain on the Shore in standard and then come back and tell me the skill levels are equal.
Oh I forgot, you don't need to play Legacy to make sweeping assumptions on the skill level of the format and its players, "special snowflakes" we may be. But don't make the claim that Legacy players don't have more skill or that Legacy players can't "step up" to other formats. You could at least try the format before bashing its players.
EDH: Grand Arbiter $tax, Freyalise Stompy, Mimeoplasm Death From the Grave
in fact, I think that sticking with a deck makes you a stronger player in any given format, which I believe is why you suffer from weaker performance in modern/standard. even though you are playing similar decks/ideas/strategies in modern and standard, the fact is that you are playing multiple decks. jeskai and grixis may share some of the same blue and red cards, but those strategies can be very distinct, especially when you take sideboards into consideration.
I will be the first to admit that I have a brewing disorder and I love to make new things and try them out at a tournament with real competition. however, when i brewed every week my tournament performance suffered as a result. i even took a break from competitive magic because i became frustrated that i was consistently not doing well.
I play mostly modern, and the one thing i know for sure is that it rewards you for knowing your own deck inside and out. it is possible to master multiple decks to be sure, but my advice is to pick a deck and stick with it. i have been playing the same modern deck since SOI released and i have prized at every event i have attended so far. same with standard, which i feel is pretty wide open. i play what i know and i stick with it. i see weak points and i try to patch them up. i research decks and how i can beat them with the 60 cards i have mostly locked in and the 15 i can change. it doesn't matter that my strategy may be known/outdated/not flashy, the fact is that i am most likely much better at piloting my deck I've been playing for months than someone else is trying to bring something unexpected to the table without much formal testing.
I think it cuts both ways though. I'd compare it to the differences between the Democratic primary system vs the Republican primary system (note: this has nothing to do with the actual policies and positions of each party).
With this year's schedule for the GOP, you could capitalize on a few of your opponents' mistakes and make big gains because of the narrower time frame and the higher amount of winner take all or winner basically take all rules. On the Democratic side, everything is proportional and more spaced out, which means that you can recover from mistakes; it's hard to pull ahead of an opponent, but it's also harder to catch up later in the game. The focus is more on incremental advantage. But there's no reason to say that one side is easier to win than the other.
Likewise, there are often multiple defensible lines of play in Legacy (you may be in a situation where you need to play against two things but you only have the resources to pick one). When you choose incorrectly, it's not necessarily a mistake, in the sense of a poor play. Your opponent's ability to punish you and take a win for you making a defensible choice doesn't mean it requires more skill.
Along the same lines, having stronger hate in a format doesn't make the format more skill intensive. In Standard, you may always have a contingency against your opponent, but they also have a contingency against you.
And on the subject of deck expenditures, well, I'm someone who has a pretty solid number of duals, other expensive staples (Lilianas, LEDs, etc), and random crap that spiked unreasonably since I bought it (e.g. Chains) and I just don't see the need to buy into Standard repeatedly. I just kind of pick an affordable deck that'll do decently at FNM and ride it until rotation. My Modern play is just whatever I can scrape together out of my Legacy collection. I certainly could do better at Standard if I bothered to buy the overpriced rares and mythics that won't be worth anything in a couple of years, and to that end I probably appear to be worse in that format than I really am, but at the end of the day, well, I can just pick up one of the several Legacy decks I built several years ago and rock that if I want to play the format. I can also choose the playstyle and level of interaction I want at a given event simply by varying what deck I play.
Buying into the same competitive level of Standard that I have in Legacy is just a poor decision, and that distorts perception as well.
Legacy might certainly look easy if you aren't considering the thought that goes into all those plays. Sure, you can run some decks off two mana, but that doesn't make it autopilot. The number of times I've run rings around bad Delver players would probably surprise you, because I know what a newbie's first instincts are and I can nudge them into suboptimal lines of play. And that's to say nothing of players who mess up their cantrip orders (for instance, I've seen people Ponder before Brainstorm without having another shuffle effect in hand and wind up not getting another shuffle effect), put the wrong cards back off Brainstorm, Force the wrong spells, and generally act like having more powerful cards means you don't have to put as much thought into things.
Another example, this one from personal experience, is Burn vs Miracles. Miracles assembled the Countertop combo and figured that'd be enough to beat me unconditionally, especially since I didn't have a Shusher out. The end result was me playing all kinds of silly stack tricks with the inexperienced Miracles player and forcing through enough spells to kill him (I also managed to slip a Red Blast onto his Counterbalance at one point in a play that one of his friends watching the match berated him after the match for walking into). A more experienced and skillful player would've beaten me in that scenario, but I was able to prey on my opponent's inexperience to eke out a win I surely wouldn't have against a better opponent. It wasn't that his deck failed him. He failed his deck.
The thing you should never forget is that while your cards may be powerful, your opponent also has powerful cards.
That's highly disingenuous. The sheer number and variety of combo decks in Legacy dwarfs anything available in Standard. In Standard, you have a few low-tier combos like Brain in a Jar, Eldrazi Displacer/Brood Monitor, etc. In Legacy, combo runs all across the tier spectrum and encompasses many fundamentally different approaches to the game. I'd suggest playing a few matches with Legacy combo decks to see the difference firsthand.
If you had any experience at all with Legacy events, you'd know that many players who are invested into the format have a wide variety of decks they can bring. As it is, your comments are ignorant to the point that they're the Legacy equivalent of the "just buy the most expensive cards and you can easily faceroll a PTQ without playtesting" canard with Standard.
Personally, for instance, if you sat down across from me, you could be facing down Jund, Burn, Dredge, ANT, D&T, Infect, Pox, Loam, or a few other decks, and that's just what I can play no-proxy. I personally know quite a few players with even broader options.
I get it. I'm no pro, but I own and have played plenty of both legacy and modern. I need not be convinced of the complexity of either format, and I am not format bashing in any way whatsoever. I'm just saying, from the standpoint of a relatively infrequent and mediocre player, that I do better at legacy. One of the reasons is that, for me at least, it feels less complicated than modern. Others may feel the opposite, and that's cool... it's just an opinion.
On a separate note, delver is one of my favorite matchups for pox... It's amazing how often I can blow someone's mind by taking out every red source in their deck and stabilize at 2 life while they have multiple bolts in hand. This of course doesn't happen much against good opponents, but there you have it.
I never said all pros are good at limited.
I never said there were turn 1 combo decks in standard.
You just lie out your nose with a wall of text because you can't make an argument against my actual words. You people doing this are just worthless to the mtgs community.
Are we not having fun?
How is that significantly different from saying Constructed is more skillful than Limited because it's more about player skill than opening good cards?
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Ummmmm.....pretty sure that's arguing I should have to fear T1 combo kills in standard. I mean, otherwise if you meant that sarcastically, you're making a water is wet argument.
While there's been minimal discussion about Limited in this thread, I'm having trouble figuring out where I addressed skill in limited, other than to illustrate a point that different formats take different types of skill into account, which really, agreed with your statement and elaborated on it more than anything else. Just because I argued against the rest of your post doesn't mean I'm arguing with all of it. The only part of my response to your comment on limited that might have been slightly disagreeing with it, was that I argued that it's important to recognize the impact that luck DOES have in the game, and how good players need to recognize the difference between bad luck and bad plays, and not to alter their playstyle or question their decision making when they run into bad LUCK.
I'm not hiding behind a "wall of text." If you bothered to spend the <2 minutes it takes to actually read my response instead of just calling me a liar, you'd realize that. If I misread or you mistyped something and as a result there's been some sort of miscommunication, then point it out so the discussion can move forward as opposed to just calling me a liar.
The "wall of text" is not "lying out my nose." It's called making an argument with reasoning to back it up, without resorting to five sentence responses, one of which is a false accusation, two of which have minimal relevancy and are at best the result of miscommunication/misreading on one of our parts and at worst lies of your own (but I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt and chalk it up to one of us misreading/writing), and the last two of which are just attacks, with NONE of them being backed up.
I'm sorry that making an argument involves, ya know, words. If they're too difficult for you to read and formulate a response other than "liar, liar pants on fire" it's no wonder you don't play Legacy. Some of those old templated cards can be quite wordy and have more than 4 lines of text without any reminders on them. The only thing worthless in this thread are your petty jabs and comments that have no factual basis to them.
Before you get up in arms and think that my responses are barbed at you for whatever reason and I'm just making up lies to make an argument because I disagree with it, please note:
1) You started this with statements I disagreed with. I'm ok with this so far and all it's going to lead to is us having a discussion on why we feel the way we do. That's a normal, healthy debate. I didn't agree with everything Ashley25746 said either, but I took some time to acknowledge (presumably her) post because it actually had some basis to it, and addressed the points I felt differently on, explained why I felt differently on them, and we're both totally cool.
2) You got a snarkier response because if you're going to dish out blanket statements like:
You should expect that provocative statements will receive a response. If this is the tone you're going to take, don't be so offended when you receive the same tone in response. Seems like a case of someone willing to dish it out, but then not be able to take it. Be glad that I'd rather address it with you than the mod staff because I'd rather provide a reasoned response instead of crying to them with the report button.
Let me know when you're ready to put some thought into your inflammatory statements and back them up with some reasoning other than "liar liar"
EDH: Grand Arbiter $tax, Freyalise Stompy, Mimeoplasm Death From the Grave
The point I was making is that your argument basically comes down to "it takes more skill to succeed in an environment that has fewer options and less variance." In essence, that removing gameplay elements increases the impact of skill, rather than decreasing it. In essence, the less diverse the metagame, the more skill is required. The problem is that's basically saying solved formats are more skillful. The fatal assumption there is that it's assuming that getting knocked out by a rogue deck comes down to variance, when in reality it's just the player being unable to deal with a deck they aren't used to playing against.
It's not bad luck if, say, you packed no graveyard hate and got knocked out by Dredge or Reanimator or Tinfins or whatever if your deck can't otherwise handle them. It's you failing to consider such matchups, or failing to put appropriate weighting on the likelihood of facing such decks.
Overall, however, the more skillful player will have the higher win percentage and thus the higher proportion of top 8 finishes. It's not really any different from how skilled players can construct mana bases that minimize the effects of variance due to mana screw, mana flood, colour screw, etc, except on a more complex scale. A format without nonbasic lands, or with fewer nonbasic lands, isn't more skillful than a format with a wide variety of nonbasic land options, and it's basically the same concept with format complexity.
This doesn't happen in Standard or Modern, and it's not because of deck optimization, playing "lesser" opponents or other bull***** reasons, but because of the card quality and variety. Legacy rewards you for knowing the rules, knowing the cards and playing tight. Modern punishes you for falling on a bad match-up and Standard is so weak the few strong cards are so unsurmountable it becomes a luck-based race to ressolving a powerful spell.
So, thinking I won't lose to a T1 combo is wrong, but you're not actually saying there are turn one combos in Standard? What exactly are you trying to saying?
Why all the hate? Did a Legacy player shoot your dog or **** your spouse or something? You seem to want to insult Legacy and its players every chance you get. I'm very curious what experiences you've had to bring you to this state.
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EDH: Grand Arbiter $tax, Freyalise Stompy, Mimeoplasm Death From the Grave