It seems that almost all blue creatures are far too overcosted in regards to CMC for them to be even remotely viable in Modern or Legacy even though their abilities are pretty powerful - Deadeye Navigator, Consecrated Sphinx, Aetherling, etc. (great for Commander) - these creatures would be better if their CMC could be reduced by 1, although this probably still doesn't make them useful in Modern or Legacy given the speed of the format.
Smaller blue creatures (Merfolk, Wizards) just aren't good enough to compete given their abilities and CMC - it seems like blue needs better 1 CMC drops - in order to be viable in Modern or Legacy. Perhaps this is why Blue is generally regulated to a support or splash color for card draw for the most part?
Brightling with unblockable and another ability replacing vigilance and lifelink seems like what blue desperately needs.
I think Delver of Secrets would qualify as a viable Modern 1-drop, but in general blue is not supposed to have efficient creatures as part of its slice of the color pie.
Smaller blue creatures (Merfolk, Wizards) just aren't good enough to compete given their abilities and CMC - it seems like blue needs better 1 CMC drops - in order to be viable in Modern or Legacy. Perhaps this is why Blue is generally regulated to a support or splash color for card draw for the most part?
I suggest looking at some Modern and Legacy blue decks, to see what creatures are considered 'viable' in those formats. While blue rarely gets efficient, large creatures, they do occasionally get efficient creatures, and small does not mean the creature can't compete.
I think Delver of Secrets would qualify as a viable Modern 1-drop, but in general blue is not supposed to have efficient creatures as part of its slice of the color pie.
MaRo vehemently disagrees. For Reasons.
Blue is, after all, primary in using flavor to justify color pie bends, breaks, and bleeds.
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Cards are game pieces, and should be treated as such, easily replaceable.
Cards are not money, investments, or a retirement fund, and should never have been treated as such.
Wizards made a mistake caving to speculators once, and we still pay for that mistake 2 decades later.
"Entitled:" the entire ad hominem fallacy condensed into a single word. It doesn't strengthen your argument to attack motivations, it just makes you look like you don't understand the argument.
Per MTGTop8, of the 8 most used creatures in modern top8 decks over the last two months, 2 are monoblue (#2 Snapcaster Mage and #4 Phantasmal Image) and 3 are multicolor including blue (#6 Reflector Mage, #7 Meddling Mage, #8 Mantis Rider).
It is the most represented color in the top 8 played modern creatures - by contrast, there are no black creatures at all, and no mono-red crteatures.
Per MTGTop8, of the 8 most used creatures in modern top8 decks over the last two months, 2 are monoblue (#2 Snapcaster Mage and #4 Phantasmal Image) and 3 are multicolor including blue (#6 Reflector Mage, #7 Meddling Mage, #8 Mantis Rider).
It is the most represented color in the top 8 played modern creatures - by contrast, there are no black creatures at all, and no mono-red crteatures.
Good point and I agree, although I would argue that Snapcaster (I love this card) doesn't necessarily wins games since you need a lot of powerful spells to be in your graveyard at the right time for him to make a significant impact on your progression toward a victory. I also like Phantasmal Image, but it's also situational (needs other big or impactful ceatures to be on the board) in order for it to make significant impact toward your progression to victory.
Per MTGTop8, of the 8 most used creatures in modern top8 decks over the last two months, 2 are monoblue (#2 Snapcaster Mage and #4 Phantasmal Image) and 3 are multicolor including blue (#6 Reflector Mage, #7 Meddling Mage, #8 Mantis Rider).
It is the most represented color in the top 8 played modern creatures - by contrast, there are no black creatures at all, and no mono-red crteatures.
Good point and I agree, although I would argue that Snapcaster (I love this card) doesn't necessarily wins games since you need a lot of powerful spells to be in your graveyard at the right time for him to make a significant impact on your progression toward a victory. I also like Phantasmal Image, but it's also situational (needs other big or impactful permanents to be on the board) in order for it to make significant impact toward your progression to victory.
Snapcaster Mage wins a lot of games. Quite a few control decks have won through Bolt, Snapcaster, Bolt over the years.
Smaller blue creatures (Merfolk, Wizards) just aren't good enough to compete given their abilities and CMC - it seems like blue needs better 1 CMC drops - in order to be viable in Modern or Legacy. Perhaps this is why Blue is generally regulated to a support or splash color for card draw for the most part?
I suggest looking at some Modern and Legacy blue decks, to see what creatures are considered 'viable' in those formats. While blue rarely gets efficient, large creatures, they do occasionally get efficient creatures, and small does not mean the creature can't compete.
I agree, but creatures like Snapcaster (which I love), Phantasmal Image (like it too), Delver of Secrets (Also like) are very situational and require the right spell to be in your graveyard already (Snapcaster), for you to have lots of spells in your deck (Delver) or to have a significantly impactful creature already on the board. These are impactful and can compete in the right situations, but I'm not sure about their efficiency otherwise.
I think Delver of Secrets would qualify as a viable Modern 1-drop, but in general blue is not supposed to have efficient creatures as part of its slice of the color pie.
MaRo vehemently disagrees. For Reasons.
I'm pretty sure that Maro would agree that in general blue is not supposed to have efficient creatures, but in the case of Delver it isn't really an efficient of a creature unless you build your deck with a bunch of instants and sorceries. That seems very blue to me. So does something like Phantasmal Bear which is the only way that blue gets a 2-power 1-drop with no other strings attached.
Blue is, after all, primary in using flavor to justify color pie bends, breaks, and bleeds.
Truth. We used to joke that whatever "drawback" blue was supposed to have is that it draws too many cards....
Snapcaster Mage wins a lot of games. Quite a few control decks have won through Bolt, Snapcaster, Bolt over the years.
I'm assuming he's talking about a pure beat down creature. Snapcaster Mage, while being the best creature in Modern probably since it was printed, is not the best beater. It just is an overall amazing card because of the CIP ability.
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Legacy - Sneak Show, BR Reanimator, Miracles, UW Stoneblade
Premodern - Trix, RecSur, Enchantress, Reanimator, Elves https://www.facebook.com/groups/PremodernUSA/ Modern - Neobrand, Hogaak Vine, Elves
Standard - Mono Red (6-2 and 5-3 in 2 McQ)
Draft - (I wish I had more time for limited...)
Commander - Norin the Wary, Grimgrin, Adun Oakenshield (taking forever to build) (dead format for me)
Smaller blue creatures (Merfolk, Wizards) just aren't good enough to compete given their abilities and CMC - it seems like blue needs better 1 CMC drops - in order to be viable in Modern or Legacy. Perhaps this is why Blue is generally regulated to a support or splash color for card draw for the most part?
I agree, but creatures like Snapcaster (which I love), Phantasmal Image (like it too), Delver of Secrets (Also like) are very situational and require the right spell to be in your graveyard already (Snapcaster), for you to have lots of spells in your deck (Delver) or to have a significantly impactful creature already on the board. These are impactful and can compete in the right situations, but I'm not sure about their efficiency otherwise.
The deal with creatures is that the context is so important.
Some creatures are played for the abilities they offer, its almost irelvant what power/toughness they have, unless context matters (like survive a bolt and blocking 1/1 tokens etc.).
----
Especially white creatures are way more efficient in terms of combat abilities, so they should have the edge over the same manacost spells in other colors.
The tradeoff is that white has almost no form of card advantage, so a single card has to matter more, while other colors might get ahead and just trade 2 for 1 at some point.
The biggest problem with creatures that "violate" this basic rules is that they tend to be actually way better than what the color usually gets.
When blue gets efficient creatures, they are fairly often format defining and stupidly powerful.
In general, if blue lacks efficient creatures, they have to team up with other colors to compensate. If they just get good creatures on their own, you end up with strong mono blue decks that crush the format.
The same is true if other colors get much more flexible and overall strong spells to work with. To make a reasonable mono colored deck work against a broad field of decks, it has to do something especially broken to compete with multicolored cards on a powerlevel alone.
Smaller blue creatures (Merfolk, Wizards) just aren't good enough to compete given their abilities and CMC - it seems like blue needs better 1 CMC drops - in order to be viable in Modern or Legacy. Perhaps this is why Blue is generally regulated to a support or splash color for card draw for the most part?
I suggest looking at some Modern and Legacy blue decks, to see what creatures are considered 'viable' in those formats. While blue rarely gets efficient, large creatures, they do occasionally get efficient creatures, and small does not mean the creature can't compete.
I agree, but creatures like Snapcaster (which I love), Phantasmal Image (like it too), Delver of Secrets (Also like) are very situational and require the right spell to be in your graveyard already (Snapcaster), for you to have lots of spells in your deck (Delver) or to have a significantly impactful creature already on the board. These are impactful and can compete in the right situations, but I'm not sure about their efficiency otherwise.
To me this is like saying that Tarmogoyf isn't strong because you need specific things to be in graveyards, or Dark Confidant isn't strong because you need to be able to draw lower costed cards not to kill yourself, or Arcbound Ravager and Steel Overseer aren't strong because because you need to have artifacts/artifact creatures on the board, or Thalia's Lieutenant is not strong because you need to have other humans on board or to play them afterwards.
Most of the time strength is relative to deck building, cards available, and match up. There are tons of strong cards that are not "strong" in and of themselves. How efficient are the above mentioned cards on their own? But in the right decks they are great. The blue creatures talked about are just in that category.
The deal with creatures is that the context is so important...
To make a reasonable mono colored deck work against a broad field of decks, it has to do something especially broken to compete with multicolored cards on a powerlevel alone.
I agree with this as well, perhaps blue is simply meant to be a support color for card draw unless you build around them - like Snapcaster, etc.
Smaller blue creatures (Merfolk, Wizards) just aren't good enough to compete given their abilities and CMC - it seems like blue needs better 1 CMC drops - in order to be viable in Modern or Legacy. Perhaps this is why Blue is generally regulated to a support or splash color for card draw for the most part?
I suggest looking at some Modern and Legacy blue decks, to see what creatures are considered 'viable' in those formats. While blue rarely gets efficient, large creatures, they do occasionally get efficient creatures, and small does not mean the creature can't compete.
I agree, but creatures like Snapcaster (which I love), Phantasmal Image (like it too), Delver of Secrets (Also like) are very situational and require the right spell to be in your graveyard already (Snapcaster), for you to have lots of spells in your deck (Delver) or to have a significantly impactful creature already on the board. These are impactful and can compete in the right situations, but I'm not sure about their efficiency otherwise.
To me this is like saying that Tarmogoyf isn't strong because you need specific things to be in graveyards, or Dark Confidant isn't strong because you need to be able to draw lower costed cards not to kill yourself, or Arcbound Ravager and Steel Overseer aren't strong because because you need to have artifacts/artifact creatures on the board, or Thalia's Lieutenant is not strong because you need to have other humans on board or to play them afterwards.
Most of the time strength is relative to deck building, cards available, and match up. There are tons of strong cards that are not "strong" in and of themselves. How efficient are the above mentioned cards on their own? But in the right decks they are great. The blue creatures talked about are just in that category.
I agree for the most part, but other colors seem to have a way to remove these fairly quickly after they hit the board (Black - Fatal Push, White - Path to Exile, Green - Have more efficient and ramp to bigger creatures, Red - Bolt), with blue you need the right counterspell to prevent them from hitting the board (which - specifically in Modern - is inefficient itself due to the specificity of these spells and their cost), or if you bounce them it can give you a minor tempo advantage before they are out again to wreak havoc and your trailing again.
Having said that it seems like mono-blue needs more efficient creatures to even somewhat deal with this because the probability of you having the right counterspells at the right time to prevent these things from hitting the board and overwhelming or curbstomping blue's inefficient creatures seems highly unlikely. Even when you do, you're still behind because you spent 2 counterspells to get 2 creatures off the board and there is still plenty where that came from (again, you get overwhelmed quickly).
Mono-Blue needs more efficient creatures? OK, I'm all for that, when every other color gets Blue's incredibly diverse bag of tricks. Pongify, Disallow, Snapcaster Mage, Serum Visions, and especially the 4-mana toolbox of a card named Cryptic Command. Since you want Blue to have no weaknesses at all, might as well take the same weaknesses from every other color at the same time.
Private Mod Note
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Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Cards are game pieces, and should be treated as such, easily replaceable.
Cards are not money, investments, or a retirement fund, and should never have been treated as such.
Wizards made a mistake caving to speculators once, and we still pay for that mistake 2 decades later.
"Entitled:" the entire ad hominem fallacy condensed into a single word. It doesn't strengthen your argument to attack motivations, it just makes you look like you don't understand the argument.
Blue creatures are not going to be able to compete with Green creatures for efficiency.
Green's creatures actually tend to be pretty inefficient as a whole. It's basically the colour that tries to play fair (i.e. through the battlefield rather than through the stack) without realizing that every other colour plays unfairly to some degree or another. It's a fundamental flaw in R&D's view of the game that something like Hornet Queen can be seen as an egregiously terrible break in the colour pie (despite being largely unplayable outside of EDH), while Delver of Secrets is met with "well it involves instants and sorceries and that's blue's thing and it's not really that big of a deal if it's format-warpingly powerful."
The deal with creatures is that the context is so important...
To make a reasonable mono colored deck work against a broad field of decks, it has to do something especially broken to compete with multicolored cards on a powerlevel alone.
I agree with this as well, perhaps blue is simply meant to be a support color for card draw unless you build around them - like Snapcaster, etc.
Is given a counter point showing an aggressive tribal merfolk deck, doesn't acknowledge it since it doesn't fit narrative of "blue is supportive color".
Mono-Blue needs more efficient creatures? OK, I'm all for that, when every other color gets Blue's incredibly diverse bag of tricks. Pongify, Disallow, Snapcaster Mage, Serum Visions, and especially the 4-mana toolbox of a card named Cryptic Command. Since you want Blue to have no weaknesses at all, might as well take the same weaknesses from every other color at the same time.
I never said I wanted Blue to have no weaknesses at all, please find my quote where I said that. Oh wait, I didn't. Please act like an adult and don't put words into people's mouths. I just asked about why blue doesn't have efficient creatures and seems like they need them. You get an "A" for sarcasm though.
The deal with creatures is that the context is so important...
To make a reasonable mono colored deck work against a broad field of decks, it has to do something especially broken to compete with multicolored cards on a powerlevel alone.
I agree with this as well, perhaps blue is simply meant to be a support color for card draw unless you build around them - like Snapcaster, etc.
Is given a counter point showing an aggressive tribal merfolk deck, doesn't acknowledge it since it doesn't fit narrative of "blue is supportive color".
Oh, Merfolk is competitive in Legacy and Modern? Wow! Let me see take a look at the metagame for each of those formats...
Nope, no merfolk there. Now I'm going to act like you and at you for providing a tribal merfolk deck that isn't putting up any significant results competitively. YOU FAIL.
Merfolk is fine in Legacy. It's a bit niche but it can run decks right over with raw tempo if necessary. And of course some decks just have no outs to a resolved True-Name Nemesis. It's not a high-tier deck but it does well enough in the hands of dedicated players.
Merfolk is fine in Legacy. It's a bit niche but it can run decks right over with raw tempo if necessary. And of course some decks just have no outs to a resolved True-Name Nemesis. It's not a high-tier deck but it does well enough in the hands of dedicated players.
Merfolk always could shine in a metagame that is full of "islands".
The moment your entire team becomes unblockable with a Lord of Atlantis is when merfolk is the king of tribal decks, backed up by free counterspells its a tribe that delivers enough "broken" mechanics all in one.
The moment your format lacks islands, they are just a fringe deck to play, especially if you have to use random crap cards just to turn lands into islands.
The raw power of each merfolk is just not good enough at this point.
But if at all, merfolk does something that blue normally does not get, which are reasonable costed beatdown creatures with among the best lords any color gets (compare the lords to what other tribes get, they are just way better, more aggressively costed and deliver at least the same ratio than the other lords, and they are BLUE creatures).
All that is good about merfolk is the quality of the lords, a prime example of "aggressively good" blue creatures that it normally does not get.
Merfolk is fine in Legacy. It's a bit niche but it can run decks right over with raw tempo if necessary. And of course some decks just have no outs to a resolved True-Name Nemesis. It's not a high-tier deck but it does well enough in the hands of dedicated players.
Merfolk always could shine in a metagame that is full of "islands".
The moment your entire team becomes unblockable with a Lord of Atlantis is when merfolk is the king of tribal decks, backed up by free counterspells its a tribe that delivers enough "broken" mechanics all in one.
The moment your format lacks islands, they are just a fringe deck to play, especially if you have to use random crap cards just to turn lands into islands.
The raw power of each merfolk is just not good enough at this point.
But if at all, merfolk does something that blue normally does not get, which are reasonable costed beatdown creatures with among the best lords any color gets (compare the lords to what other tribes get, they are just way better, more aggressively costed and deliver at least the same ratio than the other lords, and they are BLUE creatures).
All that is good about merfolk is the quality of the lords, a prime example of "aggressively good" blue creatures that it normally does not get.
This. Basically if islands are heavy in the format, using cards to change lands into islands makes this deck a fringe deck and not even remotely close to the most successful and highly used ones in the meta for Modern (or Legacy)
Smaller blue creatures (Merfolk, Wizards) just aren't good enough to compete given their abilities and CMC - it seems like blue needs better 1 CMC drops - in order to be viable in Modern or Legacy. Perhaps this is why Blue is generally regulated to a support or splash color for card draw for the most part?
Brightling with unblockable and another ability replacing vigilance and lifelink seems like what blue desperately needs.
Jalira, Master Polymorphist | Endrek Sahr, Master Breeder | Bosh, Iron Golem | Ezuri, Renegade Leader
Brago, King Eternal | Oona, Queen of the Fae | Wort, Boggart Auntie | Wort, the Raidmother
Captain Sisay | Rhys, the Redeemed | Trostani, Selesnya's Voice | Jarad, Golgari Lich Lord
Gisela, Blade of Goldnight | Obzedat, Ghost Council | Niv-Mizzet, the Firemind | Vorel of the Hull Clade
Uril, the Miststalker | Prossh, Skyraider of Kher | Nicol Bolas | Progenitus
Ghave, Guru of Spores | Zedruu the Greathearted | Damia, Sage of Stone | Riku of Two Reflections
Two Score, Minus Two or: A Stargate Tail
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MaRo vehemently disagrees. For Reasons.
Blue is, after all, primary in using flavor to justify color pie bends, breaks, and bleeds.
Cards are not money, investments, or a retirement fund, and should never have been treated as such.
Wizards made a mistake caving to speculators once, and we still pay for that mistake 2 decades later.
"Entitled:" the entire ad hominem fallacy condensed into a single word. It doesn't strengthen your argument to attack motivations, it just makes you look like you don't understand the argument.
It is the most represented color in the top 8 played modern creatures - by contrast, there are no black creatures at all, and no mono-red crteatures.
Good point and I agree, although I would argue that Snapcaster (I love this card) doesn't necessarily wins games since you need a lot of powerful spells to be in your graveyard at the right time for him to make a significant impact on your progression toward a victory. I also like Phantasmal Image, but it's also situational (needs other big or impactful ceatures to be on the board) in order for it to make significant impact toward your progression to victory.
Snapcaster Mage wins a lot of games. Quite a few control decks have won through Bolt, Snapcaster, Bolt over the years.
I agree, but creatures like Snapcaster (which I love), Phantasmal Image (like it too), Delver of Secrets (Also like) are very situational and require the right spell to be in your graveyard already (Snapcaster), for you to have lots of spells in your deck (Delver) or to have a significantly impactful creature already on the board. These are impactful and can compete in the right situations, but I'm not sure about their efficiency otherwise.
I'm pretty sure that Maro would agree that in general blue is not supposed to have efficient creatures, but in the case of Delver it isn't really an efficient of a creature unless you build your deck with a bunch of instants and sorceries. That seems very blue to me. So does something like Phantasmal Bear which is the only way that blue gets a 2-power 1-drop with no other strings attached.
Truth. We used to joke that whatever "drawback" blue was supposed to have is that it draws too many cards....
Jalira, Master Polymorphist | Endrek Sahr, Master Breeder | Bosh, Iron Golem | Ezuri, Renegade Leader
Brago, King Eternal | Oona, Queen of the Fae | Wort, Boggart Auntie | Wort, the Raidmother
Captain Sisay | Rhys, the Redeemed | Trostani, Selesnya's Voice | Jarad, Golgari Lich Lord
Gisela, Blade of Goldnight | Obzedat, Ghost Council | Niv-Mizzet, the Firemind | Vorel of the Hull Clade
Uril, the Miststalker | Prossh, Skyraider of Kher | Nicol Bolas | Progenitus
Ghave, Guru of Spores | Zedruu the Greathearted | Damia, Sage of Stone | Riku of Two Reflections
I'm assuming he's talking about a pure beat down creature. Snapcaster Mage, while being the best creature in Modern probably since it was printed, is not the best beater. It just is an overall amazing card because of the CIP ability.
Premodern - Trix, RecSur, Enchantress, Reanimator, Elves https://www.facebook.com/groups/PremodernUSA/
Modern - Neobrand, Hogaak Vine, Elves
Standard - Mono Red (6-2 and 5-3 in 2 McQ)
Draft - (I wish I had more time for limited...)
Commander -
Norin the Wary, Grimgrin, Adun Oakenshield (taking forever to build)(dead format for me)4 Cursecatcher
2 Coralhelm Commander
4 Harbinger of the Tides
4 Lord of Atlantis
4 Master of the Pearl Trident
4 Merfolk Trickster
4 Silvergill Adept
4 Merrow Reejerey
4 Master of Waves
1 Vapor Snag
Enchantments (4)
4 Spreading Seas
Lands (21)
21 Island
3 Tormod's Crypt
3 Ceremonious Rejection
1 Gut Shot
2 Sea's Claim
2 Spell Pierce
2 Unsummon
2 Negate
Some creatures are played for the abilities they offer, its almost irelvant what power/toughness they have, unless context matters (like survive a bolt and blocking 1/1 tokens etc.).
----
Especially white creatures are way more efficient in terms of combat abilities, so they should have the edge over the same manacost spells in other colors.
The tradeoff is that white has almost no form of card advantage, so a single card has to matter more, while other colors might get ahead and just trade 2 for 1 at some point.
The biggest problem with creatures that "violate" this basic rules is that they tend to be actually way better than what the color usually gets.
When blue gets efficient creatures, they are fairly often format defining and stupidly powerful.
In general, if blue lacks efficient creatures, they have to team up with other colors to compensate. If they just get good creatures on their own, you end up with strong mono blue decks that crush the format.
The same is true if other colors get much more flexible and overall strong spells to work with. To make a reasonable mono colored deck work against a broad field of decks, it has to do something especially broken to compete with multicolored cards on a powerlevel alone.
WUBRG#BlackLotusMatterWUBRG
👮👮👮 #BlueLivesMatter 👮👮👮
To me this is like saying that Tarmogoyf isn't strong because you need specific things to be in graveyards, or Dark Confidant isn't strong because you need to be able to draw lower costed cards not to kill yourself, or Arcbound Ravager and Steel Overseer aren't strong because because you need to have artifacts/artifact creatures on the board, or Thalia's Lieutenant is not strong because you need to have other humans on board or to play them afterwards.
Most of the time strength is relative to deck building, cards available, and match up. There are tons of strong cards that are not "strong" in and of themselves. How efficient are the above mentioned cards on their own? But in the right decks they are great. The blue creatures talked about are just in that category.
BWTokens
GCollected Stompany
BWGUSeance Insanity
URUR Bloo
I agree with this as well, perhaps blue is simply meant to be a support color for card draw unless you build around them - like Snapcaster, etc.
I agree for the most part, but other colors seem to have a way to remove these fairly quickly after they hit the board (Black - Fatal Push, White - Path to Exile, Green - Have more efficient and ramp to bigger creatures, Red - Bolt), with blue you need the right counterspell to prevent them from hitting the board (which - specifically in Modern - is inefficient itself due to the specificity of these spells and their cost), or if you bounce them it can give you a minor tempo advantage before they are out again to wreak havoc and your trailing again.
Having said that it seems like mono-blue needs more efficient creatures to even somewhat deal with this because the probability of you having the right counterspells at the right time to prevent these things from hitting the board and overwhelming or curbstomping blue's inefficient creatures seems highly unlikely. Even when you do, you're still behind because you spent 2 counterspells to get 2 creatures off the board and there is still plenty where that came from (again, you get overwhelmed quickly).
Cards are not money, investments, or a retirement fund, and should never have been treated as such.
Wizards made a mistake caving to speculators once, and we still pay for that mistake 2 decades later.
"Entitled:" the entire ad hominem fallacy condensed into a single word. It doesn't strengthen your argument to attack motivations, it just makes you look like you don't understand the argument.
Green's creatures actually tend to be pretty inefficient as a whole. It's basically the colour that tries to play fair (i.e. through the battlefield rather than through the stack) without realizing that every other colour plays unfairly to some degree or another. It's a fundamental flaw in R&D's view of the game that something like Hornet Queen can be seen as an egregiously terrible break in the colour pie (despite being largely unplayable outside of EDH), while Delver of Secrets is met with "well it involves instants and sorceries and that's blue's thing and it's not really that big of a deal if it's format-warpingly powerful."
I never said I wanted Blue to have no weaknesses at all, please find my quote where I said that. Oh wait, I didn't. Please act like an adult and don't put words into people's mouths. I just asked about why blue doesn't have efficient creatures and seems like they need them. You get an "A" for sarcasm though.
Oh, Merfolk is competitive in Legacy and Modern? Wow! Let me see take a look at the metagame for each of those formats...
Modern - https://www.mtggoldfish.com/metagame/modern#paper
Legacy - https://www.mtggoldfish.com/metagame/legacy#paper
Nope, no merfolk there. Now I'm going to act like you and at you for providing a tribal merfolk deck that isn't putting up any significant results competitively. YOU FAIL.
You get an "A" for effort though. Good job.
Merfolk always could shine in a metagame that is full of "islands".
The moment your entire team becomes unblockable with a Lord of Atlantis is when merfolk is the king of tribal decks, backed up by free counterspells its a tribe that delivers enough "broken" mechanics all in one.
The moment your format lacks islands, they are just a fringe deck to play, especially if you have to use random crap cards just to turn lands into islands.
The raw power of each merfolk is just not good enough at this point.
But if at all, merfolk does something that blue normally does not get, which are reasonable costed beatdown creatures with among the best lords any color gets (compare the lords to what other tribes get, they are just way better, more aggressively costed and deliver at least the same ratio than the other lords, and they are BLUE creatures).
All that is good about merfolk is the quality of the lords, a prime example of "aggressively good" blue creatures that it normally does not get.
WUBRG#BlackLotusMatterWUBRG
👮👮👮 #BlueLivesMatter 👮👮👮
This. Basically if islands are heavy in the format, using cards to change lands into islands makes this deck a fringe deck and not even remotely close to the most successful and highly used ones in the meta for Modern (or Legacy)