It's no secret that the devs' choice of "make everything broken and OP so nobody can complain" just straight up doesn't work, but blue as a whole has received preferential treatment on that front for as long as I can remember.
Yeah, playing against red or white rush is obnoxious and cheap, but there's at least some counterplay there and a significant number of cards in just about every new set that can work against it, so if you don't prepare that's kind of your fault. Same with green and black (yes, even the horribly cheap discard decks, because at least they can be worked against), and even the "all current OP meta combos as you can throw in a deck" style of playing can usually be worked against. But there's legitimately nothing half as broken as one or two drop counter spells, and unless you're playing the exact same thing, you just lose.
The fact that on Arena, once you get into Mythic (and ESPECIALLY top 500 play) just about every deck you play against has 4 copies of Saw It Coming, and that almost all top players in either tabletop or Arena have blue as a main portion of their decks, should say all that needs to be said. When any deck containing a significant number of counter spells has like 70% win rate or better, you can literally play it on autopilot (for example, I handed my phone to my ***3 year old*** niece, who had no idea what the rules were and just got a brief intro to controls, and she won 6 out of 8 games simply by playing cheap counters until they had nothing left and then used the few creatures I threw in to seal the win... I'd say it's absolutely ridiculous that this is even possible), and there's literally no counterplay unless you ALSO use those specific spells, is just lazy and stupid.
How the developers and people who are supposed to be balancing this game can claim there's any aspect of competitiveness in this game is ludicrous. And to have that even exist in the game is such a ridiculous middle finger to everyone who doesn't want to suck all the fun out of matches for everyone involved (unless you're a literal sociopath, which seems to be a pretty common thing among blue players, because who else would literally play a smooth-brain no-skill deck just so they can get meaningless wins equivalent to using jacks on an FPS game or something... but I digress) that it's almost like Wizards only hires people who hate Magic and everyone who plays it for casual fun. Either that or they just got too many calls from obnoxious Karens complaining that their kid was losing all the time and them being trash at the game was Wizards's fault, so they made playing blue or any combination of that and other colors just straight up easy mode for children and people who don't want to be bothered taking the time to get good at deck construction and strategy. Honestly, even just making counters one or two man's more expensive would do so much to work toward overall balance that it'd be game-changing, but nope, they just keep making them cheaper. It's so disappointing more than anything, honestly, because they have what should be one of the best games of all time from an interest and competition standpoint, and they choose to remove all elements of competition from it. When all the decks one can make, even those just copied from ultra high-tier players or super-meta crap have a 10-30% lower win rate against blue-centric decks than ANY OTHER color, it's just plain preferential treatment and a lack of respect for anyone who chooses to play the Magic equivalent of cheat codes or GameShark or something, simply because playing it is so boring and the wins feel cheap and unearned.
Tl,dr: Blue as a whole, and specifically counterspell-centric decks, are the main thing that make Magic suck at all levels but especially high ranks/levels of play, and take any sense of balance or legitimate skill-based play out of the equation entirely. Easy mode for people who don't care about fun and just want to boost their stats with decks that are so braindead that literal children can get to top-tier rankings with little to no experience.
Tl,dr: Blue as a whole, and specifically counterspell-centric decks, are the main thing that make Magic suck at all levels but especially high ranks/levels of play, and take any sense of balance or legitimate skill-based play out of the equation entirely. Easy mode for people who don't care about fun and just want to boost their stats with decks that are so braindead that literal children can get to top-tier rankings with little to no experience.
While this isn't untrue its also a false representation. Of top decks, only about 15% use blue which is on the low end considering there are five colors so each should get 20% representation if all was balanced. As for whats easy mode that's debatable but often to beat control decks it takes more skill than it does to play them.
Any 3 year old that is even capable to play Magic, i would assume to be some kind of prodigy.
----
In the "old" days of Magic, blue was particularly powerful, as card draw and counterspells where placed in that color primarily, black got a bunch for life payments, but any other color, white, green and red very rarely got any card draw at all that was remotely competitive.
So if a deck wanted to be a control deck, they basically had to play blue.
The most traditional classic form of a control deck had to play white and blue, for mass removal, card draw and counterspells.
A lot of combo decks in the Urzas Saga era of Magic had blue in them, as so many key-combo pieces where blue to untap your lands and generate more mana.
With time that all switched and watered down, as now, basically any color has card-draw (white gets the least, and does so in very limited scope).
In modern in particular, blue gets paired with red or white, as Magic is much more about color-pairs then mono colors at this point, almost any set is designed around color pairs or more, we did not get a mono-color matters set in basically decades.
Control with Counterspells was always disliked by people that wanted to play a slower game, but the slower game is exactly what a control deck wants, so as long as you play only 1 spell a turn, you basically just play into the strength of a control deck.
As the easy solution to that is to play more cheap spells, thats where mass removal has to clean up, and the entire matchup becomes much more of a resource-war.
Overall control plays many more lands than a low-curve aggro deck, so they will draw more of them, they quite literally have more "dead" draws.
To counter that control decks need some form of card draw, so as long as the game trades 1 for 1 card , you need to get ahead somehow, producing card advantage or double-play in a turn to sneak something through, once its resolved, they need removal to get rid of it, which is also a specific answer.
So to be fair, a competitive control deck is not fun to play against with a "casual" deck that is not optimized.
The entire point of a control deck is to quite literally control the game, if you cant do that, you lose.
For a combo deck the game plan is to find the combo and sneak it through for the win, which is once again a very different kind of game.
An aggro deck wants to play as much as possible quickly and win through an opponent that might struggle to find the answers in time, so successful aggro decks become quite the glass canon to accomplish that, chances to win a longer game diminish drastically.
What you might consider "fun" is what most casual decks aim at, a bunch of slow midrange decks, mainly creatures and removal to have a back and forth game.
But thats just one aspect of Magic.
So you have to broaden your understanding of different decks, and the competitive aspect requires a metagame of competitive decks that are tuned to play against each other ... a random casual deck will have a much harder time to compete, as you are just a worse version of either competitive deck.
Also, there are decks are cards that are great against blue. Any low-to-the-ground aggro deck, be it Mono-red or Mono-white can go right under it. Them sitting back on counters while getting hit in the face by 1 and 2 draws won't do much for them. Play Thalia, Guardian of Thraben and run em down. If you really struggle throw in some Paladin Class. Then there are uncounterable cards: Toski, Bearer of Secrets and Inferno of the Star Mounts. There are plenty of ways to get under Blue in Standard. Now if you're playing a 6 card combo and each card costs 3+ mana? That's probably an autoloss, but thems the breaks.
Easy mode for people who don't care about fun and just want to boost their stats with decks that are so braindead that literal children can get to top-tier rankings with little to no experience.
The portion of players who can efficiently make money by playing Magic they don't enjoy is much smaller than the portion of players who play blue decks. Therefore, a lot of them (and I know that this at least includes myself) care about fun, or else we wouldn't be playing Magic.
just being straight up with you. you've made up your mind and no amount of anything to the contrary is going to sway your opinion. you've made that clear.
blue isn't going anywhere. its a fundamental aspect of the game.
what you should be doing instead of having the idea that blue needs to go firmly cemented in your head; is push for other colors (not green) to get the tools to put them on par with blue. make the effort to understand what blue does as a color. learn how to beat those strategies.
can't tell you how many times i've heard island bad! counterspell unfair! over the past 30 years, and its almost always from players who over extend, or don't add any kind of card advantage to their builds, or just refuse to prepare for having their stuff interacted with.
Outside of EDH / Commander I think is where most of the complaints of Blue comes from in regards to Standard, Modern, and Pioneer where the Sideboard becomes more of the main focus to deal with these strategies and there's simply not enough to work with. Legacy and Vintage have access to Stax strategies with Stasis and Winter Orb to where it's a pain to play against where as in EDH / Commander, it isn't as bad due to the Singleton nature of the format. Less different versions of the same cards they print the less likely they'll draw into them unless they run tutors.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
America Bless Christ Jesus
"Restriction breeds creativity." - Sheldon Menery on EDH / Commander in Magic: The Gathering
"Cancel Culture is the real reason why everyone's not allowed to have nice things anymore." - Anonymous
"For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?" - Mark 8:36
"Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution." - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
"Every life decision is always a risk / reward proposition." - Sanjay Gupta
It's no secret that the devs' choice of "make everything broken and OP so nobody can complain" just straight up doesn't work, but blue as a whole has received preferential treatment on that front for as long as I can remember.
Yeah, playing against red or white rush is obnoxious and cheap, but there's at least some counterplay there and a significant number of cards in just about every new set that can work against it, so if you don't prepare that's kind of your fault. Same with green and black (yes, even the horribly cheap discard decks, because at least they can be worked against), and even the "all current OP meta combos as you can throw in a deck" style of playing can usually be worked against. But there's legitimately nothing half as broken as one or two drop counter spells, and unless you're playing the exact same thing, you just lose.
The fact that on Arena, once you get into Mythic (and ESPECIALLY top 500 play) just about every deck you play against has 4 copies of Saw It Coming, and that almost all top players in either tabletop or Arena have blue as a main portion of their decks, should say all that needs to be said. When any deck containing a significant number of counter spells has like 70% win rate or better, you can literally play it on autopilot (for example, I handed my phone to my ***3 year old*** niece, who had no idea what the rules were and just got a brief intro to controls, and she won 6 out of 8 games simply by playing cheap counters until they had nothing left and then used the few creatures I threw in to seal the win... I'd say it's absolutely ridiculous that this is even possible), and there's literally no counterplay unless you ALSO use those specific spells, is just lazy and stupid.
How the developers and people who are supposed to be balancing this game can claim there's any aspect of competitiveness in this game is ludicrous. And to have that even exist in the game is such a ridiculous middle finger to everyone who doesn't want to suck all the fun out of matches for everyone involved (unless you're a literal sociopath, which seems to be a pretty common thing among blue players, because who else would literally play a smooth-brain no-skill deck just so they can get meaningless wins equivalent to using jacks on an FPS game or something... but I digress) that it's almost like Wizards only hires people who hate Magic and everyone who plays it for casual fun. Either that or they just got too many calls from obnoxious Karens complaining that their kid was losing all the time and them being trash at the game was Wizards's fault, so they made playing blue or any combination of that and other colors just straight up easy mode for children and people who don't want to be bothered taking the time to get good at deck construction and strategy. Honestly, even just making counters one or two man's more expensive would do so much to work toward overall balance that it'd be game-changing, but nope, they just keep making them cheaper. It's so disappointing more than anything, honestly, because they have what should be one of the best games of all time from an interest and competition standpoint, and they choose to remove all elements of competition from it. When all the decks one can make, even those just copied from ultra high-tier players or super-meta crap have a 10-30% lower win rate against blue-centric decks than ANY OTHER color, it's just plain preferential treatment and a lack of respect for anyone who chooses to play the Magic equivalent of cheat codes or GameShark or something, simply because playing it is so boring and the wins feel cheap and unearned.
Tl,dr: Blue as a whole, and specifically counterspell-centric decks, are the main thing that make Magic suck at all levels but especially high ranks/levels of play, and take any sense of balance or legitimate skill-based play out of the equation entirely. Easy mode for people who don't care about fun and just want to boost their stats with decks that are so braindead that literal children can get to top-tier rankings with little to no experience.
I agree 110% it's why I rope blue players who counterspell me all the time if I don't just refuse play their sleezy disgusting decks to begin with. And Black Blue decks with both discard and counterspells, it's like do I even need to be here for this, because they seem to be playing with themselves instead? And when you point out how unfun and rotten a play style that is, they act like you just don't know how to play, as if I can't netdeck like they did, it can be played on autopilot, only a Prismatic Bridge is more autopilot then counterspell trash.
It's no secret that the devs' choice of "make everything broken and OP so nobody can complain" just straight up doesn't work, but blue as a whole has received preferential treatment on that front for as long as I can remember.
Yeah, playing against red or white rush is obnoxious and cheap, but there's at least some counterplay there and a significant number of cards in just about every new set that can work against it, so if you don't prepare that's kind of your fault. Same with green and black (yes, even the horribly cheap discard decks, because at least they can be worked against), and even the "all current OP meta combos as you can throw in a deck" style of playing can usually be worked against. But there's legitimately nothing half as broken as one or two drop counter spells, and unless you're playing the exact same thing, you just lose.
The fact that on Arena, once you get into Mythic (and ESPECIALLY top 500 play) just about every deck you play against has 4 copies of Saw It Coming, and that almost all top players in either tabletop or Arena have blue as a main portion of their decks, should say all that needs to be said. When any deck containing a significant number of counter spells has like 70% win rate or better, you can literally play it on autopilot (for example, I handed my phone to my ***3 year old*** niece, who had no idea what the rules were and just got a brief intro to controls, and she won 6 out of 8 games simply by playing cheap counters until they had nothing left and then used the few creatures I threw in to seal the win... I'd say it's absolutely ridiculous that this is even possible), and there's literally no counterplay unless you ALSO use those specific spells, is just lazy and stupid.
How the developers and people who are supposed to be balancing this game can claim there's any aspect of competitiveness in this game is ludicrous. And to have that even exist in the game is such a ridiculous middle finger to everyone who doesn't want to suck all the fun out of matches for everyone involved (unless you're a literal sociopath, which seems to be a pretty common thing among blue players, because who else would literally play a smooth-brain no-skill deck just so they can get meaningless wins equivalent to using jacks on an FPS game or something... but I digress) that it's almost like Wizards only hires people who hate Magic and everyone who plays it for casual fun. Either that or they just got too many calls from obnoxious Karens complaining that their kid was losing all the time and them being trash at the game was Wizards's fault, so they made playing blue or any combination of that and other colors just straight up easy mode for children and people who don't want to be bothered taking the time to get good at deck construction and strategy. Honestly, even just making counters one or two man's more expensive would do so much to work toward overall balance that it'd be game-changing, but nope, they just keep making them cheaper. It's so disappointing more than anything, honestly, because they have what should be one of the best games of all time from an interest and competition standpoint, and they choose to remove all elements of competition from it. When all the decks one can make, even those just copied from ultra high-tier players or super-meta crap have a 10-30% lower win rate against blue-centric decks than ANY OTHER color, it's just plain preferential treatment and a lack of respect for anyone who chooses to play the Magic equivalent of cheat codes or GameShark or something, simply because playing it is so boring and the wins feel cheap and unearned.
Tl,dr: Blue as a whole, and specifically counterspell-centric decks, are the main thing that make Magic suck at all levels but especially high ranks/levels of play, and take any sense of balance or legitimate skill-based play out of the equation entirely. Easy mode for people who don't care about fun and just want to boost their stats with decks that are so braindead that literal children can get to top-tier rankings with little to no experience.
I agree 110% it's why I rope blue players who counterspell me all the time if I don't just refuse play their sleezy disgusting decks to begin with. And Black Blue decks with both discard and counterspells, it's like do I even need to be here for this, because they seem to be playing with themselves instead? And when you point out how unfun and rotten a play style that is, they act like you just don't know how to play, as if I can't netdeck like they did, it can be played on autopilot, only a Prismatic Bridge is more autopilot then counterspell trash.
Easy mode for people who don't care about fun and just want to boost their stats with decks that are so braindead that literal children can get to top-tier rankings with little to no experience.
The portion of players who can efficiently make money by playing Magic they don't enjoy is much smaller than the portion of players who play blue decks. Therefore, a lot of them (and I know that this at least includes myself) care about fun, or else we wouldn't be playing Magic.
I don't doubt blue counter spell players care about fun,but only theirs, playing counterspell and discard heavy decks are about making other people feel powerless and making damn sure no one, but the blue player (and discard heavy black or black/red players) has any fun. I refuse to play counter spells in any blue deck I play, just as I'd never play Winona, Golos,Scute Swarm, or anything Bolas, there are certain nasty cards that no one with honor would touch.
This is good advice. It's easy to believe the other guy's deck is unbeatably strong until you try it yourself. Then you start to see the glaring weaknesses that you didn't before. It goes the other way too, control players can sometimes be quick to dismiss aggro decks as linear and brainless.
I straight up don't believe the story about a 3 year old getting a 75% win rate. There are too many decisions to be made in a game of magic. How did they know to play a land each turn? How did they know the timing for counters? How did they know where to drag the counterspell? How did they win? Did they know to activate a planeswalker each turn?
It sounds like you guys have a preferred playstyle, probably midrange, and you are running up against the hard counter to that playstyle. If you are really running into so many control decks, switch to faster aggro and go underneath them. The vast majority of counterspella are only ever one-for-one. Just play cheaper cards and play more than one each turn.
This is good advice. It's easy to believe the other guy's deck is unbeatably strong until you try it yourself. Then you start to see the glaring weaknesses that you didn't before. It goes the other way too, control players can sometimes be quick to dismiss aggro decks as linear and brainless.
I straight up don't believe the story about a 3 year old getting a 75% win rate. There are too many decisions to be made in a game of magic. How did they know to play a land each turn? How did they know the timi g for counters? How did they knkw where to drag the counterspell? How did they win? Did they know to activate a planeswalker each turn?
It sounds like you guys have a preferred playstyle, probably mudrange, and you are running up against the hard counter to that playstyle. If you are really running into so many control decks, switch to faster aggro and go underneath them. The vast majority of counterspella are only ever one-for-one. Just play cheaper cards and play more than one each turn.
It comes down to "competitive" decks vs casual decks.
Some brew of commons / uncommons and some random rares is not going to cut it against a proper competitive deck.
People play some rounds on MTG-Arena and at some point they face some control decks that have mass-removal and play with a goal in mind, while they just slam some cards down and want to win quickly.
75%+ win rate with a competitive control deck vs some casual pile of cards ? Absolutely.
Its like people that know what they are doing in Limited Draft, vs people that have no clue drafting, they will lose so badly, and think its some imbalance in the game, while its really just them failing to bring the necessary tools to the table in the first place (and that means, knowledge in terms of limited, and a meta-game deck for constructed, you need to know what you have to beat, otherwise you are just playing poker in the dark).
is push for other colors (not green) to get the tools to put them on par with blue
Quoted for truth.
There are tons of things WotC could do for better balance and they don't or won't.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Playing since 1994: Currently MAGS (HomeBrew),Standard & Pauper (Pioneer and Modern are degenerate trash formats)
STOP using "dude/bro" as a pejorative or insult. Grow up.
Margaret Thatcher: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.”
Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Martin Luther King Jr.: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
75%+ win rate with a competitive control deck vs some casual pile of cards ? Absolutely.
In the hands of a decent player, sure. But their statement was that a 3 year old child accomplished this. I.e. blue control is so easy to play that you don't need understanding of the game or even reading comprehension, you just play cards at random and win.
75%+ win rate with a competitive control deck vs some casual pile of cards ? Absolutely.
In the hands of a decent player, sure. But their statement was that a 3 year old child accomplished this. I.e. blue control is so easy to play that you don't need understanding of the game or even reading comprehension, you just play cards at random and win.
It was hyperbolic, but the essencial truth of the statement wasn't wrong.
There's always going to be one archetype or color that's more powerful than any other at any given point and time. Stick around long enough and you'll see it change within the rotating formats. Every color has checks though. What strikes me as weird is when, in a game where people in competitive formats are constantly analyzing the meta-data and figuring out to within minor percentage points what deck is the absolute best and most efficient option, suddenly playing "around" something within one particular color identity is non interactive. I mean it's frustrating to play right into a counter spell, but not anticipating that it can happen is just kind of foolish. It's like arguing that fighting games would be way better if they got rid of blocking.
There's always going to be one archetype or color that's more powerful than any other at any given point and time. Stick around long enough and you'll see it change within the rotating formats. Every color has checks though. What strikes me as weird is when, in a game where people in competitive formats are constantly analyzing the meta-data and figuring out to within minor percentage points what deck is the absolute best and most efficient option, suddenly playing "around" something within one particular color identity is non interactive. I mean it's frustrating to play right into a counter spell, but not anticipating that it can happen is just kind of foolish. It's like arguing that fighting games would be way better if they got rid of blocking.
I'd understand and agree with your argument if blocking didn't have any sort of counterplay element common to every opponent they may face. But it does. Throwing and canceling (throwing since the very beginning of fighting games as a genre, are a particularly apt comparison) both knock players out of blocks and often punish them for it. This does require the player to modify their play style slightly, as would be expected, but it doesn't wholesale remove the possibility of particular characters being successful at all. Well-balanced fighting games make it possible for any strategy to be surpassed and defeated by just about any other, given that the skill level of the opposing player is higher.
Counter spells, on the other hand, essentially have two methods of counterplay: only play low-mana-cost cards (which requires that particular methodology to be in place at the deck-building stage, which I can't say is true for counterplay to any other strategy, though I may be wrong), or use counter spells yourself. That's it. Otherwise, you just quit or wait for them to slowly break you down and win. Not only is that an incredibly boring thing to play against, it becomes so prevalent - alongside forced discard/removal decks) - at some stages of "competitive play" that it's mostly not worth the time you even put in; winning four or five different 10-30 minute games, only to face a streak of 10 of these two meta deck styles in a row, ends up with a net loss after hours invested in high skill-level play. You shouldn't necessarily be able to outskill every deck with any other deck, I'd agree. But you should have a chance, at least, in most cases, and no single style of play should be so dominant that you either play that or you face net losses every time you play.
But honestly, blue (and certain strats within black) is just getting this negative view because Wizards just straight up doesn't do a good job balancing the game. Eventually they'll run out of new and different ways to make new things more powerful than the old ones, and then they'll actually have to do their jobs or face a player base exodus in response. But until then, blue really is the only color that has a strat/ability THAT broken which is almost entirely exclusive to that ONE color. That is a ridiculous advantage which causes blue to be the single quickest and easiest way to rise to the top of the rankings, and makes the game so unbearably predictable and boring that most players just quit when they see anything implying a strat besides mill decks.
75%+ win rate with a competitive control deck vs some casual pile of cards ? Absolutely.
In the hands of a decent player, sure. But their statement was that a 3 year old child accomplished this. I.e. blue control is so easy to play that you don't need understanding of the game or even reading comprehension, you just play cards at random and win.
Go to any pre-school, there will be at least one or two 3-year-olds who can read and comprehend what they're reading. That's not being a prodigy, that's just having above-average intelligence. Even more of those, regardless of their reading and processing abilities, can learn the very simple strategies that counter decks require, and learn to recognize which card does what based on card art and rote memorization shortly thereafter. You make it sound like these things are out of reach when they're really just a result of patiently explaining basic concepts. Which isn't that hard. There were kids no more than 5 years old sitting in the airport terminal yesterday before my flight who were playing Arena on their/their parents' iPads, and though one lost badly due to a complete lack of deck structure, two of them won in competitive play consistently. One was playing red/green wolf rush, which is cheap and obnoxious but counterable, and the other was playing blue Control with maxed-out copies of all the best counters, with a few card-draw instigators and a couple creatures thrown in to eventually win the game. It amazes me that people think Magic is a tough game to explain or teach starts in. It's a BIG game, but not a hard one; just a series of small concepts used over and over in different ways, which adds the perception of complexity but not the depth that would cause additional tutelage struggles.
It's no secret that the devs' choice of "make everything broken and OP so nobody can complain" just straight up doesn't work, but blue as a whole has received preferential treatment on that front for as long as I can remember.
Yeah, playing against red or white rush is obnoxious and cheap, but there's at least some counterplay there and a significant number of cards in just about every new set that can work against it, so if you don't prepare that's kind of your fault. Same with green and black (yes, even the horribly cheap discard decks, because at least they can be worked against), and even the "all current OP meta combos as you can throw in a deck" style of playing can usually be worked against. But there's legitimately nothing half as broken as one or two drop counter spells, and unless you're playing the exact same thing, you just lose.
The fact that on Arena, once you get into Mythic (and ESPECIALLY top 500 play) just about every deck you play against has 4 copies of Saw It Coming, and that almost all top players in either tabletop or Arena have blue as a main portion of their decks, should say all that needs to be said. When any deck containing a significant number of counter spells has like 70% win rate or better, you can literally play it on autopilot (for example, I handed my phone to my ***3 year old*** niece, who had no idea what the rules were and just got a brief intro to controls, and she won 6 out of 8 games simply by playing cheap counters until they had nothing left and then used the few creatures I threw in to seal the win... I'd say it's absolutely ridiculous that this is even possible), and there's literally no counterplay unless you ALSO use those specific spells, is just lazy and stupid.
How the developers and people who are supposed to be balancing this game can claim there's any aspect of competitiveness in this game is ludicrous. And to have that even exist in the game is such a ridiculous middle finger to everyone who doesn't want to suck all the fun out of matches for everyone involved (unless you're a literal sociopath, which seems to be a pretty common thing among blue players, because who else would literally play a smooth-brain no-skill deck just so they can get meaningless wins equivalent to using jacks on an FPS game or something... but I digress) that it's almost like Wizards only hires people who hate Magic and everyone who plays it for casual fun. Either that or they just got too many calls from obnoxious Karens complaining that their kid was losing all the time and them being trash at the game was Wizards's fault, so they made playing blue or any combination of that and other colors just straight up easy mode for children and people who don't want to be bothered taking the time to get good at deck construction and strategy. Honestly, even just making counters one or two man's more expensive would do so much to work toward overall balance that it'd be game-changing, but nope, they just keep making them cheaper. It's so disappointing more than anything, honestly, because they have what should be one of the best games of all time from an interest and competition standpoint, and they choose to remove all elements of competition from it. When all the decks one can make, even those just copied from ultra high-tier players or super-meta crap have a 10-30% lower win rate against blue-centric decks than ANY OTHER color, it's just plain preferential treatment and a lack of respect for anyone who chooses to play the Magic equivalent of cheat codes or GameShark or something, simply because playing it is so boring and the wins feel cheap and unearned.
Tl,dr: Blue as a whole, and specifically counterspell-centric decks, are the main thing that make Magic suck at all levels but especially high ranks/levels of play, and take any sense of balance or legitimate skill-based play out of the equation entirely. Easy mode for people who don't care about fun and just want to boost their stats with decks that are so braindead that literal children can get to top-tier rankings with little to no experience.
I agree 110% it's why I rope blue players who counterspell me all the time if I don't just refuse play their sleezy disgusting decks to begin with. And Black Blue decks with both discard and counterspells, it's like do I even need to be here for this, because they seem to be playing with themselves instead? And when you point out how unfun and rotten a play style that is, they act like you just don't know how to play, as if I can't netdeck like they did, it can be played on autopilot, only a Prismatic Bridge is more autopilot then counterspell trash.
try it some time.
you will misplay almost every step of the game.
Done and done. Last five seasons I've finished with either two or three accounts in the top 10%. Last season, one used blue Control (a.k.a. COUNTER EVERYTHING) exclusively and made it to top 500 within days of season start and maintained there, twice in a row. I literally watched TV and paid no more than 50% of my attention to the game and still accomplished this with ease. It's a super easy strat in the first place simply because of the base power level being so high, and the aesthetics of Arena (haloing around usable cards in a given situation, for example) make it easy for anyone to learn it pretty quickly. You might lose a few because of misplay, but the amount of bad decisions you can make is so limited by the myopic scope of the strateg/deck make-up that you're almost assured to be able to attribute most losses to sheer bad draws, which is... Luck.
Cool "competitive" game, Wizards. Pick a card list off a website like this one, master a couple basic strategies and learn the lynchpin of a few opposing meta sequences, and BOOM, Mythic guaranteed and T500 likely. Yes, you could say this about a lot of deck types, but blue Control is the only one I've seen which takes every bit of fun out of the match while also requiring extremely limited game knowledge to win against most competitor. The past few releases have had enormous opportunities to change this, and had a good chance of working, but the devs just didn't make the new elements more powerful than a simple counter. And also ADDED new 1- and 2-mana counter cards, which negates most of the "use low-mana-cost cards til they run out" counterplay option, leaving only "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" way as a viable undermining methodology to the counter/Control deck.
This sort of lack of effort re: game balance makes it just about required for people to play one of a very few (usually 3 or less) deck lists and hope you'll get the better card draw within t, which in my opinion removes almost all legitimacy from the "competitive" side of the game. When decks are effectively identical, skill level is so high as to be difficult to differentiate between them on a better/worse basis, it comes down to the random element of card draw and an even more ephemeral one: luck. . When you're literally playing the exact same deck against one another and against most of the potential opponents you may face simply because if you don't you'll get the core elements of that deck should be altered or removed from the competition space. That win percentage means it's clearly broken compared to other strats, and should likely be reworked. That's just basic game design, and the very reason most manufacturers utilize pre-release testing stages and groups, like alpha/beta testing/testers. Why Wizards does neither confounds me.
you will misplay almost every step of the game.
This is seriously difficult to do, seeing as most cards have the same effects and uses as any other you'd draw: Lands, counters, card-draw inst/sorc cards, and few creatures for damage: standard make-up for any "competitive" blue deck, with 4 essential card types among them all. And just using the land-to-creature coverters make it absurdly simple to coast. instead makes it even easier to put on the autopilot.
So control is broken trash, red based aggro is cheap, and white weenie cheap.
Did Jund type this post? lol. Come on OP, I don't want to be rude or anything, but if everything you encounter is a problem, the problem is probably how you're playing.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
They call me Hank Hill because I bring the pro-pain.
Could not agree more. Blue takes limited knowledge and skill to play. A lot of the arguments used to justify the counter spell heavy decks make me laugh. The first one you hear is "In the old days of magic.." yada yada. Guess what. In the old days of magic you couldnt jam a deck full of counters. There werent even that many counters printed. GO CHECK AND STOP USING THIS JUSTIFICATION BECAUSE IT IS LAUGHABLY WRONG. This brings me to the second thing you always hear. "Get good and learn how to play against it". How about I just dont play at all because it's not fun to play against? It's not that people dont know how to play against it. Its that some of us play magic to actually cast things and play the game. "Blue is the color of thinking". LMAO. Blue is the color of nothing ever hits the board and I just need to think about how many counters to jam. It takes no thinking. I dont doubt the story of a kid with no knowledge winning with a deck like that bc it really doesnt take skill or knowledge. When more things hit the board it means more card to card interactions, more thinking, and more decisions. Wizards needs to stop printing a zillion counters with every set
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
Yeah, playing against red or white rush is obnoxious and cheap, but there's at least some counterplay there and a significant number of cards in just about every new set that can work against it, so if you don't prepare that's kind of your fault. Same with green and black (yes, even the horribly cheap discard decks, because at least they can be worked against), and even the "all current OP meta combos as you can throw in a deck" style of playing can usually be worked against. But there's legitimately nothing half as broken as one or two drop counter spells, and unless you're playing the exact same thing, you just lose.
The fact that on Arena, once you get into Mythic (and ESPECIALLY top 500 play) just about every deck you play against has 4 copies of Saw It Coming, and that almost all top players in either tabletop or Arena have blue as a main portion of their decks, should say all that needs to be said. When any deck containing a significant number of counter spells has like 70% win rate or better, you can literally play it on autopilot (for example, I handed my phone to my ***3 year old*** niece, who had no idea what the rules were and just got a brief intro to controls, and she won 6 out of 8 games simply by playing cheap counters until they had nothing left and then used the few creatures I threw in to seal the win... I'd say it's absolutely ridiculous that this is even possible), and there's literally no counterplay unless you ALSO use those specific spells, is just lazy and stupid.
How the developers and people who are supposed to be balancing this game can claim there's any aspect of competitiveness in this game is ludicrous. And to have that even exist in the game is such a ridiculous middle finger to everyone who doesn't want to suck all the fun out of matches for everyone involved (unless you're a literal sociopath, which seems to be a pretty common thing among blue players, because who else would literally play a smooth-brain no-skill deck just so they can get meaningless wins equivalent to using jacks on an FPS game or something... but I digress) that it's almost like Wizards only hires people who hate Magic and everyone who plays it for casual fun. Either that or they just got too many calls from obnoxious Karens complaining that their kid was losing all the time and them being trash at the game was Wizards's fault, so they made playing blue or any combination of that and other colors just straight up easy mode for children and people who don't want to be bothered taking the time to get good at deck construction and strategy. Honestly, even just making counters one or two man's more expensive would do so much to work toward overall balance that it'd be game-changing, but nope, they just keep making them cheaper. It's so disappointing more than anything, honestly, because they have what should be one of the best games of all time from an interest and competition standpoint, and they choose to remove all elements of competition from it. When all the decks one can make, even those just copied from ultra high-tier players or super-meta crap have a 10-30% lower win rate against blue-centric decks than ANY OTHER color, it's just plain preferential treatment and a lack of respect for anyone who chooses to play the Magic equivalent of cheat codes or GameShark or something, simply because playing it is so boring and the wins feel cheap and unearned.
Tl,dr: Blue as a whole, and specifically counterspell-centric decks, are the main thing that make Magic suck at all levels but especially high ranks/levels of play, and take any sense of balance or legitimate skill-based play out of the equation entirely. Easy mode for people who don't care about fun and just want to boost their stats with decks that are so braindead that literal children can get to top-tier rankings with little to no experience.
https://archidekt.com/user/71716
----
In the "old" days of Magic, blue was particularly powerful, as card draw and counterspells where placed in that color primarily, black got a bunch for life payments, but any other color, white, green and red very rarely got any card draw at all that was remotely competitive.
So if a deck wanted to be a control deck, they basically had to play blue.
The most traditional classic form of a control deck had to play white and blue, for mass removal, card draw and counterspells.
A lot of combo decks in the Urzas Saga era of Magic had blue in them, as so many key-combo pieces where blue to untap your lands and generate more mana.
With time that all switched and watered down, as now, basically any color has card-draw (white gets the least, and does so in very limited scope).
In modern in particular, blue gets paired with red or white, as Magic is much more about color-pairs then mono colors at this point, almost any set is designed around color pairs or more, we did not get a mono-color matters set in basically decades.
Control with Counterspells was always disliked by people that wanted to play a slower game, but the slower game is exactly what a control deck wants, so as long as you play only 1 spell a turn, you basically just play into the strength of a control deck.
As the easy solution to that is to play more cheap spells, thats where mass removal has to clean up, and the entire matchup becomes much more of a resource-war.
Overall control plays many more lands than a low-curve aggro deck, so they will draw more of them, they quite literally have more "dead" draws.
To counter that control decks need some form of card draw, so as long as the game trades 1 for 1 card , you need to get ahead somehow, producing card advantage or double-play in a turn to sneak something through, once its resolved, they need removal to get rid of it, which is also a specific answer.
So to be fair, a competitive control deck is not fun to play against with a "casual" deck that is not optimized.
The entire point of a control deck is to quite literally control the game, if you cant do that, you lose.
For a combo deck the game plan is to find the combo and sneak it through for the win, which is once again a very different kind of game.
An aggro deck wants to play as much as possible quickly and win through an opponent that might struggle to find the answers in time, so successful aggro decks become quite the glass canon to accomplish that, chances to win a longer game diminish drastically.
What you might consider "fun" is what most casual decks aim at, a bunch of slow midrange decks, mainly creatures and removal to have a back and forth game.
But thats just one aspect of Magic.
So you have to broaden your understanding of different decks, and the competitive aspect requires a metagame of competitive decks that are tuned to play against each other ... a random casual deck will have a much harder time to compete, as you are just a worse version of either competitive deck.
WUBRG#BlackLotusMatterWUBRG
👮👮👮 #BlueLivesMatter 👮👮👮
The portion of players who can efficiently make money by playing Magic they don't enjoy is much smaller than the portion of players who play blue decks. Therefore, a lot of them (and I know that this at least includes myself) care about fun, or else we wouldn't be playing Magic.
Where did you get "70%" from? Which formats and events are you claiming this is the case in?
just being straight up with you. you've made up your mind and no amount of anything to the contrary is going to sway your opinion. you've made that clear.
blue isn't going anywhere. its a fundamental aspect of the game.
what you should be doing instead of having the idea that blue needs to go firmly cemented in your head; is push for other colors (not green) to get the tools to put them on par with blue. make the effort to understand what blue does as a color. learn how to beat those strategies.
can't tell you how many times i've heard island bad! counterspell unfair! over the past 30 years, and its almost always from players who over extend, or don't add any kind of card advantage to their builds, or just refuse to prepare for having their stuff interacted with.
change your perspective, not the basic game.
Outside of EDH / Commander I think is where most of the complaints of Blue comes from in regards to Standard, Modern, and Pioneer where the Sideboard becomes more of the main focus to deal with these strategies and there's simply not enough to work with. Legacy and Vintage have access to Stax strategies with Stasis and Winter Orb to where it's a pain to play against where as in EDH / Commander, it isn't as bad due to the Singleton nature of the format. Less different versions of the same cards they print the less likely they'll draw into them unless they run tutors.
"Restriction breeds creativity." - Sheldon Menery on EDH / Commander in Magic: The Gathering
"Cancel Culture is the real reason why everyone's not allowed to have nice things anymore." - Anonymous
"For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?" - Mark 8:36
"Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution." - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
"Every life decision is always a risk / reward proposition." - Sanjay Gupta
I agree 110% it's why I rope blue players who counterspell me all the time if I don't just refuse play their sleezy disgusting decks to begin with. And Black Blue decks with both discard and counterspells, it's like do I even need to be here for this, because they seem to be playing with themselves instead? And when you point out how unfun and rotten a play style that is, they act like you just don't know how to play, as if I can't netdeck like they did, it can be played on autopilot, only a Prismatic Bridge is more autopilot then counterspell trash.
try it some time.
you will misplay almost every step of the game.
I don't doubt blue counter spell players care about fun,but only theirs, playing counterspell and discard heavy decks are about making other people feel powerless and making damn sure no one, but the blue player (and discard heavy black or black/red players) has any fun. I refuse to play counter spells in any blue deck I play, just as I'd never play Winona, Golos,Scute Swarm, or anything Bolas, there are certain nasty cards that no one with honor would touch.
This is good advice. It's easy to believe the other guy's deck is unbeatably strong until you try it yourself. Then you start to see the glaring weaknesses that you didn't before. It goes the other way too, control players can sometimes be quick to dismiss aggro decks as linear and brainless.
I straight up don't believe the story about a 3 year old getting a 75% win rate. There are too many decisions to be made in a game of magic. How did they know to play a land each turn? How did they know the timing for counters? How did they know where to drag the counterspell? How did they win? Did they know to activate a planeswalker each turn?
It sounds like you guys have a preferred playstyle, probably midrange, and you are running up against the hard counter to that playstyle. If you are really running into so many control decks, switch to faster aggro and go underneath them. The vast majority of counterspella are only ever one-for-one. Just play cheaper cards and play more than one each turn.
It comes down to "competitive" decks vs casual decks.
Some brew of commons / uncommons and some random rares is not going to cut it against a proper competitive deck.
People play some rounds on MTG-Arena and at some point they face some control decks that have mass-removal and play with a goal in mind, while they just slam some cards down and want to win quickly.
75%+ win rate with a competitive control deck vs some casual pile of cards ? Absolutely.
Its like people that know what they are doing in Limited Draft, vs people that have no clue drafting, they will lose so badly, and think its some imbalance in the game, while its really just them failing to bring the necessary tools to the table in the first place (and that means, knowledge in terms of limited, and a meta-game deck for constructed, you need to know what you have to beat, otherwise you are just playing poker in the dark).
WUBRG#BlackLotusMatterWUBRG
👮👮👮 #BlueLivesMatter 👮👮👮
Quoted for truth.
There are tons of things WotC could do for better balance and they don't or won't.
STOP using "dude/bro" as a pejorative or insult. Grow up.
Margaret Thatcher: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.”
Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Martin Luther King Jr.: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
In the hands of a decent player, sure. But their statement was that a 3 year old child accomplished this. I.e. blue control is so easy to play that you don't need understanding of the game or even reading comprehension, you just play cards at random and win.
It was hyperbolic, but the essencial truth of the statement wasn't wrong.
I'd understand and agree with your argument if blocking didn't have any sort of counterplay element common to every opponent they may face. But it does. Throwing and canceling (throwing since the very beginning of fighting games as a genre, are a particularly apt comparison) both knock players out of blocks and often punish them for it. This does require the player to modify their play style slightly, as would be expected, but it doesn't wholesale remove the possibility of particular characters being successful at all. Well-balanced fighting games make it possible for any strategy to be surpassed and defeated by just about any other, given that the skill level of the opposing player is higher.
Counter spells, on the other hand, essentially have two methods of counterplay: only play low-mana-cost cards (which requires that particular methodology to be in place at the deck-building stage, which I can't say is true for counterplay to any other strategy, though I may be wrong), or use counter spells yourself. That's it. Otherwise, you just quit or wait for them to slowly break you down and win. Not only is that an incredibly boring thing to play against, it becomes so prevalent - alongside forced discard/removal decks) - at some stages of "competitive play" that it's mostly not worth the time you even put in; winning four or five different 10-30 minute games, only to face a streak of 10 of these two meta deck styles in a row, ends up with a net loss after hours invested in high skill-level play. You shouldn't necessarily be able to outskill every deck with any other deck, I'd agree. But you should have a chance, at least, in most cases, and no single style of play should be so dominant that you either play that or you face net losses every time you play.
But honestly, blue (and certain strats within black) is just getting this negative view because Wizards just straight up doesn't do a good job balancing the game. Eventually they'll run out of new and different ways to make new things more powerful than the old ones, and then they'll actually have to do their jobs or face a player base exodus in response. But until then, blue really is the only color that has a strat/ability THAT broken which is almost entirely exclusive to that ONE color. That is a ridiculous advantage which causes blue to be the single quickest and easiest way to rise to the top of the rankings, and makes the game so unbearably predictable and boring that most players just quit when they see anything implying a strat besides mill decks.
Go to any pre-school, there will be at least one or two 3-year-olds who can read and comprehend what they're reading. That's not being a prodigy, that's just having above-average intelligence. Even more of those, regardless of their reading and processing abilities, can learn the very simple strategies that counter decks require, and learn to recognize which card does what based on card art and rote memorization shortly thereafter. You make it sound like these things are out of reach when they're really just a result of patiently explaining basic concepts. Which isn't that hard. There were kids no more than 5 years old sitting in the airport terminal yesterday before my flight who were playing Arena on their/their parents' iPads, and though one lost badly due to a complete lack of deck structure, two of them won in competitive play consistently. One was playing red/green wolf rush, which is cheap and obnoxious but counterable, and the other was playing blue Control with maxed-out copies of all the best counters, with a few card-draw instigators and a couple creatures thrown in to eventually win the game. It amazes me that people think Magic is a tough game to explain or teach starts in. It's a BIG game, but not a hard one; just a series of small concepts used over and over in different ways, which adds the perception of complexity but not the depth that would cause additional tutelage struggles.
Done and done. Last five seasons I've finished with either two or three accounts in the top 10%. Last season, one used blue Control (a.k.a. COUNTER EVERYTHING) exclusively and made it to top 500 within days of season start and maintained there, twice in a row. I literally watched TV and paid no more than 50% of my attention to the game and still accomplished this with ease. It's a super easy strat in the first place simply because of the base power level being so high, and the aesthetics of Arena (haloing around usable cards in a given situation, for example) make it easy for anyone to learn it pretty quickly. You might lose a few because of misplay, but the amount of bad decisions you can make is so limited by the myopic scope of the strateg/deck make-up that you're almost assured to be able to attribute most losses to sheer bad draws, which is... Luck.
Cool "competitive" game, Wizards. Pick a card list off a website like this one, master a couple basic strategies and learn the lynchpin of a few opposing meta sequences, and BOOM, Mythic guaranteed and T500 likely. Yes, you could say this about a lot of deck types, but blue Control is the only one I've seen which takes every bit of fun out of the match while also requiring extremely limited game knowledge to win against most competitor. The past few releases have had enormous opportunities to change this, and had a good chance of working, but the devs just didn't make the new elements more powerful than a simple counter. And also ADDED new 1- and 2-mana counter cards, which negates most of the "use low-mana-cost cards til they run out" counterplay option, leaving only "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" way as a viable undermining methodology to the counter/Control deck.
This sort of lack of effort re: game balance makes it just about required for people to play one of a very few (usually 3 or less) deck lists and hope you'll get the better card draw within t, which in my opinion removes almost all legitimacy from the "competitive" side of the game. When decks are effectively identical, skill level is so high as to be difficult to differentiate between them on a better/worse basis, it comes down to the random element of card draw and an even more ephemeral one: luck. . When you're literally playing the exact same deck against one another and against most of the potential opponents you may face simply because if you don't you'll get the core elements of that deck should be altered or removed from the competition space. That win percentage means it's clearly broken compared to other strats, and should likely be reworked. That's just basic game design, and the very reason most manufacturers utilize pre-release testing stages and groups, like alpha/beta testing/testers. Why Wizards does neither confounds me.
This is seriously difficult to do, seeing as most cards have the same effects and uses as any other you'd draw: Lands, counters, card-draw inst/sorc cards, and few creatures for damage: standard make-up for any "competitive" blue deck, with 4 essential card types among them all. And just using the land-to-creature coverters make it absurdly simple to coast. instead makes it even easier to put on the autopilot.
Congrats?
Did Jund type this post? lol. Come on OP, I don't want to be rude or anything, but if everything you encounter is a problem, the problem is probably how you're playing.