dredge and affinity are like playing rock paper scissors whether you like it or not. as others have stated, dredge can walk into any legacy tournament and dominate if nobody is packing hate because nobody is expecting dredge. if, however, people are rocking your scissors as it were and they pack the proper hate, it is very difficult for dredge to win a tournament. the same can be said for affinity.
that said, it is laughable that people defend affinity as though it is a "fair" deck. i hate jund much more than affinity but it is much more fair to play against. affinity is much more on the combo side of the spectrum than it is on the aggro side. so if someone stops your combo with a good sideboard card, good for them. that is the price you pay for a narrow strategy. i've been playing a graveyard based strategy for awhile now and doing fairly well, but sometimes people cast t1 grafdiggers cage game 2 and i just shrug my shoulders because its completely reasonable for them to have that card in their sideboard. as much as people hate to admit it, MAGIC IS LUCK DEPENDENT. you can be the best player in the world but you cannot beat the odds every time. there are many examples of topdeck victories in major tournaments. thats just the nature of the game.
So all you people playing affinity whining about Stony Silence, do I get to whine as well since I play Griselbrand-Goryo's Vengeance and get hosed by Surgical Extraction which literally EVERY deck can sideboard? No? Oh, it's just the affinity players then because that's a certain tier 1 deck.
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My Commander decks:
Chandra, Torch of Defiance - Oops! All Chandras.
Prime Speaker Zegana - Draw for Power.
Pir & Toothy - Counterpalooza.
Arcades, the Strategist - Another Brick in the Wall.
Zacama, Primal Calamity - Calamity of Double Mana.
Edgar Markov - Vampires Don't Die.
Child of Alara - Dreamcrusher.
I doubt that Treasure Cruise and Dig Through Time could draw you 3 cards on turn 5 like Ancestral Vision for 0 mana on that turn. At the very least, even if your graveyard was full enough to delve the 6 or 7 cards, you would still have to spend mana to cast Treasure Cruise or Dig Through Time. After you cast the first one, you need more cards in your graveyard to efficiently cast another copy. If you get two copies of either early on, the second copy is probably useless. If you have 2 or more copies of AV, you will suspend them so that you can draw 3 extra cards on successive turns. See the difference. AV is way too good to be unbanned.
If you run fetches and can trips a turn 5 treasure find is easy, if you play thought scour you can do it turn 3 a fair amount of the time.
They need to ban things until there is a healthy top 8 every single time a tourney fires.
This post is just like the others, based without fact. Splinter Twin lost favor when BGW/BGx was making up 10%+ of the meta. Twin gets killed by decks packing hand disruption and buttloads of instant speed removal.
So all you people playing affinity whining about Stony Silence, do I get to whine as well since I play Griselbrand-Goryo's Vengeance and get hosed by Surgical Extraction which literally EVERY deck can sideboard? No? Oh, it's just the affinity players then because that's a certain tier 1 deck.
The difference between Affinity and that deck, as well as Legacy dredge, is that Affinity is the best deck in Modern. Dredge in Legacy loses to a number of decks even if they don't have hate, namely combo decks that are faster than it is. Modern Affinity has absolutely no bad g1 matchups whatsoever. So you're forced into a position where Affinity is the best choice if you want to win the tournament, but also where your play skill means little in anything but the mirror. Even in the mirror, the coin flip is 80% of the match. You're just playing on autopilot the whole day hoping your opponents don't draw their hate, because you can't do ***** if they do. Similarly, if you don't play Affinity, the same problem applies. If your opponent is on Affinity, all that really matters is whether or not you're lucky enough to draw your hate. If you don't you're probably not going to win, no matter how good you are.
As an affinity player, Stoney Silence is the worst card to play against, but not unbeatable. I have managed to beat players who had it turn 2.
The worst part of stoney silence it can completely shut down your deck depending on your draw. At its best, stoney silence is like a blood moon on steroids vs affinity. Which arguably is very powerful.
There's a brand new Standard meta. Wizards wants you to play Standard and buy new cards. Shaking up eternal formats at this point in time doesn't make sense from that respect. My guess is they will unban some cards in Modern just before the next Modern Pro Tour. (just like they did with Nacatl and Bitterblossom)
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"I have seen the true path. I will not warm myself by the fire—I will become the flame."
—Lim-Dûl, the Necromancer
That's what you get for playing a deck that has such a high game 1 win percentage, an UNBEATABLE nut draw, as well as being able to play all 5 colours with no problem
How greedy are you?
If cards like Stony Silence, Ancient Grudge, Shatterstorm, and Hurkyl's Recall didn't exist, affinity would be the best deck in the format by leagues and it wouldn't even be close. Bear in mind this is after the artifact lands have been banned, so it's not even at full power
Affinity doesn't *just* lose to hate cards. It also sometimes loses to totally normal maindeck cards like bolt, electrolyze, snapcaster, abrupt decay, goyf, etc.
I do agree that in general it's unfun when there is a 90+% game 1 deck that gets completely shut down postboard (see Vintage dredge). It just makes the matches feel really random and not skill-based. A lot of more players seem to love these decks though... (also see storm, living end, etc.)
I think this just comes down to the fact that combo decks are the baseline for the Modern meta. A deck is good based on if it can beat:
- Affinity
- Twin
- Pod
- and to a lesser extent, Storm.
Those decks are almost all non-interactive. Interactivity is what makes a game of Magic fun. For both parties.
I contend that bannings need to be handed down hand over fist until little Jeffrey N00bsauce can pick two or three colors, build a deck out of Modern-legal cards, and win at least one game.
People who say the format is "stale" don't mean that there is a bad diversity of decks, it's just that the turn four combo kill is the litmus test against which all other decks are measured. To me (and others like me), that fact is very irritating.
Knight of the Reliquary should be good. It's not.
Geist of Saint Traft should be good. It's not.
Hexblade style decks should be good. They're not.
Fair Magic isn't really being fostered or helped in Modern at all. It's whether you have the $1000 to build your combo deck and if you practice with it enough to place in an event. That's it. That's why it's stale. Because if you try anything new, you won't win. You'll have to wade through a bunch of neckbeards sporting Twin variants first, and you won't succeed.
I think this just comes down to the fact that combo decks are the baseline for the Modern meta. A deck is good based on if it can beat:
- Affinity
- Twin
- Pod
- and to a lesser extent, Storm.
Those decks are almost all non-interactive. Interactivity is what makes a game of Magic fun. For both parties.
I contend that bannings need to be handed down hand over fist until little Jeffrey N00bsauce can pick two or three colors, build a deck out of Modern-legal cards, and win at least one game.
People who say the format is "stale" don't mean that there is a bad diversity of decks, it's just that the turn four combo kill is the litmus test against which all other decks are measured. To me (and others like me), that fact is very irritating.
Knight of the Reliquary should be good. It's not.
Geist of Saint Traft should be good. It's not.
Hexblade style decks should be good. They're not.
Fair Magic isn't really being fostered or helped in Modern at all. It's whether you have the $1000 to build your combo deck and if you practice with it enough to place in an event. That's it. That's why it's stale. Because if you try anything new, you won't win. You'll have to wade through a bunch of neckbeards sporting Twin variants first, and you won't succeed.
You will ALLWAYS have your Tier 1 decks that define the format.
The trick is to have as many as possible that use different angles to attack the metagame. That makes sure non will dominate.
Twin is an super annoying deck, for the fact alone that it can just end a game on the spot, without the opponent being able to interact with it at sorcery speed. Thats annoying, but WotC for "whatever" reason says its cool.
Pod is a very interactive deck in its form of creatures. It can totally play like a fair deck, it just has Pod to get to its silver bullets. Thats exactly like the decks of old, using Survival of the Fittest, or using any other tutor to get your selection of silver bullets. These kind of deck will allways be present if you have any form of half playable repeatable tutor engine. Even "rebels" played like that.
Affinity is a pretty interactive deck, if the opponent actual "can" interact with it. And that means you need specific hate against artifacts. If you dont have any, it will be a slaughter. Thats why the form of interaction with Affinity is a very stupid one. It asks the format to play specific hate, the same way Dredge does for graveyard hate, thats what keeps it away from dominating a format, but its also an annoying kind of metagame shift.
Then we have decks like "jund" , which might looks very interactive, but its also a incredible boring way to play magic, if all you do is just play something, the opponent uses removal, you play something, it eats removal, and so on. Jund vs Jund is a stupid matchup, as the player that sticks a card that isnt killed right away has the edge, as easy as that.
Knight of the Reliquary should be good. It's not.
Geist of Saint Traft should be good. It's not.
Hexblade style decks should be good. They're not.
Well these cards are "good" for being cheap and they where all but fun to play against in their prime times.
As it is, the cards are simply not suited for the metagame and modern is slighty to fast for them aswell, as most of these cards have a very direct plan to beat on your opponent, and thats as narrow as it gets.
I think this just comes down to the fact that combo decks are the baseline for the Modern meta. A deck is good based on if it can beat:
- Affinity
- Twin
- Pod
- and to a lesser extent, Storm.
Those decks are almost all non-interactive. Interactivity is what makes a game of Magic fun. For both parties.
I contend that bannings need to be handed down hand over fist until little Jeffrey N00bsauce can pick two or three colors, build a deck out of Modern-legal cards, and win at least one game.
People who say the format is "stale" don't mean that there is a bad diversity of decks, it's just that the turn four combo kill is the litmus test against which all other decks are measured. To me (and others like me), that fact is very irritating.
Knight of the Reliquary should be good. It's not.
Geist of Saint Traft should be good. It's not.
Hexblade style decks should be good. They're not.
Fair Magic isn't really being fostered or helped in Modern at all. It's whether you have the $1000 to build your combo deck and if you practice with it enough to place in an event. That's it. That's why it's stale. Because if you try anything new, you won't win. You'll have to wade through a bunch of neckbeards sporting Twin variants first, and you won't succeed.
Twin and Pod aren't interactive? Do you actually play Modern? 90% of the time Twin plays out like a Tempo deck, beating you down with 2/1s and throwing burn spells and Remands. Their combo, when it happens, is permanent based, and thus easy to interact with.
Pod plays out more like value midrange. Efficient guys, efficient tutors, and bringing the beats. Again, rarely does Spike Feeder or Melira just kill you.
Or are you just butthurt your terrible brew lost to a real deck?
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Whenever someone claims to hate blue I automatically assume they're a bad player.
Or are you just butthurt your terrible brew lost to a real deck?
At first this question made me angry, but the answer is "yes". It's frustrating to me and to other folks that there are only a handful of viable deck types in Modern. Even Legacy, the traditionally "broken" format, has more deck diversity. There are fair decks, not fair decks, control decks, hybrid decks, and a slew of others.
If you can't come up with something yourself, what's the point? I know it's a very Johnny-ish whine, but it still rankles that I can't just pick a color combination and go to it. And if I do, I constantly have to worry about disrupting combo strategies, which eats design space in my brews.
So yeah. I don't know if "butthurt" is the right word, but it's certainly irritation of some sort.
By the way, it was really unnecessary to say that.
Or are you just butthurt your terrible brew lost to a real deck?
At first this question made me angry, but the answer is "yes". It's frustrating to me and to other folks that there are only a handful of viable deck types in Modern. Even Legacy, the traditionally "broken" format, has more deck diversity. There are fair decks, not fair decks, control decks, hybrid decks, and a slew of others.
If you can't come up with something yourself, what's the point? I know it's a very Johnny-ish whine, but it still rankles that I can't just pick a color combination and go to it. And if I do, I constantly have to worry about disrupting combo strategies, which eats design space in my brews.
So yeah. I don't know if "butthurt" is the right word, but it's certainly irritation of some sort.
By the way, it was really unnecessary to say that.
Was it though? I guessed correctly where you were coming from, which really informs your argument, so I'd argue it was necessary.
I'm not sure why you're surprised that Legacy, a format with a much larger card pool, has a much larger pool of viable decks. Seems logical.
But you ask "what's the point?" The point is to have fun, intense games of Magic that reward skill. Playing decks will always be more important than building decks, and in any kind of competition, the point is to win. Luckily, winning most events is going to require skill, and with that comes the fun.
If you get your MtG fun by building decks instead of playing, that's great. However, constructed formats probably aren't for you.
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Whenever someone claims to hate blue I automatically assume they're a bad player.
Or are you just butthurt your terrible brew lost to a real deck?
At first this question made me angry, but the answer is "yes". It's frustrating to me and to other folks that there are only a handful of viable deck types in Modern. Even Legacy, the traditionally "broken" format, has more deck diversity. There are fair decks, not fair decks, control decks, hybrid decks, and a slew of others.
If you can't come up with something yourself, what's the point? I know it's a very Johnny-ish whine, but it still rankles that I can't just pick a color combination and go to it. And if I do, I constantly have to worry about disrupting combo strategies, which eats design space in my brews.
So yeah. I don't know if "butthurt" is the right word, but it's certainly irritation of some sort.
By the way, it was really unnecessary to say that.
Was it though? I guessed correctly where you were coming from, which really informs your argument, so I'd argue it was necessary.
I'm not sure why you're surprised that Legacy, a format with a much larger card pool, has a much larger pool of viable decks. Seems logical.
But you ask "what's the point?" The point is to have fun, intense games of Magic that reward skill. Playing decks will always be more important than building decks, and in any kind of competition, the point is to win. Luckily, winning most events is going to require skill, and with that comes the fun.
If you get your MtG fun by building decks instead of playing, that's great. However, constructed formats probably aren't for you.
Actually, in a lot of games, the format with the fewest bans has significantly fewer viable strategies/characters/cards/etc. than formats with more bans. Vintage has significantly fewer decks that Top 8 tournaments than Legacy and Modern do. (Admittedly, Vintage has been underdeveloped lately.)
In competitive Pokemon, Ubers has significantly fewer Pokemon that people use at least 3% of the time than OU, the tier with the next fewest bans, does. (I'd estimate Ubers has about half to a third of the number of viable Pokemon that OU does. However, to make sure, I'd check Smogon.)
The Smash Bros. series is generally considered uncompetitive if every stage were unbanned--some characters, like Fox McCloud, can camp out and keep shooting at and running away from most other characters on large and rugged enough stages (such as Hyrule Temple), so they win too often on those stages. Tournaments always ban most Smash Bros. stages.
So yeah, I'd be surprised that the format with the fewest bans always has the most diversity, and more bans always results in less diversity.
I doubt that Treasure Cruise and Dig Through Time could draw you 3 cards on turn 5 like Ancestral Vision for 0 mana on that turn. At the very least, even if your graveyard was full enough to delve the 6 or 7 cards, you would still have to spend mana to cast Treasure Cruise or Dig Through Time. After you cast the first one, you need more cards in your graveyard to efficiently cast another copy. If you get two copies of either early on, the second copy is probably useless. If you have 2 or more copies of AV, you will suspend them so that you can draw 3 extra cards on successive turns. See the difference. AV is way too good to be unbanned.
While this is true, a mid or late-game Treasure Cruise gets you cards immediately while Ancestral Vision has to wait a full 5 turns.
I doubt that Treasure Cruise and Dig Through Time could draw you 3 cards on turn 5 like Ancestral Vision for 0 mana on that turn. At the very least, even if your graveyard was full enough to delve the 6 or 7 cards, you would still have to spend mana to cast Treasure Cruise or Dig Through Time. After you cast the first one, you need more cards in your graveyard to efficiently cast another copy. If you get two copies of either early on, the second copy is probably useless. If you have 2 or more copies of AV, you will suspend them so that you can draw 3 extra cards on successive turns. See the difference. AV is way too good to be unbanned.
While this is true, a mid or late-game Treasure Cruise gets you cards immediately while Ancestral Vision has to wait a full 5 turns.
After watching videos on the Ascendancy deck, Treasure Cruise does get to draw you cards for almost free because of the untapping of mana creatures. Once it gets going, the deck easily draws cards for U with TC on turn 3 or 4, and it easily fills up the graveyard for a second or third TC due to the looting.
I doubt that Treasure Cruise and Dig Through Time could draw you 3 cards on turn 5 like Ancestral Vision for 0 mana on that turn. At the very least, even if your graveyard was full enough to delve the 6 or 7 cards, you would still have to spend mana to cast Treasure Cruise or Dig Through Time. After you cast the first one, you need more cards in your graveyard to efficiently cast another copy. If you get two copies of either early on, the second copy is probably useless. If you have 2 or more copies of AV, you will suspend them so that you can draw 3 extra cards on successive turns. See the difference. AV is way too good to be unbanned.
While this is true, a mid or late-game Treasure Cruise gets you cards immediately while Ancestral Vision has to wait a full 5 turns.
After watching videos on the Ascendancy deck, Treasure Cruise does get to draw you cards for almost free because of the untapping of mana creatures. Once it gets going, the deck easily draws cards for U with TC on turn 3 or 4, and it easily fills up the graveyard for a second or third TC due to the looting.
To be fair, Ascendancy Storm probably breaks Treasure Cruise way more than other decks do because Jeskai Ascendancy loots, so a mid-combo Cruise can easily turn into 9+ cards' worth of Delve.
I've tried out a Modern URb Delver deck with a high cantrip count and it can easily chain Cruises within 3 turns of each other. Cruise enables itself fairly well.
that said, it is laughable that people defend affinity as though it is a "fair" deck. i hate jund much more than affinity but it is much more fair to play against. affinity is much more on the combo side of the spectrum than it is on the aggro side. so if someone stops your combo with a good sideboard card, good for them. that is the price you pay for a narrow strategy. i've been playing a graveyard based strategy for awhile now and doing fairly well, but sometimes people cast t1 grafdiggers cage game 2 and i just shrug my shoulders because its completely reasonable for them to have that card in their sideboard. as much as people hate to admit it, MAGIC IS LUCK DEPENDENT. you can be the best player in the world but you cannot beat the odds every time. there are many examples of topdeck victories in major tournaments. thats just the nature of the game.
Chandra, Torch of Defiance - Oops! All Chandras.
Prime Speaker Zegana - Draw for Power.
Pir & Toothy - Counterpalooza.
Arcades, the Strategist - Another Brick in the Wall.
Zacama, Primal Calamity - Calamity of Double Mana.
Edgar Markov - Vampires Don't Die.
Child of Alara - Dreamcrusher.
They need to ban things until there is a healthy top 8 every single time a tourney fires.
If you run fetches and can trips a turn 5 treasure find is easy, if you play thought scour you can do it turn 3 a fair amount of the time.
This post is just like the others, based without fact. Splinter Twin lost favor when BGW/BGx was making up 10%+ of the meta. Twin gets killed by decks packing hand disruption and buttloads of instant speed removal.
The difference between Affinity and that deck, as well as Legacy dredge, is that Affinity is the best deck in Modern. Dredge in Legacy loses to a number of decks even if they don't have hate, namely combo decks that are faster than it is. Modern Affinity has absolutely no bad g1 matchups whatsoever. So you're forced into a position where Affinity is the best choice if you want to win the tournament, but also where your play skill means little in anything but the mirror. Even in the mirror, the coin flip is 80% of the match. You're just playing on autopilot the whole day hoping your opponents don't draw their hate, because you can't do ***** if they do. Similarly, if you don't play Affinity, the same problem applies. If your opponent is on Affinity, all that really matters is whether or not you're lucky enough to draw your hate. If you don't you're probably not going to win, no matter how good you are.
The worst part of stoney silence it can completely shut down your deck depending on your draw. At its best, stoney silence is like a blood moon on steroids vs affinity. Which arguably is very powerful.
Twitter: twitter.com/axmanonline
Stream: twitch.tv/axman
Current Decks
Modern: Affinity
Standard: BW Control
Legacy: Death and Taxes :symw::symr:
Vintage: NA
—Lim-Dûl, the Necromancer
Affinity doesn't *just* lose to hate cards. It also sometimes loses to totally normal maindeck cards like bolt, electrolyze, snapcaster, abrupt decay, goyf, etc.
I do agree that in general it's unfun when there is a 90+% game 1 deck that gets completely shut down postboard (see Vintage dredge). It just makes the matches feel really random and not skill-based. A lot of more players seem to love these decks though... (also see storm, living end, etc.)
- Affinity
- Twin
- Pod
- and to a lesser extent, Storm.
Those decks are almost all non-interactive. Interactivity is what makes a game of Magic fun. For both parties.
I contend that bannings need to be handed down hand over fist until little Jeffrey N00bsauce can pick two or three colors, build a deck out of Modern-legal cards, and win at least one game.
People who say the format is "stale" don't mean that there is a bad diversity of decks, it's just that the turn four combo kill is the litmus test against which all other decks are measured. To me (and others like me), that fact is very irritating.
Knight of the Reliquary should be good. It's not.
Geist of Saint Traft should be good. It's not.
Hexblade style decks should be good. They're not.
Fair Magic isn't really being fostered or helped in Modern at all. It's whether you have the $1000 to build your combo deck and if you practice with it enough to place in an event. That's it. That's why it's stale. Because if you try anything new, you won't win. You'll have to wade through a bunch of neckbeards sporting Twin variants first, and you won't succeed.
You will ALLWAYS have your Tier 1 decks that define the format.
The trick is to have as many as possible that use different angles to attack the metagame. That makes sure non will dominate.
Twin is an super annoying deck, for the fact alone that it can just end a game on the spot, without the opponent being able to interact with it at sorcery speed. Thats annoying, but WotC for "whatever" reason says its cool.
Pod is a very interactive deck in its form of creatures. It can totally play like a fair deck, it just has Pod to get to its silver bullets. Thats exactly like the decks of old, using Survival of the Fittest, or using any other tutor to get your selection of silver bullets. These kind of deck will allways be present if you have any form of half playable repeatable tutor engine. Even "rebels" played like that.
Affinity is a pretty interactive deck, if the opponent actual "can" interact with it. And that means you need specific hate against artifacts. If you dont have any, it will be a slaughter. Thats why the form of interaction with Affinity is a very stupid one. It asks the format to play specific hate, the same way Dredge does for graveyard hate, thats what keeps it away from dominating a format, but its also an annoying kind of metagame shift.
Then we have decks like "jund" , which might looks very interactive, but its also a incredible boring way to play magic, if all you do is just play something, the opponent uses removal, you play something, it eats removal, and so on. Jund vs Jund is a stupid matchup, as the player that sticks a card that isnt killed right away has the edge, as easy as that.
Well these cards are "good" for being cheap and they where all but fun to play against in their prime times.
As it is, the cards are simply not suited for the metagame and modern is slighty to fast for them aswell, as most of these cards have a very direct plan to beat on your opponent, and thats as narrow as it gets.
WUBRG#BlackLotusMatterWUBRG
👮👮👮 #BlueLivesMatter 👮👮👮
Twin and Pod aren't interactive? Do you actually play Modern? 90% of the time Twin plays out like a Tempo deck, beating you down with 2/1s and throwing burn spells and Remands. Their combo, when it happens, is permanent based, and thus easy to interact with.
Pod plays out more like value midrange. Efficient guys, efficient tutors, and bringing the beats. Again, rarely does Spike Feeder or Melira just kill you.
Or are you just butthurt your terrible brew lost to a real deck?
If you can't come up with something yourself, what's the point? I know it's a very Johnny-ish whine, but it still rankles that I can't just pick a color combination and go to it. And if I do, I constantly have to worry about disrupting combo strategies, which eats design space in my brews.
So yeah. I don't know if "butthurt" is the right word, but it's certainly irritation of some sort.
By the way, it was really unnecessary to say that.
Was it though? I guessed correctly where you were coming from, which really informs your argument, so I'd argue it was necessary.
I'm not sure why you're surprised that Legacy, a format with a much larger card pool, has a much larger pool of viable decks. Seems logical.
But you ask "what's the point?" The point is to have fun, intense games of Magic that reward skill. Playing decks will always be more important than building decks, and in any kind of competition, the point is to win. Luckily, winning most events is going to require skill, and with that comes the fun.
If you get your MtG fun by building decks instead of playing, that's great. However, constructed formats probably aren't for you.
Actually, in a lot of games, the format with the fewest bans has significantly fewer viable strategies/characters/cards/etc. than formats with more bans. Vintage has significantly fewer decks that Top 8 tournaments than Legacy and Modern do. (Admittedly, Vintage has been underdeveloped lately.)
In competitive Pokemon, Ubers has significantly fewer Pokemon that people use at least 3% of the time than OU, the tier with the next fewest bans, does. (I'd estimate Ubers has about half to a third of the number of viable Pokemon that OU does. However, to make sure, I'd check Smogon.)
The Smash Bros. series is generally considered uncompetitive if every stage were unbanned--some characters, like Fox McCloud, can camp out and keep shooting at and running away from most other characters on large and rugged enough stages (such as Hyrule Temple), so they win too often on those stages. Tournaments always ban most Smash Bros. stages.
So yeah, I'd be surprised that the format with the fewest bans always has the most diversity, and more bans always results in less diversity.
While this is true, a mid or late-game Treasure Cruise gets you cards immediately while Ancestral Vision has to wait a full 5 turns.
Storm Crow is strictly worse than Seacoast Drake.
After watching videos on the Ascendancy deck, Treasure Cruise does get to draw you cards for almost free because of the untapping of mana creatures. Once it gets going, the deck easily draws cards for U with TC on turn 3 or 4, and it easily fills up the graveyard for a second or third TC due to the looting.
To be fair, Ascendancy Storm probably breaks Treasure Cruise way more than other decks do because Jeskai Ascendancy loots, so a mid-combo Cruise can easily turn into 9+ cards' worth of Delve.
I've tried out a Modern URb Delver deck with a high cantrip count and it can easily chain Cruises within 3 turns of each other. Cruise enables itself fairly well.