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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.