Speaking of this, Flashback Boros variants do feel stronger than the various delvers, especially when you get into the staples cardpool and figure out what's core and what's flex. Lightning Axe works in those decks and it takes out Anglers, you've got the unconventional but potent sideboard options (Dead // Gone, Blaster Mage, Sparksmith) and you've got a LOT of card-draw / card filtering to go with top quality burn. Not to mention that Rally the Peasants ends games out of nowhere even in mono-white variants. Mono White Metalcraft is basically just a Kultotha Boros mashed with Affinity, and Mono-White Rebels are just a grindier Boros Tokens (has it's upsides), and they can both splash for the flashback via Prismatic Lens or whathave you. Right now we've got like 4 decks my local meta which are all riffs on the same go-wide-w-fliers-into-Peasants (which we started calling Pheasants as it seems to always be pumping up some kind of bird).
And I do think your argument about "stronger creatures" is flawed - there's really nasty creatures out there in pauper. I wrote about it before, there are at least 10 or so historically above the curve mechanics well represented across the color pie, and they provide enough powerful dudes. A lot of whom had no business being commons to begin with, but they all just pale in comparison to Delver of Secrets and Gurmag Angler because those cards just give way too much for the investment. I don't need any better dudes in Green, Red, White or even Black - I just need the damned missprint 3/2 flier for one and that black common Tarmogoyf to not be in the same format as all the rares-disguised as commons we already have. There's above-the-curve and there's just plain design mistakes.
But you do bring up a really good point. There's way too few ways around fogs in Pauper and this is getting to be a serious problem. And that's something WOTC could do something about with downshifts and new printings. What's also sorely missing is something that plays vs. lifegain, as there's crazy ammounts of quality lifegain around and all the stuff that counters or prevents it was never printed as common. All those Boros / Mono White decks I mentioned work very well but the way they get shut down by fogs is ugly. What seems to be going on in my meta now is spikes moving away from Delver and into Turbo Fog territory with random combo nonsense preying on the turbo-fog guys who prey on the Boros guys. And the big question for any deck that aims to win with dudes seems to be "Am I dead vs. fog" and it seems to be quite a problem.
"Masques Block is the worst block ever! There's not one decent card in there! The whole internet say's so, you're literally the only person who ever said it was good!" - random noob in a conversation with an Eldrazi.
We have to agree to disagree on the stronger creature point.
We need a creature(s) each that has....
This creature cannot be countered
When this creature attacks damage cannot be prevented
This creature cannot be sacrificed
Protection from instants
If an opponents spell or effect forced you to discard this creature you may put it on the battlefield
(Not all on one creature of course, but spread out over several creatures) And preferably these creatures need to be in red, green and white.
There aren't enough decent creatures out there with Undying/Persist, Hexproof (out of green or blue) or protection from red/black/white/blue. Fog decks, pack it up, lifegain decks pack it up.
It gets so boring to play game after game of Blue control, Black control, Fog control, Lifegain control, etc. So I've been seeing more Burn in response, but the play is so one dimensional it isn't even funny.
The meta needs a shakeup. Its starts at slowing down blue but it needs more.
I do agree with your other points, I wanted to add.
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."
Actually now I understand what you're trying to say - it's not STRONGER creatures we need, we've got boatloads of those, it's more utility creatures. And that's painfully true. The whole edict/sacrifice angle is such a pain that Fathom Seer ends up being "gush which pre-counters an edict", making it better than Gush in relevant matchups, and lifegain and fogs bussiness is getting out of hand. STRONG is not the issue, mind you.
Dudes available in pauper are actually fairly busted as far as raw stats go. They all pale in comparison to Delver and Angler, sure, but there's like an endless number of playable 2/2's for 0-1, 4/4's for 0-1-2, all sorts of nonsense is available to aggro/midrange creature decks. The fundament of the Pauper meta is an aggro paradise - there's very few boardwipes, no fast mana to turbocharge combo and you're essentially playing Vintage when it comes to raw-stat allstars. That's why I'd ban Delver and Angler on the spot - if a creature is clearly superior to everything else in THIS cardpool, then it's just way too strong. But with the raw stats on dudes such as they are in pauper, and no wipes, control is just dead in the water without something, and what they turn to is Fogs because there's nothing else to turn to.
The problem is that fogs just bury entire decks if their plan is to kill the other guy with dudes. You'd think they'd be less of an issue than boardwipes, but there ARE ways to play through boardwipes, even in pauper, and nothing at all comes to mind that plays through Fogs apart from Flaring Pain. And there seems to be nothing that actually works specifically vs. lifegain. And this means we don't actually disagree. We need more utility guys, we need options against fogs and lifegain, we need things which exist at uncommon to start showing up at common.
"Masques Block is the worst block ever! There's not one decent card in there! The whole internet say's so, you're literally the only person who ever said it was good!" - random noob in a conversation with an Eldrazi.
I'm not sure about this "there's no way to interact with Fogs" thesis. Ways to interact with fog effects include:
U Counterspells
B Discard, especially targeted such as Duress/Castigate. One time I was playing a game as UG Turbofog vs. BW Pestilence, and I had the game under total control until he drew a Raven's Crime and that totally flipped the situation.
RB Direct damage.
And against specific cards, any deck can use colorless graveyard exile to fight Moment's Peace and general creature removal to fight Stonehorn Dignitary.
The colors that really do have a problem interacting with fogs are GW.
And this means we don't actually disagree. We need more utility guys, we need options against fogs and lifegain, we need things which exist at uncommon to start showing up at common.
Correct, we are just disagreeing on semantics. Utility of creatures is strength of a creature in my book. A creature that has strong play potential like Sea Gate Oracle looks weak on paper by itself when judged in a vacuum but we know the card is "strong" in Pauper. Again just semantics I suppose.
Boardwipes aren't annoying until they become recursive. My problem with Pauper control decks is that the fogging becomes recursive then loops to every turn for a lockdown. Moment's PeaceSpore Frog and Stonehorn Dignitary via Ghostly Flicker style effects are the main offenders in my book. Huge board dominating effects on the relative cheap mana investment to totally lock out a creature based deck that has no answers to the lockdown. It makes for unfun games, it makes for long drawn out games. Imagine if there was an equal effect where you could drop 6 to 10 small creatures a turn and recur it turn after turn if needed. Elves can almost do it as it is but it is not guaranteed. The same could also be said about the lifegain control decks. It far outpaces what creatures can dish out in Pauper. So we may have to disagree on the power level of aggro creatures in the meta. In my book there aren't enough and they aren't as "good" as some may believe. Without evasion, removal dodge or recursion, a lot of the big guys in pauper are just big bodies waiting to be removed by any means of available removal. There isn't enough firepower in the format to dodge the control, short of say Elves or Burn. Even Bogles can get controlled easily.
Too much Blue, too much control and too much Blue that synergizes with control. A creature deck in Pauper just can't be fast enough. Something is going to have to be done.
I'm glad we agree in principal. My problem is I think we have a format full of control types that don't want to see creature based decks gain any foothold.
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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."
I'm not sure about this "there's no way to interact with Fogs" thesis. Ways to interact with fog effects include:
U Counterspells
B Discard, especially targeted such as Duress/Castigate. One time I was playing a game as UG Turbofog vs. BW Pestilence, and I had the game under total control until he drew a Raven's Crime and that totally flipped the situation.
RB Direct damage.
And against specific cards, any deck can use colorless graveyard exile to fight Moment's Peace and general creature removal to fight Stonehorn Dignitary.
The colors that really do have a problem interacting with fogs are GW.
I agree on the GW decks and I'd throw R in there as well. One card via Flaring Pain isn't enough. Thats Game 2 and probably 2 cards sided in max.
Ghostly Flicker lets you dodge removal of Dignitary. Its blue. On top of that there is always plenty of blue counter to dodge that removal as well.
Siding in colorless GY hate like Relic or Nihil Spellbomb is an option but it is no guarantee. Do you take 4 SB slots for GY hate with so many other problematic cards in the Meta?
So the answer to control is to play control then or Burn? Because that is what the B and R cards you have suggested do. Not trying to be glib, just honest. A creature based deck then has to dilute itself to work in a control package to the point it might as well become control itself.
Control has the distinct advantage, it is possible to play around it but the stars have to align. I don't want to see control nerfed, I want to see creature based aggro (outside of elves, tokens, weenies) get a little boost to at least try to go head to head with control and blue. Its at the point where if a creature based deck isn't winning by turn 4 you may as well hang it up. All a control, lifegain or fog deck has to do is hang on until then and it will most assuredly get its soft-lock to hard-lock down. And Blue facilitates that so easily and readily. Again I don't blame people for playing it. Its the cream of the cream. I just don't want to see creature based decks pushed out of the format for a controllish blue-fest.
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."
- One way to counter fogs, Counterspells, require you to be blue.
- Discard doesn't actually work all that well because Moment's Peace and Prismatic Strands have flashback, and other control decks have both the means to dig for more fogs, way to recur them and are often blue so they protect their fog loops with counterspells. And since a fog loop counters so much of the other deck, they can affort to only blow counters on your discard.
- Assembling enough direct damage to take someone out through turbo-fog is a lot more difficult than it looks. Unless you're pure burn you just draw into more dead cards than the opponent and the opponent often needs to start countering direct damage stuff when they're below threshold making their life easier.
- And playing burn isn't actually an answer because Burn doesn't really have an answer to lifegain (and CoP red), and there's lifegain that gains you 10 for 2 mana in the format. It's actually pretty easy to sideboard a fog deck into a lifegain deck to put burn in the same situation creature decks are in vs. fogs.
So in theory - yes, in practice, NO. If playing through Fogs was viable Boros Bully and Flicker Tron would not be the other two stooges of the online meta alongside Delver. Flicker Tron's a fog deck, and Boros Bully has prismatic strands and hopes of buning someone out through a fog lock.
Mono-Black devotion, with discard, Gary, Corrupt and Pestilence seems to eat all these "top decks" for breakfast (from what I've seen in tourneys week after week), but for almost everyone else the fogs are a brick wall. I'm not sure why mono-b isn't more popular online. You don't actually need Oubliette for it to work or anything. You don't, and this is hilarious, even need Pestilence. I've even seen it beat top tier stuff on bare-bones budget builds without even Chittering Rats. But everyone else's in trouble.
And I know all this really well because I put together decks for rent for our gaming caffe. And whatever I put together practically needs to run about 3 Relic of Progenitus mainboard. Not to meta-blast certain decks (I don't actually want to brutally hose other decks that I rent, obviuosly, I like as many potential winners as I can muster). They need them to even have a chance against the recurring fogs. This has the unfortunate effect of hosing less silly graveyard strats, but if you "have a problem dealing with fogs", meaning you're G or W or somesuch, you don't have a problem so much as match losess. And not even Relic necessarily helps you ws a deck like Turbo-Fog Mill (we have a regular one in our meta), as making them not reccur some fogs doesn't prevent them from chaining them long enough to kill you. And even aggro decks use them to time walk the other guy (sometimes twice).
So when tweaking decks the question of wth does this deck do vs. fogs often seems more important than what it's actual game plan is and what else it is about. If I don't fog-proof a deck to the best of my ability, and there really isn't all that much you can do, the person renting it will have a really lousy time, might not come again and probably won't rent it again.
Which probably explains why there's so much Delver around. If you want to not get fogged down you pretty much need counterspells, and Delver happens to want to play them anyway so the Delver player doesn't need to ask themselves what to do vs. fogs. Just about everybody else does. And there's very few effective answers other than "just play Delver".
"Masques Block is the worst block ever! There's not one decent card in there! The whole internet say's so, you're literally the only person who ever said it was good!" - random noob in a conversation with an Eldrazi.
One more thing that's important to note about Fogs. They mess you up worse than board wipes do if the enemy can reliably dig for them / recur them because they all work on your turn. The vast majority of boardwipes are sorceries, and this goes a fair bit towards making them manageable. You can force a wipe with some dudes, then when the other guy board wipes play a dude with flash EoT. You can put a few dudes down and pressure the other guy, force a wrath, and then play other dudes you've been holding back. You can have persist/undying/flashback/enbalm/afterlife/whathaveyou dudes which don't get wiped. Boardwipes are mostly symetrical, too, and put constraints on what sort of deck you can effectively play with them in it.
Fogs don't work that way. You get nothing from baiting them. You get nothing from holding back vs. them. There's no creatures that resist them at common or work through them. The other guy doesn't tap out on their turn to cast them. They usually don't require much mana investment. The other guy can actually play mad aggro and still blow you out with fogs. If the other guy is fogging you persistently you either have an answer in your deck and hope to draw it, and not have it countered, before the other guy can win, or you can scoop. And there's not that many answers to them at all, let alone in Pauper.
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"Masques Block is the worst block ever! There's not one decent card in there! The whole internet say's so, you're literally the only person who ever said it was good!" - random noob in a conversation with an Eldrazi.
Fogs are tons worse than boardwipe as stated. I managed to win a game 2 today and the match vs. Tron through a Tangle with my RG Aggro creature deck because I boarded in 2 Flaring Pain and luckily managed to draw one in the opening 7 and drew a second on turn 3 and played it for the win. It doesn't happen often, it did today for a change. But that is it. There is NOTHING else that plays through it short of control cards. Maybe I need to start running 2 Moment's Peace in my SB if I can find the room.
Foil need to go for sure followed closely by Gush. And I hate to say it but Moment's Peace and Prismatic Strands need to go to. All of course unless we can get more creature utility/effectiveness down at common. Until then the format is going to devolve further into a blue/control/fog/lifegain/burn meta with the only creature decks being Elves and Stompy. Wizards needs to step in. They can go easy at first but they need to ban something and maybe even unban Invigorate as well. Sure Infect could make a comeback but with all the removal/counter/fog out there I think it would be enough.
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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."
Yeah, I'm kind of on board with suggesting a Moment's Peace / Prismatic Strands ban. They create an environment where they hose just about any deck except the one which plays the two most over the top dudes in terms of cost effectiveness anyway (Delver and Angler). Just digging for a fog chain with all the blue cantrips is nasty enough on its own, or looping Ghostly Flicker (or even worse but less often seen Splice loops with Ethereal Haze and that thing which splices by returning a dude to your hand) is all kinds of awful. That ought to be looked at, too, but it's not likely to be looked at if anyone can stick flashback timewalks into any deck.
And I'd certainly prefer more appropriate dudes printed for pauper rather than unbans. Invigorate is pure insanity and would just speed up a deck that's plenty fast already increasing the need for more fogs. No reason to give people something to point a finger at and complain about how you need Moment's Peace to stop that. Infect works even now if you put it together correctly, and there's even more than one way to do it, its only problem is that it's completely dead to all the fogs everywhere. We have one here at the caffe, Mono Green, blazingly fast, works like a charm, doesn't need Invigorate... but folds to fogs.
"Masques Block is the worst block ever! There's not one decent card in there! The whole internet say's so, you're literally the only person who ever said it was good!" - random noob in a conversation with an Eldrazi.
I think that the cantrips (sans Gush) are fine. They're only as good as the cards they can find. When you're looking at a problematic deck, you should ban the problem itself, not the support for the problem.
I also think that Delver and Gurmag Angler are okay. A Delver will die to a Disfigure. A Gurmag will die to Journey to Nowhere. Many other creatures in the format are at/slightly below their power level. On a turn where you miss your land drop, Glint Hawk is a 0 mana 2/2 flier. Affinity plays 2 mana 4/4's or even zero mana 2/2's and 4/4's sometimes. Anything that's an Elf -while not individually powerful- is capable of causing a fission reaction if it's played with enough other Elves.
Even though these creatures see zero play despite being bonkers, look at Porcelain Legionnaire or Rogue Elephant.
Look at Kor Skyfisher. That creature is insane for 2 mana. It's "downside" is picking up and having to replay something that draws you a card.
What I think needs to be banned are a few things:
Gush
Foil
Ghostly Flicker and Displace (Are there more versions of this card? If so, ban them too.)
Those are the most problematic cards currently.
After that it would be:
Hexproof things. Hexproof is a cancer and the Mono-White Heroic version of it is a more fun, fair, interactive Voltron deck. Alternatively, just ban Ethereal Armor and Ancestral Mask. I don't care if Bogles isn't currently top tier, hexproof is a terrible mechanic.
Kiln Fiend and Nivix Cyclops. Bolt + Temur Battle Rage + Mutagenic Growth is 24 damage, 27 is the Bolt is fired at the face. If storm was banned, I don't see why this is allowed. There really is no reason to play any other aggro/combo deck when this exists.
Prismatic Strands. This card is insane.
All 3 and 4 mana land destruction spells. That mono green land destruction ramp deck is actually top tier, it just loses to Delver and doesn't see much play because of a sort of gentleman's agreement. The only thing the deck loses to is Delver, certain fast Stompy hands, and Elves. If you splashed a bit more red for Electrickery in the SB you could close that door too.
Infinite loops should be limited to 6 interactions per turn like Keyforge. All combo exists by accident and is a result of there being 20,000 Magic cards (6,300 something for Pauper). What people perceive as a pillar of the game in reality is just Francis from Pee-Wee Herman's Big Adventure playing uninteractive solitaire bullcrap. Combo players don't actually enjoy playing Magic, just abusing exploits and therefore their opinion doesn't count because they don't actually count as Magic players.
Other things that I don't think are huge problems currently but are things I wouldn't miss and the format would be better without:
Snuff Out and Mutagenic Growth.
Moment's Peace and fog cards in general.
The One Land Spy deck. Go play Yu-Gi-Oh someplace else.
Mulldrifter.
Spore Frog.
I'm sure I could be missing something. Feel free to nitpick my list or to suggest an addition to it.
Alright, that's a fair post but do keep a few things in mind.
Angler and Delver aren't just slightly at the top of the pile, they're above the line at which you can price things if you want them to be crazy strong. Delver is in and off himself less of a problem - his problem is that there's a lot of incentive to play blue anyway and he just makes the choice of playing blue also come attached with a really over the top evasive aggro dude. Having access to the silly Masques block constructed suite of free counters and carddraw would be kinda alright if it didn't actually mean you also get to play a 3/2 on the first turn. Because not even colors who are meant to actually be really agressive and which can't actually protect that threat get to do so.
Angler is guilty of something else, and more of a legit ban target in and off himself. He just sets the bar for a common creature way too high and nothing else can go toe to toe with him without investing another card into it. Sure, he dies to certain spells, but so does everything else. He's just cheaper, a faster clock and/or has at least as much if not higher P/T as anything else you could run. This actually means that every creature has to be measured by whether it can attack into Angler (vast majority can't) and removal has to be judged by whether it can kill angler (not that many can). The huge problem with this is that the bar is absurdly high - even a free 4/4 can't attack into a Angler and can only chump Angler. Even a hyper pushed spell like Flame Slash can't kill Angler. 5/5 is huge game, in pauper or otherwise. A 4/5 is pretty nuts if it's cheap as it stonwalls 99% of really pushed commons, a 5/5 also kills everything and clocks one turn faster. It's not very likely they'll ever print something this huge that doesn't actually require much deckbuilding and that is this splashable, and for this reason it would be best for the meta if he wasn't legal. The 3/5 deathtouch zombie with delve and deathtouch, which costs one mana more, is pretty brutal but at least it doesn't clock you nearly as fast. And Angler is a black zombie on top of everything making him randomly immune to removal that pretty much nothing else is immune to - those cards aren't even played, or are routinely sided out or in the sideboard to begin with, because despite being brutal cards they randomly don't work against this one guy - who also happens to be an easily splashable undercosted biggest fatty in the format. Compare to Myr Enforcer who can come down for free - but dies to way more things, dies to artifact hate, clocks slower, trades with most other pushed creatures and requires a very specific deck to even be run in.
So yeah, if Tarmogoyf was downshifted to common it's a big question whether he'd see actual play because of Angler. That's how nasty Angler is, and pretty much nothing else is nearly as good, no matter how strong other things may look on paper. When you push the limits to a certain point a single point of power, toughness, color, creature type, number of colored mana symbols can mean a ton, and Angler just beats everybody on everything.
Without those two, both blue and black would be plenty strong, they just wouldn't have effortless access to the best evasive early threat and the best undercosted fatty, and this would make sense. Why should they, anyway? "I want my deck to be entirely fog-proof and have solid answers to combo" and "I want my deck to have the cutting edge in early threats and the best in undercosted fatties" shouldn't lead people to the same deck.
"Masques Block is the worst block ever! There's not one decent card in there! The whole internet say's so, you're literally the only person who ever said it was good!" - random noob in a conversation with an Eldrazi.
Alright, that's a fair post but do keep a few things in mind.
Angler and Delver aren't just slightly at the top of the pile, they're above the line at which you can price things if you want them to be crazy strong. Delver is in and off himself less of a problem - his problem is that there's a lot of incentive to play blue anyway and he just makes the choice of playing blue also come attached with a really over the top evasive aggro dude. Having access to the silly Masques block constructed suite of free counters and carddraw would be kinda alright if it didn't actually mean you also get to play a 3/2 on the first turn. Because not even colors who are meant to actually be really agressive and which can't actually protect that threat get to do so.
Angler is guilty of something else, and more of a legit ban target in and off himself. He just sets the bar for a common creature way too high and nothing else can go toe to toe with him without investing another card into it. Sure, he dies to certain spells, but so does everything else. He's just cheaper, a faster clock and/or has at least as much if not higher P/T as anything else you could run. This actually means that every creature has to be measured by whether it can attack into Angler (vast majority can't) and removal has to be judged by whether it can kill angler (not that many can). The huge problem with this is that the bar is absurdly high - even a free 4/4 can't attack into a Angler and can only chump Angler. Even a hyper pushed spell like Flame Slash can't kill Angler. 5/5 is huge game, in pauper or otherwise. A 4/5 is pretty nuts if it's cheap as it stonwalls 99% of really pushed commons, a 5/5 also kills everything and clocks one turn faster. It's not very likely they'll ever print something this huge that doesn't actually require much deckbuilding and that is this splashable, and for this reason it would be best for the meta if he wasn't legal. The 3/5 deathtouch zombie with delve and deathtouch, which costs one mana more, is pretty brutal but at least it doesn't clock you nearly as fast. And Angler is a black zombie on top of everything making him randomly immune to removal that pretty much nothing else is immune to - those cards aren't even played, or are routinely sided out or in the sideboard to begin with, because despite being brutal cards they randomly don't work against this one guy - who also happens to be an easily splashable undercosted biggest fatty in the format. Compare to Myr Enforcer who can come down for free - but dies to way more things, dies to artifact hate, clocks slower, trades with most other pushed creatures and requires a very specific deck to even be run in.
So yeah, if Tarmogoyf was downshifted to common it's a big question whether he'd see actual play because of Angler. That's how nasty Angler is, and pretty much nothing else is nearly as good, no matter how strong other things may look on paper. When you push the limits to a certain point a single point of power, toughness, color, creature type, number of colored mana symbols can mean a ton, and Angler just beats everybody on everything.
Without those two, both blue and black would be plenty strong, they just wouldn't have effortless access to the best evasive early threat and the best undercosted fatty, and this would make sense. Why should they, anyway? "I want my deck to be entirely fog-proof and have solid answers to combo" and "I want my deck to have the cutting edge in early threats and the best in undercosted fatties" shouldn't lead people to the same deck.
From a card advantage perspective, it's fairly easy to trade one reasonably costed removal spell for one Delver or Gurmag. The difficulty is in resolving it past Gush and Foil.
The removal that people play in this format is also weird and "fighting the last war" so to speak. People will play decks with 23 swamps in them and yet will choose to run Disfigure over Echoing Decay because it's one mana even though they'll have 7 lands on turn 10. People will run Doom Blades and then complain about Gurmag when Soul Reap exists. People will complain about white's lack of good removal despite having Journey to Nowhere, Oblivion Ring, and Unmake at their disposal.
Stompy players will complain about their Elves matchup even though they can run Wirewood Pride. I saw that card in a bulk foil box, checked to see if it was Pauper legal (it is), and then made a mental note to tell the Stompy player about the card and how good it would be on Vault Skirge or Silhana Ledgewalker.
When I told him about it it was followed by a flat refusal to even consider the card.
People are set in their ways. You don't need to be playing Terminate to kill Gurmag Angler. Augur of Bolas doesn't actually beat Stompy, Stompy players just refuse to tech against it because they're beholden to the year old xeroxed netdeck of it. The same is true about what removal people run. They'd rather play a 2 mana Doom Blade and lose instead of playing an extra mana for Murder or Oubliette or Unmake.
Half their deck will be X/1's and yet when you ask them why they're not running Porcelain Legionnaire they'll tell you it's because of Elecktrickery and Gut Shot.
I was mocked for running 4 main board Bojuka Bogs in my 23 land deck despite having more untapped mana sources than other midrange decks. People would rather lose the game than have a land come into play tapped.
Delver and Gurmag at the end of the day are just normal creatures. They can die in a simple one for one exchange of cards. You pay 2-3 mana for Gurmag? I pay 3 mana for Oubliette and exile it. That's fun, fair, and interactive Magic. What makes them unstoppable are Gush & Foil.
Well, I'm not set in my ways at all, and what I'm telling you is just facts, not dependent on someone's opinion, quirks, shortsightedness. We run all the cards you named here and more. We've got pretty much all pauper-legal cards available in paper, there's several tens of thousands of cards in the room where I'm sitting now. Angler and Delver are NOT normal creatures for reasons I've told you - they let colors and decks which have plenty of things going for them also beat other colors for two of the overall strongest creatures in the format. This is plain wrong.
Delver is an aggro creature, sure, and dies to plenty of things, but he gives a rather effortless clock to the color of universal and effortless control. And it really wouldn't be the same if Blue didn't have him as an option, because their countermagic wouldn't be protecting a 1 mana 3/2 evasive guy. There's really nothing at all like him and if blue had nothing else going for it at all, and just had him, blue would still be played because nobody else has a 3/2 flying threat for 1 mana with virtually no downside. If blue was forced to play "the next best thing", blue would be an order of magnitude less out of control. What would it even play? All the other serious Aggro dudes in blue cost two mana for two power, and I'm not even sure there's one which also has 2 toughness without a serious downside. And those are all good, great or fine enough considering what else blue has at it's disposal. So no, banning Delver would actually be meaningful and he's not just a random dude.
Angler is even more guilty of this because he's of a size people usually ramp to be able to throw down, or even attempt to cheat into play via reanimation. And he comes down for barely any mana. And since he's so splashable he essentially gives any color a huge fatso on top of what that color brings to the table. List out all the removal that can kill him, and then list out all the removal that can kill anything else remotely playable in the format but can't kill him. List out everything that can attack into him, but then list out everything that can attack into pretty much anything else that's playable in the format but not into him. That sort of size and resilience is supposed to cost you something, and on him it doesn't cost nearly enough. Without him the whole pauper metagame would change in a moment because there suddenly wouldn't be a reanimation-size guy played in every other deck with no reanimation. He's warping the meta because stuff either can't attack into him, can't trade with him, takes way more setup to get on the field, dies to way more things than he does or all of that at once.
I mean I just played a match of some random GB pile vs. a UB reanimator for about 10 matches. I was mana screwed every game with the GB pile. The other guy would go through his motions and reanimate a serpent. I would just, while mana screwed, with no serious shennanigans, plop down an Angler. Stalemate between a deck which actually did it's thing and a deck which just has a stupid card in it. Same matchup - he goes through the motions to reanimate a quick serpent... and then he just plays a same-size dude for nothing with no hassle on the same turn. He looks at his two 5/5's and asks me "Why do I even bother with reanimation?" and it's a legit question - he had to build his deck around stuff to be able to get a hard-to-kill 5/5 guy into play... but anyone at all can get a hard-to-kill 5/5 into play, so why bother? Another game he does his thing, casts Exhume. I discard Angler in response. He can reanimate either his Serpent, his Ulamog's Crusher or his Angler. If he went for the serpent - no dice, I can trade for it fine. If he goes for the Angler - no dice I can trade for it fine. If he goes for the Ulamog's Crusher I just Snuff Out or Doom Blade which I have in hand. I was simply playing a retarded good reanimation target in a deck with no way to reanimate it because I can effortlessly play it, and so can everybody.
I mean we started running Dragon Wings, Fangs and stuff and Rush of Knowledge in decks because wth, if you can just splash black (off a prism or whatever really) and have any means to discard (and you can discard to Foil, Faithless Looting, Mongrel, whathave you), it'll effortlessly give you a stronger Angler to beat everybody else's Anglers up. And the random Rush of Knowledge will draw you 7 to reward you for playing a dude you can play in just about any deck anyway. And unless the other guy is an evasive-go wide thing, you're kind of likely to plop the Angler down, cause a stalemate and actually get to cast the Rush.
And on top of everything if you're black you have multiple tools vs. go-wide. Pretty much the color best equipped to deal with it, really, between Nausea, Evincar's Justice, Cuombajj Witches and Pestilence black tears small dudes to shreds. How convenient that you also have the best midrange-curvetopper guy who's only real issue is that he himself doesn't do much against evasive go-wide and can get cuhmped. And he's also not actually midrange or a curvetopper because he comes down about as fast as any old aggro dude, he's just the size of a reanimation target. And black could use plenty of other things in that spot, it really doesn't need to be THAT stupid.
So no, without those two clown cards the pauper meta would be very different and much healthier. They don't actually work against catch-all answers to creature strats, they don't work through fogs, a select number of removal that kills everything also hits them, they just tangibly reduce the number of viable creatures as nothing can measure up to them, and give decks and strats which have no place rushing you with with that kind of aggro the means to do it for barely any effort.
"Masques Block is the worst block ever! There's not one decent card in there! The whole internet say's so, you're literally the only person who ever said it was good!" - random noob in a conversation with an Eldrazi.
Restricted to singletons: Gitaxian Probe, Mutagenic Growth, Snuff Out, Evincar's Justice, Fireblast, Battle Screech, Birchlore Rangers, Mulldrifter, Stonehorn Dignitary, Kor Skyfisher, Chittering Rats, Spore Frog, Thoughtcast, Ancestral Mask and Firebolt.
New Cards or Downshifts:
A true man-land (to battle the ridiculous number of Edicts)
A creature that cannot be sacrificed
A creature that cannot be countered
A creature that has protection from instants
A creature that if forced to discard can enter the battlefield for free
More playable Haste creatures
Again I'm skewed against Blue, Fogs and Control and biased for creature based decks (that aren't weenie, Elves or Infect)
I see this format becoming "solved". Before too much longer there will only be about 6 to 8 decks that can compete at the highest level with a bunch of others locked out looking in. I don't want a stale format and that is the way I believe its heading.
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."
I more or less agree. Not sure about the restrictions, as I'd be fine with some of those being banned simply because they push a viable archetype over the top. I'm not sure Foil and Tangle have that much ground to be banned. Foil is just new to people so it seems like a boogeyman, but it's not that frightening, and Tangle, as opposed to Moment's Peace, can be played around in multiple ways.
I'd probably keep the rest of the suggested restrictions open, because banning the stuff on the banlist would seriously affect the power of the things on that restricted list. I'd likely ban Fireblast, though. Red's plenty good in eternal formats and doesn't need to be that strong. It's banned in 1v1 commander and that's a 20 lives eternal format, and it makes you really appreciate that particular ban.
"Masques Block is the worst block ever! There's not one decent card in there! The whole internet say's so, you're literally the only person who ever said it was good!" - random noob in a conversation with an Eldrazi.
Thanks for the reply. I have listed a lot of draconian actions but in the long run I think the format would be better for it.
As for Foil, its got to go. Looks like your free to play your creature on the draw turn one or even on the play turn 2? Heck no, this piece of cheat counters your creature for free then feeds the Anglers out there. If Angler goes people will just switch to Hooting Mandrills or Sultai Scavenger to keep the degeneracy going. Foil is rotten and blue has far more than enough counter to deal with creatures in this format.
I'd be fine with a Fireblast ban as well. The reason I listed so many singleton restrictions is that people want to play these spells. Well go right ahead, just understand that you can use only one of them.
As for Tangle, it would be picked up by players the second Moments Peace was banned as a replacement and there wouldn't be much lost. They need to look to Fog and its variants. Locking down a full board of creatures for 2 full turns is ridiculously unfair and unfun at such a ridiculously low mana investment. There are other less powerful options for the turbo fog people out there. And yes, I need to add Spore Frog to my restricted list.
Frankly I'd be happy with a small fraction of this stuff banned to start, but the way its going WotC doesn't care and won't do a thing. A ban or two isn't going to anything to the meta at all.
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."
Maybe, just maybe, there could be a chance at some sort of Draftable Set centered around Pauper coming out in the Summer. (Professor's interview with Gavin Verhey about Pauper and a hint that Oubliette could be a possible card they would look at.) If this is the case we are going to see ZERO bans because WotC will want to sell these "Pauper Masters" packs/boxes. My hope is that they would do some really nice relevant downgrades from Uncommon to Common that will ease the pressure from control, fog and blue decks. I'm not sure what those cards are but I'd be willing to bet I could find several that would help.
If that doesn't happen, who the heck knows what will happen. WotC and they ain't talkin'.
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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."
Well, I'm not set in my ways at all, and what I'm telling you is just facts, not dependent on someone's opinion, quirks, shortsightedness. We run all the cards you named here and more. We've got pretty much all pauper-legal cards available in paper, there's several tens of thousands of cards in the room where I'm sitting now. Angler and Delver are NOT normal creatures for reasons I've told you - they let colors and decks which have plenty of things going for them also beat other colors for two of the overall strongest creatures in the format. This is plain wrong.
Delver is an aggro creature, sure, and dies to plenty of things, but he gives a rather effortless clock to the color of universal and effortless control. And it really wouldn't be the same if Blue didn't have him as an option, because their countermagic wouldn't be protecting a 1 mana 3/2 evasive guy. There's really nothing at all like him and if blue had nothing else going for it at all, and just had him, blue would still be played because nobody else has a 3/2 flying threat for 1 mana with virtually no downside. If blue was forced to play "the next best thing", blue would be an order of magnitude less out of control. What would it even play? All the other serious Aggro dudes in blue cost two mana for two power, and I'm not even sure there's one which also has 2 toughness without a serious downside. And those are all good, great or fine enough considering what else blue has at it's disposal. So no, banning Delver would actually be meaningful and he's not just a random dude.
Angler is even more guilty of this because he's of a size people usually ramp to be able to throw down, or even attempt to cheat into play via reanimation. And he comes down for barely any mana. And since he's so splashable he essentially gives any color a huge fatso on top of what that color brings to the table. List out all the removal that can kill him, and then list out all the removal that can kill anything else remotely playable in the format but can't kill him. List out everything that can attack into him, but then list out everything that can attack into pretty much anything else that's playable in the format but not into him. That sort of size and resilience is supposed to cost you something, and on him it doesn't cost nearly enough. Without him the whole pauper metagame would change in a moment because there suddenly wouldn't be a reanimation-size guy played in every other deck with no reanimation. He's warping the meta because stuff either can't attack into him, can't trade with him, takes way more setup to get on the field, dies to way more things than he does or all of that at once.
I mean I just played a match of some random GB pile vs. a UB reanimator for about 10 matches. I was mana screwed every game with the GB pile. The other guy would go through his motions and reanimate a serpent. I would just, while mana screwed, with no serious shennanigans, plop down an Angler. Stalemate between a deck which actually did it's thing and a deck which just has a stupid card in it. Same matchup - he goes through the motions to reanimate a quick serpent... and then he just plays a same-size dude for nothing with no hassle on the same turn. He looks at his two 5/5's and asks me "Why do I even bother with reanimation?" and it's a legit question - he had to build his deck around stuff to be able to get a hard-to-kill 5/5 guy into play... but anyone at all can get a hard-to-kill 5/5 into play, so why bother? Another game he does his thing, casts Exhume. I discard Angler in response. He can reanimate either his Serpent, his Ulamog's Crusher or his Angler. If he went for the serpent - no dice, I can trade for it fine. If he goes for the Angler - no dice I can trade for it fine. If he goes for the Ulamog's Crusher I just Snuff Out or Doom Blade which I have in hand. I was simply playing a retarded good reanimation target in a deck with no way to reanimate it because I can effortlessly play it, and so can everybody.
I mean we started running Dragon Wings, Fangs and stuff and Rush of Knowledge in decks because wth, if you can just splash black (off a prism or whatever really) and have any means to discard (and you can discard to Foil, Faithless Looting, Mongrel, whathave you), it'll effortlessly give you a stronger Angler to beat everybody else's Anglers up. And the random Rush of Knowledge will draw you 7 to reward you for playing a dude you can play in just about any deck anyway. And unless the other guy is an evasive-go wide thing, you're kind of likely to plop the Angler down, cause a stalemate and actually get to cast the Rush.
And on top of everything if you're black you have multiple tools vs. go-wide. Pretty much the color best equipped to deal with it, really, between Nausea, Evincar's Justice, Cuombajj Witches and Pestilence black tears small dudes to shreds. How convenient that you also have the best midrange-curvetopper guy who's only real issue is that he himself doesn't do much against evasive go-wide and can get cuhmped. And he's also not actually midrange or a curvetopper because he comes down about as fast as any old aggro dude, he's just the size of a reanimation target. And black could use plenty of other things in that spot, it really doesn't need to be THAT stupid.
So no, without those two clown cards the pauper meta would be very different and much healthier. They don't actually work against catch-all answers to creature strats, they don't work through fogs, a select number of removal that kills everything also hits them, they just tangibly reduce the number of viable creatures as nothing can measure up to them, and give decks and strats which have no place rushing you with with that kind of aggro the means to do it for ...
I've only been playing Magic for a year, and exclusively MTGO Pauper with physical cards. So arguments like, "Blue and Black shouldn't have aggro creatures" or conversely, "Blue has always been OP since the start of the game, that's just how it is and it should remain as such, the only reason I play is to break the game with Gush." kind of fall on deaf ears to me. My favorite deck is MBC, I've top foured a Pauper 1k with it. One of my favorite cards for constructed Pauper is Oubliette, which is a black Oblivion Ring. I go out of my way to put cards like Utopia Vow into my cube. No joke, Banding is my favorite game mechanic in Magic since it's so thematic and novel.
So cards that do things out of their color don't really bother me. I feel that I have an an outsider's perspective on MtG since I never grew up with it.
What I view as degenerate isn't swinging in for lethal with a 3 power flier, it's breaking the game with combos, abusing Ghostly Flicker, land destruction, hex proof, etc. I also don't particularly care that someone trying to cheat things onto the table with Exhume is equaled or exceeded by someone with a less cheaty version of the deck. I see that as a good thing.
Gurmag Angler dies to edicts. It dies to to numerous targeted removal spells. It's somewhat more vulnerable to bounce than the average creature. It just doesn't die to a handful of marquee black removal spells that people won't give up for whatever reason. Soul Reap is a fine spell, just play it. Oubliette, Journey, and O-Ring gobble it up. There are some new spells in Ravnica Allegiance that kill Gurmag.
I'd also like to put forth another idea:
It's a good thing when tempo and midrange strategies (Not counting Gush&Foil) are dominant and OP because it forces everyone to play fun, fair, interactive Magic with each other. When a Countermagic based deck is OP, it keeps the level of degeneracy down (Not counting Gush&Foil).
I want to make the disclaimer that Gush and Foil go too far, but yeah.
It's a good thing that Ulamog's Crusher isn't actually that good and you have to actually earn its continued existence. It's a good thing that Big Dumb Green Idiots Turn Everything Sideways On Turn Three or even worse BDGITESOT3+Land Destruction isn't top tier.
So midrange/tempo kinds of decks having tools like Gurmag and Delver are good for the format I feel. I don't really care that Gurmag simply eats Affinity's 4/4's. I'm glad it's that way actually. I'm glad that burn can't really kill off a Gurmag easily, good, serves you right for playing a mindless deck.
If the format actually had a cheap red burn spell that was powerful enough and could kill Gurmag easily, then it would be worse off because then less interactive, Yu-Gi-Oh style decks would be more powerful. Sure, Skred exists but you have to kind of have to earn that and it only works against creatures.
If you look at the way Flicker-based Tron decks, Izzet Blitz, Elves, Affinity, Bogles, Land Destruction, etc. work then how can you complain about someone getting a vanilla 5/5 for 2-3 mana a few turns in?
In short, I see creatures swinging for combat damage normally and things like doom blades and counterspells, as "Fun, fair, interactive, good 'ole vanilla Magic". And as such, I recognize that there are going to be certain versions of these cards (say, Gurmag and Delver) that are the best ones of the bunch. But since some of the best cards of the bunch are vanilla cards, then I don't care that they're OP. If fun, fair, interactive, vanilla Magic is OP then that's a good thing in my eyes. It beats losing to ******* Storm.
And I do think your argument about "stronger creatures" is flawed - there's really nasty creatures out there in pauper. I wrote about it before, there are at least 10 or so historically above the curve mechanics well represented across the color pie, and they provide enough powerful dudes. A lot of whom had no business being commons to begin with, but they all just pale in comparison to Delver of Secrets and Gurmag Angler because those cards just give way too much for the investment. I don't need any better dudes in Green, Red, White or even Black - I just need the damned missprint 3/2 flier for one and that black common Tarmogoyf to not be in the same format as all the rares-disguised as commons we already have. There's above-the-curve and there's just plain design mistakes.
But you do bring up a really good point. There's way too few ways around fogs in Pauper and this is getting to be a serious problem. And that's something WOTC could do something about with downshifts and new printings. What's also sorely missing is something that plays vs. lifegain, as there's crazy ammounts of quality lifegain around and all the stuff that counters or prevents it was never printed as common. All those Boros / Mono White decks I mentioned work very well but the way they get shut down by fogs is ugly. What seems to be going on in my meta now is spikes moving away from Delver and into Turbo Fog territory with random combo nonsense preying on the turbo-fog guys who prey on the Boros guys. And the big question for any deck that aims to win with dudes seems to be "Am I dead vs. fog" and it seems to be quite a problem.
We need a creature(s) each that has....
This creature cannot be countered
When this creature attacks damage cannot be prevented
This creature cannot be sacrificed
Protection from instants
If an opponents spell or effect forced you to discard this creature you may put it on the battlefield
(Not all on one creature of course, but spread out over several creatures) And preferably these creatures need to be in red, green and white.
There aren't enough decent creatures out there with Undying/Persist, Hexproof (out of green or blue) or protection from red/black/white/blue. Fog decks, pack it up, lifegain decks pack it up.
It gets so boring to play game after game of Blue control, Black control, Fog control, Lifegain control, etc. So I've been seeing more Burn in response, but the play is so one dimensional it isn't even funny.
The meta needs a shakeup. Its starts at slowing down blue but it needs more.
I do agree with your other points, I wanted to add.
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."
Dudes available in pauper are actually fairly busted as far as raw stats go. They all pale in comparison to Delver and Angler, sure, but there's like an endless number of playable 2/2's for 0-1, 4/4's for 0-1-2, all sorts of nonsense is available to aggro/midrange creature decks. The fundament of the Pauper meta is an aggro paradise - there's very few boardwipes, no fast mana to turbocharge combo and you're essentially playing Vintage when it comes to raw-stat allstars. That's why I'd ban Delver and Angler on the spot - if a creature is clearly superior to everything else in THIS cardpool, then it's just way too strong. But with the raw stats on dudes such as they are in pauper, and no wipes, control is just dead in the water without something, and what they turn to is Fogs because there's nothing else to turn to.
The problem is that fogs just bury entire decks if their plan is to kill the other guy with dudes. You'd think they'd be less of an issue than boardwipes, but there ARE ways to play through boardwipes, even in pauper, and nothing at all comes to mind that plays through Fogs apart from Flaring Pain. And there seems to be nothing that actually works specifically vs. lifegain. And this means we don't actually disagree. We need more utility guys, we need options against fogs and lifegain, we need things which exist at uncommon to start showing up at common.
And against specific cards, any deck can use colorless graveyard exile to fight Moment's Peace and general creature removal to fight Stonehorn Dignitary.
The colors that really do have a problem interacting with fogs are GW.
Corrupt Control B | Burn R | UG Turbofog UG | White Weenie W | GW Tethmos WG | BG Cycling Combo BG
Enchantress GBW | Colorless Tron C | Red Deck Wins R | UG Madness UG | Mono-G Tron G | UR Puzzlehorns UR
Rhystic Tron WU| WU Prowess WU | BR Reanimator BR | Mono-R Control R | Stompy G | Temur Tron URG
Mardu Infinite Priest WBR | 85-Card Dredge BRG | Elves GU | Boros Bully RW | Jeskai Familiars RWU
Correct, we are just disagreeing on semantics. Utility of creatures is strength of a creature in my book. A creature that has strong play potential like Sea Gate Oracle looks weak on paper by itself when judged in a vacuum but we know the card is "strong" in Pauper. Again just semantics I suppose.
Boardwipes aren't annoying until they become recursive. My problem with Pauper control decks is that the fogging becomes recursive then loops to every turn for a lockdown. Moment's Peace Spore Frog and Stonehorn Dignitary via Ghostly Flicker style effects are the main offenders in my book. Huge board dominating effects on the relative cheap mana investment to totally lock out a creature based deck that has no answers to the lockdown. It makes for unfun games, it makes for long drawn out games. Imagine if there was an equal effect where you could drop 6 to 10 small creatures a turn and recur it turn after turn if needed. Elves can almost do it as it is but it is not guaranteed. The same could also be said about the lifegain control decks. It far outpaces what creatures can dish out in Pauper. So we may have to disagree on the power level of aggro creatures in the meta. In my book there aren't enough and they aren't as "good" as some may believe. Without evasion, removal dodge or recursion, a lot of the big guys in pauper are just big bodies waiting to be removed by any means of available removal. There isn't enough firepower in the format to dodge the control, short of say Elves or Burn. Even Bogles can get controlled easily.
Too much Blue, too much control and too much Blue that synergizes with control. A creature deck in Pauper just can't be fast enough. Something is going to have to be done.
I'm glad we agree in principal. My problem is I think we have a format full of control types that don't want to see creature based decks gain any foothold.
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."
I agree on the GW decks and I'd throw R in there as well. One card via Flaring Pain isn't enough. Thats Game 2 and probably 2 cards sided in max.
Ghostly Flicker lets you dodge removal of Dignitary. Its blue. On top of that there is always plenty of blue counter to dodge that removal as well.
Siding in colorless GY hate like Relic or Nihil Spellbomb is an option but it is no guarantee. Do you take 4 SB slots for GY hate with so many other problematic cards in the Meta?
So the answer to control is to play control then or Burn? Because that is what the B and R cards you have suggested do. Not trying to be glib, just honest. A creature based deck then has to dilute itself to work in a control package to the point it might as well become control itself.
Control has the distinct advantage, it is possible to play around it but the stars have to align. I don't want to see control nerfed, I want to see creature based aggro (outside of elves, tokens, weenies) get a little boost to at least try to go head to head with control and blue. Its at the point where if a creature based deck isn't winning by turn 4 you may as well hang it up. All a control, lifegain or fog deck has to do is hang on until then and it will most assuredly get its soft-lock to hard-lock down. And Blue facilitates that so easily and readily. Again I don't blame people for playing it. Its the cream of the cream. I just don't want to see creature based decks pushed out of the format for a controllish blue-fest.
So we may have to agree to disagree.
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."
- One way to counter fogs, Counterspells, require you to be blue.
- Discard doesn't actually work all that well because Moment's Peace and Prismatic Strands have flashback, and other control decks have both the means to dig for more fogs, way to recur them and are often blue so they protect their fog loops with counterspells. And since a fog loop counters so much of the other deck, they can affort to only blow counters on your discard.
- Assembling enough direct damage to take someone out through turbo-fog is a lot more difficult than it looks. Unless you're pure burn you just draw into more dead cards than the opponent and the opponent often needs to start countering direct damage stuff when they're below threshold making their life easier.
- And playing burn isn't actually an answer because Burn doesn't really have an answer to lifegain (and CoP red), and there's lifegain that gains you 10 for 2 mana in the format. It's actually pretty easy to sideboard a fog deck into a lifegain deck to put burn in the same situation creature decks are in vs. fogs.
So in theory - yes, in practice, NO. If playing through Fogs was viable Boros Bully and Flicker Tron would not be the other two stooges of the online meta alongside Delver. Flicker Tron's a fog deck, and Boros Bully has prismatic strands and hopes of buning someone out through a fog lock.
Mono-Black devotion, with discard, Gary, Corrupt and Pestilence seems to eat all these "top decks" for breakfast (from what I've seen in tourneys week after week), but for almost everyone else the fogs are a brick wall. I'm not sure why mono-b isn't more popular online. You don't actually need Oubliette for it to work or anything. You don't, and this is hilarious, even need Pestilence. I've even seen it beat top tier stuff on bare-bones budget builds without even Chittering Rats. But everyone else's in trouble.
And I know all this really well because I put together decks for rent for our gaming caffe. And whatever I put together practically needs to run about 3 Relic of Progenitus mainboard. Not to meta-blast certain decks (I don't actually want to brutally hose other decks that I rent, obviuosly, I like as many potential winners as I can muster). They need them to even have a chance against the recurring fogs. This has the unfortunate effect of hosing less silly graveyard strats, but if you "have a problem dealing with fogs", meaning you're G or W or somesuch, you don't have a problem so much as match losess. And not even Relic necessarily helps you ws a deck like Turbo-Fog Mill (we have a regular one in our meta), as making them not reccur some fogs doesn't prevent them from chaining them long enough to kill you. And even aggro decks use them to time walk the other guy (sometimes twice).
So when tweaking decks the question of wth does this deck do vs. fogs often seems more important than what it's actual game plan is and what else it is about. If I don't fog-proof a deck to the best of my ability, and there really isn't all that much you can do, the person renting it will have a really lousy time, might not come again and probably won't rent it again.
Which probably explains why there's so much Delver around. If you want to not get fogged down you pretty much need counterspells, and Delver happens to want to play them anyway so the Delver player doesn't need to ask themselves what to do vs. fogs. Just about everybody else does. And there's very few effective answers other than "just play Delver".
Preordain, Ponder, Brainstorm, Gush and the newly added Foil are the prime offenders.
Hands to the sky
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For the great Miss Y!
Fogs don't work that way. You get nothing from baiting them. You get nothing from holding back vs. them. There's no creatures that resist them at common or work through them. The other guy doesn't tap out on their turn to cast them. They usually don't require much mana investment. The other guy can actually play mad aggro and still blow you out with fogs. If the other guy is fogging you persistently you either have an answer in your deck and hope to draw it, and not have it countered, before the other guy can win, or you can scoop. And there's not that many answers to them at all, let alone in Pauper.
Fogs are tons worse than boardwipe as stated. I managed to win a game 2 today and the match vs. Tron through a Tangle with my RG Aggro creature deck because I boarded in 2 Flaring Pain and luckily managed to draw one in the opening 7 and drew a second on turn 3 and played it for the win. It doesn't happen often, it did today for a change. But that is it. There is NOTHING else that plays through it short of control cards. Maybe I need to start running 2 Moment's Peace in my SB if I can find the room.
Foil need to go for sure followed closely by Gush. And I hate to say it but Moment's Peace and Prismatic Strands need to go to. All of course unless we can get more creature utility/effectiveness down at common. Until then the format is going to devolve further into a blue/control/fog/lifegain/burn meta with the only creature decks being Elves and Stompy. Wizards needs to step in. They can go easy at first but they need to ban something and maybe even unban Invigorate as well. Sure Infect could make a comeback but with all the removal/counter/fog out there I think it would be enough.
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."
And I'd certainly prefer more appropriate dudes printed for pauper rather than unbans. Invigorate is pure insanity and would just speed up a deck that's plenty fast already increasing the need for more fogs. No reason to give people something to point a finger at and complain about how you need Moment's Peace to stop that. Infect works even now if you put it together correctly, and there's even more than one way to do it, its only problem is that it's completely dead to all the fogs everywhere. We have one here at the caffe, Mono Green, blazingly fast, works like a charm, doesn't need Invigorate... but folds to fogs.
I also think that Delver and Gurmag Angler are okay. A Delver will die to a Disfigure. A Gurmag will die to Journey to Nowhere. Many other creatures in the format are at/slightly below their power level. On a turn where you miss your land drop, Glint Hawk is a 0 mana 2/2 flier. Affinity plays 2 mana 4/4's or even zero mana 2/2's and 4/4's sometimes. Anything that's an Elf -while not individually powerful- is capable of causing a fission reaction if it's played with enough other Elves.
Even though these creatures see zero play despite being bonkers, look at Porcelain Legionnaire or Rogue Elephant.
Look at Kor Skyfisher. That creature is insane for 2 mana. It's "downside" is picking up and having to replay something that draws you a card.
What I think needs to be banned are a few things:
Gush
Foil
Ghostly Flicker and Displace (Are there more versions of this card? If so, ban them too.)
Those are the most problematic cards currently.
After that it would be:
Hexproof things. Hexproof is a cancer and the Mono-White Heroic version of it is a more fun, fair, interactive Voltron deck. Alternatively, just ban Ethereal Armor and Ancestral Mask. I don't care if Bogles isn't currently top tier, hexproof is a terrible mechanic.
Kiln Fiend and Nivix Cyclops. Bolt + Temur Battle Rage + Mutagenic Growth is 24 damage, 27 is the Bolt is fired at the face. If storm was banned, I don't see why this is allowed. There really is no reason to play any other aggro/combo deck when this exists.
Prismatic Strands. This card is insane.
All 3 and 4 mana land destruction spells. That mono green land destruction ramp deck is actually top tier, it just loses to Delver and doesn't see much play because of a sort of gentleman's agreement. The only thing the deck loses to is Delver, certain fast Stompy hands, and Elves. If you splashed a bit more red for Electrickery in the SB you could close that door too.
Infinite loops should be limited to 6 interactions per turn like Keyforge. All combo exists by accident and is a result of there being 20,000 Magic cards (6,300 something for Pauper). What people perceive as a pillar of the game in reality is just Francis from Pee-Wee Herman's Big Adventure playing uninteractive solitaire bullcrap. Combo players don't actually enjoy playing Magic, just abusing exploits and therefore their opinion doesn't count because they don't actually count as Magic players.
Other things that I don't think are huge problems currently but are things I wouldn't miss and the format would be better without:
Snuff Out and Mutagenic Growth.
Moment's Peace and fog cards in general.
The One Land Spy deck. Go play Yu-Gi-Oh someplace else.
Mulldrifter.
Spore Frog.
I'm sure I could be missing something. Feel free to nitpick my list or to suggest an addition to it.
Ignoring what Magic players say isn't the answer, it's listening to what they have to say and doing the exact opposite that's correct.
Angler and Delver aren't just slightly at the top of the pile, they're above the line at which you can price things if you want them to be crazy strong. Delver is in and off himself less of a problem - his problem is that there's a lot of incentive to play blue anyway and he just makes the choice of playing blue also come attached with a really over the top evasive aggro dude. Having access to the silly Masques block constructed suite of free counters and carddraw would be kinda alright if it didn't actually mean you also get to play a 3/2 on the first turn. Because not even colors who are meant to actually be really agressive and which can't actually protect that threat get to do so.
Angler is guilty of something else, and more of a legit ban target in and off himself. He just sets the bar for a common creature way too high and nothing else can go toe to toe with him without investing another card into it. Sure, he dies to certain spells, but so does everything else. He's just cheaper, a faster clock and/or has at least as much if not higher P/T as anything else you could run. This actually means that every creature has to be measured by whether it can attack into Angler (vast majority can't) and removal has to be judged by whether it can kill angler (not that many can). The huge problem with this is that the bar is absurdly high - even a free 4/4 can't attack into a Angler and can only chump Angler. Even a hyper pushed spell like Flame Slash can't kill Angler. 5/5 is huge game, in pauper or otherwise. A 4/5 is pretty nuts if it's cheap as it stonwalls 99% of really pushed commons, a 5/5 also kills everything and clocks one turn faster. It's not very likely they'll ever print something this huge that doesn't actually require much deckbuilding and that is this splashable, and for this reason it would be best for the meta if he wasn't legal. The 3/5 deathtouch zombie with delve and deathtouch, which costs one mana more, is pretty brutal but at least it doesn't clock you nearly as fast. And Angler is a black zombie on top of everything making him randomly immune to removal that pretty much nothing else is immune to - those cards aren't even played, or are routinely sided out or in the sideboard to begin with, because despite being brutal cards they randomly don't work against this one guy - who also happens to be an easily splashable undercosted biggest fatty in the format. Compare to Myr Enforcer who can come down for free - but dies to way more things, dies to artifact hate, clocks slower, trades with most other pushed creatures and requires a very specific deck to even be run in.
So yeah, if Tarmogoyf was downshifted to common it's a big question whether he'd see actual play because of Angler. That's how nasty Angler is, and pretty much nothing else is nearly as good, no matter how strong other things may look on paper. When you push the limits to a certain point a single point of power, toughness, color, creature type, number of colored mana symbols can mean a ton, and Angler just beats everybody on everything.
Without those two, both blue and black would be plenty strong, they just wouldn't have effortless access to the best evasive early threat and the best undercosted fatty, and this would make sense. Why should they, anyway? "I want my deck to be entirely fog-proof and have solid answers to combo" and "I want my deck to have the cutting edge in early threats and the best in undercosted fatties" shouldn't lead people to the same deck.
From a card advantage perspective, it's fairly easy to trade one reasonably costed removal spell for one Delver or Gurmag. The difficulty is in resolving it past Gush and Foil.
The removal that people play in this format is also weird and "fighting the last war" so to speak. People will play decks with 23 swamps in them and yet will choose to run Disfigure over Echoing Decay because it's one mana even though they'll have 7 lands on turn 10. People will run Doom Blades and then complain about Gurmag when Soul Reap exists. People will complain about white's lack of good removal despite having Journey to Nowhere, Oblivion Ring, and Unmake at their disposal.
Stompy players will complain about their Elves matchup even though they can run Wirewood Pride. I saw that card in a bulk foil box, checked to see if it was Pauper legal (it is), and then made a mental note to tell the Stompy player about the card and how good it would be on Vault Skirge or Silhana Ledgewalker.
When I told him about it it was followed by a flat refusal to even consider the card.
People are set in their ways. You don't need to be playing Terminate to kill Gurmag Angler. Augur of Bolas doesn't actually beat Stompy, Stompy players just refuse to tech against it because they're beholden to the year old xeroxed netdeck of it. The same is true about what removal people run. They'd rather play a 2 mana Doom Blade and lose instead of playing an extra mana for Murder or Oubliette or Unmake.
Half their deck will be X/1's and yet when you ask them why they're not running Porcelain Legionnaire they'll tell you it's because of Elecktrickery and Gut Shot.
I was mocked for running 4 main board Bojuka Bogs in my 23 land deck despite having more untapped mana sources than other midrange decks. People would rather lose the game than have a land come into play tapped.
"Turn one cycle Striped Riverwinder, go."
"Bojuka Bog, pass"
Delver and Gurmag at the end of the day are just normal creatures. They can die in a simple one for one exchange of cards. You pay 2-3 mana for Gurmag? I pay 3 mana for Oubliette and exile it. That's fun, fair, and interactive Magic. What makes them unstoppable are Gush & Foil.
Ignoring what Magic players say isn't the answer, it's listening to what they have to say and doing the exact opposite that's correct.
Delver is an aggro creature, sure, and dies to plenty of things, but he gives a rather effortless clock to the color of universal and effortless control. And it really wouldn't be the same if Blue didn't have him as an option, because their countermagic wouldn't be protecting a 1 mana 3/2 evasive guy. There's really nothing at all like him and if blue had nothing else going for it at all, and just had him, blue would still be played because nobody else has a 3/2 flying threat for 1 mana with virtually no downside. If blue was forced to play "the next best thing", blue would be an order of magnitude less out of control. What would it even play? All the other serious Aggro dudes in blue cost two mana for two power, and I'm not even sure there's one which also has 2 toughness without a serious downside. And those are all good, great or fine enough considering what else blue has at it's disposal. So no, banning Delver would actually be meaningful and he's not just a random dude.
Angler is even more guilty of this because he's of a size people usually ramp to be able to throw down, or even attempt to cheat into play via reanimation. And he comes down for barely any mana. And since he's so splashable he essentially gives any color a huge fatso on top of what that color brings to the table. List out all the removal that can kill him, and then list out all the removal that can kill anything else remotely playable in the format but can't kill him. List out everything that can attack into him, but then list out everything that can attack into pretty much anything else that's playable in the format but not into him. That sort of size and resilience is supposed to cost you something, and on him it doesn't cost nearly enough. Without him the whole pauper metagame would change in a moment because there suddenly wouldn't be a reanimation-size guy played in every other deck with no reanimation. He's warping the meta because stuff either can't attack into him, can't trade with him, takes way more setup to get on the field, dies to way more things than he does or all of that at once.
I mean I just played a match of some random GB pile vs. a UB reanimator for about 10 matches. I was mana screwed every game with the GB pile. The other guy would go through his motions and reanimate a serpent. I would just, while mana screwed, with no serious shennanigans, plop down an Angler. Stalemate between a deck which actually did it's thing and a deck which just has a stupid card in it. Same matchup - he goes through the motions to reanimate a quick serpent... and then he just plays a same-size dude for nothing with no hassle on the same turn. He looks at his two 5/5's and asks me "Why do I even bother with reanimation?" and it's a legit question - he had to build his deck around stuff to be able to get a hard-to-kill 5/5 guy into play... but anyone at all can get a hard-to-kill 5/5 into play, so why bother? Another game he does his thing, casts Exhume. I discard Angler in response. He can reanimate either his Serpent, his Ulamog's Crusher or his Angler. If he went for the serpent - no dice, I can trade for it fine. If he goes for the Angler - no dice I can trade for it fine. If he goes for the Ulamog's Crusher I just Snuff Out or Doom Blade which I have in hand. I was simply playing a retarded good reanimation target in a deck with no way to reanimate it because I can effortlessly play it, and so can everybody.
I mean we started running Dragon Wings, Fangs and stuff and Rush of Knowledge in decks because wth, if you can just splash black (off a prism or whatever really) and have any means to discard (and you can discard to Foil, Faithless Looting, Mongrel, whathave you), it'll effortlessly give you a stronger Angler to beat everybody else's Anglers up. And the random Rush of Knowledge will draw you 7 to reward you for playing a dude you can play in just about any deck anyway. And unless the other guy is an evasive-go wide thing, you're kind of likely to plop the Angler down, cause a stalemate and actually get to cast the Rush.
And on top of everything if you're black you have multiple tools vs. go-wide. Pretty much the color best equipped to deal with it, really, between Nausea, Evincar's Justice, Cuombajj Witches and Pestilence black tears small dudes to shreds. How convenient that you also have the best midrange-curvetopper guy who's only real issue is that he himself doesn't do much against evasive go-wide and can get cuhmped. And he's also not actually midrange or a curvetopper because he comes down about as fast as any old aggro dude, he's just the size of a reanimation target. And black could use plenty of other things in that spot, it really doesn't need to be THAT stupid.
So no, without those two clown cards the pauper meta would be very different and much healthier. They don't actually work against catch-all answers to creature strats, they don't work through fogs, a select number of removal that kills everything also hits them, they just tangibly reduce the number of viable creatures as nothing can measure up to them, and give decks and strats which have no place rushing you with with that kind of aggro the means to do it for barely any effort.
Bans: Gush, Foil, Delver, Angler, Moment's Peace, Tangle, Prismatic Strands, Quirion Ranger, Ghostly Flicker, Displace, Spellstutter Sprite, Ethereal Armor
Restricted to singletons: Gitaxian Probe, Mutagenic Growth, Snuff Out, Evincar's Justice, Fireblast, Battle Screech, Birchlore Rangers, Mulldrifter, Stonehorn Dignitary, Kor Skyfisher, Chittering Rats, Spore Frog, Thoughtcast, Ancestral Mask and Firebolt.
New Cards or Downshifts:
A true man-land (to battle the ridiculous number of Edicts)
A creature that cannot be sacrificed
A creature that cannot be countered
A creature that has protection from instants
A creature that if forced to discard can enter the battlefield for free
More playable Haste creatures
Again I'm skewed against Blue, Fogs and Control and biased for creature based decks (that aren't weenie, Elves or Infect)
I see this format becoming "solved". Before too much longer there will only be about 6 to 8 decks that can compete at the highest level with a bunch of others locked out looking in. I don't want a stale format and that is the way I believe its heading.
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."
I'd probably keep the rest of the suggested restrictions open, because banning the stuff on the banlist would seriously affect the power of the things on that restricted list. I'd likely ban Fireblast, though. Red's plenty good in eternal formats and doesn't need to be that strong. It's banned in 1v1 commander and that's a 20 lives eternal format, and it makes you really appreciate that particular ban.
As for Foil, its got to go. Looks like your free to play your creature on the draw turn one or even on the play turn 2? Heck no, this piece of cheat counters your creature for free then feeds the Anglers out there. If Angler goes people will just switch to Hooting Mandrills or Sultai Scavenger to keep the degeneracy going. Foil is rotten and blue has far more than enough counter to deal with creatures in this format.
I'd be fine with a Fireblast ban as well. The reason I listed so many singleton restrictions is that people want to play these spells. Well go right ahead, just understand that you can use only one of them.
As for Tangle, it would be picked up by players the second Moments Peace was banned as a replacement and there wouldn't be much lost. They need to look to Fog and its variants. Locking down a full board of creatures for 2 full turns is ridiculously unfair and unfun at such a ridiculously low mana investment. There are other less powerful options for the turbo fog people out there. And yes, I need to add Spore Frog to my restricted list.
Frankly I'd be happy with a small fraction of this stuff banned to start, but the way its going WotC doesn't care and won't do a thing. A ban or two isn't going to anything to the meta at all.
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."
If that doesn't happen, who the heck knows what will happen. WotC and they ain't talkin'.
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."
I've only been playing Magic for a year, and exclusively MTGO Pauper with physical cards. So arguments like, "Blue and Black shouldn't have aggro creatures" or conversely, "Blue has always been OP since the start of the game, that's just how it is and it should remain as such, the only reason I play is to break the game with Gush." kind of fall on deaf ears to me. My favorite deck is MBC, I've top foured a Pauper 1k with it. One of my favorite cards for constructed Pauper is Oubliette, which is a black Oblivion Ring. I go out of my way to put cards like Utopia Vow into my cube. No joke, Banding is my favorite game mechanic in Magic since it's so thematic and novel.
So cards that do things out of their color don't really bother me. I feel that I have an an outsider's perspective on MtG since I never grew up with it.
What I view as degenerate isn't swinging in for lethal with a 3 power flier, it's breaking the game with combos, abusing Ghostly Flicker, land destruction, hex proof, etc. I also don't particularly care that someone trying to cheat things onto the table with Exhume is equaled or exceeded by someone with a less cheaty version of the deck. I see that as a good thing.
Gurmag Angler dies to edicts. It dies to to numerous targeted removal spells. It's somewhat more vulnerable to bounce than the average creature. It just doesn't die to a handful of marquee black removal spells that people won't give up for whatever reason. Soul Reap is a fine spell, just play it. Oubliette, Journey, and O-Ring gobble it up. There are some new spells in Ravnica Allegiance that kill Gurmag.
I'd also like to put forth another idea:
It's a good thing when tempo and midrange strategies (Not counting Gush&Foil) are dominant and OP because it forces everyone to play fun, fair, interactive Magic with each other. When a Countermagic based deck is OP, it keeps the level of degeneracy down (Not counting Gush&Foil).
I want to make the disclaimer that Gush and Foil go too far, but yeah.
It's a good thing that Ulamog's Crusher isn't actually that good and you have to actually earn its continued existence. It's a good thing that Big Dumb Green Idiots Turn Everything Sideways On Turn Three or even worse BDGITESOT3+Land Destruction isn't top tier.
So midrange/tempo kinds of decks having tools like Gurmag and Delver are good for the format I feel. I don't really care that Gurmag simply eats Affinity's 4/4's. I'm glad it's that way actually. I'm glad that burn can't really kill off a Gurmag easily, good, serves you right for playing a mindless deck.
If the format actually had a cheap red burn spell that was powerful enough and could kill Gurmag easily, then it would be worse off because then less interactive, Yu-Gi-Oh style decks would be more powerful. Sure, Skred exists but you have to kind of have to earn that and it only works against creatures.
If you look at the way Flicker-based Tron decks, Izzet Blitz, Elves, Affinity, Bogles, Land Destruction, etc. work then how can you complain about someone getting a vanilla 5/5 for 2-3 mana a few turns in?
In short, I see creatures swinging for combat damage normally and things like doom blades and counterspells, as "Fun, fair, interactive, good 'ole vanilla Magic". And as such, I recognize that there are going to be certain versions of these cards (say, Gurmag and Delver) that are the best ones of the bunch. But since some of the best cards of the bunch are vanilla cards, then I don't care that they're OP. If fun, fair, interactive, vanilla Magic is OP then that's a good thing in my eyes. It beats losing to ******* Storm.
Ignoring what Magic players say isn't the answer, it's listening to what they have to say and doing the exact opposite that's correct.