Print a lackluster anti-counter card and all the blue mages who are still pining for the days when you could run 20 counterpell.deck at every tournament come out and start decrying the color dead. Counterspells should never be amazing cards that are the foundation of the best decks in standard. There should never be more than 1 good and a few mediocre counterspells in standard, because it's awful for the health of the game and always has been.
Ever wonder why Hearthstone has literally only one card that does this and you can see it coming a mile away? Game design is why.
Funny how red players don't go into convulsions every time they see an obstinate baloth.
Control decks will kill this with spot removal, yawn, and move on. Stop freaking out.
I hate being the one defending blue as if its a turf war, but none of this makes sense.
Counter spells are "bad design" because you can't see follow the simple procedure of:
1. Look to see if there is open blue mana
2. Count the mana
3. Run a mental list of possible cards to cast with that mana
4. Prioritize value of cards in your hand
5. Play less valuable cards or a good card you have in multiples to bait out the counterspell.
6. Play your real threat after opponent spends mana. Or stack your hand with threats to barge through the counterspells a turn later
7. If you lost anyway either your deck is worse, or you drew badly/your opponent drew better
Problem?
Also Red players have no reason to go into "convulsions" - as far as I recall Mono red decks of some sort of other were always more or less competitive in the game.
When your argument boils down to, "counters are bad if you're a far better player than your opponent is," your argument is bad. Your opponent has a gigantic advantage in knowing what spells are going to kill him and which spells he can afford to let resolve, because he knows his own deck a lot better than you do.
Not that it's been a thing for awhile, but draw-go is probably the most toxic unfun archetype ever spawned by this game, and it's very much a good thing that WOTC makes sure it's killed dead.
I miss the days when people could play with whatever they wanted to without the player base whining and complaining that having their cards countered is "cancerous" or unfun.
I miss control because of the time period of magic it represents for me. When everybody didn't send wizards mad tweets and found ways to beat decks they didn't like outside of "ban it" "needs to be banned " "ruins my fun".
Old school control was "unfun" because you lost on turn 6 but they didn't actually kill you until turn 50. Also, if we're talking pre-Mirrodin, you simply didn't beat control in that era of MTG. If you weren't playing a Counterspell-based control deck, you were either playing a completely broken combo deck that was destined for banning or your plan against control was, "hope that they forgot your deck exists." If they made any effort towards beating what you were playing, you were getting rolled.
What happens if you activate the Crew ability of a vehicle and then, before the ability resolves, the vehicle becomes a copy of something that doesn't have a P/T? Like say it becomes a copy of an animated land. What happens when the Crew ability resolves and turns it into a creature? Does it still use the P/T printed on the card despite the copy effect?
That's just false. Red-deck-wins and white weenie were usually very competetive, if not outright winning the World Championship on any given year.
RDW and White Weenie were "competitive" in the sense that they could occasionally win a tournament in the event that all the Counterspell players basically forgot they existed. If the control players respected these decks at all they got completely crushed. When Counterspell was legal, it was so dominant that occasionally all the control players would start taking out all their anti-aggro cards to gain an edge in the Counterspell mirror. U/W would take out Wrath of God and StP, etc. When enough people did that, RDW could steal a tournament. After that everyone put their anti-aggro cards back in and RDW was completely dead.
I started playing when Type II was Urza/Masques. Counterspell was totally dominant and it just got worse and worse. If your opponent showed up with Replenish, or Accelerated Blue, or Psychatog, or Wake, or U/W Decree of Justice control, and you weren't playing Counterspell yourself, you could basically pack it in, you were screwed. There was years of MTG where after about round 3 of any tournament, the best opening hand you could hope for was 7 lands, because that was the best hand in the control mirror and that's all that would be left.
Counterspell. It's clearly not the most broken card they've ever printed, but when you consider how long it remained in print, it's by far their biggest mistake ever. While Counterspell was legal, the only time a hard-grind control deck wasn't by far the best deck in all formats was when something was about to get banned.
Most decks in Legacy can't function with CMC 1 turned off, and aside from Abrupt Decay they can't remove this either, as pretty much all other removal played in Legacy also costs 1. This is very much counter it or immediately lose.
But how is this really better than Chalice of the Void with X = 1?
Some decks will like the body, but the Chalice is arguably even harder to remove
(and much easier to cast for values of 0 and 1).
It's Chalices 5-8. That's a big deal.
The problem with Chalice decks is that Legacy is absurdly mana-starved so your deck basically has to be half one-drops. If you're on the Chalice plan, you can't play 20+ 1-drops so any draw without Chalice is generally awful. This adds a massive amount of consistency to the plan.
Most decks in Legacy can't function with CMC 1 turned off, and aside from Abrupt Decay they can't remove this either, as pretty much all other removal played in Legacy also costs 1. This is very much counter it or immediately lose.
If you run four of each recruiter then any recruiter plus Food Chain casts two Hornet Queens. You can also use the four red Recuiters to generate mana then use the four white Recuiters to loop Sawtooth Loons until you find Emrakul. I doubt it's good enough for Legacy but it might be worth looking at.
If you use Ertai's Meddling to counter a creature spell when Containment Priest is in play, will the creature actually make it into play when the last counter is removed and the spell resolves? The copy Ertai's Meddling creates wasn't cast, but it's a copy of a spell that was, and I'm not sure if, uh, "castedness" is something that the copy can actually copy.
Man, this was so close to making Tooth & Nail a playable Modern deck. One more point of toughness on the 4/3 would have done it. But as it is now, dies to Lightning Bolt, so nope.
If I have a 4/4 Lambholt Pacifist and my opponent has a Watchdog, can my Lambholt Pacifist attack? Would it be any different if the effect said, "tapped creatures get -1/-0"?
Like it not Trump is highly likely to win at this point. He's even getting evangelicals to vote for him in the primaries and there's basically no way he can lose if this demographic also votes for him in the general election. Democrats are getting really low turnout, and a pretty significant percentage of Sanders supporters absolutely despise Hilary Clinton and will not vote for her in the general election. The youth vote and the evangelical vote are the two biggest question marks on either side and the Democrats are not going to win if young people stay home and evangelicals show up. The Norpoth model predicts a 97% chance of a Trump victory.
Trump's threatened trade war is the scariest part of his candidacy and that's not a fight we're going to win even if the numbers say we can. A trade war with China would be an absolute disaster. In China, the political party responsible for a >50 million person genocide is still in power. They will have no problems convincing their population to endure the hardship of a simple economic depression. That's most certainly not the case over here, and we'll be throwing in the towel and looking like idiots the moment things start getting really bad.
Flip jace replaced jtms in vintage. That should tell you something about its power level
Brainstorm and Ponder are restricted in Vintage which means Jace's card filtering is much stronger. In Legacy you already have Brainstorm and Ponder to trade cards you don't need for random ones off the top, Jace is redundant. Also in Vintage you have lots more mana available to you than you do in Legacy, in Legacy you can't afford to drop a two mana card that dies to Lightning Bolt without giving you anything. The 1-mana tempo loss is a huge deal in Legacy.
I'm curious, how would this be handled in a tournament if the game is at a point where you can't get away from the loop anymore? Like, for example, let's say Player A has executed the Worldgorger Dragon/Animate Dead combo and generates 3 quadrillion mana, then moves Animate Dead to Ambassador Laquatus and announces they're putting a quadrillion mill activations on the stack. Their intent is to kill Player B with Ancestral Recall when B's library empties. But it turns out Player B has Gaea's Blessing in their deck, so this kill will only work if the Blessing randomly ends up in the bottom 3 cards. Player A announces they will simply wait until it ends up there then cast Ancestral. It's not slow play because A isn't repeating anything, but there's no way to shortcut through the loop. It's also not an infinite loop, so you can't call the game a draw due to there being an infinite loop.
This isn't some convoluted situation with cards nobody plays, either. All these cards see regular Vintage play, and the Ambassador Laquatus kill with Animate Dead/WGD was a top tier Vintage deck back in the day and it's certainly conceivable that someone could dig it up and play it in a tournament.
When your argument boils down to, "counters are bad if you're a far better player than your opponent is," your argument is bad. Your opponent has a gigantic advantage in knowing what spells are going to kill him and which spells he can afford to let resolve, because he knows his own deck a lot better than you do.
Old school control was "unfun" because you lost on turn 6 but they didn't actually kill you until turn 50. Also, if we're talking pre-Mirrodin, you simply didn't beat control in that era of MTG. If you weren't playing a Counterspell-based control deck, you were either playing a completely broken combo deck that was destined for banning or your plan against control was, "hope that they forgot your deck exists." If they made any effort towards beating what you were playing, you were getting rolled.
RDW and White Weenie were "competitive" in the sense that they could occasionally win a tournament in the event that all the Counterspell players basically forgot they existed. If the control players respected these decks at all they got completely crushed. When Counterspell was legal, it was so dominant that occasionally all the control players would start taking out all their anti-aggro cards to gain an edge in the Counterspell mirror. U/W would take out Wrath of God and StP, etc. When enough people did that, RDW could steal a tournament. After that everyone put their anti-aggro cards back in and RDW was completely dead.
I started playing when Type II was Urza/Masques. Counterspell was totally dominant and it just got worse and worse. If your opponent showed up with Replenish, or Accelerated Blue, or Psychatog, or Wake, or U/W Decree of Justice control, and you weren't playing Counterspell yourself, you could basically pack it in, you were screwed. There was years of MTG where after about round 3 of any tournament, the best opening hand you could hope for was 7 lands, because that was the best hand in the control mirror and that's all that would be left.
It's Chalices 5-8. That's a big deal.
The problem with Chalice decks is that Legacy is absurdly mana-starved so your deck basically has to be half one-drops. If you're on the Chalice plan, you can't play 20+ 1-drops so any draw without Chalice is generally awful. This adds a massive amount of consistency to the plan.
Trump's threatened trade war is the scariest part of his candidacy and that's not a fight we're going to win even if the numbers say we can. A trade war with China would be an absolute disaster. In China, the political party responsible for a >50 million person genocide is still in power. They will have no problems convincing their population to endure the hardship of a simple economic depression. That's most certainly not the case over here, and we'll be throwing in the towel and looking like idiots the moment things start getting really bad.
Brainstorm and Ponder are restricted in Vintage which means Jace's card filtering is much stronger. In Legacy you already have Brainstorm and Ponder to trade cards you don't need for random ones off the top, Jace is redundant. Also in Vintage you have lots more mana available to you than you do in Legacy, in Legacy you can't afford to drop a two mana card that dies to Lightning Bolt without giving you anything. The 1-mana tempo loss is a huge deal in Legacy.
This isn't some convoluted situation with cards nobody plays, either. All these cards see regular Vintage play, and the Ambassador Laquatus kill with Animate Dead/WGD was a top tier Vintage deck back in the day and it's certainly conceivable that someone could dig it up and play it in a tournament.