Wow, I had heard of this format. But to see so many people into it. It's amazing.
I actually played 93/94 in 1993/1994. LOL! I'm sure many people did here too as well.
It's weird how theres so many different variations.
How my group played in 93/94
Strip mine x 1
Fallen Empires Yes
Mana Burn Obviously.
Recall x 1
Workshop x 4
Maze x 4
Time Vault x 1
Shaharazad x 1
Strip mine was by gentlemen's agreement x1. With 4 it's simply a different type of 93/94 format though. Wizards throughout the years nerfed land destruction. I've played with Strip Mine x 4. It's definitely brutal. But I respect that land destruction was an incredibly powerful archetype in that era with stone rain, ice storm, sink hole.
Nobody in my group actually played with workshop x4, which would have been a vintage mechanic, but things were alot less powerful in 93/94. What are you going to do with all that mana? Summon a Colossus of Sardia?
Maze was x4, because it came at the expense of mana generators. Powerful anti creature to be sure. But with the land destruction of that era, not OP.
If you played control, you had to have a response to lands on some level.
Time Vault --tbh nobody in my group played this. They erratta'ed it and then un-errata'd it.
Shaharazad. There is no way I would play a guy with 4 Shaharazads in his/her deck. Esp back then I played UW control. It's bad enough feldons cane could reset counterspell wars of attrition let alone worrying about Sharazads on top of that.
As is often the case most people don't actually know what a Mary Sue is, only that being one is wrong. So let's look at all the reasonable definitions of a Mary Sue.
An idealized seemingly perfect character. You start off with "other than her flaws she's perfect" so it's hard to even start. She doesn't trust others and shouldn't be trusted. This alone is enough to mark off this troupe.
An author insert character. Very much a no as she was created as a troupe, just not this troupe.
An individual whom can perform feats beyond what their background settings imply. Her background settings come equipped with a deus ex that is meant to solve her problems when her normal powers can't. So...no but only on the technicality that they gave her a truly broken background.
Generally the best and loved by all. Nope, not even close. She was heading there but then she messed up with Chandra on Kaladesh and Jace got his memories back. So only Gideon even likes her a little and he is the quintessential "I like and trust everyone" character.
Upstages the protagonist. Again a hard nope. She was saved when she was the protagonist on Innistrad and didnt upstage anyone on Kaladesh or Amonkeht.
Poorly developed character lacking in realism. This is close. But she underwent actual character development in Dominaria and might undergo further in Rav so I'd say no again.
So with Lily failing to meet a single definition of a Mary Sue I find is impossible to agree with the premise that she is in fact a Mary Sue.
+1
Exactly. People shouldn't start pointing out Mary Sues just because thats the vanilla thing to hate on this month or year.
That just takes away all the meaning.
Are you serious? Look red is and has always been the fundamental clock in whatever format it's legal in.
Damage is cumulative, meaning the "inevitability" factor is greater for your classic burn deck than every other deck.
Rather than cry about it, let me just say the burn deck is the first step of deck tier you have to be able to overcome.
It's the first and primary barrier. Like others have stated, you cant spend the first three turns doing junk.
No I haven't played arena. You got me there. But I've been playing magic since 1994, and since that time, understanding why your deck loses to burn means to move from the beginner to the intermediate levels of magic. Magic is and basically always has been the same. Bless its heart.
Burn decks are built to be weak to card advantage. Once they blow their load, they're basically top decking. Sometimes decks with simple life gain could defeat it.
Burn decks are fast, but combo is generally faster. The classic meta is Aggro beats Control, Control beats Combo, Combo beats aggro.
If your combo loses to Aggro, its not that combo now sucks, its that perhaps the combo you built is a little too fragile.
Burn decks exhibit a kind of tempo. If you disrupt their tempo, you can really disrupt their strategy. Beating the clock means that burn now has to address your threats, which changes your game.
There is a reason why "dies to bolt" was a meme a few years ago. The meta defining burn magic indeed meant that creatures with 3 toughness or less would in the meta be removed by a single burn spell. On the other hand, if burn is spending two cards to remove one of your threats, they're going to lose in the long run. The kicker is though, burn is only going to respond to your threats if you can kill them faster.
Disruption or Card discard disrupts the tempo of burn decks as well. Dont go for things like thoughtseize though.
Finally if you really want to know the weaknesses of the deck, go play it yourself.
you'd be better off making a list of reserve list cards that see play in legacy.
Look at this list of complete crap. So much of the reserve list is just unplayable junk.
What's more, some of the reserve list is just bannned period in legacy (like black lotus or balance)
Basically once you add in the 10 duals, take out the reserve list cards so good they're banned in legacy, there isn't much else that's relevant.
I suppose tabernacle of PV is a decent hoser.
But what this stands for is the proposition that the reserve list isn't actually that big of a problem for legacy. It's the duals and thats about it.
I play legacy in my kitchen table group. We actually have something similar to your goals---namely cheap legacy legal decks that play against each other.
Here's what my group has (with some modifications for your purposes)
The monocolored versions of some of these days may not be be competitive in tournament. But if you wanted fun cheap legacy decks that play well off each other this worked for me.
I build legacy decks most as homebrews. My kitchen table format is legacy legal, so its a blast.
But I play without duals, using proxies or other modern legal mana fixers.
In other words, I definitely crack the dual lands for value and play with what I have.
Personally I enjoy it like this because I get to experience legacy decks without worrying about damaging or losing dual lands.
When you're ready to buy them back, do so. But thats just my take.
I think the main culprit (as mentioned right above) is reprinting the hell out of the cards (I remember Future Sight used to be a $3 card... now's it is around 80 cents). The other culprit is mass production.
But it's not just the reprinting of cards...
It's the expectation that the cards will be reprinted. Wizards has gone absolutely reprint crazy. It lowers the barrier to entry of magic.
But it also makes people less committed to their collections and their decks.
If I open a shiny new mythic planeswalker in a new set, should I hold onto it or sell it? Wizards has not in fact reprinted it (obviously since its the first time coming out), but the decision to sell is based on what i expect wizards to do. There's no question these days you should expect Wizards to reprint based on their recent actions.
If that's the case, then there's no point holding onto my new Serra planeswalker(as an example). She's just going to be one of six different editions.
When I play burning reanimator, I like being able to pressure my opponents with raw damage.
But Bogardan Hellkite's ability to clear out weenie or planeswalkers is great too.
It comes down to the reserve list. People hate the reserve list because they think it makes MTG too expensive.
Ok fine.
So they go the complete opposite direction with Modern Standard. Reprint modern staples into oblivion, vastly increase the size of the print runs for new product. Result: It makes magic cheaper. Players have been begging for this for years because they complain the cost of magic is too high. Now the cost of magic has never been cheaper. Relative to other years, the price of standard and Modern is cheaper than its ever been. There is so much product floating around. So players go what they wanted---cheaper magic which theoretically should lower the barrier to entry for MTG.
Here are the unintended side effects which I argued 5 years ago.
1. Loss of Allure of MTG as a collectible.
2. New mtg cards no longer appreciate in value. Market will begin adjusting with this realization.
3. Permanently lower EVs for all new sets based on extra supply and reasons 1-2, 4-5 (topic of the thread)
4. Lingering expectation that your cards to be reprinted and therefore drop in value over time. Pushes ppl to sell instead of holding onto cards.
5. Overreliance on the player aspect of the MTG market to pick up the slack in sales.
MTG has always been a collectible card game. Players and Collectors both. If you make MTG all about the game, without making it appealing for collectors,
your business model is heavily dependent on your new playerbase not getting bored. Sure MTG is cheaper for new entrants. But if you're pushing out collectors, you better hope you can keep those players invested in just the game aspect and not moving onto fortnite or life.
MTG grading convention is that signed cards are DAMAGED or Heavily Played, regardless of condition.
I would be upset if I bought LP and received a signed card.
I don't care about what the debate is. The debate, if there is any is, "what the actual condition of the card is."
MTG ppl LOVE to get caught up in missing the point.
Don't get caught up in that debate. That's not the point.
The point is that if a seller passes a signed card to you, its just that much harder to move.
When other people obey the convention that signed = HP, then now you have to move your "LP" card as an HP card instead of a LP card.
Alternatively you can take on the burden of convincing others you are selling an LP card.
Maybe you can do it. Maybe you wont have any problem getting that done.
But they shouldn't have been able to pass that burden onto you.
When Curse took over, some people just didn't like it, didn't want to be associated with it. Whether or not it was just Curse, or a combination of other factors, bottom line is Curse didn't help matters.
When Curse took over, half the forum users could no longer log in under their old usernames.
With apologies to the mods (and Curse), if I'm being generous, it was single most poorly managed 'Migration from Thing A to Thing B' I have ever witnessed. Users were effectively kicked out. Trying to resolve it just left users confused, then frustrated, then they stopped coming altogether. I almost did myself and I've been here forever.
They never came back. Here we are.
Pretty simple, really.
Fully agree. I lost my old account, couldn't log back in.
The identity associated with hundreds if not thousands of posts was lost.
When that was lost, I lost my tie to this site. On top of that a few other forums were removed or altered.
It just seemed like it was time to move on with my life.
That I still post here at all, is just a distant recognition of an old habit. It doesn't help that it feels like there isn't much to come back to.
I don't blame the mods. As far as I know, the mods have zero financial incentive to do anything.
Why should they put the onus on themselves to help curse.com make best it can be for them?
I didn't think much of Elesh Norn until I saw her in action. Amazing! Even as a reanimation target with so many tough competitors, she had her uses.
Then the judge promo came out with awesome flavor. Same feeling though. I couldnt justify the cost.
I actually played 93/94 in 1993/1994. LOL! I'm sure many people did here too as well.
It's weird how theres so many different variations.
How my group played in 93/94
Strip mine x 1
Fallen Empires Yes
Mana Burn Obviously.
Recall x 1
Workshop x 4
Maze x 4
Time Vault x 1
Shaharazad x 1
Strip mine was by gentlemen's agreement x1. With 4 it's simply a different type of 93/94 format though. Wizards throughout the years nerfed land destruction. I've played with Strip Mine x 4. It's definitely brutal. But I respect that land destruction was an incredibly powerful archetype in that era with stone rain, ice storm, sink hole.
Nobody in my group actually played with workshop x4, which would have been a vintage mechanic, but things were alot less powerful in 93/94. What are you going to do with all that mana? Summon a Colossus of Sardia?
Maze was x4, because it came at the expense of mana generators. Powerful anti creature to be sure. But with the land destruction of that era, not OP.
If you played control, you had to have a response to lands on some level.
Time Vault --tbh nobody in my group played this. They erratta'ed it and then un-errata'd it.
Shaharazad. There is no way I would play a guy with 4 Shaharazads in his/her deck. Esp back then I played UW control. It's bad enough feldons cane could reset counterspell wars of attrition let alone worrying about Sharazads on top of that.
+1
Exactly. People shouldn't start pointing out Mary Sues just because thats the vanilla thing to hate on this month or year.
That just takes away all the meaning.
Damage is cumulative, meaning the "inevitability" factor is greater for your classic burn deck than every other deck.
Rather than cry about it, let me just say the burn deck is the first step of deck tier you have to be able to overcome.
It's the first and primary barrier. Like others have stated, you cant spend the first three turns doing junk.
No I haven't played arena. You got me there. But I've been playing magic since 1994, and since that time, understanding why your deck loses to burn means to move from the beginner to the intermediate levels of magic. Magic is and basically always has been the same. Bless its heart.
Burn decks are built to be weak to card advantage. Once they blow their load, they're basically top decking. Sometimes decks with simple life gain could defeat it.
Burn decks are fast, but combo is generally faster. The classic meta is Aggro beats Control, Control beats Combo, Combo beats aggro.
If your combo loses to Aggro, its not that combo now sucks, its that perhaps the combo you built is a little too fragile.
Burn decks exhibit a kind of tempo. If you disrupt their tempo, you can really disrupt their strategy. Beating the clock means that burn now has to address your threats, which changes your game.
There is a reason why "dies to bolt" was a meme a few years ago. The meta defining burn magic indeed meant that creatures with 3 toughness or less would in the meta be removed by a single burn spell. On the other hand, if burn is spending two cards to remove one of your threats, they're going to lose in the long run. The kicker is though, burn is only going to respond to your threats if you can kill them faster.
Disruption or Card discard disrupts the tempo of burn decks as well. Dont go for things like thoughtseize though.
Finally if you really want to know the weaknesses of the deck, go play it yourself.
Look at this list of complete crap. So much of the reserve list is just unplayable junk.
What's more, some of the reserve list is just bannned period in legacy (like black lotus or balance)
Basically once you add in the 10 duals, take out the reserve list cards so good they're banned in legacy, there isn't much else that's relevant.
I suppose tabernacle of PV is a decent hoser.
But what this stands for is the proposition that the reserve list isn't actually that big of a problem for legacy. It's the duals and thats about it.
Here's what my group has (with some modifications for your purposes)
Red: Legacy Burn Deck
Black: Reanimator
Green: Infect
Blue: Monoblue delver
White: Stoneblade
The monocolored versions of some of these days may not be be competitive in tournament. But if you wanted fun cheap legacy decks that play well off each other this worked for me.
But I play without duals, using proxies or other modern legal mana fixers.
In other words, I definitely crack the dual lands for value and play with what I have.
Personally I enjoy it like this because I get to experience legacy decks without worrying about damaging or losing dual lands.
When you're ready to buy them back, do so. But thats just my take.
But it's not just the reprinting of cards...
It's the expectation that the cards will be reprinted. Wizards has gone absolutely reprint crazy. It lowers the barrier to entry of magic.
But it also makes people less committed to their collections and their decks.
If I open a shiny new mythic planeswalker in a new set, should I hold onto it or sell it? Wizards has not in fact reprinted it (obviously since its the first time coming out), but the decision to sell is based on what i expect wizards to do. There's no question these days you should expect Wizards to reprint based on their recent actions.
If that's the case, then there's no point holding onto my new Serra planeswalker(as an example). She's just going to be one of six different editions.
When I play burning reanimator, I like being able to pressure my opponents with raw damage.
But Bogardan Hellkite's ability to clear out weenie or planeswalkers is great too.
Edit:
Didnt see you already had it in your deck.
Ok fine.
So they go the complete opposite direction with Modern Standard. Reprint modern staples into oblivion, vastly increase the size of the print runs for new product. Result: It makes magic cheaper. Players have been begging for this for years because they complain the cost of magic is too high. Now the cost of magic has never been cheaper. Relative to other years, the price of standard and Modern is cheaper than its ever been. There is so much product floating around. So players go what they wanted---cheaper magic which theoretically should lower the barrier to entry for MTG.
Here are the unintended side effects which I argued 5 years ago.
1. Loss of Allure of MTG as a collectible.
2. New mtg cards no longer appreciate in value. Market will begin adjusting with this realization.
3. Permanently lower EVs for all new sets based on extra supply and reasons 1-2, 4-5 (topic of the thread)
4. Lingering expectation that your cards to be reprinted and therefore drop in value over time. Pushes ppl to sell instead of holding onto cards.
5. Overreliance on the player aspect of the MTG market to pick up the slack in sales.
MTG has always been a collectible card game. Players and Collectors both. If you make MTG all about the game, without making it appealing for collectors,
your business model is heavily dependent on your new playerbase not getting bored. Sure MTG is cheaper for new entrants. But if you're pushing out collectors, you better hope you can keep those players invested in just the game aspect and not moving onto fortnite or life.
Can I ask what you picked up?
I would be upset if I bought LP and received a signed card.
I don't care about what the debate is. The debate, if there is any is, "what the actual condition of the card is."
MTG ppl LOVE to get caught up in missing the point.
Don't get caught up in that debate. That's not the point.
The point is that if a seller passes a signed card to you, its just that much harder to move.
When other people obey the convention that signed = HP, then now you have to move your "LP" card as an HP card instead of a LP card.
Alternatively you can take on the burden of convincing others you are selling an LP card.
Maybe you can do it. Maybe you wont have any problem getting that done.
But they shouldn't have been able to pass that burden onto you.
Fully agree. I lost my old account, couldn't log back in.
The identity associated with hundreds if not thousands of posts was lost.
When that was lost, I lost my tie to this site. On top of that a few other forums were removed or altered.
It just seemed like it was time to move on with my life.
That I still post here at all, is just a distant recognition of an old habit. It doesn't help that it feels like there isn't much to come back to.
I don't blame the mods. As far as I know, the mods have zero financial incentive to do anything.
Why should they put the onus on themselves to help curse.com make best it can be for them?
Then the judge promo came out with awesome flavor. Same feeling though. I couldnt justify the cost.