Why does it matter that the color blue is overrepresented? Your deck is not a color. Telling me you play a deck with "black" in it also tells me absolutely nothing. (Storm? Esper Stoneblade? Pox? Jund? Shardless BUG? Death's Shadow?) Your deck is a set of cards for a strategy, not a color.
Do you like aggro? Combo? Control? Tempo? There is a set of cards that are very good for doing what you like to do. Why does it matter that blue is a color in that strategy?
Yes, there are some defining cards in legacy. That is a good thing. It's the same for Modern. For example, if Lightning Bolt were not legal in Modern, how dominant do you think aggressive creature-based strategies would be? Likewise, if Force of Will were legal in Modern, do you think Seething Song, Rite of Flame, Blazing Shoal, etc. would have been banned? Sometimes, good cards open up a format's possibilities.
Legacy is such a boring and overrated format. (And so is modern - the bashing comes later. So save the pitchforks.)
You can play this! That! You can play Tezzerator! Or blood moon decks! Or Enchantress! Or MUD! Or this, or that!
... And lose. You play from a list of a little bit over a dozen decks, or you lose. Elves, Show and Tell, Shardless Bug, RUG delver, Stoneblade, URW Delver, Maverick, Death and Taxes, Storm, Miracles, Dredge, and a few others that I'm missing.
Occasionally, some rogue deck or outlier takes it all, but the same is true of modern - it needs to be running hot and get lucky pairings / be well positioned against the top dogs it goes against.
Here's the SCG Providence Top 8 after the release of True Name Nemesis (the nail in the coffin for that format):
1 Sneak Show Jared Boettcher
2 Stoneblade Alex Bertoncini
3/4 Death & Taxes Elijah Herr
3/4 Stoneblade Robert Vaughan
5/8 Stoneblade Joshua Cicio
5/8 BUG Aggro / Midrange Kris Brakke
5/8 UR Delver Benjamin Battle
5/8 UR Delver Warren Connell
SO DIVERSE YOU GUYS.
The combination of old, undercosted spells combined with new creatures forming the great power creep singularity will destroy your brew, or your established tier 2/3 deck.
This whole nonsense argument about legacy being so open and diverse needs to die, because its disingenuous.
Modern has the same problem; it is just as stagnant. It is, relatively speaking, about as 'open and diverse' as legacy (card pool overlap). There are LOT of modern brews out there that are ripe for exploration. But it seems that at the moment, like legacy, your brews WILL lose to some combination of Affinity, Jund, Melira Pod, Tron, etc. The ~dozen or so decks at the top that eat everything else for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
The problems with both formats are very similar to be honest - all coming back to , IMO, creature power creep.
I don't know about you, but that Legacy top 8 looks healthily diverse. 6 different decks in the top 8. (the 3 "Stoneblade"s are actually two very different decks, one is a control deck and the other is a tempo deck)
Looking back one week before that:
1 Stoneblade Timothy Thomason
2 Storm Avery Williams
3 UB Death Shadow Wyatt Archer
4 Canadian Threshold Tommy Wells
5 Merfolk Alexander Dochnal
6 Stoneblade Kyle Edwards
7 Shardless Bug Jason Crone
8 Miracle Blade Joe Bass
Looks pretty healthy to me. Even if we combine both of these top 8s, there are 12/16 unique decks. If you did that for modern you'd end up with maybe 7 - 8 decks, probably less. Jund, Tron, Living End, Twin, Pod, maybe affinity + infect, + 1 rogue deck.
The point is that Legacy has a tier 1 - 1.5 deck for every kind of strategy that you want to play. There is a deck that fits your style. You like really long, controlling games? Play miracles. You like tempoing your opponent? Play RUG/UWR delver. You like getting huge value out of your cards? Play Shardless BUG. You like attacking with 2/1s and 3/1s? Play Death and Taxes. You like playing huge creatures? Play Sneak & Show. You like combo? Play Storm.
Most of these archetypes are simply not available in Modern. There is no control. There is no tempo. There is no aggro. There is only value. That's why a lot of players don't play Modern - there isn't a good deck that fits their style.
I'm playing against an opponent in a legacy tournament, and I have 4 cards in hand. I bounced a blue creature with Jace, the Mind Sculptor a few turns earlier that he hadn't replayed, so I know one of the cards in his hand is a creature. My opponent taps out to casts a spell that I want to counter, so I think for a bit to see if I want to cast my Force of Will. I ask my opponent how many cards he has in his hand, and he says 1. Knowing that he can't Force back because I know the last card in his hand, I cast my Force and exile another card in my hand. He then mistakenly realizes that he has 2 cards in hand, even though I've already cast my Force and showed him 2 cards in my hand.
What happens if this was accidental (my opponent didn't say misrepresent the cards in hand on purpose, he just said the wrong thing)?
Would my opponent be allowed to counter my Force even if he had a Pact of Negation in hand?
We found in playtesting that it was very important to this card's purpose that it not die in combat with a Snapcaster Mage, so we gave it first strike.
It's funny that a large number of cards in RTR have been mentioned by the developers themselves that they were designed to stop Snapcaster Mage.
It still looks pretty real. They could just have removed the 1993- portion, since it is redundant. Wizards has had a track record of cleaning up small details. This could pretty easily be one of them. I'm disappointed that the previous thread got Locked, because there really was no substantial evidence this was a fake.
On the note that the reminder text should be the same as the text for Cackling Counterpart: they probably left the word "target" out of the reminder specifically to make it castable without a token target. See: Proliferate.
I'm kind of new to the Bay Area and looking to play some legacy, but it's pretty rough to make it out to San Jose/Cupertino from downtown SF. Are there any places to play closer to the city, or on weekends?
Because they would all need to agree on that simultaneously and WoTC would need to not care about any of that, which both are very unlikely.
Sorry but that isn't correct:
January 2010: Stoneforge Mystic went from a few dollars during pre-release to $7 during release November 2010: stable at $10 February 2011: rise to $25 with Mirrodin Besieged April 2011: peaked to $25-30 May 2011: tanked to $15 when the event deck list was announced June 2011: between June 10 (event deck release) and June 19 (announcement of ban) it plummeted to $7 but quickly recovered and continued to be worth between $8 and $10 until now.
Overall, the biggest drop was caused by the event deck announcement and release.
The only reason why it dropped so much was because there were 2 Stoneforge Mystics in the event deck. I doubt there would be 2 Snapcasters in an event deck, if they decided to make one.
Karakas
Scalding Tarn
Flusterstorm
Shardless Agent
Show and Tell
Not Reprinted:
Envelop
Aegis of the Gods
Divert
Fire Covenant
Elephant Grass
Do you like aggro? Combo? Control? Tempo? There is a set of cards that are very good for doing what you like to do. Why does it matter that blue is a color in that strategy?
Yes, there are some defining cards in legacy. That is a good thing. It's the same for Modern. For example, if Lightning Bolt were not legal in Modern, how dominant do you think aggressive creature-based strategies would be? Likewise, if Force of Will were legal in Modern, do you think Seething Song, Rite of Flame, Blazing Shoal, etc. would have been banned? Sometimes, good cards open up a format's possibilities.
I don't know about you, but that Legacy top 8 looks healthily diverse. 6 different decks in the top 8. (the 3 "Stoneblade"s are actually two very different decks, one is a control deck and the other is a tempo deck)
Looking back one week before that:
1 Stoneblade Timothy Thomason
2 Storm Avery Williams
3 UB Death Shadow Wyatt Archer
4 Canadian Threshold Tommy Wells
5 Merfolk Alexander Dochnal
6 Stoneblade Kyle Edwards
7 Shardless Bug Jason Crone
8 Miracle Blade Joe Bass
Looks pretty healthy to me. Even if we combine both of these top 8s, there are 12/16 unique decks. If you did that for modern you'd end up with maybe 7 - 8 decks, probably less. Jund, Tron, Living End, Twin, Pod, maybe affinity + infect, + 1 rogue deck.
The point is that Legacy has a tier 1 - 1.5 deck for every kind of strategy that you want to play. There is a deck that fits your style. You like really long, controlling games? Play miracles. You like tempoing your opponent? Play RUG/UWR delver. You like getting huge value out of your cards? Play Shardless BUG. You like attacking with 2/1s and 3/1s? Play Death and Taxes. You like playing huge creatures? Play Sneak & Show. You like combo? Play Storm.
Most of these archetypes are simply not available in Modern. There is no control. There is no tempo. There is no aggro. There is only value. That's why a lot of players don't play Modern - there isn't a good deck that fits their style.
and nobody does. That is the problem.
Now an uncommon in RTR, foreshadowing GTC.
Maybe we'll see a DGM rare in GTC?
I'm playing against an opponent in a legacy tournament, and I have 4 cards in hand. I bounced a blue creature with Jace, the Mind Sculptor a few turns earlier that he hadn't replayed, so I know one of the cards in his hand is a creature. My opponent taps out to casts a spell that I want to counter, so I think for a bit to see if I want to cast my Force of Will. I ask my opponent how many cards he has in his hand, and he says 1. Knowing that he can't Force back because I know the last card in his hand, I cast my Force and exile another card in my hand. He then mistakenly realizes that he has 2 cards in hand, even though I've already cast my Force and showed him 2 cards in my hand.
What happens if this was accidental (my opponent didn't say misrepresent the cards in hand on purpose, he just said the wrong thing)?
Would my opponent be allowed to counter my Force even if he had a Pact of Negation in hand?
Nefarious Lich and Nourishing Shoal with the 12 cost green fatty is a real combo.
It's funny that a large number of cards in RTR have been mentioned by the developers themselves that they were designed to stop Snapcaster Mage.
On the note that the reminder text should be the same as the text for Cackling Counterpart: they probably left the word "target" out of the reminder specifically to make it castable without a token target. See: Proliferate.
The only reason why it dropped so much was because there were 2 Stoneforge Mystics in the event deck. I doubt there would be 2 Snapcasters in an event deck, if they decided to make one.
Bob is too strong for standard, though he might see reprinting in some other "FTV-ish" set down the road.
Pile A:
Darkslick Shores
Foil M12 Mana Leak
Pile B:
Geist of Saint Traft