New Phyrexia Previews

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
I don't know about "less powerful" (although the one the sticks out in my mind is Mercadian Masques), but due to Rath's fast environment, they did want to slow things down a bit. But again, since Urza's Saga came right after Rath, the "slowing down" didn't show up until after (Mercadian Masques again? :) )
"Rath's fast environment" is much slower than what recent sets have generally been providing.

Perhaps that card is merely geared towards the "Timmys".
It's an exact copy of an existing card (one that was a powerhouse ever since it was printed) with one new ability and a single mana tacked onto its cost. It's not geared toward anything. It's just completely derivative. I'm not against all derivative card design. Most of it over the years has been fine. Fixed versions of cards that were poorly designed (too good or unplayable), color-shifted versions of older cards (what with the whole color pie thing), or new takes on old ideas that add something of substance are all reasonable enough.

When did that come to be?
Debatable. Combo decks have been around from the beginning and have always sought to kill very quickly. Goblins has been around from the beginning and was pretty fast even back then. After a while, control decks started to dominate the format more. Over the past few years, there's been a new wave of beefed up aggro and aggro-combo that has brought the average clock down noticeably. Even the control decks are aggro decks (Sure, CounterTop looks pretty controllish, but if it decides to go for the kill rather than trying to slow the opponent down, it will get that kill pretty quickly, thanks to Tarmogoyf, bant creatures, or perhaps cheating Progenitus into play).
 

Spiderman

Administrator
Staff member
Oversouk said:
"Rath's fast environment" is much slower than what recent sets have generally been providing.
That may be, but my response was specifically geared towards the comment of Urza's Block and Rath block, not recent sets.

Oversoul said:
Debatable.
So... what I'm hearing is that it was either always that way since Legacy format was created, or not? 'Cause no one knows?
 

Shabbaman

insert avatar here
Control decks play Firespout, and play white for StP. In SCG's deck database I found a total of 4 top 8-decks running WoG (one of them from an online event...). You can find an elaborate walkthrough of current decks here. From those lists there was a single occasion where one guy ran a single WoG. In a Thopter deck.

Debatable. Combo decks have been around from the beginning and have always sought to kill very quickly. Goblins has been around from the beginning and was pretty fast even back then. After a while, control decks started to dominate the format more. Over the past few years, there's been a new wave of beefed up aggro and aggro-combo that has brought the average clock down noticeably. Even the control decks are aggro decks (Sure, CounterTop looks pretty controllish, but if it decides to go for the kill rather than trying to slow the opponent down, it will get that kill pretty quickly, thanks to Tarmogoyf, bant creatures, or perhaps cheating Progenitus into play).
Of the creature decks that aren't goblins and that will kill you fast? Hm. Affinity and Zoo. Zoo can kill you on turn 4 for sure, so you have to be lucky to make it to turn 4 and be lucky to win the dice roll. There are some midrange decks like Rock and Horizons that won't get you that quick, but those decks pack enough disruption to keep you from double white long enough. Zoo, Rock and Horizons are packed with (new) creatures that push the power level.
 

Spiderman

Administrator
Staff member
You can find an elaborate walkthrough of current decks here
So... it'd be interesting to see what the role of WoG has been in Legacy, from its inception to present. No one or no site keeps track of that/decks/cards though, right? One would have to look in a variety of places to glean the deck information and do the analysis oneself, right?
 

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
That may be, but my response was specifically geared towards the comment of Urza's Block and Rath block, not recent sets.
Yes, but that was part of something I was saying that wasn't limited to that, so I guess I miss your point?

So... what I'm hearing is that it was either always that way since Legacy format was created, or not? 'Cause no one knows?
I know what I said was kind of vague, but when I said "debatable" I really did mean just that and not "no one knows." There's an important distinction between the two. One thing I can definitely say is that it was technically possible for a deck to kill you before you got a fourth turn in Legacy from the beginning. Belcher's been there from day one and can easily get a first-turn kill (not reliably, of course), if you want an extreme example. But it wasn't that common to be dead before your fourth turn in the early days of Legacy. And it's not necessarily the rule now, although the environment is faster. So I guess one way to put it is that asking when it happened that Legacy became so fast that being dead before getting a fourth turn was a major concern is a valid question, but it doesn't have a single, exact answer. Not because no one knows, but because you'd have to precisely define how often it would have to be, what percentage of decks kill that quickly, control for local metagames, etc.

Of the creature decks that aren't goblins and that will kill you fast? Hm. Affinity and Zoo. Zoo can kill you on turn 4 for sure, so you have to be lucky to make it to turn 4 and be lucky to win the dice roll. There are some midrange decks like Rock and Horizons that won't get you that quick, but those decks pack enough disruption to keep you from double white long enough. Zoo, Rock and Horizons are packed with (new) creatures that push the power level.
I think in a discussion of survivability against aggro, Zoo is a pretty good benchmark. If the answer to "Can it put up some form of defense and have a decent shot at winning before Zoo runs it over" is "No" then a deck is, at best, severely limited as far as what it can do in Legacy. As for beatdown that can kill quickly, along with Goblins, Affinity, and Zoo, I'd definitely append Dredge. Aggro Loam, Berserk Stompy, and Bant are also pretty fast. And then there are all the aggro-control or aggro-combo decks that will, if it's the best move in the situation (like if your deck is slow and vulnerable to a quick kill), throw a giant creature into play with Natural Order or Show and Tell or Reanimate or whatever. But Zoo is notable because it's so fast and, unlike most of the other fast decks, isn't even relying on chaining synergies between cards to achieve big effects that, while lightning fast, have a particular weakness (like how Dredge needs its graveyard to be left alone if it wants to kill that quickly). It's just cheap, powerful creatures that will bust your skull in before you have a chance to do much.

You could use deckcheck for that, but deckcheck is dead.
There is deckcheck.org (which does have a Legacy archive). It's slower, less accurate, and not as nice to use (I suspect it's not as comprehensive either, but it seems to work well enough) as the old deckcheck.net (for any member reading this who don't know, deckcheck.net was the website to use for perusing tournament results and decklists, but the maintainer shut it down last year out of protest for some business practice that WotC was doing that he couldn't abide by).

Looking at Wrath of God in Legacy since 2005, it seems to have been used mostly in Landstill (which makes sense) pretty much the whole time.
 

Spiderman

Administrator
Staff member
Oversoul said:
Yes, but that was part of something I was saying that wasn't limited to that, so I guess I miss your point?
I see now what you're saying. Well, Rath's environment was 13 years ago, so of course the pace of sets is going to ebb and flow. I guess right now we're back in a "fast" pace.

Oversoul said:
I know what I said was kind of vague, but when I said "debatable" I really did mean just that and not "no one knows."
Hence my asking and throwing out the "no one knows", because I certainly didn't know what to make from your vagueness :) But thanks for explaining it further.
 

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
I see now what you're saying. Well, Rath's environment was 13 years ago, so of course the pace of sets is going to ebb and flow. I guess right now we're back in a "fast" pace.
I can't recall Legacy having "ebbed" thus far, but it's not all that old of a format and changes to that would effect it have been almost entirely limited to a growing cardpool with the release of new sets. The addition of new cards could make control decks stronger, slowing the format down, which has certainly happened multiple times in the history of Vintage, but in Legacy, that has practically never happened. Maybe it never will. Maybe aggro will ramp up to some sort of asymptote and never stop. I have no idea.
 

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
Well, of course there's going to be more potential for that in a rotating format, but like I said, I don't know what the metagame looks like in Standard and haven't for some time. From what Ransac indicated, it sounds like it's pretty fast these days...
 

Shabbaman

insert avatar here
The thing is, cards don't go away in Legacy. They do in standard. Though it's clear that Legacy has changed since it's inception (mainly better mana bases, under the influence of wasteland+stifle decks), it hasn't changed much. Even today's top deck is the same deck it was in 2004.
 

Spiderman

Administrator
Staff member
Oversoul: I kinda lost track of what we were saying or why but the since WOTC primarily focuses on the Standard environment, that's why they create the ebb and flow of fast/slow environments and cards to fit.

From what Shabbaman is saying, cards from Standard do seem to replace cards in Legacy rather than create whole new decks (well, top decks) as better equivalents are made.
 

Shabbaman

insert avatar here
From what Shabbaman is saying, cards from Standard do seem to replace cards in Legacy rather than create whole new decks (well, top decks) as better equivalents are made.
That's partly true. In the case of dredge and affinity for instance, it's pretty clear that these decks spawned from Standard decks, but generally speaking there's little chance you could adapt your Standard deck to Legacy. Sometimes existing tier 2 decks get a boost by a single new card, so they emerge as a seemingly new deck (when they in fact aren't, they're just more viable). But if you look at Zoo, a deck that's been around since forever, it's clear that the deck gets better cards from a lot of new sets.

What this means for your "ebb and flow": in theory, with the creature power creep (faster, cheaper, bigger) you'd expect that the format would become faster. The thing is that Legacy can't get any faster, as the fastest deck (Belcher) can kill you on turn 1 anyway. It's more the metagame that influences the "ebb and flow": if people pack enough sideboard hate, most decks stand a decent chance against specific other decks to hate those decks out. An easy example: if Reanimator is the best and fastest deck, everybody packs 15 graveyard hate cards and Reanimator won't win. So the next time around nobody will be playing Reanimator because of all the hate, and then people stop playing graveyard hate but pack other hate. So the next time you could gamble and play Reanimator again. Now, repeat this for several different kind of archetypes and you end up with a pretty complex set of gambles. That's one of the reason Legacy results vary so much between different tournaments. And one of the reasons people whine about "overpowered cards that need to get banned". Now, to get back to the "ebb and flow": if you leave combo out of the evaluation and just look at the aggro v.s. control matchup, then yes, there's probably some "ebb and flow". But it's not so rapidly changing, because like I wrote in my previous post, cards just don't leave the format (unless they're banned, damn you wizards). Some cards have a significant impact. I think Counterbalance slowed down the format, since it devaluated one drops like Kird Ape. The card obviously had it's impact on the control v.s. combo matchup as well. Over time the aggro v.s. control matchup got faster, as it turned into a "get a Tarmogoyf and make it big" matchup. The last few years the better creatures really helped aggro decks. Although the mana curve got steeper, the mana v.s. power ratio got better. So while a 10-land stompy deck would be unviable against counterbalance, a "20-land 'Goyf plus KotR deck" (iow zoo) trumps Counterbalance. So people are less inclined to play CB, and the format gets faster.

Anyway, why were we talking about this? I was just mentioning that power creep is a bad thing ;)
 

Spiderman

Administrator
Staff member
Shabbaman said:
Anyway, why were we talking about this? I was just mentioning that power creep is a bad thing
LOL.... I think it all stemmed from that and my reply that it's inevitable for Magic to grow :)
 

Ransac

CPA Trash Man
Gitaxian-Probe.png
Wizards came up with an awesome set for New Phyrexia.... too bad all of their secrecy on the name of the set/previews/etc. is now unraveled. The entire spoiler has been leaked online.... along with a card that Oversoul might love more than Street Wraith.


Ransac, cpa trash man
 

Shabbaman

insert avatar here
The entire spoiler has been leaked online....
The last time this happened some people got themselves in a serious shitstorm...

Anyway, back to power creep... Diabolic Edict is pretty good right? There's now a Diabolic Edict that deals 1 damage in the addition of the sacrifice clause, for BB instead of 1B. Not that's it's overpowered I guess, but making cards strictly better is lazy design. In this case I don't see why they didn't just reprint Diabolic Edict.
 
M

mythosx

Guest
Hm...I don't like this Phyrexian mechanic at all. I know they are using it for full on flavor effect. But it's definitely a black mechanic. The ability to do anything but at steep cost is a purely black mechanic. I don't think it should have been allowed to creep into the other colors. Plus if you thought Vintage or Legacy storm was powerful before...it just got propelled to the number one spot with this new mechanic.
 

Spiderman

Administrator
Staff member
Let's wait and see. I don't think *every* card is going to have the mechanic, just a few and probably the "basics", nothing too earth-shattering.
 

Ransac

CPA Trash Man
The idea of every color having the "black color power" is great flavor when you consider that the Phyrexians have infected the majority of Mirrodin, all colors.


Ransac, cpa trash man
 
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