I played very little Magic in the mid 00s.Lord Mistborn wrote:Question, did you play magic during mid 00's? Because I've been gesturing in the direction of original Ravnica Block and I feel like that's falling on deaf ears. There were a fair number of weird synergy cards like I'm proposing and that format if rembered fondly as one of the most diverse of all time, despite or even because of decks that were way weirder and way less fair then Temurge, Rally, or even Marvel. You had the your aggro, your control, even your good stuff midrage, but you also had decks you don't see the like of today like, Owling Mine, Heartbeat, Greater Gifts, Dragonstorm, or Pickles.
Like you seemed so shocked and appalled by the Rally the Ancestors decks that I felt the need to look them up(I did't play standard when those decks were meta) and it just seemed fine. I expected way more looting effects and self mill, but apparently no the deck seems to mostly just played creatures the fair way and eventually cast big Rally that would kill them. (I checked some vods of the deck and apparently what you do is use the first rally to draw a bunch of cards to find the second one and then you could set up your graveyard when you discarded to hand size). It seems like a combo engine that's relatively slow and easy to disrupt.
The point of 4 Color Rally isn't that it's a horrible deck to play against or that it's terribly unfair. It's actually very difficult to interact with because graveyard hate of the period was essentially non-existent and the deck legitimately doesn't give a shit whether its cards are in play or in the graveyard, so removing or even countering its creatures doesn't really set it back. It was a very good deck with a very high winrate.
The issue is that 4 Color Rally decks don't vary much from the stock list. If your stated goal is to have more different cards see play at the top tables, then every deck like 4 Color Rally that becomes Tier 1 is a step backwards and every deck like Golgari Midrange that becomes Tier 1 is a step forwards.
Synergy decks have more inertia and a lower considerable card pool than card quality decks. A deck that was pure card quality could find room for something really out-there like Scrabble Claws that hates on graveyards or something if the field warranted doing that. A deck that was pure Synergy would not and could not.
The cost to a deck like Aetherworks Marvel to take an Energy production card out is that it's harder to spin the wheel of the Marvel itself. You need to get to 6 energy to try to get your Eldrazi Titan on turn 4. It doesn't really matter how good or bad the cards are. For fuck's sake, you usually end up playing fucking puzzle knots because you need the Energy so bad. And that means that the stock list does not and can not change very much. Every Tier 1 deck that is like Aetherworks Marvel reduces the number of cards that see play in top tables. Its midrangey opponents of the time were Mardu Vehicles and GB Delirium, and those lists varied a lot more.
You seem to be under the impression that a deck being weird is enough to increase the number of cards that see play at top tables. This is flatly wrong. The number of top decks is just the number of top decks. There are more top tier Standard decks now than there have ever been at any time in any previous version of Standard, which has to do with the Play Balance Team and shit, not with the apparent strangeness or normality of any particular deck. Turbofog and Gates are weird, Sultai Midrange and Esper Control are normal, but the point is that there are a lot of them seeing play concurrently. That's good, but we chalk it up to a good job done by the development and balance teams. We don't have separately competitive Mono-Red, Mono-Blue, and Mono-White Aggro decks simultaneously with competitive midrange lists with a White-Red and Green-Black core simultaneously with tempo lists based on a Red-Blue and Green-Blue core simultaneously with Control lists with a Blue-Red and Black-White core with combo lists based on 5-color tapped lands, Turbo Fog, Mardu Aristocrats, and Birthing Pod all at the same time because of the weirdness or synergy dependence of any particular deck. We have all these decks threatening to win tournaments because of very impressive balancing work.
Red Deck Wins and Mono-Blue Aggro share zero cards. Not even lands. That is because they are different colors, and can't share cards. If you want more variation of that sort, just add more colors. Seriously.
But the number of decks that see top play is not going to go up because you make decks weird or make them synergistic or whatever the fuck. That's an issue for development and play balance. The current team does a much better job of this than previous teams because they have decades of experience and a much larger staff. There's always going to be however many hundreds of trillions of decks you could theoretically make, but most of them are going to be essentially or literally unplayable and the difference in power between one deck or another is going to drive some number of nominally functional decks out of Tier 1.
The number of cards that see top play is simply the number of decks that see top play times the number of different cards that those decks use. Which means obviously that if that's your concern you should be encouraging decks like Boros Midrange that use a lot of different cards and discouraging decks like Nexus Turbofog that don't.
And yes, I have read up on the period you keep wanking to. There's a Throwback Gauntlet that lists Nine Decks from that two year period. All I can say is: "Meh." We could make a bigger and deeper gauntlet from major Tier 1 Decks from February of 2019 than WotC managed to highlight from that two year period.
- Sultai Midrange
- Izzet Drakes
- Boros Angels
- Judith Priest
- Nexus Turbofog
- Five Color Gates
- Red Deck Wins
- White Weenies
- Mono Blue Tempest
- Jeskai Control
- Esper Control
- Temur "Pod" Rhythm
- Selesnya "Twin" Tokens
You're wrong about the history and you're wrong about the theory.
-Username17