Modern feels in a similar place right now because of Nadu. Everyone is expecting the bird to get banned as it's proven to be too much for the format. Even the recent mtgo creator showdown was run with a Nadu ban to diversify the content in the face of overwhelming Nadu performance at the pro-tour. They are choosing to wait until August to ban the bird, and now it feels like there's no point in play testing/going to FNM/jumping into leagues until the bird is gone. There's so much fun stuff to play from MH3 that's unfortunately getting under explored because we just have to wait until after bloomburrow to experience the format the way it should be.
I've been running Nadu in modern mtgo leagues specifically for free money. The deck is broken and needs to go. I went in with literally zero games played before, and got 3 consecutive 4-1s
@@Anonymoose-2750”trivial to build against” “100% of the pro tour top 4, with every one of the best players in the world fully aware that it is the deck to beat” Do illumine.
I hope Nadu remains borderline unplayable in legacy because it's tournaments play patterns make it seem like 4 Horsemen 2.0, which will probably also have to trigger a ban
Nadu is one of the few things that when it hits the table, I just stop recording and update at end of turn or critical points. It is very poor from a gameplay and viewership perspective.
As an old school psychatog player I absolutely love the frog. I can essentially rebuild psychatog without the downside of needing upheaval…. I doubt it’ll be format warping post grief ban but I’ll still play it 😂. It’s also in my UB Delver instead of bowmasters
no, they just don't understand the game at all, MULTIPLE times, they have said "oh um...we just didn't do this in playtesting" especially to things that can self target, and there was another one, I can't remember the name, that was straight up "we didn't expect you to target the opponent with it"
@@Frostmond1349 How do you put "Remove all abilities" and NOT immediately try to use it against your opponent??? Whoever was playtesting was on markers lmfao
Re: frog I think it's absolutely justifiable to pull the trigger now. It's a threat that you have to answer immediately or it spirals the game after 1 hit. It gives significant and real card advantage with evasion. I've remarked multiple times "oh I got hit by frog on turn 4. I lose. It'll be turn 13 when my life total hits 0, but I lost right now." We've seen this song and dance before. This isn't a new play pattern for legacy. It's every card delver has had banned in the last 5 years and significantly longer in all likelihood.
The rock-paper-scissors where delver punishes greedy decks only works if focused aggressive decks can go over the top. Psychic Frog halting an aggro start for 2 mana is an issue.
I think the relationship between frog and chalice of the void is worth bringing into the discussion. Like you said, part of what makes the blue cantrip shell acceptable in legacy is that there are ways to prey on it. Chalice of the Void used to be a great way to deal with those decks because it shut off all the cantrips and most of their threats. Now, if you chalice a blue mage, they just feed all their dead cards to the frog and kill you with it. It's just another way that frog covers up that decks weak spots.
The cantrip shell is a integral part of Legacy but Daze is not a true part of it. Dazes powerlevel has creeped up over the years exponencially and has gotten multiple cards banned single handedly. Its not just the tempo delver shell but increasingly Daze protects Combo's for its downside has become negligable. In the ye oldern days one could have always argued, and i did myself, that having 8 "free" counterspells is good for the format and removing Daze would attack that pressure valve. Yet since force of negation exists and has shown its usefullness this should be those additional free counterspells in the format not the increasingly free and extremly powerfull Daze. We have faced oppressive Delver lists for 15 years straight of beeing the best thing one can play when its not fueled by nightmarishly powercreeped new cards and beeing broken when those cards are around. This card will only keep on generating problems and with WotC beeing of the rails with their designs there will always be a 2 drop around breaking Daze/Delver strategies. If they do not ban Daze we will see another 40% share of the metagame slinging UB and Grixis delver and once the frog is gone there will be another period of flavor of the month delver if there isnt someting even more horendously broken overshadowing delver for a month or 2 before its back to be at least 20+ percent of the meta. Grief and Daze ban would be the best thing happening the Legacy since survival of the fittest ban which used to be an integral cornerstone of the format back then as well and nobody misses that card that got more overpowered with every new edition.
I disagree on a few tidbits here and there, but I mostly agree with you. Daze only gets better and better as WotC keeps printing more and more busted turn 1 threats. Back when Avacyn Restored came out, I thought Delver was going to ruin legacy, and I was salty about that card for years. Now? I'm fucking BEAMING when I see a turn 1 Delver instead of DRC, Ragavan, or Grief.
I don't understand how people don't see daze as a problem nowadays. It wasn't a problem 5 years ago, now it is. once upon a time it was used to protect something like a tarmogoyf, a relatively big creature without evasion. Now it's used to protect much larger creatures with evasion, effectively reducing the turns you have to find solution to 1 or 2 at the very most
@@marioalbertoferrero33 So ban the overpowered cards? It's time to face reality and held wotc accountable for their mistakes, which they have made hundreds in the last few years, paper mtg is dying across the board, everywhere, except for commander and that's because the insane and insanely stupid, powercreep has been reducing deck variety in all formats, if you don't play cards from the latest set your deck is worthless, it's time wotc removes all the problematic cards from all formats, cards that quite literally invalidate decades of sets and tens of thousands cards in favor of a handful from a month ago.
14:40 seems like white removal is going to be king. Dumping 4 cards into frog to eat a swords sounds risky. I assume that right now grief is very good at clearing the way. 15:00 this will probably be the case, but really the shell itself is broken. It's not a coincidence the same deck gets broken every single year. 19:25 this change didn't happen with Grief, though. Grief was in the format for 2.5 years before scaminator got big. 28:40 I think if you added up the times over the past 6 years when Legacy has been broken vs not you get a majority of time being broken, almost entirely due to these tempo shells. The comparison to Vintage is misleading because Vintage uses restrictions, and even with all the blue cards restricted, it's the best color. If blue weren't so much better than other colors that it can dominate the format with all 1-ofs, workshop and bazaar probably would have been restricted because format diversity can be achieved in other ways. Everyone knows that workshop is the issue behind thorn etc. being restricted (whereas in legacy people operate under the delusion that all the cards on the legacy banned list are actually too good for the format on their own). If something replaced shops in enabling an aggro deck it wouldn't be banned to preserve the "identity" of the format. 33:00 speaking of format identity... as you previously described, there are often lots of other cards on the "most played legacy" cards list. Why is the cantrip/daze shell allowed to push other format staples out of the meta, over and over, by being too good? How much play does thalia see these days? Is Elves not part of the format's identity? If ancient tomb or lotus petal broke 6 decks in 6 years, do you think people would be taking this same attitude that you can't ban format staples? Or is it just tempo that gets the kid gloves treatment?
Agree with all of your points! Been playing legacy since 2009, and yes there have been a cyclic nature of the "best deck" / most played cards, but 90% of the time the top cards are the blue cantrip/daze/FoW shell + others (as mentioned in the video, ancient tomb, StP, etc). And if we are being honest, usually the cards getting banned are played in that blue cantrip/daze/FoW shell. I'm trying to think off the top of my head the most recent banned cards. 1) Sticker goblin --> wasn't actually broken, just people couldn't handle the paper shenanigans 2) Expressive Iteration / WPA --> Blue cantrip shell/daze/FoW + Ancient tomb deck 3) Ragavan --> Blue cantrip shell/daze/FoW 4) DHA/Astrolobe/Oko --> Blue cantrip shell/FoW/some dazes 5) Lurrus --> Blue cantrip shell/daze/FoW 6) Underworld Breach 7) Wrenn/Six --> Blue cantrip shell/FoW 8) DRS --> was used in alot of decks, but again the most playd deck was blue cantrip shell/FoW/Daze I can keep going back but its the same trend. I really feel like this fine line we are tip toeing between a "broken format" and one that is healthy is whenever a new card is printed that can be abused in the blue cantrip / tempo shell and we start this cycle all over again. I wonder if we should try to do something different and weaken that shell or its going to happen again. Whether its MH4 or the next UB sets, something is going to come along, be slotted into the blue cantrip shell, and a new T0 deck. Also maybe I'm salty that I've been a long time elves player and a card was printed and pushed my pet deck out of the format and now i want other decks to suffer. No one seems to care about the poor little 1/1 elves. Jokes aside, I've been traditionally ok with delver being the top dog time after time, but I think with the recent trend of pushed cards (that can be easily slotted into the delver / blue cantrip shell), i'm just tired of this cyclic nature and want to try to change things up. I do think to a VERY large degree that the tempo / delver shell do get as you call it, the "kids gloves treatment". We all know its too strong, but we keep it cause we like the play patterns / we want it to be the pillar of the format. But lets not kid ourselves, it is is too powerful and maybe its time for a change.
I think that while I do agree that the cantrip/daze/FoW shell is too good, and it is too remarkable, I disagree on the solution as it would need too revamp the whole banlist and wouldn't change the format, it would straight up create other one, which is actually interesting, I think the solution should be created a cantrip legacy and a cantripless/dazeless legacy, the problem is that the main thing separating modern from legacy is that, and so modern was supposed to be that format, but obviously modern is way too much into its problems and prob created another whole identity around it that this doesn't work anymore
Every year or 2 we go through this dance of a Xerox shells needing to have something banned and people dismiss daze bans... If it's such a healthy part of a metagame why are half the cards we've banned from the format in the last decade cards that heavily feature in the Xerox deck? How many other archetypes get THIS MUCH LEEWAY? With the way WOTC keeps printing these cheap creatures that generate tons of value we are just going to continue to be banning cards because they are pushing the Xerox shell over the edge. How is a constant stream of bannings to keep a single archetype in check healthy for this format?
Daze, brainstorm, and several other cards would haven went if they managed the format from the beginning. But now they are grandfathered in. They talked about it on the ban discussion the last few times. The blue menaces are staying sadly.
Love. These. Videos. I'm pretty sure I say this every single time one of these drops, but just for posterity's sake: I *thoroughly* enjoy your regular play videos because not only do I get to see an absolute professional pilot these decks, but I also get to hear the thought process behind decisions (like a DVD Director's Commentary track)... but it is these deep-dive analysis videos that made me Patreon you. Cheers, mate. Keep it up (and fuck the haters). 🤘
Moxfield is really interesting. With all of your decks available in a simple table, it's really easy to copy that to Excel to find out that recent Preston Initiative Blink Commander decklist is your most liked decklist, while also being one of the most viewed of your decks, edging out your Manaless Dredge Legacy list from 2022, Thalia and Gitrog Commander list from 2023, and your Dragonstorm Legacy list from 2023.
I think the bigger problem is more fundamental: FIRE design. On a personal level, I can point to the printing of Oko as the exact moment where my interest in competitive Magic started to wane, and it has never come back to where it was. I bring that up not because I think the game should cater to me - it's moved on, and I can accept that - but because it signaled the change in direction. The eternal formats are now more heavily defined by whatever recently printed card becomes the new best thing that you can do, and as long as that design philosophy is followed, bans will only be Band-Aid fixes until the next pushed card comes out. To be clear, there's nothing wrong with still finding your fun here, and there will be periods of time where things are relatively stable, but that's the game now. Sorry to be so negative.
I can agree with you. For me legacy and modern were the kind of formats that you build a deck and keep it forever, usually updating the list every now and then. But now those formats became standard 2.0 where the new bs pushes the old stuff out of the format. And how do they push out the new bs? With MORE broken bs. I can accept oko as a design mistake, and "maybe" they truly underestimated the power of a single card. But now every set introduces a card that breaks the format (or multiple of them lol). Grief, orcish bowmasters, murktide and now the frog. I can only blame greed as the reason for priting powercreep-formatshifting-cards one after another. It's crazy to think my vintage cube has a lot of cards from the last 5 years.
@@servantofcygnus Emphasis on "mainly focused". We get it, you're trying to be cute with facts. The brute fact that you're ignoring - assuming that you even posted in good faith to begin with - is that since FIRE design has become a thing, eternal competitive formats have suffered from cards being too good. When I started playing MTG, cards had downsides. It made deckbuilding fun and interesting. Where's the downside to a card like Nadu? That it only triggers twice per creature? That you can't jam it on turn 1 in Modern? Magic was a much better competitive game ten years ago than it is today. I would move over to Premodern, but the idiots who designed the format decided to ban Brainstorm and Force of Will, which just makes the format entirely uninteresting as a Legacy replacement.
after playing grixis delver quite a bit this week, Frog in the delver shell does feel that crazy, but I agree that I think we need to see a world without grief before we can be sure of anything. The Eldrazi deck scares me more than frog tbh but we will see where it goes.
Totally agree that Grief needs the hammer. Period. Full stop. Enemy #1 for sure. Next on that list is daze. I think we would still have ragavan in the format right now if daze were banned. The problem isn’t the monkey, or DRC, it’s the fact that it can be dropped t1 on the play and there’s nothing the opponent can do about it before it generates a, usually, overwhelming amount of value. Volcanic island into a threat while holding daze is the strongest thing you can do in legacy (aside from grief obviously, and even then, daze is a 4 of). And it’s been that way for years. I refute the notion that daze is on the same level of “omg it’s part of the format! We can’t ban it!” That force of will and brainstorm are at. The card is too good, ban it…
People are going to be disappointed/surprised when Grief is banned and UB reanimator is still an excessive 15-20% of the format. The cards in UB reanimator are just too efficient. Either frog, daze or brainstorm gotta go too. For the good of the format.
November 2019-wrenn and six February 2021-dreadhorde arcanist January 2022-ragavan March 2023-expressive iteration August 2024-talks of psychic frog Delver has been getting random cards that are tolerable in other formats banned at a rate of about once per year for 4 years. Arguably longer. I think this will continue to happen or even happen at an accelerated rate going forward if it's just never addressed.
Great video, Phil. I always enjoy these types of videos. Do you have any suggestions for side board cards that are "ok" against this deck while we wait for the bans?
I've been running Leyline of Sanctity off and on in Legacy for years. It's not the most reliable thing, but it's the single best card against getting scammed on the draw.
primary usage of orcs is by other blue shell strategies in an arms race is, along with ubiquity, the most compelling argument against orcs to me, with the 2nd being that it answers itself. The whole, well people just hate it angle. My bold (not bold haha) prediction is it's going right on back to 40%...
Just a thought on Orcish Bowmaster. If it wasn't able to target creatures, I think a lot of the (debatably legitimate) criticism of its position in the metagame would be nullified, while it would still fulfill the purpose of punishing wheel effects, brainstorm etc. It also wouldn't have that play pattern of players trying to catch out each other's bowmasters. I wonder whether or not it was ever tested this way
I kinda disagree about the whole blue cantrip-counterspell shell. I think it's the actual thing that has been holding legacy back for years. It, to me at least, is also the thing that made it impossible for wizards to balance the format and might have led to them stopping to support legacy at all. I'm not saying that is the only reason or that it was a reason at all. It just seems to be that way to me. I really dislike that paper legacy is almost entirely cantrip-based with over half of the tournament being blue players every single time. And I'm saying it as a Prison player, so technically I have a good matchup against almost all of them. To me it just feels boring to play against the same 20+ cards every game (8 cantrips, 4 forces, at least 10 fetchlands), not even being able to guess what the opponent is playing even if they play 5 different cards. It is a huge set back in terms of deckbuilding since if you want to play blue, you need to autoinclude these cards most of the time (unless you are an extremely good combo deck builder like TonyScapone, but let's be honest, he's one of a kind). I remember the rise of delver decks in early 2010s and I honestly think it has been bothering me back then the same way it is now. The only thing that changed is that they've gained some unreasonably strong win conditions to follow up that 20+ card shell like murktide, grief and now psychic frog or nadu which all I think have huge design flaws. I honestly would not mind brainstorm, grief and frog being banned and seeing how legacy finally changes into something different, more inclusive towards people who do not want to be stuck inside the same shell if they decide that they want to include blue in their decks. It would be fun to see any other shell in that color without having to rely on artifacts. Also I think brainstorm getting cut from the format would actually make the Orcish Bowmaster density drop to a reasonable level, making the creature decks maybe not exactly tier 1, but at least playable. That's just my 2 cents. Ofc you can disagree, I do not mind.
12:54 I think your question here is a perfect example of two things being correct at the same time. I think Psychic Frog is an excellent card. It slots in really well in Non-Grief Dimir lists, and even Grixis Delver and even to a lesser extent Sultai Beans. I think the Rescaminator shell is the cake and Psychic Frog is the frosting. I feel that Frog has enough answers to it that it can be managed without warping the format.
Tbf, the cards from bloomburrow and duskmourn are unlikely to do much to legacy. Frog and grief are both from horizons sets. I would not mind daze getting banned. If something needed to come out of the blue shell. Daze doesn't seem to really do anything good for the format.
Daze just punishes the fair decks that should keep tempo decks in check. It's supposed role in checking combo is overblown, because fast combo decks are often the best decks at beating daze because they generate so much burst mana. If daze gets banned, blue players get to play FoN anyway, which is a much better card at actually stopping combos, because it is online on T0 and is a hard counter.
The way bans work in a long-term sense is that many "broken" things have never co-existed and that leaves me wondering if unbans should be being discussed way more than they are. Some things like WPA and Ragavan were obviously ban worthy at the time, but now it kind of feels like "X deck has no chance against the current problem" because their tools were taken away from them. Ragavan feels particularly noteworthy in a bowmasters format. Maybe in a world with Nadu-Snowko, WPA innitiative, DRS delver, DHA or Ragavan delver, EI delver, top-miracles etc. things could sort themselves out. There's a big, almost certain, chance something would have to be banned again, but I have this feeling that if we could test this problem cards together many of them would be perfectly fine for the format. As an example, I mentioned snowko and it seems pretty safe to assume Oko would be too much, but maybe this is what it would take for control to keep up with these absurdly efficient threats nowadays. And if Oko is too much, maybe astrolabe could be just the right amount of color fixing for control to police the format more effectively. Tldr - "unban (at least) WPA and Astrolabe you cowards!"
Astrolabe is subtly one of the most criminal printings WoTC has ever made that can be a x4 in contrusted. It basically invalidates the natural way the game is played by colorfixing for a player at near zero risk/cost. It will never be unbanned nor should it. Funny enough, Oko, Thief of Crowns actually be okay for Legacy but they are unlikely to ever take such a risk as it was too good with Astrolabe when it was legal in the format.
As someone with zero stake in the legacy format other than as a spectator, Psychic Frog is incredibly above rate. It's not too good in modern, but holy heck is the metagame of legacy warped to make it incredible.
Phil's reactions to the rescaminator list remind me of pre EI ban izzet delver. WotC leaving grief untouched for this long is painful to watch. Can't imagine how dull and repetitive it must be to try something remotely off meta and get grief/frog jammed down your throat every other game.
The Mid July twitter vote has grief staying … NOT going away. At a ratio of 65:35 I believe almost 2:1 yes VS no. How about that? WOW didn’t expect to see that the other day
Daze gotta go. Wizards is not going to stop printing the cheap efficient cards that generate resources. (Ragavan, Dreadhorde Arcanist, Psychic Frog, Expressive Iteration etc.) The new cheap threats will keep coming and they will keep breaking the disruptive blue cards shell. So either daze eats a ban or every 18 months another cheap creature eats a ban. Creatures which are for the most part fine in other formats
I think a Daze ban is something worth entertaining in Legacy, generally speaking, but it is so abundantly clear that right now that is not the core issue.
@@ThrabenUniversityOh yea the main issue is grief I just think a lot of the problem with psychic frog is this pattern we've been seeing in legacy for 6+ years
I think Murktide Regent should be in the discussion if we're talking about things that make the blue-cantrips shell too powerful. Especially since it helps those decks play around things that were designed to fight blue tempo decks like Long Goodbye and Abrupt Decay.
Frog is now a better murktide outside of beanstalk deck and in decks that play them alongside one another Frog even boosts murktide's stats at will. I think frog is more problematic at this point in time.
Murktide is stupid and shouldn't grow off the second copy, but it's "fine." The delver shell has had big dumb creatures that technically top the curve but are mostly efficient and fueled by graveyard forever (hooting mandrils, gurmag angler, tarmogoyf if you squint). It's the strongest version, but not a problem
I agree and the reason I think Murk is a bigger issue than frog is that frog requires you to discard to make it as physically large a threat. Yes it also draws a card on hit, which is it's own issue, but it requires "real" resources to grow. Meanwhile Murk is fed by all the things blue cantrip decks already want to do and simply comes down between turn 2-4 as a two mana 6/6 or better that simply wins the game in only a few attack steps. For a frog to do that, they have to heavily invest their cards into it, and if they suddenly lose their Griefs (which serve as hand control and hand KNOWLEDGE) they will be less confident in that being worth it. Sure they COULD drop 4 cards into their frog, but if their opponent was waiting on them to do that with a swords in hand they didn't know was there because they don't have as much discard... that hurts. I also think frog itself will be worse in a format without Murk because right now one of the main "fair-ish" thing to do with a frog is to dump card into your yard to fuel a follow up Murk, OR to eat spells out of your yard with the frog's flying ability to grow a Murk you already played.
Agree the rescam shell and Grief have worn out their welcome. However, I don’t find the subjective fun argument as valid or constructive as rationale for banning grief. Is grief scam less fun that turn 1 blood moon? Is it less fun than initiative mechanic that cannot be meaningfully interacted with? Is it less fun than being stormed out on turn 1 without making a play. The point on there being little to no counterplay seems much more valid and constructive and something to bear in mind for future ban discussions.
I think the issue with Psychic Frog is its middle ability. It turns dead draws into a resource for breaking parody on board, it fuels your graveyard for spells that can utilize it in the future, and it straight up breaks the color pie. We've seen this ability before on both Wild Mongrel (I'll be it, temporary) and the closest comparison with Psychic Frog, Lotleth Troll. And they're both green! I think Physic Frog is too dominant of a body for what it does in its colors and for its mana value, especially for the current blue-black reanimater shell in Legacy.
@@ThrabenUniversity do you think the following cards would be too powerful in the current "or post frog/grief ban" metagame? astrolabe, earthcraft, hermit druid, lurrus, mind twist, mana drain, ragavan, top, skullclamp, survival, white plume adventurer, wrenn and six
Bowmasters (when the majority of the format is running 4 copies in the main) is a problem. Not because of its power level, but because of how it invalidates a huge number of cards. Any creature with 1 toughness becomes very hard to want to play when you face 4 bowmasters most games. Currently I don’t think it’s an issue because it seems to be trending towards more of a 2 of or a sideboard card, but I wonder if that is because it already pushed the 1 toughness creatures out of the format. Also means wotc basically has to make any card worth playing 2 toughness or more from here on out
I hope the irony was not lost on you when saying "the best deck isn't always a blue deck... sometimes it is a delver deck or a control deck..." I get what you mean but those are blue decks, too, propped up by the cantrip core and it is very often the case that either of them is the deck to beat. I still agree that the gameplay around those decks is mostly healthy but they also break easily, as we have seen with basically every new creature or card advantage spell printed in the last several years.
Skill issue... My Obstinate Baloth, Nullhide Ferrox, Loxodon Smiter, Wilt-lief Liege deck has been absolutely DOMINATING. I've even caught a few nice Orvar, the All Form hat tricks to copy their Grief and ruin their hand. Jokes aside, a possible reason why Necrodominance hasn't seen much play even though it has the "mull to five, double protected win" lines is because people avoided playing it due to it's ban worthiness being verry obvious. Have seen a lot of friends that spent obscene amounts of money on the pushed cards (ragavan, oko, plume) only for those cards to get banned the Monday before the legacy fnm, a definite feels bad- you see how the necrodominance deck works and say "oh yeah that's getting banned immediately, I may as well not even get the cards". One interesting thing you didn't touch on is more possible UN-bannings in legacy, Mind's Desire didn't break the format wide open... Is Earthcraft really that messed up in today's legacy?
Rescaminator is fun and a combo deterrent. I think they should just nerf it by banning atraxa, griselbrand and archon of cruelty. This way the shell stay the same. You just have to get more creative with your entomb target. I don't think other entomb target are as good. If this is not enough you can also ban psychic frog.
Your solution falls apart each time a new large creature is printed. Also, I think you severely underestimate the reanimation target pool that already exists.
I watched this video mostly as a way to update my knowledge about the entire Legacy metagame, as I've been away from it for awhile. I think my main takeaway is that I should just stay away from Magic, as nothing good seems to be happening. A two mana Shadowmage Infiltrator with other abilities? They are just pushing and pushing creatures with no end in sight. I remember a time when Sheldon Menery wrote an article for SCG where he posited a future where a new player would think Hypnotic Specter was beyond broken because of how they made creatures weaker and weaker over time. That was hyperbole then, and it wasn't entirely accurate given that creature quality in general had been on the rise from the low points of the first few expansions, but the developers have gone in the completely opposite direction. They're not even trying to maintain a level playing field, but to just make better and better cards so that people will buy them. They use other popular IPs to boost their sales figures even though they spent 20 years not touching another modern IP (and only using Arabian Nights for the very first expansion). It's just sickening for me to see what's happened to the game.
Orcish Bowmaster peaked at a prevalence for a creature that, far as I know, has only been surpassed by Lurrus. I was tracking it for a while after it was printed and making notes when it surpassed other popular creatures like peak Uro, Deathrite Shaman, and Ragavan. Bowmasters isn't too strong, but I hate how harshly it keeps 1 toughness creatures from existing. Same argument against it and W6 in Modern, though they help keep Ragavan down in Modern.
I really enjoyed your thoughts on this. One card I think deserves to be in the conversation is Daze. Its a really good tempo card that essentially puts your opponent a turn behind. The blue player gets to play on curve and use its mana while the opponent has to always keep one mana open. With the introduction of frog and surveil lands Its not even a dead card late game you can tax an opponent and pick up a surveil land or pump your Frog. Many times its not even a downside to picking up the land as the deck is land light and you just play it again for your land drop. With so many "free" counterspell effects in the format. I think its reasonable to consider if Daze should go.
@@ThrabenUniversity Totally agree that Grief is the number one issue and you make very solid points that Frog may be the next issue. I am just thinking long term the shell of Brainstorm Ponder FOW Daze lends it self to creating problems. After we get some BANs for the current issue perhaps weakening the shell that these things tend to adopt as we get continued power creep could lessen their oppressive nature going forward.
I would also add (strickly my opinion) is that turbo necro is so low because it is not very fun to play as well. Gets really boring. You get the win or you dont.
Hi Phil, GuiBonella, mtgo grinder here. It's really a shame grief didn't get the axe, challenges are very boring now, almost 50% of meta is rescam... Frog as you said is perfect for the shell, but maybe without grief we can use gy hate better, but besides that, i'm playing in another tempo decks, it feels like a faster murktide, one attack and you are doomed, 2 is lethal, but i hope that without grief we can play removals better, stp/reb/push. But i disagree hardly on bowmaster, that era of 40% bowmasters were veryy bad too, we didn't see any changes on ppl playing less brainstorms lol. we have to play bowmasters to kill the others bowmasters, and simply we can't play thalia, dryad arbor, welder, anything 1 resistance, plus it leaves a token versus removal.
Yeah, and the fact that we are going to have another month like this is pretty rough. I dislike many things about Bowmaster from a deckbuilding perspective, but I think it generates some interesting gameplay patterns regarding timing of cantrips. Bowmaster being the best answer to Bowmaster isn't the best play pattern though (see Mental Misstep), so I totally understand the arguments for wanting to see it exit the format.
I disagree about bowmaster. It’s warping decks like DnT into splashing black because it’s generically strong. It’s not stopping people from being able to play cantrip decks as emphasized by rescam being such a dominant archetype but what it is doing is wiping out creature combo decks like combo elves/aluren/spell seeker high tide. If it was just a side board hate card it would be fine but for a period of time it was the most played card in the format in part just to kill other bowmasters. It’s not that the card is too good for legacy but its too strong of an architype hate card to also be something generically strong enough people will warp their decks to play it.
Just thinking out loud. How would an updated version of 8 Mulch with scry lands and maybe a few more sac/draw lands fare against Grief Re-scaminator? I mean just until Grief actually gets banned.
I personally think legacy needs like 25 bans past the stuff to hit grief. I disagree with any “busted card is just part of the format we can’t ban it” for any eternal/nonrotating format
I mean really all daze does is gatekeep tap out decks, there's a lot of decks you could build that would use a higher mana curve than 3 and those decks get absolutely demolished by daze as they tend to not play threats until turn 3 or turn 4 because it's shit like Primeval Titan Which the downside of plaything big dumb things is you're tanking a lot of damage before deploying them in the first place, having Daze just makes playing green decks a punishing experience as trying to dump your mana into a GSZ is a liability even when you know they don't have FoW
I think you strike a good balance between "news channel" and "gameplay" channel. Your podcasty episodes never feel like click bait. Instead, one gets the impression that if you do a talking video it's because you have something to say, not because you don't feel like grinding through a league.
Psychic frog is a very good card. It brought back grixis and esper control shells to life in force. (kinda). Every time I played the card, I always won that game. Is really a fkup card in some capacity. Now if is the one next to be banned after grief... Hope not...
Banning Grief is not enough IMO. I think Frog and Grief definitely need to go, and I think Nadu probably needs to go along with it due to the play patterns it generates and how it will impact the format without Grief. Then I think there does need to be a little discussion about the Delver shell, DRC/Murktide both have some pretty awkward play patterns that just make Delver being too powerful at some point inevitable. If you strip out the Murktide, you turn on removal like Abrupt Decay in the format and You make Delver fight lower to the ground instead of having this big I win button. Alternatively you hit the DRC which provides ridiculous selection and reliability of 8 cards that come down turn one and beat for three. The fact it combos so well with Murktide is also an issue that compounds. I don't necessarily feel like Delver needs clipping right now, but it's worth thinking about as it readily becomes the best deck at any given moment. If the best delver shell was RUG with Questing Druid and no Murktide, there's a lot of tools to fight. Delver is basically always one card away from being broken and dominant too much, maybe that's too proactive to hit Murks etc, but it should be kept in mind. Grief and Frog definitely need to go though.
This is insane. I can't believe these numbers. No wonder the format is utterly unplayable. I play standard on arena and right now that's really fun. I'm sorry to hear legacy is fucked.
You bring up valid points for bow master but honestly i can't believe his ban bandwagon has fallen this hard. The card is not fair at all and completely warped legacy for worse. It should have been banned with frog, if your shell doesn't include these 2 drops you are doing it wrong
I would love to see a Thoracle ban entirely because it's by a colossal margin THE best combo "I win" card ever printed. Unfair combo decks have universally dovetailed to that single card as the way they actually win and, unlike previous entries in the combo "I win" slot like Labman, if it resolves, that's it. You don't get to play around it with removal, you don't get to untap and have one more shot to win, the Thoracle player doesn't have to consider anything other than, "does it resolve while my library is empty?". It's not overpowered by most metrics, but it does make combo decks dreadfully uninteresting.
@@drewgregory4079 if you ban it, than those decks will simply stop existing. The alternatives are just so much worse while the competition has so many more hate cards now
@@ThrabenUniversity Agree in that regard. Thoracle is faaaaar from a problem card. I just don't like how it constrains the build space for combo decks.
Hey Phill, there are many things i could say, i will try to condense my thoughts. When i first saw Pfrog i was immediatelly reminded of Psycathog... now with MORE upside! The issue for me is the first text that should have made it UG, rather than UB, for historical reasons. Beyond that its bascally a planeswalker for combat, virtually with no limitations to its growth (G design btw), compounded by the ease of U to draw cards. Although B might be a limitation by design, it is actually a huge convenience when most free spells are in your colors. And that has been, imo, a big issue of Legacy, for a while: the assimetry of the quality of "free" spells. This takes the base of why i no longer play competitively or collect MTG: i dont think R&D really understands the power of certain effects, especially now with the broadening of alternative costs. Grief is technically a 1 for 2, ignoring the fact that the controller makes all the choices. The funny thing is that reanimator actually makes it a 3 for 3 if the board is to be empty . On the other hand R&D, while trying to bring better focus to creatures, neglects other possibilities. Should a land have a torpor orb effect? Should G or W have better mana ramp to counteract U selection or B disruption? Bring back Great Sable Stag with better stats? I dont think WotC doesnt ask these questions and is working on [[stifled creativity]] (G/W enchantment: abilities dont trigger and cant be activated)
Grief reanimate is stronger than a 3 for 3. you end up with perfect information and you take their best cards. I think its probably more accurate to say its a 3 for 3.5/4.
I don't play Legacy. I like to spectate Legacy and modern, more so modern. And thinking about grief in a similar way to thinking about Gitaxian probe in that it can only enable unfair things sorta makes sense to me. from a modern perspective as a spectator I see grief, the one ring and Nadu all as problems for that format. And watching the reanimator deck in Legacy I do think that frog might end up being an issue. As far as reanimate goes, I think that as creatures increase more and more in quality we might see a day when it is just too powerful. I don't think we're there yet. That'll be a sad day because reanimator is one of my favorite archetypes
2 mana creature value engines have been creeping into other formats as well. Satoru, Inti, Basim, all good enough for eternal format play. In design eras of the past these would all be too cheap or efficient to ever be printed. Also, I think you give too much of a pass to Daze. No other card in the format gives you such a huge amount of bluff equity just for having a random T1 Fetch/Island in play.
Loved the video. Though I think Grief WILL get banned, after a lot of thought and discussion I think Reanimate is the card that SHOULD get the ban. I don't think it's radical to say that no one thinks Unmask is a problem card. Similarly no one I have spoken to thinks the 4 mana mode on Grief is anything other than the icing on the cake. Lastly I haven't heard any complaints about the combination of Grief and Ephemerate or the modern black scam tech and the WB color combination is rare to nonexistent in the legacy format recently anyways. Basically every complaint I have heard is about the combination of Grief and Reanimate and banning either will effectively kill the t1 scam package. You argue in this video that the 2 mana reanimation effects are poor substitutes and I agree, particularly in the context of a tempo deck like scam. I basically only see Animate Dead and its like in decks running entomb and with a legitimate weakness to graveyard hate. I also agree with you that we should try to keep around classic legacy cards when possible. So if you can ban either why do I say to ban the classic Reanimate over the new Grief? First, I think Reanimate is at a point where it is likely to break again. Even before Grief was printed Reanimate was seeing some play in fair decks (most notably in UB Shadow). With Reanimate in the format any way of getting a threat into the graveyard becomes another potential problem. Second, Reanimate leads to worse play patterns than Grief. To be clear, I don't have a problem with linear decks like classic Reanimator and Oops, but one of the fundamental tradeoffs integral to legacy is that decks that get to do something with the power level of linear decks do so at the cost of being able to flex into other plans. Reanimate is a good enough fair card with little to no enabling that you don't need to build a deck around it. This means that otherwise fair decks get to threaten Reanimate while still presenting their plan A. This leads to the un-adaptable situation that we see right now. Decks have classically been able to beat fair blue or unfair combo but expecting a deck to be able to beat both in a single game is unreasonable. While Grief (without Reanimate) is certainly powerful it has obvious tradeoffs and weaknesses. Much like Force of Will in fair decks, the cost of a card is meaningful to the point that evoking would be a significant tradeoff. Conversely in unfair decks looking for the slight upgrade to Unmask the usual game of discard vs sideboard is part of the expected play pattern and has shown time and again to not be beyond what the format can manage. I don't expect many people to agree with me and that's okay but I thought you and the community might enjoy reading this perspective. I also agree with you that it is very hard to tell if psychic frog is too strong when the scam shell is at such a high baseline. Unfortunately I expect we won't actually get enough clarity on that post Grief ban because it will still have very high overlap with Reanimate.
As a counterpoint, Grief + Ephemerate or Grief + Undying Evil is obnoxious in other formats to the point of being a core strategy. Reusing the Grief triggers seems to be the think that is pushed beyond the other stuff.
I get it, but as someone who can only afford single color legacy options for paper magic, Grief/Bowmasters, and a lot of the newer cards at least let me feel like I was playing legit legacy.
At the end of the day, banning cards just isn’t gonna fix the direct-to-modern set problem. They’ll just keep printing more stuff. More stuff that’s gradually more and more powerful, constant unchecked powercreep. Sooner or later, we’ll end up where Yugioh is at these days: completely unplayable. They’ve gotta slow down or they’ll end up running Magic into the ground.
I dont see a problem, wotc just has to print leyline of the Boromir and we are good and ready for our good old white aggro deck. Boromir leyline and swords are going to break all those unhealthy cards in one swoop. We can adress the problem of Boromir Leyline taking over the format after it has done enough damage. PS: dont ban reanimate... we need it even tho i hate it, i also believe vexing bauble was a good step towards countering the issue of grief, but apparently it wasnt enough. Also i believe a reanimate ban would most likely just make the grief decks into grief ephemerate decks. (to be fair thats alot weaker becoz of the pitch options) PS2: banning brainstorm/ponder etc would break the format as well... why would you play blue, if you cant cantrip? why would you force of will if you dont have blue cards in your deck, how would you play delvers if you dont put cards into your graveyard through cantrips? i believe its not a good idea to remove something which is not broken, but we should remove what makes this core become too strong. PS3: Orcish Bowmasters truly is scary because it destroys /1 creature decks. its a healthy card, but the problem is the fact this card is in so many decks and with that you cannot bring your /1 creature decks to any meaningful legacy match. ps4: you were talking for 40 minutes ;)
I think if Grief gets banned, it could be an opportunity to ban Force of Will. In my opinion, Grief is stronger than Force of Will. Since Grief is attached to a body, it _can_ cost slightly less card disadvantage than Force does. At the same time, I believe that Force of Will is strong in the same way that Grief is strong, and that they have similar play patterns. I think that Legacy has two paths forward: Strong manaless interaction is allowed, or alternatively, strong manaless interaction is not allowed. Personally, I think Magic plays better when interaction spells can be played around. I do think that cards which trade card advantage for disruption are interesting. However, I don’t think a 2 for 1 is enough of a drawback to justify the disruption being both manaless and able to hit anything.
@@ThrabenUniversity I think that's a totally fair take! If I'm understanding correctly, you believe it is Grief's body that pushes it over the edge? In other words, if they printed Force of Grief, it would be at an okay power level. It is the synergies enabled by Grief's body (reanimation, option to hard cast as a threat) that make it too strong for legacy. *Force of Grief* {B}{B}{3} Instant. You may pay 1 life and exile a black card from your hand rather than pay this spell’s mana cost. Target opponent reveals their hand. You choose a nonland card from it. That player discards that card.
@@user-cz3sl5gr3n You described a worse Unmask, which has stopped seeing play a while ago, because it can't be reanimated. It was only really good in Tin Fins and okay in B/R Reanimator.
I think WOTC/Hasbro gave up on the original eternal formats for their new po$ter child Commander. It all began with Modern Horizons and has been rolling downhill ever since. I firmly believe that legacy and vintage cards should only come out of the standard rotation of cards. It sounds extreme, but I would suggest banning all cards printed directly into modern and commander. I feel like a boomer when i say these things, but I remember when legacy would get a few great cards per YEAR out of the standard format. The dial has been turned to 11... Thank you for this wonderful content, Phil, we really appreciate your commitment to these formats!
I am curious how it took grief 2 years to utterly break Legacy. It doesn't look like any part of rescaminator came out since then, so am just curious. (Obviously the frog being a new card is different.)
It's more that enough people finally iterated upon lists to BUILD something that was busted. Grief was already very good, but people finally found the shells where it crossed the line.
seems like you havee forgoten that reanimator was so dominant that mystical tutor got banned so saying that reanimator was never great in the past is not true. Banning Reanimate would still be wrong though since it would kill the archetype.
Great lecture phil 👍 very insightful and much appreciated.. is it possible to just errata the +1/+1 ability of the frog and make it until end of turn? This has been mentioned in some comments and I think this would make the frog manageable.
I don't believe that frog is too good tbh. We are just not used to run alot of removal spells anymore, since most of them did not hit the big creatures. However Push, Decay and stuff are very solid Frog killers and maybe this + the fact that Eldrazi are insane shaking up the format might lead to a whole new Meta once Grief is gone. Also Elves seem to get back on the show and this also needs to be further investigated. We simply don't know what the next best thing will be. But sure frog is good, but i can't believe it to be bann worthy.
Also there has been times of 20% delver meta not rarely. Why was Daze never banned? Why was wasteland never banned? Why did delver recieve a new toy every half a years that needed to be banned? Because the delver shell itself always has been good. Baleful Strix is a good showstopper for frog. Maybe control can do a better job if not getting griefed the fck out.
@@EatWasteland march 2024 beanstalk most played deck and after that delver... grief is indeed powerful but you need a 2 card combo that was legal a pretty long time without breaking the format...
@@EatWasteland thats a pretty good question... i would say because there are or were decent answers to beat it and i think if frog is banned consistency drops and hate has more effect... that said a lot of cards on the current banlist should be legal and the list generally updated...
We get another lecture at the Thraben university, and it seems like attendance is part of the grading
Oh come on Phil, just look at that cute little frog, look deeply into his eyes, he's completely harmless! Nothing to see here.
Cant wait until grief is banned so I can start reanimating Griselbrand again and start feeding my frog even faster.
Modern feels in a similar place right now because of Nadu. Everyone is expecting the bird to get banned as it's proven to be too much for the format. Even the recent mtgo creator showdown was run with a Nadu ban to diversify the content in the face of overwhelming Nadu performance at the pro-tour.
They are choosing to wait until August to ban the bird, and now it feels like there's no point in play testing/going to FNM/jumping into leagues until the bird is gone.
There's so much fun stuff to play from MH3 that's unfortunately getting under explored because we just have to wait until after bloomburrow to experience the format the way it should be.
Yeah, it's a bit of a sad reality, unfortunately.
I've been running Nadu in modern mtgo leagues specifically for free money. The deck is broken and needs to go. I went in with literally zero games played before, and got 3 consecutive 4-1s
@@ThrabenUniversity its starting to feel like WOTC banning structure is somehow becoming worse than yugiohs...
@@Anonymoose-2750”trivial to build against”
“100% of the pro tour top 4, with every one of the best players in the world fully aware that it is the deck to beat”
Do illumine.
@@Anonymoose-2750 and yet Storm was one of the worst performing decks while Nadu was the best. Learn how metagames work.
Frogg has also another niche that is very importaint in mirror matches, in that it can protect your own graveyard from opposing reanimate
indeed...
Plus it easily grows your own Murktides
I hope Nadu remains borderline unplayable in legacy because it's tournaments play patterns make it seem like 4 Horsemen 2.0, which will probably also have to trigger a ban
Nadu is one of the few things that when it hits the table, I just stop recording and update at end of turn or critical points. It is very poor from a gameplay and viewership perspective.
Agree it's one of the least fun combos to sit and watch
Love how deep you dive into format and think you have great takes on the health of it. Looking forward to more crazy decks
I saw a couple videos titled something like "is X the answer to scam" and inevitability they get their ass blasted in their first game vs scam
I originally thought the abilities on Frog were swapped. Discarding a card to gain flying to connect and draw seems a lot more fair.
This would have made Frog way more fair!
there's only one true deck that can answer the call to maindeck rescaminator hate...
it's time for the rise of opalescence leylines combo!
someone sponsor a league
Leyline of sanctity actually playable XD
And with Leyline of the Guildpact and Scion of Draco as a somewhat reasonable backup plan, it's a hair better.
These are almost caw-blade numbers for the deck. Jesus.
Here's to hoping we get a solution in august.
And Caw-Blade was standard, this is an eternal format with much more card selection
Sir, you think we don't want to listen to you ramble about grief and legacy for an hour. That is a mistake ❤😂
Oh shut up
@@andreaparker7154 ??
Andrea sexy AF when she mad
As an old school psychatog player I absolutely love the frog. I can essentially rebuild psychatog without the downside of needing upheaval…. I doubt it’ll be format warping post grief ban but I’ll still play it 😂. It’s also in my UB Delver instead of bowmasters
WoTC stopped play-testing cards a LONG time ago.
no, they just don't understand the game at all, MULTIPLE times, they have said "oh um...we just didn't do this in playtesting" especially to things that can self target, and there was another one, I can't remember the name, that was straight up "we didn't expect you to target the opponent with it"
@@kaiseremotion854 I think that was oko elking your opponents stuff
@@Frostmond1349 yes thank you, my brain couldn't remember if it was oko or an older card
@@Frostmond1349 How do you put "Remove all abilities" and NOT immediately try to use it against your opponent??? Whoever was playtesting was on markers lmfao
Listening to you ramble for an hour is exactly what my workday needs sir.
Re: frog
I think it's absolutely justifiable to pull the trigger now. It's a threat that you have to answer immediately or it spirals the game after 1 hit. It gives significant and real card advantage with evasion. I've remarked multiple times "oh I got hit by frog on turn 4. I lose. It'll be turn 13 when my life total hits 0, but I lost right now."
We've seen this song and dance before. This isn't a new play pattern for legacy. It's every card delver has had banned in the last 5 years and significantly longer in all likelihood.
The rock-paper-scissors where delver punishes greedy decks only works if focused aggressive decks can go over the top. Psychic Frog halting an aggro start for 2 mana is an issue.
Another good thing about the blue shell being the solid dependable best deck is it keeps keeps glass cannon t1 combo decks in check.
I think the relationship between frog and chalice of the void is worth bringing into the discussion. Like you said, part of what makes the blue cantrip shell acceptable in legacy is that there are ways to prey on it. Chalice of the Void used to be a great way to deal with those decks because it shut off all the cantrips and most of their threats. Now, if you chalice a blue mage, they just feed all their dead cards to the frog and kill you with it. It's just another way that frog covers up that decks weak spots.
The cantrip shell is a integral part of Legacy but Daze is not a true part of it. Dazes powerlevel has creeped up over the years exponencially and has gotten multiple cards banned single handedly. Its not just the tempo delver shell but increasingly Daze protects Combo's for its downside has become negligable. In the ye oldern days one could have always argued, and i did myself, that having 8 "free" counterspells is good for the format and removing Daze would attack that pressure valve. Yet since force of negation exists and has shown its usefullness this should be those additional free counterspells in the format not the increasingly free and extremly powerfull Daze.
We have faced oppressive Delver lists for 15 years straight of beeing the best thing one can play when its not fueled by nightmarishly powercreeped new cards and beeing broken when those cards are around.
This card will only keep on generating problems and with WotC beeing of the rails with their designs there will always be a 2 drop around breaking Daze/Delver strategies. If they do not ban Daze we will see another 40% share of the metagame slinging UB and Grixis delver and once the frog is gone there will be another period of flavor of the month delver if there isnt someting even more horendously broken overshadowing delver for a month or 2 before its back to be at least 20+ percent of the meta.
Grief and Daze ban would be the best thing happening the Legacy since survival of the fittest ban which used to be an integral cornerstone of the format back then as well and nobody misses that card that got more overpowered with every new edition.
I disagree on a few tidbits here and there, but I mostly agree with you. Daze only gets better and better as WotC keeps printing more and more busted turn 1 threats. Back when Avacyn Restored came out, I thought Delver was going to ruin legacy, and I was salty about that card for years. Now? I'm fucking BEAMING when I see a turn 1 Delver instead of DRC, Ragavan, or Grief.
@@Seelenverheizer yes, ban grief and daze and unban deathrite shaman
I think Daze is not *currently* the problem.
I don't understand how people don't see daze as a problem nowadays. It wasn't a problem 5 years ago, now it is. once upon a time it was used to protect something like a tarmogoyf, a relatively big creature without evasion. Now it's used to protect much larger creatures with evasion, effectively reducing the turns you have to find solution to 1 or 2 at the very most
@@marioalbertoferrero33 So ban the overpowered cards? It's time to face reality and held wotc accountable for their mistakes, which they have made hundreds in the last few years, paper mtg is dying across the board, everywhere, except for commander and that's because the insane and insanely stupid, powercreep has been reducing deck variety in all formats, if you don't play cards from the latest set your deck is worthless, it's time wotc removes all the problematic cards from all formats, cards that quite literally invalidate decades of sets and tens of thousands cards in favor of a handful from a month ago.
Evidently, the first stage of grief is denial
14:40 seems like white removal is going to be king. Dumping 4 cards into frog to eat a swords sounds risky. I assume that right now grief is very good at clearing the way.
15:00 this will probably be the case, but really the shell itself is broken. It's not a coincidence the same deck gets broken every single year.
19:25 this change didn't happen with Grief, though. Grief was in the format for 2.5 years before scaminator got big.
28:40 I think if you added up the times over the past 6 years when Legacy has been broken vs not you get a majority of time being broken, almost entirely due to these tempo shells. The comparison to Vintage is misleading because Vintage uses restrictions, and even with all the blue cards restricted, it's the best color. If blue weren't so much better than other colors that it can dominate the format with all 1-ofs, workshop and bazaar probably would have been restricted because format diversity can be achieved in other ways. Everyone knows that workshop is the issue behind thorn etc. being restricted (whereas in legacy people operate under the delusion that all the cards on the legacy banned list are actually too good for the format on their own). If something replaced shops in enabling an aggro deck it wouldn't be banned to preserve the "identity" of the format.
33:00 speaking of format identity... as you previously described, there are often lots of other cards on the "most played legacy" cards list. Why is the cantrip/daze shell allowed to push other format staples out of the meta, over and over, by being too good? How much play does thalia see these days? Is Elves not part of the format's identity?
If ancient tomb or lotus petal broke 6 decks in 6 years, do you think people would be taking this same attitude that you can't ban format staples? Or is it just tempo that gets the kid gloves treatment?
Agree with all of your points! Been playing legacy since 2009, and yes there have been a cyclic nature of the "best deck" / most played cards, but 90% of the time the top cards are the blue cantrip/daze/FoW shell + others (as mentioned in the video, ancient tomb, StP, etc). And if we are being honest, usually the cards getting banned are played in that blue cantrip/daze/FoW shell.
I'm trying to think off the top of my head the most recent banned cards.
1) Sticker goblin --> wasn't actually broken, just people couldn't handle the paper shenanigans
2) Expressive Iteration / WPA --> Blue cantrip shell/daze/FoW + Ancient tomb deck
3) Ragavan --> Blue cantrip shell/daze/FoW
4) DHA/Astrolobe/Oko --> Blue cantrip shell/FoW/some dazes
5) Lurrus --> Blue cantrip shell/daze/FoW
6) Underworld Breach
7) Wrenn/Six --> Blue cantrip shell/FoW
8) DRS --> was used in alot of decks, but again the most playd deck was blue cantrip shell/FoW/Daze
I can keep going back but its the same trend.
I really feel like this fine line we are tip toeing between a "broken format" and one that is healthy is whenever a new card is printed that can be abused in the blue cantrip / tempo shell and we start this cycle all over again. I wonder if we should try to do something different and weaken that shell or its going to happen again. Whether its MH4 or the next UB sets, something is going to come along, be slotted into the blue cantrip shell, and a new T0 deck.
Also maybe I'm salty that I've been a long time elves player and a card was printed and pushed my pet deck out of the format and now i want other decks to suffer. No one seems to care about the poor little 1/1 elves. Jokes aside, I've been traditionally ok with delver being the top dog time after time, but I think with the recent trend of pushed cards (that can be easily slotted into the delver / blue cantrip shell), i'm just tired of this cyclic nature and want to try to change things up.
I do think to a VERY large degree that the tempo / delver shell do get as you call it, the "kids gloves treatment". We all know its too strong, but we keep it cause we like the play patterns / we want it to be the pillar of the format. But lets not kid ourselves, it is is too powerful and maybe its time for a change.
I think that while I do agree that the cantrip/daze/FoW shell is too good, and it is too remarkable, I disagree on the solution as it would need too revamp the whole banlist and wouldn't change the format, it would straight up create other one, which is actually interesting, I think the solution should be created a cantrip legacy and a cantripless/dazeless legacy, the problem is that the main thing separating modern from legacy is that, and so modern was supposed to be that format, but obviously modern is way too much into its problems and prob created another whole identity around it that this doesn't work anymore
Every year or 2 we go through this dance of a Xerox shells needing to have something banned and people dismiss daze bans... If it's such a healthy part of a metagame why are half the cards we've banned from the format in the last decade cards that heavily feature in the Xerox deck? How many other archetypes get THIS MUCH LEEWAY? With the way WOTC keeps printing these cheap creatures that generate tons of value we are just going to continue to be banning cards because they are pushing the Xerox shell over the edge. How is a constant stream of bannings to keep a single archetype in check healthy for this format?
Daze is clearly not the problem card right now, but I think Daze is a reasonable card to discuss as a longer-term problem in the format.
Daze, brainstorm, and several other cards would haven went if they managed the format from the beginning. But now they are grandfathered in. They talked about it on the ban discussion the last few times. The blue menaces are staying sadly.
Love. These. Videos. I'm pretty sure I say this every single time one of these drops, but just for posterity's sake: I *thoroughly* enjoy your regular play videos because not only do I get to see an absolute professional pilot these decks, but I also get to hear the thought process behind decisions (like a DVD Director's Commentary track)... but it is these deep-dive analysis videos that made me Patreon you.
Cheers, mate. Keep it up (and fuck the haters). 🤘
This is why we love the Eternal Glory pod :)
Moxfield is really interesting. With all of your decks available in a simple table, it's really easy to copy that to Excel to find out that recent Preston Initiative Blink Commander decklist is your most liked decklist, while also being one of the most viewed of your decks, edging out your Manaless Dredge Legacy list from 2022, Thalia and Gitrog Commander list from 2023, and your Dragonstorm Legacy list from 2023.
Yeah, it's kinda wild how many views that Preston deck got.
I think the bigger problem is more fundamental: FIRE design. On a personal level, I can point to the printing of Oko as the exact moment where my interest in competitive Magic started to wane, and it has never come back to where it was.
I bring that up not because I think the game should cater to me - it's moved on, and I can accept that - but because it signaled the change in direction. The eternal formats are now more heavily defined by whatever recently printed card becomes the new best thing that you can do, and as long as that design philosophy is followed, bans will only be Band-Aid fixes until the next pushed card comes out. To be clear, there's nothing wrong with still finding your fun here, and there will be periods of time where things are relatively stable, but that's the game now.
Sorry to be so negative.
I can agree with you. For me legacy and modern were the kind of formats that you build a deck and keep it forever, usually updating the list every now and then. But now those formats became standard 2.0 where the new bs pushes the old stuff out of the format.
And how do they push out the new bs? With MORE broken bs.
I can accept oko as a design mistake, and "maybe" they truly underestimated the power of a single card. But now every set introduces a card that breaks the format (or multiple of them lol). Grief, orcish bowmasters, murktide and now the frog.
I can only blame greed as the reason for priting powercreep-formatshifting-cards one after another. It's crazy to think my vintage cube has a lot of cards from the last 5 years.
and thats today's instance of "people forgetting fire design was mainly focused around low rarity limited cards" on the bingo card
@@servantofcygnus Emphasis on "mainly focused". We get it, you're trying to be cute with facts. The brute fact that you're ignoring - assuming that you even posted in good faith to begin with - is that since FIRE design has become a thing, eternal competitive formats have suffered from cards being too good. When I started playing MTG, cards had downsides. It made deckbuilding fun and interesting. Where's the downside to a card like Nadu? That it only triggers twice per creature? That you can't jam it on turn 1 in Modern?
Magic was a much better competitive game ten years ago than it is today. I would move over to Premodern, but the idiots who designed the format decided to ban Brainstorm and Force of Will, which just makes the format entirely uninteresting as a Legacy replacement.
on a positive note bloomburrow seems mega fair
Gotta be honest, the little "duh-duh duh-duh duh" is my favorite part of every video. Gives me life.
after playing grixis delver quite a bit this week, Frog in the delver shell does feel that crazy, but I agree that I think we need to see a world without grief before we can be sure of anything. The Eldrazi deck scares me more than frog tbh but we will see where it goes.
Totally agree that Grief needs the hammer. Period. Full stop. Enemy #1 for sure. Next on that list is daze. I think we would still have ragavan in the format right now if daze were banned. The problem isn’t the monkey, or DRC, it’s the fact that it can be dropped t1 on the play and there’s nothing the opponent can do about it before it generates a, usually, overwhelming amount of value. Volcanic island into a threat while holding daze is the strongest thing you can do in legacy (aside from grief obviously, and even then, daze is a 4 of). And it’s been that way for years. I refute the notion that daze is on the same level of “omg it’s part of the format! We can’t ban it!” That force of will and brainstorm are at. The card is too good, ban it…
u gotta give credit to phil for staying impartial to bowmasters because that card kills the (real) mascot of this channel lol
Before i watch:
Im so for these info podcast videos. Absolutely valuable, and interesting to hear an informed perspective.
People are going to be disappointed/surprised when Grief is banned and UB reanimator is still an excessive 15-20% of the format. The cards in UB reanimator are just too efficient. Either frog, daze or brainstorm gotta go too. For the good of the format.
November 2019-wrenn and six
February 2021-dreadhorde arcanist
January 2022-ragavan
March 2023-expressive iteration
August 2024-talks of psychic frog
Delver has been getting random cards that are tolerable in other formats banned at a rate of about once per year for 4 years. Arguably longer.
I think this will continue to happen or even happen at an accelerated rate going forward if it's just never addressed.
the broken thing is it killed all the small creature decks, kind of like how fury killed all of them in modern
Great video, Phil. I always enjoy these types of videos. Do you have any suggestions for side board cards that are "ok" against this deck while we wait for the bans?
Highly efficient spot removal, probably.
I've been running Leyline of Sanctity off and on in Legacy for years. It's not the most reliable thing, but it's the single best card against getting scammed on the draw.
We love analysis videos 🎉
primary usage of orcs is by other blue shell strategies in an arms race is, along with ubiquity, the most compelling argument against orcs to me, with the 2nd being that it answers itself. The whole, well people just hate it angle. My bold (not bold haha) prediction is it's going right on back to 40%...
Just a thought on Orcish Bowmaster. If it wasn't able to target creatures, I think a lot of the (debatably legitimate) criticism of its position in the metagame would be nullified, while it would still fulfill the purpose of punishing wheel effects, brainstorm etc. It also wouldn't have that play pattern of players trying to catch out each other's bowmasters. I wonder whether or not it was ever tested this way
I kinda disagree about the whole blue cantrip-counterspell shell. I think it's the actual thing that has been holding legacy back for years. It, to me at least, is also the thing that made it impossible for wizards to balance the format and might have led to them stopping to support legacy at all. I'm not saying that is the only reason or that it was a reason at all. It just seems to be that way to me. I really dislike that paper legacy is almost entirely cantrip-based with over half of the tournament being blue players every single time. And I'm saying it as a Prison player, so technically I have a good matchup against almost all of them. To me it just feels boring to play against the same 20+ cards every game (8 cantrips, 4 forces, at least 10 fetchlands), not even being able to guess what the opponent is playing even if they play 5 different cards. It is a huge set back in terms of deckbuilding since if you want to play blue, you need to autoinclude these cards most of the time (unless you are an extremely good combo deck builder like TonyScapone, but let's be honest, he's one of a kind). I remember the rise of delver decks in early 2010s and I honestly think it has been bothering me back then the same way it is now. The only thing that changed is that they've gained some unreasonably strong win conditions to follow up that 20+ card shell like murktide, grief and now psychic frog or nadu which all I think have huge design flaws.
I honestly would not mind brainstorm, grief and frog being banned and seeing how legacy finally changes into something different, more inclusive towards people who do not want to be stuck inside the same shell if they decide that they want to include blue in their decks. It would be fun to see any other shell in that color without having to rely on artifacts.
Also I think brainstorm getting cut from the format would actually make the Orcish Bowmaster density drop to a reasonable level, making the creature decks maybe not exactly tier 1, but at least playable.
That's just my 2 cents. Ofc you can disagree, I do not mind.
12:54 I think your question here is a perfect example of two things being correct at the same time. I think Psychic Frog is an excellent card. It slots in really well in Non-Grief Dimir lists, and even Grixis Delver and even to a lesser extent Sultai Beans. I think the Rescaminator shell is the cake and Psychic Frog is the frosting. I feel that Frog has enough answers to it that it can be managed without warping the format.
Tbf, the cards from bloomburrow and duskmourn are unlikely to do much to legacy. Frog and grief are both from horizons sets.
I would not mind daze getting banned. If something needed to come out of the blue shell. Daze doesn't seem to really do anything good for the format.
Daze just punishes the fair decks that should keep tempo decks in check. It's supposed role in checking combo is overblown, because fast combo decks are often the best decks at beating daze because they generate so much burst mana. If daze gets banned, blue players get to play FoN anyway, which is a much better card at actually stopping combos, because it is online on T0 and is a hard counter.
I think a Daze ban is a reasonable thing to consider for Legacy, but it is CLEARLY not the current problem.
The way bans work in a long-term sense is that many "broken" things have never co-existed and that leaves me wondering if unbans should be being discussed way more than they are. Some things like WPA and Ragavan were obviously ban worthy at the time, but now it kind of feels like "X deck has no chance against the current problem" because their tools were taken away from them. Ragavan feels particularly noteworthy in a bowmasters format.
Maybe in a world with Nadu-Snowko, WPA innitiative, DRS delver, DHA or Ragavan delver, EI delver, top-miracles etc. things could sort themselves out.
There's a big, almost certain, chance something would have to be banned again, but I have this feeling that if we could test this problem cards together many of them would be perfectly fine for the format.
As an example, I mentioned snowko and it seems pretty safe to assume Oko would be too much, but maybe this is what it would take for control to keep up with these absurdly efficient threats nowadays. And if Oko is too much, maybe astrolabe could be just the right amount of color fixing for control to police the format more effectively.
Tldr - "unban (at least) WPA and Astrolabe you cowards!"
Astrolabe is subtly one of the most criminal printings WoTC has ever made that can be a x4 in contrusted. It basically invalidates the natural way the game is played by colorfixing for a player at near zero risk/cost. It will never be unbanned nor should it. Funny enough, Oko, Thief of Crowns actually be okay for Legacy but they are unlikely to ever take such a risk as it was too good with Astrolabe when it was legal in the format.
I don't think those specific unbans make the format better. I'd start by unbanning some of the clearly safe stuff that remains on the list.
@exposfan94movies but it was fun
@@Anonymoose-2750unbans right before master sets certainly will 😅
Legacy is perfectly fine when it’s totally broken. I expect crazy dumb things to happen in that format. It’s where things like Grief belong.
As someone with zero stake in the legacy format other than as a spectator, Psychic Frog is incredibly above rate. It's not too good in modern, but holy heck is the metagame of legacy warped to make it incredible.
"Oh, the Rock is 4%!"
4 Gaea's Cradle
"Oh, guess I still won't be able to complete a Junk deck in my life"
Phil's reactions to the rescaminator list remind me of pre EI ban izzet delver. WotC leaving grief untouched for this long is painful to watch. Can't imagine how dull and repetitive it must be to try something remotely off meta and get grief/frog jammed down your throat every other game.
The Mid July twitter vote has grief staying … NOT going away. At a ratio of 65:35 I believe almost 2:1 yes VS no. How about that? WOW didn’t expect to see that the other day
Daze gotta go.
Wizards is not going to stop printing the cheap efficient cards that generate resources. (Ragavan, Dreadhorde Arcanist, Psychic Frog, Expressive Iteration etc.) The new cheap threats will keep coming and they will keep breaking the disruptive blue cards shell. So either daze eats a ban or every 18 months another cheap creature eats a ban.
Creatures which are for the most part fine in other formats
I think a Daze ban is something worth entertaining in Legacy, generally speaking, but it is so abundantly clear that right now that is not the core issue.
@@ThrabenUniversityOh yea the main issue is grief
I just think a lot of the problem with psychic frog is this pattern we've been seeing in legacy for 6+ years
I think Murktide Regent should be in the discussion if we're talking about things that make the blue-cantrips shell too powerful. Especially since it helps those decks play around things that were designed to fight blue tempo decks like Long Goodbye and Abrupt Decay.
The problem is that people will just replace it with psychic frog. Also psychic frog is probably even better.
Frog is now a better murktide outside of beanstalk deck and in decks that play them alongside one another Frog even boosts murktide's stats at will. I think frog is more problematic at this point in time.
Murktide is stupid and shouldn't grow off the second copy, but it's "fine." The delver shell has had big dumb creatures that technically top the curve but are mostly efficient and fueled by graveyard forever (hooting mandrils, gurmag angler, tarmogoyf if you squint). It's the strongest version, but not a problem
I agree and the reason I think Murk is a bigger issue than frog is that frog requires you to discard to make it as physically large a threat. Yes it also draws a card on hit, which is it's own issue, but it requires "real" resources to grow. Meanwhile Murk is fed by all the things blue cantrip decks already want to do and simply comes down between turn 2-4 as a two mana 6/6 or better that simply wins the game in only a few attack steps. For a frog to do that, they have to heavily invest their cards into it, and if they suddenly lose their Griefs (which serve as hand control and hand KNOWLEDGE) they will be less confident in that being worth it. Sure they COULD drop 4 cards into their frog, but if their opponent was waiting on them to do that with a swords in hand they didn't know was there because they don't have as much discard... that hurts. I also think frog itself will be worse in a format without Murk because right now one of the main "fair-ish" thing to do with a frog is to dump card into your yard to fuel a follow up Murk, OR to eat spells out of your yard with the frog's flying ability to grow a Murk you already played.
you are just 1 year late. murktide isnt even nearly banable today.
Agree the rescam shell and Grief have worn out their welcome. However, I don’t find the subjective fun argument as valid or constructive as rationale for banning grief. Is grief scam less fun that turn 1 blood moon? Is it less fun than initiative mechanic that cannot be meaningfully interacted with? Is it less fun than being stormed out on turn 1 without making a play. The point on there being little to no counterplay seems much more valid and constructive and something to bear in mind for future ban discussions.
Necro frog going to come in hot with frog after this ban. Necro, frog pitch all the cards murktide to chew them up if we don’t want to reanimate them.
I think the issue with Psychic Frog is its middle ability. It turns dead draws into a resource for breaking parody on board, it fuels your graveyard for spells that can utilize it in the future, and it straight up breaks the color pie. We've seen this ability before on both Wild Mongrel (I'll be it, temporary) and the closest comparison with Psychic Frog, Lotleth Troll. And they're both green! I think Physic Frog is too dominant of a body for what it does in its colors and for its mana value, especially for the current blue-black reanimater shell in Legacy.
Rather them unban everything and see how it plays out for six months and start from there.
new up to date banlist =)
This is one of those things that is fine for a local event as a spectacle, but quite miserable from the player experience side.
@@ThrabenUniversity do you think the following cards would be too powerful in the current "or post frog/grief ban" metagame?
astrolabe, earthcraft, hermit druid, lurrus, mind twist, mana drain, ragavan, top, skullclamp, survival, white plume adventurer, wrenn and six
Bowmasters (when the majority of the format is running 4 copies in the main) is a problem. Not because of its power level, but because of how it invalidates a huge number of cards. Any creature with 1 toughness becomes very hard to want to play when you face 4 bowmasters most games. Currently I don’t think it’s an issue because it seems to be trending towards more of a 2 of or a sideboard card, but I wonder if that is because it already pushed the 1 toughness creatures out of the format. Also means wotc basically has to make any card worth playing 2 toughness or more from here on out
I hope the irony was not lost on you when saying "the best deck isn't always a blue deck... sometimes it is a delver deck or a control deck..." I get what you mean but those are blue decks, too, propped up by the cantrip core and it is very often the case that either of them is the deck to beat. I still agree that the gameplay around those decks is mostly healthy but they also break easily, as we have seen with basically every new creature or card advantage spell printed in the last several years.
Skill issue... My Obstinate Baloth, Nullhide Ferrox, Loxodon Smiter, Wilt-lief Liege deck has been absolutely DOMINATING. I've even caught a few nice Orvar, the All Form hat tricks to copy their Grief and ruin their hand.
Jokes aside, a possible reason why Necrodominance hasn't seen much play even though it has the "mull to five, double protected win" lines is because people avoided playing it due to it's ban worthiness being verry obvious.
Have seen a lot of friends that spent obscene amounts of money on the pushed cards (ragavan, oko, plume) only for those cards to get banned the Monday before the legacy fnm, a definite feels bad- you see how the necrodominance deck works and say "oh yeah that's getting banned immediately, I may as well not even get the cards".
One interesting thing you didn't touch on is more possible UN-bannings in legacy, Mind's Desire didn't break the format wide open...
Is Earthcraft really that messed up in today's legacy?
Earthcraft is probably okay. People tried to break Necro and failed though.
Thank you for your informative video. This is my favorite format and hate to see when it gets so out of balance.
This is my favorite type of content magic theory/level ups and deep dives need more of this
Shadowmage In-Frog-trator
Rescaminator is fun and a combo deterrent. I think they should just nerf it by banning atraxa, griselbrand and archon of cruelty.
This way the shell stay the same. You just have to get more creative with your entomb target. I don't think other entomb target are as good.
If this is not enough you can also ban psychic frog.
Your solution falls apart each time a new large creature is printed. Also, I think you severely underestimate the reanimation target pool that already exists.
I watched this video mostly as a way to update my knowledge about the entire Legacy metagame, as I've been away from it for awhile. I think my main takeaway is that I should just stay away from Magic, as nothing good seems to be happening. A two mana Shadowmage Infiltrator with other abilities? They are just pushing and pushing creatures with no end in sight. I remember a time when Sheldon Menery wrote an article for SCG where he posited a future where a new player would think Hypnotic Specter was beyond broken because of how they made creatures weaker and weaker over time. That was hyperbole then, and it wasn't entirely accurate given that creature quality in general had been on the rise from the low points of the first few expansions, but the developers have gone in the completely opposite direction. They're not even trying to maintain a level playing field, but to just make better and better cards so that people will buy them. They use other popular IPs to boost their sales figures even though they spent 20 years not touching another modern IP (and only using Arabian Nights for the very first expansion). It's just sickening for me to see what's happened to the game.
Orcish Bowmaster peaked at a prevalence for a creature that, far as I know, has only been surpassed by Lurrus.
I was tracking it for a while after it was printed and making notes when it surpassed other popular creatures like peak Uro, Deathrite Shaman, and Ragavan.
Bowmasters isn't too strong, but I hate how harshly it keeps 1 toughness creatures from existing. Same argument against it and W6 in Modern, though they help keep Ragavan down in Modern.
I really enjoyed your thoughts on this. One card I think deserves to be in the conversation is Daze. Its a really good tempo card that essentially puts your opponent a turn behind. The blue player gets to play on curve and use its mana while the opponent has to always keep one mana open. With the introduction of frog and surveil lands Its not even a dead card late game you can tax an opponent and pick up a surveil land or pump your Frog. Many times its not even a downside to picking up the land as the deck is land light and you just play it again for your land drop. With so many "free" counterspell effects in the format. I think its reasonable to consider if Daze should go.
I think Daze is a reasonable conversation for a Legacy ban, but it is so clearly not the current problem.
@@ThrabenUniversity Totally agree that Grief is the number one issue and you make very solid points that Frog may be the next issue. I am just thinking long term the shell of Brainstorm Ponder FOW Daze lends it self to creating problems. After we get some BANs for the current issue perhaps weakening the shell that these things tend to adopt as we get continued power creep could lessen their oppressive nature going forward.
The Konamification of Wotc/MTG needs a lengthy video essay. MTG players clammor for bans harder than ygo players do now its insane
I would also add (strickly my opinion) is that turbo necro is so low because it is not very fun to play as well. Gets really boring. You get the win or you dont.
How did forest creep into the top 10 lands played lol
Endurance, Collector Oomf and Na(h)Du(de) are all good cards
Reasonable in lands, nadu, beans, and some other fringe decks. Sometimes in multiples.
Out here asking the real questions!
Hi Phil, GuiBonella, mtgo grinder here. It's really a shame grief didn't get the axe, challenges are very boring now, almost 50% of meta is rescam... Frog as you said is perfect for the shell, but maybe without grief we can use gy hate better, but besides that, i'm playing in another tempo decks, it feels like a faster murktide, one attack and you are doomed, 2 is lethal, but i hope that without grief we can play removals better, stp/reb/push.
But i disagree hardly on bowmaster, that era of 40% bowmasters were veryy bad too, we didn't see any changes on ppl playing less brainstorms lol. we have to play bowmasters to kill the others bowmasters, and simply we can't play thalia, dryad arbor, welder, anything 1 resistance, plus it leaves a token versus removal.
Yeah, and the fact that we are going to have another month like this is pretty rough. I dislike many things about Bowmaster from a deckbuilding perspective, but I think it generates some interesting gameplay patterns regarding timing of cantrips. Bowmaster being the best answer to Bowmaster isn't the best play pattern though (see Mental Misstep), so I totally understand the arguments for wanting to see it exit the format.
I disagree about bowmaster. It’s warping decks like DnT into splashing black because it’s generically strong. It’s not stopping people from being able to play cantrip decks as emphasized by rescam being such a dominant archetype but what it is doing is wiping out creature combo decks like combo elves/aluren/spell seeker high tide. If it was just a side board hate card it would be fine but for a period of time it was the most played card in the format in part just to kill other bowmasters. It’s not that the card is too good for legacy but its too strong of an architype hate card to also be something generically strong enough people will warp their decks to play it.
It feels like we're approaching the whiteplume/expressive iteration meta levels of broken
Just thinking out loud. How would an updated version of 8 Mulch with scry lands and maybe a few more sac/draw lands fare against Grief Re-scaminator? I mean just until Grief actually gets banned.
I personally think legacy needs like 25 bans past the stuff to hit grief. I disagree with any “busted card is just part of the format we can’t ban it” for any eternal/nonrotating format
I mean really all daze does is gatekeep tap out decks, there's a lot of decks you could build that would use a higher mana curve than 3 and those decks get absolutely demolished by daze as they tend to not play threats until turn 3 or turn 4 because it's shit like Primeval Titan
Which the downside of plaything big dumb things is you're tanking a lot of damage before deploying them in the first place, having Daze just makes playing green decks a punishing experience as trying to dump your mana into a GSZ is a liability even when you know they don't have FoW
unbanning Expressive Iteration would be good balance against frog :)
When I originally started playing Legacy Entomb was a banned card.
I think you strike a good balance between "news channel" and "gameplay" channel. Your podcasty episodes never feel like click bait. Instead, one gets the impression that if you do a talking video it's because you have something to say, not because you don't feel like grinding through a league.
Psychic frog is a very good card. It brought back grixis and esper control shells to life in force. (kinda).
Every time I played the card, I always won that game. Is really a fkup card in some capacity. Now if is the one next to be banned after grief... Hope not...
Banning Grief is not enough IMO.
I think Frog and Grief definitely need to go, and I think Nadu probably needs to go along with it due to the play patterns it generates and how it will impact the format without Grief.
Then I think there does need to be a little discussion about the Delver shell, DRC/Murktide both have some pretty awkward play patterns that just make Delver being too powerful at some point inevitable. If you strip out the Murktide, you turn on removal like Abrupt Decay in the format and You make Delver fight lower to the ground instead of having this big I win button. Alternatively you hit the DRC which provides ridiculous selection and reliability of 8 cards that come down turn one and beat for three. The fact it combos so well with Murktide is also an issue that compounds. I don't necessarily feel like Delver needs clipping right now, but it's worth thinking about as it readily becomes the best deck at any given moment. If the best delver shell was RUG with Questing Druid and no Murktide, there's a lot of tools to fight. Delver is basically always one card away from being broken and dominant too much, maybe that's too proactive to hit Murks etc, but it should be kept in mind.
Grief and Frog definitely need to go though.
This is insane. I can't believe these numbers. No wonder the format is utterly unplayable. I play standard on arena and right now that's really fun. I'm sorry to hear legacy is fucked.
You bring up valid points for bow master but honestly i can't believe his ban bandwagon has fallen this hard. The card is not fair at all and completely warped legacy for worse. It should have been banned with frog, if your shell doesn't include these 2 drops you are doing it wrong
I would love to see a Thoracle ban entirely because it's by a colossal margin THE best combo "I win" card ever printed. Unfair combo decks have universally dovetailed to that single card as the way they actually win and, unlike previous entries in the combo "I win" slot like Labman, if it resolves, that's it. You don't get to play around it with removal, you don't get to untap and have one more shot to win, the Thoracle player doesn't have to consider anything other than, "does it resolve while my library is empty?". It's not overpowered by most metrics, but it does make combo decks dreadfully uninteresting.
@@drewgregory4079 if you ban it, than those decks will simply stop existing. The alternatives are just so much worse while the competition has so many more hate cards now
There is absolutely no data suggesting that this is necessary at this time from a format balance perspective.
@@ThrabenUniversity Agree in that regard. Thoracle is faaaaar from a problem card. I just don't like how it constrains the build space for combo decks.
Hey Phill, there are many things i could say, i will try to condense my thoughts.
When i first saw Pfrog i was immediatelly reminded of Psycathog... now with MORE upside! The issue for me is the first text that should have made it UG, rather than UB, for historical reasons. Beyond that its bascally a planeswalker for combat, virtually with no limitations to its growth (G design btw), compounded by the ease of U to draw cards. Although B might be a limitation by design, it is actually a huge convenience when most free spells are in your colors. And that has been, imo, a big issue of Legacy, for a while: the assimetry of the quality of "free" spells.
This takes the base of why i no longer play competitively or collect MTG: i dont think R&D really understands the power of certain effects, especially now with the broadening of alternative costs. Grief is technically a 1 for 2, ignoring the fact that the controller makes all the choices. The funny thing is that reanimator actually makes it a 3 for 3 if the board is to be empty .
On the other hand R&D, while trying to bring better focus to creatures, neglects other possibilities. Should a land have a torpor orb effect? Should G or W have better mana ramp to counteract U selection or B disruption? Bring back Great Sable Stag with better stats? I dont think WotC doesnt ask these questions and is working on [[stifled creativity]] (G/W enchantment: abilities dont trigger and cant be activated)
Grief reanimate is stronger than a 3 for 3. you end up with perfect information and you take their best cards. I think its probably more accurate to say its a 3 for 3.5/4.
I don't play Legacy. I like to spectate Legacy and modern, more so modern. And thinking about grief in a similar way to thinking about Gitaxian probe in that it can only enable unfair things sorta makes sense to me. from a modern perspective as a spectator I see grief, the one ring and Nadu all as problems for that format. And watching the reanimator deck in Legacy I do think that frog might end up being an issue.
As far as reanimate goes, I think that as creatures increase more and more in quality we might see a day when it is just too powerful. I don't think we're there yet. That'll be a sad day because reanimator is one of my favorite archetypes
2 mana creature value engines have been creeping into other formats as well. Satoru, Inti, Basim, all good enough for eternal format play. In design eras of the past these would all be too cheap or efficient to ever be printed. Also, I think you give too much of a pass to Daze. No other card in the format gives you such a huge amount of bluff equity just for having a random T1 Fetch/Island in play.
Loved the video.
Though I think Grief WILL get banned, after a lot of thought and discussion I think Reanimate is the card that SHOULD get the ban. I don't think it's radical to say that no one thinks Unmask is a problem card. Similarly no one I have spoken to thinks the 4 mana mode on Grief is anything other than the icing on the cake. Lastly I haven't heard any complaints about the combination of Grief and Ephemerate or the modern black scam tech and the WB color combination is rare to nonexistent in the legacy format recently anyways. Basically every complaint I have heard is about the combination of Grief and Reanimate and banning either will effectively kill the t1 scam package. You argue in this video that the 2 mana reanimation effects are poor substitutes and I agree, particularly in the context of a tempo deck like scam. I basically only see Animate Dead and its like in decks running entomb and with a legitimate weakness to graveyard hate.
I also agree with you that we should try to keep around classic legacy cards when possible. So if you can ban either why do I say to ban the classic Reanimate over the new Grief?
First, I think Reanimate is at a point where it is likely to break again. Even before Grief was printed Reanimate was seeing some play in fair decks (most notably in UB Shadow). With Reanimate in the format any way of getting a threat into the graveyard becomes another potential problem.
Second, Reanimate leads to worse play patterns than Grief. To be clear, I don't have a problem with linear decks like classic Reanimator and Oops, but one of the fundamental tradeoffs integral to legacy is that decks that get to do something with the power level of linear decks do so at the cost of being able to flex into other plans. Reanimate is a good enough fair card with little to no enabling that you don't need to build a deck around it. This means that otherwise fair decks get to threaten Reanimate while still presenting their plan A. This leads to the un-adaptable situation that we see right now. Decks have classically been able to beat fair blue or unfair combo but expecting a deck to be able to beat both in a single game is unreasonable. While Grief (without Reanimate) is certainly powerful it has obvious tradeoffs and weaknesses. Much like Force of Will in fair decks, the cost of a card is meaningful to the point that evoking would be a significant tradeoff. Conversely in unfair decks looking for the slight upgrade to Unmask the usual game of discard vs sideboard is part of the expected play pattern and has shown time and again to not be beyond what the format can manage.
I don't expect many people to agree with me and that's okay but I thought you and the community might enjoy reading this perspective. I also agree with you that it is very hard to tell if psychic frog is too strong when the scam shell is at such a high baseline. Unfortunately I expect we won't actually get enough clarity on that post Grief ban because it will still have very high overlap with Reanimate.
As a counterpoint, Grief + Ephemerate or Grief + Undying Evil is obnoxious in other formats to the point of being a core strategy. Reusing the Grief triggers seems to be the think that is pushed beyond the other stuff.
Reanimate is better target for ban than grief
I get it, but as someone who can only afford single color legacy options for paper magic, Grief/Bowmasters, and a lot of the newer cards at least let me feel like I was playing legit legacy.
At the end of the day, banning cards just isn’t gonna fix the direct-to-modern set problem. They’ll just keep printing more stuff. More stuff that’s gradually more and more powerful, constant unchecked powercreep. Sooner or later, we’ll end up where Yugioh is at these days: completely unplayable. They’ve gotta slow down or they’ll end up running Magic into the ground.
I dont see a problem, wotc just has to print leyline of the Boromir and we are good and ready for our good old white aggro deck. Boromir leyline and swords are going to break all those unhealthy cards in one swoop. We can adress the problem of Boromir Leyline taking over the format after it has done enough damage.
PS: dont ban reanimate... we need it even tho i hate it, i also believe vexing bauble was a good step towards countering the issue of grief, but apparently it wasnt enough. Also i believe a reanimate ban would most likely just make the grief decks into grief ephemerate decks. (to be fair thats alot weaker becoz of the pitch options)
PS2: banning brainstorm/ponder etc would break the format as well... why would you play blue, if you cant cantrip? why would you force of will if you dont have blue cards in your deck, how would you play delvers if you dont put cards into your graveyard through cantrips? i believe its not a good idea to remove something which is not broken, but we should remove what makes this core become too strong.
PS3: Orcish Bowmasters truly is scary because it destroys /1 creature decks. its a healthy card, but the problem is the fact this card is in so many decks and with that you cannot bring your /1 creature decks to any meaningful legacy match.
ps4: you were talking for 40 minutes ;)
Want new players to play legacy gotta make cards that are not on the reserved list. (Bans those cards immediately) 😅
noo, my froggy boi is too perfect. he go plip plap plip plap
I think if Grief gets banned, it could be an opportunity to ban Force of Will. In my opinion, Grief is stronger than Force of Will. Since Grief is attached to a body, it _can_ cost slightly less card disadvantage than Force does. At the same time, I believe that Force of Will is strong in the same way that Grief is strong, and that they have similar play patterns.
I think that Legacy has two paths forward: Strong manaless interaction is allowed, or alternatively, strong manaless interaction is not allowed.
Personally, I think Magic plays better when interaction spells can be played around. I do think that cards which trade card advantage for disruption are interesting. However, I don’t think a 2 for 1 is enough of a drawback to justify the disruption being both manaless and able to hit anything.
Legacy breaks without Force of Will.
@@ThrabenUniversity I think that's a totally fair take!
If I'm understanding correctly, you believe it is Grief's body that pushes it over the edge? In other words, if they printed Force of Grief, it would be at an okay power level. It is the synergies enabled by Grief's body (reanimation, option to hard cast as a threat) that make it too strong for legacy.
*Force of Grief* {B}{B}{3} Instant.
You may pay 1 life and exile a black card from your hand rather than pay this spell’s mana cost.
Target opponent reveals their hand. You choose a nonland card from it. That player discards that card.
@@user-cz3sl5gr3n You described a worse Unmask, which has stopped seeing play a while ago, because it can't be reanimated. It was only really good in Tin Fins and okay in B/R Reanimator.
I think WOTC/Hasbro gave up on the original eternal formats for their new po$ter child Commander. It all began with Modern Horizons and has been rolling downhill ever since. I firmly believe that legacy and vintage cards should only come out of the standard rotation of cards. It sounds extreme, but I would suggest banning all cards printed directly into modern and commander. I feel like a boomer when i say these things, but I remember when legacy would get a few great cards per YEAR out of the standard format. The dial has been turned to 11... Thank you for this wonderful content, Phil, we really appreciate your commitment to these formats!
I am curious how it took grief 2 years to utterly break Legacy. It doesn't look like any part of rescaminator came out since then, so am just curious. (Obviously the frog being a new card is different.)
It's more that enough people finally iterated upon lists to BUILD something that was busted. Grief was already very good, but people finally found the shells where it crossed the line.
seems like you havee forgoten that reanimator was so dominant that mystical tutor got banned so saying that reanimator was never great in the past is not true. Banning Reanimate would still be wrong though since it would kill the archetype.
Print a version of Orcish Bowmasters without the ETB and then just ban OBM.
i think nadu getting a chance to shine just means more board wipes in the side board
Great lecture phil 👍 very insightful and much appreciated.. is it possible to just errata the +1/+1 ability of the frog and make it until end of turn? This has been mentioned in some comments and I think this would make the frog manageable.
Magic don't tend to errata like that. It's not a primarily digital game, so they can't frequently just make small tweaks like that.
Thanks for the quick reply phil. Love your content.
Cough cough companions;)
If they banned reanimate instead of grief, I will probably quit magic.
With you there
There's a reason why all the creators are specifically talking about Grief. Reanimate is a format pillar.
That'd be the equivalent of when they banned Bridge from Below in Hogaak a couple years ago.
I don't believe that frog is too good tbh. We are just not used to run alot of removal spells anymore, since most of them did not hit the big creatures. However Push, Decay and stuff are very solid Frog killers and maybe this + the fact that Eldrazi are insane shaking up the format might lead to a whole new Meta once Grief is gone. Also Elves seem to get back on the show and this also needs to be further investigated. We simply don't know what the next best thing will be. But sure frog is good, but i can't believe it to be bann worthy.
take a look at the metagame before frog entered..
@@robertdarnhofer536 grief was insane high percentage too.
Also there has been times of 20% delver meta not rarely. Why was Daze never banned? Why was wasteland never banned? Why did delver recieve a new toy every half a years that needed to be banned? Because the delver shell itself always has been good.
Baleful Strix is a good showstopper for frog. Maybe control can do a better job if not getting griefed the fck out.
@@EatWasteland march 2024 beanstalk most played deck and after that delver... grief is indeed powerful but you need a 2 card combo that was legal a pretty long time without breaking the format...
@@EatWasteland thats a pretty good question... i would say because there are or were decent answers to beat it and i think if frog is banned consistency drops and hate has more effect... that said a lot of cards on the current banlist should be legal and the list generally updated...
Blue is very strong in legacy, but it’s cards like FoW and Daze to keep combo decks in check en let people still play them without banning too much.
I enjoyed the video. Thanks.