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I used to really like Legacy, but I've become rather ambivalent over the past year. When Vintage Masters launched, I gave playing Legacy on MTGO a try and quickly came to the realization that playing online just wasn't as good as paper Legacy. A large part of the problem for me was the prevalence of Miracles online.
I've always hated playing against Miracles. There are interesting decisions in the matchup, but usually only for the first couple of turns, after which point you have probably already won or lost and then you have to wait an hour and a half to find out which is the case. I didn't mind playing against it once or twice in a nine round tournament, but playing against it 2-3 times in a four round event is just miserable. This weekend Willy Edel tweeted this in response to the Grand Prix Lille coverage:
Once upon a time, Sensei's Divining Top was banned in Extended. I was not a fan of that ban at the time, but I dug up the reasoning from that announcement and it seems to play with regard to Legacy.
Ultimately Top 8s throughout the season were littered with the one-cost artifact either in conjunction with Counterbalance to lock opponents out of games, Trinket Mage to be found reliably, or (and usually in addition to) Onslaught’s sac-lands to allow players to shuffle away cards they didn’t wish to draw while peeking at a fresh set of three cards. Such a pervasive performance during a single season created a different problem as well: it made tournaments take too much time.
The constant activating of Divining Top bogs games down, which ultimately leads to an increase in the number of matches that go to time and beyond, which in turn leads to tournaments running much longer than they have historically. Furthermore, the Top encourages players to maximize the number of shuffle effects they play in a deck and the constant shuffling, cutting, presenting to an opponent to repeat the process, and then continuation of a turn exacerbated the situation. In the past the DCI has banned such cards on those grounds alone (Shahrazad is a good example of this, with Land Tax and Thawing Glaciers also having been banned for similar reasons) but in conjunction with the Top’s popularity during the last Extended PTQ season, the decision was to ban the card from the format it was harming.
I'd miss Top a lot more than I'd miss Counterbalance, but either way you'd have a hard time convincing me that banning Top wouldn't make Legacy more enjoyable to play and to watch. Of course, one should always tread lightly with a ban, and there are definitely Miracles fans that this would isolate. I personal believe that the benefits outweigh the harm.
Top is one of the few non-blue card selection tools, and is used in other decks than Miracles (although not as a 4-of generally). Banning it will absolutely kill Miracles, but also hurt those other decks (Painter, Nic Fit…).
I’m against bannings in Legacy for reasons such as “making coverage better” : Legacy is the last home (with Vintage, but that is even less accessible) of a certain conception of Magic (stack-based interactions as opposed to creature combat) that I feel should have a place to exist without falling prey to the coverage obsession (see the last video coverage rules for cards layout).
Given your reasoning, would you be as bothered by a Counterbalance ban?
I would be less bothered by a Counterbalance ban, since it would hurt one and only one deck in the format.
I’m not sure Miracles as a deck would still exist without Counterbalance (although Counterbalance is sided out in several matchups, it’s still an important piece of the deck in many matchups such as combo). I suppose it would still be possible to have a control deck featuring Top and Miracles cards (Terminus mostly), but this deck would be much softer to Combo.
Miracles is currently the most proeminent Control deck in the format, and as such it fulfills an important function, one that I would hate to see disappear (Grixis control exists, but is less permission-based). Considering that I said I don’t support “coverage/logistics based bans” (I was also against the Eggs/Second Sunrise ban in Modern), banning Counterbalance would have to be because Miracles had become over the Top (pun not intended) in the format and must be specifically targetted.
The card I’d be more inclined to see banned is Dig Through Time : it is really good in Miracles, but completely busted in other blue-based decks (such as Omni-Tell). Banning DTT (like the Love Boat before it) would curb down the power, velocity and consistency of various blue cantrips-using decks (including Miracles) without destroying them, and I think that would be a good thing for the overall balance of the format.
Miracles is the ONLY control deck in legacy (at least from a Tier 1 perspective) and while many legacy decks include control aspects (usually Combo/Control or Aggro/Control), Miracles as a deck keeps combo decks in check…banning Top, would likely push Legacy into being much more “combo” heavy (similar to how modern seems to lack a true control deck now and most of the decks win via some sort of combo finish)…..though I will admit I play Miracles and love the deck….sure you can run out of time, but to complain that the game is decided in the first few turns and it takes forever to realize which isn’t a good argument….I’ve had players concede when they realized they had no hope of winning plenty of times w/o waiting for me to actually present my win condition (that’s what control decks do). Many good legacy players know when their liklihood of winning is close to 0 and concede to gain that time for future games, so NOT conceding when you’re locked out is just as much your fault as the Miracles player’s….
Your claim works in a game one situation, but not necessarily in a game two or three situation. Playing to turn a loss into a draw isn’t necessarily wrong.
It’s often the right path to take. The Miracles player often can’t win fast enough to race the clock if you win game one and then play defensively (and don’t stall!) in game two.
I think the overall point is the slowness of the card, and how many games go to time because of it. Games do not go to time because of Counterbalance, or Dig Through Time, its because of Top. During Thursday Night Legacy at my store, 3 weeks in a row with 2-3 players playing Miracles, we consistently went to time almost every round, and up to 10 minutes after to actually finish the matches. 2 weeks ago there were 0 miracles players and we finished every round at least 10 minutes early. Literally every round. At a larger event, that could potentially shave an hour or two off the duration of the event.
While I can understand other people’s frustration with that….the time limit was set by WoTC as an acceptable game length….if time concerns are that big of a factor then they should just ban FoW and we can have 8 round Legacy Tournaments end in 1.5 hours….granted it’ll be all Belcher, Ooops All Spells, Cheerios, and Storm…but it’ll be fast.
The problem is how much time is spent with Top itself. The amount of time spent looking at the top 3, re-arranging cards, using fetches and repeating the process is quite slow, and Miracles consistently proves to be a deck that goes to time and longer.
Wizards has banned a card due to time restraint before,
“Second Sunrise”
Here is Wizards reasoning:
“In a large tournament, such as a Grand Prix, when time for the round expires, players are given five additional turns to complete their game. Usually, this takes a few minutes to conclude the rest of the games. However, a player playing Eggs might have a fifteen-minute turn during the additional turns, delaying the start of the next round by ten minutes or more (beyond the next-longest match). Over the course of a day, this can mean an extra hour of waiting for everyone else in the tournament.
The DCI considered which card to ban to deal with this issue. We decided to try and do the narrowest possible ban: one that would reduce the chance of such long turns without banning a card used in other decks. That is why Second Sunrise is banned in Modern.”
You should try playing 12 Post. I love playing against Miracles. Seriously. The matchup makes me feel like a cat playing with its food. In the 3-1/2 years I’ve been piloting the deck, I’ve lost only 3 matches to Miracles. It’s almost a bye.
My list is actually quite cheap online ($300):
http://www.starcitygames.com/article/31032_Daily-…
A very similar list took 34th at Lille too.
Ya…I’ve been on the other side of that matchup…it was brutal…my only joy came from countering a Wurmcoil via CB trigger and revealing a Terminus.
Legacy is one of the few places in Magic where it’s still acceptable to play a deck that makes other players truly miserable. Prison decks abound in the second tier, as does Pox. Lands was terrible to play against until Thespian’s Stage was printed. Death and Taxes is about as much fun to play against as the name implies.
This is one of the things I like most about Legacy. It preserves a style of play that is absent from Modern or Standard. Miserable grinding 🙂
(Full disclosure: I usually play Dark Bant, Delver or Menfolk.)