It's hard for me to categorize Duress as a one for one because while in the strictly technical sense of the definition it is valid, but the information you gain from seeing an opponent's hand is invaluable. Where as say casting Doom Blade on a Tarmogoyf is more along the lines simply trading one of your cards for theirs, and not gaining that additional information.
1 for 1
1 for 1 + See their hand + Identify threats + Adapt your strategy ect.
Ok I see where I created the confusion over milling, I did say that you could create virtual card advantage by removing your opponents deck from the game.. now this was honestly a bad attempt at a joke, when you use a spell that removes their entire deck (not just some cards) then they cant draw and get no advantage, you're right a spell like traumatize does not create card advantage in a literal sense.. it can create an advantage to tempo by slowing your opponent through the removal of key cards from his deck
I'm currently in the airport so ill give you a better response to this when I get to my hotel and can address it, but I understand what you're saying and perhaps I wasn't cler enough with some of the ideas I was trying to convey (happens when you rush through thing sometimes), ill have to reread what I wrote becuase I don't think I implied anywhere that milling equals card advantage. I do understand I wasn't clear with my intention on duress and I did realize this after it got posted, yes duress is one to one, the idea was to give an idea of discard options and that was misleading yes. What I was trying to do with this was talk about card advantage and tempo as a similar concept almost trying to relate that there's an umbrella concept that is where the two ideas are overlapped
Id say wrathing a field (or infesting it) is equivalent to virtual advantage negation. Meaning you gained advantage virtually by threatening with 15 tokens and I countered the threat by wiping them off the board. I don't think either have much to do with card advantage in that situation but both have a lot to do with tempo control. Where advantage might come in is if you have free token generation on a stick (say Raise the Alarm on an Isochron Scepter.) and I wrath, then I lose a card to gain back tempo. I think a lot of these kinds of discussions are interesting but don't really get to the heart of it. Magic is game of more than just tempo and card advantage. You can be way behind and about to lose and still win despite being down on cards and in a bad way on the board. All the factors combined add up to a formula that is hard to specify with precision without knowing the decks in question and the players in question for that matter.
well im not going to address the rest of your comment since I'm not that good at this game. But I will give my opinion on the token creature thing. I think it all depends on the number of tokens and where they came from.
i think most tokens provide card advantage or no advantage. I cant think of any cards that just provide a token and thats it. Most have some additional ability or give you multiple tokens. For if I cast the Supply half of Supply//Demand for 15 tokens and you wrath them next turn...we still traded one for one. However if i play Broodmate Dragon and you kill both of them with terminates then i just cost you two cards for my one
You're using a very different definition of Card Advantage than most Magic writers and players use, in my experience. But even by your definition (cards in hand), Duress and Thoughtseize do not generate any card advantage. If you and your opponent both have 5 cards, and you cast Thoughtseize, then you both have 4 cards. It's a one-for-one trade, and no card advantage is gained or lost. You get some information, and you may reduce his average card quality by taking his best card, but those are advantages in other aspects of the game. Casting Duress and seeing all spells and creatures can actually give you opponent some card advantage, as you whiffed and traded one for zero! Mind Rot is card advantage.
Back to definitions though. Your "only cards in hand count" really doesn't work, as opposed to the widely used "cards in hand plus permanents in play" definition most people use. Here's a really solid example of why. Let's say we're playing the "Forests + Grizzly Bears deck mirror match". It's turn 6, and we've both made all six land drops. My opponent, who was on the play, has also played out 5 Grizzly Bears. He has 1 card left in hand. I could have a similar boardstate, if I played a convention sort of Magic strategy.
However, I have read your article and decided to embrace this new "having cards-in-hand advantage is the main thing" way of evaluating things. So I've held back ALL my Grizzly Bears and only played out one Forest per turn, so I don't have to wastefully go to 8 cards and discard. At this point I have SEVEN cards in hand to his ONE. By your method of evaluating card advantage, I am totally kicking this guy's ASS in this game. I'm six cards ahead!
Of course, the conventional way of measuring card advantage everybody else uses, cards in hand PLUS permanents in play, puts us about even (I still have one card of "advantage" from being on the draw). That shows it to be a lot closer to the truth of the matter about who's winning here. If we considered some measure that ranked "permanents already played" as being MORE valuable than "permanents still in hand", which in most cases they are - then we'd rate the other guy as being actually ahead. Which he is.
Not considering Wrath of God to be a massive card advantage spell is another thing that makes your version of Card Advantage theory less useful. If someone plays out 5 pieces of cardboard, and you neutralize their effects with one piece of cardboard, you're coming out way ahead & that play will often be the one that won you the game. If you say your mid-game five-for-one Wrath wasn't card advantage, but your turn 1 one-for-one Thoughtseize was card advantage, I just don't the value in your alternate version of card advantage theory.
Also milling is in no way "card advantage". If you remove their entire library from the game, the fact that they lose immediately in their next draw step is the only thing that's relevant, not the lack of a newly drawn spell to cast in their next main phase - they never reach that main phase.
On the other paw, if you play one Traumatize in a 14 turn game, and no other milling, they will still have gotten to draw exactly the same number of cards over the course of the game, and you haven't reduced the number of cards they get to draw and play against you at all, not one iota. You've just changed which ones they get, and not in a focused way, but a random way. The chances that the cards you repositioned their draws steps are will be of equal overall quality, worse quality, or better quality balance out, and statistically the average quality of drawn cards they see will tend to be the same over a large sample of games. There isn't even card quality advantage there. If you strip out all their spells and leave only lands, you have card quality advantage at least, though the number of draws they get from the deck doesn't change.
You can gain a little card quality advantage from milling if they have tutors, because they could see all their copies of a key target spell get milled before they tutor. However you can also strengthen your opponent by milling them if they have cards like Rise from the Grave, Eternal Witness, or god help you dredge or an All Suns Dawn. In general though, "card advantage" is not the right term to use to describe milling, ever. The right term is just "milling".
Anyway I'd say any definition of Card Advantage that leads to the conclusion "holding your creatures in hand rather than playing them generates card advantage" needs refining, in my view. I'd suggest "cards in hand plus permanents" like everyone else uses. People often debate how to count creature tokens, which is a good question, but I sorta think of them as at least a fraction of a card, or maybe a whole card - tough call there. It's a lot more tempting to call a 5/5 dragon token "worth a card" than a 0/1 plant token, too. But nobody said this game was easy!
There are a couple of paths you can take. You can try and shore up your weaknesses to combo or graveyard recursion by adding something like Aven Mindcensor or Tormod's Crypt.
You can also replace it with a one shot theft effect, like Conquering Manticore (my favorite of these because it leaves a body behind), Unwilling Recruit, or Mark of Mutiny.
Or you can go a slightly different route, by usine Mimic Vat or Echo Chamber. These guys give you things to chuck, but don't get rid of threats. However, they are repeatable, which is what I liked most about the Bringer. So I would personally go with something like this.
We had 19 players for this week's event and things went very smoothly with no drops due to time contraints with the long slog of five rounds to overcome,
The standings were:
1st negative_optimist 5-0
---------Won 6 tix, 2 foils and a pack of Scars of Mirrodin that was donated by *HG-Thuh-Nagarjuna*
2nd moromete 4-1
---------Won 4 tix and 2 foils
3rd HornedFish 4-1
---------Won 2 tix and 2 foils
4th jam33 4-1
---------Won 2 tix and 2 foils
The rest of the players were awarded the participation award, this week it was 2 foil and 1 tix for each person after the top four.
5th plateddragon 3-2
6th mrjebus27 3-2 *HG-Don't-Mess-with-the-Jebus*
7th OMC11 3-2
8th Mr Slippery 39 3-2 *HG-The-Slippery-B.I.G.*
9th lozarian 3-2
10th Bliven731 2-3
11th Nagarjuna 2-3 *HG-Thuh-Nagarjuna*
12th ChrisMH77 2-3
13th feastoftheunicorn 2-3
14th jeremy812 2-3
15th HoffeFin 1-4 *HG-Hoffe-the-Fin*
16th Naproxen 1-4
17th RedMan929 1-4
18th varcoldf 1-4 *Varchild-Cold-Fury*
19th ArcherDarks 0-1 (Drop)
Great event, looks like tribal caught a lot of people flat-footed this go around, I'm interested to see how the meta shift next week to adjust.
Sorry to hear you had trouble finding us last week,
I'll include a tentative list in the next article, but because my clinical rotation for school is somewhat erratic I'm probably going to have to adjust the days from the regular schedule some time or get someone else to run it. You can always find the time Here: http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75846/25877457/Heirloom_MTGO... Or just leave me a message online, I usually check it at least once a day if not a few times a day.
Maybe I'll also have a regenerating announcement on the blog hub that deletes the only announcement and replaces it with the most recent each week.
Sounds like a cool event. I know you do a lot Xao, but it would really help me (perhaps some others) if the dates where just in the articles on puremtgo, I missed the last tournament, but didn't want to.
thanks for the feedback, yea I have the curve (actually I have two between my personal and work phone lol) but I just write it in the browser and then i jumped on here on my laptop in order to actually do the formating and editing lol
Just fiddling with my ipod makes my eyes hurt...not sure how I'd stop myself from gouging them out in frustration trying to type meaningful and legible text for an article. (Considering the blackberries I've seen have the tiniest keypads possible.)
Nice article. Glad to hear that you're keeping busy. But how the hell do you write articles on your BlackBerry? I've tried with mine (I have a Storm) and it is just too much of a pain for me to try. Especially the editing.
except that pauper isnt a viable one. It has nowhere near the level of cards that are simply too good not to play. we are talking about if everyone had every card in standard, then it would quickly just become some form of ramp decks or something at least i would say 75% of the the time. Pauper is great but do to the self-imposed restrictions on card pool doesnt really qualify
While all you said is true, I don't think pauper is close enough to the classic formats to be taken as example, that's because in pauper there aren't cards as powerful as there are in the other formats. The power level difference within cards in pauper is not as wide as it is in Standard or Extended for example.
I can figure myself playing red in pauper without playing goblins or white without resorting to Boros Landfall cards.
I'm definitely not a brilliant deckbuilder but I can't figure myself playing green in Standard without Primeval Titan or possibly Vengevine even if lately it was left out. And blue without big Jace? Good luck.
What can I do to overcome the insane advantage given by those cards?
This can be said, in my opinion, about Twiddle Storm in pauper too, it's one of the most consistent decks I've ever seen in this format.
But it relies on a combo rather than an insanely overpowered card that can win games on its own, hence there is much that can be done to prevent it from fire.
Having access to all the cards surely incentivize creativity but some cards just can't be ignored so easily and expect a close level of effectiveness.
I think Pauper Classic is a viable examination of this premise.
Assumptions:
1) Most cards are affordable enough to make it so most players have access to the cards necessary to build any particular "best" deck.
2) Like any eternal format, the impact of new sets is limited (i.e., the card pool itself is rather stagnant).
3) Pauper Classic has a weekly PE and one or more PREs that provide a body of work for all players to study to identify the best deck and develop a "hive mind".
Innovation is very prevalent in Pauper Classic. The winning decks and the composition of the top 8 change very regularly. There are weeks with a single archetype dominating and weeks with 8 different archetypes reaching the top 8. It is a robust environment and innovation provides a significant driving force in what continues to win via:
1) Innovation in deck creation with a number of new and viable decks reaching the top 8 in the past few months such as mono-Green Ramp, Twiddle Storm, Team America, and Famaliar Storm.
2) Innovation in sideboard adjustments allowing existing decks to remain relevant such as the addition of Boomerang and Halimar Wavewatch to MUC to combat Twiddle Storm and Stompy.
Its a product of human nature. The vast majority of people would select the best possible cards, and build the best possible deck. This is not narrow, it is human nature. It happens in professional sport, and it happens in MTG and MTGO. Format's entropy.
Gah... delete text here.
Are there patterns in the formats online or not? /me suggests there are, and these patterns trend towards sharing tech and creating similarities, not towards diversity. Better = better = better. THE only guaranteed (supported) format to see diversity is draft or sealed. (Or block, don't play it so I wouldn't know). There is the occasional rogue deck in classic or legacy, but the archetypes are pretty established...
If these decks were playable by every kid in the cas cas room they would be. High Tide broke out like a rash in the MP room when kids realised most of the pieces are common. With the exception of myself, I have seen no-one use essentially infinite mana to cast limitless instants/sorceries and win off Sphinx-Bone Wand. And even then I am really only tweaking the win con, not being innovative.
/me sees no compelling evidence yet to suggest that if every player had access equally to every card that a bohemian utopia of creativity would ensue. I actually think we would see less diversity - ask people how much they enjoy playing on the beta server after the novelty has worn off. Most people... meh.
right on thats what i thought just wanted to be sure thanks for the replies and for understanding my jarbled typing ability. negative phails at typing so sad lulz
There are a lot more nuances to the resolution of this discussion than one side being right and one side being wrong. Its all very relative to current conditions.
Black Summer was totally degenerate so the viable cards in the format were a very small group making the effective card pool tiny and innovation of decks in the fringe happened but not very successfully, it was a stagnant format regardless of that many people could not afford the best deck. Innovation is sometimes supported by lack of card access, there is no denying that, and in an environment like Black Summer it was probably the only thing driving innovation. But to use the mistakes of wizards set designers in one instance that warped the game to such an extent to draw all conclusions about dynamism in magic constructed formats is just silly.
You're trying to create a universal rule when instead only conclusions about a very specific set of circumstances is warranted.
I only discussed Heirloom as a counterexample since few other good ones were mentioned, and it was noted earlier.
If you simply want to say that in the wizard's supported formats that lack of access to cards today drives much innovation that's true. Of course those that have access are driving most innovation but it's still true. It's mostly true again though because of degenerate cards causing too much warping of the meta around cards that are too good relative to others.
The vast majority of people do not play heirloom, and it is a small sample. Choosing it as representative is limited.
Ditto for Pauper. The general principle of play the most powerful supercedes any limitation we would like to make on a format, and then try to extrapolate its attributes out to the rest of magic. The truth is, quite simply, that Black Summer was black summer for a reason. Anyone who could play necro did. The phenomena would repeat, I have no doubt, if all cards were available to all kids.
Shard's point about necessity being the mother of invention is true. If all cards were, entropy and no diversity would abound it all cards were available to all.
Xaos: "4) these major formats are often defined by a few degenerate cards (eg in standard jace, mana leak, koth, titans, pulse, blightning, bloodbraid, vengevine ect) which essentially narrow the playable card range to a fairly small number of actually powerful cards, limiting innovation in those formats by effectively trimming the card pool down a great deal (this prefers Heirloom, but not standard pauper, and not having access to all cards or not, its just an important detail)"
This right here is my point. There is still some innovation in standard currently do to the people who want to play but cant afford the Koths, Jaces, and Titans. They have to innovate on a budget and sometimes they succeed. Like StrobeRed which i view as different than the typical RDWKoth decks. However is WotC was more involved in regulating prices in the secondary market and people could afford all the top cards then they have lost any reason to really innovate besides tweaking.
that's pretty much what I'm talking about, sure there are typical definitions that everyone accepts, but it is never as black and white
It's hard for me to categorize Duress as a one for one because while in the strictly technical sense of the definition it is valid, but the information you gain from seeing an opponent's hand is invaluable. Where as say casting Doom Blade on a Tarmogoyf is more along the lines simply trading one of your cards for theirs, and not gaining that additional information.
1 for 1
1 for 1 + See their hand + Identify threats + Adapt your strategy ect.
Ok I see where I created the confusion over milling, I did say that you could create virtual card advantage by removing your opponents deck from the game.. now this was honestly a bad attempt at a joke, when you use a spell that removes their entire deck (not just some cards) then they cant draw and get no advantage, you're right a spell like traumatize does not create card advantage in a literal sense.. it can create an advantage to tempo by slowing your opponent through the removal of key cards from his deck
That's nice to hear.
I'm currently in the airport so ill give you a better response to this when I get to my hotel and can address it, but I understand what you're saying and perhaps I wasn't cler enough with some of the ideas I was trying to convey (happens when you rush through thing sometimes), ill have to reread what I wrote becuase I don't think I implied anywhere that milling equals card advantage. I do understand I wasn't clear with my intention on duress and I did realize this after it got posted, yes duress is one to one, the idea was to give an idea of discard options and that was misleading yes. What I was trying to do with this was talk about card advantage and tempo as a similar concept almost trying to relate that there's an umbrella concept that is where the two ideas are overlapped
Id say wrathing a field (or infesting it) is equivalent to virtual advantage negation. Meaning you gained advantage virtually by threatening with 15 tokens and I countered the threat by wiping them off the board. I don't think either have much to do with card advantage in that situation but both have a lot to do with tempo control. Where advantage might come in is if you have free token generation on a stick (say Raise the Alarm on an Isochron Scepter.) and I wrath, then I lose a card to gain back tempo. I think a lot of these kinds of discussions are interesting but don't really get to the heart of it. Magic is game of more than just tempo and card advantage. You can be way behind and about to lose and still win despite being down on cards and in a bad way on the board. All the factors combined add up to a formula that is hard to specify with precision without knowing the decks in question and the players in question for that matter.
well im not going to address the rest of your comment since I'm not that good at this game. But I will give my opinion on the token creature thing. I think it all depends on the number of tokens and where they came from.
i think most tokens provide card advantage or no advantage. I cant think of any cards that just provide a token and thats it. Most have some additional ability or give you multiple tokens. For if I cast the Supply half of Supply//Demand for 15 tokens and you wrath them next turn...we still traded one for one. However if i play Broodmate Dragon and you kill both of them with terminates then i just cost you two cards for my one
You're using a very different definition of Card Advantage than most Magic writers and players use, in my experience. But even by your definition (cards in hand), Duress and Thoughtseize do not generate any card advantage. If you and your opponent both have 5 cards, and you cast Thoughtseize, then you both have 4 cards. It's a one-for-one trade, and no card advantage is gained or lost. You get some information, and you may reduce his average card quality by taking his best card, but those are advantages in other aspects of the game. Casting Duress and seeing all spells and creatures can actually give you opponent some card advantage, as you whiffed and traded one for zero! Mind Rot is card advantage.
Back to definitions though. Your "only cards in hand count" really doesn't work, as opposed to the widely used "cards in hand plus permanents in play" definition most people use. Here's a really solid example of why. Let's say we're playing the "Forests + Grizzly Bears deck mirror match". It's turn 6, and we've both made all six land drops. My opponent, who was on the play, has also played out 5 Grizzly Bears. He has 1 card left in hand. I could have a similar boardstate, if I played a convention sort of Magic strategy.
However, I have read your article and decided to embrace this new "having cards-in-hand advantage is the main thing" way of evaluating things. So I've held back ALL my Grizzly Bears and only played out one Forest per turn, so I don't have to wastefully go to 8 cards and discard. At this point I have SEVEN cards in hand to his ONE. By your method of evaluating card advantage, I am totally kicking this guy's ASS in this game. I'm six cards ahead!
Of course, the conventional way of measuring card advantage everybody else uses, cards in hand PLUS permanents in play, puts us about even (I still have one card of "advantage" from being on the draw). That shows it to be a lot closer to the truth of the matter about who's winning here. If we considered some measure that ranked "permanents already played" as being MORE valuable than "permanents still in hand", which in most cases they are - then we'd rate the other guy as being actually ahead. Which he is.
Not considering Wrath of God to be a massive card advantage spell is another thing that makes your version of Card Advantage theory less useful. If someone plays out 5 pieces of cardboard, and you neutralize their effects with one piece of cardboard, you're coming out way ahead & that play will often be the one that won you the game. If you say your mid-game five-for-one Wrath wasn't card advantage, but your turn 1 one-for-one Thoughtseize was card advantage, I just don't the value in your alternate version of card advantage theory.
Also milling is in no way "card advantage". If you remove their entire library from the game, the fact that they lose immediately in their next draw step is the only thing that's relevant, not the lack of a newly drawn spell to cast in their next main phase - they never reach that main phase.
On the other paw, if you play one Traumatize in a 14 turn game, and no other milling, they will still have gotten to draw exactly the same number of cards over the course of the game, and you haven't reduced the number of cards they get to draw and play against you at all, not one iota. You've just changed which ones they get, and not in a focused way, but a random way. The chances that the cards you repositioned their draws steps are will be of equal overall quality, worse quality, or better quality balance out, and statistically the average quality of drawn cards they see will tend to be the same over a large sample of games. There isn't even card quality advantage there. If you strip out all their spells and leave only lands, you have card quality advantage at least, though the number of draws they get from the deck doesn't change.
You can gain a little card quality advantage from milling if they have tutors, because they could see all their copies of a key target spell get milled before they tutor. However you can also strengthen your opponent by milling them if they have cards like Rise from the Grave, Eternal Witness, or god help you dredge or an All Suns Dawn. In general though, "card advantage" is not the right term to use to describe milling, ever. The right term is just "milling".
Anyway I'd say any definition of Card Advantage that leads to the conclusion "holding your creatures in hand rather than playing them generates card advantage" needs refining, in my view. I'd suggest "cards in hand plus permanents" like everyone else uses. People often debate how to count creature tokens, which is a good question, but I sorta think of them as at least a fraction of a card, or maybe a whole card - tough call there. It's a lot more tempting to call a 5/5 dragon token "worth a card" than a 0/1 plant token, too. But nobody said this game was easy!
There are a couple of paths you can take. You can try and shore up your weaknesses to combo or graveyard recursion by adding something like Aven Mindcensor or Tormod's Crypt.
You can also replace it with a one shot theft effect, like Conquering Manticore (my favorite of these because it leaves a body behind), Unwilling Recruit, or Mark of Mutiny.
Or you can go a slightly different route, by usine Mimic Vat or Echo Chamber. These guys give you things to chuck, but don't get rid of threats. However, they are repeatable, which is what I liked most about the Bringer. So I would personally go with something like this.
Hey everyone,
We had 19 players for this week's event and things went very smoothly with no drops due to time contraints with the long slog of five rounds to overcome,
The standings were:
1st negative_optimist 5-0
---------Won 6 tix, 2 foils and a pack of Scars of Mirrodin that was donated by *HG-Thuh-Nagarjuna*
2nd moromete 4-1
---------Won 4 tix and 2 foils
3rd HornedFish 4-1
---------Won 2 tix and 2 foils
4th jam33 4-1
---------Won 2 tix and 2 foils
The rest of the players were awarded the participation award, this week it was 2 foil and 1 tix for each person after the top four.
5th plateddragon 3-2
6th mrjebus27 3-2 *HG-Don't-Mess-with-the-Jebus*
7th OMC11 3-2
8th Mr Slippery 39 3-2 *HG-The-Slippery-B.I.G.*
9th lozarian 3-2
10th Bliven731 2-3
11th Nagarjuna 2-3 *HG-Thuh-Nagarjuna*
12th ChrisMH77 2-3
13th feastoftheunicorn 2-3
14th jeremy812 2-3
15th HoffeFin 1-4 *HG-Hoffe-the-Fin*
16th Naproxen 1-4
17th RedMan929 1-4
18th varcoldf 1-4 *Varchild-Cold-Fury*
19th ArcherDarks 0-1 (Drop)
Great event, looks like tribal caught a lot of people flat-footed this go around, I'm interested to see how the meta shift next week to adjust.
X-
What would be the next card you would put in for EDH since Bringer can't be in there?
Sorry to hear you had trouble finding us last week,
I'll include a tentative list in the next article, but because my clinical rotation for school is somewhat erratic I'm probably going to have to adjust the days from the regular schedule some time or get someone else to run it. You can always find the time Here: http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75846/25877457/Heirloom_MTGO... Or just leave me a message online, I usually check it at least once a day if not a few times a day.
Maybe I'll also have a regenerating announcement on the blog hub that deletes the only announcement and replaces it with the most recent each week.
X-
Sounds like a cool event. I know you do a lot Xao, but it would really help me (perhaps some others) if the dates where just in the articles on puremtgo, I missed the last tournament, but didn't want to.
thanks for the feedback, yea I have the curve (actually I have two between my personal and work phone lol) but I just write it in the browser and then i jumped on here on my laptop in order to actually do the formating and editing lol
Pitfall and Excitebike! You had me at hello.
Just fiddling with my ipod makes my eyes hurt...not sure how I'd stop myself from gouging them out in frustration trying to type meaningful and legible text for an article. (Considering the blackberries I've seen have the tiniest keypads possible.)
Nice article. Glad to hear that you're keeping busy. But how the hell do you write articles on your BlackBerry? I've tried with mine (I have a Storm) and it is just too much of a pain for me to try. Especially the editing.
except that pauper isnt a viable one. It has nowhere near the level of cards that are simply too good not to play. we are talking about if everyone had every card in standard, then it would quickly just become some form of ramp decks or something at least i would say 75% of the the time. Pauper is great but do to the self-imposed restrictions on card pool doesnt really qualify
While all you said is true, I don't think pauper is close enough to the classic formats to be taken as example, that's because in pauper there aren't cards as powerful as there are in the other formats. The power level difference within cards in pauper is not as wide as it is in Standard or Extended for example.
I can figure myself playing red in pauper without playing goblins or white without resorting to Boros Landfall cards.
I'm definitely not a brilliant deckbuilder but I can't figure myself playing green in Standard without Primeval Titan or possibly Vengevine even if lately it was left out. And blue without big Jace? Good luck.
What can I do to overcome the insane advantage given by those cards?
This can be said, in my opinion, about Twiddle Storm in pauper too, it's one of the most consistent decks I've ever seen in this format.
But it relies on a combo rather than an insanely overpowered card that can win games on its own, hence there is much that can be done to prevent it from fire.
Having access to all the cards surely incentivize creativity but some cards just can't be ignored so easily and expect a close level of effectiveness.
I think Pauper Classic is a viable examination of this premise.
Assumptions:
1) Most cards are affordable enough to make it so most players have access to the cards necessary to build any particular "best" deck.
2) Like any eternal format, the impact of new sets is limited (i.e., the card pool itself is rather stagnant).
3) Pauper Classic has a weekly PE and one or more PREs that provide a body of work for all players to study to identify the best deck and develop a "hive mind".
Innovation is very prevalent in Pauper Classic. The winning decks and the composition of the top 8 change very regularly. There are weeks with a single archetype dominating and weeks with 8 different archetypes reaching the top 8. It is a robust environment and innovation provides a significant driving force in what continues to win via:
1) Innovation in deck creation with a number of new and viable decks reaching the top 8 in the past few months such as mono-Green Ramp, Twiddle Storm, Team America, and Famaliar Storm.
2) Innovation in sideboard adjustments allowing existing decks to remain relevant such as the addition of Boomerang and Halimar Wavewatch to MUC to combat Twiddle Storm and Stompy.
Its a product of human nature. The vast majority of people would select the best possible cards, and build the best possible deck. This is not narrow, it is human nature. It happens in professional sport, and it happens in MTG and MTGO. Format's entropy.
Gah... delete text here.
Are there patterns in the formats online or not? /me suggests there are, and these patterns trend towards sharing tech and creating similarities, not towards diversity. Better = better = better. THE only guaranteed (supported) format to see diversity is draft or sealed. (Or block, don't play it so I wouldn't know). There is the occasional rogue deck in classic or legacy, but the archetypes are pretty established...
If these decks were playable by every kid in the cas cas room they would be. High Tide broke out like a rash in the MP room when kids realised most of the pieces are common. With the exception of myself, I have seen no-one use essentially infinite mana to cast limitless instants/sorceries and win off Sphinx-Bone Wand. And even then I am really only tweaking the win con, not being innovative.
/me sees no compelling evidence yet to suggest that if every player had access equally to every card that a bohemian utopia of creativity would ensue. I actually think we would see less diversity - ask people how much they enjoy playing on the beta server after the novelty has worn off. Most people... meh.
right on thats what i thought just wanted to be sure thanks for the replies and for understanding my jarbled typing ability. negative phails at typing so sad lulz
There are a lot more nuances to the resolution of this discussion than one side being right and one side being wrong. Its all very relative to current conditions.
Black Summer was totally degenerate so the viable cards in the format were a very small group making the effective card pool tiny and innovation of decks in the fringe happened but not very successfully, it was a stagnant format regardless of that many people could not afford the best deck. Innovation is sometimes supported by lack of card access, there is no denying that, and in an environment like Black Summer it was probably the only thing driving innovation. But to use the mistakes of wizards set designers in one instance that warped the game to such an extent to draw all conclusions about dynamism in magic constructed formats is just silly.
You're trying to create a universal rule when instead only conclusions about a very specific set of circumstances is warranted.
I only discussed Heirloom as a counterexample since few other good ones were mentioned, and it was noted earlier.
If you simply want to say that in the wizard's supported formats that lack of access to cards today drives much innovation that's true. Of course those that have access are driving most innovation but it's still true. It's mostly true again though because of degenerate cards causing too much warping of the meta around cards that are too good relative to others.
X-
The vast majority of people do not play heirloom, and it is a small sample. Choosing it as representative is limited.
Ditto for Pauper. The general principle of play the most powerful supercedes any limitation we would like to make on a format, and then try to extrapolate its attributes out to the rest of magic. The truth is, quite simply, that Black Summer was black summer for a reason. Anyone who could play necro did. The phenomena would repeat, I have no doubt, if all cards were available to all kids.
Shard's point about necessity being the mother of invention is true. If all cards were, entropy and no diversity would abound it all cards were available to all.
Xaos: "4) these major formats are often defined by a few degenerate cards (eg in standard jace, mana leak, koth, titans, pulse, blightning, bloodbraid, vengevine ect) which essentially narrow the playable card range to a fairly small number of actually powerful cards, limiting innovation in those formats by effectively trimming the card pool down a great deal (this prefers Heirloom, but not standard pauper, and not having access to all cards or not, its just an important detail)"
This right here is my point. There is still some innovation in standard currently do to the people who want to play but cant afford the Koths, Jaces, and Titans. They have to innovate on a budget and sometimes they succeed. Like StrobeRed which i view as different than the typical RDWKoth decks. However is WotC was more involved in regulating prices in the secondary market and people could afford all the top cards then they have lost any reason to really innovate besides tweaking.