In Vintage, it is a lot more effective against Stax because you can accelerate with Moxen and once Oath lands, they have difficulty removing it. I also agree that it's better in Classic against Affinity than Stax, although I don't know if it is 'good' per se. My point was more that if you want to play a 'Big Blue' deck, you are way better off playing Oath against a Workshop deck then something like a traditional Jace Control style deck or a Gush-Bond oriented build. I agree Fish has a better matchup, but there is a pretty distinct archetype distinction between the creature/hatebears decks running Blue for FoW and Brainstorm and a more traditional 'Big Blue' type deck that I think is pretty warranted and many prefer the former.
As for people quitting Classic over a restriction, I don't know I could be wrong, but I feel some of that sentiment is akin to people threatening to move out of a country over an election. Also, I think that a format should be governed more objectively and not according to the whims of the player base (one reason I'm against having a separate B&R list for PREs, which I think would definitely split the community).
My personal objective in writing this was to spotlight the problem and build some awareness in order to encourage people to point the DCI in this direction, because let's face it, the DCI isn't looking at Classic without some cajoling from the player base. If the DCI were to look at the format and to say, "Yep, everything is fine." I would disagree, of course, and be a bit disappointed, but I still think the objective of the article would be met.
Well I will disagree that Oath is an anti-workshop tactic nowadays, it is anti-affinity but I do not think it is for STAX. A blue mage is better going blue with a fish build than oath to beat STAX from my experience.
If restricting Tangle Wire doesn't hurt DE's let's do it. But I will say - a constant DE participant has already signaled he will bow out until vintage if this happens, maybe he will change his mind...
These are rational concerns regarding DEs. That being said, I think that something like what the time slot is, how much staples cost, etc. would be bigger overall factors than Tangle Wire being restricted or not. I honestly don't think losing Wire would be a game-changer for Shop decks, it would just force them to fight a bit fairer (I'm planning on doing a follow-up where I go into more detail about what I think are the main problems for Tangle Wire in the format and some of the, IMO, negative effects it has.)
As for Oath, I talked to you on CQ about why I think more people try to fight Shops then play Shops, and it's worth noting that Oath is commonly considered to be an anti-Workshop tactic. I think the results of QT #4 and the last QT have illustrated the limits of this, but if you are a blue mage who doesn't like playing heavy creature builds, Oath is pretty much the only game in town.
This is a great discussion! I do not see classic tourney's having a large amount of workshop decks. In fact, I consistently see far more oath decks regularly being used than workshop. We cannot see the # types of decks entered into DE's but I have played in almost every classic DE this year and I do not see workshop decks in large quantities.
Classic DE's players have dwindled for some reason since end of 2011. To get DE's to fire, people in the community have had to pay others entry fee, offer substantial additional prize support and pretty much beg/bother folks on a weekly basis. If we lose just 5-10% of the tourney player base (without gaining new ones) because they disagree with this then most DE's do not fire from my experience.
I explained further at CQ, but I'll restate here. The problem with the proportionality argument is that over time, if a large quantity of players are playing a single deck, they will be punished by predators and will change to other decks, so if a large amount of people (40 to 50 percent) are playing the same archetype over a long period of time, it means the deck is dominant enough to have some type of built-in resistance against predation from other strategies (we are assuming the player base is rational - I suppose it could be explained by the other players being too lazy or stupid to change decks, but that's not a very useful heuristic).
EDIT: An additional illustration, you can see this dynamic in Vintage where Shops were for a time posting big numbers (although not quite as big as these), the meta adjusted from Gush and Tinker/Vault decks to Landstill and other slower Mana Drain control builds and Tempo/Fish decks that were strong against Stax, which led to Oath getting better in the metagame, etc.
Why do you think DEs firing hinge on Tangle Wire remaining unrestricted? The card was only released online at the end of 2011 and plenty of Dailies fired then.
But why do you agree with Menendian? The statement tells me no rational on the conclusion other than just stating it as a fact.
If tangle wire will increase the likelihood of DE's firing then I think they should ban it (as I said before). My gut says it will do the opposite which is my concern.
Paul: I agree that there is probably a deeper imbalance regarding Workshop in a format without any Moxen. The problem with restricting Workshops, however, is that by removing an entire archetype from the format, you are creating a huge vacuum, which in the case of Classic would likely be filled by very nasty Gush and Storm combo decks that would necessitate a cascade of restrictions.
woof: Thanks for the kind words. I really did try to focus on the numbers. I used all the DEs for 2013 in the CQ database, which came out to 14, which isn't exactly the greatest sample size, but unfortunately it is what I had to work with, which is also why I supplemented with the data from the major PREs. That being said, I do think the data in totality is enough to have relevance (i.e. I didn't just pick one or two Dailies and a PRE).
In terms of play skill, there were a lot of skilled players doing well at the height of Caw-Blade in Standard, which Aaron Forsythe addressed in his article on the Jace/Stoneforge bannings. If all (or most of) the best players in the format are playing one archetype, that should be a major red flag, IMO.
As for proportionality of decks in the field, I tend to agree with Menendian, who I will quote here (from the article of his I linked) speaking about Thirst decks, although I realize this isn't authoritative and that others might have a different opinion:
"Second even if a deck was merely performing proportionate to the field that does not mean that DCI action is not warranted. For example if Necropotence (or Academy) decks were 50% of the field but only 40% of top 8s no argument could be heard that Necropotence is not a problem."
As for any possible effects, it would really depend on the card. Restricting Workshop would obviously blow the format up (and I'm not in favor of it, as discussed above). Restricting Golem would be a major blow to Affinity because I think it would make that strategy soft to combo and Oath. Stax, I think, and Shop archetypes in general, would survive in some form, however; the card is too powerful not to build a deck around. I think a Golem restriction would probably push Shops into a direction away from mono-brown. As for Tangle Wire, Affinity and Stax were both played before Tangle Wire was released online and I imagine they'd probably still be played afterwards.
And on the effect it would have on DEs, I don't know. A large part would depend on what the restriction was. I imagine a Tangle Wire restriction would have little effect, other than maybe some Shop players grumbling for a few days. The radical move of restricting Workshop would probably have a major effect, whether good or bad, I couldn't say (and as mentioned, I don't really want to go there).
Great article and finally someone has tried to come with statical fact rather than purely empirical evidence. The numbers you present persuade people to agree with your conclusions, and do so quite convincingly. My only issue is your numbers do not account for the decks used in the events or play skill of a player.
On play skill a large enough sample size should account for different play skills (e.g. the stax players are more skilled than the other players in said tourney). Just so we know, how many DE's were used in your calcs?
On decks used, only WOTC can look at the DE's, but if in a DE 40% of the people used STAX/Affinity then it would make sense that 40% would place in the top. So without knowing the field you are potentially missing a critical factor in why the results look as they do.
That said, I think you are missing one other critical point, if WOTC bans say tangle wire, what will that do to classic events. We cannot even get a DE to fire without FishyFellow and I harassing multiple people, paying entry fees and posting notes. If WOTC bans a card will it just decrease the potential players so an event never fires again? Or will this energize the player base and events will fire easier? Will STAX/affinity now be viable in classic at all or will those decks be fringe at best. Does the format become warped to other decks (e.g. storm/oath/dredge/fish). These questions I think are critical and worries me most with a banning.
If a banning gets more DE's to fire then I would actually go along with it and be happy (and I am an affinity player!). If not, then this move is a death sentence to classic. Choose wisely you ban hammer people!
I realize that as a nonparticipant in the soon to be revived Dailies and Premier events that my voice doesn't really matter but I would definitely think strongly about restricting Workshop itself. My own experiences playing with and against various shops decks showed me that turn 1 Golem is usually gg if you don't have a fow or some similar answer in hand and ready. The thing is I imagine the ptb would not want to be restricting any kind of land seeing as how outraged people get when you mess with their mana.
Lodestone and it isn't even close!!!! Lock component + epic beatdown is truly unfair - ESPECIALLY when it pushes sphere effects to 12+
Also banning tangle wire would be cool to go with lodestone.
Planetwalls: I agree with your sentiments re: David v. Goliath and it is one of the draws of the format. However, I think Goliath actually has to be beatable for that to work out. I think one problem, particularly with Stax decks more than Affinity, is that you can pack all the awesome hate cards you want, but if you are on the draw and they have the Turn 1 Trinisphere/Lodestone, Tangle Wire into Tangle Wire, Chalice @1 then Chalice @2 play, then it doesn't really matter what awesome anti-artifact cards you have in your hand or really what cards in general you have in your hand, and that's a problem.
I also think an archetype needs to have strengths and weaknesses and the problem is that Shops are so powerful they can not only get ahead of you super quickly on the board, but can also essentially 'reset' the game with Tangle Wire and take a bunch of unimpeded turns to rebuild their hand. To use your last match in CQ League as an example, I don't really have a problem with what happened Game 3: He had a restricted card in hand and that's just how it went. I have a bit more of a problem with how Game 1 turned out, where you basically hit five land drops, all of them basics, but it ended up not mattering because of Tangle Wire into Tangle Wire essentially locking you out of the game until it was too late.
In terms of the Restricted List, I think that, when managing a competitive format, you have to assume rational activity on part of the player base as opposed to depending on social mores (as opposed to maybe something like Commander, which isn't balanced out via the Banned List, but depends on table politics to dictate the 'proper' as opposed to 'broken' or 'unfun' uses of a particular card). Everyone has a different viewpoint on what is fun and the viewpoint of most tournament players is generally dictated on what they think will win (which is their right), so having to depend on peer pressure/disapproval or people being altruistic and not playing the most powerful deck is, IMO, not the way to go.
dangerlinto: I do plan on doing a follow-up with my own personal ideas of 'how we got here' and 'what can be done about it' (although I obviously wish I didn't have to, because as a player I inherently have a bias in the matter). However, with this article I wanted to focus on the facts of the current situation and establishing that we have a 'problem' and when it ended up being four pages in Word, I decided it might be best to bracket the other things to a later article. To give a preview, my own thoughts are that Tangle Wire is the prime culprit, although I definitely plan on breaking down all the possibilities regarding Workshop itself, Golem, Cage, etc (including whether any unrestrictions can balance the format, although I am skeptical of that possibility).
Sadly, although I'd like to be optimistic, I agree with your prediction.
I will also send to Turian. I imagine there has to be some group in charge of making those decisions, although I can at least somewhat sympathize with the fact that they don't make it easy to contact them, as I imagine they would have an inbox full of complaints from random players who are butthurt after losing to "Card X."
Keya if you are in a bubble howd you manage a cast?? :P I have not played in any drafts in ages so no flashbacks. Short cast this week. Hopefully there will be more to talk about next. :)
If you do (pic=gaddock teeg) You'll get the large card image that links directly to the MTGOtraders site. If you want a smaller, thumbnail version, you just put (thmb=gaddock teeg).
I've been thinking and trying to tinker up ideas, but thought a solid gameplay might be to get out a {spine of ish sah} and {possessed portal}. Even a wurmcoil into the portal gives me three things to sac into the portal and can keep recurring if you have the ruins on board. And what about running {tolaria west} or splashing in {breeding pool} to play {ancient stirrings} or {sylvan scrying}? Also, is {vedalken shackles} valid sideboard? I just feel like I want more from the mono blue deck, and wonder about portal in it or the rg version.
It's been awhile since I've written for this site, but I cannot remember how to get those cards to show up as images. How did you do that Leviathan? (As I recall, I only ever used the parenthesis to autolink them).
I really enjoyed how you broke it down into the numbers. Those kind of numbers are the things that hold up in front of the shop-loving crowd who wave the "But shops can be beat" flag and march behind it. And there are so many of them, because of course... well look at the numbers :)
I would have liked it more if you had gone into detail on what you would think would be the best card to restrict. Your main culprits are Lodestone, Tangle Wire and to a less extent Cage.
Lodestone is a beast. I'm relatively sure that sending Lodestone down to 1 and forcing stax-like shops decks into playing Thorn of Amethyst again would push shops really far down the ladder - and it would probably kill the affinity lists, who would become a lot more of a glass-canon hoping to belch out their opening hand with a tangle wire.
Restricting Tangle Wire would probably just result in the players putting Smokestack back inthe lists - which is certain less destructive to a game plan than tangle wire and is way worse late game. Also, Affinity style lists can't take advantage of Smokestack the way they can take advantage of a couple of turn of tapped down permanents. Affinity doesn't slow-roll the win.
Cage is interesting, because it just gives Workshops an out to its natural enemies - Oath and Dredge - two decks that just need to activate one land, once or cast one 2 mana spell to win against shops.
Personally, I agree that even for 6 more months it would be nice to see what classic would be like without full shops dominance in the face of a lack of permanent artifact mana. I would look to either wire or cage (probably wire) but I'd be interested in taking out any of those three and just seeing what happens
My prediction: Nothing happens. I doubt the WoTC people (I believe Lauer, LaPille and Lee Sharpe are on the list of people who make some of these decisions for MTGO formats) are all that interested in a format that will be gone in 6 months.
I have a couple of thoughts, one personal and introspective (1), the other an observation about the particularity of the Classic format that may complicate the matter one way or another (2).
(1) I have historically thought of deckbuilding in Classic as an exercise in playing David to Goliath. For this reason, I have personally enjoyed fighting against all the unbelievably powerful interactions in Shop-based decks (both Affinity and Prison Stax). Winning these matchups is more satisfying when I have built something that can depose them in all their glory. It is, because of this, somewhat unsatisfying on a personal level to fight against Workshop-based decks on an, as it were, meta-metagame level (through a restriction). With that said, I can bracket my personal feelings (against restricting anything) and note that the Shop matchups have enough sudden 'I-win' options (in the shape of Turn 1 Lodestone, Turn 1 Trinisphere, Crucible-Strip/GQ, Turn 2-4 Tangle Wire) that actually preemptively negate hate cards that I think it is stifling to every other archetype of the format. I say this more tentatively than you do, E-, because of my point (2) below.
(2) The Classic player base is small. The Classic player base also does not fit the model of a community of rational actors, if what we take to be rational in this case is playing a deck that affords that player the best chance to win a tournament. (This is especially true for the player-run events.) In other words, for various reasons (primarily related to player preference, I suspect, but perhaps also card cost and availability), most players do not choose to pilot the decks they perceive would afford them the best chance of winning. This has a couple of effects.
First, it obscures what the metagame would look like if played by a larger community whose members were motivated primarily by the desire to place in tournaments. Second, it allows the format to have some degree of variety and versatility despite one or two decks being significantly better than the others. My strong suspicion is that more people would be playing Shop-based Prison decks or Affinity if more of the community only wanted to win. If I am correct in this assessment, it means that Shop-based decks are even more powerful than the data E- cites suggest. However, it still permits conditions that are tolerable to many players (including myself) because most matchups nonetheless do not involve either player playing the most powerful, Shop-based decks.
I am not sure if this is a point in favor of a restriction or a point against, honestly, because I do not know whether bans and restrictions ought to be evoked based on considerations of a card pool around which a metagame of a hypothetical, idealized player base of rational agents (trying to maximize wins) enters tournaments, or, on the other hand, based on consideration of the actual metagame of tournaments, (in this case) in which a minority of players choose to pilot Shop-based decks. In short, we don't know what Classic would feel like if everyone were a rational agent and played the best Shop-based decks. (My suspicion is that it would be unpleasant.) But this is not what the actual metagame is like, even if the Top 8 and 3-1/4-0 DE slots of most tournaments involve a number of Shop-based decks.
I sent the link of my article to Mike Turian who passed it along internally to "the B&R team", as he put it. Is there an actual DCI group anymore? I just thought it was done by a bunch of internal WotC people, but I honestly have no idea.
I thought they announced the B&R changes when new sets came out? So the next update will be the end of January before Born of the Gods? Or does Online Classic have a different schedule?
Well, if it is longer, that gives you time to really get a campaign going!
LOL at shared accounts, Zach.
It's rules / Oracle updates when new sets come out. B&R is different.
In Vintage, it is a lot more effective against Stax because you can accelerate with Moxen and once Oath lands, they have difficulty removing it. I also agree that it's better in Classic against Affinity than Stax, although I don't know if it is 'good' per se. My point was more that if you want to play a 'Big Blue' deck, you are way better off playing Oath against a Workshop deck then something like a traditional Jace Control style deck or a Gush-Bond oriented build. I agree Fish has a better matchup, but there is a pretty distinct archetype distinction between the creature/hatebears decks running Blue for FoW and Brainstorm and a more traditional 'Big Blue' type deck that I think is pretty warranted and many prefer the former.
As for people quitting Classic over a restriction, I don't know I could be wrong, but I feel some of that sentiment is akin to people threatening to move out of a country over an election. Also, I think that a format should be governed more objectively and not according to the whims of the player base (one reason I'm against having a separate B&R list for PREs, which I think would definitely split the community).
My personal objective in writing this was to spotlight the problem and build some awareness in order to encourage people to point the DCI in this direction, because let's face it, the DCI isn't looking at Classic without some cajoling from the player base. If the DCI were to look at the format and to say, "Yep, everything is fine." I would disagree, of course, and be a bit disappointed, but I still think the objective of the article would be met.
Well I will disagree that Oath is an anti-workshop tactic nowadays, it is anti-affinity but I do not think it is for STAX. A blue mage is better going blue with a fish build than oath to beat STAX from my experience.
If restricting Tangle Wire doesn't hurt DE's let's do it. But I will say - a constant DE participant has already signaled he will bow out until vintage if this happens, maybe he will change his mind...
Bounce and dispel are pretty much the ways I go. Not the best answers, nor the most creative. :(
These are rational concerns regarding DEs. That being said, I think that something like what the time slot is, how much staples cost, etc. would be bigger overall factors than Tangle Wire being restricted or not. I honestly don't think losing Wire would be a game-changer for Shop decks, it would just force them to fight a bit fairer (I'm planning on doing a follow-up where I go into more detail about what I think are the main problems for Tangle Wire in the format and some of the, IMO, negative effects it has.)
As for Oath, I talked to you on CQ about why I think more people try to fight Shops then play Shops, and it's worth noting that Oath is commonly considered to be an anti-Workshop tactic. I think the results of QT #4 and the last QT have illustrated the limits of this, but if you are a blue mage who doesn't like playing heavy creature builds, Oath is pretty much the only game in town.
This is a great discussion! I do not see classic tourney's having a large amount of workshop decks. In fact, I consistently see far more oath decks regularly being used than workshop. We cannot see the # types of decks entered into DE's but I have played in almost every classic DE this year and I do not see workshop decks in large quantities.
Classic DE's players have dwindled for some reason since end of 2011. To get DE's to fire, people in the community have had to pay others entry fee, offer substantial additional prize support and pretty much beg/bother folks on a weekly basis. If we lose just 5-10% of the tourney player base (without gaining new ones) because they disagree with this then most DE's do not fire from my experience.
I explained further at CQ, but I'll restate here. The problem with the proportionality argument is that over time, if a large quantity of players are playing a single deck, they will be punished by predators and will change to other decks, so if a large amount of people (40 to 50 percent) are playing the same archetype over a long period of time, it means the deck is dominant enough to have some type of built-in resistance against predation from other strategies (we are assuming the player base is rational - I suppose it could be explained by the other players being too lazy or stupid to change decks, but that's not a very useful heuristic).
EDIT: An additional illustration, you can see this dynamic in Vintage where Shops were for a time posting big numbers (although not quite as big as these), the meta adjusted from Gush and Tinker/Vault decks to Landstill and other slower Mana Drain control builds and Tempo/Fish decks that were strong against Stax, which led to Oath getting better in the metagame, etc.
Why do you think DEs firing hinge on Tangle Wire remaining unrestricted? The card was only released online at the end of 2011 and plenty of Dailies fired then.
But why do you agree with Menendian? The statement tells me no rational on the conclusion other than just stating it as a fact.
If tangle wire will increase the likelihood of DE's firing then I think they should ban it (as I said before). My gut says it will do the opposite which is my concern.
StewardUlk: Thanks for the kind words.
Zach: :)
Paul: I agree that there is probably a deeper imbalance regarding Workshop in a format without any Moxen. The problem with restricting Workshops, however, is that by removing an entire archetype from the format, you are creating a huge vacuum, which in the case of Classic would likely be filled by very nasty Gush and Storm combo decks that would necessitate a cascade of restrictions.
woof: Thanks for the kind words. I really did try to focus on the numbers. I used all the DEs for 2013 in the CQ database, which came out to 14, which isn't exactly the greatest sample size, but unfortunately it is what I had to work with, which is also why I supplemented with the data from the major PREs. That being said, I do think the data in totality is enough to have relevance (i.e. I didn't just pick one or two Dailies and a PRE).
In terms of play skill, there were a lot of skilled players doing well at the height of Caw-Blade in Standard, which Aaron Forsythe addressed in his article on the Jace/Stoneforge bannings. If all (or most of) the best players in the format are playing one archetype, that should be a major red flag, IMO.
As for proportionality of decks in the field, I tend to agree with Menendian, who I will quote here (from the article of his I linked) speaking about Thirst decks, although I realize this isn't authoritative and that others might have a different opinion:
"Second even if a deck was merely performing proportionate to the field that does not mean that DCI action is not warranted. For example if Necropotence (or Academy) decks were 50% of the field but only 40% of top 8s no argument could be heard that Necropotence is not a problem."
As for any possible effects, it would really depend on the card. Restricting Workshop would obviously blow the format up (and I'm not in favor of it, as discussed above). Restricting Golem would be a major blow to Affinity because I think it would make that strategy soft to combo and Oath. Stax, I think, and Shop archetypes in general, would survive in some form, however; the card is too powerful not to build a deck around. I think a Golem restriction would probably push Shops into a direction away from mono-brown. As for Tangle Wire, Affinity and Stax were both played before Tangle Wire was released online and I imagine they'd probably still be played afterwards.
And on the effect it would have on DEs, I don't know. A large part would depend on what the restriction was. I imagine a Tangle Wire restriction would have little effect, other than maybe some Shop players grumbling for a few days. The radical move of restricting Workshop would probably have a major effect, whether good or bad, I couldn't say (and as mentioned, I don't really want to go there).
Great article and finally someone has tried to come with statical fact rather than purely empirical evidence. The numbers you present persuade people to agree with your conclusions, and do so quite convincingly. My only issue is your numbers do not account for the decks used in the events or play skill of a player.
On play skill a large enough sample size should account for different play skills (e.g. the stax players are more skilled than the other players in said tourney). Just so we know, how many DE's were used in your calcs?
On decks used, only WOTC can look at the DE's, but if in a DE 40% of the people used STAX/Affinity then it would make sense that 40% would place in the top. So without knowing the field you are potentially missing a critical factor in why the results look as they do.
That said, I think you are missing one other critical point, if WOTC bans say tangle wire, what will that do to classic events. We cannot even get a DE to fire without FishyFellow and I harassing multiple people, paying entry fees and posting notes. If WOTC bans a card will it just decrease the potential players so an event never fires again? Or will this energize the player base and events will fire easier? Will STAX/affinity now be viable in classic at all or will those decks be fringe at best. Does the format become warped to other decks (e.g. storm/oath/dredge/fish). These questions I think are critical and worries me most with a banning.
If a banning gets more DE's to fire then I would actually go along with it and be happy (and I am an affinity player!). If not, then this move is a death sentence to classic. Choose wisely you ban hammer people!
I realize that as a nonparticipant in the soon to be revived Dailies and Premier events that my voice doesn't really matter but I would definitely think strongly about restricting Workshop itself. My own experiences playing with and against various shops decks showed me that turn 1 Golem is usually gg if you don't have a fow or some similar answer in hand and ready. The thing is I imagine the ptb would not want to be restricting any kind of land seeing as how outraged people get when you mess with their mana.
Lodestone and it isn't even close!!!! Lock component + epic beatdown is truly unfair - ESPECIALLY when it pushes sphere effects to 12+
Also banning tangle wire would be cool to go with lodestone.
-MONTOLIO
Good work, well writen, even if i still stick to my Quote(thx for correction my spelling errors^^ ) you seriously put some Effort in this.
Planetwalls: I agree with your sentiments re: David v. Goliath and it is one of the draws of the format. However, I think Goliath actually has to be beatable for that to work out. I think one problem, particularly with Stax decks more than Affinity, is that you can pack all the awesome hate cards you want, but if you are on the draw and they have the Turn 1 Trinisphere/Lodestone, Tangle Wire into Tangle Wire, Chalice @1 then Chalice @2 play, then it doesn't really matter what awesome anti-artifact cards you have in your hand or really what cards in general you have in your hand, and that's a problem.
I also think an archetype needs to have strengths and weaknesses and the problem is that Shops are so powerful they can not only get ahead of you super quickly on the board, but can also essentially 'reset' the game with Tangle Wire and take a bunch of unimpeded turns to rebuild their hand. To use your last match in CQ League as an example, I don't really have a problem with what happened Game 3: He had a restricted card in hand and that's just how it went. I have a bit more of a problem with how Game 1 turned out, where you basically hit five land drops, all of them basics, but it ended up not mattering because of Tangle Wire into Tangle Wire essentially locking you out of the game until it was too late.
In terms of the Restricted List, I think that, when managing a competitive format, you have to assume rational activity on part of the player base as opposed to depending on social mores (as opposed to maybe something like Commander, which isn't balanced out via the Banned List, but depends on table politics to dictate the 'proper' as opposed to 'broken' or 'unfun' uses of a particular card). Everyone has a different viewpoint on what is fun and the viewpoint of most tournament players is generally dictated on what they think will win (which is their right), so having to depend on peer pressure/disapproval or people being altruistic and not playing the most powerful deck is, IMO, not the way to go.
dangerlinto: I do plan on doing a follow-up with my own personal ideas of 'how we got here' and 'what can be done about it' (although I obviously wish I didn't have to, because as a player I inherently have a bias in the matter). However, with this article I wanted to focus on the facts of the current situation and establishing that we have a 'problem' and when it ended up being four pages in Word, I decided it might be best to bracket the other things to a later article. To give a preview, my own thoughts are that Tangle Wire is the prime culprit, although I definitely plan on breaking down all the possibilities regarding Workshop itself, Golem, Cage, etc (including whether any unrestrictions can balance the format, although I am skeptical of that possibility).
Sadly, although I'd like to be optimistic, I agree with your prediction.
I will also send to Turian. I imagine there has to be some group in charge of making those decisions, although I can at least somewhat sympathize with the fact that they don't make it easy to contact them, as I imagine they would have an inbox full of complaints from random players who are butthurt after losing to "Card X."
Thank you so much I appreciate it!
Keya if you are in a bubble howd you manage a cast?? :P I have not played in any drafts in ages so no flashbacks. Short cast this week. Hopefully there will be more to talk about next. :)
If you do (pic=gaddock teeg) You'll get the large card image that links directly to the MTGOtraders site. If you want a smaller, thumbnail version, you just put (thmb=gaddock teeg).
I've been thinking and trying to tinker up ideas, but thought a solid gameplay might be to get out a {spine of ish sah} and {possessed portal}. Even a wurmcoil into the portal gives me three things to sac into the portal and can keep recurring if you have the ruins on board. And what about running {tolaria west} or splashing in {breeding pool} to play {ancient stirrings} or {sylvan scrying}? Also, is {vedalken shackles} valid sideboard? I just feel like I want more from the mono blue deck, and wonder about portal in it or the rg version.
It's been awhile since I've written for this site, but I cannot remember how to get those cards to show up as images. How did you do that Leviathan? (As I recall, I only ever used the parenthesis to autolink them).
Thanks for your (or anyone's!) reply.
I really enjoyed how you broke it down into the numbers. Those kind of numbers are the things that hold up in front of the shop-loving crowd who wave the "But shops can be beat" flag and march behind it. And there are so many of them, because of course... well look at the numbers :)
I would have liked it more if you had gone into detail on what you would think would be the best card to restrict. Your main culprits are Lodestone, Tangle Wire and to a less extent Cage.
Lodestone is a beast. I'm relatively sure that sending Lodestone down to 1 and forcing stax-like shops decks into playing Thorn of Amethyst again would push shops really far down the ladder - and it would probably kill the affinity lists, who would become a lot more of a glass-canon hoping to belch out their opening hand with a tangle wire.
Restricting Tangle Wire would probably just result in the players putting Smokestack back inthe lists - which is certain less destructive to a game plan than tangle wire and is way worse late game. Also, Affinity style lists can't take advantage of Smokestack the way they can take advantage of a couple of turn of tapped down permanents. Affinity doesn't slow-roll the win.
Cage is interesting, because it just gives Workshops an out to its natural enemies - Oath and Dredge - two decks that just need to activate one land, once or cast one 2 mana spell to win against shops.
Personally, I agree that even for 6 more months it would be nice to see what classic would be like without full shops dominance in the face of a lack of permanent artifact mana. I would look to either wire or cage (probably wire) but I'd be interested in taking out any of those three and just seeing what happens
My prediction: Nothing happens. I doubt the WoTC people (I believe Lauer, LaPille and Lee Sharpe are on the list of people who make some of these decisions for MTGO formats) are all that interested in a format that will be gone in 6 months.
E-, lovely article.
I have a couple of thoughts, one personal and introspective (1), the other an observation about the particularity of the Classic format that may complicate the matter one way or another (2).
(1) I have historically thought of deckbuilding in Classic as an exercise in playing David to Goliath. For this reason, I have personally enjoyed fighting against all the unbelievably powerful interactions in Shop-based decks (both Affinity and Prison Stax). Winning these matchups is more satisfying when I have built something that can depose them in all their glory. It is, because of this, somewhat unsatisfying on a personal level to fight against Workshop-based decks on an, as it were, meta-metagame level (through a restriction). With that said, I can bracket my personal feelings (against restricting anything) and note that the Shop matchups have enough sudden 'I-win' options (in the shape of Turn 1 Lodestone, Turn 1 Trinisphere, Crucible-Strip/GQ, Turn 2-4 Tangle Wire) that actually preemptively negate hate cards that I think it is stifling to every other archetype of the format. I say this more tentatively than you do, E-, because of my point (2) below.
(2) The Classic player base is small. The Classic player base also does not fit the model of a community of rational actors, if what we take to be rational in this case is playing a deck that affords that player the best chance to win a tournament. (This is especially true for the player-run events.) In other words, for various reasons (primarily related to player preference, I suspect, but perhaps also card cost and availability), most players do not choose to pilot the decks they perceive would afford them the best chance of winning. This has a couple of effects.
First, it obscures what the metagame would look like if played by a larger community whose members were motivated primarily by the desire to place in tournaments. Second, it allows the format to have some degree of variety and versatility despite one or two decks being significantly better than the others. My strong suspicion is that more people would be playing Shop-based Prison decks or Affinity if more of the community only wanted to win. If I am correct in this assessment, it means that Shop-based decks are even more powerful than the data E- cites suggest. However, it still permits conditions that are tolerable to many players (including myself) because most matchups nonetheless do not involve either player playing the most powerful, Shop-based decks.
I am not sure if this is a point in favor of a restriction or a point against, honestly, because I do not know whether bans and restrictions ought to be evoked based on considerations of a card pool around which a metagame of a hypothetical, idealized player base of rational agents (trying to maximize wins) enters tournaments, or, on the other hand, based on consideration of the actual metagame of tournaments, (in this case) in which a minority of players choose to pilot Shop-based decks. In short, we don't know what Classic would feel like if everyone were a rational agent and played the best Shop-based decks. (My suspicion is that it would be unpleasant.) But this is not what the actual metagame is like, even if the Top 8 and 3-1/4-0 DE slots of most tournaments involve a number of Shop-based decks.
I sent the link of my article to Mike Turian who passed it along internally to "the B&R team", as he put it. Is there an actual DCI group anymore? I just thought it was done by a bunch of internal WotC people, but I honestly have no idea.
I thought they announced the B&R changes when new sets came out? So the next update will be the end of January before Born of the Gods? Or does Online Classic have a different schedule?
Well, if it is longer, that gives you time to really get a campaign going!