So Mystical Tutor is banned.
Fair enough.
It was pretty clear that Reanimator was the best deck in the format, with Tendrils being probably second best, depending on how many people were playing Counterbalance at the time. Tendrils is by far the most dominant deck in the Netherlands, and the finals of Grand Prix: Madrid was a battle between Reanimator and Tendrils. Stephen Menendian wrote an exhaustive metagame analysis of GP: Madrid; you can see how the Mystical Tutor decks outperform the field every step of the way. Further, both Mystical Tutor decks were heavily favored against beatdown strategies. Tendrils simply goldfished aggro decks on turn 2, while Reanimator decks would use Thoughtseize and Force of Will to battle removal spells while they hid behind Blazing Archon or Sphinx of the Steel Wind.
In a recent interview, Aaron Forsythe said that “creature-based metagames are the way to go.” It appears that Wizards likes to see people discover new, unforeseen interactions, and they like it when people win tournaments out of left field with new combo decks, like when Seismic Swans showed up at Grand Prix: Barcelona. On the other hand, they want people to be able to sideboard four Pithing Needles, or some other hoser, and have a reasonable chance of winning the match. Four Mindbreak Trap out of the board was not even close to enough for Zoo decks to turn their Tendrils matchup around, even with Gaddock Teeg to complement it.
“[Combo] should not be a pillar of the metagame.”
Wizards wants creatures to be the primary means of interaction between players. This is very reasonable. Recall the article I wrote about teaching my girlfriend to play Magic? Before the Seattle Open, she asked me what kind of deck I was going to play. At the time, I was on the fence between Tendrils, Dredge, and Reanimator. Explaining the concepts behind Reanimator went fairly smoothly, but explaining how Dredge and Tendrils actually won games didn’t fit with her conceptual framework of Magic.
(Some will likely argue that Wizards could have waited for the results of Grand Prix: Columbus to make any decisions, but Wizards can’t really afford to have what may well be the largest North American GP of all time to be dominated by a bunch of combo decks that make the combat phase essentially obsolete.)
I suspect that there are two main reasons behind the new method for Extended rotation. The first is that people want to be able to port their Standard deck into Extended without a ton of hassle, but the second is that, historically, Extended has been dominated by combo decks. Even recently, Scapeshift, Hypergenesis, and Dark Depths have headlined the format, with Hive Mind and Dredge lurking around the edges. With Extended being Lorwyn forward, the only real combo deck is Seismic Swans, which isn’t nearly as egregious to people’s conception of a game of Magic than Hypergenesis is.
Like Extended, Legacy helps reassure people that their cards will retain value over time. The problem is, you don’t want to point at your evergreen format and show someone a totally different game of Magic than what they’re used to. You want beatdown strategies to be good.
Stephen and Matt Elias have been quick to point to Zoo’s success in the U.S. metagame as evidence against the dominance of Mystical Tutor. On the other hand, I was talking to Daniel Marley in between rounds at the Seattle StarCityGames.com Open. Daniel played Zoo. After every round, our conversation was more or less the same:
“How’d your match go?”
“He was playing Merfolk. I crushed him.”
Sometimes there was some deviation from the script, like when Daniel ran someone over in the mirror with Umezawa’s Jitte.
Daniel got the Tendrils pairing in round 4. Matt Nass annihilated him. Later, though, Daniel came up to me, beaming.
“I beat Tendrils!”
“Really? How’d that happen?”
“Well, in one game, I had a fast Steppe Lynx draw and bought an extra turn by Pyroblasting his Mystical Tutor.”
“Fair enough. What about the other game?”
“He forgot to sacrifice his Lion’s Eye Diamond in response to Infernal Tutor.”
“…”
I’m firmly in the camp that if you’re not level five or higher, you’re probably pretty bad at Magic, but whenever I make the argument that the results of the StarCityGames.com Open don’t really reflect the power of certain archetypes because of how “bad” the Open players are, I’m told that I just have anecdotal evidence but no real proof.
Now, I spent most of the last year in a computer lab doing statistical analysis. I believe in the value of empirical data, and I know how pernicious anecdotal evidence can be. So I was pretty hesitant to just make a blanket claim that everyone in the U.S. metagame was garbage and that the lack of tournament data to document the dominance of certain archetypes didn’t reflect how good (and bad) some archetypes really were.
But consider Daniel’s story. Zaiem Beg played Zoo at the Seattle Open as well, and when we talked about his rounds, most of them went something along the lines of “I played Wild Nacatl, he screwed up, and I killed him.”
Zaiem played in a smaller, local tournament last weekend. Local Seattle tournaments are usually packed with ringers, because there are a lot of grinders who live in the University District and don’t have much to do aside from go to class and play MTGO. None of Zaiem’s opponents gave him any games on a silver platter that weekend, and he got crushed.
At the Seattle Open, in the 4-1 bracket, I played the Reanimator mirror. My opponent discarded Iona, Shield of Emeria to Careful Study, and was shocked when I cast Reanimate on it. He was totally unaware that Reanimate could target creatures in any graveyard. I’ve been unable to attend other large U.S. tournaments, but friends of mine have reported that the quality of play in the Legacy Opens is unbelievably low compared to a PTQ. Certainly, we’re all familiar with the gaffes shown on the ggslive coverage; the Lands player who got a game loss for procedural error in a game 3 that he couldn’t possibly have lost otherwise, and the famous “Dark Ritual, go” games spring readily to mind.
Now, you could argue that even though Legacy was unhealthy, since people weren’t playing Reanimator or Tendrils, or were playing them badly, that Wizards didn’t really need to ban Mystical Tutor.
On the other hand, Gerry Thompson brewed up a Reanimator list, showed up to an Open, came in second, and said it was the easiest tournament of his life. He only lost in the finals because his Tendrils opponent killed him on turn 1 through Force of Will. Then Luis Scott-Vargas took Gerry’s list, changed about three cards, and made Top 8 at another Open.
Nice decks.
…
Some have questioned why Mystical Tutor got the axe instead of Entomb and Ad Nauseam. First, by banning just Mystical Tutor, Wizards only has to ban one card instead of two to hit both decks. There is a very real cost to banning cards, and Wizards cannot afford to do it lightly. In fact, I suspect that Wizards has kept some cards on the banned list “in reserve” as it were, to be able to unban cards simultaneously with new bannings, to somewhat soften the blow from saying “you can’t play with this card anymore.”
Second, with Mystical gone, not only do both decks become slower (and thus somewhat fairer), but they also become less resilient to hate. When I was playing Reanimator, I beat double Tormod’s Crypt and a Faerie Macabre with a one-of Show and Tell that I could easily find with Mystical Tutor. Tendrils decks could easily tutor up an answer to Gaddock Teeg or any other hate bear.
Concerning the unbannings: About the only broken start that Grim Monolith enables is an Ancient Tomb/City of Traitors/Chrome Mox draw into Trinisphere, but decks that want to play Trinisphere on turn 1 already have Mox and Spirit Guides to accelerate anyway, and they aren’t exactly tearing up the metagame. Certainly, Monolith is superior to Spirit Guides, but I hardly think the upgrade will drive Stax to the top of the heap.
Illusionary Mask doesn’t actually do that much, since now you can cheat Phyrexian Dreadnought into play with Stifle.
So where does that leave Legacy?
First, people will try to explore alternatives to Mystical Tutor in Tendrils and Reanimator. The obvious replacement card is Personal Tutor, but Personal Tutor doesn’t get Ad Nauseam, nor Entomb, nor Dark Ritual or Force of Will. Tendrils decks can get Infernal Tutor, sure, but I expect the immediate reaction of Reanimator players will be to run Ponders and increase their fatty count to make their Careful Studies into pseudo-Entombs. Still, losing Mystical will make it much harder to pick up bullets for specific matchups.
Tendrils decks will likely move away from the Ad Nauseam shell and more towards the Ill-Gotten Gains or Doomsday (or both) shells of old. Bryant Cook recently lost in the semifinals of a Lotus tournament in New England with a Tendrils list that only featured two copies of Mystical Tutor, and he boarded them out in most rounds. Certainly, Tendrils lost a lot of resiliency with the Mystical Tutor bullet plan, but Burning Wish is a reasonable substitute.
As for the Legacy metagame at large, let us consider the poles of the new Legacy:
Aggressive non-Blue decks, split into subcategories of linear (Goblins) and nonlinear. (Zoo)
The aggressive decks have obviously gained from the neutering of their worst matchups; as a corollary, the Counterbalance decks that were favored against the Mystical decks have lost. However, because the Counterbalance decks don’t need to be as concerned with their combo matchups, they can tweak their builds to include more ammunition against beatdown. It’s been popular to say that anyone who wanted to beat Tendrils or Dredge or Reanimator badly enough would be able to do so, but anyone who wakes up and decides they don’t want to lose to Wild Nacatl can just jam their deck full of white removal spells and two-for-ones and be in a very good spot. Note that Zoo is a pretty heavy favorite against Goblins, and so the Goblin presence in the metagame may not increase significantly.
Midrange Green decks with Survival of the Fittest.
To place this as a pole is a little strange, because historically, Legacy Survival decks have been sort of an amalgamation of several silver bullet strategies based around a Survival toolbox with a Tarmogoyf beatdown plan tying everything together. More recently, using Loyal Retainers and Survival to reanimate Iona, Shield of Emeria on turn 3 or 4 has become popular. These sorts of decks were generally soft to Tendrils, and will gain in its absence, but will still struggle with decks like New Horizons.
Daze-based aggressive decks, split into subcategories of linear (Merfolk) and nonlinear (New Horizons)
The Daze aggro decks usually have to be built with a specific metagame in mind; in the last few months, they have generally focused on beating Counterbalance and combo decks. The exact permission and removal package in a deck like New Horizons varies greatly on what the most relevant spells in the format are, and Merfolk is almost unplayable if everyone is playing Zoo. New Horizons can shift towards beating aggressive decks, but it will lose some of its edge against the control decks in doing so.
Counterbalance-based control decks, usually split into the versions with Tarmogoyf and the Enlightened Tutor builds that run the Thopter Foundry/Sword of the Meek combo.
Counterbalance decks lose some good matchups, but gain some flexibility and the ability to attack other strategies. The Enlightened Tutor toolbox approach is one plan to address beatdown decks, but overloading on Spell Snares and other removal spells is a reasonable strategy against attack decks as well. I would like to note that, these days, Progenitus isn’t as powerful as he used to be, owing to the ability of Zoo and other beatdown decks to race him, and how hard it can be to resolve a four-mana sorcery against Merfolk and New Horizons. Natural Order is pretty sick in the mirror, no question, but I wouldn’t expect a ton of mirror matches in the immediate future as people start flocking to Zoo.
Life from the Loam linears; Lands and Aggro-Loam.
The Life from the Loam decks are big winners. The Loam decks were huge dogs to Mystical Tutor and are heavy favorites against the beatdown strategies that will likely become more prevalent in the wake of the banning.
Enchantress
Enchantress had rough matchups against Tendrils and Reanimator. Now it gets to come in from the cold and prey on the aggro decks that are soon to be on the rise. Enchantress used to be a solid favorite against older Counterbalance decks, but as Counterbalance adapted to the metagame and adopted more threes and fours for the purpose of Counterbalancing, Enchantress’s edge in that matchup fell. Still, Enchantress certainly gained a lot.
Graveyard-based linears; Dredge and whatever Reanimator deck can be salvaged after Mystical is gone.
Dredge’s worst matchups were Tendrils and Reanimator, so it certainly gains from the bannings. Dredge is also a solid favorite against Zoo, and the prevalence of Zoo will probably help push Merfolk, another close matchup, out of the picture. The uptick in Lands isn’t actively good for Dredge, but it isn’t the end of the world; I think Dredge is the deck to play going forward.
Reanimator, obviously, takes a bit of a hit.
Storm
I expect most Tendrils decks going forward to be based around a Burning Wish toolbox, perhaps with a Doomsday package as well. They will have the capacity to kill on turns one or two, but will mostly be a turn three deck. There is also High Tide, but it has essentially been dead since the printing of Counterbalance. Goblin Charbelcher combo decks, while not true Storm decks, gain quite a bit from the bannings; Tendrils was a rough matchup for Belcher, but now there will be more Zoo decks, less splash hate for Belcher, and more decks without Force of Will to beat up on.
Prison
Legacy Prison decks tend to be in either a Red shell for Blood Moon and Magus of the Moon, or a White shell for Armageddon. They gain more turn 1 Trinisphere draws with the unbanning of Grim Monolith, but the Prison decks are still a bit inconsistent and vulnerable to Force of Will, not to mention your opponent simply keeping a five-land hand and blanking most of your deck. Further, one of the best matchups for Prison decks were the Mystical decks that were exceptionally vulnerable to Chalice of the Void and Trinisphere; as those fall out of favor, so too will Ancient Tomb.
…
The sky is not falling. Reanimator and Tendrils were too good, and made certain strategies too bad. Something had to go, and Mystical Tutor was a strong choice. Legacy will be considerably healthier and more fun starting in July.
max dot mccall at gmail dot com