The Long and Winding Road – Survival: The Experts, the Engine, and Legacy’s Future

Before you go any further, if you want to take this poll, please take it now, before reading my thoughts.

This is an article in three parts. In the first part, I’ll take another look at the arguments in favor of the banning of Mystical Tutor and explain why I believe it was the wrong choice. In the second part, I’ll look at Survival of the Fittest and explain how it’s an engine rather than a deck, and how dominant engines can be problematic to formats. In the last section, I’ll discuss the effect of Survival of the Fittest on post-Mystical Tutor Legacy, and how it brings the reasons for banning Mystical Tutor back to the forefront.

Before we start, a general statement: I strongly believe that formats should be managed to provide diversity among deck styles, that a format with an active and shifting metagame is healthy, that combo decks occasionally being the best decks in a format isn’t a bad thing provided it’s temporary, and that the goals of the body managing a format and the methods by which the format is managed should be known and transparent. Additionally, banning cards should be done as a last resort, with significant scrutiny, and with logic based on results over a period of time that gives the results some degree of statistical significance. The ultimate format, in my opinion, is one where the best decks rotate over time due to metagame adjustments, and one where the tools to beat each “best deck” are present in the format. A format “breaks” when it’s no longer able to self-correct and one deck (or style of deck), or engine, dominates the format for an extended period of time.

My opinion is exactly that: opinion, and my opinion alone. The reality is that there isn’t one capital-A
Answer
here; Magic data is easily skewed, and it’s easy to see what we want, in results and in our own testing. In most cases, there isn’t enough data to be statistically significant, and Mystical Tutor Legacy and Vengevine/Survival Legacy never had a chance to interact, so we’re already into the realm of conjecture and predictive analysis.

Part One: Why Banning Mystical Tutor was Wrong

The DCI provided an explanation on why Mystical Tutor was banned. Among these were the following:

• Mystical Tutor was the top-tier tutor in the format, closer in power level to Vampiric Tutor than the other legal tutors. Tutor power level is problematic in that it supports non-interactive decks. In those same non-interactive decks, Mystical Tutor allowed powerful linear strategies to circumvent countermeasures.

• One Grand Prix and testing online in a mostly similar Legacy format showed that Mystical Tutor decks were too powerful, regardless of the results of other events before and after the banning announcement and regardless of the short period of time where the alleged “dominance” occurred.

• Various experts in the field of Magic, including Wizards employees and professional players, agreed that Mystical Tutor decks were the top-tier (regardless of posted tournament results, written off for a variety of reasons), and as experts in the field, their predictive analysis trumps analysis of actual results.

Let’s look at these in reverse order. It is easy to read various pro players say that Mystical Tutor decks are the best when played at a high level and assume that they’re correct; the same is true, perhaps more so, for people employed every day in the making of this game. Both parties are living this game day in and day out. They’re the experts. Experts are generally correct.

Right?

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”
-Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

“We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.”
-Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962

“640K ought to be enough for anybody.”
-Bill Gates, 1981

“Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.”
-Irving Fisher, Professor of Economics, Yale, 1929

“Weather man tellin’ us it ain’t gon’ rain
So now we sittin’ in a drop-top, soaking wet”
-Outkast

I could continue with these, but you get the idea. Predictive analysis is exceptionally difficult, yet humans have always believed they possess the ability to analyze, understand, and predict complex systems, even in the face of constant reminders (such as weather prediction, economic models, experiments with ecology/bio-system tampering, etc.) that rigorous science with high-powered computing still often yields faulty results.

When the DCI, and pro Magic players, cast their eye across Legacy and said Mystical Tutor was too good, there weren’t any complex computational models being calculated, just the opinions of experts in the field of Magic.

The metagame of a format like Legacy is exceptionally complicated and interdependent on a large number of factors. To sit back and look at two months’
worth of results across only a few tournaments and draw conclusions about the future of a format,
even with the support or confirmation of experts in this field,
is a dangerous activity. The result of knocking out one support structure from a complex piece of architecture is unknown. Effectively, it’s playing Jenga with a format. You may think you’re removing one piece, but the result may be several pieces falling away, or the entire structure collapsing.

This is even more true of Legacy than possibly any other format, as there’s a wealth, a depth, of untapped strategy in Legacy, rare for a mature format. The card pool is enormous, and large-scale tournaments with quality reporting are relatively new to the format. Additionally, new printings are more likely to be relevant in Legacy than in Vintage, as there is more wiggle room in a format without Power. While Legacy contains powerful cards, including cards that are actually restricted in Vintage, it has often had room for creature decks as well at certain points in the maneuvering and evolution of the metagame.

Was the idea to ban Mystical Tutor correct based on expert analysis and opinion alone? In my opinion: No.

For some more examples of great predictive analysis by experts regarding Magic, see the opinion on Merfolk being trash before Grand Prix Columbus, or the theory that Zoo was unplayable in Legacy while Mystical Tutor was legal, or the reviews on Tarmogoyf when Future Sight came out, or the reviews on Jace, the Mind Sculptor in general (and especially in Vintage), or the common opinions on Workshop decks by many pro players, or the general reception Rizzo received when he caught onto the Dredge mechanic, and on and on…

What about the idea that Mystical Tutor “smashed” the Grand Prix in Madrid, or that it was dominant, or too good? This has been debunked repeatedly, so I won’t cover what was already written, but rather will link you to some articles on this subject. You can certainly choose to dismiss the evidence for whatever reason you want, such as skill level of players, or player count, location of events in question, and so on. You’re not going to find anything really definitive, but I find it telling that people who repeatedly stated that Mystical Tutor decks were the best in the format headed to various StarCityGames.com Open events where Mystical was legal… and played decks that did not contain Mystical Tutor.

These are two of the stronger articles looking at the data as far as Mystical decks being “the best,” in so much as we believe the best decks should have the best results:

http://www.starcitygames.com/magic/legacy/19676_So_Many_Insane_Plays_A_Guide_to_Grand_Prix_Columbus.html

http://www.starcitygames.com/magic/legacy/19654_Unlocking_Legacy_A_Mystifying_Decision.html

So, Mystical Tutor decks are the best decks: False, based on the results of tournaments after Grand Prix Madrid, and the fact that pro players said one thing and mostly did another once Reanimator stopped winning. Go look again at the StarCityGames.com Legacy Open where LSV lost in the quarterfinals; review how much hate was in that Top 8, Mystical or no Mystical to fight against it.

What about the idea that Mystical Tutor enabled powerful linear decks like Reanimator and ANT to circumvent the massive and varied hate available? Mystical Tutor enabled Reanimator to find Show and Tell, dodging graveyard hate. It also gave ANT the ability to find Wipe Away or other bounce effects to fight through cards like Ethersworn Canonist. How did this work in real-life situations?

Early reaction to a new, powerful strategy is the use of obvious sideboard cards. So, if I like a deck, and Reanimator becomes a problem, I just sideboard graveyard hate like Tormod’s Crypt, tossing a few in my existing deck. Reanimator was built to beat those types of stock reactions. Similarly, ANT was good at beating decks like Merfolk, or Zoo decks that wanted to just toss in a few hate-bears.

However, people learned quickly that in order to beat Reanimator, or ANT, you needed to either redesign your existing deck to have a shot at racing in post-board games, or you needed to change to a deck that was designed to beat up on Mystical Tutor decks in a foundational way.

But, we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Remember Counterbalance/Top? I argued in the first portion of
this
article that most of the exact logic cited by Tom LaPille regarding Mystical Tutor could be applied to Counterbalance/Top in 2009 after Grand Prix: Chicago. Yet, at that point in time, the DCI didn’t ban Sensei’s Top, even with the results from the Grand Prix and the StarCityGames.com Open events immediately following it.

Similarly, they didn’t interfere with Elves in Extended after Pro Tour Berlin, despite the deck’s outrageous dominance in that event. In both of these cases, the DCI trusted the formats to right themselves; in the case of Legacy post-Chicago, new printings such as Qasali Pridemage would revitalize the aggro section of Legacy, and the development of the modern Legacy Merfolk deck, also supported by new cards, would further punish Counterbalance/Top.

With regard to Mystical Tutor decks ascending in the spring of 2010, the format tilted back in favor of Counterbalance/Top decks, which have natural resistance to those strategies. If Zoo was built to beat Merfolk and Counterbalance decks that competed against Merfolk, then Mystical Tutor decks were
a logical evolution to beat Zoo. Thankfully,
the tools to beat Mystical Tutor decks already existed in the format in the form of Counterbalance decks.
While Counterbalance/Top decks have a powerful trump to Reanimator (which was almost exclusively ones and twos) and ANT, builds like Thopters were tailor-made to beat those decks. The use of Enlightened Tutor resulted in a Counterbalance/Top deck that was not only better at assembling its namesake combo, but one which could also tutor for relevant sideboard cards.

It wasn’t just Counterbalance reemerging that suppressed the theoretical dominance of Mystical Tutor decks however, as even a deck like Goblins often had tremendous success against Reanimator. The reason is in the design of Goblins after Entomb’s unbanning.

1.       Goblins preys on mana-greedy decks, like Reanimator.

2.       Goblins has a reasonably fast clock that involves multiple attackers to bypass a single reanimation target,
and
one of those creatures has protection from blue to bypass blockers like Sphinx of the Steel Wind,
and
Aether Vial can let the deck race Iona on red.

3.       Goblins can, and did, play cards like Warren Weirding and Stingscourger, which it could tutor for and resolve even in the face of Iona; these cards can help trump Show and Tell.

4.       Goblins supported all of the previous three items, which were maindeck inclusions, with additional sideboard suppression.

Even Zoo had a surprisingly robust game against Reanimator, provided that the Zoo deck in question was designed for speed and played Path to Exile, rather than the “big Zoo” style of Zoo decks that were designed to beat other creature decks or win the mirror. Zoo was actually quite capable of pushing Reanimator out of Reanimate range in only a few turns, and when significant sideboard hate came into play (especially “free” cards like a mix of Tormod’s Crypt and Faerie Macabre) could get those post-board games very close to coin-flip territory.

The tournament results post-Madrid suggest that the format was perfectly capable of adjusting to beat Mystical Tutor decks, and that this was largely already happening by late May and early June, and confirmed all through June.

Pulled from Facebook, I’ll look at some shorter arguments made to explain why Mystical Tutor should be banned:

“Mystical Tutor can’t be easily answered.”

This is correct in that one can’t simply add three Ethersworn Canonists or Tormod’s Crypts and call it a day, but incorrect in that Legacy players, theoretically slow to adapt to format changes, only took a few months to reinvent existing decks, build new ones, and revitalize others in order to counteract Mystical Tutor foundationally, a la Counterbalance/Top.

“Banning Mystical Tutor promotes interactivity.”

This is a strange argument. Before Reanimator decks were sufficiently brewed, and before new reanimation targets were printed (remember that Inkwell Leviathan, Iona, Sphinx of the Steel Wind, Terastodon, and even Realm Razer are all new cards from Shards and Zendikar block), Legacy was a wide-open format, with new decks winning Opens on a regular basis. There was a rotating cast of Tier-one decks typically making up the majority of the field and Top 8, from mid-2009 straight through mid-2010. Then, even after Reanimator and ANT took advantage of a format that was skewing towards the aggro side of the spectrum, Open tournaments were being populated heavily by interactive decks like Zoo, Goblins, Merfolk, Counterbalance, and Lands. The format, with Mystical Tutor in it, was by and large very interactive; only a few lopsided matchups were non-interactive and in a format as broad as Legacy, there’s no way to avoid that. Lion’s Eye Diamond was legal before, and still is. Therefore, non-interaction will continue to exist. In fact, there is much
less
incentive at the moment to acknowledge combo, leading to huge blowout matchups for many LED-powered decks.

“It would’ve been awkward if Mystical Tutor obliterated Columbus.”

Not really. In fact, I think it would’ve had the opposite reaction: if Mystical Tutor decks dominated a field
prepared
for them in Columbus, it would’ve massively bolstered the DCI’s position and removed much of the conjecture. If anything, it would’ve been awkward for the devoted Legacy community, many of whom strongly opposed the idea that Mystical Tutor decks were unbeatable or the best in the format; had Mystical dominated that Grand Prix, it would’ve confirmed the opposing view supported by Wizards / the DCI and the pro consensus. It would suggest that they know Legacy better than Legacy-centric folks and were right on Mystical Tutor. It would’ve given them the ammo to ban the card without as much dissent from that community. Keep in mind that Flash’s dominance outweighed Mystical Tutor’s and was acknowledged headed into that tournament by pro and Legacy-centric players alike, and that the deck was about to get much
better
with the Pacts becoming legal. Similarly, keep in mind that Zoo performed admirably at Grand Prix Madrid, and in fact, probably suppressed Counterbalance and helped allow the Mystical Tutor decks to do so well there in the first place.

“Wizards cares deeply about Tutor strength.”

That makes it odd that they would unban Entomb, then proclaim Reanimator a huge problem after printing the very cards that made it so good, and it also ties into our discussion on Survival, below, as Survival is a permanent tutor effect.

“Most of the time there’s a best deck, and people just lie to themselves about testing results to cover it up.”

This is actually an argument against banning Mystical Tutor. On one hand, you have multiple tournaments suggesting the Mystical issue has been mitigated by metagame adjustments, and on the other, you have players focusing exclusively on two tournaments and on their own opinions and testing results. Once the pro consensus was that Mystical Tutor was the best, confirmation bias and other factors come into play, especially when contrary results are abundant.

“There is always going to be a best deck,” or “You can’t avoid a metagame with a best deck.”

Duh.

At some points Mystical Tutor decks were absolutely the best, but as with the other Legacy decks, that time period was short and transient. Given the circular nature of formats, it would’ve come back around,
and that is a healthy metagame.
What you want is a format where a variety of decks and deck types are Tier one – not all of them, at all times, but all of them, at some times. At various points in a healthy metagame, all the various types of decks will be the best. Legacy had that, which is one reason why it was so loved by so many people (and conversely, why some people dislike it). Snap-banning Mystical Tutor after a few months of being the best deck, then Tier one, then possibly less, makes little sense to me.

In conclusion, I believe that the reasons provided for banning Mystical Tutor were faulty. The chief reason for this has been the ascension of Survival of the Fittest and Vengevine as an engine. This Survival/Vengevine engine trumps traditional creature strategies, rendering Zoo nearly unplayable at the moment unless hybridized with Survival itself. It trumps Counterbalance/Top decks and is very good against Merfolk. It would fold to combo with Mystical Tutor, but that deck no longer exists. Combo decks are still the best option to battle Survival in my opinion, but the serious loss of percentage against aggro decks (including aggro Survival) and Merfolk is problematic.

The texture of Legacy has changed dramatically due to the simultaneous removal of one pillar and the ascension of an entirely new engine. Legacy, today, is headed down a path of Survival and anti-Survival, with Survival dominating at a pace far beyond what Mystical Tutor was able to do.

Part Two: Defining Engines (with regard to Survival of the Fittest)

I’m not particularly hung up on nomenclature with regard to deck classifications, as far as aggro, combo, midrange, etc. I don’t find those discussions particularly useful to my understanding of Magic, but I know some people do, so for all the times I blatantly misclassify something, I apologize.

What does matter to me is the fact that people attempt to communicate about decks in a meaningful way without differentiating between engines and decks. For example, when someone asks me, “What is this deck’s matchup against Counterbalance/Top?” I really have no idea how to respond, because I don’t know what deck you’re actually asking about.

Counterbalance/Top isn’t a deck; it’s a combination of cards, a soft-lock combination, an engine that powers and can be ported into any number of strategies. Counterbalance/Top can be:

• A U/G/R deck that wins via Tarmogoyf, Vendilion Clique, and Jace.

• A U/W deck (Thopters) that uses Enlightened Tutor and wins using the Thopter Foundry and Sword of the Meek combo.

• A U/G/W (or NO Bant) version that wins with Tarmogoyf, Rhox War Monk, and Natural Order into Progenitus.

• A U/x deck (Dreadtill) that utilizes mana suppression, Standstill, and wins with Phyrexian Dreadnought and, often, Tarmogoyf.

These decks can have wildly different matchup percentages, and which specific version is best positioned depends greatly on what else is being played in Legacy. Counterbalance/Top has even shown up in combo decks like Sadin/Moreno’s Flash deck in 2007, and Doug Linn and I both tried to put it into Chapin’s Entomb Hulk deck to see if we could get that deck up to the top tier, as a revival of the combo/CB/Top hybrid.

Counterbalance/Top is designed to prey on the fact that, because Legacy can be such a fast format, the majority of cards that see play cost one or two mana and can be “locked out” by the combination of Counterbalance and Sensei’s Divining Top (just as Chapin’s Next Level Blue was designed to do this in Extended in the early 2008 season). This engine powers some of the best decks in Legacy. It was present in the winning Grand Prix decks in 2007 and 2009.

Yet, it’s beatable, by both single cards and strategic decisions.

Decks that want to beat this combination need to vary casting costs or play threats at higher casting costs, slip creatures into play before the soft-lock is established, or with Aether Vial, or disrupt the deck’s ability to develop mana to power the engine or resolve it. Legacy has plenty of options if one wants to beat Counterbalance/Top. Merfolk, Goblins, some versions of Zoo, Stax, The Rock, Dredge, and so on. The engine itself is also heavily blue due to the UU cost of Counterbalance, which limits its ability to “eat up” other decks in Legacy.

Survival of the Fittest/Vengevine is, similarly, an engine and not a deck. Survival itself has mostly been just below playable in terms of tier in
Legacy. It had some interesting moments in the spotlight, including
this little number
at Worlds 2007.

This deck strongly evokes a number of features of modern Survival decks, except it lacks the backup aggro / combo plan that Vengevine provides, which is probably the key factor differentiating today’s Survival decks: they are fast, and their backup plan is far more reasonable. The actual engine
is similar to the Loyal Retainers / Iona plan; you might even consider
this
version of Reanimator to be an offshoot of Stu’s deck, another example of the uncharted depths of this format.

I was going to list the successful Survival decks in detail for you, but Patrick Chapin was kind enough to compile them all in his
article
last week. When you ask someone about matchups for “Survival,” you have to differentiate between the types of Survival decks:

• U/G Survival Madness and G/W Survival, which are hybrid decks capable of playing a long or short game, and with a pure clock speed that can eclipse Zoo and Goblins if the VV/Survival engine fires.

• B/G/W Ooze Survival, a disruptive combo version that utilizes one of the available Tutors, Enlightened Tutor.

• G/x Survival decks using a reanimation-style strategy with Loyal Retainers and/or Goblin Welder

• G/R/x Survival Zoo decks, which might actually not run Vengevine, such as this Top 8 deck from a side event at Grand Prix Bochum:

In a lot of ways, U/G and G/W Survival do the same thing as Merfolk and various blue tempo decks, but they do it better. The versions with Loyal Retainers attempt to do the same thing Reanimator used to do, but without as extreme a vulnerability to graveyard hate or a need to preserve life total for Reanimate (and they can even use Emrakul). Ooze Survival emulates the speed (to an extent) and tutor capability of a traditional combo deck, without losing to the usual anti-Storm measures. A Zoo Survival deck can be a potent weapon against U/G and G/W Survival by burning out opposing mana creatures and establishing a Survival advantage.

Therein lies the problem: the Survival engine only requires some access to green mana and creatures, and automatically bestows a backup plan of resolving those creatures and turning them sideways, albeit with varying degrees of effectiveness; winning with Wild Mongrel is more reasonable the beating down with Squee.

Speaking with Brassman about Gush in 2007/2008 Vintage helped me come to a different understanding of Survival in terms of how it functions as an engine a la Tetsuo at the end of Akira. Andy is concerned (to the extent that the unflappable Brassman expresses concern about anything) about the influence of Gush due to its previous effect on the decks of Vintage. One constant issue with Vintage is the potential for sameness among decks due to the power level of the cards on the Restricted list. Thus, to people outside the format in particular, seeing much of a difference between Cobra Tezzeret, Trygon Tezz, TPS, and Bob Tendrils can be difficult… but Gush made this issue far worse. Where we now have some degree of separation between pillars, some would argue there used to be only GushBond.

Today, we see Tendrils decks, and Oath decks, and Tezzeret decks, and they pull from the Restricted list but otherwise diverge. If you take a look at
the article I wrote when the return of Gush was announced,
here,
you’ll see that many of the top-tier Vintage decks when Brainstorm and Gush were both unrestricted started with those eight cards, plus many of the current Restricted list overlap, plus Fastbond. Every deck that wielded blue also wanted to play the GushBond engine. It started to devour the other decks, until Gush was present in all the blue decks, much like Survival is beginning to wedge itself into the rest of the decks in Legacy. There was no need to differentiate between Gush and non-Gush outside of linear decks like Dredge, Flash, or Workshops: they were
all
Gush decks.

Legacy may be headed down the same path, where the differentiation between Survival and non-Survival versions of decks disappears, and every non-linear or tribal deck automatically begins, “Four Vengevine, Four Survival of the Fittest…”

Dominant engines that port themselves into a variety of strategies are significantly harder to trump, harder to hate out or beat, than linear strategies such as those pushed by Mystical Tutor. While Mystical Tutor gives those decks the ability to fight hate, at the end of the day, Reanimator is still trying to beat you with giant monsters, and Storm is still trying to beat you with Storm. There’s no true alternate or transformative win condition.

And that, really, is the problem we now face: how do you beat a superior engine when it also has impressive flexibility?

Part Three: The Dominance of Survival and the Future of Legacy

There should be no question that Survival is the most dominant engine in Legacy today, or at least, in the StarCityGames.com Legacy Opens.

Look at these numbers:

Location	Top Two	Top Four	Top Eight	Top Sixteen
Minneapolis	0	1	2	5
Baltimore	1	2	3	5
Nashville	2	3	4	5
Charlotte	2	2	5	7
Boston	2	2	4	7
Quantity Total	7	10	18	29
Percentage	70.00%	50.00%	45.00%	36.25%

 

Survival’s percentage of the field increases at each cut closer to the finals, and Survival decks make up 70% of the finals, and 80% of the winners, of the last five Open events. More disturbingly, Survival decks constitute 100% of the finalists of the past three Legacy Open events.

That domination is staggering. As an engine, Survival is clearly the most dominant set of decks in the modern history of post-Flash Legacy. These last five tournaments are packed into a short period of time, of course, and time will tell if the engine can remain this dominant, but thus far, there isn’t much to suggest that Survival decks are going to decline.

At present, the most consistent way to attack Survival is to play combo, the same strategy hampered by the DCI with the banning of Mystical Tutor. This is problematic in that there isn’t enough incentive to
really
push the format to a mass-adoption level of Tendrils decks, which would have probably happened otherwise. As Mystical decks pushed out Survival decks, anti-Mystical decks could attack them, and you’re back to a rotational format. Again, just conjecture as their cards (Mystical Tutor decks against the Survival/Vengevine engine) never had the chance to interact.

That’s still where I would start though, and not necessarily with TES; Matt Sperling
Helm-Line Tendrils
deck is an interesting look at an anti-Survival version of Legacy LED combo. When you look at that deck, it is an extension of what Max McCall advocates in TES: basic lands powering a stable mana base, and resistance to Survival (in that deck’s case via maindeck Leyline of the Void), and in this deck’s case, the ability to “go off” from any life total via Ill-Gotten Gains.

The other strategy that seems to be moderately successful is to exploit the lack of, or limited amount of, removal in most Survival decks; some examples include playing Phyrexian Dreadnoughts to race Vengevine, probably supported by Trinket Mage to tutor bullets against Survival and the graveyard, or the use of cards like Peacekeeper.

Why is any of this problematic? Most of the arguments about Mystical Tutor are actually applicable to Survival of the Fittest. It is a splashable (permanent) tutor and combo enabler that is flat-out better than most available alternatives. It is hard to beat, because it isn’t all that linear. Shut off Survival? Decks can go aggro, or they can use Natural Order, as they are already in green and already running creatures. They can tutor bullets to attack combo, via Survival, and Enlightened Tutor is highly relevant in that it finds the engine component. And, it is honestly dominating tournaments. Look at some of what Gerry Thompson said about Survival in his tournament report last week, an event where he hit the Finals, going 6-0 matches, 12-2 games across the first six rounds:

“Survival of the Fittest should be banned, especially if WotC is going to be banning things like Mystical Tutor. Either let us play with all of our degenerate cards, or ban Counterbalance (maybe Top), Survival, and Mystical to put everyone on an even playing ground.”

“Once you start building a Survival deck that basically has twelve Survivals, disruption, and fast mana, bad things start happening. I don’t expect anything other than a mirror match or a pure hate deck to defeat me. If I had a Mesmeric Fiend and Big Game Hunter, I don’t know what it would’ve taken for me to lose a game.”

Additionally, if you take the time to look at Gerry’s report from May with Reanimator, you’ll see that in round 1 he beat Bramblewood Paragon.dec, then beat mono-black, so he played two more or less bogus decks the first two rounds. He also beat two Counterbalance decks at the end of that event, noting one misplayed badly and the other lost to double nut-draws. The gauntlet of decks he beat with Survival seems much more legitimate in terms of the decks he smashed through. The only thing that beat him? Another Survival deck.

[As an aside, the key thing I took away from both reports is that GT is light-years ahead of most people in terms of sideboard construction. He always seems to have some trump that others lack.]

So, here’s the difficulty: how is it that we’re now in a format where Entomb was unbanned, Reanimator decks using it played a role in the banning of Mystical Tutor, and Survival of the Fittest is still legal? If the DCI bans Survival, and the reason cited is format dominance (which is not the reason given regarding Mystical Tutor), then what is the goal and methodology of the decision for banning cards in Legacy?

I’m not advocating a ban on Survival of the Fittest.

Not yet.

Three months is a short period of time, albeit one much longer than Mystical Tutor was allowed to “dominate” Legacy. I’m still hopeful that some semblance of normalcy can return to Legacy, and that the Survival/Vengevine engine won’t continue to gobble up everything until the top tier is only Survival decks and anti-Survival combo decks, because frankly, that format seems infinitely worse than the diverse and vibrant format we had a few short months ago.

In the meantime, keep brewing up decks that you think can reasonably beat the Survival engine, and hopefully if we throw enough at the wall, something will stick.

If not, well, it’s your move, DCI. If you ban Survival, at least you’ll have some numbers to back you up this time, but at least in my opinion, it will cement many people’s view that the Mystical Tutor banning was unnecessary and possibly detrimental.

Personally, if it were up to me, I’d start with a right-click undo on the Mystical Tutor ban, and see how things shake out from there, and assess again at the Grand Prix.

Matt Elias

[email protected]

Voltron00x on SCG, TMD, and The Source