Post by sdfkjgh on May 21, 2020 18:25:16 GMT
I’m getting pretty sick and tired of being paired against 5, 10 control decks in a row on Arena, especially since there’s so goddamn many of them, with very little overlap in card selection between them. Before we get into the meat of the Manifesto, I feel I should establish a definition of control:
Any deck that not only uses countermagic, discard, tempo-oriented removal such as bounce effects, &/or more permanent removal to prevent the opponent from ever establishing or maintaining a board presence, but has that goal as its main gameplan.
So here’s some rules I hope Wizards implements:
- When there are three or more different, unique1, viable control decks in Standard, then something has gone horribly wrong with that Standard.
1a) The greater the number of viable control decks in Standard, and the greater the uniqueness among those control decks, the greater the problem. - Control should only ever be viable as a metagame choice, not a dominant or overwhelming pillar of the format.
- The removal suite of all control decks should only ever be of only one category, NEVER a mix: either all countermagic, all discard, all bounce, all targeted removal, or all mass removal. The goal with this rule is to prevent control from being able to answer anything and everything.
- The existence of more than one control-oriented planeswalker in any Standard represents one of the grossest failures of R&D. Right now, we have 72 planeswalkers legal in Standard, and of them, only 39 are viable choices (and I’m being extremely generous with quite a few of them). Of those, we have two Ashy Larrys, a Chandra, Davriel, two Kayas, fucking Liliana, TWO goddamn Narsets, one complete and utter “fuck you” to the entire multiverse, one guy who we never see much of nowadays, FATHERFUCKING Teferi, dammit Eugene, and Her Royal Highness geared towards control. THIS IS FAR TOO FUCKING MANY!! With this many, you could build at least two completely unique Superfriends control lists, and that is NOT ok!
- I and any others have said this before, but it bears repeating and special attention paid to it: Teferi and Narset individually were MASSIVE mistakes, as they each remove fundamental aspects of the game from their opponents, but to have them BOTH be in the same set is an unforgivable compounding of mistake after mistake after mistake.
5a) This is after they printed another completely oppressive Teferi, which means the mistakes were compounded even further. Then they announced that the next Core Set would be Teferi-themed, demonstrating that, yes, they can perpetrate YET ANOTHER perfect failure.
I dunno, mebbe I’m just talking outta my hate-hole. Rules 1 & 2 could be applied to any strategy archetype you, the reader hates most, and would still be an arguably valid point.2 I’ll really be glad when War of the Spark rotates out, even though Os Mutantes will be losing its best card. I just hope they print (or reprint) a low-cost hexproof creature while the deck is still Standard-legal.
Anyway, that’s all I got for this week. Thanks to Daij_Djan, and we’ll see if there’s anything for next week when we get there. Until then, YOU DANG KIDS GET OFFA MY LAWN!!!
{Footnotes}
| 1 | Uniqueness of a deck is defined as having less than half the cards in each deck being the same. |
| 0 | |
| 2 | But not if you apply them to ALL of them, because that takes us back to the bad old homogenous days of only one deck per strategy, or, even worse, one deck to beat them all. (see Affinity, Faeries, Necropotence, etc., etc., etc.) |
