Legacy

Mental Misstep and the Ruining of a Format

Ah Legacy, the perfect format.  The format where you can play anything you want and have a shot at the title.  It feels good just thinking about how open the format is…er, was.  This lovely format used to be a bastion of hope for the brewer—the format of The Everyman.  The Starcitygames Open Series helped the burgeoning format literally explode in the past 6-10 months.  We had top 8’s featuring 6-8 different archetypes…life was good.  And then…

[card]Mental Misstep[/card]

This innocuous little card has single-handedly raped and pillaged the joy out of this format we all love.  Now, to better set the scene: it was less than a year ago that [card]Survival of the Fittest[/card] was beginning to take a stranglehold on the Legacy format by garnering a 55%-60% win percentage against the field.  A 2-mana enchantment that basically won you the game if you untapped with it in play; when it was backed up by countermagic, it proved to be too strong.  It was an oppressive deck that invalidated a wide variety of other decks in the field, narrowed the format, and resulted in 5-6 versions of Survival decks in the top 8 of most SCG Open tournaments.  Something had to be done as players were vocal in condemning the power of the legacy Survival decks.  The ban announcement came and there was much rejoicing.

I will argue that [card]Mental Misstep[/card] is doing every bit as much to warp the legacy format as [card]Survival of the Fittest[/card] did before it was banned.

1. Recent legacy top eights have been littered with copies of [card]Mental Misstep[/card].  Last weekend, SCG Boston’s Top 8 contained 8 decks running [card]Mental Misstep[/card] and 15 out of the top 16 decks ran Misstep!  Those numbers are simply absurd.

2. Format diversity has disappeared: of SCG Boston’s top 16 decks, 13 were either UW Stoneblade or NO Rug variants.  These decks excel because they apply quick pressure by turn 3-4 that mostly avoids [card]Mental Misstep[/card], while using Misstep to help fight any opposing strategy.

3. Traditional combo decks have all but disappeared due to the prevalence of Misstep.  ANT (Storm), Charbelcher, High Tide, Elves, Painted Stone are all either a distant tier 2 or completely unplayable in today’s metagame.  This should allow beatdown decks back into the field in order to pray on the blue decks; however, because Misstep helps fight the early beatdown plays, U/W Stoneblade and NO RUG typically have great matchups versus aggressive decks.  Essentially, these blue control decks (or aggro control, perhaps more accurately) are easily the best decks against the field (these decks easily garner the 55%-60% win percentage against the field that the Survival decks did, tending to lose only to each other).

Now, some will say that Wizards printed Misstep with the express purpose of killing the Legacy format (because the increased level of interest in the Legacy format was making the cards far too expensive).  This conspiracy theory gains credibility now that we have seen Wizards pushing the Modern format as an alternative non-rotating format—and one they hope to be able to keep more affordable than Legacy.  Thus far, the concept of Modern’s affordability is a joke as the format is nearly as expensive as Legacy at the moment.  It’s incredibly obvious, but the secondary market prices for cards go up as more people play a format that features those cards.  Only a fool would have believed that Ravnica Shocklands would stay in the $4-$6 range once everyone jumped on the Modern bandwagon.  Modern as the poor man’s Legacy?  That’s like saying Steve Jobs is the poor man’s Bill Gates.

What we do know for sure is that Wizards prefers Modern to Legacy as they plan to make it a PTQ format and are about to feature it at a Pro Tour.  Want more proof that they prefer Modern and want to kill the buzz surrounding Legacy: they banned Misstep right away in Modern, but have not done so—even after months of accruing tournament data—in Legacy.

Some will naively tell you to build your deck so that it avoids [card]Mental Misstep[/card].  When you try to do that, your deck becomes slower and you still tend to get crushed by the blue decks that play Misstep.  The only exception might be the [card]Show and Tell[/card] decks, but those are weak to [card]Vendilion Clique[/card] and early pressure, a theme common to all the successful Misstep decks.  By and large, you simply have to play one drops in a format as powerful as Legacy in order to keep up with the [card]Brainstorm[/card]/Misstep blue decks—which then proceed to crush you with their Missteps.

[card]Mental Misstep[/card] has never seemed to garner the same broad, consistently negative attention that Survival did at its peak.  Part of the issue is that players know that they can always fight [card]Mental Misstep[/card] with their own [card]Mental Misstep[/card]s.  Every deck can play Misstep (unlike a card like Survival) and the card does technically fight itself.  These are reasons that have allowed many to dismiss the warping power of this card.  It seems much more innocuous than a card like [card]Survival of the Fittest[/card].  But I assure you, the format has spiraled out of control in a remarkably similar manner.

The format quickly transitioned from incredible diversity to unbelievable stagnancy.  We now have a ubiquitous card that forces every deck to play it—the decks that refuse are invalidated entirely.  And I remain completely baffled at how Wizards can be so vocal about wanting format diversity and not being afraid to ban cards in order to reach that end, while leaving Misstep alone in Legacy.  They have sought format diversity in Standard and Modern with recent ban announcements designed to fix problems in the formats.  The only rational explanation is that they don’t want people to play Legacy.

Most successful formats should have a fairly balanced paper/rock/scissors metagame (i.e., aggro/control/combo) where no one type of deck crushes the other two.  If they really intended Misstep as a way to stop combo decks from running away with the format, then mission accomplished.  But the unintended consequence was that they made blue EVEN BETTER, destroying the chance of aggressive decks to be playable.  In the end, Wizards killed combo (which they generally dislike) and aggro (which they generally love). This left only blue (which didn’t need the help in the first place).

Addendum #1: It could be possible that the main problem I have with [card]Mental Misstep[/card] is the Phyrexian mana symbol.  If you had to tap U to cast this card, I don’t think it would be nearly as oppressive.  But since that’s not the case, my point stands.

Addendum #2: If you want my best advice on how to fight against the current legacy environment, it is this…Play burn.  And no, I’m not joking.  I went 6-0 vs. decks with [card]Mental Misstep[/card] at the Legacy Champs en route to an 11th place finish.  Misstep isn’t as good against Burn as it is against Zoo decks.  While it is true that most of the burn deck’s spells cost one mana, most are interchangeable and the threat density in the deck is much higher than that of Zoo.  If they draw double Misstep, oh well, they probably took 2-4 damage from them and you just continue drawing Bolts off the top of your deck …every turn.  Running only 20 land (including a ridiculous 12 fetch lands) means you draw threat after threat every turn if the game goes late.  The Zoo deck’s one-drops tend to be absolutely vital to their more creature-heavy, slightly slower strategy (see [card]Wild Nacatl[/card]). By running more land they have far more dead late game draws.  If you counter a Nacatl on turn one, they play a turn 2 [card]Tarmogoyf[/card].  That is far from scary for a Stoneblade or NO RUG deck (both of which have early blockers).  The Zoo deck will have REAL problems pushing through creature damage against Stoneforge (with [card]Batterskull[/card] at the ready) or Hierarch/[card]Tarmogoyf[/card]/[card]Dryad Arbor[/card] from the NO RUG deck.

The burn deck on the other hand, can just start burning to the face, ignoring most opposing creatures.  Killing [card]Stoneforge Mystic[/card] is still highly recommended; but otherwise, just play the role of a combo deck.  I assure you that the Burn deck is very, very good against Stoneblade decks.  Its matchup against NO RUG is probably slightly worse (since they can play the role of a combo deck as well), but you definitely have the tools to race a [card]Progenitus[/card] with damage.  Note that almost no one has a good sideboard against a Burn deck right now.  I think the two things that would scare you the most are [card]Leyline of Sanctity[/card] and [card]Chalice of the Void[/card] set to 1.  Otherwise, things don’t really improve for your opponents after board.  See my Legacy Champs report here on ManaDeprived.com for more information about the deck.

Dan Mayo

@mtgeternal

Danmayo_at_gmail_dot_com

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