Monkey Business: Fixing Legacy


Delver of Secrets was released ten years ago and has defined Legacy ever since. In roughly ever other iteration of Legacy since 2011, some form of Delver deck has been either one of the best decks or the best deck by such a large margin that something eventually had to be banned. Modern Horizons 2 propelled Delver to broken deck status once again - with so many busted threats that Delver itself is optional now - and the inevitable ban conversation is in full force with heated disagreement over who the real culprit is. 

The most common target is Ragavan, with some arguments for banning other threats like Murktide Regent instead or as well - Matthew Vook lays out a case for banning just Ragavan here while addressing some broader issues and Anuraag Das makes his own case here. Beyond Ragavan specifically, the common 'ban the threats' argument goes as follows: Legacy, and Delver's role in it, were mostly fine before the power creep of the FIRE/2019-2020 era (starting with War of the Spark or Modern Horizons). It's the cheap threats that run away with the game quickly if answered that are causing problems; ban the worst offenders now and stop printing cards like that so Legacy can return to a peaceful resting state. 

I think this argument flies in the face of years of historical evidence and misunderstands what makes the Delver core so consistently successful. 


Delver is the best home for pushed threats

Let's look at the Legacy bans of the past decade:

Primarily played in Delver 

January 2015: Treasure Cruise
July 2018: Deathrite Shaman, Gitaxian Probe
November 2019: Wrenn and Six
May 2020: Lurrus of the Dream-Den
February 2021: Dreadhorde Arcanist, Oko

Not played in Delver

September 2015: Dig Through Time
April 2017: Sensei's Divining Top
March 2020: Underworld Breach
May 2020: Zirda, the Dawnwaker
February 2021: Arcum's Astrolabe

One reading of this supports the idea that the Delver core isn't the problem. Every card (with the possible exception of Dreadhorde Arcanist) in the first group was clearly across the line on power level and wasn't only broken in a specific context - Oko's homogenizing effect on the format was as obnoxious in the slow Astrolabe decks as it was in Delver. 

On the other hand, the Delver core ended up as the best home for every one of these cards. It's easy to see why Gitaxian Probe would be perfect in Delver but finding a common thread between Probe, Wrenn, Lurrus, Oko etc is more tricky. The basic shell - other cheap threats, as many cantrips as possible, free or low-cost interaction, and mana denial - creates ideal conditions for any card which creates a continual advantage over time. Your ability to spend so many slots on the format's best card selection maximizes access to the threat and the mana to cast it while your unmatched mana efficiency allows you to pick and win the fights that matter in the short window before that card can take over the game. If you just need to untap with Dreadhorde Arcanist (or Wrenn and Six, or...), no shell does that better than the Daze + Wasteland deck. Once this dynamic is in place, the best way to contain these threats is to have the same threats and answers yourself - the best answer to Wrenn or Lurrus is just Daze. It's easy to justify going down a card with Force of Will to win these fights when the structure of your deck allows you to win with fewer resources than any other deck and you are less likely to flood between a low land count and the best possible card selection. If the opponent does have relevant answers, you can overload these because you have other cheap, must-answer threats (which also give extra contextual support to some of these cards - if Wrenn does resolve you can attack it down with Tarmogoyf and your Arcanist that had to die on sight both cleared the way for Lurrus and was the perfect thing to recur with it).

The Delver core becomes the default home for any new, pushed threat or engine card. Anything that tries to add variety to the format needs to be specialized enough that Delver can't gobble it up but appealing enough to be worth building around - a much harder balance to strike than 'don't print another Ragavan'.


In one sense, the most alarming new tempo threat isn't Ragavan or Dragon's Rage Channeler or Murktide Regent but Urza's Saga. Saga is exactly the kind of card that should pose a threat to Delver - it requires specific interaction and has a lot of raw power - and seems like it shouldn't fit in Delver at all. 

What happened? A bigger 'Sagavan' shell sprang up with the same basic infrastructure and relatively minor concessions to enable Urza's Saga. The best Saga deck isn't Affinity or some scary Lion's Eye Diamond deck - it's the same thing we've seen a million times before. 

If we roll back the clock to before Modern Horizons 2... we find that UR Delver was already the best deck. Were Sprite Dragon or Ethereal Forager glaring mistakes that are too strong for Legacy? Conversely, how often do you hear complaints about the crop of Modern Horizons 2 threats in Legacy outside the context of the URx tempo shell? 

When five rounds of bans have been prompted by those cards' performance in the same shell (with a sixth likely to come soon), focusing on any one of those cards as the culprit is bizarrely short-sighted. Even if hitting Ragavan and/or something else addresses the problem in the short term, historical precedent suggests we will be back here quickly. 


It's not just the threats, it's everything 

A broader diagnosis highlights recent printings that addressed the few flaws in the Delver core.

Force of Negation gives Delver redundant counterplay against linear decks that can present a game-winning threat (from Infernal Tutor to Reanimate to Chalice of the Void/Blood Moon) before Delver has time to set up and the exile clause neuters recursive threats like Life from the Loam that could otherwise grind through Delver's interaction. This additional layer of interaction on top of Daze/Wasteland and threats that literally or effectively end the game quickly means that Delver is well set up against linear decks without having to make real commitments. You do have to actually play these cards - Storm predictably did well in the Wrenn and Six era when there was a greater emphasis on soft/conditional stack interaction - but the main reason not to currently is their weakness in the 'mirror', which is the most important matchup by such a margin that it crowds out everything else. 

While Delver is exceptional at instigating and winning one-for-one exchanges, decks that can survive the early game and reload on cards used to have an edge later. Many of the banned Delver headliners - Lurrus, Wrenn, Cruise - were so good in part because they made beating Delver on this axis futile. Expressive Iteration isn't as flashy or egregious as Treasure Cruise but is very effective at letting Delver compete in longer games while retaining its inherent advantage in shorter ones, prompting calls for it to be banned too. 

Iteration is certainly obnoxious (in part because it's most effective when your curve is low, further subsidizing the core concept of Delver) but Delver decks were already prepared to win these fights. RUG Delver with Arcanist/Oko was able to pivot to Sylvan Library effectively in grindy games (with Delver expert and mad scientist Daniel Goetschel/Gul_Dukat leaning hard into Library + Uro) - Prismatic Ending makes this less reliable now but other aces against control like Court of Cunning are still available. That said, Iteration is the most consistent of these effects with the fewest diminishing returns and you're thrilled to maindeck the full four in a way you aren't with any of the alternatives. 

An honest structural assessment of the problem has to go back much further:


If the Delver core has only intermittently been able to keep up on raw card count, it has always had the best card selection. Brainstorm is the best card in Legacy and the fetchlands that enable it are responsible for cards like Deathrite Shaman or Wrenn and Six being so oppressive but these are untouchable foundations of the format - since its inception, the unique selling point of Legacy for many players is that it's where you get to play Brainstorm with all the implications that has for gameplay. Since you can play Brainstorm, you probably should - a Brainstorm deck is inherently more consistent than a non-Brainstorm deck and that's a rule that any version of Legacy would have to live with.

That's not all bad - Brainstorm at least gives you an incentive to play conditional cards or assemble specific combinations of cards. The problem is that blue decks in Legacy have enough redundant, top-shelf card selection that they are an order of magnitude more consistent than any non-blue deck and can work towards the same strategic or tactical goals every time. These cards occupy enough slots that most of your deck is accounted for leaving less room for differentiation - and the choice of which situational cards to play is less meaningful because you have such consistent access even to singletons. A second tier of card selection like Faithless Looting - in a different colour with very strong deckbuilding incentives - would encourage much more diversity. Instead, blue enjoys access to the most and best card selection in a way that stifles diversity in the format at large and within blue decks themselves. This card selection, in conjunction with the flexibility of fetch + dual manabases, lets the blue decks poach cards from other colours on demand too. 

(I'll add that Ponder specifically is a nightmare for paper play/coverage - a card that shuffles and incentivizes you to play more shufflers, all while dealing with hidden information).

This helps to explain why our birthday boy had such a dramatic effect on Legacy. Before Delver, tempo decks at least had to look to other colours for threats and those threats were less efficient. In Magic more widely, blue had the weakest and fewest creatures; in an instant, blue became the best in this arena too. Ten years later, the printing of Murktide Regent is so baffling because it extends that advantage even further. 

Daze is brought up in these discussions often and for good reason - this comment makes the case against Daze well, as does Vook's piece (though he stops short of calling for a Daze ban himself). At this point the only arguments I see in Daze's defence rest on bizarre assumptions about its play patterns or assign it sacred cow status alongside Brainstorm and Force of Will as iconic cards that are central to the experience of Legacy. While I can't speak for how others feel individually, I have never seen Daze described in those terms until the idea of banning it began to be floated and I don't see the card bring out the same feelings of nostalgia and excitement in lapsed players that, say, Swords to Plowshares, Wasteland, or Lion's Eye Diamond do. A format without any of those cards wouldn't 'feel like Legacy' at all; a format without Daze would be a new iteration of Legacy.

==

The blue tempo shell in Legacy has the best card selection and the best card advantage. It has the best threats. It has unique and important safety valves like Force of Will and Force of Negation and a format-warping tool in Daze. Ban discourse focuses almost exclusively on the threats, the most replaceable and most replaced part of that equation. 

Ban Ragavan or not - I don't think it really matters. Flip a coin to see if Murktide Regent should stay. Hit Delver itself just to make a statement. If you don't touch the other foundations of the deck, any upcoming ban won't be the last.  




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

2022 Review/2023 Goals

Vintage Variety Hour