Blue needs a nerf.

starfall

Discussion in this thread:

• forums.d3go.com/discussion/77740/copy-card-rule-change

has turned into a different discussion about the power level of blue in Standard, and I think it's time to look very seriously at whether blue needs a nerf or not. Spoiler: It does.


Firstly, BSZ needs a nerf. It's beyond question. It's twice as powerful as Behold the Beyond, one of the best cards in SOI, which was an extremely overpowered set. Consider a deck with a core like this:

• BSZ
• Bacon Bolt
• Stitch in Time
• Talent of the Telepath
• Discovery
• Notion Rain
  

The other cards of the deck can be tweaked as you wish, although you probably want to play at least 7 spells. Maybe add Demolish and Perilous Voyage, or go deeper on Surveil with Lazav, or add some OP supports like Search for Azcanta or Storm the Vault. However you finish the deck, it's easily going to be pumping out lethal damage from multiple Bacon Bolts by about turn 5 whilst simultaneously wiping out your opponent's board on every turn.

Under the most recent 3.3 copy card rules, you can build a deck in which Expansion casts off a BSZ, and then immediately casts a new BSZ. You have to tweak the list a little, of course, maybe not include Discovery and Notion Rain, perhaps include Mission Briefing instead, but you're still having turns casting 20 spells. This is not a loop, so you probably won't get timed out by the LPS, but your turns are enormous. Way too big for Standard. These are Legacy turns.

Another return combo under the copy card rules is Naru Meha + Quasiduplicate. In the last HoD, my opponent put a 300/300 Naru Meha into play on turn 2 (the infinite loop stopped because of the LPS). It's not impossible to beat an opponent that does that by any means, but I would argue it's too degenerate for Standard. You can kill that 300/300 creature easily with a Final Reward, for example... but, maybe your opponent has given it haste...

I'll have to rely on someone else who has Thousand Year Storm to tell me whether it's broken or not.


One thing I would like to address from the last thread is this comment:

Mburn7 said:

Besides, the combos enabled now involve Mythic or Masterpiece cards and some very specific deck setups.  I say let them be.

That's a point of view, certainly. I think it bears pointing out though that Mythics and Masterpieces are easy to acquire for the top coalitions. Everyone in mine has a BSZ, for example. When up and coming players ask me for advice, I tell them, "move heaven and Earth to get a BSZ", and they do. The way that booster crafting and Mythic packs do not give you duplicates make it a certainty that over time you *will* acquire the older Standard Legal OP cards if you're performing well in events and doing all the dailies. It'll take me a while to get hold of a Killer Instinct from the latest set, but I got my BSZ, Decree of Justice, Plague Wind, and Luminarch's Ascension a very long time ago, my Stitch not long after that, and I have 5k jewels sitting in my account waiting for Glimpse to roll back around in the packs. I'd have bought it already but I wanted to save a good quantity for RNA, but it turns out RNA doesn't have much worth saving for.

BATMAN1

I don’t think blue needs a nerf I think all the other colors need a buff. What happen to green? 

Mburn7

BATMAN1 said:

I don’t think blue needs a nerf I think all the other colors need a buff. What happen to green? 

I like this idea.

A long time ago I was told the main difference between League and DOTA is that when a character was OP in League they nerf it to the ground and when a character is OP in DOTA they just buff everyone else, so League was full of boring "balanced" characters and DOTA was full of stupid OP characters (but that was ok because everyone was OP).  Everyone I knew much preferred DOTA because it was just more fun to have everyone be broken than for everyone to be boring.

Green has been nerfed hard with the removal of gem converter spells from new cards.  Red was nerfed hard by the overall increase in planeswalker life totals, Black was nerfed by other color's easy access to removal, and White was never great on its own to begin with (but has always been solid).

I say drop every non-Origins walker's max health by 20 (except Sorin), bring back green gem converters, make all bounce not work with 6 cards in hand (and take out all red or green kill spells), and nerf BSZ.  Then every color is stupid strong and we can all be happy.

Laeuftbeidir

Well. I like having balance as a goal, since only in a balanced environment you can identify not balanced stuff.

Blue currently aces:

Mana generation

Ramp (!)

Discard (!)

Burn (!)

Creature based damage

Card draw (well, that's actually correct)

GY stuff (!)

creature removal

Support removal

If you buff up all other colors to that level, you could just make every pw a five color pw and forget about it for good.

By the way :

https://forums.d3go.com/discussion/74932/whats-up-with-blue-bounce-amp-steal/p1

Theros

I don't think blue needs a nerf. 
The new Timer even if not the best idea does put a check on blue or all other forms of combos.
After some tests on my own, decks that cast copies the same turn (with expansion, duplicate..) and decks that do not cast copies hit the same plateau with the TIMER. As such, there is absolutely no competitive making decks that cast copies the same turn.
Another as such, the TIMER makes cards like expansion redundant, waste of space or useless.
I played around with Thousand Year Storm too. It also turned out to be redundant and actually problematic due to bottleneck. Multiple copies of same spells are not useful this time around and you eventually get less output of other important cards by the time you hit the  TIMER. Copies truly shine when no timer is in place. 
In conclusion, in reference to your poll, there is really no point in preventing copies to cast the same turn for the reasons I listed.
Instead of nerfing we can buff other colors starting with black. White is not as powerful in standard compared to legacy/

wickedwitch74

This is a conversation that has been going on for quite some time. It was (maybe) two years ago when it was suggested (and I agreed) that blue was too powerful. This was before BSZ was around, and possibly before Omnipotence was made available.

The problem blue cards continue to show up. Omnipotence and BSZ are devastating in ways that no other color can match, allowing for explosive turns.

As Starfall correctly points out, any player who is committed to doing the daily grind will acquire these cards eventually, so their rarity is moot.

It's tough for "sideboard" cards (Kambal) to really see play, because it's not like paper magic where you might swap something in after seeing a strategy in the first of a three game set.

Blue's traditional strengths (paper) have always been mana denial, card draw, threat deterrence (unsummon, etc) and evasive creatures.

It's weakness has always been weaker/fewer creatures, higher casting costs, a lack of mass sweepers.

This game has kept blue's strength, but turned some of these weaknesses on their head. 

When you look at, for example, Green's traditional strengths, it was always cheap/powerful creatures, explosive mana, and the ability to "go wide".

By removing this option to "go wide", the metagame has been skewed towards control. I no longer have to worry about 30 attacking buffed creatures. Instead, I only have to worry about 3. 

This is another reason that the +1/+1 buffs in this game are about as useless as you can get, but that is for another post (someone beat me to it, in fact).

Card draw has always made blue the most powerful color in magic, both paper and in PQ, but the current game design of PQ has made it overwhelmingly powerful. There are the aforementioned problem cards, which should be toned down. There are ways to make cards from other colors more powerful in order to balance out the color pie. 

But I think they need to look at the battlefield and recognize how they've set certain colors up for success, and hamstrung more creature-heavy strategies.

Creating a fourth slot for creatures would alter deck building towards a more creature-heavy focus.

If targeted spells destroyed/unsummoned, say, one reinforcement, while leaving the rest on the battlefield, this would also impact the game to tone down the power that blue/black have.

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Mark_Tedin

blue has always been a stronger color in mtg ... since the beginning of the game ...



and in MTGPQ this could not be different... the timer was the biggest NERF in the game history so far ...all my decks were damaged... we do not need more NERF ... 

Laeuftbeidir

Well, in return for balancing acts for blue offenders, the timer should be obsolete anyway.

Expansion is pointless? Well, let's just disagree here since it's just nuts like it is right now. You can also break the loop timer rather easily to get a second and third loop with fresh time. If the cards aren't designed carefully, we'll find ways to break them. We even broke bsz furtherly, and it's the devs job to react to that accordingly.

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Mark_Tedin

starfall said:

All the cards you've listed there are banned in Standard, Modern, and Legacy, and restricted in Vintage, the only format you can play them in.

Yes. That was just an example of vintage. If you look for the top decks in the current standard the agro monoblue shines !!!

bobby_2613

I hate NERF so much. I'm still chasing BSZ and don't want it to be useless when I'll finally get it. 

jtwood

This game is about grinding. Grinding is about winning. A lot. OP cards let you win faster, making grinding less tedious. 

If they want to nerf cards and slow down games, they need to increase prizes to offset. Otherwise, put me in the OP camp. 

Brakkis

Blue is broken. It was broken in paper for quite some time until they realized it had eclipsed all of the other colors and they toned it way down. It's currently at that eclipse point in PQ. 

You don't crank up the power on the other 4 colors to match a broken color. You stop giving the broken color access to the primary things the other 4 colors are supposed to have a monopoly on. In paper they'd also ban the cards that most egregiously eat into the other colors. You can't ban cards in PQ so instead, you tone them down.

A number of changes would need to be, and should be, implemented involving blue. 

- Do away with the majority of these nonsense drain mana cards blue has and make them do what they were intended to do all along. Give them Flash and make them counters.
- Bounce needs to be limited. Either it bounces only if the opponent has 5 or fewer cards in their hand or if it's a higher tier bounce, it puts the card back in their library. Blue should not have better removal than Black.
- Blue's creatures are meant to be low in P/T but have evergreen's that make them more troublesome to deal with. Flying, Hexproof, Unblockable, etc. 
- Blue should not even come close to Green in terms of mana generation. Right now it dwarfs it in standard and is close to it in legacy.
 -- BSZ is the primary culprit of this nonsense and should be nowhere near it's current power level. It's supposed to be a draw card. If you want to give it a little something extra than so be it but having it draw a full 6 cards and giving all of them 12 mana is broken beyond belief.
 -- STV is the other. It shouldn't convert gems at all. It should only give mana based on the number of your artifact supports and their reinforcements.
- Blue should not have access to direct damage. It can have some access to direct creature damage but hitting the player directly is not its wheelhouse.
 -- Beacon Bolt shouldn't be able to target the Planeswalker.

Aside from the alteration to blue though, some of the other colors need to be fixed to some degree.

- Green needs converters. Big ones or consistently mid-range ones. For some reason you've avoided adding any at that level since Oktagon took over.

- Red's direct damage spells need to be increased. They are absolutely pitiful. You increase the P/T of creatures and you vastly increase player health in the transition from paper to PQ and yet, red's spell remain at the same value, completely undermining their effectiveness.

Stormcrow

BATMAN1 said:

I don’t think blue needs a nerf I think all the other colors need a buff. What happen to green? 

What happened to green is that all of its good mana ramp rotated out of Standard, and all the new mana ramp that came in to replace it was blue.

Brakkis said:

- Blue should not have access to direct damage. It can have some access to direct creature damage but hitting the player directly is not its wheelhouse.
 -- Beacon Bolt shouldn't be able to target the Planeswalker.

<snip>

- Red's direct damage spells need to be increased. They are absolutely pitiful. You increase the P/T of creatures and you vastly increase player health in the transition from paper to PQ and yet, red's spell remain at the same value, completely undermining their effectiveness.

I get where you're coming from, but the elephant in the room in at least this part of the discussion is the dual-colored nature of the Ravnica cards and how that intersects with the way PQ Planeswalkers work. Beacon Bolt isn't just blue, it's blue/red. Should blue have access to burn that strong? No, probably not, but as you point out, Red desperately needs burn that strong. Or what about Assassin's Trophy? Green shouldn't have kill spells, Black shouldn't have support removal; seems pretty clear though that Assassin's Trophy is deliberately designed to sit in that black/green intersection and do both things, on purpose. So what do you about these multicolored cards that muddy the color pie? Just remove a color from them, regardless of what colors they are in paper? Turning Beacon Bolt into a pure red card would make very little difference, since most of the time it's showing up in Bolas or Ral decks that would still have access to it. Whichever color you removed from Assassin's Trophy, it'd still break the color pie for the color it stayed.

The only real way to "fix" Beacon Bolt, Assassin's Trophy, and other dual-color color-pie offenders would be to require that the planeswalker have all the colors shown on a given card; that would mean Beacon Bolt would be restricted to PWs that could run both blue and red, and Assassin's Trophy would be Vraska-only. It would fix those color pie issues, and be much closer to paper MTG, but at what cost? That kind of fundamental change to the game would break basically...everything.

BSZ though, is just ridiculous. It's also mono-blue. No reason not to nerf it. Gently, of course, we still want it to be a good card, but the sheer amount of mana gain is just ridiculous. Something closer to Apex of Power, where the mana gain is a fixed amount instead of all the cards getting 12 mana, would make more sense. Or, they could just lower the cap on Stored Mana; it's not like we can ever possibly draw 10 cards, anyhow.

I've talked about StV before, and my biggest issue with StV is still not the amount of mana it generates but the sheer amount of loyalty it generates, which is what pushes it into "too overpowered" territory for me. I think ideally I'd have the front side drain loyalty in order to produce treasures, and/or the back side should just produce mana directly instead of converting gems.

I have mixed feelings about bounce spells. Having them function as kill spells when the opponent's hand is full is definitely too strong, but having played with enough of the older bounce spells that only work if your opponent has space in their hand, I definitely feel that they're too weak if left that way. Returning a creature to the top of the library is okay as long as it's more expensive than the equivalent black kill spells, but they can't all be like that. It's really hard for me to come up with a solution that feels balanced besides just going back to allowing us (and Greg) to temporarily go over our max hand size, and making us automatically discard the cards over 6 at the end of our turn.

Brakkis

Stormcrow said:

Brakkis said:

- Blue should not have access to direct damage. It can have some access to direct creature damage but hitting the player directly is not its wheelhouse.
 -- Beacon Bolt shouldn't be able to target the Planeswalker.

<snip>

- Red's direct damage spells need to be increased. They are absolutely pitiful. You increase the P/T of creatures and you vastly increase player health in the transition from paper to PQ and yet, red's spell remain at the same value, completely undermining their effectiveness.

I get where you're coming from, but the elephant in the room in at least this part of the discussion is the dual-colored nature of the Ravnica cards and how that intersects with the way PQ Planeswalkers work. Beacon Bolt isn't just blue, it's blue/red. Should blue have access to burn that strong? No, probably not, but as you point out, Red desperately needs burn that strong. Or what about Assassin's Trophy? Green shouldn't have kill spells, Black shouldn't have support removal; seems pretty clear though that Assassin's Trophy is deliberately designed to sit in that black/green intersection and do both things, on purpose. So what do you about these multicolored cards that muddy the color pie? Just remove a color from them, regardless of what colors they are in paper? Turning Beacon Bolt into a pure red card would make very little difference, since most of the time it's showing up in Bolas or Ral decks that would still have access to it. Whichever color you removed from Assassin's Trophy, it'd still break the color pie for the color it stayed.

No. You literally remove its ability to target the player. It can't target the player in paper, only creatures. It needs to be the same here. Blue does have access to some creature damage spells in paper, including Beacon Bolt. But allowing it to target the opponent greatly increases its capability beyond it's intended purpose.

Then, buff reds already existing burn spells. A lot.

Likewise, green does have creature removal. Every color dips its toes into the preferred abilities of the other colors but it's rare. Assassins Trophy is that rare example in this case.  Just like Blue isn't known for full field clears but Rivers Rebuke was a rare foray into that domain.

tfg76

I also like the idea of doing some positive things to the rules that would benefit other colors, like:

- As mentioned, kill spells or bounce should only pick off one reinforcement, not the whole stack.
- Normalize tokens - reduce the number of different ones. For instance, in Guilds, they could have had all the green/white cards generate Lifelink Soldiers rather than also having Vigilance Elves. Vampires were good this way.
- Better creatures in general, especially at lower rarities. I'd say a vanilla green common creature should be something like 8 mana 6/6. In blue it might be a 3/3 flyer for the same kind of cost.

That said, I think BSZ is too much of a crutch right now, and should be nerfed. Its only redeeming factor is that Greg often doesn't use it well. I play BSZ in all my decks, so it'll hurt, but I think it would be for the better.

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arNero

I wholeheartedly agree with the thread title, even though I can only pinpoint a few blue cards which have been severely problematic from the day of their conception. (the cards being Prism Array, Omniscience and yes, BSZ)

If we're speaking of BSZ, in my point of view, the problem is this: It takes one of the strongest card in Legacy, which is Seasons Past (I know some may ask, this is one of the strongest?!?), bring it back to its pre-Nerf level (where you get the cards BEFORE you gain the mana from the gems), then double the number of cards it can fetch. Oh sure, BSZ may not fire any card it draws (owing to 12 mana cap), but aside from Stitch in Time (I forgot its cost, but if it is listed in this thread I assume it's 12 or less mana), you can always combo it with Thunderherd Migration or, god forbid, Hour of Promise to fill the rest of the cards.

Also, one of the more recent most sickening combo I've seen involves BSZ's ability to be fetched with FULL MANA (including the stored mana) via cards like Sunbird Invocation and Expansion.

I am all in with the notion that BSZ must be nerfed, but seeing that recently we have yet to see any nerf at all (I think the last nerf was the extremely unnecessary nerf to Nissa Cycling), I don't expect much.