Community

Sep 20, 2012 -- 11:56PM, Redgurr wrote:

@crimson_sunrise He didn't say that it doesn't happen all the time. He said they don't do it for the sake of doing it, and try to give a good reason why CARDNAME should be pushed in this particular environment. "Power Creep" as you put it, is something that had to happen. Spells were so OP back in the day that creatures were just too undervalued to play. Which doesn't make sense when you consider that 48-54% of all sets are creatures and 2 or 3 of them saw constructed play. I think creatures are where they need to be now, pushing them any further will probably be overkill. As for those cards you mentioned. A lot of those are still great cards, but what made them great was how useful they were in their environments. Not everyone can be a all-format-all-star like Tarmogoyf.

Let's look at Mike Flores' article about the decks that were "breaking" Standard:

www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.a...

Cawblade had only two or three creatures, depending on what you called Batterskull. It was also the strongest deck ever in Standard, compared to the field.
Jund ran more creatures than noncreature spells.
Faeries ran slightly less creatures than noncreatures.
Tooth and Nail required a fairly wide variety of creatures to win.
Ravager Affinity was a deck based on a ton of VERY strong creatures.
Psychatog had only two creatures, but one of them was absolutely ridiculous.
Fires of Yavimaya is a creature deck. No, really, it's a CREATURE deck. Loaded with 'em, and they're all good.
Academy had no creatures. It was also part of the most broken block known to the game.
Deadguy Red and other RDW variants are very creature-heavy.
Necropotence, surprisingly, had a healthy complement of creatures.

So you see, there were ALWAYS a solid amount of creatures used in Constructed. Occasionally it would flicker back and forth between more creatures and less creatures, but it would often swing back to a balance around where Jund and Faeries lie. Some decks would be on one side, some decks on the other. Limited would give a chance for all the creatures that couldn't make Constructed play to shine, along with some of the spells that had the same problem. Outside of a couple of EXTREMELY rare situations that involved unbelievably broken cards, there was never a situation where creatures wre unseen. In our current modern metagame, we are now starting to see situations where there are viable tournament-level decks that only run four non-creature spells (RG Aggro). Those four non-creature spells are used solely to kill enemy creatures. In my opinion, this is an unhealthy focus on creatures nearly as harmful as Academy's complete disregard of them. Creatures previously held a balanced position in the metagame, with the immediate impact of a creature being much less than that of a spell because the creature gets to have a persistent impact over time. Now, as creatures gain much higher impact and become much more resistant to spell-based disruption, that balance is being disrupted, perhaps permanently. Things ARE changing, and I'm not all happy about it.

Sep 21, 2012 -- 1:03AM, Acritter wrote:

 In our current modern metagame, we are now starting to see situations where there are viable tournament-level decks that only run four non-creature spells (RG Aggro). Those four non-creature spells are used solely to kill enemy creatures. In my opinion, this is an unhealthy focus on creatures nearly as harmful as Academy's complete disregard of them.

No, academys is a problem because those non-creature decks are inherantly non-interactive decks, the vast vast majority of potentiol decks cannot interact with them at all.

Decks that run almost entirely creatures are extremely interactive decks, both in their ability to interact with their opponent, and enabling the opponent to interact with them.