HL Cup Hanau (GP XII) - 20.04.2013

[Doks]

You are right, I guess I was a bit harsh, but to me your reasoning seemed to only stress the less vital points of why oath is such a strong card. This led to me assuming you were defending a pet card of yours no matter what. I am sorry, if I got that wrong.

On the topic of slots and winconditions. Of course, once your Oath is handled, you have a tougher time winning with planeswalkers and such but after all, your deck is geared to buy time and protect your most vital cards. How likely is it for you to really lose it? What clock can your adversary put you under while being heavily disrupted? I have never played the Oath deck myself, so I may as well be wrong, but Krosan Grip aside, which card really handles oath definitely?

And the competetiveness surely is there, else this format would not appeal to me this much but contrary to a regular Tournament, where most people would play what they think is the best deck (or what they can afford) or the best deck suited to their playstyle, on the HL Cup and Tournaments the beloved pet Deck factor is much much higher.
Just look at all those foil, alternate art, signed and whatnot cards in most of the decks. A lot of the people there have put a considerate effort and a lot of money in hunting down unique/special versions. Do you think they change their decks at a whim?
Again, no one doubts the competitive nature of the format, but after all most players love their highlander as much as they would love their cat/dog and they even groom it to a certain extent. It is hard to just get another cat because the one you grew up with does not catch mice anymore. Maybe you get her eyes fixed, but you do not let her go easily.

I for one will probably always play esper highlanders. Of course I try to build a strong deck and I am sure I succeeded at that, but I know that a lot of archetypes out there are stronger. And I say this as a very competitive player with several PTQ T8s, three PTs and one top 16 PT finish under my belt. There is a soft spot in my heart for this 100 card pile. I can not just leave it at the side of the road like a dog before the holidays.

Have you played an Oath deck by yourself for a certain amount of time? I don't mean like 10 or 20 games, but maybe over a few weeks. No offense intended, I'm being completely serious about this. To me it seems that you had some really bad games playing against the Oath archetype. But only playing it yourself will show you how much the named drawbacks really weigh.

For quite some time, I hated all multicoloured aggro archetypes because losing on turn 4/5 feels somewhat 'unfun' to me. I became so narrow-minded playing against a friend of mine that I only noticed his good draws and neglected the times he didn't kill me so early with a bunch of undercosted 3/x beaters. He offered me to swap decks for several games and suddenly I realized that his Naya has some bad and mediocre draws as well.

It's the same with Oath: losing to a Turn 2 Oath definitely feels somewhat 'dumb'. But if you ever play the deck, you will notice that you just win or lose without an Oath equally often. In theory, this deck indeed is full of answers and can handle everything. But a purely reactive deck core is not a winning strategy. Answering your opponent's threats 5 turns in a row is not going to win you the game any time soon.

[Kenshin]

Believe it or not, I have neither played with nor against an Oath deck. I am not biased in any way. I do not need to flip several million coins to conclude that they will roughly come up 50/50.

In the end I may have made the wrong assumptions but arguing with results is a pretty shaky basis in this case.

[Vazdru]

@ W0lf

thx! it was fun to play against you too - in rl you're a nice guy while the evil one on this forum  , never guessed you could be the same person  

i try to publish the Top 8 profiles till end of this week


@ Oath discussion

just checked decklists of HL Cup Hanau for Oath-builds, here the results:

Jonny / Tabris with 4C-Oath, 1st, 17 pts after Swiss
Andreas Keupp with Reanimator-Oath, 10th, 15 pts
Marcel Schneider with BUG-Oath, 36th, 12 pts
Florian Hering with BUG-Oath (Top 8 with BUG-Oath last HL Cup and Trial-Winner with Oath this time) -> 42nd, 10 pts (6 rounds played - 2 wins, 1 draw, 2 losses, 1 Bye)
Manuel Laubscher with BUG-Oath (Trial-winner), 64th, 8 pts (6 rounds played - 1 win, 2 draws, 2 losses, 1 Bye)

the performance of the Oath-Decks obviously not meta-breaking not to say just average
i watched some Oath-matches of Tabris and they were quite close each time

nevertheless Oath is on Watchlist, so everyone can be relaxed, we - the hl council- are aware that this card could cause problems especially the combo-oath-version, which noone has chosen this time as it is quite hard to pilot

[LasH]

I kinda think the balance discussions get to a useless point. The amount of players for certain cards will always be like 50:50 or max 60:40. I absolutly cannot follow hl-council members argumentations anymore.

(btw I never had a t1 Tutor for a t2 oath in the entire tournament)

Statements like this are so opposed. Since u never had that "autowin" draw we can unban Libraryof Alexandria because the main argument is that its autowin on starthand? BC you just say u didnt draw a certain card for 8 rounds of HL in the first turn you contradict with a statement against library in the format. Is the card less broken because you didnt draw it?

Its just one example of MANY. There is so much contradict in the banlist and it really feels like ppl are 50:50 about all cards why dont we implent a straight going for banning cards.

91% of banned cards do have a manacost of 2 or less (the 3 remaining: gifts ungiven, birthing pod, tinker). So for example:

- Only undercosted cards get consider for a ban because they stop interacting with players or give one player a drastic early advantage (Reason to BAN P9, a reason not to ban natural order/gifts because decks are supposed to handle 4 mana cc cards)

- A card gets banned if the active player has a drastically early advantage which rarely loses a game(reason to ban survival, jitte, birhting pod, oath )

- banning one cards combos (hermit druid, survival, birthing pod, tinker)

- if a card is stoping evolution of the format (tolarian academy, tinker, survival)

- Either ban or unban one mana tutors. Stop the randomnes.

No one can seriously argument against this. This would finally stop all biased ban/unban argumentations and we had a straight going for banning cards. If a card matches at least 2/3 of the categories it gets banned. Pretty simply.

Im not saying this raster is perfect but you could work it out so the banlist at least 100% reasonable. Because right now its absolutly not the case. Im not saying we have a bad banlist. But some cards get banned for a reason while other cards have the absolutly same impact and dont get banned. I can totally understand why ppl ask to ban oath, because it matches at least 5 reasons why you banned survival. Check your newspost 01.04.2010.

The performance of oath is not meta-breaking? It won 2 GPs in a row in 2 completly different versions. Once again a fail statement (sry i like you ). We dont have much tournaments so if a deck wins the biggest tournament at all TWICE by different players you cannot say its not meta breaking.

And the competetiveness surely is there, else this format would not appeal to me this much but contrary to a regular Tournament, where most people would play what they think is the best deck (or what they can afford) or the best deck suited to their playstyle, on the HL Cup and Tournaments the beloved pet Deck factor is much much higher.
Just look at all those foil, alternate art, signed and whatnot cards in most of the decks. A lot of the people there have put a considerate effort and a lot of money in hunting down unique/special versions. Do you think they change their decks at a whim?
Again, no one doubts the competitive nature of the format, but after all most players love their highlander as much as they would love their cat/dog and they even groom it to a certain extent. It is hard to just get another cat because the one you grew up with does not catch mice anymore. Maybe you get her eyes fixed, but you do not let her go easily.

Thats the reason why we dont see a TOP 8 full of "affinity-decks". If ppl only would run the best decks we would see MUCH more combo builds like christoph's build. Did the eternity top8 player patrick richter EVER changed his goodstuff deck in any GP? Most players run 1 deck like some1 else said before and thats usually not the best deck. If you want to play the best deck you check christoph's statement how to "break the format" in speed and consistency and he proofed that it works.

[W0lf]

Ok i can`t help it i must tell you my opinion on oath and the Top 8 decks i will try to be nice and reasonable this time.

When I´m looking at the t8 decks I see that everyone of them has really really focused game plan  whether it is early board control from elves,softlock/nonbasic hate strategies from aggro-control/UR decks or heavy control that relies on single spells to win. You just take one look at the lists and you know what they will do to you if you play against them.
They are all extremely well built and i can imagine the amount of time and brains invested must have been huge.
Anyone of them could have won this Tournament if the pairings would have been different as every deck in this list has a bad matchup against at least one of the others.

Regarding the Oath discussion:
For me the Card that rly breaks Oath in Jonnys build is the addition of Eternal Witness in combination with Volrath`s Stronghold.While "All-in" oath decks are just to weak, he took a different route and built the ultimate Control Deck engine. This is no cheap win strategy, it is high level Deckbuilding that everyone should respect.
Hope i didn`t insult anyone this time, just saying the possibilities in HL are endless and there will always be a better deck to create somewhere hidden in your mind. 

[Tabris]

Just some short statements regarding your points Lash:


The mentioning of "I had never a t2 oath" is not an argument for anything I just wanted to show (as I already said) that my deck is a heavy control deck which CAN win w/o Oath and the card alone is not the only thing which helped me win the tournament. If I remember correctly every T8 participant made a mistake which lead to a loss (since the UW and Bant players are friends of mine, they told me what tend to their losses) also my opponents in QF and SF did make some mistakes which lead to their defeat (well one could argue that the BBE decission was not a mistake but more a high risk/high reward play).

Besides that, Patrick played a huge variance of decks. At the DM he played a Bant Ramp deck with Upheaval + Sorveigns of lost Alara before that he had a 4c Toolbox deck since the last GP he choose an aggro control deck, so saying hes playing the same deck over and over is not true. He switched from midrange to ramp to aggro control and back again (sure they all have a 4c greed mana base + some pet cards but they differ in many ways and their approachs)

[LasH]

Just some short statements regarding your points Lash:

The mentioning of "I had never a t2 oath" is not an argument for anything I just wanted to show (as I already said) that my deck is a heavy control deck which CAN win w/o Oath and the card alone is not the only thing which helped me win the tournament. If I remember correctly every T8 participant made a mistake which lead to a loss (since the UW and Bant players are friends of mine, they told me what tend to their losses) also my opponents in QF and SF did make some mistakes which lead to their defeat (well one could argue that the BBE decission was not a mistake but more a high risk/high reward play).

I dont see the relation of this post and my statement. Who said your deck can only win with oath? Which oath list cannot win without oath? Why is this matter important at all? (Many questions but i dont get it right now)

Besides that, Patrick played a huge variance of decks. At the DM he played a Bant Ramp deck with Upheaval + Sorveigns of lost Alara before that he had a 4c Toolbox deck since the last GP he choose an aggro control deck, so saying hes playing the same deck over and over is not true. He switched from midrange to ramp to aggro control and back again (sure they all have a 4c greed mana base + some pet cards but they differ in many ways and their approachs)

http://www.mtgpulse.com/search#[byplayer=Patrick%20Richter]

Thats for 2 years. The concept does not change. Cards always change in time, splashing does change in time. What he does is adapting his deck to the meta (very efficient). I doubt he would ever run UW control on a GP. Hope this helps you to understand my purpose of this example. Btw it was not a negative statement about patrick. It shows his skill to reanimate his deck perfectly for each meta but thats what goodstuff is about, isnt it? And he does it tight.

I would rather see a statement from you about the important parts of my post.

[W0lf]

There is nothing important in your post?

[MMD]

Tabris's Contol Oath list looks rock solid (though I just don´t understand the reason for playing G1 sorceries instead of artifact ramp) but I doubt that adding Witness/Stronghold is neather new nor format breaking. He mentioned that he dodged non basic hate and benefited from opponents misplays. In addition to beeing an good magic player this can be enough to win such a tournament.

I don't want to say ,,ban oath" because it won two tournaments in a row (with two different strategies which is also very important to see imo) but I agree with a lot of LasH's arguments regarding the banned list in general. Imo Oath can be compared (cheap, hard to kill, game wharping, etc. ) to some cards which are already on the banned list for a good reason.

Btw, there is also a Oath-topic in the banned list thread: http://www.magicplayer.org/forum/index.php?topic=908.15

[W0lf]

The only thing thats nether new or format breaking is people crying about cards after every gp.the one thing you dont see is banning oath wont make you better at playing magic.

DEAL WITH IT!

[MMD]

The only thing thats nether new or format breaking is people crying about cards after every gp.the one thing you dont see is banning oath wont make you better at playing magic.

DEAL WITH IT!

Thanks for your intelligent and enlightened feedback! Can we come back to some useful content please?

[Kenshin]

The only thing thats nether new or format breaking is people crying about cards after every gp.the one thing you dont see is banning oath wont make you better at playing magic.

DEAL WITH IT!

This is probably the most stupid thing I have read in a while. I asked myself if such douchebaggery even deserves an answer, but I will feed the troll:

Beneath the fact that I told you I have won PTQs and played PTs, which should tell you that I am probably not a bad player (though not as good as I was back then because I took a break during Innistrad and Scars), I doubt that this is even a point in this discussion. Most of the posters before brought up good reasons why to ban/not ban Oath. I never played against Oath, I am surely not "butthurt". The card poses a problem and we discuss it. I do not see a person in this thread hating on it for the reasons you accuse them of.

And surely most of those people spoke out against Oath before that tournament. I sure did and I even tried to bring it up with Vazdru at our local Tournaments in Karlsruhe but that is not the place to have a lengthy discussion so we just had a little chat about it. Recent events tend to define the topics of discussion. That is perfectly normal. There is no surprise in the timing of Oath coming up as the subject "du jour".

If this was any other format I would invest some time to hunt down the relevant cards and learn how to play this oath deck to the highest possible extent of my abilitys. But this is not Type 2 or modern and it won't get me on the Pro Tour, so I do not. I do not know if it is the strongest Deck around but it sure is the strongest I have seen so far.

[Maqi]

Regarding a possible banning of Oath of Druids (wall of text incoming):

When you take a look at the HL banned list you'll see (ante, manual and time issue cards aside) that there are basically 5 different kinds of cards:
1. Fast Mana (Black Lotus, all the Moxen, Mana Crypt, Mana Vault, Sol Ring, and to some extent Fastbond and Tolarian Academy)
2. Grossly undercosted cards a.k.a. mistakes from the past (Ancestral Recall, Balance, Time Walk)
3. Combo pieces (Flash, Grindstone, Strip Mine, Time Vault)
4. Combo tutoring (Entomb, Imperial Seal, Mystical Tutor, Tinker, Vampiric Tutor)
5. Dominator cards (Birthing Pod, Gifts Ungiven, Library of Alexandria, Mind Twist, Skullclamp, Stoneforge Mystic, Survival of the Fittest, Umezawa's Jitte)

When talking about Oath we are talking about category #5 - Dominator cards. And I feel it surely belongs in this category.

What are Dominator cards?

There are several dimensions to this concept.

1. Non-interactivity
That means, a card renders many or even all cards of your opponent useless (in the context of what is important in the current game state) or just doesn't allow your opponent to cast spells at all.
An aspect of Non-intereactivity is the "game-warping" attribute, which means that as soon as the specific card hits play, everything revolves around it. It becomes the center of the game.

Non-banned cards of this kind: Trinisphere, Oath of Druids, The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale, Back to Basics, Blood Moon, Humility etc.

2. Inevitability
The card wins the game, almost regardless of what else is going on. This is not to say, that the game must be won on the spot but can rather mean that the game is locked into a state where winning is only a matter of time.

Non-banned cards of this kind: Oath of Druids, Jace TMS, Sylvan Library, Aether Vial etc.

3. Wins the game from a position where winning shouldn't be possible
The card is winning out of the blue. This means, that the card can come down too early in the game or that it can win from a position where one is so far behind, that winning through the means of one card alone feels unfair to the opponent.

Non-banned cards of this kind: Black Vise, Price of Progress, Scapeshift, Mana Drain, Oath of Druids, Parallax Wave etc.

Obviously every card has a little bit of everything. It would be more accurate to regard each specific card individually and attribute a score for each category. For example, Survival of the Fittest would score something like the following:

Non-interactivity / Game warping: 7 points (of 10)
Inevitability: 8 points (of 10)
Winning out of the blue: 3 points (of 10)

Dominator cards tend to lead to UNFUN game states. Non-interactivity, Inevitability and wins out of the blue are not FUN. And the criteria of FUN/UNFUN must be the ultimate cornerstone that guides a banning decision. If a card only leads to frustrating games, it must banned - period.

The difficult part of course is to evaluate if a card scores to high on the above categories.

If I were to rate Oath of Druids it would look something like this:

Non-interactivity / Game warping: 7 points (of 10)
Inevitability: 7 points (of 10)
Winning out of the blue: 6 points (of 10)

These are of course subjective numbers.

Krosan Grip is being tossed around by some of you as an answer. I don't know if you have noticed, but Abrupt Decay got printed. Nevertheless, that's not what matters. When a game warping card begins to even warp the metagame and deckbuilding decisions around it, something's fishy.

Let me ramble on for a bit. These are just unconnected thoughts I have on the subject.

I think that Oath of Druids is not played as much as it should be because of the price tag on The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale. An optimal Oath-list needs one of those. But not that many players own one. I for myself have not played Oath in tournament because I don't own a TaPV, although I have everything else assembled.

Furthermore, a card like Oath poses a special threat to a format without a sideboard. If you could play a board with say 1x Nature's Claim, 1x Extract and 1x Krosan Grip it would be much less of a problem. Draw these exact cards vs. the RDW or Naya aggro player however, since you have to run them mainboard, and you are pretty surely not going to have much fun with them.

Do I think Oath needs to be banned? I guess my answer at the moment would be "yes". I once was convinced, that a short banned list is a plus for the format. But I no longer think so. Instead I think that several more cards need to be banned. But that is another topic in its own right.

[Nastaboi]

Oath could also be classified as a mana accelerator (cheats mana costs), tutor (finding one of the few fatties in the deck) or combo tutor/piece (mill your whole deck and win from there). Not saying that is should be necessarily banned, but that we could compare its banworthiness in other categories, too.

[Vazdru]

I've added another decklist of Andreas Keupp / meteora, 9th place of final ranking:
http://mtgpulse.com/event/12976#183549

first player profiles online

runner-up Bernd Fritsch, who played Elves! like a day after in Legacy in which he reached Top 4 too: http://www.planetmtg.de/articles/artikel.html?id=6465

HIGHLANDER TOURNAMENT HANAU Apr. 20th, 2013 - TOP 8

RUNNER-UP

NAME / NICKNAME: Bernd Fritsch
Age: 29
Hometown: Ansbach
Occupation: professional elves player

Shop and/or community where you usually play Magic:
Prinz Regent Ansbach

Your deck archetype:
Elves! (Voll auf die Elf!)

Why did you choose your deck?
I play it in every format: "Always the elves."

Number of Times Playing on Highlander GPs:
4

Number of HL Top 8s:
1

Other previous Magic Accomplishments:
none

What was your record today?
5-1-1

How often do you play Highlander?
every week

Is there any card you would like to nominate for Ban / Unban in Highlander?
Ban: Oath of Druids

Anything else you would like to say?


________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

HIGHLANDER TOURNAMENT HANAU Apr. 20th, 2013 - TOP 8

SEMI-FINALIST

NAME / NICKNAME: Christoph Quade / W0lf
Age: 29
Hometown: Berlin
Occupation: -

Shop and/or community where you usually play Magic:
Berlin

Your deck archetype:
4C Tempo

Why did you choose your deck?
Wins against everything except Elves.

Number of Times Playing on Highlander GPs:
3

Number of HL Top 8s:
1

Other previous Magic Accomplishments:
none

What was your record today?
5-0-2

How often do you play Highlander?
every day

Is there any card you would like to nominate for Ban / Unban in Highlander?
Unban: Jitte / Library of Alexandria // Ban: Craterhoof Behemoth  

Anything else you would like to say?