The moderators of this subreddit said it would be ok to make an "Upvote This" style post to help gauge interest for a Marit Lage playmat for all you other Depths, Lands, and Maverick players out there.

Stephan Martiniere's Marit Lage Token Artwork for reference

Relevant crosspost information

/u/krauserkrauser works along side WOTC artists to get officially licensed playmats out there. He said he's recently spoken with Stephan Martiniere and that if there was sufficient interest it could happen.

Edit 10/13/19

Stephan Martiniere has been messaged. Thank you everybody for the upvotes and support.

So if you haven't been paying attention to news about the new set, this new burn spell was recently spoiled, and people have been debating whether this is good or not in Legacy/Modern Burn.

I had some free time and I know how to beep boop on a computer, so I decided to code up a quick simulation comparing Skewer the Critics to a regular bolt effect.

For the simulation, I used the following quadlaser deck, because it was simple and straightforward, while still being a reasonable representation of a typical burn deck.

20 Mountain
4 Goblin Guide
4 Monastery Swiftspear
4 Eidolon of the Great Revel
4 Fireblast
4 Price of Progress
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Chain Lightning
4 Lava Spike
4 Rift Bolt
4 Skewer the Critics

The bot uses the following decisions to mulligan:

• Keep any 7 card hand with 1 land and 3+ one mana plays (counting Rift Bolt and Skewer as one mana plays)

• Keep any 7 card hand with 2 or 3 lands

• Keep any 6 card hand with 1, 2, or 3 lands

• Keep any 5 or less card hand with 1 or more lands

The bot uses the following flowchart when deciding what to play. When it his a bullet point that it can do, it does so and then starts over from the beginning again:

• Play Land

• Cast Eidolon

• Cast Goblin Guide/Monastery Swiftspear

• Cast 1 CMC Skewer if able

• Suspend Rift Bolt if exactly 1 mana remaining

• Suspend Rift Bolt if Skewer not in hand

• Cast Lightning Bolt/Chain Lightning/Lava Spike

• Suspend Rift Bolt

• Cast Price of Progress

• Cast 3 CMC Skewer

• Cast Fireblast if it is possible to end the turn with no spells in hand

In addition, I used the following conditions:

• Creatures never activate Skewer. I assume that they are just cast and then disappear into the void.

• All non-Rift Bolt spells turn on Skewer. I assume that Price of Progress does nonzero damage when it is cast.

• Rift Bolt turns on Skewer the turn after it is suspended. The bot never hardcasts Rift Bolt because I was too lazy to program it to do so and it doesn't matter too much.

I let the bot goldfish 100,000 games using the above logic, and here were the statistics that I ended up with.

Percentage of Games Skewer has a Noticeable Drawback: 4.562%

This is the percentage of games where the bot ended a turn with at least one mana available and a Skewer in hand that could not be cast.

Percentage of Games Skewer was Drawn: 57.401%

EDIT: I was dumb in the original post and forgot to include this statistic. Combined with the above statistic, this means that Skewer has about a 7.9% chance of being awkward, conditional on it being drawn in the first place.

Average Turns to Become Hellbent: 4.50577 turns

This is the average number of turns it takes the bot to empty its hand of spells. Lands are not included in this measure.

I also ran a second simulation on an additional 100,000 games, this time replacing Skewer with an additional 4 copies of Lightning Bolt. This is the result.

Average Turns to Become Hellbent, No Skewer: 4.48142 turns

This is the average number of turns it takes the bot to empty its hand of spells, with Skewers treated as additional Lightning Bolts.

Now, here are some caveats that you need to be aware of when you interpret the data.

• The deck I used might not be your deck. The numbers displayed above will probably still be pretty accurate for most reasonable Burn decks, but do understand that the farther your deck deviates from the list I provided above, the less accurate the statistics that I calculated will be. Whether my statistics overestimate or underestimates the true numbers for your deck depends on what changes were made. Also, it might be important to be aware of the fact that multiple copies of Skewer in your hand are often awkward together. Perhaps the correct number of Skewers might actually be less than 4 copies.

• The bot does not mulligan or sequence its spells perfectly. I tried to program in a reasonable flowchart for it to follow, but it still plays worse than a reasonable human player. For example, it will happily keep a seven card hand with one land and three Fireblasts, while most humans would look at that hand and recognize that it should probably be mulliganed. This flaw likely increases how awkward Skewer is in the statistic above compared to the actual numbers, because Skewer is generally easy to cast with more reasonable openers.

• Your creatures will often turn on Skewer. In my calculations I assumed that you were never able to deal combat damage. In practice, your creatures often deal combat damage (or else, why would you play them?), which makes Skewer a lot easier to cast in actual games compared to the simulation above.

• Price of Progress does not always do damage. This is very rare, but it can happen, and makes Skewer slightly harder to cast compared to the simulation above.

• Other bolts sometimes do not turn on Skewer. This is relevant when you need to bolt two creatures. If you are bolting one creature and sending the other bolt to the face, you can just hit face with your regular bolt and then Skewer the creature. Also, if your first bolt is countered by something like Spell Pierce of Flusterstorm, Skewer might not be turned on. Note that this does not apply to Force of Will, as your opponent needs to pay life in order to Force, which turns on Skewer. This makes Skewer slightly harder to cast compared to the simulation above.

Overall, I believe that this shows that Skewer seems like a promising card. But you are free to interpret the data how you wish.

After the last round of the last legacy trial, all my cards were stolen. There were just a few people left in the area, and I was helping one of the judges straighten chairs and clean up bits of trash that had fallen around the tables.

My backpack was sitting on a table and suddenly it was gone. I freaked out and searched everywhere. The backpack was found about half an hour later in a bathroom stall--the backpack was empty. The stolen decks included: Legacy UR Delver, Modern Boros Burn, Modern Mono Green Stompy (which belongs to a friend), Legacy Burn, and maybe 150 other cards.

I've had a lot of these cards since I was a kid and when they were way cheaper than they are now. If the cards are really gone, that means that magic is over for me--I'm not in a position financially to get back into legacy. : (

Please, if you know the person who has the cards, remind him how much emotion exists alongside the monetary values. No questions asked if the cards are dropped off or "found" tomorrow at the Legacy main event. I will be there in the morning to see if anything has shown up but I won't compete because I don't have any decks left.

Please. If whomever took the cards really badly needs money, he can take one of the volcanics but please return the rest.

UPDATE: Thank you everyone for the kind comments. Please PM me if there's any info... I will give a VOLCANIC ISLAND as a REWARD if the cards are "found" and I get them all back. I hope that with enough peer pressure from the community we can stop this kind of thieving in the future. Not many people come to events alone... Friends don't let friends steal cards.

I want to say something about the cost of power creep, specifically when it comes to Legacy. A huge part of the appeal of Legacy is its longevity and its history. This history comes with nostalgia, sure, but also a sense of being involved a collective enterprise. When I started to look into Legacy around 5 years ago, I was looking for a couple of things. Affordability (I was in college with a small campus job, no real income), interaction (I hate linear decks), and having somewhere to start. Blue decks were categorically too expensive for me to justify ($500 game pieces is just fucking dumb). Most non-blue decks I saw were linear, boring or had other significant expenses (ex. Tabernacle). I owned 2 Vials, a Piledriver, a Warchief, a Gempalm Incinerator, and a Siege Gang Commander, all from when I was playing as a little kid, so I thought Goblins was the perfect fit. I told myself I would eventually build D&T as my “competitive” deck. Once I found the Source, I was completely hooked on Goblins, and even though I did eventually build D&T, nothing could compel me to put down Goblins. There was literally 10 years of material I could read and watch on this one deck! How cool is that!? There was a dedicated community of people all around the world working constantly in their own way on a communal iterative process to develop the ideal Goblins deck. People disagreed, sometimes vehemently, and people posted testing results, and even if low quality, with great enthusiasm. Long-form tournament reports were written with gusto and (attempted) humor, with all the panache of storyteller at a campfire. Even if such a goal is not really possible, or not for any longer than a weekend anyway, it was amazing to see and exciting to participate in. I read the Source primer over and over, checked archived threads, and constantly posted new comments, asking questions of these players who would become genuine friends of mine in the future. The fact that this wealth of knowledge already existed, and that people could point to SCG footage from 2010 and say “here’s this Goblins match and decklist that we can learn from even today” was fascinating to me.

I was a Classics/Archaeology major; I adore history, so learning lessons from the past had massive appeal. Goblins is, by my count, the oldest contiguous Legacy deck in existence. The core shell and deck philosophy has remained since the printing of Aether Vial, and the Legacy deck comes from even older antecedents in Extended and Block Constructed. The thousands of hours sunk into creating decks in 2008 still could inform me in 2016. Pilots who played “back in the day” could say “well back when X was really good, we tried this card to beat it, and maybe that could work again these days against the similar Y”. I felt like I was joining in a collective effort beyond myself, informed by years of prior work. To make a historical metaphor: I was working on a temple that had begun 50 years before I was born, and would not be finished until 50 years after my death, but I was proud to add any bricks that I could. Any major breakthroughs in the deck felt genuinely exciting (which you could see here on reddit back in 2018 when I was writing my primer on Volrath's Stronghold in Goblins). Had Goblins just cropped up into existence in 2016, I guarantee I would not have cared about it. I wanted the deck I chose to have a history, a depth to it. A community that cared about more than their results with it; it meant something to them because it carried memories and experiences. Legacy is often pitched to people as the format where deck expertise matters the most, and that putting the effort in yourself is the best way to learn and become better.

This kind of interest; a historical, community-based interest, is impossible to cultivate or encourage when decks appear and die with each set release. While it can be exciting to see brand new archetypes crop up, when they have no historical antecedent to connect them to, or are quickly solved then put aside, this is novelty and nothing more. Long-term work and dedication is the appeal of eternal formats like Legacy, and they will absolutely die if the Legacy decks of 2025 are not recognizably descendants of Legacy archetypes in 2020. The iterative process, once a nearly unbroken chain of hand-over-hand effort from a community of experts and enthusiasts, is being reduced to a series of bursts where cards come out, a deck is made, newer cards come out, and the deck either dies or becomes something entirely new, detached from the logic and thinking that brought it out in the first place.

To be clear, I am not complaining about change. Legacy should not remain the same 10-15 decks playing against each other for eternity. Some decks will inevitably fade into obscurity or non-existence as their competitive niche gets eaten by other archetypes. I understand this, though I think it’s not unreasonable to believe that old decks can come back thanks to new printings, and that this is the greatest boon of new cards entering Legacy (the modern revival of Cephalid Breakfast is one such story). I’m complaining that the way change is being done essentially trashes prior effort because these new cards break the rules. Upsetting the fundamentals of a format with new cards messes with some of the very building blocks of what makes Magic appealing to me. If those old lists and old match footage can hold no secret to be gleaned, and they’re simply written off as “well that was Magic from a different time, so any lessons are nonapplicable” then this game is fundamentally worse and is discarding some of its greatest strengths as a game; its longevity and its depth. Magic has existed for 25 years, but it feels like current Legacy has a short memory. If Legacy decks are just going to be Brainstorm, Ponder, Wasteland, Force of Will, fast mana, then whatever busted garbage comes out each release, then what makes it different than Standard but with $4,000 paperweights that we barely get to use anyway? Each new deck is just a cul-de-sac that doesn’t live long enough to create a community that people truly get invested in, making everyone’s experience of it shallower.

Right now, everyone’s building their companion decks because they have to, given the degree of advantage the mechanic gives you inherently. Various Legacy deckbuilders are churning out decklists daily, posting results, writing little reports, all the good stuff. What about the next thing that dethrones the Companions? Will any of these decks be worth looking at ever again in a year (not to mention the wallet fatigue of shelling out cash for whatever the new hotness is)? Given current trends, I doubt it. Deck development is almost artificial at that point. “After this [card in deck’s colors or vague strategy] was printed, our deck started playing it because it was too good not play”. Repeat this ad nauseum. That’s the future of a lot of Legacy decks. Sure doesn’t sound like fun to me. The iterative process is now almost redundant. Cards are immediately identified as format-defining, then jammed into decks that can contort themselves into casting them (which currently is trivially easy, thanks Arcum’s Astrolabe). If your deck can’t contort itself that much due to its own restrictions, tough luck, your deck is just categorically worse than others. Have fun!

If I were looking into getting into Legacy today instead of 5 years ago, I would not have. And I think the same can be said for lots of us the Legacy community right now. The frustration is palpable, and it’s not just the normal amount of complaining. People’s old favorite cards, even powerful staples like Jace the Mind Sculptor, are overwhelmingly being cut from competitive lists. I cannot help but see this as a crushing loss. People like their old cards! When looking for sideboard tech, who doesn’t like jumping through a box of garbage in paper, pulling up Scryfall or old forums, only to find your answer in an uncommon from Legends, or a conversation that took place 6 years ago? The deep cardpool does not matter when the only cards worth building around are overwhelmingly from the past two years. This is a downright tragedy for a game as good as Magic, and a format with as much potential as Legacy. The creative flexibility afforded by the past decades of Magic cards simply…doesn’t matter. As someone who has devoted the past few years of my life to making Goblins as good as it can be, this trend is somewhere between “depressing” and “soul-crushing”. I feel like my choices don’t really matter anymore because any information or insight I make now will be irrelevant before it is even fully formed in my head or on a page. The format’s attention span feels so frantic that it’s impossible to figure anything out without grinding so many hours a day that the game ceases to be enjoyable. So why play at all? I’m personally cutting very far back on the amount of Legacy, and Magic content in general, I’m playing or consuming on Twitch and Youtube. Maybe I’ll feel the urge to jump back in again, the siren’s call of Magic Online saying “hey, what if you tried this idea?”. But to be honest, I hope I do not.

Thanks for reading.

Eli

Just a letter of appreciation to the ban team for their stalwart stewardship of this format.

Thank you for banning a card nearly as old as the format itself so that we could keep Nexus in the format.  I too find it refreshing that metagame and gameplay reasons can be brushed aside in favor of Rule 0 esque justifications like “we think its cool.”  It’s good to know that the people running this game don’t let nerd shit like data or deep analysis get in the way of fun.  Know that your wildly vacillating dedication to doing whatever you want with mysterious data keeps this format fresh and exciting. 

Additionally, I’d like to thank WotC for not banning car.  Similarly, I too think it is cool to die out of nowhere at any given moment.  I’ve always wanted to know what that guy deer who cut me off at the local piggly wiggly saw seconds before he it was run over by an unidentified motorist.  I’ve also always wondered what it was like to live under the threat of constant imminent death despite being in typically safe places, like a crosswalk for instance.  I am now deeply familiar with both feelings as I’m consistently being run over by 4 superheroes out of many of the format’s top decks.  God bless universes beyond.

So hats off to you BnR team, now get back to doing lines with the design folks who designed this card.  I am excited that WotC has finally combined my two greatest hobbies, magic and vehicular manslaughter enthusiastic enforcement of local jaywalking ordinances.  You deliver unto us the same chaotic energy as a crackhead running unchecked through a small town.  I wouldn’t have it any other way.

This may be a long shot, but here it goes. Many years ago when SCG still did their Open Tours around the country, they had an SCG Open Legacy in the convention center in downtown Los Angeles. I was relatively new to MTG. I didnt do too great and went maybe 3-3 drop. On the last game that I lost, i left in a heartbeat and left my entire legacy deck sitting on the table, and either you or someone turned it in.

I'm looking to reward that person, maybe you remember what the deck is, maybe you don't but if you see this, or you've heard from a friend who turned in a deck that day (2014-2015) ish?

Please reach out to me or share it to the right friend. Thanks!

EDIT: 6:25PM PT
Found the guy, or he found me. Here's an update:
https://www.reddit.com/r/MTGLegacy/comments/hb4rt4/update_thank_you_uhill_giant_thanks_rmtglegacy_i/