Standstill vs Brainstorm in Gay/Red

[Jacob Orlove]

I'm not quite sure how you're playing brainstorm, but it's been working well for me. I rarely cast it turn one, since I usually have a lavamancer or a mox. Instead, I generally use it a few turns later, when I've played several threats out of my opening hand. If I have only 2 land in my opening hand, it's nice on turn 3, so I can play one of the lands it gives me (tempo), and if I have a bunch of land, it's good to wait until I can play it and pop a fetch in the same turn, to get rid of some of the useless land.

I never had much trouble getting brainstorm + fetch together, except when I'd topdeck brainstorm. In those situations, brainstorm was great, though, because I got to see three more cards that turn.

The problem with Standstill is that while it can generate tempo, it's much, much worse going second, and it can't really turn an even board position into a favorable one. Also, if it makes both players hold back on playing spells, then you aren't really getting a tempo advantage unless you have a manland out. And for that to happen reliably, you need conclave, which is awful. With just factories (which your deck runs only 3 of), Standstill isn't going to give you a tempo advantage too often.

Edit: to clarify what I mean on tempo. A good working definition here is mana used. If Standstill makes both players not use ("waste") their mana, then both lose tempo. If it makes them wait while you spend the mana on manlands, you end up ahead. Even so, this isn't a huge gain, since they can play lands and break standstill EOT in a turn or two--at which point the fact that you haven't been playing spells comes back to bite you.

And on the issue of Standstill getting card advantage--it gives you stuff like Cloud of Faeries. I'd estimate that you only get about two "full" cards worth out of Standstill, and it's likely that one will be a dual/fetch. Sometimes you'll get a nice set of 3 cards, but the card quality in Fish isn't enough to make Standstill a consistent ancestral.

[PucktheCat]

In what sense do people mean that Standstill generates tempo?

Please let me know if I am misusing the concepts here.  I would say that the only time Standstill generates tempo is when your opponent intentionally delays playing a spell to avoid breaking it.  In that situation your opponent must think he is getting something more valuable than the tempo he loses delaying the spell.  Most often what he hopes to gain is more land in play and a period where you aren't casting spells yourself.  That is tempo.  So if an opponent delays casting a spell because of Standstill (losing tempo) in order to gain more tempo (by laying a land or delaying your deck's development) can you really say that Standstill generates tempo?

There are some situations where the above reasoning doesn't apply, like when you are playing against a bad player who doesn't know when to break Standstill (and therefore gives up tempo without ensuring that he is gaining more than he lost) or when you play some important land that changes the calculation of tempo gain and loss (manlands, basically), but most of the time if a player is delaying breaking a Standstill correctly it is costing you tempo.  If a player is delaying breaking Standstill incorrectly it may be getting you tempo, but in that case I would say bad player generate tempo, not Standstill.

Jacob, I thought this was most of your argument against Standstill.

At any rate, the reason to include Standstill is that it gains CARD ADVANTAGE, any tempo it generates is the result of bad play on your opponent's part.

Also, I started to write a long bit comparing Standstill to Necropotence* but I will just summarize my thoughts:

Necro's main disadvantage (before combo decks were built with it) was that if you didn't control the board early you could use too much life to make it work well.  To combat this the deck was built with very cheap underpowered spells (for the time, pump-knights were cheap and underpowered - compare with Ernham Djinn, for example) and things like Dark Ritual to sieze an early advantage.  Even Hymn to Tourach is a card that is powerful early and much weaker late.  As the deck was played more people realized that these cheap spells weren't only better with Necro early (ensuring that Necro was active), but were actually better later too, because there is no point in drawing lots of cards if you can't cast a lot too.  Firestorm Necro, and the cutting of Nevinyrral's Disk both represent the move that was made to cheap, mana efficient cards and away from large, card efficient cards.

Standstill has a similar structural impact on deck design, forcing a deck to gain control of the board early and rewarding them with cards for their trouble.  Cheap creatures like Cloud of Faeries fill the role of pump-knights.  The are undercosted, underpowered but their synergy with the draw engine can help to compensate for that by making sure that there are a lot of them.

Whether Standstill gives ENOUGH card advantage to justify the demands it places on the deck is the question deckbuilders need to ask themselves.

Leo

*Before you get your underwear up your ass-crack, I am not comparing them on power level but on their demands on deck construction.  Also, I am talking about pre-Trix Necro not anything more modern.

[dicemanx]

Thus this card can sit as dead weight in the player's hand precisely against the decks they need to find answers against the most often. Against every match up from madness and goblins to scrubby beats decks and mirror matches, standstill can be a liability.

You forget that Fish *doesn't* run answers to aggro. It's designed to overwhelm control and combo with control elements (Null Rod, Strip/Waste, Stifle with FoW/Misd back-up). Standstill is the best choice in Fish, far better than Brainstorm could ever hope to be, because quantity, not quality of cards is what matters most - Fish is a highly degenerate deck and therefore cards that improve quality do not belong. The idea that BS allows you to throw back two of your "worst" cards and shuffle them away is also misleading because there usually aren't any two "worst cards" - they are almost all equally bad .

FCG and other aggro like Madness/O.Stompy or scrubby stuff like White Weenie or Sui will always be a problem for Fish, regardless whether you run Brainstorm or Standstill. However, it makes a huge difference if you run Standstill over BS against everything else.

[Jacob Orlove]

The idea that BS allows you to throw back two of your "worst" cards and shuffle them away is also misleading because there usually aren't any two "worst cards" - they are almost all equally bad :).

That's why it takes more radical changes to the deck to make brainstorm worthwhile--changes like cutting Cloud of Faeries and running better creatures.

[dicemanx]

The idea that BS allows you to throw back two of your "worst" cards and shuffle them away is also misleading because there usually aren't any two "worst cards" - they are almost all equally bad .

That's why it takes more radical changes to the deck to make brainstorm worthwhile--changes like cutting Cloud of Faeries and running better creatures.

Well, once you start improving the quality of the creatures and spells, then you start moving away from gay/r and towards stuff like WTF/Ug madness where BS becomes better than Standstill. That I could understand, but in gay/r specifically, which runs some god-awful creatures and contentious spells like Daze or Stifle, SS is superior.

[PucktheCat]

I'd stay away from the word "tempo". The relevant words here are quality (BS) vs quantity (Standstill).

I agree, although I think think it would be remiss to leave out tempo entirely.  As far as tempo is concerned Brainstorm costs one instead of two and there is no chance an opponent will use it to set up (I think the chance is pretty low with Standstill, but it isn't 0).  Standstill costs more and may give your opponent a bit of time under rare circumstances, but it gives you perhaps the most important means of generating tempo - more cards.  Cards translate into tempo in this deck at a frantic pace, so generally the +2 cards Standstill provides put you more ahead than any one card the deck could play.

Leo

[dicemanx]

I agree, although I think think it would be remiss to leave out tempo entirely. As far as tempo is concerned Brainstorm costs one instead of two

Well, if we do want to speak of tempo, gay/r doesn't want to be tying up mana early with a search card when what it wants to do is establish board position as quickly as possible. Once it drops its stuff into play, then it wants to end things off with a Standstill, not dig for yet another crappy 1/1.

So, BS stifles early game tempo. Those 4 slots in the deck are for "reloading" the hand in later turns, not digging for threats.


EDIT: Hmm, 10 votes for Brainstorm. I'd like to know who these people are and if they have ever played gay/r before

[Phantom Tape Worm]

Incidentally, if you're going to add mask of memory, you may as well cut null rod and then find a way to include skull clamp.


And just how many more tournaments do I have to win before this standstill debate is officially settled?  

[PucktheCat]

dicemanx: I like the new sig   .

Anyway, I agree with you entirely.  Even Jacob says that Brainstorm is a midgame card for WTF and Gay decks in general.  If you cast it first turn it had better be because you have nothing else to do.

The fact that it is a midgame card brings up another point that is worth considering with Brainstorm - the card is best when you have cards in your hand because that is when you have a wide range of cards available to shuffle back into your library.  When you Brainstorm/shuffle as the last card in your hand you really haven't done much at all (its like a bad, pre-errata, impulse), it is only when you have a full hand that you can use the card to its fullest potential, letting you refine your mana to spells ratio and put back the late game cards you get in your opening 7.

Leo

Edit: PTW, you don't understand.  The conventional wisdom is that if you ever played a good deck you would win without taking any damage.  It is playskill that explains your success, not deck building.  I mean you play Standstill, for God's sake.

Edit again:
This was edited into Jacob's first post:

And on the issue of Standstill getting card advantage--it gives you stuff like Cloud of Faeries. I'd estimate that you only get about two "full" cards worth out of Standstill, and it's likely that one will be a dual/fetch. Sometimes you'll get a nice set of 3 cards, but the card quality in Fish isn't enough to make Standstill a consistent ancestral.

If a deck is drawing cards it is really bad to be playing with whole cards when it could be playing with half cards.  I am serious.  The average "whole card" in T1 costs around 2 mana to play.  Most of the time that means that you can only play 1-2 whole cards a turn.  Usually, you are better off to give up some card quality in order to gain speed.  That is only true if you have the card draw to be able to do so, though.

Lets look at some cards that have less than par card effect in this format but see play because they are mana efficient:

Force of Will (usually 1/2 a card, but costs 0)
Dark Ritual (reduce target casting cost by 2)
Off-color Moxen (these are much weaker than a basic land, but they are faster and let a deck use the cards it draws)
Psychatog pumps (horrible use of a card, but very mana efficient)
Firestorm

Gay/r just does this a slightly different way than Tog.  Instead of dropping Moxen and pumping Tog to turn its cards into something that effects the game faster it just runs cheaper cards.

[Hi-Val]

Standstill is a much better card in Fish than Brainstorm. It gives you 2 more cards than BS does and thats better than quality in Fish. Fish doesn't run the best cards, but the ones that work best with each other.

You've hit it on the head. Fish wants card quantity because it obviously doesn't have card quality. You run brainstorm when you need to find the right answer for a situation or get a part of your strategy online. In Fish, the redundancy is overwhelming to where you're probably going to draw what you need anyway, as everything does practically the same thing. Thus, instead of mucking up two draws, it's better to drop a standstill and draw tangible cards from it.

[Toad]

There is something I don't understand with Standstill. All the pros (ie persons that spend hours a day in playtesting) say Standstill is an horrible card. I've talked about that with a couple of french pros lately, and the feedback they gave me about Standstill is "We tested Standstill in Madness because Madness easily achieve board superiority. After a few test runs, we cut them because they sucked. They are like Careful Study, but more expensive".

So my question is: "How an horrible card in Standard (back when Odyssey block was Type 2 legal obviously) and in Extended can be strong in Type One?"

Bad players?

[dicemanx]

If we started over in T1, I bet the pros would have the same kind of pre-conceived notions about many cards in T1, not just Standstill. Standstill is easy to pick on from a theoretical point of view, but unfortunately those theories doesn't always hold up in practice.

Standstill might be poor in madness, but that doesn't mean that by extension it's poor in gay/r or even Landstill. And T1 is VASTLY different than T2 or Extended - Standstill would never work in those environments because of so many aggro decks that appear in those formats.

Bad players in T1? No. Arrogance from pros that probably have little understanding of T1, and how radically different it is from all other formats? Yes.

its tier 1 thats all i have to say so stfu test and then comeback with results

[PucktheCat]

Three reasons T1 is a better environment for Standstill than any other:

1.  People rely on spells for their mana development.  Think of Moxen, Brainstorm, etc.

2.  Mishra's Factory.

3.  People don't play removal or creatures, so 1/1s can actually stay on the board.

I think #1 is the most underrated factor on that list.  Think about how Sphere of Resistance, a card that was unplayable when it was in T2, is absolutely devastating to a tuned T1 deck.  The reason this is so is that T1 decks simply cast more spells than other decks do, and are constructed with that in mind.  A T2 deck that is not playing spells might very well be doing the same thing it would be doing anyway, waiting until it can cast its next important spell.  A T1 deck is almost never in the same position, if you can't cast a spell in T1 the game is usually over.

Leo

[Phantom Tape Worm]

And just how many more tournaments do I have to win before this standstill debate is officially settled?

No, seriously, I want an answer.  


I just don't see how the whole "standstill is soooo bad" argument is even a defensible position in light of hard tournament data.  I think some of us are so trapped in our theoretical approach to this game that we refuse to acknowledge what is actually happening sometimes.  These ridiculous explanations like "all type 1 players are SOO bad" or "this card is so easy to play around if you just think for a moment" for the decks' (landstill and fish) success are, how do you say, le shit.

I'll be the first to admit that there is a large luck component that goes into this game.  However, victory after victory with gay/r would be impossible to acheive if the deck was not well constructed or if it were horribly misbuilt.  No realistic amount of luck or playskill is going to make a deck that is designed poorly win multiple large events, in different metagames, against GOOD players.  And make no mistake about it, gay/r is DESIGNED AROUND standstill.  It is the focal point of the deck.

At this point, you really do have to be in some serious denial to not acknowledge standstill as a strong card in the decks that run it.

[Jacob Orlove]

And just how many more tournaments do I have to win before this standstill debate is officially settled?

No, seriously, I want an answer.  :)

At this point, you really do have to be in some serious denial to not acknowledge standstill as a strong card in the decks that run it.

Standstill is definitely the focal point of the deck, but what I'm trying to show is that the deck might be able to get much stronger if we shift that focus. Right now, it's at pretty much the "optimal" level for the Standstill-based version, but we don't know that the brainstorm version is worse. It's kinda like how Azhrei didn't bother to add red to OSE because he kept winning with the blue/black version, but then found that the deck got even better with the red cards added. It takes a complete reevaluation of pretty much everything in the deck, but it may be that brainstorm can change the deck to one who's optimal version is even better than Gay/r.

Obviously, you're winning with Gay/r, but it might be that you'd win more easily and lose fewer games (not matches) with a brainstorm version. I'm not saying that this is necessarily the case, but that it's certainly at least worth investigating.

[Phantom Tape Worm]

Standstill is definitely the focal point of the deck, but what I'm trying to show is that the deck might be able to get much stronger if we shift that focus. Right now, it's at pretty much the "optimal" level for the Standstill-based version, but we don't know that the brainstorm version is worse. It's kinda like how Azhrei didn't bother to add red to OSE because he kept winning with the blue/black version, but then found that the deck got even better with the red cards added. It takes a complete reevaluation of pretty much everything in the deck, but it may be that brainstorm can change the deck to one who's optimal version is even better than Gay/r.

Obviously, you're winning with Gay/r, but it might be that you'd win more easily and lose fewer games (not matches) with a brainstorm version. I'm not saying that this is necessarily the case, but that it's certainly at least worth investigating.

I guess, I just don't think there's any theoretical support for your case, jacob.  

Ancestral recall is an abusive card.  In the decks that are designed to run standstill, standstill becomes ancestral recall 90+ percent of the time.  In these decks, standstill IS an abusive card.  The gay decks are literally built around standstill; without it, there is no reason for the decks to run such suboptimal cards.  You've said it yourself before, cloud of faeries, conclave, etc. these cards are all pretty S'y.  BUT because they have synergy with standstill (the focal point of the deck), they have to be included.  

Your assertion that brainstorm can somehow be better (ie. more abusive) is questionable in my view and here's why:  
If I am able to resolve two ancestral recalls in a game, it is highly likely that I will win that game (regardless of what deck i'm playing).  On the other hand, if I am able to resolve two brainstorms in a game, it is not necessarily likely that I will win that game.

There is simply nothing abusive about brainstorm.  

If I have to chose between focal points for a deck, and my choice is between brainstorm and standstill, I think the choice is obvious.

The instant you take out the standstills you just end up playing a watered down version of countersliver.

[Jacob Orlove]

If I have to chose between focal points for a deck, and my choice is between brainstorm and standstill, I think the choice is obvious.

Well, sure. That's because Brainstorm isn't any good as the focal point of a deck; I'm not suggesting that it should be the focus. I'm saying that by eliminating Standstill as the focal point (and thus cutting the bad cards that Standstill makes you run), and therefore having no specific focus at all, you might get a deck that's better overall. Brainstorm won't be the focus of the deck; it'll just be a strong support card.

The Brainstorm version is fine even if it never draws Brainstorm, whereas the Standstill version won't do as well if it never draws a Standstill. By eliminating that focus on Standstill, the deck no longer has broken Standstill hands, but it also has fewer required mulligan hands, and it can usually handle having to mulligan (or even double-mulligan) into a Standstill-free hand.

Then again, the Standstill version may end up the stronger option. I'm just interested in exploring the Brainstorm alternative, which seems to be at least worth looking into.

Edit: now that this is open again, I should add something: Brainstorm sees play in EVERY combo and control deck in the format. Everyone dismisses it as merely good enough for those slots, but honestly, an automatic 4-of in T1 is Force of Will level good. Maybe we should run both.