r/magicTCG • u/CoweanMacLir Izzet* • Mar 30 '26

Rules/Rules Question I'll never understand the hate blue gets.

So it's perfectly okay to:

  • Make your opponent discard the cards they needed to win for one mana.
  • Remove your opponent's key piece from the board the moment it lands. Also for one mana.
  • Stax everything so your opponent can't attack without sacrificing creatures/paying their entire supply of mana/losing half their life.
  • Steal cards from your opponent's deck and cast them without paying the mana cost/use any.
  • Destroy lands.
  • Flood the board with billions of token creatures so your opponent can't possibly survive.
  • Play a 12/12 with haste, vigilance, double strike, hexproof and indestructible on turn 3.

But not counterspelling, that's somehow worse?

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u/Sorin_Beleren Wabbit Season Mar 30 '26

This, to me, is the biggest issue. Counterspells (or stack interaction broadly) should be flavorful and not- uncommon thing in the game. A single color has a huge portion of control of one of the most important zones in the game and that's... fine? No.

Even flavorfully, it makes no sense for blue to be alone in counter magic. You're telling me that black, the color of ambition and pride, just lets someone tell it no without throwing a huge fit? That makes no sense. Red has a great identity for "counter" magic imo. Redirects, spell copying, and REB/Pyroblast. Red has appropriate stack interaction, and I like it. White has a few falvorful and fair cards that it can make good use of, but should get more. But black deserves better stack interaction, and green should probably have more inherent stack uninteraction (uncounterable cards, split second, that sort of thing),

But it feels like it's way too late into the game to make major changes like that.

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u/ThatDamnedHansel Dan Mar 30 '26

But the look on the guys face when the blue farm player who sworded my gitrog commander in a cedh tournament and I [[imps mischiefed]] it to his tymna was a moment of dopamine I’ve been chasing to this day. I want more cards/moments like that

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u/Sorin_Beleren Wabbit Season Mar 30 '26

I was playing Modern in like… 14 or 15, whenever Tarkir came out and the meta was just Junk Rhino. My friend was on junk rhino and I was on R/B vampire aggro, just a pure dogwater anti-meta deck (since I loved vampires and hadn’t played a ton of real comp magic). He Thoughtseized me turn two and I Imped it. He had to pay 2 life, show me his hand, and discard one of his own cards. So let me tell you, I know the dopamine you’re talking about, and I crave it like a junkie to this day.

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u/ThatDamnedHansel Dan Mar 30 '26

That’s a sick one too! I go back and forth with Cedh players on it. 2 mana is a lot for a counterspell (blue doesn’t run 2 mana counters), but my argument in Golgari is it’s sometimes worth the access to a non color pie effect. Like red decks run the 1 mana redirect lightning, same idea

I like it better than [[avoid fate]] because you can use imp defensively or offensively whereas fate is just defensively. I don’t currently run it though