@TheHunter said:
ATV is an event that actively encourages and benefits GTA, as if it needed a leg up.It’s really time to talk about nerfing Ghalta, I think. The latest card which people are breaking with GTA (Ghalta, Tortoise, Atraxa for any devs listening who might be unaware of the terminology) is Annie Joins Up, and while Ghalta exists in it’s present form cards like that are just going to keep coming.
I might make a separate thread about Ghalta today, actually…
And here, indeed, is that thread!
Sitting snuggly at the top of the top tier of Standard decks for some time now is a deck known colloquially as GTA, for it’s habit of playing Ghalta, Stampede Tyrant, Blossoming Tortoise, and Atraxa, Grand Unifier. (Sometimes I play a mono green version without Atraxa for the sake of journal quests… it’s still incredibly broken)
I don’t think that there’s any other deck in Standard that has anything like the explosive power of GTA in Greg’s hands. I know of at least one silly combo deck that can win extremely fast (tagging @Xibvert ^_^), and there are very dangerous mono PWs whose passive abilities make them very formidable (Liliana of the Veil and Teferi, Chronoclast are both feared by players!), but none of these is going to put pressure on you as early in the game as GTA can… Greg’s certainly not going to play the cards in that combo deck in the right order.
As early as turn 1, and certainly comfortably by turn 3, Greg can play his entire hand, and probably far more cards than that, putting multiple large threats on the board (perhaps even lethal in one attack!), AND fill up his loyalty (Both Wrenn and Realmbreaker and Sarkhan, Unbroken have 3rd Planeswalker abilities which break this deck even further).
Killing all creatures with, say, a Push/Pull or No Witnesses still leaves Greg way ahead, with his extra loyalty, cards in hand full of mana waiting to counter your plays, and any supports he may have played on the board (Villainous Wealth and Demolition Field are 2 particularly insidious ones!). Even a total board sweep effect like The Great Aurora or Urgent Necropsy (if you somehow managed to get 2 Simple tokens amidst all the chaos) will still only solve 1 out of 3 of those additional problems.
GTA decks are becoming more and more common in weekday events. I mean, if you’re just playing the daily events to collect the resources, who wouldn’t want to clear those events in the fastest time possible by using the most broken deck? In coalition events, it’s more difficult to play GTA, because it’s extreme power means it’s very easy to win before you can complete both objectives. This, however, does not stop some players playing the deck. It can be very frustrating for players who are building decks to achieve the objectives to face/off against a deck much more broken than theirs who are not.
Webcore seem to want to keep the power level of at least a few new cards very high with each new set, and that’s fun for us, the players, but it does mean that each new set is likely to produce a new toy for Ghalta to break. The latest one in OTJ is Annie Joins Up, and here’s our @mainloop demonstrating it’s power:
Greg, of course, is not the best at playing his combo cards in the right order to go infinite, but I’ve already seen for myself a GTA deck with Annie Joins Up in Training Grounds which played one card from it’s hand and the resulting turn left creatures large enough to kill me in a single turn on the battlefield after the in-game loop timer (LPS) timed out.
Ghalta’s ‘high’ 25 mana cost is much less of a drawback than you’d think. While it’s unlikely that Greg will cascade into a Ghalta on turn 1, it’s certainly possible, and by turn 3 it’s pretty likely that Greg will have the mana to cast it. And, of course, there are ways to cheat Ghalta into play for less mana, most notably Blossoming Tortoise and Thunderous Debut. In the hands of a player, it’s not hard to get 25 mana in 2 swaps; my man @Larz70 recently told me that with a specific PW with fairly average mana bonuses (Nicol Bolas, Dragon-God), you get an average of 15 mana on your turn for a swap. I thought this sounded crazy high but I tested it myself and stap me if it isn’t absolutely true.
So… I think, personally, that something in GTA needs a nerf, and I think it’s Ghalta.
Atraxa is of course extremely powerful, but we had Atraxa before we had Ghalta and she didn’t seem to be so much of a problem back then. She could go infinite with Sarkhan, Unbroken’s ultimate PW ability, but it was harder to do without Ghalta generating all that loyalty.
Blossoming Tortoise, too, is extremely powerful, and if anyone wanted to say it’s one of the best creatures in Standard, I’d probably agree. I’d hope we can get away with not nerfing the Tortoise tho. We have quite a lot of very powerful cards in Standard; like, say, Teferi Hero of Dominaria, or Rakdos Patron of Chaos, or Leyline of the Guildpact… you might describe these cards as ‘broken’ (‘broken’ is a word that gets a lot of use when describing MTG cards!), but, dammit, we like playing with powerful cards, and they don’t need fixing unless they warp the entire Standard format too much.
So I would hope that GTA can be busted down to a more reasonable power level by just nerfing one card, Ghalta.
I think it’s very telling that Oktagon avoided printing green gem conversion cards for years. In the early days of MTGPQ, we’d get one of them in every set or two, like Nissa’s Renewal, Season’s Past, Hour of Promise, or Rishkar’s Expertise, and it wasn’t long before everyone figured out that you could throw a bunch of them in a deck with a card draw engine like Baral, Chief of Compliance, Prism Array, or Rashmi, Eternities Crafter,, add in some kind of win condition like Ulvenwald Hydra, Sage of Ancient Lore (which had a significant nerf since it was created!), or Part the Waterveil, and bingo, you’d have a deck which would go infinite. Indeed, it was the creation of decks like these which necessitated in inclusion into the game of the Loop Prevention System (LPS). Such decks still sit firmly in the top tier of decks in the broken combo swamp that is the Legacy format (note to devs: don’t try and fix Legacy. That way madness lies). When Webcore took over as developers, it didn’t take them long to give us both Ghalta and Tempt with Discovery, and who knows if they’ll continue to print top tier conversion cards in the future. With a critical mass of such cards, Standard might just become Legacy 2.0
How would I nerf Ghalta? Well that’s a tricky one innit. You don’t want a nerf that makes it too weak, you don’t want a nerf that doesn’t reduce it’s power level enough to stop it being a problem, and you ideally don’t want to keep nerfing it multiple times until you get it right. Thank goodness this isn’t my job! 
Is creating cards like Desert a good answer to Ghalta’s power? I don’t think it is. Desert, in particular, is too broad an answer: it punishes fair decks that want to play with, say, the MKM gem conversion lands/supports, or small creatures that gain mana like Ziatora’s Envoy or Steamcore Scholar far more than it does the huge 15/15 body and loyalty generating power of Ghalta. All players like gaining mana to cast their cards, and cards that that do so and are resilient to Desert tend to be very high rarity. But narrow answers to deck like GTA are a bad idea too, since, as I’ve noted before, we don’t play any PvP games with a sideboard in MTGPQ they way they do in paper MTG.
My thoughts on the subject would be that reducing Ghalta below a 15/15 doesn’t do much, and, honestly, reducing the amount of gems she converts may not be the right nerf either. Perhaps after Ghalta converts gems, she could disable all other cards in hand, or end the turn outright? Does that seem like a decent nerf? Or perhaps, Webcore could take the unprecedented step of banning Ghalta in Standard… she doesn’t look out of place in Legacy beside the other gem conversion cards there, and, of course, there are still plenty of opportunities to play Ghalta in Legacy events every single day, most notably with the Trial of the Planes event.