What if Gush gets restricted? How to replace it, or can we?

Protoaddict

If Gush ever got restricted it would be in a meta with more restricted blue draw cards than there ever has been. DDT, TC, and Dack did not exist the last time Gush was banned, so really what I think you would see would be a shift to more of a Blue Good Stuff deck than a "Gush" deck.

AmbivalentDuck

@Protoaddct I don't think that's clear. I think Delver Aggro strategies and something more Legacy-like might find an opening as well.

Aaron Patten

Does anyone remember when Dark Ritual rotated out of Standard or Extended? Black was terrible. Then it got some new printings and was still terrible on account of about a decade of printings that expected every black card to be powered out with Dark Ritual. In a meta where every card filter is restricted I'd expect the oops I win strategy to see more play than "fair" strategies which depend on consistency in the early turns of the game.

Edit: Blue would still be a valid colour.

vaughnbros

@Aaron-Patten Gush decks are fair?

Aaron Patten

@vaughnbros Not by default. Some were calling them so. You seem to have a different opinion.

AmbivalentDuck

Gush decks are more fair now than they were with 4x Merchant Scroll and 4x Brainstorm. Doomsday, Tropical Storm, and the like were pretty brutal. They competed with unrestricted Flash.

Aaron Patten

@AmbivalentDuck It seemed to me at the time like a lot of decks competed with unrestricted Flash. I was running main deck Wasteland and Stifle to great affect against non-Flash decks as well.

AmbivalentDuck

I suspect that Stifle lost of a lot of its power with the printing of Misstep. Keeping Gush decks off their second land was a great strategy, though.

I think people have advocated massive unrestrictions in the past. The Tropical Storm era was actually incredibly diverse and still changing pretty rapidly when the restriction spree happened.

I find it very unlikely that we'll see unrestrictions, though. I think we're far more likely to see Gush and Shops restricted.

vaughnbros

@AmbivalentDuck I think you'll find the deck that is the biggest culprit of keep "fair" decks out of the format are the current Gush variants. It's almost impossible to get a good MU against them with any creature based or hard control strategy.

Aaron Patten

@vaughnbros said:

ntrol strategy.

Would this still be the case if Mentor et al. were restricted?
Would Mentor and Pyro still be on top without Gush?

vaughnbros

@Aaron-Patten
I think its potentially a deck if Mentor is restricted.
I think Mentor is still played without Gush, but likely not Pyro.