That may be, but my response was specifically geared towards the comment of Urza's Block and Rath block, not recent sets.
Yes, but that was part of something I was saying that wasn't limited to that, so I guess I miss your point?
So... what I'm hearing is that it was either always that way since Legacy format was created, or not? 'Cause no one knows?
I know what I said was kind of vague, but when I said "debatable" I really did mean just that and not "no one knows." There's an important distinction between the two. One thing I can definitely say is that it was technically possible for a deck to kill you before you got a fourth turn in Legacy from the beginning. Belcher's been there from day one and can easily get a first-turn kill (not reliably, of course), if you want an extreme example. But it wasn't
that common to be dead before your fourth turn in the early days of Legacy. And it's not necessarily the rule now, although the environment is faster. So I guess one way to put it is that asking when it happened that Legacy became so fast that being dead before getting a fourth turn was a major concern is a valid question, but it doesn't have a single, exact answer. Not because no one knows, but because you'd have to precisely define how often it would have to be, what percentage of decks kill that quickly, control for local metagames, etc.
Of the creature decks that aren't goblins and that will kill you fast? Hm. Affinity and Zoo. Zoo can kill you on turn 4 for sure, so you have to be lucky to make it to turn 4 and be lucky to win the dice roll. There are some midrange decks like Rock and Horizons that won't get you that quick, but those decks pack enough disruption to keep you from double white long enough. Zoo, Rock and Horizons are packed with (new) creatures that push the power level.
I think in a discussion of survivability against aggro, Zoo is a pretty good benchmark. If the answer to "Can it put up some form of defense and have a decent shot at winning before Zoo runs it over" is "No" then a deck is, at best, severely limited as far as what it can do in Legacy. As for beatdown that can kill quickly, along with Goblins, Affinity, and Zoo, I'd definitely append Dredge. Aggro Loam, Berserk Stompy, and Bant are also pretty fast. And then there are all the aggro-control or aggro-combo decks that will, if it's the best move in the situation (like if your deck is slow and vulnerable to a quick kill), throw a giant creature into play with Natural Order or Show and Tell or Reanimate or whatever. But Zoo is notable because it's so fast and, unlike most of the other fast decks, isn't even relying on chaining synergies between cards to achieve big effects that, while lightning fast, have a particular weakness (like how Dredge needs its graveyard to be left alone if it wants to kill that quickly). It's just cheap, powerful creatures that will bust your skull in before you have a chance to do much.
You could use deckcheck for that, but deckcheck is dead.
There is deckcheck.org (which does have a Legacy archive). It's slower, less accurate, and not as nice to use (I suspect it's not as comprehensive either, but it seems to work well enough) as the old deckcheck.net (for any member reading this who don't know, deckcheck.net was
the website to use for perusing tournament results and decklists, but the maintainer shut it down last year out of protest for some business practice that WotC was doing that he couldn't abide by).
Looking at Wrath of God in Legacy since 2005, it seems to have been used mostly in Landstill (which makes sense) pretty much the whole time.
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