Because my post in the other thread seems to have been glazed over.

Although originally I had said that if anything should be banned alongside Tarmogoyf, it should be Lion's Eye Diamond, I've changed my mind.

Basically, Tendrils of Agony is a card that changed the way combo worked. In the old 1.5, which existed for about a year with Tendrils but which had no real fast mana aside from Dark Ritual and Elvish Spirit Guide, we had combo decks that were fast; they were primarily Food Chain Goblins and Dragon.

Food Chain Goblins functioned as an aggro deck that could occasionally explode into a turn three or four (once in a great while, turn two) kill with hasty piles of Goblins, using Goblin Recruiter and Ringleader to drop a lot of Warchiefs and Piledriver.

It was also stopped by such non-blue cards as Elephant Grass, Moment's Peace, Humility, Moat, and usually Engineered Plague.

Dragon was undisputably the best combo deck... and yet, every single color had cheap and ready answers to it. Cards like Abolish or Swords to Plowshares, Naturalize or Diabolic Edict, Chain of Vapor or Stifle could not only end the combo, but would leave the opponent with nothing in hand. Worst comes to worst you could run Tormod's Crypt, which stopped the combo but didn't remove all their lands from the game the way other answers did.

Now, if you didn't have those answers you were SOL, and Dragon could run cards like Duress and Unmask and Force and Avoid Fate and Orim's Chant of it's own, but generally speaking, you did not have to play blue or die without sideboard hate.

However... since then...

Combo has been redefined in 1.5. Combo, for the most part, no longer means traditional combo, a deck where two or more cards interact to kill you, most of which were permanents of some stripe.

Today's combo is a lot of mana and some tutoring effects into a very big burn spell.

What's more, although storm was designed to fight countermagic, in fact countermagic is the only strategy that's able to contain this threat effectively.

Here's my question:

Would the format be better without Tendrils of Agony decks? Solidarity would still exist but still be slow; CRET Belcher would still exist but be vulnerable to Engineered Explosives and Pernicious Deed and Pyroclasm.

And I know that Tendrils decks are not dominating the metagame, but I believe that, more than any factor besides possibly Tarmogoyf, they're indirectly responsible for the dominance of the color blue.

Moreover... speaking of LED... like Long.dec, as long as Tendrils is around, all fast mana and draw or tutoring cards require laser-like scrutiny. Sooner or later, if Wizards keeps printing such cards (which they should), something else will need to be banned. And then something else. But the problem, fundamentally, is Tendrils of Agony.

My personal thoughts are that Tendrils should go on the banned list and more vulnerable combos and enablers, such as Hermit Druid, Dragon, Entomb, Metalworker, should come off.

But right now I'm simply asking; Does Tendrils of Agony make the format more or less interesting.