Brainstorm
Force of Will
Lion's Eye Diamond
Counterbalance
Sensei's Divining Top
Tarmogoyf
Phyrexian Dreadnaught
Goblin Lackey
Standstill
Natural Order
I just thought of something regarding this - if wotc did a drastic adjustment of the banlist, it’d shake up the meta, right? Then, the meta would settle, and legacy might start getting stale.
The playable cardpool in legacy moves glacially as it is, so maybe wotc just wants to leave some unbannables for when they feel like there isn’t going to be any meaningful changes to the cardpool for a long time (or some conspiracy along those lines).
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Legacy decks: mono U painter, strawberry shortcake, imperial painter, solidarity, burn
EDH decks: zedruu voltron, rakdos the defiler, persistent petitioners, blind seer
I think it's actually the opposite - they know full well those cards wouldn't do anything, but sometimes they slip up and print something like Dig Through Time and need to ban it, and being able to say, "well, you can't play with this new toy we just printed, BUT, here's Goblin Recruiter/Earthcraft back!" softens the blow a bit.
It doesn't matter if those cards are in the format now, so there's not really a cost to having them on the list, and it gives them some nice options when their hand is forced.
Brainstorm Realist
I close my eyes and sink within myself, relive the gift of precious memories, in need of a fix called innocence. - Chuck Shuldiner
I was willing to believe this until they had Deathrite Shaman and Gitaxian Probe shot and thrown out of a plane without giving us anything. Now I find it more likely that they think Earthcraft is too strong. They even printed two "not Earthcrafts" in recent memory (Cryptolith Rite and Song of Freyalise)
I hate to admit it, but I can't help but agree with this. I don't necessarily think that a group managing the format outside of wizards is a bad thing, but I can't help but think there's a good chance it may not go great.
Regardless, I've always been a fan of Wizard's 'hands-off' approach with eternal formats...but I sure wish they had the same approach when it comes to cards in supplemental sets.
I'm not sure if it's a matter of big egos as much as it is a matter of strong opinions, but maybe these things overlap. Anyway, I think it would be hard to have a leadership emerge spontaneously from a group of people scattered over the world whichever the group may be. But, if some well known players agreed to form a new banlist and started streaming events, that might work. On the other hand, I wouldn't mind seeing several small communities test different variations of the ban list, as they prefer, and learning from what others are doing. Edit: if some changes would turn out to be fruitful, these might spread to other communities, and this might both change the attitude of players in general and Wizards' perception of requested changes from the community, aswell as reducing the risk for them in making changes.
As I've argued before, these bans were about public perception, rather than actual brokenness. In this case, the boon to the playerbase was assumed to be the banning itself, so no compensation was needed - if the thing you wanted was Probe gone, for whatever personal vendetta you had against the card, then there's no other compensation required, because you got what you wanted.
If Wizards thinks that people will be happy with the ban, they won't try to offset it with an unban.
I agree with this, I remember Top's banning being quite the contentious occurrence. Most were in favor of the ban but a lot of people had serious money invested in Miracles (and didn't think they could play the deck without Top, ha, jokes on them...) They seemed to feel the need to 'throw us a bone', which I think was Worldgorger Dragon at the time.
Brainstorm Realist
I close my eyes and sink within myself, relive the gift of precious memories, in need of a fix called innocence. - Chuck Shuldiner
Just looking at the timeline of a few recent ones (I can't really speak for the time before I played regularly, because I wouldn't have a good sense of the community sentiment):
Modern, 2014: Ban DRS; Unban Bitterblossom and Wild Nacatl
Modern, 2015: Ban DTT, Treasure Cruise, and Birthing Pod; unban Golgari Grave Troll
Legacy, 2015: Ban Treasure Cruise; unban Worldgorger Dragon
Vintage, 2015: Restrict Treasure Cruise; Unrestrict Gifts Ungiven
Legacy, 2015: Ban DTT; unban Black Vise
Vintage, 2015: Restrict Chalice of the Void and DTT; unrestrict Thirst for knowledge
Modern, 2016: Ban Eye of Ugin, unban Ancestral Vision and Sword of the Meek (this is surprising to me because at the time it was completely obvious that Eye needed to go, the deck was bananas)
Vintage: Restrict Thorn of Amythyst and Monastery Mentor; unrestrict Yawgmoth's Bargain
Examples of popular Bans (i.e., WotC felt no compensation was necessary):
Modern, 2013: Ban Second Sunrise
Modern, 2016: Ban Splinter Twin and Summer Bloom
Pauper, 2016: Ban Peregrine Drake Edited, thanks Zombie
Modern, 2017: Ban Gitaxian Probe and Gorgari Grave Troll
Legacy, 2017: Ban Sensei's Divining Top
Legacy, 2018: Ban Deathrite Shaman and Gitaxian Probe
Modern, 2019: Ban Krark Clan Ironworks
It's not a 100% guaranteed tactic, but I think it does play meaningfully into their decision schema.
Plus, as others have pointed out, a lot of the banlist management has to do with playerbase perception, and unbanning a card just to reban it later looks more foolish than just leaving it on, and the formats are mostly fine even with some dubious inclusions/exclusions.
Last edited by taconaut; 01-28-2019 at 08:55 AM.
Wrong format.Modern, 2016: Ban Peregrine Drake
Originally Posted by Lemnear
So it looks like they unbanned cards to make up for the delve shitstains. This sets a soft precedent that they hold safe cards on the banlist to be released for the next fuckup.
Brainstorm Realist
I close my eyes and sink within myself, relive the gift of precious memories, in need of a fix called innocence. - Chuck Shuldiner
It's also notable that Probe was most used in Combo and DRS was most used in "Fair"; hitting both sides slowed both sides down. Combo has to go off in the dark or with protection more often, while Fair decks have a harder time with 3 colors, and definitely shakey at 4 (and don't accelerate much) While it's weird to be in a world without DRS; the fact that I don't get probed T1 by every DTB is kinda neat. Neat enough that; while it's taken me 6 months to figure out what I'd do without DRS and care enough to build a deck; I'm actually kind of excited again.
Don't ban Brainstorm.
But please unban every single thing on the ban list thats not blue or an artifact.
Ehh, nevermind. Just ban brainstorm already from all formats. Thanks to the existance of fetchlands, Brainstorm is for all intents and purposes is an Ancestral Recall.
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Am I the only one who actually wants them to fuck up on a semi-regular basis? That means they are actually printing new cards with a chance to disrupt the eternal formats.
IMO it is much more interesting for the format when they print high power-level cards that can *gasp* disrupt the meta.
I don't mind them 'disrupting the format' with powerful cards, the only problem I have is often the cards are either more shit for dnt or shit that can get absorbed by the blue shell. or something like tnn which should just be retroactively aborted
On that note, I've been glad theyve taken to printing some strong spells lately...Light Up the Stage seems hopeful, for example.
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