Brainstorm
Force of Will
Lion's Eye Diamond
Counterbalance
Sensei's Divining Top
Tarmogoyf
Phyrexian Dreadnaught
Goblin Lackey
Standstill
Natural Order
Grouping Storm, Delver, and Miracles is always going to be wrong.
Top 16
At this point, this shit is getting comical:
14 Brainstorm decks
1 Elves
1 MUD (Anti-BS strategy with Chalice and Trinisphere)
Such diverse. Much Brainstorm. Wow.
4 of the Top 8 decks also run MD REBs/Pyros. This is not healthy.
WotC will probably just ban Treasure Cruise or Dig Through Time instead for 'warping the metagame'. But yes, the penetration of the Top 16 of the GP is extremely undiverse, with a core of BS, Force, Ponder, GProbe featuring in most decks to varying numbers (with the sole exception of BS, which is a 4-of in any deckt hat plays it.)
The Mental Misstep meta was also "diverse". Hell, the Top 8 of GP Flash was "diverse". Something like the Standard Stoneblade meta where it only contains 2 decks in the top 32 with 100% Jace isn't going to happen. That doesn't mean that it's the sign of a healthy format.
Brainstorm does significantly outperform anything else. Just look at the Day 2 data. ~71% Brainstorm decks (give or take a few %) and the Top 16 is another 87.5% Brainstorm decks.
Edit: Typo
Or nothing, because there isn't a problem.
My only issue with this is that to do any better at managing the B&R lists for Vintage and Legacy than the DCI is currently doing would require the people on the committee to be active players of the formats in question and so they'd not only have skin in the game, they wouldn't be able to act in the best interest of WotC/Hasbro/the secondary market without people seeing conspiracies more places than they do now. I wish they'd be a little less cautious when it comes to unbannings (looking at you, SotF, Earthcraft) , but what they're doing is probably better than anything we as a community could do.
Thing is that EDH is a casual format. Sure, Wizards would love to take over the management of its banned list to force their vision on Commander, but it's hard to actually enforce in a non-sanctioned format where people can give two shits about it and make their own house rules. And taking away the format management from the players wouldn't go too well with the playerbase, I guess.
There's no such thing as a "Brainstorm Deck."
Might as well complain about all the "Tropical Island Decks."
I strongly disagree, although it's easy to miss the issue; there's a core of 16 cards that seems to improve your chances of going 7-2 or better on Day 1 by a considerable percentage, even accounting for a bias due to the number of decks playing Brainstorm.
Again, I disagree, although once again, it's easy to miss the issue. Given the multiple times reasoning for bannings (meta-warping, 'un-fun'), Brainstorm is far more penetrative than any other card that has been banned; that includes Skullclamp, which had an incredible penetration at the GPs and PT that got it banned in all of the formats. Mental Misstep was one that warped the meta to the point that it was 'play MM or go home'). Brainstorm is the single largest remover of variance, which comes into play in tournaments with lots of rounds. Having an above 70% penetration conistently into Top 8s in large tournaments is arguably the very definition of meta-warping.
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