This is a completed article I wrote that was too edgy for MTGSalvation (despite several rewrites). I am not about to dilute it again, and the material is quickly becoming dated. It seemed like a waste to just bin it. Anyway, the formatting is a bit off. I have cleaned it up some. Here it is.
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Why was Mystical Tutor really banned?
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The opening section of this article was originally an account of how tenuous the evidence was to support the ban of [card]Mystical Tutor[/card] from Legacy and why actual empirical evidence is superior than the opinion of any individual or group of individuals no matter how tempting it is to believe in the passion of an "authority". But Christopher Coppola did such a wonderful job of analyzing and dismembering the rationale given by Tom LaPille that it no longer needs to be said. Whether or not you agree with Christopher's conclusions, I think he leaves no doubt as to the fact that this decision was not come to by the standards that B&R decisions need to be if they are intended to prevent a single card from dominating. I will be examining why this happened, and what it means for Legacy.
Mystical Tutor is a powerful tool that enables considerably higher consistency in a deck that relies on instants and sorceries to do the heavy lifting. It makes Reanimator's singleton Show and Tell appear in your hand only when you actually need it. It allows ANT to have access to its sideboard cards with far greater frequency than it otherwise would. Why then would a fellow like me, who primarily builds and plays aggro-control decks, be concerned that it is gone?
Did you know that Ali from Cairo was on the first restricted list? This was not for Vintage. There were no formats back then, just an all-purpose restricted list and a banned list. Swords to Plowshares, Terror, and Lightning Bolt were all widely used at the time. But the fear that that this card put unfair limitations on deck designs was still enough to earn Ali a spot. They were acting on a guess of what decks were going to look like. They did not have any history to draw from, and they made a decision to be conservative. It was a reasonable guess. It just happened to be completely wrong. But that's what happens when you take an initial guess without any quantitative analysis to draw from. He was soon removed from the restricted list, and a bit of knowledge was gained in the process. Over the years there have been a few mistakes on printed cards being too powerful, but the DCI banned these cards as necessary and the game went on. They collected data from tournaments and discussed the matter armed with the facts. They even told us how this data was collected and on occasions even how the conversations went. Today, with the Future-Future League and a proper system for identifying the correct power level for new cards, bannings are far less frequent in Standard. But it does happen. And the DCI has always been spot-on with their research and testing.
But apparently they thought that Legacy needed rescuing from Mystical Tutor. After all, it is a powerful tutor found in some excellent decks. In a format as diverse as Legacy, there are quite a few tutor targets available to make those decks very versatile. To beat the combo decks that use it, you need specific hate in high enough concentration that you consistently disrupt their game plan from the beginning of the game or you lose. Even then, you are still going to lose if you can not pile more hate on top of it all while delivering damage. It is a tall order to ask of a deck. And with Mystical Tutor allowing combo decks to access their countermeasures so easily, it is no wonder why so few are properly equipped to beat combo. This is undoubtedly what the DCI was thinking when they decided to ban it. Or was it?
Forget for a moment that the enormous Legacy format has not had time to react to the warping power of Mystical Tutor. The card has never even proven itself to be broken - or even widely played - in the first place. (Why would other decks be reacting to it?) If it is an overpowered card, shouldn't the decks it appears in be, ya know, winning? The people who made this decision counted on their own prowess in gauging the effect of a card in the most diverse format there has ever been rather than based on evidence. There actually is plenty of data to draw upon here, but it almost all points towards those decks underperforming compared to the field. I am not going to go into statistics, but particularly in the Star City Games 5K series (where the overwhelming majority of data comes from), both Reanimator and ANT have been largely absent from the top 8's. Perhaps the powerful interactions in Legacy go beyond this one card. Maybe, just maybe tournament players are capable of beating these decks due to solid design and knowing how to play their deck.
Nahhh!!! Who am I kiddin'? It must be a "Gentleman's Agreement" between players not to play the best decks.
Unlikely. But to sell us on the idea that a perfectly reasonable card needs a ban, they needed a story. To make it plausible, they also have to say that they know more about what works in Legacy than the players who are out there actually playing it, tournament results be damned. After all, they played several games in the Tournament Practice room on Magic Online and were able to dominate. Really? In the TP room? I don't know how many of you have played Legacy in the TP room, but let me just tell you that the decks are almost all casual, and not tournament-ready in any form. So imagine what happened when some ex-pros took combo decks in there. What did they honestly expect would happen?
While Thopter Foundry decks are sure to soon be popping up frequently in Legacy because of this card, I am more interested in the sideboards of decks like UW Tempo, Death and Taxes, and some versions of Landstill that are equipped with Enlightened Tutor. It provides the same function as Mystical and is employed in the same fashion. In fact, featuring prominently amongst the cards these decks fetch most often are the anti-storm foils from their side boards. It's just cat and mouse with Enlightened Tutor fetching hate and Mystical Tutor fetching answers. Why then is this card not on the chopping block as well?
Before I go on, there is something you should all know. It has to do with research and the danger of small samples. The problem with small samples is in the extrapolation that leads to your conclusions. Which are the random, inconsequential occurrences and which are the important trends? It is a pillar of modern scientific research and a fundamental concept of logical reasoning that you can not make broad generalizations from a small number of examples. The DCI knows this very well. Deciding when to ban a card is something the DCI has become reliably good at. Then why did they fail this time? After years of properly conducting research for when to ban a card did the DCI suddenly forget all this? It seems pretty implausible that they would ban Mystical Tutor on evidence that is totally flawed. So what are they doing? This is why I say it is unlikely that the "Gentleman's Agreement" theory is accurate. To buy into it, you would have to believe that somehow the DCI guys really do know better than what the evidence points to. Then you would have to believe that competitive Legacy players somehow knew this as well, and had intentionally been playing inferior decks because they want to ensure more interesting game play - that is, winning is not their primary motivation. Taken as a whole, it's a pretty absurd idea. That leaves us with two simple, mutually exclusive possibilities:
a. The DCI actually believes what Tom LaPille told us.
b. The DCI does not believe what Tom LaPille told us.
As you have probably guessed I am going with the second answer. I don't care about the cover story so much. I am far more concerned about what this means for the game. In every other case since Ali from Cairo (and Icy Manipulator, I suppose) a card has been banned or restricted because it was either part of a dominating deck or had unfortunate side effects on tournaments. Well, this card was clearly not warping the format by being too powerful. So, because it had side effects then? When Chaos Orb was legal we would spread our cards all over the table, keep our lands at the edge of the table, use our library as a barricade, slide cards up against the opponent's, etc. That was an unfortunate side effect. More recently, Sensei's Divining Top and Shahrazad got the axe for taking games to time too often. Actually Shahrazad did not become a big issue simply because it was never very popular, but I can tell you from experience that you can easily keep the first game going until time with it. We can see that these were necessary bans. But Mystical Tutor was banned for a different reason. A new reason. This was formatscaping.
Formatscaping takes place in the design and development stages of new cards all the time - especially for something like Standard. But when they ban a card to retroactively sculpt the metagame with no particular dominating deck in the crosshairs, the DCI is entering new territory. It was an arbitrary removal of a card because the metagame was gently drifting toward combo and combo-esque decks. In fact, I suspect that this decision had more to do with a desire to ensure a relevant attack phase in as many games as possible for GP: Columbus than any actual belief that the format really needed this ban. With Legacy Grand Prix tournaments continuing to set the bar for attendance, Wizards surely wants as fun a tournament scene as possible. Several prominent Wizards employees, including Aaron Forsythe have been quoted as saying that they believe players prefer creature combat over slick combos - especially combo vs. combo games. And you can bet they have meetings on the subject of improving attendance to these events. Fun is good. Cutting up the format to suit the preferences of some players over others is not. I know that this is a private company. They can do what they want. They have a bottom line after all. But there is something to be said for the freedom to use any fair card that has ever been printed. That's what the Legacy format is all about. Exerting this kind of control over Legacy is a mistake that gets at the heart of the format.
Of course there is a group of people whose duty it is to keep making the game fresh and fun so that we will continue to enjoy it. They will do what they have to. Heck, I have been buying cards for 16 years now. And that is how they get me to keep paying them money - they keep the game new and interesting. I play this game to escape into its world. I mean that. I have bills, kids, problems, deadlines. You know what I mean. But when I am sitting across from that opponent, or preparing for a tournament, or even just shooting the breeze about the game - I am in Magic mode. I cherish that. I don't want anyone going in and tinkering with it all willy-nilly. Now I know that they can and will swoop in and remove a precious card whenever they please if they think it will improve attendance or sell more cards. That takes something away form this game that I have loved for so long. I prefer my fantasy world without a corporate bottom line. So Wizards, stop mucking about trying to fix what is not broken.
"Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."
"Politicians are like diapers. They should be changed often and for the same reason."
"Governing is too important to be left to people as silly as politicians."
"Politicians were mostly people who'd had too little morals and ethics to stay lawyers."
Not much to add except that I agree with you almost 100%.
For the TLDRers, Finn is basically concluding that the DCI was trying to stop the metagame shift towards combo because they believe players prefer creatures.
Originally Posted by Nihil Credo
as a control player i despise creature defined formats ,so lets get the tutor unbanned
As a high school graduate, I despise sentences without initial capitalization, so let's get Black Vise unbanned.
Sign me u... No, wait, don't.
Nice read, I think that's pretty accurate.
There was kind of a lot in there, but I think the cocnlusion is not that the DCI is preventing a metagame shift, but how they are doing it.
I am all for the tutor being gone. But I suppose they really did ban it in a strange way.
I love it when Tacosnape reads me Seuss. It's the sodomy I don't like.
Great article, Finn. I agree with you completely even though I'm not a combo player. I also feel the same way about being in Magic Mode and would prefer if Wizards just left our format alone. I can't imagine they'd unban Mystical Tutor in the next unbanning session but I can hope.
I'd agree with you Finn. I don't think it's that Mystical was necessarily too powerful for the format, but that when it was used, it was used to fuel non-interactive decks. This has been something Wizards/DCI has been trying to steer away from. I personally prefer to play Agro or Control when they are positioned well in the meta/format, so I guess this "formatscaping" was beneficial to my playstyle, but it does seem strange to introduce an arbitrary shift to suit what they perceive the majority of players to want.
Well written/analyzed though. After the banning, I was thinking their reasoning had to be along the same lines, but wouldn't have been able to present it as well as you did.
I'm confused, do you despise sentences that aren't initially capitalized, or that lack capitalized initials? Black Vise seems like it probably hit both of those at some point so I'm unsure of how to interpret what you wrote.
Last edited by median; 07-22-2010 at 04:04 AM. Reason: Grammar!
Good article.
I guess it would be interesting to have different groups regarding the B&R list like there are views of the constitution/political parties. I would align myself closest to a conservative/libertarian in that I am all for letting the metagame take its course except when there are obvious problems like Flash. I also believe in opening up the metagame by carefully unbanning cards. I think Shahrazad should have been left alone. If someone went to a tournament and liked to draw the game, it really isn't their fault. It's almost no different than control decks that take a million turns to win, and expect the opponent to scoop. As long as you play magic within the rules its really up to you how you do it.
As much as I like legacy circa 2006 (I really actualy do, the games were slower and less "old" cards were obsoleted, there was also a lower power entry barrier for a deck to be competitive) Tarmogoyf was printed and so was AdNauseum and decent fatties to reanimate. So wizards, you made this format where FTK and Werebear suck by printing better cards and now you want to go ban MT because you think people like to attack more? I call bullshit. Finn is right, this is format scaping, the answers given for the banning by the DCI were weakest sauce.
Anyway, the positive side is since there isn't that much hate for combo anymore jank decks have a better shot and it is fun to build new off the wall things. The issue is if a jank deck ever gets good/popular enough, the Tier 1 decks of the format will probably be able to add a few more SB cards and stuff it back down the hole it crawled out of.
I disagree with the article because I know that ANT was too powerful. Its almost impossible to win from ANT if your playing Zoo and half a sideboard isn't enough. Reanimator is very hard to win as well but at least the sideboard hate also come in handy vs other decks like Dredge. I think Wizards looked at Grand Prix Madrid and did some testing and realized this.
So even if Wizards did it solely to steer the metagame 'back' to aggro. Do you want a format that only runs combo? Because that's exactly what was happening.
I'm glad they made that decision but I would have wanted them to wait a bit longer so that tournaments would prove that ANT was too powerful.
Quit playing Legacy but could still play Goblins (Rgw, Rg, Rw, Rb)
ジェームス・ブラウン
I'm staring in the mirror looking at my biggest rival.
Please stop this bullshit.
- Nobody had any evidence of the format being dominated by combo.
- It happens that some decks can't beat others, even with half of a sideboard dedicated to it. If they have other positive matchups in the metagame they'll still be played, if they don't they'll fade away.
“My power is as vast as the plains, my strength is that of mountains. Each wave that crashes upon the shore thunders like blood in my veins.” —Memoirs
If you read the top 8 matches you know why Wizards banned Mystical Tutor.
http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazin...d10/welcome#21
If a very strong deck like zoo that beats almost all other match ups simply cannot win from combo (ANT / Reanimator) then there's something really wrong. Because of Mystical Tutor even control decks have a hard time winning. And in the combo matchups it has been Mystical Tutor that made the win possible.
I wouldn't have minded if they'd waited a bit longer but its my believe that it would've happen eventually anyway.
Quit playing Legacy but could still play Goblins (Rgw, Rg, Rw, Rb)
ジェームス・ブラウン
I'm staring in the mirror looking at my biggest rival.
Actually I believe combo was dominating the European front. It was only a matter of time until the States caught on.
In any case, Wizards made the right choice but did it for the wrong reasons.
Sorry Niels, but that makes no sense what-so-ever.
It's calles a bad matachup. Combo beats aggro, aggro beats control and control beats combo. That's the order of the universe as we know it.
Mystical was banned because it made combo decks retard proof, every down-syndrom having/inbred/dumbass could pick up ANT and win.
Combo wasn't supposed to function like that, it was supposed to function like TES and SI, wich require skill and a great deal of testing.
If there is such a thing as too much power, I have not discovered it.” —Volrath
Founding father of Team Moosebite, the team that really bites.
That universe did not exist anymore until the banning. Control didn't beat combo, control even had (has) a hard time winning from Zoo. And Combo beat both. To me the link I posted translates exactly the way the metagame (in Europe/Holland at least) was working. Until the banning anyway.
That's exactly why Zoo is THE dominating aggro deck. Because its the best deck vs almost all other matchups is the reason it was still played even though its dominated by ANT and Reanimator.
Quit playing Legacy but could still play Goblins (Rgw, Rg, Rw, Rb)
ジェームス・ブラウン
I'm staring in the mirror looking at my biggest rival.
I can't really understand why this top8 matches would justify the banning of Mystical, because there were 3 decks playing it? Because the final match was between them?
I hope you know that a single tournament, as large as this might be, can't be taken as a sample for dominance, and that's not even counting the fact that this tournament wasn't dominated by a single deck/archetype/whatever you want.
The fact that one of the best decks (Zoo) can't win from Mystical Tutor decks, not only is wrong, but would also be meaningless as others have stated, since if it won consistently against all the field, it certainly would have been a problem.
No, combo wasn't dominating the European front. Certainly not in Italy, and from what I could see in the reports neither in Spain or Germany. Maybe in Holland it was big, but Holland certainly isn't Europe and still has the problem of being a bit too small of a sample.
If combo did beat every other deck, why it wasn't showing bigger numbers in top8? And most of all why would Zoo (which by can't win no matter what) be one of the most played deck?
Maybe I wasn't clear: there has never been any evidence of dominance by decks using Mystical Tutor, and if you are going to say otherwise I kinldy ask you to provide said evidence.
The only "acceptable" reason for the ban was the argument about the fun involved in tapping creatures to attack...
“My power is as vast as the plains, my strength is that of mountains. Each wave that crashes upon the shore thunders like blood in my veins.” —Memoirs
Most played != Best.
Even some people were fucking up how to play Ant or Reanimator, which were considered the best decks in the format. The thing is, Zoo was also a good deck yet required far less skill to play and master. ANT and Reanimator were slightly better than Zoo, but required a large increase of skill to get to that point.
Here's one thing.
If you look back at the T8 at GP Madrid, you see a T8. 3 of those decks were combo ( reanimate is kind of a combo).
All 3 decks made it to T4 easily.
Second thing.
Combo did dominate the dutch meta-game, maybe since we have capable combo-players, or whatever reasons. Not always did combo end up a vast majority in the T8, but when you looked at the T16, you could find the rest easily.
Also I am quite certain that most of the little nubles that picked up combo took saito-ant. It was more explosives and piss easy to play, but it was the inferior version. Saito stated that himself after he lost to David Do Ahn in the semi-finals.
Most new combo-players have not a single CLUE of how to deal with tougher situations. i.e. a chalice, teeg or iona. And for some sideboarding is a thing they would never understand.
Now really, how strong is a deck that can win from any other type of deck?!
ANT could easily have done that, it doesn't lose to much if you KNOW how to play.
Counterbalance lock is annoying, but not unbeatable, same goes for chalcies, trinispheres, teegs, cannonist, mindbreak trap, chants, discard.
You name it.
Look at reanimate, in a short time results start popping out of nowhere, where are the results now?!
Since mystical has been banned, the results have dropped. Both decks are not that easily to play or to make T1-T2 kills with them. It actually needs skill to play it now!
you ask for evidence why it was breaking the format, I can't give you the sheer numbers. Since morons that pick up a deck can't be filtered by numbers.
and offcourse...
Vote Snepvangers for HoF!
No.
If a very strong deck that beats almost all other match ups has a Achilles' heel then we can call it a bad match up, health format and we can love our metagame that there isn't only one very strong deck that can beats everything. I know that many people like Jund on Standard, but ... hey, I was a zoo player but I just accepted that I can beat merfolks and merfolks can beats ANT and ANT can beats me...
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