Quote Originally Posted by umbowta View Post
...because clearly Brainstorm and Daze would suck for Splinter Twin?

I mean, tempo control decks would love it too but I think that's more harm than good.
Brainstorm would be significantly worse than Ponder and Preordain in Splinter Twin. The deck runs, at most, 4 shuffle effects (not including Ponder which is not all that fantastic after a Brainstorm) and is concerned primarily with how deep it can dig to go off on turn 4 every game. Minor sculpting of its hand is irrelevant.

This is the thing. People look at cards and go "man, this card is good in x, so it must be good in everything!" When there was discussion of where the format should start, I heard all kinds of people saying things like: 'OMG, Masques would mean Dark Ritual, that would have to immediately go on the banned list!' Except it wouldn't be all that good in combo. Without LED to activate IT consistently, Tendrils decks really wouldn't be much good. You're either packing 4xAd Nauseam (very painful in a format with no 0 mana accelerants) or some other half-ass tutor. But people don't *think* about how cards interact, they just make snap judgements. That's why the boys at Wizards did such a shitty job with the banned list in the first place.

I happen to agree with Darkshine that Masques should've been the cutoff for the format. Daze and Foil would go a long way towards curbing combo. Combo decks, by nature, contain less compact win-cons than control decks. A significant portion of the deck is going to be devoted to the win-con and the engine, whereas control does not need to allot as much space to winning. This means control can run more counters. If the counters in the format weren't all piss-poor, that might actually make control viable.

Disrupting Shoal is the closest thing to Force that the format has, but it's an absolute bear to construct around and requires you to hold cards you would otherwise want to cast in order to balance the CMCs in your hand. Foil, while more card disadvantage (and so thus also on the cusp of unplayability) is an unconditional counter. Good luck using Disrupting Shoal on the Blazing Shoal that just turned that Blighted Agent into BSC.