A ban of Goblin Chainwhirler is pretty unlikely, honestly. Monored/Rakdos Aggro was already a pretty good deck in the format even before Goblin Chainwhirler entered into it. Its high level of play seems to more be a symptom than a cause.
Even if the question shifts to being a ban of something other than Goblin Chainwhirler, rotation is in just a few months and half of the deck rotates out. I don't think we'll be seeing changes as a result.
Of course, Pro Tour results are a pretty lousy way to judge a metagame anyway considering 37.5% of what decided the Top 8 was draft, which has nothing to do with the decks they were playing in the constructed portion. It makes it surprising people use data from it at all when you consider that.
They've banned Rampaging Ferocidon and Chainwhirler is arguably a even better, more suppressive card. Question is if WotC can afford another 4 months of shitty Standard?
I really wonder if things would have been different if protection had been still around instead of that garbage "hexproof from X".
If you only look at the Constructed portion, it still outperformed the field by a significant margin:
https://twitter.com/SaffronOlive/sta...85042246963200
I think the future of Magic may lay with a sequence of non rotating formats. When Modern becomes too expensive we see something new. Even though they can print a who's who of Modern in a tin and ship it. Like Extended but slower.
Standard is mainly hold up by official tournament support. The other formats are the stuff people actually want to play, hence e.g. Modern taking over Standard in terms of popularity and EDH being probably the most popular format overall due to all the kitchen table players.
I'm suprised they don't cash in on the Commander/Modern popularity, though. Brawl is a pretty stupid idea born from Arena, given how limited the cardpool is and the fact that it's rotating, aka casual poison. Why don't they make a Modern Commander version, though? It isn't rotating, has a deeper cardpool than Standard and doesn't require all those silly old (Reserve List) cards that cost a fortune. Plus, they could push out even more product that way (EDH precons AND Modern Commander precons).
I actually don't think that'd be a bad thing at all—depending on the execution. In its favor, such a system would provide people entering the game at any point the opportunity to pursue something older without a prohibitive barrier to entry. I worry less that Legacy is dying than that Modern is becoming inaccessible; draft Magic is fun, but there's only so much one can handle while still feeling involved in a game that keeps printing Grizzly Bears. If Standard is the only other way to play, why collect at all?
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"Chainwhirler" isn't a deck. It's just a card that gets played in some decks. In all honesty, it's not even that impressive of a card, it's just a solid 3-drop so it provides an intersection between R/BR Aggro and BR Midrange, hence it being played in both.
I'm not sure if we'd even have "4 months of misery." The various Standard players I've talked to before this Pro Tour thought the format was in a pretty good place. And it's not as if this deck was an unknown quantity, people were playing it and while it was great, it wasn't dominating anything close to this. So I suspect there was something about the Pro Tour metagame that made it behave better than at the previous events it was being played at.
Of course, its dominance at the Pro Tour may cause a lot of people to pick it up and be annoying on that matter, i.e. not that it's overpowered, but because it's overplayed.
EDIT: Never mind, I didn't see GP Birmingham which actually had a similar-looking Top 8. That said, I really don't think Chainwhirler is the problem, but people are probably just going to see it's a 4-of in the various decks and jump to blaming it rather than the actually more powerful cards. It's just the default 3-drop for lack of other competition, but isn't what really puts the decks over the top, at least not any more than anything else in it.
I think it's funny how many people want a new non-rotating format. So we've got a whole 'nother rotation. It's like standard but they applied some kind of extension to it. What could we call it? Something that's been extended would be called... wait! That's it! We'll call it Extended!
I enjoyed the Extended that predated Legacy. Once WOTC got rid of duals and a truckload of other format staples, the format was a lot worse. My personal view is that nonrotating formats are almost always better than rotating formats. What initially attracted me to Legacy when I came back to the game was that it reminded me of the old Extended.
The 7-year rotation Extended was my favorite format to date. Cards lasted a long time and always had a chance to be reprinted. Mana bases were good but not broken. The top decks were more powerful than Modern decks but not as good as Legacy.
When I was playing, Zoo, Thopter-Depths, Dredge, Hypergenesis, Affinity, All-In-Red, and Elfball were all top strategies.
I loved old Extended. Then Tempest-Onslaught block rotated and it was just only kinda alright. Then the next rotation kicked in three years later which was pretty much the death blow for the format. Then WotC had double down on it and made the list of sets even shorter before completely killing it.
Old timer in my late 30s that doesn't play anymore other than the occasional MTGO logon. I feel like legacy is going the way of vintage or it is already that way.
I know this was proposed a long time ago on some other forum but you can have non-rotating formats by having a point rating assigned to cards. So you get a point based spending limit to construct your deck with. For example the spending limit could be 50 points and basic lands cost 0 points with other cards getting a point value from 1-5 points. It gives the flexibility to still use every card ever printed and also the ability to adjust the power level of each card as they can always change its point value.
The idea might work or might be crap just throwing it out there.
I was a huge fan of 100 card singleton and Kaleidoscope on MTGO and I love new competitive formats. Unfortunately the only new format we got recently is brawl which is just 60-card standard commander.
One version of what you are describing is called Canadian Highlander (https://canadianhighlander.wordpress...tro-to-format/) though as far as I know it is only really popular on the west coast of North America.
The current state of magic: Underground Sea buyout.
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