Quote Originally Posted by Crimhead View Post
To be fair, I think this was mostly a failing on design and development to create the intended environment.
Not really. They've constantly defended things like the nerfing of answers as being what players want according to market research.

In fact, if you examine the numbers, development did a surprisingly good job balancing things out. Sure, UW Aggro was the top deck, but it wasn't nearly as dominant as the top deck was in the last few Standard environments (compare Collected Company, Abzan, and Monoblack Devotion, which were constantly at 30% or more of the metagame). And there was legitimate representation of various strategies, with quite viable aggro, control, and combo(!) decks. The only real issue from a metagame standpoint was how much play Smuggler's Copter was seeing, but it still fit into a variety of strategies and decks.

The problem is that the format they created, while actually reasonably balanced by Standard standards, was also one that players really disliked to the the point they were banning things despite the fact, again, the metagame from an objective standpoint was better than it had been for the last 1-3 years. They did a stellar job doing exactly what they claimed the market research said players wanted, and players rejected it en masse.

True, there were some more legitimate issues with development, like CopyCat or having to ban Aetherworks Marvel later on; the former they just completely missed, and the latter came about because their initial group of bannings was actually not all that thought through (the bannings of Reflector Mage, Smuggler's Copter, and Emrakul was practically tailor-made to ensure Aetherworks Marvel would become the best deck, and the only reason it didn't was because CopyCat distracted everyone for a while). But those came after the format that caused them to ban several cards.