All B/R update speculation.

[H]

Yet another card that's strictly worse than brainstorm and ponder that gets banned for their sins. Wheee

Well, of course, but at this point, that is like cards being Restricted in Vintage because Mishra's Workshop taps for . Fair? Not really. But that is just what Vintage is. If we like it or not, Brainstorm/Ponder are Legacy (as Wizards chooses to have it be).

[ReAnimator]

Yeah i understand it, still don't like it, and think it's silly to have untouchable "pillars" in any format. I also think it sucks for game play reasons. I've played against brainstorm for decades, i think iteration is a much more interesting card to play with, against, design and build with compared to BS. Just how i feel.

[H]

Yeah i understand it, still don't like it, and think it's silly to have untouchable "pillars" in any format. I also think it sucks for game play reasons. I've played against brainstorm for decades, i think iteration is a much more interesting card to play with, against, design and build with compared to BS. Just how i feel.

I mean, in many ways I agree with you that Brainstorms dominance is a bit boring, but at the same time I disagree that were is really a "better" way to ground Legacy. No matter what, there has to be at least one meta-setting card. In Legacy's case, it's more like three (Force of Will, Brainstorm, Ponder). This is both a good thing, in the sense of not having the meta be an absolute free-for-all where you cannot metagame at all and sideboard are a total crapshoot. It is a harsh metagame "fun police" though, but ultimately that might just be somewhat better overall.

Ultimately though, erring toward keeping a "grounding" level, meta-setting ground of cards is probably something of a good thing, especially with the release pace now, or else the meta would likely be shifting all over the place. In the old days, the question was "can you beat a turn 1 Lackey?" to know if you really had a Legacy deck. Now, the question is more, can you compete with Force/Brainstorm/Ponder? Is that particularly fair? Not really. But, one has to start somewhere and that just where we start.

[FourDogsinaHorseSuit]

Sounds like some people owe me fucking money

Be gracious in victory.

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

I refuse

[FourDogsinaHorseSuit]

I refuse

We know.

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

I want to say that in theory, it's more correct to build your banlist around what you want the format to look like than just banning whatever's the most powerful per se, but that assumes a level of engagement that I don't think Wizards actually has to eternal formats.

Also they should actually be banning fetchlands

[FTW]

March 6th B&R

So they banned the 3cmc Initiative creature and fair blue's card advantage, but you can still Show and Tell 8 copies of 7/7 flying lifelink draw 7.

Seems like they want JPA > WPA.

[Zoid]

Wouldn't have expected that but it fits their recent pattern:
Protect established archetypes and only nerf them slightly while every new and different thing gets banhammered into oblivion as soon as it seems like it might be viable.
It would help if they stopped printing absurd shit that breaks half the formats every set but I guess that doesn't sell enough product.
Why even bother supporting other formats at this point instead of just releasing only commander products and secret lair nonsense?

[jmlima]

Wouldn't have expected that but it fits their recent pattern:
Protect established archetypes and only nerf them slightly while every new and different thing gets banhammered into oblivion as soon as it seems like it might be viable.
It would help if they stopped printing absurd shit that breaks half the formats every set but I guess that doesn't sell enough product.
Why even bother supporting other formats at this point instead of just releasing only commander products and secret lair nonsense?

Well, I would like less extreme and frequent shifts in meta but, for every one like me, there's ten others shouting in reddit and twitter about the need to 'freshen' up the metagame and so on. They are the target demographic, not me, and I have to accept that irrespective of if I like it or not.

Also, the fact is that with the rental schemes in MTGO, there's no longer a premium put in going for the next broken thing for a couple of weeks before changing to the next broken thing, in fact, this is actively encouraged and, I suspect, is one of the reasons for the owners of MTGO now and WOTC previously going along with what is a blatant violation of the platform's rules. This allows them to do the 'release broken thing-ban broken thing' cycles with total impunity.

[morgan_coke]

I still say if they want to fix Legacy they need to ban everything until Wild Nacatl is viable again. Delver was the true point of no return, and they've shown just zero appetite to have non-blue creatures be the best in the game ever since.

[FTW]

I still say if they want to fix Legacy they need to ban everything until Wild Nacatl is viable again. Delver was the true point of no return, and they've shown just zero appetite to have non-blue creatures be the best in the game ever since.

Zoo still top8s once a year or so. The most viable build is 8Lynx (I still think the deck should be called "Raining cats and dogs!"). Wild Nacatl got power-crept by 1-mana 4/5s (Akoum Hellhound+Steppe Lynx) and 1-mana 3/4s (Elvish Reclaimer). Luckily those creatures are nonblue and in Zoo colors.

Zoo's problem is it has 0 game against combo. Any deck that goes off T1-T3 is going to annihilate Zoo (sometimes you can race on the play T3). TES, Reanimator, Oops, Doomsday. Zoo's never had an adequate plan for them. You scoop game 1, hope to surprise them with SB hate in game 2, then watch them board & play correctly around your hate in game 3. Meanwhile blue tempo can also play the aggro game, but annihilates combo.

[Zoid]

Well, I would like less extreme and frequent shifts in meta but, for every one like me, there's ten others shouting in reddit and twitter about the need to 'freshen' up the metagame and so on. They are the target demographic, not me, and I have to accept that irrespective of if I like it or not.

Welcome to the old man club.
We meet after 6 in the local pub to complain about kids these days and yell at clouds.

I still maintain that this business model will hurt them in the long run as it will wear out players faster than they can generate new ones.
Burnouts are also much harder to get back later then the ones who stopped at some point due to real life.

[Wrath of Pie]

I still maintain that this business model will hurt them in the long run as it will wear out players faster than they can generate new ones.
Burnouts are also much harder to get back later then the ones who stopped at some point due to real life.

Shareholders oddly don't seem to care about the long run other than expecting profits to continually increase.

[Purple Blood]

Per usual, there's a lot of unrealistic takes in this thread. They aren't going to take drastic measures that will completely change the entire metagame. Naya_Creatures.dec will never be a thing. They aren't going to ban Brainstorm and Ponder and if they did go down that route eventually this format would be indistinguishable from Modern anyway. Etc. Etc.

It's the less risky move for them to ban new cards and keep things toward their historical norm. That's exactly what they did.

[KobeBryan]

I was going to respond to this earlier but I failed to dig up actual screenshots of the data I'm referencing. That is my failure to take adequate screenshots I guess. I just remember Ragavan-Delver topping out at higher on the same site

To be clear, it's still way too prevalent. Wizards decided to take what was arguably already the best deck/archetype in the format and give it four insanely powerful new cards, and then banned one. And I'm completely open to the argument that Ragavan was the weakest of those four, if the swingiest.

But the idea that banning Ragavan was helping Izzet Delver is still stupid. What's helping Izzet Delver is that they printed three insanely powerful cards to an already tier 1 strategy in the past 18 months or so.

Wizards got what they want. Sell packs and ban them. Started with that degenerate wrenn and six then oro

[Zoid]

Shareholders oddly don't seem to care about the long run other than expecting profits to continually increase.

You just identified what is wrong with the western economy in general since the late 90s or so.

As long as they make a profit and then sell afterwards they don't care.

Per usual, there's a lot of unrealistic takes in this thread. They aren't going to take drastic measures that will completely change the entire metagame. Naya_Creatures.dec will never be a thing. They aren't going to ban Brainstorm and Ponder and if they did go down that route eventually this format would be indistinguishable from Modern anyway. Etc. Etc.

It's the less risky move for them to ban new cards and keep things toward their historical norm. That's exactly what they did.

We're talking about Legacy which really doesn't matter to them like at all.
Legacy isn't creating them much revenue so they could do whatever they want.

[jmlima]

...
Legacy isn't creating them much revenue so they could do whatever they want.

I think they have when they flogged off the platform for legacy , modern etc and kept the one for standard & digital formats.

[jmlima]

...
It's the less risky move for them to ban new cards and keep things toward their historical norm. That's exactly what they did.

But are they? Is Legacy's historical norm a metagame change with every other release?

Mind you, I'm looking at things from the prism of MTGO where you do have easy access to the latest deck and can change decks in about 5mins. Fair enough, those 6 guys playing their weekly in a shop on a lost corner of some city are probably still very much playing their static metagame and hating that one guy that got to buy delver back in the day and just keeps adding new toys to his deck. But they are not representative as much as they may think they are. The big numbers are in MTGO.

[Purple Blood]

We're talking about Legacy which really doesn't matter to them like at all.
Legacy isn't creating them much revenue so they could do whatever they want.

I agree Legacy doesn't make them money which only undercuts some of the comments we've seen in this thread about this being some kind of cash grab.

While they might not, relatively speaking, make money on the format they presumably still have an interest in maintaining the format. They would also know the type of players who play this format likely want it to remain stable. Banning half of the pillars of the format is the opposite of stability.

But are they? Is Legacy's historical norm a metagame change with every other release?

Mind you, I'm looking at things from the prism of MTGO where you do have easy access to the latest deck and can change decks in about 5mins. Fair enough, those 6 guys playing their weekly in a shop on a lost corner of some city are probably still very much playing their static metagame and hating that one guy that got to buy delver back in the day and just keeps adding new toys to his deck. But they are not representative as much as they may think they are. The big numbers are in MTGO.

The idea is if you start banning many of the ubiquitously played card it will entirely change the metagame and that could take years to sort out with additional bans. Who can possibly predict what decks would be viable if they actually banned all the cards suggested in the last few pages of this thread? And who can possibly know what collateral damage that will cause, including additional bans that may be needed, if that happens?

I doubt WOTC wants to spend the time on sorting that giant mess out on a format they barely care about. So the easy answer is execute whatever bans are needed to maintain the status quo. Understanding that, the recent bans are easy to explain: (1) Delver is too strong right now; (2) the Initiative is a stupid mechanic for 1v1. OK - ban a card from those two decks and reevaluate from there.