Legacy, Summer 2010: Most Bannable Card?

[ktkenshinx]

Legacy, Summer 2010: Most Bannable Card in Legacy?
(not that they will touch it)
Part 2

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THE QUESTION
What is the MOST bannable card in Legacy?

THE DISCLAIMER
NOT that anything is going to be banned or needs immediate banning

Where is the "Nothing" option?
We are trying to determine what the most likely candidate for banning is. That does not mean the card is getting banned, or that it should ever be banned.

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While reading through the "Is Legacy Too Broken" thread (http://www.mtgthesource.com/forums/s...ead.php?18571-
Is-Legacy-too-broken), I stumbled across a request to recreate the August 25, 2009 poll about the most bannable card in Legacy. Started by Dr. Jones, this thread went on for a whopping 25 pages, and had approximately 200 voters. The original thread can be found here: http://www.mtgthesource.com/forums/s...te-speculation.

This initial poll, however, is quite outdated. Including such absurd options as Standstill, Phyrexian Dreadnought, and Natural Order, the data here might be considered a bit oudated. Moreover, the metagame has made drastic changes since this early poll. Mystical Tutor was legal. Tarmogoyf-based aggro decks were everywhere. CounterTop midrange decks were consistently taking tournaments. In light of this old 2009 metagame, it is perhaps unsurprising that SDT won out in "most bannable card" with 103 votes. Counterbalance, Goyf, and LED were the next closest contenders, each with 34, 46, and 35 votes respectively.

Things have changed. New fears are on the horizon. New articles have called for card bannings, and various players from the community have spoken out in favor or in opposition of these suggestions. How does that same poll look now, a full year later? Let us find out. This topic deserves a new thread all its own due to recent conversation about the issue. It is a fundamentally different question than the one posted in 2009 (Dr.Jones original thread), and thus it needs its own new home.

I have included these cards on the poll due to their presence in a variety of articles, their recurrence in banning/metagame health threads, and their general tournament prevalence. The candidates are:

Brainstorm: Heavily played card in both combo and many blue decks
Counterbalance: The enabling card of the CounterTop engine.
Force of Will: The glue that holds the format together? Or the wedge that drives it apart?
Lion's Eye Diamond: A flatly unfair piece of combo decks.
Sensei's Divining Top: The other enabler of CounterTop. Also causes time problems in rounds.
Show and Tell: At 3 mana and a blue card, is SnT too much of a danger?
Survival of the Fittest: Making a meteoric rise in recent tournaments. Safe or unsafe?
Tarmogoyf: Magic's most efficient beater. The old question stands: is he TOO efficient?
Tendrils of Agony: The core of all good, modern combo decks.
Wasteland: An overperforming, hyper-versatile bullet.

Some cards did not make the cut.

Imperial Recruiter: Prohibitively expensive. Does not always post consistently broken results, even though its home deck is quite solid.
Entomb: Reanimator has been weakened, but not crippled, by Mystical Tutor. GY hate is easily sideboarded, and the deck itself has not been performing too well recently.
Life from the Loam: Lands and Aggro Loam are solid decks, but not broken ones. This engine is never too unfair, and enables 2 interesting strategies for the format.
Dark Ritual: It's too easy to list all the combo cards on the above poll. I chose the biggest culprits, not the small (albeit critical) engine components.
Wild Nacatl: Ari Lax suggested it. It was a dumb suggestion, and it has not been backed up by recent tournament performances.
Ad Nauseam: A powerful engine, but really not the big problem with Storm. Tendrils is obviously a bigger problem, and LED is obviously more consistently broken.

So those are the cards in questions. Feel free to post your rankings, your justifications, and your discussions alongside your poll.

-ktkenshinx-