Quote Originally Posted by Aggro_zombies View Post
The interaction you've laid out here is a pretty textbook example of a format warping around a particular card, actually. You are playing a deck that never needs to interact with it (combo), a deck that runs it (some sort of U/x/y tempo or midrange deck), or a deck that preys on the decks in the second category.

It's also worth noting that many of the removal spells you've listed are not things that are playable across a huge category of decks. The sweepers basically only go in some sort of Miracles deck or Tier 2/Tier 2.5 Homebrew Control decks. The black spells will see play in Jund or BUG (a deck that can run its own Nemeses) and then a bunch of Tier 2.5 or below decks like Pox. Pyroblast and REB are nice and all, but red has basically no answers to a resolved TNN, so relying on them to protect yourself is super dicey; they end up being better in TNN decks as sideboard options against other TNN decks than they are in decks that don't want to run TNN.

And that's the problem. You're not so much building to a metagame, you're building to a single card. It chases non-TNN aggro decks out of the metagame because they're not fast enough to race it, don't have good solutions to it (are you seriously going to sweep your own board away for one TNN?), and can't exactly ignore it. It forces midrange decks to run blue for their own TNNs plus counters for answers, or makes them run a bunch of awkward do-nothing sideboard options like Golgari Charm in the hopes of beating it. It strengthens combo decks, which were clearly already paragons of interactivity for non-blue decks.

If TNN isn't a clear signal that you should be playing Brainstorm or you're doing it wrong, I don't know what is.
I wouldn't call this warping, at least not in the Trinisphere-in-Vintage sense. Yes, TNN has created a disequilibrium in the metagame, but any card that makes it into Legacy or Vintage and isn't a marginally better replacement for an existing card is going to do that. That's how eternal metagames change, rather than by rotation. Warping around card X is "every deck must either play X , answer X as soon as it resolves, or lose to X (functionally as soon as it resolves)." You could say "you'll lose to any threat that isn't answered" but when RUG wins and you had no answer for Goyf, they likely would have been able to kill you with Delver (or TNN) anyway, so it was the deck rather than Goyf beating you. When decks went Shop --> Trinisphere, you lost if you didn't have your own Shops or a Force, and you lost to Trinisphere rather than to the rest of their deck (meaning you had to mull to Force if you weren't running Shops).

Ironically, your point about the removal that hits TNN being mostly run in "Tier 2 or lower" decks is one reason I think the effect TNN has on the metagame is interesting - if he makes the decks he's in good enough to make a deck strong enough to compete just because it has a good TNN.dec matchup, I say that's a feature, not a bug. The only way the meta gets worse is if RUG or UW TNN decks start weakening their combo matchups to deal with hate and more conventional control decks don't step in to fill the void, leading to some sort of combo-dominated field. If for some reason that happened, there'd be a case for banning. But I don't see that happening. And there's probably a control build out there that can prey on both TNN.dec AND combo.