The September 20th 2011 Banned / Restricted List Update Reaction Thread

[joemauer]

Shall I continue?



You see, Swords to Plowshares wasn't bad because it made things less diverse, even though I believe it did. It was bad because it was an unfair card. You had to play with it or around it to succeed. Playing around it meant running no creatures. If you liked to use creatures in your deck but did not enjoy using Swords to Plowshares (to remove blockers), you were out of luck. Feeling like you have to put StP in your deck to play creature cards warps the format negatively.

Note: Swords to Plowshares costs mana, and the card does not protect against opposing swords to plowshares.

[Gheizen64]

Note: Swords to Plowshares costs mana, and the card does not protect against opposing swords to plowshares.

Note: Swords to Plowshares can answer 10 mana creatures, MM can only answer 1 mana spells, so StP is often a better mana investment.

That argument isn't bringing anyone anywhere.

[Lemnear]

This helped prove my point. I never said blue dominance. I said Mental Misstep dominance.

Maverick was the only deck to win a tourney without Mental Misstep from links you provided.

The most recent tourney had mental misstep in the top four decks.

My personal favorite was the dredge list that won. Even Dredge used Mental Misstep!

Point 1: You said decks that rely one-mana-cards are unplayable with misstep around. I'm sure I saw two red decks that rely on them.

Point 2: The other lists weren't for you but for all those talking about "blue dominance". To me those tournament T8 doesn't Seem bluer than before misstep

Point 3: SpikeyMikey made my day but forgot Submerge ... a free "timewalk + creature removal"

[joemauer]

Note: Swords to Plowshares can answer 10 mana creatures,

Not Progenitus.....

[trivial_matters]

/facepalm

[Admiral_Arzar]

God this thread has turned to semantic bullshit. What were we legitimately arguing about again?

[joemauer]

Whether or not swords to plowshares can effectively kill any ten mana creatures in the current meta-game.

[Koby]

Snuff Out I believe requires a swamp, so that is very much in black's usual flavor.

So your best comparison to Mental Misstep is Tormod's Crypt? A graveyard sweeper...

and gut shot and surgical extraction? Which set of cards do those two negate?

I should mention Leyline of <whatever>. 0 mana, turn 0 and very hard to answer.

And don't even bring up that you have to open it in your hand, because MM would also have the same condition to be just as effective.

[Gheizen64]

Whether or not swords to plowshares can effectively kill any ten mana creatures in the current meta-game.

My point was simply that "penalizing a subset of cards" doesn't make sense. My example was just a way to show that StP has "penalized" a subset of cards by making costly creatures without protection from StP unplayable. You then argued that the main point here was the mana cost, so implicitly tempo, but Swords actually can generate much more tempo than MM does especially if used to remove costly creatures. So the argument is fallacious.
A better argument is "MM always generate tempo if in the starting hand, while being (arguably) less conditional than StP and while being card parity unlike FoW". That's an argument (and we could debate just how much MM can be considered conditional, there's actually a grey zone here, since the card is unplayed in vintage and imho wouldn't be played as much in modern), however the focal point is: was the card good for the format? For sure it was badly designed (almost non-conditional/card-parity 0 mana counterspell is pretty lazy design), but i'm not entirely convinced the ban was for the best of the format, especially if, like WotC said, the objective was to reduce the blue dominance.

[xfxf]

The fact that anyone can argue that MM.format was more diverse than pre-MM.format blows my mind. I'm not sure what you're on bro, but can you share some of it? I want to expand my mind. Also, why is it always Goblins that control players bash? Is it because they think the deck isn't skill intensive? (complete bullshit, btw). Or is it just because Goblins' card advantage engine allows it to shit on control? Probably the latter.

Don't get mind blown that easily. Just try to understand the simple fact that US is not the whole world. Here, take a look at what a European has to say:

While I'm kinda mad that my LED's cover with dust with all the missteps and spell snares around the pure numbers theCounsil.es and others share do indeed show more different viable (T8) decks than pre-misstep with TES, Zoo, Meerfolk, Countertop and pets. Zenith decks gained more steam, Maverick, Rock, Junk, HiveMind all were suddenly playable because of the slowdown of the meta misstep caused. Those data prove too that there wasn't a significant increase of "blue decks" due to missteps rise outside of SCG.

Magic is not only about counterspells but counterspell strategies have been so repressed in the past few years that once they became viable again people jumped at the control decks in some places. US is one of them I guess and so is Tokyo apparently.

The one-drops aren't really important against slow blue control. It's the Matrons and Ringleaders that allow you to grind out the late game. Vial makes these games kind of one-sided, but goblins can definitely win without it. The opponents that the deck really needs the one-drops against are the more aggressive u/x midrange decks, where if you don't get a fast start you just get beat down by 'Goyfs and Germ tokens before you can stabilize and overwhelm them with card advantage.

I want to play in a format where that's applicable. Players shouldn't depend on turn 1 autowin because they can get Misstepped. So they have to depend on minor tweaks in deck building and playskill. There should be very little auto-loss mathcups. ANT was almost an auto-loss matchup against Team America with MM and I admit that combo needed a boost, but that doesn't mean that MM ban was necessary. They could just print some balancing cards and keep everything within the format boundaries.

[honestabe]

haha, I can promise you that WoTC did not ban Mental misstep in order to make combo better.

[joemauer]

My point was simply that "penalizing a subset of cards" doesn't make sense. My example was just a way to show that StP has "penalized" a subset of cards by making costly creatures without protection from StP unplayable. You then argued that the main point here was the mana cost, so implicitly tempo, but Swords actually can generate much more tempo than MM does especially if used to remove costly creatures. So the argument is fallacious.
A better argument is "MM always generate tempo if in the starting hand, while being (arguably) less conditional than StP and while being card parity unlike FoW". That's an argument (and we could debate just how much MM can be considered conditional, there's actually a grey zone here, since the card is unplayed in vintage and imho wouldn't be played as much in modern), however the focal point is: was the card good for the format? For sure it was badly designed (almost non-conditional/card-parity 0 mana counterspell is pretty lazy design), but i'm not entirely convinced the ban was for the best of the format, especially if, like WotC said, the objective was to reduce the blue dominance.

I can pretty much agree with everything except the bolded part.

The negating a subset of cards was more of a side effect and reason why Mental Misstep was so overly played. Free tempo is the most dangerous part of the card.

[xfxf]

The negating a subset of cards was more of a side effect and reason why Mental Misstep was so overly played. Free tempo is the most dangerous part of the card.

I agree with this. MM didn't only stop Vials and Nacatls. Duress, StP, Brainstom and many others..

But (this but isn't intended to negate everything I said previously as "but" usually tends to do), I still think that control, and classical control, should have some tools to be able to exist in an eternal format. Counterspells are not the only way to play Magic and I don't feel like an elite playing control. It's just that I like playing tight games, bluffing counters and/or removals, trying to stop the bashing race, calculating for it and playing the defense game.

It's also a part of this game. It's personal preference, it's not only about winning, dominating the field and being a "control elitist". It's about personal tastes. From the responses I'm getting in this forum I'm starting to feel that if you want to enjoy such a line of play it's already unjust enough and annoying enough that you really really have to work your way towards it whereas if you enjoy playing offensive strategies (a.k.a. aggro), winning easy and having favorable matchups across the field "must" be a given. Thinking otherwise is being either a spike or a "blue control elitist".

When I started playing Magic Lackeys were there and Force Spikes were there. We didn't have Vials nor Missteps. It was an even game and a turn 1 Lackey didn't end games. Aggro and Control player eyeballed each other and carefully cast each spell and fun games were had.

[Oiolosse]

This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the strategy of the game. You're putting the cart before the horse here. Combo doesn't beat aggro because of any failing of aggro, it beats aggro because if it doesn't, it's not worth playing. Which is why you don't see Sandquipoise decks. Or Trix. Or Project Melira. Or Rice Snack. Or Blackjack, Pebbles, Life, Soul Sisters, Splinter Twin or any other combo deck from the annals of Magic history. It's not because they stopped functioning, it's because they stopped beating aggro. Control is always going to have better tools to fight combo than combo is going to have to fight control. When this isn't the case, generally part of the combo gets banned because it's too format warping. So it has to focus on beating aggro. If it doesn't consistently beat aggro, there's no reason to play it.

No one commented so I thought I would say, well put. I think it's important to define it in such a way. To define combo as innately beating aggro, and primarily in terms of speed. Control is the limiting factor to combo's consistency. If control weren't there to thwart it and cause it to change it's game plan a bit (ie, decreasing speed for increased consistency) then it would dominate. This has been consistent with events in the past.

[Oiolosse]

/facepalm

well, trivial matters, right?

[2Rach]

Snuff Out I believe requires a swamp, so that is very much in black's usual flavor.

But the point was that Misstep wasn't good for the format since it strengthened blue and the result was that blue decks ran it the most. Rather than the intended function, which was to give non-blue this effect. But Misstep is a counter, in blue's slice of the pie, and is also mostly ran in blue decks, so it's ok, right?

[kicks_422]

This thread's still alive?

[Solar Ice]

It's really not your fault. Most people are bad at theory.

So, that we have different viewpoints = I'm bad at theory/stupid. Very classy.

This thread's still alive?

My thoughts exactly.

[Richard Cheese]

[Solar Ice]

LOL, yeah. Though its getting fewer and fewer posts by the hour.