All B/R update speculation.

[Barook]

As far as draw spells are concerned, does Frantic Search really break the format harder than Brainstorm?

[Bed Decks Palyer]

As far as draw spells are concerned, does Frantic Search really break the format harder than Brainstorm?

Definitely not. I cannot understand why it's still on the list. It does nothing. So High tide would be better? Reanimator would get Careful Study that's extra vulnerable to Daze, FLusterstorm and Spell Pierce? Madness would be a Tier2 deck? Where's the trouble?

[Lemnear]

As far as draw spells are concerned, does Frantic Search really break the format harder than Brainstorm?

Apples and Oranges? It's pointless to try drawing parallels here, because there is no one. It's totally out of context.


Edit:

Definitely not. I cannot understand why it's still on the list. It does nothing. So High tide would be better? Reanimator would get Careful Study that's extra vulnerable to Daze, FLusterstorm and Spell Pierce? Madness would be a Tier2 deck? Where's the trouble?

Reanimator gets careful Study 5-8, High Tide /12-post get a Ritual + card-selection spell

[Barook]

It's totally out of context.

Question is whether or not Frantic Search is more powerful than Brainstorm, considering one is on the Banned List while the other is not.

[Lemnear]

Question is whether or not Frantic Search is more powerful than Brainstorm, considering one is on the Banned List while the other is not.

Any matching criteria for "powerful" in regards to these two cards? You can compare Ad Nauseam to Griselbrand to Bargain to discuss why one is banned and the other is not. The same applies to Tinker vs. Natural Order or Gaea's Cradle vs. Tolarian Academy or Intuition vs Gifts Ungiven in Vintage.

The question to ask in regards to unbannings is: "Would the unbanning of this card make the format more diverse and enjoyable?" If the answer is "no" or "potentially the opposite", WotC does not give a fuck.

You can expect something random coming off the list if they decide to swing the banhammer on the Delver + TC circlejerk, for the sake of keeping the ban-list small, so they can pat their own shoulders for "balancing the format without a Giant banlist"

[Echelon]

I'm glad to see some consensus on the power level of the blue shell.

I do find it laughable that people'd consider unbanning Mind's Desire. That card isn't funny in an environment with LEDs. You can pretty much just slide in into the ANT-shell, replacing Ad Nauseam. It Ad Nauseams without the lifeloss AND lets you cast whatever you draw while also combo-ing with PiF. OMG, lol. I used to play it when it was Extended-legal, but even there I could pull of T2 kills when having the utter nuts. Just chain Mind's Desires & Sins of the Pasts FTW. Now let's try that in a format that lets you run LED & buddies.

[FoolofaTook]

Except what you'd want is to commit to a chain of banning since banning FoW would mean this format would be as bad against combo as modern is, and then you have to get 50+ banned cards on the list. At which point you get modern with duals, and who care? A single ban to weaken a dominant archetype wouldn't remove any archetype from the format, wouldn't require any more ban subsequential to it, and would open the space for many T1.5 strats to become actually viable.

What you're proposing make no sense in a real eternal format imho. Banning 10+ cards for a slightly different modern? I don't see the appeal.

If you ban Force of Will then people start playing fast mana again in things other than combo. Plays like Dark Ritual - Dark Ritual big whomping creature come back into play. Plays like Dark Ritual - Chalice of the Void at 1 or Trinisphere come back into play. As Force of Will leaves the format Dark Ritual re-enters and we're back to black as something other than a splash color for a few power cards.

Blue doesn't become just a splash color for a few powerful cards in that situation either. It maintains Threshold, Stifle, Daze with Treasure Cruise to refill. Merfolk is still a big list with Cursecatcher and Chalice as options to suppress combo. Blue-based control might even re-emerge from the shadows that blue aggro control creates.

The DTB list is no longer 4 or 5 blue lists with a couple of non-blue shells. Now it's 4 or 5 non-blue lists with a couple of blue shells. That's a much more healthy meta that allows the majesty of Magic to re-appear after a long absence. Legacy has been broken since at least 2010. That's when the blue shell became the best shell with the banning of Survival of the Fittest and we've had bland sameness at the top ever since.

[Tylert]

Isn't Force of will a necessary evil to counter decks like belcher?
From my point of view, Force of will is a fine card because it's Card disadvantage.
The blue shell itself is too powerfull, and brainstorm with the possibilities it offers (Unmulliganing, hiding card from discard... etc...) is the usual suspect of the blue shell.

[rufus]

...
I do find it laughable that people'd consider unbanning Mind's Desire. That card isn't funny in an environment with LEDs. You can pretty much just slide in into the ANT-shell,...

There are safer cards to unban, but I'm not sure what makes you think that Mind's Desire would work as a drop-in replacement for Ad Nauseam.

Desire is strong, but not that much stronger than cards which are already available. Typically when Mind's Desire is likely to win, so is tutoring for Tendrils of Agony.

[Lemnear]

If you ban Force of Will then people start playing fast mana again in things other than combo. Plays like Dark Ritual - Dark Ritual big whomping creature come back into play. Plays like Dark Ritual - Chalice of the Void at 1 or Trinisphere come back into play. As Force of Will leaves the format Dark Ritual re-enters and we're back to black as something other than a splash color for a few power cards.

Blue doesn't become just a splash color for a few powerful cards in that situation either. It maintains Threshold, Stifle, Daze with Treasure Cruise to refill. Merfolk is still a big list with Cursecatcher and Chalice as options to suppress combo. Blue-based control might even re-emerge from the shadows that blue aggro control creates.

The DTB list is no longer 4 or 5 blue lists with a couple of non-blue shells. Now it's 4 or 5 non-blue lists with a couple of blue shells. That's a much more healthy meta that allows the majesty of Magic to re-appear after a long absence. Legacy has been broken since at least 2010. That's when the blue shell became the best shell with the banning of Survival of the Fittest and we've had bland sameness at the top ever since.

You are the only one prefering to cast a creature, a Chalice or a Trinisphere rather than Ad Nauseam after double Dark Ritual -.-

[FoolofaTook]

You are the only one prefering to cast a creature, a Chalice or a Trinisphere rather than Ad Nauseam after double Dark Ritual -.-

How many Ad Nauseum's does an ANT list have?

Using Dark Ritual to support fast mana in lists that won't win the game right away is what has gone missing in the meta since the blue shell began to dominate and define what everybody else could do.

The right way to look at it is that Force of Will and the blue shell has destroyed combo and fast mana aggro. That's something we can point at with no fear of contradiction. Combo is about 5% of the metagame right now after Elves is taken out of the picture. Fast mana aggro even less than that.

Everybody talks about how combo will absolutely dominate and destroy the meta if Force of Will is removed. Why don't we all talk about how having Force of Will in the meta has destroyed countless other archetypes over the years?

[Megadeus]

I can't believe people are actually arguing for a force of will ban. Do you people play legacy or vintage?

[iamajellydonut]

The right way to look at it is that Force of Will and the blue shell has destroyed combo and fast mana aggro. That's something we can point at with no fear of contradiction. Combo is about 5% of the metagame right now after Elves is taken out of the picture. Fast mana aggro even less than that.

Force of Will has not "destroyed" combo. Combo is alive and healthy in various forms, and Force of Will acts as an "oh shit" to keep combo in check. If there is anything "dead" about combo, it is only through lack of interest. With your comment about combo only representing 5% of the meta without Elves, I assume you're talking about something like ANT only remaining and not considering things like Show and Tell and Dredge and Reanimator as combo. They would of course represent a much smaller percentage considering Elves's performance, but it wouldn't really be anything that's not directly comparable to how control would look without Miracles or aggro without UR Delver. Long live midrange.

Also, I'm not sure how you mean your comment about fast mana aggro (fucking really?) being dead because of Force of Will. If you mean players shifted from junky unreliable shells with few reasonable global answers to decks that were capable of playing Force of Will, you hit the nail on the head. If you mean to imply that aggro actually gives a fuck about playing against Force of Will, you're very incorrect.

[Megadeus]

Theonly reason I don't like force now is because the blue decks can overcome the card disadvantage with Cruise now. Before, force of will was a bad bad card.

[rufus]

...
Everybody talks about how combo will absolutely dominate and destroy the meta if Force of Will is removed. Why don't we all talk about how having Force of Will in the meta has destroyed countless other archetypes over the years?

I think that cards like Force of Will that punish game plans which heavily invest in a single spell are important to the diversity of the format, and that instead of banning it, it would be nice to see cards with a similar profile in other colors.

[maharis]

I think that cards like Force of Will that punish game plans which heavily invest in a single spell are important to the diversity of the format, and that instead of banning it, it would be nice to see cards with a similar profile in other colors.

A-greed. Force is fine. After 20 years of cards, fair decks have way too much threat density and value to make a Force backbreaking to their plan. Turning your whatever spell into a Hymn to Tourach, then you just cast some other bomb, is fine. Combo decks have to play around it but that's the price of going all-in on a powerful instant-win plan. I know it's just as omnipresent as Brainstorm but its actual utility is sorely limited (and Brainstorm makes it better at times where it would be a dead card).

Yet quite often it is.
The only real non-blue, non-hate deck left in ETB is Elves, right? DnT exists only becasue of how inbred the metagame is, and its whole plan is to make the environment as hostile as possible for the decks that rely on five real lands and 32 cantrips. (Ok, ok...)

This is the real issue with the metagame at this time. One argument I've heard for keeping BS in the format is that decks like Food Chain or Aluren need it to work. That's great, but it's not like you show up at a tournament and you just get overrun by Food Chain decks because so many people love it. There are more powerful combos, there are more powerful creature decks, and there is really no other reason other than pure love of the game why you would play a second-tier deck when you have all the staples for the most powerful decks.

Meanwhile, if you lack those staples or simply don't want to spend $40 and your whole Sunday playing Delver mirrors, your deck which may be full of very powerful cards in a vacuum simply can't compete with the raw efficiency of the blue tempo shell. So what do you do? You try to cut off their advantage. That means instead of playing more powerful cards, you are stuck playing lame hatebears that just make your deck some sort of inferior D&T. Go take a look in the Rock, Jund, DGA, Maverick threads. We're basically discussing which hatebears are maindeckable and how cool cards like Hymn or Liliana are invalidated by the card advantage and selection of the blue shell. Sure, that includes some discussion of style points cards like Chains, but if you play Chains yourself, you end up policing your own fun as well. Or you just cave and play blue yourself and we have mirror after mirror of the same counterburn decks. It's making the format stale.

Brainstorm is warping the format around it. You play a Brainstorm deck, you play one of three decks like Elves, Burn, or Dredge that can sort of ignore Brainstorm, or you overload your deck with Brainstorm hate like D&T, or you lose. That's the simple fact.

[ahg113]

I can't believe people are actually arguing for a force of will ban. Do you people play legacy or vintage?

The talk of banning FoW seems to be a complicit, "If we can't ban BS because reasons, we'll pick off a known associate." Not the best remedy, but something more than nothing.

[Megadeus]

The talk of banning FoW seems to be a complicit, "If we can't ban BS because reasons, we'll pick off a known associate." Not the best remedy, but something more than nothing.

Except a ban of force would actually hurt the format rather than help it. As much as you can scream about there being a multitude of free counters (foil, MB Trap, and such) they are completely terrible and if you are playing them, you probably are losing.

[Lemnear]

You play a Brainstorm deck, you play one of three decks like Elves, Burn, or Dredge that can sort of ignore Brainstorm, or you overload your deck with Brainstorm hate like D&T, or you lose. That's the simple fact.

I see Tezz, 12-Post, Goblins, Jund, Imperial Painter, Maverick, Slivers, Dragon Stompy, Meerfolk, Junk, Nic Fit, Foodchain, Lands.dec and Oops! All Spells! with top 8 Performances within the last two months.

[FoolofaTook]

Force of Will has not "destroyed" combo. Combo is alive and healthy in various forms, and Force of Will acts as an "oh shit" to keep combo in check. If there is anything "dead" about combo, it is only through lack of interest. With your comment about combo only representing 5% of the meta without Elves, I assume you're talking about something like ANT only remaining and not considering things like Show and Tell and Dredge and Reanimator as combo. They would of course represent a much smaller percentage considering Elves's performance, but it wouldn't really be anything that's not directly comparable to how control would look without Miracles or aggro without UR Delver. Long live midrange.

Also, I'm not sure how you mean your comment about fast mana aggro (fucking really?) being dead because of Force of Will. If you mean players shifted from junky unreliable shells with few reasonable global answers to decks that were capable of playing Force of Will, you hit the nail on the head. If you mean to imply that aggro actually gives a fuck about playing against Force of Will, you're very incorrect.

In a meta ruled by the blue shell and FoW the logical answer for aggro lists is to have many redundant threats that take FoW and basically say "fine 2-for-1 yourself and I'll put out another threat next turn and make you pay for it". The alternate approach of trying to do something spectacularly aggro on turn 1 just doesn't pay when 40% of the time the opponent is just going to FoW your end result and another 40% of the time the threat will be removed afterwards.

Malakir Bloodwitch would be an interesting card to play in this meta were it not for Force of Will. It would be the logical successor to the Juzam Djinn lists that also went out of favor at exactly the point that Force of Will emerged as a staple.