I'm starting to feel Words of Wind is one of the most powerful cards evar in EDH. Much more easy to abuse than Staff.
I don't think Words of Wind is ever going to be played enough to irritate people into ever giving it serious consideration for a ban. It can obviously do absurdly powerful and one-sided things if you build around it - but the Words cycle has always been ignored apart from a few Johnnies because players like drawing cards and "not drawing cards" isn't the sort of theme most people want to build around. (Yes, I know that the way you power a Words deck is with card-drawing, but you get the point.)
Another reason I don't think it is a problem is that a good mass bounce engine like this won't win the game unless it goes unbounded (and there are easier unbounded combos) and once it shows up it will often trigger political union of the rest of the table to be able to keep their permanents down. My playgroup sees quite a bit of stuff like Evacuation plus Izzet Chronarch or Cowardice but shenanigans like that usually backfire once people get wise to them.
The quote used a couple of pages back directly referred to reproductions (such as a photocopy or printed,copy of a Magic card). Simply writing Mana Crypt on the back of a basic land is more or a representation than a reproduction. Would this still fall into the same category, or a grey area or the law?
Standard "not legal advice" disclaimer, but as long as you are not reproducing the art of the card or the rules text, but just writing the name of the card on something, you should be completely fine. After all, you aren't infringing any copyright by typing "Mana Crypt" into your forum post, and writing the name of the card down on another card doesn't make that different. You are also not infringing copyright through the actual play of the game, because the copyright that Wizards has is on the card art and text - saying "tap my Mana Crypt proxy to add 2 to my mana pool" is not copyright infringing. To quote from the U.S. Copyright Office, "Copyright does not protect the idea for a game [...] or the method or methods for playing it."
To boil it down to the fundamental, copyright protects the pictures and words printed on the cards, not the actions of gameplay. If you proxy by printing out a copy of the card - or even by making a "derivative work" that is based on the original artwork, such as an alter - then you are breaking copyright law. If you don't copy the art and contents of the text box, but just write the names with a sharpie on basic land, you should be on safe legal ground.
Of course, given the steady expansion of copyright laws, in a few years, maybe even typing the names of cards on forums will become something that Wizards could regulate. Celebrities are now given expanded rights to control their image, which can lead to absurd results - Vanna White successfully got a judgment against a Samsung advertisement where a robot with a blond wig turned letters on a game show, because she claimed the robot was intended to remind people of her, and that infringed her rights.
I would like to add something very important about the legal issues people are bringing up in relation to proxies. The term "proxy" means anything that substitutes for a tournament legal magic card, it doesn't necessarily mean something that infringes copyright.
In my playgroup, we don't print or photocopy proxies - we just use a sharpie to write "Umez's Jitte" on an old junk common or land. This type of casual "proxy" does not infringe copyright.
It seems what bothers a lot of people is not "proxies" like this, but people who are basically making whole "counterfeit" decks by printing copies of cards and making stickers to make identical-to-the eye fake cards. I don't have much experience with this because nobody in my playgroup does that.
I only support the use of casual, non-infringing proxies that can be used to represent a mtg card in gameplay but do not reproduce the full face of the card as an illegal copy. Also, it almost goes without saying that proxies are for casual, kitchen-table play, not tournaments unless its an official proxy approved tournament like some Vintage.
I'd like to offer a bit of personal perspective and history. Within the context of my long-term playgroup, when we started out, I was willing and able to spend a lot more money on the cards than my friends were. If I wanted to be able to play Magic with my friends, I would have needed to either build only weak decks, or permit them to proxy the cards they need to make decent decks.
If I had said to my friends ten years ago "no, proxies aren't cool, only cards you pay for" then I wouldn't have had friends to play with, because getting beat up by "Mr. Suitcase" when you are Mr. Pauper isn't going to hold your interest in the game. By letting everyone play the game regardless of the size of their wallet, we all had more fun - and guess what? The guy who was too poor to buy cards five or ten years ago has a better job now and spends a lot of money on Magic, and he never would have kept with the game if he had been kept out of it due to financial reasons when he was younger.
So why own any cards at all? Just print 100 cards you like and shuffle up.
You should have to own the card to play it, makes you invest in your collection.
I absolutely believe it is just fine to own no real cards whatsoever and still play as much magic as you want. My friends and I buy tons of Magic cards because we love them - even though we permit proxies, everyone prefers to own the real cards and play with them because Magic cards are cool and awesome.
I honestly find this thread rather shocking to read, because I never would have dreamed that many people would object to using proxies in social play. I want to be able to play a fair game of Magic with any human being, not just with people who have enough money to match my card collection.
None of the anti-proxy attitude makes sense to me. I think free use of proxies is almost mandatory in social play, because otherwise, magic becomes a game of "The Richest Kid Wins". The fact that the playing pieces for the game of magic are expensive is a flaw in the game as a pure game - think about if when you sat down to a game of chess, you had to buy each piece at a rate of $10 per pawn, $200 if you wanted a Queen. It would make the game incredibly stupid if one player can afford to buy all the pieces and the other player is stuck with 3 pawns because that is all they can afford.
Proxies level the playing field and allow you to play the real game of Magic, not a subset that is limited by your budget.
"The more you spend, the more you win!" is not a good thing, and allowing free use of proxies is the only way to avoid it. In social play, people should be able to proxy whatever cards they want to play with, because money should have no role in the game.
There is nothing fun or fair about losing because you can't afford to buy the cards that your friends are playing with, and nothing sporting about beating up on a pauper deck with a fully powered vintage deck worth 10 grand.
The Rav karoos are my favorite land cycle ever printed and I always use them extensively in all but the most aggressive beatdown decks. In my experience, in multiplayer magic, reaching the "top point" on your curve is very important. Nothing is more frustrating than being stuck on 6 mana for several turns with a game-breaking 7 mana spell in your hand.
By playing a lot of karoos, you extend the "reach" of your landbase, at the cost of some tempo and vulnerability to targeted LD. In my experience, this is very, very worth it - and the bounce can often be turned into a benefit by resetting CIP lands or vivids.
Let us suppose for a minute that the rule is abolished. How does the ban list change? I would posit that no cards would go on or come off due to this update. What has removing the rule accomplished? It will add fuel to the 'unban LoA' crowd, but in the end I think the list does not change.
Thoughts?
That is exactly my point - if removing the rule results in no change to the banlist (which I think is correct) then what purpose is the rule serving? To me that is the best argument FOR removing the price/availability principle - it isn't actually doing anything, because the only cards it is actually being applied against can also be banned purely for being degenerate and unhealthy for the format, regardless of price.
So, my thinking is not "if removing the rule doesn't change anything, why bother?" but rather "if removing the rule doesn't change anything, that proves definitely it's not serving a purpose and should be removed."
It is applied consistantly if you read the whole rule.
The shocklands and checklands etc are viable alternatives. No one said they are as good, but your deck does not go from awesome to terrible because you have 3 shocklands instead of ABU duals.
Adding a Ruby Mox instead of Mox Diamond or Chrome Mox doesn't take the deck from terrible to awesome.
Exactly this. Every single card in Magic has other cards which can be used to perform the same function. The banning guidelines are vague and subjective enough that you can find a way of justifying almost any ban or unban with them.
In fact, the RC even states semi-officially that the banning principles are just guidelines for explanation, not an attempt to provide a set of rational objective criteria. The "real inconsistency" is that price and availability is actually more objective and data-based than the other principles, and that is why it doesn't fit and should be discarded!
For long-term Magic players this may come as a surprise, but to many of the newer players the game has acquired in the past couple years, cards like the original dual lands seem just as expensive and unattainable as the Power 9. During the late 90s, I collected some of the P9 which I sold a few later, and I spent a lot less on that than a current new player would spend trying to acquire a high-quality manabase of duals and fetches.
Please don't misunderstand me - again, I'm not saying that dual lands should be banned - what I'm saying is that the current banned list doesn't even accomplish the goal of keeping budget-limited players competitive, so there isn't much point in keeping the "barrier to entry" principle around.
And how would you suggest that "specialness" get applied consistently?
The 'barrier to entry' is NOT just about price. Please read the thead for that discussion.
What? I think you are misunderstanding what I'm saying. I was saying that the question being asked wasn't meaningful, because players don't evaluate P9 cards the same way they evaluate others. My exact point was that players' feelings and reactions are not consistent.
I think the price/barrier to entry criteria is fundamentally a mistaken principle and should be discarded because it isn't even applied correctly or consistently on its own terms, and if it was, it wouldn't produce good results, because it would end up banning several of the dual lands. Painlands etc are NOT a true "substitute" for the duals any more than Silverglade Elemental is a meaningful "substitute" for Primeval Titan.
"Most players want the moxen banned for price/ubiquity reasons. Almost no players want Imperial Seal banned for price/ubiquity reasons."
Assuming the above is true, would that qualify a consistent criteria?
Price/ubiquity is all about what will turn people away from the format, so it is reasonable to include player opinion in that breakdown.
I think there is something crucial missing in how this is framed. "The Power 9" have a very special place in the game and in the psychology of players. The Moxes and Lotus exist in a different category from all other cards in terms of how players think of and respond to them.
So, I think this is really just a specific example of the general principle that the P9 is "special" and other cards don't elicit the same reactions or get evaluated or treated in the same way.
I'm curious - is there anyone who actually wants Imperial Seal or Imperial Recruiter banned for price reasons? Or do they just come up as hypothetical counterexamples?
I think they should be banned for consistency reasons, if the "price barrier" criteria is going to remain as part of the banning principles. I certainly don't have a personal issue with them because nobody I know owns those cards or even bothers to play them as proxies. That is probably true for most of the player base.
"We don't need to ban it because nobody owns it" isn't a sensible policy, so I'm not sure it matters whether or not people's objections are hypothetical or not. P3K stuff mostly shows up on Cockatrice and obviously there are no price issues in that context.
The fact that the rules committee hasn't actually applied the price/availability criteria consistently (given the P3K examples) and the player base hasn't been very vocal in complaint is evidence to me that the "price" criteria isn't needed because P9 is all banworthy for degeneracy reasons.
[That brings us back to the Mana Crypt debate since it is obviously just as degenerate as the Moxes, but since I think MC should "obviously" be banned, I'm fine with that.]
If you want to discuss the guideline feel free, but I do not see that ever changing. No one wants new players to be turned off EDH because people are dropping moxes and LoA.
What doesn't make sense to me about this guideline is that given the price increases in the price of many mtg singles, there are now many cards which are approaching the prices cards such as Library were at a few years ago. At this point, many of the original dual lands are now over $100 as singles. A lot of cards that were once very easily obtainable like Wasteland and Force of Will are now expensive "investment" cards.
Before anyone gets upset, I DO NOT think that dual lands or FoW should be banned for cost reasons. What I do think is that the "price barrier" criteria makes no sense in the current world of magic singles prices.
Moxes, Lotus, Library are all correct bans for the reason of being unbalanced broken cards that are unhealthy for the format - the price barrier principle isn't needed.
I think that the current EDH banning criteria should be simplified to something like the following: "We aren't trying to create a perfectly balanced competitive format. Instead, we simply ban the most obviously unbalanced and unfun cards based on a good faith effort to maintain the spirit of the format."
There are 500 billion different ideas for "slightly fixed" dual lands, the reason they haven't been printed isn't because r&d can't think up tons of variants. Most of the ideas people are posting here are terribly inelegant hacks, but that isn't the fundamental issue.
What threads like this do show, though, is that the reserved list is actually pretty much meaningless. They can print "Noir Lotus" that sacs for 5 mana of any color, and draws you a card, too, if they want to - that doesn't break the reserved list! Why not true triple lands that obsolete the duals by having 3 basic land types and tapping for all 3 colors of mana with no disadvantage?
What the "reserved list" really boils down to is that WotC doesn't want to overly disrupt the secondary market, and they also aren't very interested in doing r&d for the "broken" eternal formats.
That is the one thing that is keeping my slight hopes of a decent amount of product. I would think that GP would be one of the larger, if not the largest, NA GPs.
People keep mentioning the GP in connection with the size of the print run, but I think people aren't doing the math here - the amount of product opened at a GP is absolutely miniscule compared to even a very small print run.
For instance, consider the print run for Arabian Nights - 5 million cards. That is tiny in comparison to modern print runs and undoubtedly "too small" for Modern Masters. However, a sealed/draft gran prix with an attendance of 2000 people would still only require a fraction of that many cards - overestimating at 18 packs/player/2000 players, that is 540 000 cards.
So, simple estimation of magnitudes shows that the Gran Prix has no meaningful impact on the amount of cards in circulation.
Thanks for this list. I collect mostly Canyon Minotaur and Primal Clay and Unsummon and I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to be competitive in current standard. I see now that I'm well prepared, and I'm also thinking of going into Harbor Serpent in a big way now that I see it is also "in the club" so to speak.
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I don't think Words of Wind is ever going to be played enough to irritate people into ever giving it serious consideration for a ban. It can obviously do absurdly powerful and one-sided things if you build around it - but the Words cycle has always been ignored apart from a few Johnnies because players like drawing cards and "not drawing cards" isn't the sort of theme most people want to build around. (Yes, I know that the way you power a Words deck is with card-drawing, but you get the point.)
Another reason I don't think it is a problem is that a good mass bounce engine like this won't win the game unless it goes unbounded (and there are easier unbounded combos) and once it shows up it will often trigger political union of the rest of the table to be able to keep their permanents down. My playgroup sees quite a bit of stuff like Evacuation plus Izzet Chronarch or Cowardice but shenanigans like that usually backfire once people get wise to them.
Standard "not legal advice" disclaimer, but as long as you are not reproducing the art of the card or the rules text, but just writing the name of the card on something, you should be completely fine. After all, you aren't infringing any copyright by typing "Mana Crypt" into your forum post, and writing the name of the card down on another card doesn't make that different. You are also not infringing copyright through the actual play of the game, because the copyright that Wizards has is on the card art and text - saying "tap my Mana Crypt proxy to add 2 to my mana pool" is not copyright infringing. To quote from the U.S. Copyright Office, "Copyright does not protect the idea for a game [...] or the method or methods for playing it."
To boil it down to the fundamental, copyright protects the pictures and words printed on the cards, not the actions of gameplay. If you proxy by printing out a copy of the card - or even by making a "derivative work" that is based on the original artwork, such as an alter - then you are breaking copyright law. If you don't copy the art and contents of the text box, but just write the names with a sharpie on basic land, you should be on safe legal ground.
Of course, given the steady expansion of copyright laws, in a few years, maybe even typing the names of cards on forums will become something that Wizards could regulate. Celebrities are now given expanded rights to control their image, which can lead to absurd results - Vanna White successfully got a judgment against a Samsung advertisement where a robot with a blond wig turned letters on a game show, because she claimed the robot was intended to remind people of her, and that infringed her rights.
In my playgroup, we don't print or photocopy proxies - we just use a sharpie to write "Umez's Jitte" on an old junk common or land. This type of casual "proxy" does not infringe copyright.
It seems what bothers a lot of people is not "proxies" like this, but people who are basically making whole "counterfeit" decks by printing copies of cards and making stickers to make identical-to-the eye fake cards. I don't have much experience with this because nobody in my playgroup does that.
I only support the use of casual, non-infringing proxies that can be used to represent a mtg card in gameplay but do not reproduce the full face of the card as an illegal copy. Also, it almost goes without saying that proxies are for casual, kitchen-table play, not tournaments unless its an official proxy approved tournament like some Vintage.
I'd like to offer a bit of personal perspective and history. Within the context of my long-term playgroup, when we started out, I was willing and able to spend a lot more money on the cards than my friends were. If I wanted to be able to play Magic with my friends, I would have needed to either build only weak decks, or permit them to proxy the cards they need to make decent decks.
If I had said to my friends ten years ago "no, proxies aren't cool, only cards you pay for" then I wouldn't have had friends to play with, because getting beat up by "Mr. Suitcase" when you are Mr. Pauper isn't going to hold your interest in the game. By letting everyone play the game regardless of the size of their wallet, we all had more fun - and guess what? The guy who was too poor to buy cards five or ten years ago has a better job now and spends a lot of money on Magic, and he never would have kept with the game if he had been kept out of it due to financial reasons when he was younger.
I absolutely believe it is just fine to own no real cards whatsoever and still play as much magic as you want. My friends and I buy tons of Magic cards because we love them - even though we permit proxies, everyone prefers to own the real cards and play with them because Magic cards are cool and awesome.
I honestly find this thread rather shocking to read, because I never would have dreamed that many people would object to using proxies in social play. I want to be able to play a fair game of Magic with any human being, not just with people who have enough money to match my card collection.
Proxies level the playing field and allow you to play the real game of Magic, not a subset that is limited by your budget.
"The more you spend, the more you win!" is not a good thing, and allowing free use of proxies is the only way to avoid it. In social play, people should be able to proxy whatever cards they want to play with, because money should have no role in the game.
There is nothing fun or fair about losing because you can't afford to buy the cards that your friends are playing with, and nothing sporting about beating up on a pauper deck with a fully powered vintage deck worth 10 grand.
By playing a lot of karoos, you extend the "reach" of your landbase, at the cost of some tempo and vulnerability to targeted LD. In my experience, this is very, very worth it - and the bounce can often be turned into a benefit by resetting CIP lands or vivids.
That is exactly my point - if removing the rule results in no change to the banlist (which I think is correct) then what purpose is the rule serving? To me that is the best argument FOR removing the price/availability principle - it isn't actually doing anything, because the only cards it is actually being applied against can also be banned purely for being degenerate and unhealthy for the format, regardless of price.
So, my thinking is not "if removing the rule doesn't change anything, why bother?" but rather "if removing the rule doesn't change anything, that proves definitely it's not serving a purpose and should be removed."
Exactly this. Every single card in Magic has other cards which can be used to perform the same function. The banning guidelines are vague and subjective enough that you can find a way of justifying almost any ban or unban with them.
In fact, the RC even states semi-officially that the banning principles are just guidelines for explanation, not an attempt to provide a set of rational objective criteria. The "real inconsistency" is that price and availability is actually more objective and data-based than the other principles, and that is why it doesn't fit and should be discarded!
For long-term Magic players this may come as a surprise, but to many of the newer players the game has acquired in the past couple years, cards like the original dual lands seem just as expensive and unattainable as the Power 9. During the late 90s, I collected some of the P9 which I sold a few later, and I spent a lot less on that than a current new player would spend trying to acquire a high-quality manabase of duals and fetches.
Please don't misunderstand me - again, I'm not saying that dual lands should be banned - what I'm saying is that the current banned list doesn't even accomplish the goal of keeping budget-limited players competitive, so there isn't much point in keeping the "barrier to entry" principle around.
What? I think you are misunderstanding what I'm saying. I was saying that the question being asked wasn't meaningful, because players don't evaluate P9 cards the same way they evaluate others. My exact point was that players' feelings and reactions are not consistent.
I think the price/barrier to entry criteria is fundamentally a mistaken principle and should be discarded because it isn't even applied correctly or consistently on its own terms, and if it was, it wouldn't produce good results, because it would end up banning several of the dual lands. Painlands etc are NOT a true "substitute" for the duals any more than Silverglade Elemental is a meaningful "substitute" for Primeval Titan.
I think there is something crucial missing in how this is framed. "The Power 9" have a very special place in the game and in the psychology of players. The Moxes and Lotus exist in a different category from all other cards in terms of how players think of and respond to them.
So, I think this is really just a specific example of the general principle that the P9 is "special" and other cards don't elicit the same reactions or get evaluated or treated in the same way.
I think they should be banned for consistency reasons, if the "price barrier" criteria is going to remain as part of the banning principles. I certainly don't have a personal issue with them because nobody I know owns those cards or even bothers to play them as proxies. That is probably true for most of the player base.
"We don't need to ban it because nobody owns it" isn't a sensible policy, so I'm not sure it matters whether or not people's objections are hypothetical or not. P3K stuff mostly shows up on Cockatrice and obviously there are no price issues in that context.
The fact that the rules committee hasn't actually applied the price/availability criteria consistently (given the P3K examples) and the player base hasn't been very vocal in complaint is evidence to me that the "price" criteria isn't needed because P9 is all banworthy for degeneracy reasons.
[That brings us back to the Mana Crypt debate since it is obviously just as degenerate as the Moxes, but since I think MC should "obviously" be banned, I'm fine with that.]
What doesn't make sense to me about this guideline is that given the price increases in the price of many mtg singles, there are now many cards which are approaching the prices cards such as Library were at a few years ago. At this point, many of the original dual lands are now over $100 as singles. A lot of cards that were once very easily obtainable like Wasteland and Force of Will are now expensive "investment" cards.
Before anyone gets upset, I DO NOT think that dual lands or FoW should be banned for cost reasons. What I do think is that the "price barrier" criteria makes no sense in the current world of magic singles prices.
Moxes, Lotus, Library are all correct bans for the reason of being unbalanced broken cards that are unhealthy for the format - the price barrier principle isn't needed.
I think that the current EDH banning criteria should be simplified to something like the following: "We aren't trying to create a perfectly balanced competitive format. Instead, we simply ban the most obviously unbalanced and unfun cards based on a good faith effort to maintain the spirit of the format."
What threads like this do show, though, is that the reserved list is actually pretty much meaningless. They can print "Noir Lotus" that sacs for 5 mana of any color, and draws you a card, too, if they want to - that doesn't break the reserved list! Why not true triple lands that obsolete the duals by having 3 basic land types and tapping for all 3 colors of mana with no disadvantage?
What the "reserved list" really boils down to is that WotC doesn't want to overly disrupt the secondary market, and they also aren't very interested in doing r&d for the "broken" eternal formats.
People keep mentioning the GP in connection with the size of the print run, but I think people aren't doing the math here - the amount of product opened at a GP is absolutely miniscule compared to even a very small print run.
For instance, consider the print run for Arabian Nights - 5 million cards. That is tiny in comparison to modern print runs and undoubtedly "too small" for Modern Masters. However, a sealed/draft gran prix with an attendance of 2000 people would still only require a fraction of that many cards - overestimating at 18 packs/player/2000 players, that is 540 000 cards.
So, simple estimation of magnitudes shows that the Gran Prix has no meaningful impact on the amount of cards in circulation.