On the issue of power level as ban list criteria, what defines it? A card like Deadeye Navigator might not meet a competitive players criteria for a broken card, but it might for a casual player. The reverse is true for a card like Hermit Druid, so you'll still have people arguing inconsistency. Different people have different definitions of broken, and the argument of Survival of the Fittest more than proves that.
This is why there are house bans. If you ban every card that a casual player can't deal with/doesn't like in their games, the ban list would be massive. The house ban rule is to help casual players fix their play groups, but how about more competitive groups?
I'd like to add to a productive discussion, on a card that's acting like a shush-shush potential for the Ban List. So I'll address your comments and try to refrain from a "gloves off" discussion, which you're provoking. I do believe that by having cards discussed out on the open, more and more people will see the reasoning and frustration of many players and begin to share their view. So having a flame fest does nothing other then chase people away with whines and personal agenda.
..... but Survival is hardly a card ban worthy. You still have to cast the cards you get with it, plus you have to discard a card to use it and that is a hefty cost. Sure that cost and be useful when built around but this is the case for many, many cards. Lots of cards become powerful when built around, is the solution to ban every card that gets better when it becomes better when built around?
I do agree that you have to cast the cards yourself, that's a terrible drawback. Much like the one all top black tutors share, yet they don't have the privilege of being able to fetch a fresh card, often multiple times per turn for the measly investment of one G mana. I'm more then convinced that you're familiar with the fact that discarding a creature is often not a drawback, but a plus. There're many, many cards that feel right at home in the GY and Survival of the Fittest puts them there and also fetched a brand new creature. In reality, the resource needed to feed Survival of the Fittest replenishes itself out of the effect of the card, allowing the owner to quickly go through every creature he wants, depending on the situation. Getting cards back from the GY is mere child's play for Green, so I do hope that we've covered how poorly the drawback actually functions like one.
Your taking my points out of context. Sure Survival can fuel other strategies like graveyard/recursion but i never said that it could not do so. Survival is not the enabler that Gifts Ungiven is, Survival is just a powerful card that works well with the most prevalent card type (creature) and fuels an ever growing resource (graveyard). And yes sometimes discarding a creature to get an Acidic Slime can be a draw back because you don't have another creature in your hand to activate Survival and you need to cast the Slime. We can debate games states until we are blue in the face. My point was that there is a cost to activating Survival and that cost is an important one. And yes you can build a deck to minimize the drawback or even make the drawback an advantage, but there are costs that along with that kind of deck building, costs which I am sure you are aware of and don't need to be discussed here.
There is absolutely nothing wrong or ban worthy when it come to Survival of the Fittest. It requires you to have cards to pitch for it be useful, or some other way to recoup creatures back to your hand, for it to be useful for long periods of time.
Both cards require "cards to pitch for it", or them in this case, in order to function. By comparison, the required conditions for Survival of the Fittest to work are laughable and don't forget, the card fuels itself, while the others don't. I'm also fully aware why both cards were banned, but thanks for the links, someone else might find them refreshing.
Survival does not work unless you discard a card, it is pretty simple. Metalworker has no such constraint although its effectiveness diminishes over time, and after the initial imprint Mirror doesn't either. This is how Mirror has a power level/mana cost imbalance.
The cards that interact/deal with both Metalworker and Mirror are exactly the same cards that interact/deal with Survival so interacting/dealing with them is the same as dealing with Survival.
This is where I really knew that we aren't playing the same format. This is just a wrong statement, through and through. Out of all the various types of removal, enchantment removal is by far the hardest to find, this format is no exception. Enchantments (keeping lands out of this, who are at times even easier to remove) are the most difficult cards to deal with, especially ones that hit the board as early as t2. Saying that an artifact Panoptic Mirror and an artifact creature Metalworker are just as hard to deal with is simply dishonest. This isn't coming from a group hug environment player, I consider my play group pretty cutthroat and capable, they all run removal spells, but it's very hard to wedge in the situational enchantment removals (most of them).The worse part is yet to come still, the card gets less attractive to remove the more turns pass. Players are forced to deal with the actual threats it brings and often prefer to wait out the storm instead of dealing with the card, because it has already served its purpose. In short, players don't feel any gratification from the removal of Survival of the Fittest, it's already done its job and then some, it's even able to get a few activations on the stack of most removal spells aimed at it. Why even bother?
Again you are taking my points out of context. The comparison was between both Mirror and worker to Survival, and the cards that interact with all three. Metalworker is a creature and is the easiest permanent to deal with, paired that with artifact and the list of cards that destroy is too lengthy to post. Mirror is an artifact and there are many ways to control artifacts in EDH, and for every card that says destroy in only artifacts there is a card that destroys only enchantments, which brings us to Survival, and the the multitudes of cards that destroy them. I am not making a dies to removal argument, only that your perception is skewed to suit your point. Cards, like Naturalize, Disenchant, Kroshan Grip, and all of their like are all reasonable cards that answer all three of the cards in question. So yes Mirror is not any more difficult to interact with than Survival, or Metalworker.
Many cards are easily abused and according to RC's banned list philosophy Survival doesn't fit any of those categories, and I agree with the RC on this. Is Survival powerful and if left unchecked easily abused and capable of propelling a player to victory, sure. But then again so are many other cards.
Now, this is a statement made by the RC that I haven't seen. It would be great if you can find a link for it. Survival is indeed powerful, but I honestly can't really name cards of the top of my head, which warp a game so fast, repeatably tutor for creatures for both the GY and hand in Green and are extremely hard to deal with, working with such a small investment.
Again your taking my points out of text. I never said anything about a RC statement. Only that the RC evaluates cards worthy for banning based on several categories, and that Survival does not fit into any of them right noe.
About the worst thing Survival has going for it is that it can create repetitive game play from game to game. That is to say that a deck looking to abuse Survival will play the same way each game that its owner plays it, and that is hardly a reason to ban a card. If you want Survival banned you should present a better argument for its banning other than the half brained, poorly thought out, cherry picked examples you presented.
At the very least you agree that it creates identical games and ruins the feeling of a singleton environment. After this, however, I disagree with you. First of all, this is very important, the card doesn't need a deck build around it to work. It's exactly the opposite to that! Even Birthing Pod requires a lot more though then Survival. You just have to play creatures, which you often already do in the first place and with Survival you get to have access to them early. Survival of the Fittest is a toolbox all by its own, which I find oppressive and quite powerful, at least worthy of a check by the RC.
I would agree that Survival is a toolbox kind of card and the box is only as good as the tools in it, and if so desired, the owner of the box can play out the majority of their games in similar fashion with the exact same end plan using the same tools every game, if their opponents let them do so. I don't find this kind of deck building or game play fun so I choose to make and play different decks, however it doesn't take away any fun from my experience. So is it the box's fault for carrying the tools?, is it the fault of the tools for being efficient?, or is it the owner of the box who is at fault for the tools they include in the box and the manner in which they use the tools and the box. You seem to subscribe to the "it is the box's fault". To my knowledge the RC has not made any statements about banning cards because they are a toolbox type of card. And comparing Survival (toolbox) to Metalworker (fast mana), and Mirror (imbalanced power/cost ratio) was your idea.
On the issue of power level as ban list criteria, what defines it? A card like Deadeye Navigator might not meet a competitive players criteria for a broken card, but it might for a casual player. The reverse is true for a card like Hermit Druid, so you'll still have people arguing inconsistency. Different people have different definitions of broken, and the argument of Survival of the Fittest more than proves that.
This is why there are house bans. If you ban every card that a casual player can't deal with/doesn't like in their games, the ban list would be massive. The house ban rule is to help casual players fix their play groups, but how about more competitive groups?
You missed my edit (stupid phone submitted before I was finished messing with the post) ;P
You already know my feelings on competitive groups and house bans. I also believe that the ban list should try to represent both groups to a degree, but like I said, broken is subjective. There are people who run Hermit Druid to self mill while running basics, so why one group over the other.
I think the ban list should be at least a little longer, but I also don't want it to be obscenely long.
On the issue of power level as ban list criteria, what defines it? A card like Deadeye Navigator might not meet a competitive players criteria for a broken card, but it might for a casual player. The reverse is true for a card like Hermit Druid, so you'll still have people arguing inconsistency. Different people have different definitions of broken, and the argument of Survival of the Fittest more than proves that.
This is why there are house bans. If you ban every card that a casual player can't deal with/doesn't like in their games, the ban list would be massive. The house ban rule is to help casual players fix their play groups, but how about more competitive groups?
You missed my edit (stupid phone submitted before I was finished messing with the post) ;P
You already know my feelings on competitive groups and house bans. I also believe that the ban list should try to represent both groups to a degree, but like I said, broken is subjective. There are people who run Hermit Druid to self mill while running basics, so why one group over the other.
I think the ban list should be at least a little longer, but I also don't want it to be obscenely long.
This is why banning enablers is brought up so much and is a good idea. By banning enablers, building a deck entirely to rely on 1 card (that is not the commander) is pretty much impossible. You'd have to wait many turns to get enough mana to cast expensive tutors for hermit druid. Then you can re-evaluate other powerful cards (ie look at them with respect to how the format plays).
The resistance to banning enablers is actually surprising to me. I thought sol ring was cool for maybe 2 days, and then I realised that whoever drew it first would win (in a 1v1 - I mostly played 1v1s when I first started out in EDH). Fast tutors are fun when you search for answers, but then you could run card draw or more answers. I think the main thing that surprises me is that enablers are very uninteresting. Tutoring for whatever card you want gets dull once you know which cards to go for and when, and fast mana is blatantly unfair (which is why it requires the entire table to gang up against you when you play it).
Power level of combo cards is typically measured by what turn they kill. Smashing the consistency of these hard, dedicated decks will lower the power level of these cards by lowering the consistency (meaning an on-average later combo).
By this criteria, you can approach cards more objectively. Tooth and nail wins at 9 mana whereas panoptic mirror can win at 5. Maybe that is enough to have the mirror banned and tooth and nail not banned. Who knows. At least you are arguing something rather than saying things about banned cards that you can say about unbanned cards or vice versa. That's most of what I've seen in arguments about banning/unbanning cards.
You can't really be suggesting boiling down the ban list to how much mana it takes to win, right? I know that was an example, but my point is if you don't have a bunch of these "criteria" (wins with less than 7 mana to randomly pick something) you won't hit the offending cards. And when you add criteria you get inconsistencies.
If what you want is Protean Hulk is banned because it does X, and Tooth and Nail does not do X, so it remains legal the cards are too nuanced to do so effectively. Maybe I am wrong but I have yet to see anything close to a list that accomplished that goal and catches the worst cards without axing way too many.
If you start working on one let me know, I would love to be part of the process.
Someone mentioned that it simply fetched answers. Yes, that's right. I don't know how that makes it any less oppressive, since whatever strategy you choose, the person with Survival will manage to counteract it. Also, you seem to forget that more often then not, Greens answer cards are also threats on their own, many of which are capable of winning the game by simply swinging. Due to recent printing and the huge power spike Green received in the past 4-5 years, I believe that Survival of the Fittest has to be tested by the RC and decided if it's worth banning. A potential ban to the card, could possibly spare other green "staples" from getting banned, since their enabler is gone, people would see less of them and they would be a fair bit easier to deal with.
You seem to have an issue with any card that does something counter to what you are trying to accomplish. Yes cards that tutor for multiple answers are powerful. With SotF these answers have two costs: Discarding a creatures AND paying the normal amount. This is hardly oppressive. The RC plays with cards all the time, they don't do dedicated testing to see "if it's worth banning". Saying that this ban will stop other green staples from getting banned is just inaccurate. If a card is getting banned, that's that. Banning demonic tutor is not stopping any black cards from being banned.
If people are sick of reading about stuff just stop taking part. You have 100% control over what you read. Simic Ascendancy isn't going to get banned just because you didn't tell someone to shut up on the internet.
I would agree that Survival is a toolbox kind of card and the box is only as good as the tools in it, and if so desired, the owner of the box can play out the majority of their games in similar fashion with the exact same end plan using the same tools every game. So is it the box's fault for carrying the tools?, it the fault of the tools for being efficient?, or is it the owner of the box who is at fault for the tools they include in the box and the manner in which they use the tools and the box. You seem to subscribe to the "it is the box's fault". To my knowledge the RC has not made any statements about banning cards because they are a toolbox type of card.
Quite often, the RC bans enablers. Cards that hasten, or easily allow for advantage to be gained, without a real drawback, efficiently. Survival of the Fittest is an enabler/toolbox card. While I do agree that other enablers also have to be, at the very least, re-checked by the RC, I believe that Survival is currently the biggest offender. Due to an unfortunate combination of: low casting cost; low activation cost; easy usage, with little to no actual deck building around the card; hard to remove and often futile to remove it; no restriction on the number of activations, what so ever.
Now, I want to make it perfectly clear. I'm NOT saying that all of the cards listed are equal to Survival of the Fittest, some are obviously busted and should stay where they are. However, all of these cards are, in a vacum, enablers. Meaning that if the cards they enable aren't strong/unfair/broken... w/e, the cards themselves also aren't. Primeval Titan is a great example. It too can be considered fair, if it grabbed basic lands. I can assure you, that it wasn't going to receive a ban if that was case, although it would still be extremely strong. However, it acts as an enabler that warped the game around who controlled it. I was here when the discussions were heating up about this card and I talked to people who swore the card will never be banned. It was banned and it was a late call in my mind. Survival of the Fittest feels the same, it allows its controller to search for the right answer for any situation, because currently Green can do that, answer pretty much anything.
Someone mentioned that it simply fetched answers. Yes, that's right. I don't know how that makes it any less oppressive, since whatever strategy you choose, the person with Survival will manage to counteract it. Also, you seem to forget that more often then not, Greens answer cards are also threats on their own, many of which are capable of winning the game by simply swinging. Due to recent printing and the huge power spike Green received in the past 4-5 years, I believe that Survival of the Fittest has to be tested by the RC and decided if it's worth banning. A potential ban to the card, could possibly spare other green "staples" from getting banned, since their enabler is gone, people would see less of them and they would be a fair bit easier to deal with.
Your example of Primeval Titan is flawed because it does not grab basics it gets any land, and it was banned because every player either played it or had a plan to get it from those who did. This fits the definition of repetitive game play...every player with the same objective, clone, steal, reanimate, cast PT, PT enable nothing other than ensuring each game was fought over the same card. Survival had nothing to do with the PT, and honestly the RC was to slow in banning the card.
So what does Survival enable then? The cards you listed on the banned list all enable a specific thing, fast mana, repetitive game play, power/cost imbalance, or poor interaction with the format. If players are using Survival to get answers how does this qualify for a ban.
And to be clear Survival does not enable repetitive game play like Primeval Titan did or Recurring Nightmare does, where once in play there is little to zero motivation to anything other that clone/activate.
Please stop saying "just remove survival and it'll stop causing problems". The fact that a 2-mana enchantment demands removal should tip you off to the fact that maybe it's a little too good. Plus, if you clutter your deck with cheap spot removal, then you just die to the other players because they don't waste their time killing the problem permanents, and if you don't clutter your deck with spot removal then you will definitely have many times where you will not be able to instantly kill problematic cards like survival.
LOTS of cards costing from 1 to 10 require answers if you don't want to lose. Yes survival is one of them. Having answers for stuff is not "clutter", its being a good enough deck builder to address a known issue. Spot removal is underplayed, calls for bans on stuff people don't want to answer is overplayed.
How many cards under 3 mana demand that kind of attention?
How often are you going to actually draw into your spot removal?
If you draw into your spot removal often enough, how much spot removal are you running and how do you plan on beating your opponents when they aren't wasting their time 1-for-1'ing other people's things?
How many cards under 3 mana demand that kind of attention?
I have never made a comprehensive list. I would estimate a dozen. What difference does that make? SotF is not circumventing costs, so they are letting you know what they plan on playing. Generate a plan to stop them.
How often are you going to actually draw into your spot removal?
Almost every game. If all 4 people have some, important items get answered. Then something does not and someone wins.
If you draw into your spot removal often enough, how much spot removal are you running and how do you plan on beating your opponents when they aren't wasting their time 1-for-1'ing other people's things?
I beat them because I used cheap removal when it was relevant and then did my own thing, working around whatever they had.
People honestly need to stop thinking spot removal is bad. If you have a threat out, and so does someone else sweepers rule, right?
If people are sick of reading about stuff just stop taking part. You have 100% control over what you read. Simic Ascendancy isn't going to get banned just because you didn't tell someone to shut up on the internet.
I understand that survival is powerful, but I think what it does in EDH often falls within fair use.
Survival is a value engine for it's controller, but because it requires you to discard a creature to search for one; it doesn't generate raw value. Instead, what it does is add value to the creature cards you already have. As previously mentioned there is a tension between keeping creatures to pitch and playing the cards you tutor for.
Survival can be used fairly:
1. Using it to cash in a worthless, low cmc creature for something you can actually play that make an impact. EX: Discarding Birds of Paradise for Avenger of Zendikar
2. Discarding a creature to find a niche answer card. EX: Pitching Wood Elves to find Duplicant. [Answers are fair as is tutoring for them. You can't slam a big play and expect someone not to try and kill it.]
It can also be abused:
1. Using Survival 4+ times in one turn as a repeatable Entomb to just fill up the GY before mass reanimation. Note that GGG for 3 creatures in the GY has the same mana per cards in yard ratio as Buried Alive.
2. Using it to tutor for a 2 card creature combo. Usually most tutors can only find 1 creature. Being able to go from a blah hand to a winning one is very nice. However, there are tutors that find multiple creatures like Tooth and Nail, Weird Harvest, or Congregation at Dawn that can also be used to strait up find an 'I win' combo.
I see much more of the fair use of Survival then I see abuse of it, so I don't think it needs to be banned, but I'm just going off my narrow view of the larger commander meta.
One thing to note: Survival is a card that comes up pretty frequently in discussion of the Legacy banlist as a card that should be unbanned. Survival was banned in Legacy back in 2010 mostly due to it's interaction with Vengevine and potential combos with Necrotic Ooze. However, many Legacy players feel like the card can and should be unbanned due to the large number of hosers/answers that have been printed since then.
By this criteria, you can approach cards more objectively. Tooth and nail wins at 9 mana whereas panoptic mirror can win at 5. Maybe that is enough to have the mirror banned and tooth and nail not banned. Who knows. At least you are arguing something rather than saying things about banned cards that you can say about unbanned cards or vice versa. That's most of what I've seen in arguments about banning/unbanning cards.
You can't really be suggesting boiling down the ban list to how much mana it takes to win, right? I know that was an example, but my point is if you don't have a bunch of these "criteria" (wins with less than 7 mana to randomly pick something) you won't hit the offending cards. And when you add criteria you get inconsistencies.
If what you want is Protean Hulk is banned because it does X, and Tooth and Nail does not do X, so it remains legal the cards are too nuanced to do so effectively. Maybe I am wrong but I have yet to see anything close to a list that accomplished that goal and catches the worst cards without axing way too many.
If you start working on one let me know, I would love to be part of the process.
Yes, it was an example, and probably the biggest issue with it is that it doesn't capture why panoptic mirror is banned in the first place. Because of that, all we are comparing is mana cost and the ability to win the game with them on the spot. There's much more to say about the cards, but that can be left for its own discussion. In any case, I am definitely not saying that mana cost of winning spells should be what determines if a card should be banned or not.
Why wouldn't you hit the offending cards? These kinds of threads are where people will bring up arguments about cards that should be banned, and then they can be analyzed. You can also find other cards by finding similar cards and comparing the differences. If you run boarderline cards in your decks and ask other people to do so as well, you can get a feel for how the card performs. You can't just make a complete ban list from scratch in a small amount of time, so it would be fine if it took a while to flesh it out.
I wasn't planning on working on one, but I'll let you know if I do.
Survival is a card that will likely be looked at with some frequency, if only because players like us constantly bring it up. There is no doubt that it's a powerful card so you will have to risk it eventually getting banned. The only solace is that it's an old card and hasn't been banned yet.
At the same time though, there have been relatively no new additions that break survival in the last few years. This means that we haven't been getting new reasons to consider banning it so I would say its relatively safe at the moment because there hasn't really been any new compelling reason to consider banning it that didn't exist in the past.
As it stands, my own guess is that Tooth and Nail is more likely to catch a ban as it stands than survival is but that's just because T&N often assembles its combo for less mana and with less intricacy.
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I have officially moved to MTGNexus. I just wanted to let people know as my response time to salvation decks being bumped is very hit or miss.
Why wouldn't you hit the offending cards? These kinds of threads are where people will bring up arguments about cards that should be banned, and then they can be analyzed. You can also find other cards by finding similar cards and comparing the differences. If you run boarderline cards in your decks and ask other people to do so as well, you can get a feel for how the card performs. You can't just make a complete ban list from scratch in a small amount of time, so it would be fine if it took a while to flesh it out.
I was tying to say that any criteria that is as definitive as you were proposing is either way to lax, to keep the ban list small, or hits way too many "medium" powered cards because it is overly aggressive to get all the offenders.
As always I appreciate a thoughtful debate. I don't think power level is the kind of thing that can be quantified to improve the ban list, but I have been wrong before
If people are sick of reading about stuff just stop taking part. You have 100% control over what you read. Simic Ascendancy isn't going to get banned just because you didn't tell someone to shut up on the internet.
Why wouldn't you hit the offending cards? These kinds of threads are where people will bring up arguments about cards that should be banned, and then they can be analyzed. You can also find other cards by finding similar cards and comparing the differences. If you run boarderline cards in your decks and ask other people to do so as well, you can get a feel for how the card performs. You can't just make a complete ban list from scratch in a small amount of time, so it would be fine if it took a while to flesh it out.
I was tying to say that any criteria that is as definitive as you were proposing is either way to lax, to keep the ban list small, or hits way too many "medium" powered cards because it is overly aggressive to get all the offenders.
As always I appreciate a thoughtful debate. I don't think power level is the kind of thing that can be quantified to improve the ban list, but I have been wrong before
It would take a lot of work but it can be done (quantification of power level). Data science PhD thesis levels of work probably lol.
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"I think EDH would be more fun for the majority of participants if players just showed eachother their decks rather than actually playing games out."
If people are sick of reading about stuff just stop taking part. You have 100% control over what you read. Simic Ascendancy isn't going to get banned just because you didn't tell someone to shut up on the internet.
That really sounds like you enjoy targeted LD and some cards that have VERY narrow answers. Luckily I think anything that gets considered for an unban would fall outside this list. Why would you want those cards off?
If people are sick of reading about stuff just stop taking part. You have 100% control over what you read. Simic Ascendancy isn't going to get banned just because you didn't tell someone to shut up on the internet.
Sundering - because he only targets basics and only one of each type with each hit so its not like he can really harass any one player
Primordial - because I don't think he is even that good of a card.
Upheaval because it is everyone it is sorcery speed and it is 6 mana.
Sway of the Stars - because it is isn't nearly world fire and it costs like 10 mana
Nightmares - I just don't see it as that broken but this is probably the one I could see reasons for keeping.
Emrakul - Proliferation of Board wipes in the format render cards like him and Progenitus rather irrelevant.
I would go out on a limb and guess you have not played against most of theses cards. The Titans easily earned their spots, Upheaveal and Sway just troll people, and those others have very narrow answers.
If people are sick of reading about stuff just stop taking part. You have 100% control over what you read. Simic Ascendancy isn't going to get banned just because you didn't tell someone to shut up on the internet.
Primordial isn't a Titan I agree that card should be banned
Also why would you need to waste time banning cards that from your own point exist only to troll. Those kinds of cards get weeded out by people using them and then the people they play with telling them to stop. Upheaval is also a great tempo card if used correctly just like something like Devastation Tide or in very specifically designed decks built around putting more than one land into play.
Also I find the whole "you probably haven't played against these dumb cards therefore they should be banned" strand of logic rather silly, I played in a game with a mono-red deck and the Zedruu player gifted me, Celestial Dawn am I going to ask for either of those cards to be banned?
Upheaval and Sway of the Stars are specifically banned because of the fact that you can float mana into casting them and replay your stuff while the rest of the table is reset to zero. In a multiplayer environment, these cards are too powerful and just succeed at trolling a table.
Cards like Emrakul, the Aeons Torn, Sundering Titan, and Sylvan Primordial are all repetitive resource denial cards that have significant upside in addition to wrecking opponent's mana bases and ability to play the game. I think the RC is more likely to ban resource denial cards that give players so much other incentive to want to run them.
Recurring Nightmare is banned because it is a source of recursion that is so difficult to interact with due to the fact that you return it to your hand to activate. Having a repeatable effect that is so hard to interact with is inherently too powerful. I love Recurring Nightmare, but I fear that games would devolve quickly once a person got one going.
If that is the reason then Obliterate should be on the list.
I don't understand Sway even less because yes you can float even more than the 10 mana to cast it as you do, but what you have following its effect is not in your control.
I think the actual problem with Sway the stars is the set life total to 7 bit... they have been trying to ban cards that set people to low life totals we were playing a game but in the end it didn't matter at all except for what happens after this spell. However Magister sphinx and sorin are unbanned but I think it is the setting of everyone to that low life that is the problem, Mag sphinx is one of those cards that gets cloned if it hits the field. It is a card that gets house banned a lot. not suggesting it should be banned, just pointing out it wreaks the starting at 40 life total point of the format.
The arguments for banning SotF were pretty convincing, I think the only thing that is preventing it being banned is the fact it only pitches and tutors creatures and they are much more concerned about non creature spells. I krosan griped the last one I saw my opponent made the mistake of not using it immediately.
Sundering titan discourages the use of basic lands they want the opposite.
Prime time was repeatative cast PT get urbog and Coffers all of the mana. the format was warped around him.... and the same happend to Sylvan (I have to remind everyone you can Entomb + Exhume Sylvan for an instant turn 2 win I have had a jarad deck get the double E opener but thankfully can only get a Giant Adephage.
Speaking of warped format...I like the card but Cyclonic rift (more so than Prophet) seems to be warping the format atm. I don't think its power is that high its just a... "did your draw rift?"... "well my only way out of this is rift". I feel like Deadeye has faded in popularity Prophet is strong but no stronger than the others of its type. Rift is a much more unique effect that is one of those whatever happened until the rift didn't matter cards. non blue decks can't really interact with it, Red can fork it and that's it.
This is why there are house bans. If you ban every card that a casual player can't deal with/doesn't like in their games, the ban list would be massive. The house ban rule is to help casual players fix their play groups, but how about more competitive groups?
BBB Two Hundred Zombies BBB
Duel Commander
WR Tajic, Wrath of the Manlands RW
BGW Doran Destruction WGB
Commander
GUB Mimeoplasm, Screw Politics BUG
BR Mogis, God of Slaughter RB
RGW Marath, Ramp and Removal WGR
WUBRG Karona, Jank God GRBUW
Your taking my points out of context. Sure Survival can fuel other strategies like graveyard/recursion but i never said that it could not do so. Survival is not the enabler that Gifts Ungiven is, Survival is just a powerful card that works well with the most prevalent card type (creature) and fuels an ever growing resource (graveyard). And yes sometimes discarding a creature to get an Acidic Slime can be a draw back because you don't have another creature in your hand to activate Survival and you need to cast the Slime. We can debate games states until we are blue in the face. My point was that there is a cost to activating Survival and that cost is an important one. And yes you can build a deck to minimize the drawback or even make the drawback an advantage, but there are costs that along with that kind of deck building, costs which I am sure you are aware of and don't need to be discussed here.
Survival does not work unless you discard a card, it is pretty simple. Metalworker has no such constraint although its effectiveness diminishes over time, and after the initial imprint Mirror doesn't either. This is how Mirror has a power level/mana cost imbalance.
Again you are taking my points out of context. The comparison was between both Mirror and worker to Survival, and the cards that interact with all three. Metalworker is a creature and is the easiest permanent to deal with, paired that with artifact and the list of cards that destroy is too lengthy to post. Mirror is an artifact and there are many ways to control artifacts in EDH, and for every card that says destroy in only artifacts there is a card that destroys only enchantments, which brings us to Survival, and the the multitudes of cards that destroy them. I am not making a dies to removal argument, only that your perception is skewed to suit your point. Cards, like Naturalize, Disenchant, Kroshan Grip, and all of their like are all reasonable cards that answer all three of the cards in question. So yes Mirror is not any more difficult to interact with than Survival, or Metalworker.
Again your taking my points out of text. I never said anything about a RC statement. Only that the RC evaluates cards worthy for banning based on several categories, and that Survival does not fit into any of them right noe.
I would agree that Survival is a toolbox kind of card and the box is only as good as the tools in it, and if so desired, the owner of the box can play out the majority of their games in similar fashion with the exact same end plan using the same tools every game, if their opponents let them do so. I don't find this kind of deck building or game play fun so I choose to make and play different decks, however it doesn't take away any fun from my experience. So is it the box's fault for carrying the tools?, is it the fault of the tools for being efficient?, or is it the owner of the box who is at fault for the tools they include in the box and the manner in which they use the tools and the box. You seem to subscribe to the "it is the box's fault". To my knowledge the RC has not made any statements about banning cards because they are a toolbox type of card. And comparing Survival (toolbox) to Metalworker (fast mana), and Mirror (imbalanced power/cost ratio) was your idea.
You missed my edit (stupid phone submitted before I was finished messing with the post) ;P
You already know my feelings on competitive groups and house bans. I also believe that the ban list should try to represent both groups to a degree, but like I said, broken is subjective. There are people who run Hermit Druid to self mill while running basics, so why one group over the other.
I think the ban list should be at least a little longer, but I also don't want it to be obscenely long.
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This is why banning enablers is brought up so much and is a good idea. By banning enablers, building a deck entirely to rely on 1 card (that is not the commander) is pretty much impossible. You'd have to wait many turns to get enough mana to cast expensive tutors for hermit druid. Then you can re-evaluate other powerful cards (ie look at them with respect to how the format plays).
The resistance to banning enablers is actually surprising to me. I thought sol ring was cool for maybe 2 days, and then I realised that whoever drew it first would win (in a 1v1 - I mostly played 1v1s when I first started out in EDH). Fast tutors are fun when you search for answers, but then you could run card draw or more answers. I think the main thing that surprises me is that enablers are very uninteresting. Tutoring for whatever card you want gets dull once you know which cards to go for and when, and fast mana is blatantly unfair (which is why it requires the entire table to gang up against you when you play it).
Power level of combo cards is typically measured by what turn they kill. Smashing the consistency of these hard, dedicated decks will lower the power level of these cards by lowering the consistency (meaning an on-average later combo).
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If what you want is Protean Hulk is banned because it does X, and Tooth and Nail does not do X, so it remains legal the cards are too nuanced to do so effectively. Maybe I am wrong but I have yet to see anything close to a list that accomplished that goal and catches the worst cards without axing way too many.
If you start working on one let me know, I would love to be part of the process.
You seem to have an issue with any card that does something counter to what you are trying to accomplish. Yes cards that tutor for multiple answers are powerful. With SotF these answers have two costs: Discarding a creatures AND paying the normal amount. This is hardly oppressive. The RC plays with cards all the time, they don't do dedicated testing to see "if it's worth banning". Saying that this ban will stop other green staples from getting banned is just inaccurate. If a card is getting banned, that's that. Banning demonic tutor is not stopping any black cards from being banned.
Your example of Primeval Titan is flawed because it does not grab basics it gets any land, and it was banned because every player either played it or had a plan to get it from those who did. This fits the definition of repetitive game play...every player with the same objective, clone, steal, reanimate, cast PT, PT enable nothing other than ensuring each game was fought over the same card. Survival had nothing to do with the PT, and honestly the RC was to slow in banning the card.
So what does Survival enable then? The cards you listed on the banned list all enable a specific thing, fast mana, repetitive game play, power/cost imbalance, or poor interaction with the format. If players are using Survival to get answers how does this qualify for a ban.
And to be clear Survival does not enable repetitive game play like Primeval Titan did or Recurring Nightmare does, where once in play there is little to zero motivation to anything other that clone/activate.
How many cards under 3 mana demand that kind of attention?
How often are you going to actually draw into your spot removal?
If you draw into your spot removal often enough, how much spot removal are you running and how do you plan on beating your opponents when they aren't wasting their time 1-for-1'ing other people's things?
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Almost every game. If all 4 people have some, important items get answered. Then something does not and someone wins.
I beat them because I used cheap removal when it was relevant and then did my own thing, working around whatever they had.
People honestly need to stop thinking spot removal is bad. If you have a threat out, and so does someone else sweepers rule, right?
Survival is a value engine for it's controller, but because it requires you to discard a creature to search for one; it doesn't generate raw value. Instead, what it does is add value to the creature cards you already have. As previously mentioned there is a tension between keeping creatures to pitch and playing the cards you tutor for.
Survival can be used fairly:
1. Using it to cash in a worthless, low cmc creature for something you can actually play that make an impact. EX: Discarding Birds of Paradise for Avenger of Zendikar
2. Discarding a creature to find a niche answer card. EX: Pitching Wood Elves to find Duplicant. [Answers are fair as is tutoring for them. You can't slam a big play and expect someone not to try and kill it.]
It can also be abused:
1. Using Survival 4+ times in one turn as a repeatable Entomb to just fill up the GY before mass reanimation. Note that GGG for 3 creatures in the GY has the same mana per cards in yard ratio as Buried Alive.
2. Using it to tutor for a 2 card creature combo. Usually most tutors can only find 1 creature. Being able to go from a blah hand to a winning one is very nice. However, there are tutors that find multiple creatures like Tooth and Nail, Weird Harvest, or Congregation at Dawn that can also be used to strait up find an 'I win' combo.
I see much more of the fair use of Survival then I see abuse of it, so I don't think it needs to be banned, but I'm just going off my narrow view of the larger commander meta.
One thing to note: Survival is a card that comes up pretty frequently in discussion of the Legacy banlist as a card that should be unbanned. Survival was banned in Legacy back in 2010 mostly due to it's interaction with Vengevine and potential combos with Necrotic Ooze. However, many Legacy players feel like the card can and should be unbanned due to the large number of hosers/answers that have been printed since then.
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Yes, it was an example, and probably the biggest issue with it is that it doesn't capture why panoptic mirror is banned in the first place. Because of that, all we are comparing is mana cost and the ability to win the game with them on the spot. There's much more to say about the cards, but that can be left for its own discussion. In any case, I am definitely not saying that mana cost of winning spells should be what determines if a card should be banned or not.
Why wouldn't you hit the offending cards? These kinds of threads are where people will bring up arguments about cards that should be banned, and then they can be analyzed. You can also find other cards by finding similar cards and comparing the differences. If you run boarderline cards in your decks and ask other people to do so as well, you can get a feel for how the card performs. You can't just make a complete ban list from scratch in a small amount of time, so it would be fine if it took a while to flesh it out.
I wasn't planning on working on one, but I'll let you know if I do.
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As it stands, my own guess is that Tooth and Nail is more likely to catch a ban as it stands than survival is but that's just because T&N often assembles its combo for less mana and with less intricacy.
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As always I appreciate a thoughtful debate. I don't think power level is the kind of thing that can be quantified to improve the ban list, but I have been wrong before
It would take a lot of work but it can be done (quantification of power level). Data science PhD thesis levels of work probably lol.
If I had a vote
Sundering
Primordial
Upheaval
Sway
Nightmares
Emrakul
Would be off the list.
Primordial - because I don't think he is even that good of a card.
Upheaval because it is everyone it is sorcery speed and it is 6 mana.
Sway of the Stars - because it is isn't nearly world fire and it costs like 10 mana
Nightmares - I just don't see it as that broken but this is probably the one I could see reasons for keeping.
Emrakul - Proliferation of Board wipes in the format render cards like him and Progenitus rather irrelevant.
Also why would you need to waste time banning cards that from your own point exist only to troll. Those kinds of cards get weeded out by people using them and then the people they play with telling them to stop. Upheaval is also a great tempo card if used correctly just like something like Devastation Tide or in very specifically designed decks built around putting more than one land into play.
Also I find the whole "you probably haven't played against these dumb cards therefore they should be banned" strand of logic rather silly, I played in a game with a mono-red deck and the Zedruu player gifted me, Celestial Dawn am I going to ask for either of those cards to be banned?
Cards like Emrakul, the Aeons Torn, Sundering Titan, and Sylvan Primordial are all repetitive resource denial cards that have significant upside in addition to wrecking opponent's mana bases and ability to play the game. I think the RC is more likely to ban resource denial cards that give players so much other incentive to want to run them.
Recurring Nightmare is banned because it is a source of recursion that is so difficult to interact with due to the fact that you return it to your hand to activate. Having a repeatable effect that is so hard to interact with is inherently too powerful. I love Recurring Nightmare, but I fear that games would devolve quickly once a person got one going.
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I don't understand Sway even less because yes you can float even more than the 10 mana to cast it as you do, but what you have following its effect is not in your control.
The arguments for banning SotF were pretty convincing, I think the only thing that is preventing it being banned is the fact it only pitches and tutors creatures and they are much more concerned about non creature spells. I krosan griped the last one I saw my opponent made the mistake of not using it immediately.
Sundering titan discourages the use of basic lands they want the opposite.
Prime time was repeatative cast PT get urbog and Coffers all of the mana. the format was warped around him.... and the same happend to Sylvan (I have to remind everyone you can Entomb + Exhume Sylvan for an instant turn 2 win I have had a jarad deck get the double E opener but thankfully can only get a Giant Adephage.
Speaking of warped format...I like the card but Cyclonic rift (more so than Prophet) seems to be warping the format atm. I don't think its power is that high its just a... "did your draw rift?"... "well my only way out of this is rift". I feel like Deadeye has faded in popularity Prophet is strong but no stronger than the others of its type. Rift is a much more unique effect that is one of those whatever happened until the rift didn't matter cards. non blue decks can't really interact with it, Red can fork it and that's it.
Is Cyclonic rift's use still healthy?
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