Yeah see, the thing is that your argument goes both ways. With no banlist, any fluid-changing group (Like mine) would also run into the issue of having a problem with house bans. House unbans are actually easier as you can just tell folks new to your LGS "Hey, welcome, before we get started, we allow cards X, Y and Z. Just so you know." The new player doesn't immediately have to change decks to avoid issues during the game. With House Bans, however, you get stuff like "I play X" "HEY, That's banned here! It's okay for now but next time change it please." "Uh, okay..." And alterations MUST be made if you want to continue in a playgroup.
Besides, most of the cards on the banlist should probably not come off anyway. There's a few that could be interesting (I'm in favor of unbanning Protean Hulk and Braids, and giving Recurring Nightmare and Panoptic Mirror a trial), but most sits well where they are right now.
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My Commander decks:
Chandra, Torch of Defiance - Oops! All Chandras. Prime Speaker Zegana - Draw for Power. Pir & Toothy - Counterpalooza. Arcades, the Strategist - Another Brick in the Wall. Zacama, Primal Calamity - Calamity of Double Mana. Edgar Markov - Vampires Don't Die. Child of Alara - Dreamcrusher.
My group is thinking very seriously about starting up a points based banlist like er, Canadian Highlander or whatever it's called, but every time I think about it I cringe at the idea of having to explain it to random folks we play with at shops.
After playing EDH for a long while, I'm not sure it'd be very fun without some kind of banlist -- pick up games would be even more egregious than they already are. Currently your odds of having a good game with randoms are probably right about 50/50 (at least in my experience, with my 75% decks). Without the banlist I suspect those chances would drop to nothing in short order.
There is something beautiful about how the current list subtly guides most folks away from utter degeneracy, but I do think it could stand to be a little heavier handed in some instances (mirage tutors + sol ring + grim monolith + mana vault + mana crypt + tooth & nail, and a few other really annoying cards).
Yeah see, the thing is that your argument goes both ways. With no banlist, any fluid-changing group (Like mine) would also run into the issue of having a problem with house bans. House unbans are actually easier as you can just tell folks new to your LGS "Hey, welcome, before we get started, we allow cards X, Y and Z. Just so you know." The new player doesn't immediately have to change decks to avoid issues during the game. With House Bans, however, you get stuff like "I play X" "HEY, That's banned here! It's okay for now but next time change it please." "Uh, okay..." And alterations MUST be made if you want to continue in a playgroup.
Besides, most of the cards on the banlist should probably not come off anyway. There's a few that could be interesting (I'm in favor of unbanning Protean Hulk and Braids, and giving Recurring Nightmare and Panoptic Mirror a trial), but most sits well where they are right now.
Player policing doesn't have to take the form of a hard coded list of bans though. That's what created the current monstrosity of a list in the first place. "Please don't play your strong prison deck, no one is going to enjoy that right now" is the much better way of handling it.
Yes, and that can all be policed by the players. The banlist isn't needed.
Well then, why don't you tell your playgroup that and make a pile of house unbans? Let me know the (total lack of) results, kay?
My main playgroup is a constantly changing group of players at a store.
This is why the banlist is absolutely horrible. Now there are a few arbitrary bans that I can't get rid of. It doesn't stop unfun strategies at all, it doesn't make the format more fun, but now there are a bunch of cards that people can't play with.
The banlist is worse than nothing.
Just out of curiosity, what cards are on the banlist that you really want to play with?
You mentioned that the absence of a banlist would allow players to police themselves, but your situation doesn't seem ideal for that. You mentioned that you cannot unban cards because your playgroup constantly changes. How would the players be able to police themselves if the group is constantly changing? Even if you get 3 people together than have determined that they should in no way play Channel, what stops the 4th player from adhering to that if they aren't part of the "normal" group? Or, what about Strip Mine, Crucible of Worlds, and Fastbond to keep everyone off of lands?
It would seem that if you are in a scenario that allows for what are effectively custom bans (as a result of players policing themselves) then it also allows for custom unbans. If you can't do one, it seems like it would be difficult to do the other.
Even when we agree on cut throat decks for a particular edh game I can't play these cards, and those games are nothing but the most unfair things you can manage.
Basically even with the idea of player policing I still can't make these cards legal. I can always say "hey can you play a weaker deck", but "I have these banned cards" never goes over well.
Fastbond and balance have no place in this format. At. All. I really want the banned as a commander rule back so we could play with braids/rofellos/erayo again but as that's gone it's understandable that they are banned. Braids and erayo were stupid oppressive and Rof was ridiculous. I regularly stomped my playgroup with him by the 4th or 5th turn before he got the banhammer again. Granted that was when primetime was legal but it was still unfair.
I can see an argument that gifts be unbanned(not that I favour that line of discussion) because Intuition is around. Recurring Nightmare can probably come off and not be terrible - it's been kept up with as far as gy hate is concerned.
And sundering titan just played poorly with the vision of the format. Not that I minded it but it did leave a sour taste in a lot of players mouths. But I don't think it should be unbanned - especially if you play with a shifting group because of that bad taste.
I think it's a bit off base to complain that the existing banlist hurts your cutthroat EDH games because the decks you are playing with "still employ un-fun strategies and the banlist doesn't prevent that so it must be useless". The banlist wasn't designed for that and you know it. It's dishonest for you to pretend like the banlist is at fault for you playing a type of game that is outside the intended style.
Sure, the banlist is probably horrible for people that want to play cutthroat or competitive EDH; we've been over this before. The banlist is not horrible in and of itself though, which you'd like us to believe based on your anecdotal evidence, Carthage.
The solution for you, again, is to house ban or unban for your cutthroat group/games. The mainstream EDH banlist will never serve that type of play effectively.
Thesis statement: I don't think self-regulation is an adequate tool for playgroups. The argument that things are fine the way they are because a group can just houserule something is mere sophistry.
Argument 1: The social contract is hard to legislate.
Houserules prima facie work relatively well in two settings. Here I will argue that in neither of these situations can a custom banlist be made easily and concretely.
The first is in a small playgroup with, say, three to six people, all of which have relatively matching conceptions about what they want their games to look like. In this setting, players can have a reasonable discussion about what a card does to their games of Magic, why that is undesirable, and whether or not this warrants a ban. If one player has a radically different notion of what EDH should be, that player is likely going to be unhappy with the resolution that their playgroup makes, but on the other hand they probably shouldn't be playing together in the first place since somebody is bound to ruin somebody else's night anyway. Here, however, to have any concrete way of deciding what should and shouldn't be banned, the players have to work out beforehand what needs to happen for it to be banned. Must the decision be unanimous, or is it decided by democracy? If so, do all players' votes have equal weight, and what quota must be met to ban it? Does everyone who happens to be present get to vote, or just the core members of the group? As this gets more and more complicated, the playgroup starts playing less and less EDH and spends more and more time talking about playing EDH. I personally would hate to be in a playgroup where the rules are decided by majority opinion, for numerous reasons. Majority opinion changes all the time. Majority opinion is less likely to produce desirable results than authority opinion, when the authority is a qualified party without vested interests and doesn't make arbitrary decisions.
Speaking of authority, this brings me to the second setting in which custom bannings and rules are likely to work elegantly, which is in a tournament setting held by a shop. Since the shop is running the show, they can (assuming the event is not DCI-sanctioned) create their own banlist that is easily enforceable. Additionally, since a shop is a business, it is in their interest to create a banlist that satisfies the players and creates enjoyable experiences that make them want to come back. However, this too has complications that make me suspicious. The first is that a shopowner let his rule-setting power be interfered by the interests of the shop - in other words, he may decide to unban a certain card because he has many of them that he wants to sell. I would immediately be suspicious of a shop running a tournament with its own banlist (in any format) for this reason. The second reason is that the shopowner is undoubtedly a busy person, who may or may not even play Commander, and putting the onus on them to create a balanced format only eats more time out of their day.
In many other situations, like a large playgroup or a sanctioned tournament setting, having a balanced banlist is pretty necessary, as creating your own banlist becomes increasingly impossible.
Argument 2: Even if a suitable banlist can be made, the discrepancies between playgroups creates a negative experience.
The reasons for this are twofold. The first is that a player who is playing in an unfamiliar playgroup may be unable to play his deck of choice. You may say "She can just take the banned card out of her deck!" This, however, is often impractical. It may be that the banned card is central to her strategy, and that banning the card removes any real chance that player has at getting to do her thing. The banlist could also include several of the cards in her deck, for which there is no real replacement. Finally, the banned card could even be her commander. This also creates a negative experience when a player from a custom-banlist group goes to another group. He may now be dealing with all sorts of different decks, since they are tuned to a totally different meta. If I get together with my playgroup and decide to ban all the fast-mana (rocks which produce more mana than they cost and untap normally), then I will tune my deck to a slower pace, and forget about dealing with the faster decks. When I go to another meta and these fast decks are the norm, I will be totally unbalanced.
Additionally, it makes it very hard to have a meaningful discussion with people online about your deck when you play in a custom-banlist meta. Banning/unbanning one or two cards is maybe doable, but after that, the differences in what EDH looks like with my friends vs with other people is just too huge. You already see this a bit since there is a wide range of philosophical differences in playgroups - some are more competitive and end games on turns 3-6, some are more casual and games draw out for hours, and others walk a line somewhere in between. However, people, generally, stick to their own on the internet. It would be foolish for me to go into a casual player's thread and tear his deck apart from a competitive standpoint, since he and I don't have the same ends. On the other hand, when I want to talk to people online about how I can make a deck better, but everyone else is playing a game with a different card pool than I do, it gets very hard to have a conversation that leads anywhere.
I turn your attention now to a post made in this thread about a hundred pages ago, where user Jusstice touches on some themes that I have attempted to make more explicit.
It all comes down to conflict resolution. Maybe you've argued yourself into a hole where broken cards don't cause problems, but let's say hypothetically that you did have one. What would you do to solve it? What exactly is the role of the ban list, if any, in solving it?
The usefulness of the ban list is often cast against a group with practically limitless ability in conflict resolution. That is great for you if you live in a universe where everyone agrees. In that case, the only possible use of a ban list would be for the wise patrons of the format to protect everyone else from cards that they literally cannot pinpoint as reducing the quality of their games. Essentially, only the "accidentally unfun" category of SP, PT, and so forth. The only other legitimate criteria would arise from concerns outside the game, such as PBtE, Ante, Dexterity, draw games and such. Maybe cards that "interact badly with the rules of the format" would be banned, but more because, of course, everyone agrees that these cards don't make sense.
What about people whose conflict management skills aren't perfect? I think it's unfair to classify their conflict management skills as non-existent, just imperfect. Personally, I have seen a lot of people switch to a different deck because their first one was just playing over the top of everybody. In my eye, this is even extremely common to see. I've also seen a couple players meet up over a table at a card shop and come to the conclusion that they shouldn't be playing against each other, because every deck in one player's box just aren't well matched against the other's. Not even deck construction either, sometimes a skill disparity will lead to that resolution in a format like Standard. What I've never seen though is one player convince all the others that a given card is disruptive of the game, then watch the other players unsleeve that card in all their decks and substitute it for another one.
What I've seen quite often also is for one player to pick up a deck that is just better suited to interacting with another one. If a game needs more Control, then players will pick up a deck of theirs that's a little bit better at it. They find in-game resolutions to their conflict rather than resolutions outside the game. In EDH though, it just doesn't work because certain cards just allow people to play past one another.
That should be the role of the ban list, in my opinion. If one card, regardless of how often it's drawn, does nothing but polarize a game in a way where a group has to invoke their conflict resolution mechanisms outside the game, then that's a card that just needs to get banned in order for people to be able to play with one another. You can always say a card is fine until you break it, but I'd say that a card's broken if all you can do against it is try to persuade someone to stop using it. I don't really know what that looks like in every case, for sure. But I am pretty sure that the line is a lot nearer than where it has been drawn if so many people need to be reminded all the time of how great they should be at resolving conflicts in order to play this game.
I think it's a bit off base to complain that the existing banlist hurts your cutthroat EDH games because the decks you are playing with "still employ un-fun strategies and the banlist doesn't prevent that so it must be useless". The banlist wasn't designed for that and you know it. It's dishonest for you to pretend like the banlist is at fault for you playing a type of game that is outside the intended style.
Sure, the banlist is probably horrible for people that want to play cutthroat or competitive EDH; we've been over this before. The banlist is not horrible in and of itself though, which you'd like us to believe based on your anecdotal evidence, Carthage.
The solution for you, again, is to house ban or unban for your cutthroat group/games. The mainstream EDH banlist will never serve that type of play effectively.
The banlist does not help prevent people from ruining more classical edh games either. Fast mana, prison effects, and instant kills are easily available in all colors.
Rofellos( in 99 ), Gifts ungiven, braids( in 99 ), recurring nightmare are all no worse than many cards off the ban list right now in longer, fair games. So it's not like it isn't actively hurting deck construction for those longer games.
And I don't just play cut throat. This is another assumption I want people to stop making. People aren't just cut throat or just long games, most people are happy to switch up the level at which they play for more variety if they have the cards for it.
The first is in a small playgroup with, say, three to six people, all of which have relatively matching conceptions about what they want their games to look like. In this setting, players can have a reasonable discussion about what a card does to their games of Magic, why that is undesirable, and whether or not this warrants a ban. If one player has a radically different notion of what EDH should be, that player is likely going to be unhappy with the resolution that their playgroup makes, but on the other hand they probably shouldn't be playing together in the first place since somebody is bound to ruin somebody else's night anyway. Here, however, to have any concrete way of deciding what should and shouldn't be banned, the players have to work out beforehand what needs to happen for it to be banned. Must the decision be unanimous, or is it decided by democracy? If so, do all players' votes have equal weight, and what quota must be met to ban it? Does everyone who happens to be present get to vote, or just the core members of the group? As this gets more and more complicated, the playgroup starts playing less and less EDH and spends more and more time talking about playing EDH. I personally would hate to be in a playgroup where the rules are decided by majority opinion, for numerous reasons. Majority opinion changes all the time. Majority opinion is less likely to produce desirable results than authority opinion, when the authority is a qualified party without vested interests and doesn't make arbitrary decisions.
This is a bit silly. It's a bit of slippery slope, and a whole lot of awful resolution.
"What rules should make a card banned for a playgroup?"
"Let's let a group of people we've never met make all banning decisions and have that be set in stone!"
You also assume that people care that much about deck construction. This tends to only become the case after someone starts winning way to much or plays very lame effects like armageddon. They just play most of the time.
In many other situations, like a large playgroup or a sanctioned tournament setting, having a balanced banlist is pretty necessary, as creating your own banlist becomes increasingly impossible.
From a tournament perspective, the current banlist is 100% useless, so in practice it does not help at all.
Argument 2: Even if a suitable banlist can be made, the discrepancies between playgroups creates a negative experience.
The reasons for this are twofold. The first is that a player who is playing in an unfamiliar playgroup may be unable to play his deck of choice. You may say "She can just take the banned card out of her deck!" This, however, is often impractical. It may be that the banned card is central to her strategy, and that banning the card removes any real chance that player has at getting to do her thing. The banlist could also include several of the cards in her deck, for which there is no real replacement. Finally, the banned card could even be her commander. This also creates a negative experience when a player from a custom-banlist group goes to another group. He may now be dealing with all sorts of different decks, since they are tuned to a totally different meta. If I get together with my playgroup and decide to ban all the fast-mana (rocks which produce more mana than they cost and untap normally), then I will tune my deck to a slower pace, and forget about dealing with the faster decks. When I go to another meta and these fast decks are the norm, I will be totally unbalanced.
Additionally, it makes it very hard to have a meaningful discussion with people online about your deck when you play in a custom-banlist meta. Banning/unbanning one or two cards is maybe doable, but after that, the differences in what EDH looks like with my friends vs with other people is just too huge. You already see this a bit since there is a wide range of philosophical differences in playgroups - some are more competitive and end games on turns 3-6, some are more casual and games draw out for hours, and others walk a line somewhere in between. However, people, generally, stick to their own on the internet. It would be foolish for me to go into a casual player's thread and tear his deck apart from a competitive standpoint, since he and I don't have the same ends. On the other hand, when I want to talk to people online about how I can make a deck better, but everyone else is playing a game with a different card pool than I do, it gets very hard to have a conversation that leads anywhere.
The format is already very nebulous, because the ban list does not prevent cut throat, and people often build their decks to not be so fast. Does the prossh player want to run food chain and a ton of tutors for it? Does this blue deck need force of will and other similar cards to keep up? Or do they want to sit down a play a 10+ turn game that ends with a fair strategy? It can be hard to suggest cards when you don't know these things, because the lists for each level of play are substantially different.
Also, as I've mentioned before, a hard coded ban list when players police themselves is a bad solution. It can easily be handled on a case by case basis. Any ban list will have tons of problems, especially the current one edh has.
You also assume that people care that much about deck construction. This tends to only become the case after someone starts winning way to much or plays very lame effects like armageddon. They just play most of the time.
This is exactly why the ban list is useful. It's why this format has spread and thrived and replaced 60 card casual in many places. It's all because most people don't care that much about deck construction, they just want to play the game.
The easiest way to achieve good games of magic reliably is to play in an environment where all the decks are well balanced against one another. In competitive environments, this situation establishes itself naturally as people all play their decks to maximum ability and a meta comes together around the strongest strategies. In a casual environment, the primary goal is to have fun, which means people might play underpowered decks to have the experience they desire. That's all fine and dandy, but everyone playing whatever they want to doesn't create balance. Without the invisible hand of competition balancing the decks, it becomes the responsibility of the players to balance games themselves, and there are two problems with this situation:
1) Deliberate self-regulating is hard to do. It's easy to balance decks against each other if you play against the same decks over and over, but planning a deck to be the right power level without live testing and adjustment requires a very deep understanding of the game, I'd argue a deeper understanding of the game than building a competitive deck from scratch. It's not only that most people do not want to spend time designing their deck carefully to their desired power level, it's that they are not actually capable of doing so. I think I'm pretty good at casual deck building, but I still do things like build a new deck without removal knowing it won't be as strong as opponents I'm familiar with because it's easier for me to react and adjust than to try and design the deck to work right in the first place.
2) Different groups will balance themselves at completely different power levels. While I was playing 60 card casual, I would be playing something like Rage Nimbus + Ragged Veins deck against my friend's Glitterfang + Equilibrium deck and we'd have a great time, while 100 miles away a group I would later join while they were switching to edh were playing Isochron Scepter + Silence against Channel + Emrakul, the Aeons Torn. They were both casual environments, it's not like one group was being more casual than the other, we just had fun playing different styles of magic. There's plenty of discussion in this thread about the inability to take a deck to a new group of people and just play without issue, but that is nearly impossible to do with unregulated 60 card casual decks. I can't make a fun 60 card deck and go anywhere and expect people to even remotely match well against me no matter how powerful a deck I build. There's just too wide a range between competitive vintage deck and a bad old pre-constructed deck, and you can't know how someone will play until you play them.
Edh does 3 things different from completely unregulated casual magic. First, the 40 life 100 card singleton format lands itself to longer, slower, and more varied games. In any format, any given game, a bad deck can beat a good one because of random chance. The high variety of edh games blurs good and bad even more, allowing for a broader range of deck power levels to find common competitive ground with one another. Second, the addition of the commander gives people something to naturally build around, and that makes for a lot of flavor heavy theme decks that do not take a lot of effort to design fun decks. And third is the ban list, which while it doesn't do anything to force people to play fair, it does set a tone for how people are generally expected to play. I don't need Balance to lock boards down for my benefit, but it's presence on the ban list tells me and everyone else that the style of play is frowned upon enough to warrant a ban.
You can argue the list has problems or the RC is unnecessary in theory, but the results, at least to me, are very clear. I've never once been able to take a 60-card casual deck from one place to another without changing it to meet new standards, but I actively play the same Zedruu deck in like 5 different groups at a time without any major issues. People don't necessarily want to devote time and effort to deck construction before they get to play, and because of a few defining factors in edh, they can generally build a deck once and then play with it whenever and wherever. And the ban list is part of that.
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Zedruu: "This deck is not only able to go crazy - it also needs to do so."
EDH has exactly the same problems you mention as 60 card formats.
I've built decks that can consistently end the game on the 4th turn, 10th turn, and 20th turn. These decks are VASTLY different in power, like playing vintage against a precon. The ban list does absolutely nothing to regulate this. I don't accept any argument that makes this claim.
You can also read into things in the other direction:
"Sol ring isn't on the ban list, so using broken artifacts to get 8 mana on the 3rd turn must be fine"
"Armageddon and similar effects aren't on the ban list, so I guess a resource denial/prison strategy is fine"
"Demonic/Vampiric/Grim/etc tutor aren't on the ban list, so I guess I'm fine to tutor up an infinite as fast as possible"
I know many players would be unhappy to face these kinds of strategies.
The ban list doesn't help with this, it's the players communicating with one another than helps create a nice environment. The ban list is useless and detrimental, especially now that the format has hit the point of official supplemental products.
EDH has exactly the same problems you mention as 60 card formats.
I've built decks that can consistently end the game on the 4th turn, 10th turn, and 20th turn. These decks are VASTLY different in power, like playing vintage against a precon. The ban list does absolutely nothing to regulate this. I don't accept any argument that makes this claim.
You can also read into things in the other direction:
"Sol ring isn't on the ban list, so using broken artifacts to get 8 mana on the 3rd turn must be fine"
"Armageddon and similar effects aren't on the ban list, so I guess a resource denial/prison strategy is fine"
"Demonic/Vampiric/Grim/etc tutor aren't on the ban list, so I guess I'm fine to tutor up an infinite as fast as possible"
I know many players would be unhappy to face these kinds of strategies.
The ban list doesn't help with this, it's the players communicating with one another than helps create a nice environment. The ban list is useless and detrimental, especially now that the format has hit the point of official supplemental products.
Edh is a casual format, it's still your responsibility to make the specific environment you want to play in. The rules and ban list create a common jumping off point for everyone playing the format. The format is not built such that there's only one monolithic acceptable style of play, and if it were it would be far worse off, but it's not complete anarchy either. You can make your 4th turn clock all you want, but you're not going to be able to take it to any game store and expect to have a good time. You absolutely know that the average edh table is going to frown upon that heavily. You can go anywhere and have at least a reasonable guess at how powerful a deck you should be playing or how people will feel about your decks, and the ban list is a major part of that.
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Zedruu: "This deck is not only able to go crazy - it also needs to do so."
Are you honestly trying to argue that Mana Crypt would not be in 98% of all lists if it's price was less than $10?
Yes I am. I don't need Sol Ring numbers quoted at me, they are different cards. Would 98% of people who want to win before T8 play it, YES. Is that 98% of EDH players, NO.
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.
EDH has exactly the same problems you mention as 60 card formats.
I've built decks that can consistently end the game on the 4th turn, 10th turn, and 20th turn. These decks are VASTLY different in power, like playing vintage against a precon. The ban list does absolutely nothing to regulate this. I don't accept any argument that makes this claim.
You can also read into things in the other direction:
"Sol ring isn't on the ban list, so using broken artifacts to get 8 mana on the 3rd turn must be fine"
"Armageddon and similar effects aren't on the ban list, so I guess a resource denial/prison strategy is fine"
"Demonic/Vampiric/Grim/etc tutor aren't on the ban list, so I guess I'm fine to tutor up an infinite as fast as possible"
I know many players would be unhappy to face these kinds of strategies.
The ban list doesn't help with this, it's the players communicating with one another than helps create a nice environment. The ban list is useless and detrimental, especially now that the format has hit the point of official supplemental products.
Edh is a casual format, it's still your responsibility to make the specific environment you want to play in. The rules and ban list create a common jumping off point for everyone playing the format. The format is not built such that there's only one monolithic acceptable style of play, and if it were it would be far worse off, but it's not complete anarchy either. You can make your 4th turn clock all you want, but you're not going to be able to take it to any game store and expect to have a good time. You absolutely know that the average edh table is going to frown upon that heavily. You can go anywhere and have at least a reasonable guess at how powerful a deck you should be playing or how people will feel about your decks, and the ban list is a major part of that.
Does the ban list prevent me from making a deck that will crush most decks in unfun ways? No.
Does the ban list encourage me to play in a more fun and interactive way? No.
Does the ban list prevent me from ever playing certain cards, regardless of how powerful they may be? Yes.
These reasons are why I want the ban list gone. It might have been useful 4 years ago. It is obsolete and detrimental.
Does the ban list prevent me from making a deck that will crush most decks in unfun ways? No.
Does the ban list encourage me to play in a more fun and interactive way? No.
Does the ban list prevent me from ever playing certain cards, regardless of how powerful they may be? Yes.
These reasons are why I want the ban list gone. It might have been useful 4 years ago. It is obsolete and detrimental.
You want bad absolutes, it can't prevent anything, but it DOES 'encourage [people] to play in a more fun and interactive way', you just don't want those types of games, so you rail against how it is not an absolute measure. Your minority position should not be pushed for the majority of us that can use the list appropriately.
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.
On the topic of dead eye. I see it as a win more card if anything. You need something to loop it with, and if you don't, it's a dead card. Also, people who usually play dead eye are people who will play loops anyways or people who see it fit well in their deck(cough ezuri cough).
On the topic of the banlist. It's a guideline, not something that has to be followed. House unbans can be common, and people are usually pretty chill with them.
Does the ban list prevent me from making a deck that will crush most decks in unfun ways? No.
Does the ban list encourage me to play in a more fun and interactive way? No.
Does the ban list prevent me from ever playing certain cards, regardless of how powerful they may be? Yes.
These reasons are why I want the ban list gone. It might have been useful 4 years ago. It is obsolete and detrimental.
You want bad absolutes, it can't prevent anything, but it DOES 'encourage [people] to play in a more fun and interactive way', you just don't want those types of games, so you rail against how it is not an absolute measure. Your minority position should not be pushed for the majority of us that can use the list appropriately.
You are explicitly contradicting previous statements I made and misrepresenting my position. I play at several different levels depending on what the table agrees to beforehand. I never said I don't want more fun and interactive games. If the goal is to have more fun and interactive games, the ban list doesn't help with that any more than a simple explanatory paragraph would, and the paragraph wouldn't have the side effect of forcing me and others to remove cards/strategies from our decks regardless of how fun they are for the table.
Nothing in the ban list screams "play more interactive games". In fact, the ban on primeval titan screams "play unfair strategies", because their is nothing to do with broken prison strategies on the ban list.
Also, how is my "players can police themselves, we don't need a list of hard bans" wanting absolutes? That's as far from absolute as possible.
Does the ban list prevent me from making a deck that will crush most decks in unfun ways? No.
Does the ban list encourage me to play in a more fun and interactive way? No.
Does the ban list prevent me from ever playing certain cards, regardless of how powerful they may be? Yes.
These reasons are why I want the ban list gone. It might have been useful 4 years ago. It is obsolete and detrimental.
Ok, but if you want the general guidance of the format's founders in how to play, you care about the ban list. If you and the people you play with think you can do better without the ban list, you can play without it. And if you want to play without it but your group wants it, it sounds like you've had your experience massively improved by the ban list and you refuse to recognize that the cards you aren't playing would have pissed people off if they weren't banned.
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Zedruu: "This deck is not only able to go crazy - it also needs to do so."
The banlist does not help prevent people from ruining more classical edh games either. Fast mana, prison effects, and instant kills are easily available in all colors.
Rofellos( in 99 ), Gifts ungiven, braids( in 99 ), recurring nightmare are all no worse than many cards off the ban list right now in longer, fair games. So it's not like it isn't actively hurting deck construction for those longer games.
And I don't just play cut throat. This is another assumption I want people to stop making. People aren't just cut throat or just long games, most people are happy to switch up the level at which they play for more variety if they have the cards for it.
The format is already very nebulous, because the ban list does not prevent cut throat, and people often build their decks to not be so fast. Does the prossh player want to run food chain and a ton of tutors for it? Does this blue deck need force of will and other similar cards to keep up? Or do they want to sit down a play a 10+ turn game that ends with a fair strategy? It can be hard to suggest cards when you don't know these things, because the lists for each level of play are substantially different.
Also, as I've mentioned before, a hard coded ban list when players police themselves is a bad solution. It can easily be handled on a case by case basis. Any ban list will have tons of problems, especially the current one edh has.
While I'd like Rofellos off the list, the RC taking away BaaC does make that a bit impossible even if I don't think the change makes any sense. For all its shortcomings though, I think it accomplishes its purpose. Just because there are cards that you like that are on the list doesn't mean it is worthless. I'd like to put PT or SP in my Omnath list because they are some of the best curve toppers in the colors, but I can't because they're banned and I understand why.
If you've reached a point in your cutthroat games where the banlist is restricting cards that are more "fair" than the things you're playing, you've gone far beyond any eventuality the banlist was made to account for.
While I'd like Rofellos off the list, the RC taking away BaaC does make that a bit impossible even if I don't think the change makes any sense. For all its shortcomings though, I think it accomplishes its purpose. Just because there are cards that you like that are on the list doesn't mean it is worthless. I'd like to put PT or SP in my Omnath list because they are some of the best curve toppers in the colors, but I can't because they're banned and I understand why.
If you've reached a point in your cutthroat games where the banlist is restricting cards that are more "fair" than the things you're playing, you've gone far beyond any eventuality the banlist was made to account for.
The thing is, if you are trying to win as many games as possible, cards like demonic tutor outperform almost the whole ban list already in setting up wins.
Ok, but if you want the general guidance of the format's founders in how to play, you care about the ban list. If you and the people you play with think you can do better without the ban list, you can play without it. And if you want to play without it but your group wants it, it sounds like you've had your experience massively improved by the ban list and you refuse to recognize that the cards you aren't playing would have pissed people off if they weren't banned.
The guidance could have been given in a paragraph, maybe even a sentence. "Play big dumb things and try not to make the table unhappy".
People have been playing casual magic since the game's inception doing only self policing, it's not necessary at all to have a ban list. I played casually before edh was a thing and never needed a ban list to have fun.
It's not even that my group wants it, it's that this is now an official format and changing it requires immense effort, the same amount it would take to change standard/modern/legacy/vintage's banlist.
Thing is if your trying to win as many games as possible the banlist doesn't cater to you use your own. Thing is if that's not possible for whatever reason you need to suck it up your not the target audience and you never will be. If someone goes and creates a separate format that's similar but has a "more balanced" compeitive ruleset that's fine but the things that make commander different make it inherently broken. Assuming you don't remove the commander likely the most broken part I would recommended starting with 20 life and dual commanders ban lost and expanding it for multiplayer. I don't think any format like this should feel entitled to pull in many of the current commander players as a large part of the success of the format is a large part of the player base NOT wanting competitve play. If you don't think the masses for the RCS vision need a banlist that's fine it's wrong but fine. Thinking they should get rid of it or change it to cater to groups who don't share that vision however is pretty rediculos. Use house rules make your own format or suck it up I hardly find anything they do "detrimental" with how fast the format as a whole has grown.
Thing is if your trying to win as many games as possible the banlist doesn't cater to you use your own. Thing is if that's not possible for whatever reason you need to suck it up your not the target audience and you never will be. If someone goes and creates a separate format that's similar but has a "more balanced" compeitive ruleset that's fine but the things that make commander different make it inherently broken. Assuming you don't remove the commander likely the most broken part I would recommended starting with 20 life and dual commanders ban lost and expanding it for multiplayer. I don't think any format like this should feel entitled to pull in many of the current commander players as a large part of the success of the format is a large part of the player base NOT wanting competitve play. If you don't think the masses for the RCS vision need a banlist that's fine it's wrong but fine. Thinking they should get rid of it or change it to cater to groups who don't share that vision however is pretty rediculos. Use house rules make your own format or suck it up I hardly find anything they do "detrimental" with how fast the format as a whole has grown.
It doesn't matter if I am the target audience, the banlist affects me. It will be nearly impossible for me to convince the store where I play my current games to change the banlist. If I go to a store in a different city and they are playing edh, I will have to follow the banlist 100%. It affects me and others like me whether we are the target audience or not.
You want bad absolutes, it can't prevent anything, but it DOES 'encourage [people] to play in a more fun and interactive way', you just don't want those types of games, so you rail against how it is not an absolute measure. Your minority position should not be pushed for the majority of us that can use the list appropriately.
People have been playing casual magic since the game's inception doing only self policing, it's not necessary at all to have a ban list. I played casually before edh was a thing and never needed a ban list to have fun.
I played casually before edh existed. I know that can be done. In fact, I was slow to be convinced to play EDH. Why did I need some bloated format that makes it needlessly difficult to build around my pet cards? I can play big goofy things myself without an organized format, thank you very much... until I started playing edh and found out what it did. Maybe I didn't need edh to make me play the game I wanted, but I needed it to make everyone else play the game I wanted. If I was playing magic with 30 people when I switched over, maybe 5 of them would have good games of 60 card with me where 25 of them would have good games of edh. The added rules are absolutely to thank for that, and the ban list is a huge part of the format.
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Zedruu: "This deck is not only able to go crazy - it also needs to do so."
It doesn't matter if I am the target audience, the banlist affects me. It will be nearly impossible for me to convince the store where I play my current games to change the banlist. If I go to a store in a different city and they are playing edh, I will have to follow the banlist 100%. It affects me and others like me whether we are the target audience or not.
That's really unfortunate, but if you cant convince people to change, you are the minority, right? Explain why the minority should make the rules. No one forces you to play this way, you choose to.
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.
It doesn't matter if I am the target audience, the banlist affects me. It will be nearly impossible for me to convince the store where I play my current games to change the banlist. If I go to a store in a different city and they are playing edh, I will have to follow the banlist 100%. It affects me and others like me whether we are the target audience or not.
That's really unfortunate, but if you cant convince people to change, you are the minority, right? Explain why the minority should make the rules. No one forces you to play this way, you choose to.
Even if 70% of players wanted to change/remove the list where I play, what about those 30% who don't? What about newer players who drop in?
The ban list isn't linked to majority appeal. It's linked to what a small group of people think.
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Besides, most of the cards on the banlist should probably not come off anyway. There's a few that could be interesting (I'm in favor of unbanning Protean Hulk and Braids, and giving Recurring Nightmare and Panoptic Mirror a trial), but most sits well where they are right now.
After playing EDH for a long while, I'm not sure it'd be very fun without some kind of banlist -- pick up games would be even more egregious than they already are. Currently your odds of having a good game with randoms are probably right about 50/50 (at least in my experience, with my 75% decks). Without the banlist I suspect those chances would drop to nothing in short order.
There is something beautiful about how the current list subtly guides most folks away from utter degeneracy, but I do think it could stand to be a little heavier handed in some instances (mirage tutors + sol ring + grim monolith + mana vault + mana crypt + tooth & nail, and a few other really annoying cards).
UW Ephara Hatebears [Primer], GB Gitrog Lands, BRU Inalla Combo-Control, URG Maelstrom Wanderer Landfall
Player policing doesn't have to take the form of a hard coded list of bans though. That's what created the current monstrosity of a list in the first place. "Please don't play your strong prison deck, no one is going to enjoy that right now" is the much better way of handling it.
Fastbond and balance have no place in this format. At. All. I really want the banned as a commander rule back so we could play with braids/rofellos/erayo again but as that's gone it's understandable that they are banned. Braids and erayo were stupid oppressive and Rof was ridiculous. I regularly stomped my playgroup with him by the 4th or 5th turn before he got the banhammer again. Granted that was when primetime was legal but it was still unfair.
I can see an argument that gifts be unbanned(not that I favour that line of discussion) because Intuition is around. Recurring Nightmare can probably come off and not be terrible - it's been kept up with as far as gy hate is concerned.
And sundering titan just played poorly with the vision of the format. Not that I minded it but it did leave a sour taste in a lot of players mouths. But I don't think it should be unbanned - especially if you play with a shifting group because of that bad taste.
Sure, the banlist is probably horrible for people that want to play cutthroat or competitive EDH; we've been over this before. The banlist is not horrible in and of itself though, which you'd like us to believe based on your anecdotal evidence, Carthage.
The solution for you, again, is to house ban or unban for your cutthroat group/games. The mainstream EDH banlist will never serve that type of play effectively.
EDH:
G[cEDH] Selvala, Heart of the StormG
URW[cEDH] Narset, the Last AirmericanURW
GWUSt. Jenara, the ArchangelGWU
UBGrimgrin, Chaos MarineUB
GOmnath, Mana BaronG
URWNarset, Justice League AmericaURW
GWUBAtraxa, Countess of CountersGWUB
GWUEstrid, Enbantress PrimeGWU
Argument 1: The social contract is hard to legislate.
Houserules prima facie work relatively well in two settings. Here I will argue that in neither of these situations can a custom banlist be made easily and concretely.
The first is in a small playgroup with, say, three to six people, all of which have relatively matching conceptions about what they want their games to look like. In this setting, players can have a reasonable discussion about what a card does to their games of Magic, why that is undesirable, and whether or not this warrants a ban. If one player has a radically different notion of what EDH should be, that player is likely going to be unhappy with the resolution that their playgroup makes, but on the other hand they probably shouldn't be playing together in the first place since somebody is bound to ruin somebody else's night anyway. Here, however, to have any concrete way of deciding what should and shouldn't be banned, the players have to work out beforehand what needs to happen for it to be banned. Must the decision be unanimous, or is it decided by democracy? If so, do all players' votes have equal weight, and what quota must be met to ban it? Does everyone who happens to be present get to vote, or just the core members of the group? As this gets more and more complicated, the playgroup starts playing less and less EDH and spends more and more time talking about playing EDH. I personally would hate to be in a playgroup where the rules are decided by majority opinion, for numerous reasons. Majority opinion changes all the time. Majority opinion is less likely to produce desirable results than authority opinion, when the authority is a qualified party without vested interests and doesn't make arbitrary decisions.
Speaking of authority, this brings me to the second setting in which custom bannings and rules are likely to work elegantly, which is in a tournament setting held by a shop. Since the shop is running the show, they can (assuming the event is not DCI-sanctioned) create their own banlist that is easily enforceable. Additionally, since a shop is a business, it is in their interest to create a banlist that satisfies the players and creates enjoyable experiences that make them want to come back. However, this too has complications that make me suspicious. The first is that a shopowner let his rule-setting power be interfered by the interests of the shop - in other words, he may decide to unban a certain card because he has many of them that he wants to sell. I would immediately be suspicious of a shop running a tournament with its own banlist (in any format) for this reason. The second reason is that the shopowner is undoubtedly a busy person, who may or may not even play Commander, and putting the onus on them to create a balanced format only eats more time out of their day.
In many other situations, like a large playgroup or a sanctioned tournament setting, having a balanced banlist is pretty necessary, as creating your own banlist becomes increasingly impossible.
Argument 2: Even if a suitable banlist can be made, the discrepancies between playgroups creates a negative experience.
The reasons for this are twofold. The first is that a player who is playing in an unfamiliar playgroup may be unable to play his deck of choice. You may say "She can just take the banned card out of her deck!" This, however, is often impractical. It may be that the banned card is central to her strategy, and that banning the card removes any real chance that player has at getting to do her thing. The banlist could also include several of the cards in her deck, for which there is no real replacement. Finally, the banned card could even be her commander. This also creates a negative experience when a player from a custom-banlist group goes to another group. He may now be dealing with all sorts of different decks, since they are tuned to a totally different meta. If I get together with my playgroup and decide to ban all the fast-mana (rocks which produce more mana than they cost and untap normally), then I will tune my deck to a slower pace, and forget about dealing with the faster decks. When I go to another meta and these fast decks are the norm, I will be totally unbalanced.
Additionally, it makes it very hard to have a meaningful discussion with people online about your deck when you play in a custom-banlist meta. Banning/unbanning one or two cards is maybe doable, but after that, the differences in what EDH looks like with my friends vs with other people is just too huge. You already see this a bit since there is a wide range of philosophical differences in playgroups - some are more competitive and end games on turns 3-6, some are more casual and games draw out for hours, and others walk a line somewhere in between. However, people, generally, stick to their own on the internet. It would be foolish for me to go into a casual player's thread and tear his deck apart from a competitive standpoint, since he and I don't have the same ends. On the other hand, when I want to talk to people online about how I can make a deck better, but everyone else is playing a game with a different card pool than I do, it gets very hard to have a conversation that leads anywhere.
I turn your attention now to a post made in this thread about a hundred pages ago, where user Jusstice touches on some themes that I have attempted to make more explicit.
Jarad Graveyard Combo[Primer]!
Sidisi ANT!
Playing Commander to Win - A guide on Competitive, 4-player EDH
LandDestruction.com - An EDH blog
The banlist does not help prevent people from ruining more classical edh games either. Fast mana, prison effects, and instant kills are easily available in all colors.
Rofellos( in 99 ), Gifts ungiven, braids( in 99 ), recurring nightmare are all no worse than many cards off the ban list right now in longer, fair games. So it's not like it isn't actively hurting deck construction for those longer games.
And I don't just play cut throat. This is another assumption I want people to stop making. People aren't just cut throat or just long games, most people are happy to switch up the level at which they play for more variety if they have the cards for it.
This is a bit silly. It's a bit of slippery slope, and a whole lot of awful resolution.
"What rules should make a card banned for a playgroup?"
"Let's let a group of people we've never met make all banning decisions and have that be set in stone!"
You also assume that people care that much about deck construction. This tends to only become the case after someone starts winning way to much or plays very lame effects like armageddon. They just play most of the time.
From a tournament perspective, the current banlist is 100% useless, so in practice it does not help at all.
The format is already very nebulous, because the ban list does not prevent cut throat, and people often build their decks to not be so fast. Does the prossh player want to run food chain and a ton of tutors for it? Does this blue deck need force of will and other similar cards to keep up? Or do they want to sit down a play a 10+ turn game that ends with a fair strategy? It can be hard to suggest cards when you don't know these things, because the lists for each level of play are substantially different.
Also, as I've mentioned before, a hard coded ban list when players police themselves is a bad solution. It can easily be handled on a case by case basis. Any ban list will have tons of problems, especially the current one edh has.
This is exactly why the ban list is useful. It's why this format has spread and thrived and replaced 60 card casual in many places. It's all because most people don't care that much about deck construction, they just want to play the game.
The easiest way to achieve good games of magic reliably is to play in an environment where all the decks are well balanced against one another. In competitive environments, this situation establishes itself naturally as people all play their decks to maximum ability and a meta comes together around the strongest strategies. In a casual environment, the primary goal is to have fun, which means people might play underpowered decks to have the experience they desire. That's all fine and dandy, but everyone playing whatever they want to doesn't create balance. Without the invisible hand of competition balancing the decks, it becomes the responsibility of the players to balance games themselves, and there are two problems with this situation:
1) Deliberate self-regulating is hard to do. It's easy to balance decks against each other if you play against the same decks over and over, but planning a deck to be the right power level without live testing and adjustment requires a very deep understanding of the game, I'd argue a deeper understanding of the game than building a competitive deck from scratch. It's not only that most people do not want to spend time designing their deck carefully to their desired power level, it's that they are not actually capable of doing so. I think I'm pretty good at casual deck building, but I still do things like build a new deck without removal knowing it won't be as strong as opponents I'm familiar with because it's easier for me to react and adjust than to try and design the deck to work right in the first place.
2) Different groups will balance themselves at completely different power levels. While I was playing 60 card casual, I would be playing something like Rage Nimbus + Ragged Veins deck against my friend's Glitterfang + Equilibrium deck and we'd have a great time, while 100 miles away a group I would later join while they were switching to edh were playing Isochron Scepter + Silence against Channel + Emrakul, the Aeons Torn. They were both casual environments, it's not like one group was being more casual than the other, we just had fun playing different styles of magic. There's plenty of discussion in this thread about the inability to take a deck to a new group of people and just play without issue, but that is nearly impossible to do with unregulated 60 card casual decks. I can't make a fun 60 card deck and go anywhere and expect people to even remotely match well against me no matter how powerful a deck I build. There's just too wide a range between competitive vintage deck and a bad old pre-constructed deck, and you can't know how someone will play until you play them.
Edh does 3 things different from completely unregulated casual magic. First, the 40 life 100 card singleton format lands itself to longer, slower, and more varied games. In any format, any given game, a bad deck can beat a good one because of random chance. The high variety of edh games blurs good and bad even more, allowing for a broader range of deck power levels to find common competitive ground with one another. Second, the addition of the commander gives people something to naturally build around, and that makes for a lot of flavor heavy theme decks that do not take a lot of effort to design fun decks. And third is the ban list, which while it doesn't do anything to force people to play fair, it does set a tone for how people are generally expected to play. I don't need Balance to lock boards down for my benefit, but it's presence on the ban list tells me and everyone else that the style of play is frowned upon enough to warrant a ban.
You can argue the list has problems or the RC is unnecessary in theory, but the results, at least to me, are very clear. I've never once been able to take a 60-card casual deck from one place to another without changing it to meet new standards, but I actively play the same Zedruu deck in like 5 different groups at a time without any major issues. People don't necessarily want to devote time and effort to deck construction before they get to play, and because of a few defining factors in edh, they can generally build a deck once and then play with it whenever and wherever. And the ban list is part of that.
I've built decks that can consistently end the game on the 4th turn, 10th turn, and 20th turn. These decks are VASTLY different in power, like playing vintage against a precon. The ban list does absolutely nothing to regulate this. I don't accept any argument that makes this claim.
You can also read into things in the other direction:
"Sol ring isn't on the ban list, so using broken artifacts to get 8 mana on the 3rd turn must be fine"
"Armageddon and similar effects aren't on the ban list, so I guess a resource denial/prison strategy is fine"
"Demonic/Vampiric/Grim/etc tutor aren't on the ban list, so I guess I'm fine to tutor up an infinite as fast as possible"
I know many players would be unhappy to face these kinds of strategies.
The ban list doesn't help with this, it's the players communicating with one another than helps create a nice environment. The ban list is useless and detrimental, especially now that the format has hit the point of official supplemental products.
Edh is a casual format, it's still your responsibility to make the specific environment you want to play in. The rules and ban list create a common jumping off point for everyone playing the format. The format is not built such that there's only one monolithic acceptable style of play, and if it were it would be far worse off, but it's not complete anarchy either. You can make your 4th turn clock all you want, but you're not going to be able to take it to any game store and expect to have a good time. You absolutely know that the average edh table is going to frown upon that heavily. You can go anywhere and have at least a reasonable guess at how powerful a deck you should be playing or how people will feel about your decks, and the ban list is a major part of that.
Hyperbole like this is why, despite a lot of smart things you say, most of what you post is useless to the discussion.
Does the ban list prevent me from making a deck that will crush most decks in unfun ways? No.
Does the ban list encourage me to play in a more fun and interactive way? No.
Does the ban list prevent me from ever playing certain cards, regardless of how powerful they may be? Yes.
These reasons are why I want the ban list gone. It might have been useful 4 years ago. It is obsolete and detrimental.
You aren't forced to follow it but you need a compromise with your group and settle it in a democratic way.
On the topic of the banlist. It's a guideline, not something that has to be followed. House unbans can be common, and people are usually pretty chill with them.
Thanks Argentleman;)
WB Teysa token aggroBW (retired)
MAKING (Onmath, Numot, maybe something in Esper)
You are explicitly contradicting previous statements I made and misrepresenting my position. I play at several different levels depending on what the table agrees to beforehand. I never said I don't want more fun and interactive games. If the goal is to have more fun and interactive games, the ban list doesn't help with that any more than a simple explanatory paragraph would, and the paragraph wouldn't have the side effect of forcing me and others to remove cards/strategies from our decks regardless of how fun they are for the table.
Nothing in the ban list screams "play more interactive games". In fact, the ban on primeval titan screams "play unfair strategies", because their is nothing to do with broken prison strategies on the ban list.
Also, how is my "players can police themselves, we don't need a list of hard bans" wanting absolutes? That's as far from absolute as possible.
Ok, but if you want the general guidance of the format's founders in how to play, you care about the ban list. If you and the people you play with think you can do better without the ban list, you can play without it. And if you want to play without it but your group wants it, it sounds like you've had your experience massively improved by the ban list and you refuse to recognize that the cards you aren't playing would have pissed people off if they weren't banned.
While I'd like Rofellos off the list, the RC taking away BaaC does make that a bit impossible even if I don't think the change makes any sense. For all its shortcomings though, I think it accomplishes its purpose. Just because there are cards that you like that are on the list doesn't mean it is worthless. I'd like to put PT or SP in my Omnath list because they are some of the best curve toppers in the colors, but I can't because they're banned and I understand why.
If you've reached a point in your cutthroat games where the banlist is restricting cards that are more "fair" than the things you're playing, you've gone far beyond any eventuality the banlist was made to account for.
EDH:
G[cEDH] Selvala, Heart of the StormG
URW[cEDH] Narset, the Last AirmericanURW
GWUSt. Jenara, the ArchangelGWU
UBGrimgrin, Chaos MarineUB
GOmnath, Mana BaronG
URWNarset, Justice League AmericaURW
GWUBAtraxa, Countess of CountersGWUB
GWUEstrid, Enbantress PrimeGWU
The thing is, if you are trying to win as many games as possible, cards like demonic tutor outperform almost the whole ban list already in setting up wins.
The guidance could have been given in a paragraph, maybe even a sentence. "Play big dumb things and try not to make the table unhappy".
People have been playing casual magic since the game's inception doing only self policing, it's not necessary at all to have a ban list. I played casually before edh was a thing and never needed a ban list to have fun.
It's not even that my group wants it, it's that this is now an official format and changing it requires immense effort, the same amount it would take to change standard/modern/legacy/vintage's banlist.
Damia http://forums.mtgsalvation.com/showthread.php?t=410191
DDFT Legacyhttp://forums.mtgsalvation.com/showthread.php?t=505247
Domain Zoo http://forums.mtgsalvation.com/showthread.php?p=10212429#post10212429
It doesn't matter if I am the target audience, the banlist affects me. It will be nearly impossible for me to convince the store where I play my current games to change the banlist. If I go to a store in a different city and they are playing edh, I will have to follow the banlist 100%. It affects me and others like me whether we are the target audience or not.
Dial it back a notch, kay?
Misc. EDH Stuff: Commander Cube | Zombies (Horde)
Resources:Commander Rulings FAQ | Commander Deckbuilding Guide
Follow me on Twitter! @cryogen_mtg
I played casually before edh existed. I know that can be done. In fact, I was slow to be convinced to play EDH. Why did I need some bloated format that makes it needlessly difficult to build around my pet cards? I can play big goofy things myself without an organized format, thank you very much... until I started playing edh and found out what it did. Maybe I didn't need edh to make me play the game I wanted, but I needed it to make everyone else play the game I wanted. If I was playing magic with 30 people when I switched over, maybe 5 of them would have good games of 60 card with me where 25 of them would have good games of edh. The added rules are absolutely to thank for that, and the ban list is a huge part of the format.
Even if 70% of players wanted to change/remove the list where I play, what about those 30% who don't? What about newer players who drop in?
The ban list isn't linked to majority appeal. It's linked to what a small group of people think.