Sorry for not making things clear in my opening post. Hopefully I do a better job clarifying my ideas here.
What I am trying to suggest is that the impact of a banned card and the impact of a legal card that players have no will to use is the same: the card won't see play. As such, banning cards that the community has no will to use may be unnecessary. If such cards won't see play anyways, where's the harm in letting them go? Wouldn't it be best then to unban such cards? I think it might be. Worldgorger Dragon was able to come off of the banned list back in 2011 despite it having little fair application in Commander, and yet little harm was created as a result of that decision. I think that's largely because the Commander community has little will to play the card.
Limited Resources is an example of a card that I believe may fit that criteria, a card that is banned but the community may have little will to use. I'm not saying it is, just that I think it might be. You may disagree, and that's fine. My perception might be totally incorrect. Maybe Limited Resources is a card which the community actually has an intense desire to play, and I'm just not aware of it. In that case, yeah, please keep Limited Resources on the banned list. Commander games are almost certainly better off without it. I certainly don't want to run into it. All I'm trying to suggest is that this idea, the idea that a ban needs to remain impactful for it to have merit, may be worth considering regardless of what card we're talking about, be it Limited Resources or Coalition Victory or anything else.
I understand where you're going with this - bluntly put it's a question of "Shouldn't the EDH Community at large be able to regulate themselves to the usage of "broken" cards, like they did with Worldgorger Dragon and the cards that should be banned are those that couldn't be regulated, like Primeval Titan and Prophet of Kruphix (I'm still not very convinced Sylvan Primordial actually reached those levels from my own experience).
No offense to the RC nor implying you're "against" them (I know this is just a hypothetical discussion), but bluntly put, it's a base statement of "Does any of the RC's other banning criteria even matter in the first place if a card can be socially regulated by the entire EDH community?" We could run this test on any card on the list that wasn't banned for "not being able to be kept under social regulations" (like the two cards I mentioned above), starting from the likes of Worldfire/Coalition Victory all the way to Griselbrand/Channel (Yeah that's probably a terrible idea considering Primeval Titan, but still we can't prove it). I mean, if we all could regulate our usage of Channel, is there any reason it should even be on the list even if hypothetically & strategically it one of the most broken cards on the list?
To what degree and individuality of each card can we trust the EDH Community to regulate themselves? We have people like myself who don't believe even "casuals" would regulate themselves to not play Coalition Victory as an emergency "I Win" button (please direct specifics over to its specific thread) and others who think they can. Likewise, we have people who think Tooth and Nail isn't being socially regulated because every time they see it is an "I Win" button, whereas we have people who say it's being regulated well because they see a diversity of results with their encounters with the card (Again, don't argue the specifics of TNN here.)
And we've barely scratched the surface, all the cards mentioned above are all "game-enders" to some degree. This forum's favorite example of a card that I think we can all safely say isn't socially regulated, at what degree of "power"/"impact" of a card does it need to have for a "socially-unregulated" card to be considered "safe" for the format despite being unregulated, or is the fact it is socially unregulated a testament to that "power"/"impact" (I mean Solemn Simulacrum isn't as powerful/impactful and subsequently isn't as "unregulated", even if it is a staple of some sort). Then it boils back to the same question, what is the measure of the "social regulation" that determines it's too "powerful/impactful" to stay in the format?
All questions, no answers. I actually sincerely hope an RC member can sort of clarify it, but I can also see that being the huge murky mess it is that it isn't the easiest thing to draw a clear line across.
That being said, Limited Resources (along with Channel) was 1 of the cards I kept banned in my own hypothetical 10-card banlist world and my rationale was that the sheer "stax-impact" it imposes on the game, especially early-game was just too deadly to be left to any measure of Social Regulation and that's where I drew my line. Likewise in non-10-card-world, my whole argument that for Iona was that it was the only card to flexibly capitalize on a mechanical structure (Color Identity) to potentially undermine another (Multiplayer/Inverse Archenemy) and that if they wanted to keep the integrity of these two structures of the format, Iona needs to go regardless of how well its social regulation is.
I understand where you're going with this - bluntly put it's a question of "Shouldn't the EDH Community at large be able to regulate themselves to the usage of "broken" cards, like they did with Worldgorger Dragon and the cards that should be banned are those that couldn't be regulated, like Primeval Titan and Prophet of Kruphix (I'm still not very convinced Sylvan Primordial actually reached those levels from my own experience).
Before addressing anything, I would like to thank you for posting. You're the first person thus far who I'm truly convinced has made an effort to understand the ideas I've suggested in this thread and to actually address them in your post. So seriously, thank you. After the first page, I honestly didn't think any good would come out of this thread.
With that out of the way, you're very close. You might understand me well enough already and you just haven't gone into enough detail to convince me of that, but justifying a card's ban-worthiness goes beyond just being unregulatable by the Commander community. The Commander community must also have the will to play the card, and the card must also be capable of causing significant harm to the format. In fact, I think it would be helpful for me to explicitly spell out what I believe the criteria for banning a card should be. I think my beliefs may actually be a bit more stringent than the Rules Committee's.
1. For a card to be ban-worthy, it must be able to cause significant harm to the Commander format.
This is pretty straightforward. Many cards can be used in some capacity to damage games of Commander, some more than others. From my perspective, for a card to be ban-worthy it must be capable of causing significant harm to the Commander format. If it isn't causing harm, or is capable of causing harm but not at a significant level, players should have the freedom to play that card. What constitutes significant harm? That's for the Rules Committee to decide. I believe the Rules Committee has done an excellent job of detailing what constitutes harm in their philosophy document. How much harm a given card is causing is also up to the Rules Committee's interpretation.
2. If a card can cause significant harm to the Commander format, for a card to be ban-worthy the Commander community must also have the will to play the card.
Being able to cause significant harm to the format isn't enough to warrant a card being banned. The Commander community must also have the desire to play with said card. If they have no such desire, than no matter the reason, the volume of harm created by such cards is negligible because nobody is actually putting such cards into their decks. This is something I suspect may be true of Limited Resources. I believe that Limited Resources may be such a disliked and unpopular card that nobody might actually play with the card even if it were legal. A couple of earlier posters disagreed. Regardless, I don't know the truth. I am only suggesting that if the Commander community does not actually possess the will to play with Limited Resources as I believe, banning the card may now be unnecessary as in such case it would no longer be causing harm to the format.
3. If a card can cause significant harm to the Commander format AND the Commander community has the will to play the card, for a card to be ban-worthy the Commander community must also not possess the ability to regulate the card socially.
Even if a potentially harmful card sees widespread play, if the Commander community can regulate themselves to the extent that the harmful effects of a card do not frequently occur, I believe it would be unnecessary to ban that card. Tooth and Nail seems like an excellent example. Tooth and Nail is a card that is capable of causing tremendous harm to the Commander format by virtue of being a one card combo, and the Commander community certainly possesses the will to use it. What makes Tooth and Nail currently unbannable is the Commander community's ability to regulate themselves. They won't frequently play Tooth and Nail as a problematic one card combo. As such, banning it is currently unnecessary. If the Commander community were to suddenly have a change of heart and lose their ability to self-regulate, then Tooth and Nail would meet each of the following criteria and become ban-worthy.
I made this thread because I wanted to discuss under what criteria people believe cards should be banned. I believe the three I listed above to be my own. I am humored by the idea of Limited Resources not meeting the second criteria. It meets the first criteria likely more than any other Magic card in existence, and I have little faith in the Commander community to regulate how they play Limited Resources in such a way that it minimizes the harm it is capable of. If the Commander community lacks the will to play the card though, the volume of harm it creates would be minimal.
No offense to the RC nor implying you're "against" them (I know this is just a hypothetical discussion), but bluntly put, it's a base statement of "Does any of the RC's other banning criteria even matter in the first place if a card can be socially regulated by the entire EDH community?" We could run this test on any card on the list that wasn't banned for "not being able to be kept under social regulations" (like the two cards I mentioned above), starting from the likes of Worldfire/Coalition Victory all the way to Griselbrand/Channel
To clarify, I'm definitely not against the Rules Committee, although I once was. At the time, I was being a cretin. Today, and throughout most of my Magical misadventures, I believe the Rules Committee has done an excellent job of regulating their format. It certainly wouldn't be as successful if they hadn't.
And you are correct. I'm not convinced any of the ban criteria is even relevant if a given card can be socially regulated or won't even see marginal play due to how unpopularity it is. It all stems from how much actual harm a given card is causing. Cards not played are obviously not causing harm because they aren't being played. Potentially harmful cards that are played in unharmful ways aren't harmful because they're being played in unharmful ways. It's only when all three of these elements combine that the Rules Committee need step in and forbid players from using a given card.
(Yeah that's probably a terrible idea considering Primeval Titan, but still we can't prove it).
I don't think that's a terrible idea. I think reaffirming that all of the cards on the banned list are still deserving of their space is an excellent idea because public perception of cards can change and that change may affect a card's ban-worthiness. While it's unlikely that a card will become less harmful to the Commander format over time, players may lose the will to play the card or be willing to play the card in ways that are no longer harmful. In fact, I think Narset, Enlightened Master is an excellent example of this.
When it first released, I remember seeing Narset everywhere. It was ubiquitous and everyone built it the same way: as an endless series of extra turns and combat steps upon attack. Upon release, the card was almost certainly ban-worthy, but the Rules Committee wisely chose to not take action since the card was still new, and they wanted to get a feel for how the community would play the card. Since its release, Narset has cooled off significantly. Its popularity has since waned, diminishing the volume of harm it creates, and many of the players interested in abusing Narset have since exhausted their interest and left the players who are interested in pursuing fairer builds with the card.
With Primeval Titan specifically, I believe it meets all of my above mentioned criteria. It can cause significant harm to the Commander format (even if it doesn't cause AS much harm as something like say Limited Resources), and players certainly have the will to use it. I think what mostly made some of the more modern bans controversial is my third criteria. Not everyone was convinced that cards like Primeval Titan were being regulated poorly. They felt as though they weren't always being played in ways that caused harm.
I mean, if we all could regulate our usage of Channel, is there any reason it should even be on the list even if hypothetically & strategically it one of the most broken cards on the list?
If there is a compelling reason, I have yet to find it. Thus far, no one in the thread has offered one. Having said that, I think we can still safely agree that Channel will never be a card the Commander community would even adequately regulate.
To what degree and individuality of each card can we trust the EDH Community to regulate themselves? We have people like myself who don't believe even "casuals" would regulate themselves to not play Coalition Victory as an emergency "I Win" button (please direct specifics over to its specific thread) and others who think they can. Likewise, we have people who think Tooth and Nail isn't being socially regulated because every time they see it is an "I Win" button, whereas we have people who say it's being regulated well because they see a diversity of results with their encounters with the card (Again, don't argue the specifics of TNN here.)
I think the best policy would be to always assume the Commander community can regulate themselves unless they prove otherwise. The Commander community's inability to regulate themselves should only be measured on a card by card basis.
And we've barely scratched the surface, all the cards mentioned above are all "game-enders" to some degree. This forum's favorite example of a card that I think we can all safely say isn't socially regulated, at what degree of "power"/"impact" of a card does it need to have for a "socially-unregulated" card to be considered "safe" for the format despite being unregulated, or is the fact it is socially unregulated a testament to that "power"/"impact" (I mean Solemn Simulacrum isn't as powerful/impactful and subsequently isn't as "unregulated", even if it is a staple of some sort). Then it boils back to the same question, what is the measure of the "social regulation" that determines it's too "powerful/impactful" to stay in the format?
I think you're trying to ask a lot of different things here, and I'll do my best to address each of them. First off, I want to say that powerful cards don't necessarily cause harm. Powerful cards also aren't necessarily lacking social regulation. I believe that powerful cards do tend to attract players and increase players' willingness to use the card, but that's it.
On the topic of Sol Ring, I really think it being unbanned has more to do with the amount of harm it produces (or therefore lack of) than anything else. Unlike some folks, I've always been of the opinion that Sol Ring does not cause significant harm to the format. The fact that it's widely played and largely unregulated (sort of like Solemn as you mentioned) becomes moot if the card isn't actually causing any sort of significant harm. It is my belief that a card must possess all three characteristics I outlined above to be ban-worthy, and I'm not convinced Sol Ring meets the first.
As far as measuring social regulation, that's a bit intangible and can't directly be measured, but it likely corresponds with a number of things, namely folks *****ing about cards on the Internet for instance. Those sorts of avenues paint a pretty good picture of the public's overall perception of a card and whether or not they feel it's being used in socially acceptable ways.
All questions, no answers. I actually sincerely hope an RC member can sort of clarify it, but I can also see that being the huge murky mess it is that it isn't the easiest thing to draw a clear line across.
I always hope members of the Rules Committee will participate, but I can't blame them for not choosing to. They've got it rough. I would really just be satisfied by having been heard and having been understood by the Rules Committee, even if they disagree with me. Hell, that applies to pretty much everyone. That satisfaction is hard to come by though when folks don't speak up. Still, I know some members of the Rules Committee peruse these boards, so maybe I get lucky and an exchange of ideas does occur.
That being said, Limited Resources (along with Channel) was 1 of the cards I kept banned in my own hypothetical 10-card banlist world and my rationale was that the sheer "stax-impact" it imposes on the game, especially early-game was just too deadly to be left to any measure of Social Regulation and that's where I drew my line. Likewise in non-10-card-world, my whole argument that for Iona was that it was the only card to flexibly capitalize on a mechanical structure (Color Identity) to potentially undermine another (Multiplayer/Inverse Archenemy) and that if they wanted to keep the integrity of these two structures of the format, Iona needs to go regardless of how well its social regulation is.
I actually went back and read Sheldon's article on his hypothetical 10 card banned list. If you wrote your own hypothetical 10 card banned list, I'd actually like to read that too.
I can't blame anyone for wanting to ban Limited Resources. It's just about the most toxic card in Commander. The only case I make for it being potentially unbanned is the same one I've repeated throughout this thread. It cannot cause harm if the Commander community has no will to play the card as outlined in my second criteria.
Your three rules are kind of clever and demonstrate a level of thought. The second one is in some fashion already part of the way we think, at least in regard to less well-known cards. We didn't really jump on Trade Secrets, for example, until we saw evidence that it was getting played. The main thing I'd ask is for you to define "harm" and then articulate the difference between harm and significant harm.
arrogantAxoltl, while I have read through and appreciate the effort you put into replying into literally every paragraph of my already-lengthy post, I'm going to selectively (and not-in-order) pick the segments I'm going to reply because it's simply unwieldy to continue a direct-reply system. If I miss anything it may or may not be intentional (depending whether I thought it was really necessary to continue on for), but feel free to point things I missed out you thought was important.
First off, you wanted my hypothetical banlist. It's currently at Page 1249 of the General Ban List Discussion Thread, but I'll just leave the excerpt in spoilers here. Disclaimer it was a quick mental exercise I did back then in like 15 minutes after seeing Sheldon's take on it. Considering it's already different from Sheldon's, I don't expect anyone to have the exact same list, so just read it with a pinch of salt, I don't want to divert the topic off, but I'm listing it here for convenience and because I do want to cite some examples from it for the my actual response to the concept you raised:
That article really got my thought-exercise going but I don't think it's worth a thread of its own (since it's largely hypothetical), so I'll just put my list/thoughts here instead.
I'm not going to go through them in great detail, but simply put: Channel outright breaks in a 40-life format far more than any Lotus/Mox... except Mox Lotus Gaea's Cradle/Tolarian Academy for pretty much the same reasons. Sure, the academy is magnitudes higher in the format (especially with the Mox around), but I simply think the sheer expansion that the Cradle creates within a single turn is an issue by itself as well (especially the way creatures have been going) that the "Solved by Wraths everywhere" doesn't feel quite valid to me anymore. Griselbrand/Yawgmoth's Bargain - they pretty much explain themselves in a 40-life format. Karakas - lots of cards don't work well with the format / go against the concept and if I had to choose a poster child, it would be this. Limited Resources is the poster child for "unfun" the way Karakas is for "Anti-format". Panoptic Mirror/Time Vault - Yes, we greatly accelerated the format, but I'm still uncomfortable with some of the easiest infinite turn combos. Mirror stays on because I decided a lone Time Walk is better off free in a 10-card banlist and we just lock the single card that interacts with all the time magic. Tinker - Unlike Sheldon, I don't think the "1-time" effect saves this card from the list... because the Mox are free on top of the already fast mana acceleration we have in the format. Sure, we can leave it to social contracts, but I still think a competitively-contracted meta will involve the Mox and Tinkering into some quick win-condition. I may have let the Mox free due to their scarcity, but I don't take it into a large account when I account for these scenarios.
A quick recap for the other cards on Sheldon's list, but not mine... Balance - Well, it's #1 on Sheldon's list, but I don't actually think it's that broken in a 10-card banlist world. Scepter can't imprint it and I have the Mirror on the list. It might cause grief when cast at a low cost, but I really don't see people going all the way out to rapidly Balance-Grief in a 10-card banlist world. Prophet of Kruphix, Primeval Titan, Sylvan Primordial - All the relatively-recently banned cards in the format... that I honestly think would be too slow in a 10-card banlist world.
Just the clarification (and disclaimer) that I don't take the actual quantity of the released cards into account, I assume that all groups, even those with social contracts will eventually improve to a more-competitive state, the same way I generally see more Mana Crypt arms-races recently (although that was due to Eternal Masters). So bluntly put, I'm ignoring reprint policies and prices as a 10-card banlist requires much more attention to whatever impact a card that isn't on the list has on the format itself, regardless of actual quantity out there (at least I took that assumption for this hypothetical exercise).
Now, onto the main point I wanted to raise - while your three guidelines are great, I don't agree that it has to follow that stringent order, especially when your first guideline (does harm to the format) is highly subjective, something you admitted, but I want to say that since it's subjective, there's nothing wrong for someone to consider a card that flouts the other 2 guidelines to fulfill the first condition as a result, creating a guidelines pattern 2-3-1 rather than 1-2-3. I'll argue that the 3 most recently banned cards (Primeval Titan/Sylvan Primordial/Prophet of Kruphix) actually followed that sequence instead. It's easy for us to look back in hindsight and attempt to justify a 1-2-3 pattern when a card is already banned, but the actual process of banning for those 3 cards felt like they went through a 2-3-1 process instead.
Moving forward, the 2-3-1 pattern is pretty much the base argument for cards like Sol Ring/Cyclonic Rift. Effectively 2-3-1 is a "Ban Reason/Clause" of Ubiquity and the belief that Ubiquity in by itself causes a card to bring harm to the format. That's what I would say, until Solemn Simulacrum hit me with essentially the same criteria, but with literally no call for bans. So at this point I'm inclined that in the 2-3-1 pattern, the 2-3 pattern is always executed then the purely subjective issue of 1 rears its form to determine whether a card is powerful enough to cause harm with its existing Ubiquity. As such, Ubiquity's real definition is 2+3.
Okay, now to the other issue, what about cards that are missing "2", like Limited Resources (or any card on the List actually since we can't play with them). It's essentially not that much different from the 2-3-1 sequence, except now we're being subjective on "2" as well, which means the sequence would go 1-3-2 instead, because instead of using 2+3 (Ubiquity) to determine whether a card also meets 1 as a result, we know have to use 1+3 to determine so. Except we know 1 is subjective, which makes the 1-3-2 formula a whole lot more trickier to determine. On top of that "3-2" as a formula doesn't really work out effectively, most people socially regulate better if a card is willingly played in the first place (compare Tooth and Nail to Gaea's Cradle), but "3-2" is an assumption one has to make when a card doesn't fulfill condition 2, because it's really difficult to determine whether a card can be socially regulated if we don't even have enough sample sizes.
But I said before I understood your point - it was that "if there isn't enough sample size, that in itself is a social regulation of some sort", which is a very murky, murky point to have, because if we take what effectively is the opposite of Ubiquity (2+3 being more or less unknown factors), what we're left if with Condition 1, which is as subjective you can get. When all 3 conditions are murky/subjective, the whole sequence falls apart. Functionally we could say the only reason Limited Resources is on the list while Iona is their differences in Condition 1 from the viewpoint of the RC, if we assume both of them meeting the same "murky" conditions of (2+3), being cards not really played and more-or-less socially regulated as a result.
Your viewpoint was always the inverse of those who say (2+3 = Ubiquity, meets Condition 1 as a result), you're effectively saying (2+3 not met, means the card can be considered harmless and its fate is solely dependent whether it's capable of meeting Condition 1 without the other 2), which is basically questioning every card currently on the list (that's not the Ubiquitous 3 I mentioned) whether they were capable of meeting Condition 1 on their own.
Oh my, all that typing and I ended up with the same question as Sheldon - what is your definition of "harm"? Except I also impose this question along with an additional condition "What is your definition of a card causing harm to the format for a card that doesn't quite meet the other 2 Conditions?"
The second one is in some fashion already part of the way we think, at least in regard to less well-known cards. We didn't really jump on Trade Secrets, for example, until we saw evidence that it was getting played.
Your 10 Card Banned List article also suggested this.
The main thing I'd ask is for you to define "harm" and then articulate the difference between harm and significant harm.
Will do. I just need a bit of time to mull things over and type everything out. With multiple exams right around the corner though, it may take me a few days to get out. Having said that, it's probably safe to assume that the sooner I reply, the more I'll have procrastinated.
Okay! This took a lot more time than I had hoped to produce, and I am mega sorry for the slow response. Hopefully my delay hasn't killed the conversation.
The main thing I'd ask is for you to define "harm" and then articulate the difference between harm and significant harm.
Before going into my definitions, I would like to state that I think this request was really good of you to ask of me. I found it required some introspection. Sometimes we (humans) aren't exactly sure of what we mean when we say things to one another. We've often got a good idea, a good feeling in our gut about what we mean to convey, but actually articulating that feeling out with a high degree of accuracy is another thing entirely. In articulating our feelings, we're really forced to confront exactly what it is we wish to communicate head on, all the way down to the smallest granule. Often, that process can take a bit of time to work through. When you asked me to define harm, I wasn't immediately sure how I would define it. After having done some reflection though, I believe a sufficient amount of time has passed for me to shape my raw idea into something more substantial. It isn't something I've contemplated over a period of weeks, but I think I'm now sufficiently prepared to answer.
So, what is harm? Harm is what happens when a card, a combination of cards, or some source causes a game of Commander to become unfun for some number of players. So, when I say that a card has the potential to cause harm, what I mean is that that card can be the source of grief for somebody sitting at the Commander table. It can suck fun out of the game. There are numerous ways for cards to cause harm, but perhaps the most noticeable is when players use cards in ways they aren't intended for Commander, such as by using Tooth and Nail as a one card combo. Now, I realize I just used the words fun and unfun here, so I want to divert away from harm for a moment to talk about what is fun and what is unfun since that's really important to the conversation at hand.
Fun is subjective. It varies from person to person. One person might find it fun to run a marathon. The next person might find it an exhausting and painful impossibility. The fact that different people find different things fun isn't really disputable. What I believe is worth mentioning though is the fact that large groups of people commonly find certain things to be fun or unfun. That's important because that allows us to agree upon a commonly recognized version of what's considered fun, making the subjectivity of fun mostly irrelevant. We don't have to worry about the guy who thinks watching paint dry is fun. He doesn't share the commonly accepted version of fun that the rest of us do. And there's nothing wrong with that. If watching paint dry is truly the activity said individual wants to participate in because that is what they get the most enjoyment from, then by all means, let them go do that. All I'm trying to say here is that that person, the person who doesn't share what is commonly considered fun in Commander, isn't of concern. If they don't find Commander fun and they aren't a constituent, they don't have to play it.
So, I think all of that begets the question: what group of people ultimately gets to decide what is commonly considered fun in Commander? Well, because this is the Rules Committee's format and not the Commander communities' format, I'm going to take the position that what the Rules Committee commonly considers to be fun and unfun to be what we consider pertinent material here, not what the Commander community finds to be fun or unfun. Since I am not part of the Rules Committee however, I am obviously going to have to make some assumptions. I can't definitively say what the Rules Committee finds fun or unfun because I don't know them well enough. I'm not part of that group. I'd like to think that I have an idea about what they find fun or unfun and that, as a Commander player myself who upholds the spirit of the format, my ideas are somewhat qualified, but I absolutely can't know for certain. Some of my assumptions will be wrong, and that's okay. I'm not a mind reader. I'm just doing my best.
If you, reader, feel as though a stance regarding what the Commander community commonly determines to be fun or unfun is more appropriate than what the Rules Committee commonly determines to be fun or unfun, that substitution can be made. I'm just sticking with the Rules Committee's perception here because I've previously heard rhetoric about the Rules Committee being unwavering in their vision of the format, and I can't really blame them for that. Commander is their baby, not anyone elses'. I'm not trying to make an argument for one group's perception being better than the others. I'm just siding with the Rules' Committee's perception here because they made the format, and I don't believe they have any obligation to appease the Commander community.
So, now that I've established that since fun is subjective but that subjectivity really isn't relevant because the fun I'm talking about is an agreed upon version of fun, the Rules Committee's collective interpretation of fun, I feel as though I can continue discussing harm. As I mentioned above, harm is what occurs whenever something, usually a card, causes a game of Commander to become unfun for some party. That isn't a particularly difficult feat to accomplish though given the modularity of most Magic cards. In a game of Magic, we can use cards in many different ways. As such, it should be unsurprising that most cards, dare I say all cards, are capable of causing harm in some way. To make an analogy, imagine a pencil. A pencil is a tool designed to make marks on a surface. A player can use their pencil to make marks on a surface, but that isn't all they can do. A pencil is also a sufficiently pointy implement. If a player wants to, they can also choose to stab other players with their pencil. Now, a pencil isn't a weapon. It isn't designed for stabbing, but it is nevertheless somewhat pointy and can be used in that fashion. This illustrates how a seemingly mundane item can be used harmfully.
So, how does that analogy extend to a card like Mountain? Honestly, I can't say. Off the top of my head, I can't really imagine a way in which a player can use a card like Mountain to cause harm in a game of Commander. Regardless, people are creative, and I think it is safe to say that since Magic cards are sufficiently modular, many, if not most cards can be used in ways that cause harm to games of Commander. Does that actually matter? Well, no. It basically doesn't matter that cards are capable of causing harm. We use pencils all the time, and we never worry about people stabbing one another with them. The fact that a card is capable of causing harm isn't really important because even the most innocent items are capable of causing harm in some way, shape, or form. What is important is the severity of harm a card can cause.
Significant harm is just a high degree of harm. How high a degree? That, I can't say. Different cards make different players (or, from my perspective, the Rules Committee) feel differently, and there are many different reasons why a card could cause the game to become unfun for someone. Sometimes, a card can be mildly annoying. Under different circumstances, the same card could be anger inducing. Generally, the more negative feelings induced by a card, the more harm it's causing. Going back to the pencil analogy, if a player harmed me by stabbing me in the arm with a pencil, that would obviously hurt, but I wouldn't call that a significant injury. It might draw blood, sure, and it would more than likely piss me off, but a player using a pencil that way wouldn't devastate me. The same can't be said for a player misusing a gun though. When guns are misused, the repercussions are significant. Which cards are pencils and which cards are guns? I think the best way of determining that is by looking at how certain cards make players feel. Is, under some circumstance, a card capable of causing someone to feel intense, negative feelings? If so, it's probably a gun; it has the capability of making Commander much more unfun than a pencil ever could.
It's okay to allow people to use guns, even if they're dangerous (rule 1). It's okay to allow people to use guns, even if a lot of people want to use them (rule 2). It isn't okay to allow lots of people to use dangerous items if they're going to use them irresponsibly (rule 3). That's what tends to cause significant harm, when all three conditions are met. When rule 1 isn't met, the harm a card inflicts upon a party isn't significant. When rule 2 isn't met, the total volume of harm is minuscule. When rule 3 isn't met, harm isn't being inflicted because players are using their cards responsibly.
arrogantAxoltl, while I have read through and appreciate the effort you put into replying into literally every paragraph of my already-lengthy post, I'm going to selectively (and not-in-order) pick the segments I'm going to reply because it's simply unwieldy to continue a direct-reply system. If I miss anything it may or may not be intentional (depending whether I thought it was really necessary to continue on for), but feel free to point things I missed out you thought was important.
Hey, that's no problem at all. I tend to like dissecting posts because I feel it makes what I'm responding to very clear. When I take the time to write something, I don't like to be misunderstood, so I believe quoting pieces of text helps make what I'm responding to more evident. And yeah, sometimes that can get a bit unwieldy. It often takes me a long time to write out my posts. Hell, it almost always takes me a long time to write out my posts. Writing is one of my hobbies though, so I really tend to enjoy the process. Writing for me is especially useful in that it gives me better tools for conveying my thoughts accurately. Sometimes it takes a lot of words to do that and consequently my posts get ignored by people because of it. If someone should ever want to understand me though, my writing should certainly make what I'm thinking clear to them.
First off, you wanted my hypothetical banlist. It's currently at Page 1249 of the General Ban List Discussion Thread, but I'll just leave the excerpt in spoilers here. Disclaimer it was a quick mental exercise I did back then in like 15 minutes after seeing Sheldon's take on it. Considering it's already different from Sheldon's, I don't expect anyone to have the exact same list, so just read it with a pinch of salt, I don't want to divert the topic off, but I'm listing it here for convenience and because I do want to cite some examples from it for the my actual response to the concept you raised:
That article really got my thought-exercise going but I don't think it's worth a thread of its own (since it's largely hypothetical), so I'll just put my list/thoughts here instead.
I'm not going to go through them in great detail, but simply put: Channel outright breaks in a 40-life format far more than any Lotus/Mox... except Mox Lotus Gaea's Cradle/Tolarian Academy for pretty much the same reasons. Sure, the academy is magnitudes higher in the format (especially with the Mox around), but I simply think the sheer expansion that the Cradle creates within a single turn is an issue by itself as well (especially the way creatures have been going) that the "Solved by Wraths everywhere" doesn't feel quite valid to me anymore. Griselbrand/Yawgmoth's Bargain - they pretty much explain themselves in a 40-life format. Karakas - lots of cards don't work well with the format / go against the concept and if I had to choose a poster child, it would be this. Limited Resources is the poster child for "unfun" the way Karakas is for "Anti-format". Panoptic Mirror/Time Vault - Yes, we greatly accelerated the format, but I'm still uncomfortable with some of the easiest infinite turn combos. Mirror stays on because I decided a lone Time Walk is better off free in a 10-card banlist and we just lock the single card that interacts with all the time magic. Tinker - Unlike Sheldon, I don't think the "1-time" effect saves this card from the list... because the Mox are free on top of the already fast mana acceleration we have in the format. Sure, we can leave it to social contracts, but I still think a competitively-contracted meta will involve the Mox and Tinkering into some quick win-condition. I may have let the Mox free due to their scarcity, but I don't take it into a large account when I account for these scenarios.
A quick recap for the other cards on Sheldon's list, but not mine... Balance - Well, it's #1 on Sheldon's list, but I don't actually think it's that broken in a 10-card banlist world. Scepter can't imprint it and I have the Mirror on the list. It might cause grief when cast at a low cost, but I really don't see people going all the way out to rapidly Balance-Grief in a 10-card banlist world. Prophet of Kruphix, Primeval Titan, Sylvan Primordial - All the relatively-recently banned cards in the format... that I honestly think would be too slow in a 10-card banlist world.
Just the clarification (and disclaimer) that I don't take the actual quantity of the released cards into account, I assume that all groups, even those with social contracts will eventually improve to a more-competitive state, the same way I generally see more Mana Crypt arms-races recently (although that was due to Eternal Masters). So bluntly put, I'm ignoring reprint policies and prices as a 10-card banlist requires much more attention to whatever impact a card that isn't on the list has on the format itself, regardless of actual quantity out there (at least I took that assumption for this hypothetical exercise).
Thanks for sharing this. It's interesting to see Balance absent. I, myself, have really never played with or against the card, and I'm really having a hard time imagining just how scary it is. To me, it looks just like a more severe Smallpox. If it's as bad as Sheldon makes it out to be though, I'll definitely take his word for it. At a glance, it certainly seems innocuous, at least to me.
Now, onto the main point I wanted to raise - while your three guidelines are great, I don't agree that it has to follow that stringent order, especially when your first guideline (does harm to the format) is highly subjective, something you admitted, but I want to say that since it's subjective, there's nothing wrong for someone to consider a card that flouts the other 2 guidelines to fulfill the first condition as a result, creating a guidelines pattern 2-3-1 rather than 1-2-3.
Sorry for not making this clear, but there really isn't an order to my three rules. Perhaps I did my ideas a disservice by even explaining them as three separate rules. There really aren't three separate rules; there's just one:
1. For a card to be ban-worthy, it must be causing significant harm to the Commander format.
That's it. That's really the only rule. The three rules I wrote earlier aren't so much rules as they are explanations for how a card may not actually be causing harm in games of Commander, even if it has the potential to do so. Maybe a better way of explaining this whole thing would be through a mathematical model:
Before saying anything else, I would first like to make it perfectly clear that this model is not perfect. It's just something I cooked up that I believe will sufficiently explain how my three rules (variables) interact with one another. I think I've identified every major factor that influences total harm here, but there's always a chance I've overlooked something. Specifically, I'm currently wrestling with the idea of portraying how frequently cards capable of causing significant harm actually do so for reasons beyond malpractice. I'm not exactly there yet though, and I don't really want to table this post any longer though in favor of having a slightly more accurate model, so here it is. The interaction between these variables is obviously more complex than how I've laid them out to be, and I'm mostly certain that some of these variables are actually nested inside one another. That said, I think this model will still be useful for our discussion and should do a fine job illustrating my three rules, at least for now.
As this model demonstrates, there's really only one value that I believe the Rules Committee should be looking at when it comes to determining whether or not a card is ban-worthy, and that's how much harm a card is causing. The three rules I posted previously simply explain how different elements influence a card's total amount of harm. In this model, the total harm of a card is equal to its severity, the degree of potential harm it can cause (rule 1), times its ubiquity, how often players are willing to use the card (rule 2), times its malpractice, how often players fail to regulate the card socially (rule 3). By assigning values to each of these variables, this formula can produce a number, a score, roughly demonstrating how much harm a card is causing in Commander. By increasing a card's severity, ubiquity, or malpractice values, that card's total harm score will increase. Conversely, decreasing these values also decreases the total harm score. Cards possessing high total harm scores should be of great concern to the Rules Committee and those possessing low scores should not.
From here forward, I'll be referring to the three rules I previously wrote as the names I've given them here in this formula: severity, ubiquity, and malpractice. In any examples I use, I will also use values of 0 through 10 to give estimates for what I believe are likely a card's total harm score. Don't look too deep into it though. My gut is providing the values. I haven't actually sat down and considered what super precise values would look like.
I also want to mention that I do not believe a card is causing significant harm just because it is both popular (rule 2) and frequently misused (rule 3). Take Mountain for example. Mountain is one of the most ubiquitous cards in Commander because it is a basic land. Now imagine every player in the Commander community wanting to use the card irresponsibly and abuse it to the fullest extent. No matter how much players wish they could inflict harm by using the card, their ill intentions will never cause it. Why? Because Mountain is a card that cannot cause harm. There's virtually nothing a player can do to abuse the card despite how much they might want to. Here's what Mountain's total harm score would look like if everyone hypothetically sought to misuse the card:
This illustrates how a card's ubiquity and malpractice does not automatically make a card cause harm, let alone significant harm. A card with low severity (greater than zero), but high ubiquity and high malpractice values, would be the kind of card that shows up frequently and is always a minor annoyance, but never anything more than that.
I'll argue that the 3 most recently banned cards (Primeval Titan/Sylvan Primordial/Prophet of Kruphix) actually followed that sequence instead. It's easy for us to look back in hindsight and attempt to justify a 1-2-3 pattern when a card is already banned, but the actual process of banning for those 3 cards felt like they went through a 2-3-1 process instead.
I disagree. The reason these three cards were banned was definitely because they were causing significant harm to the Commander format in some way. If they weren't, there would be no imperative to ban them. If I had to provide values for the three cards, I would give each medium-high to high severity values, high ubiquity values (perhaps a bit lower ubiquity score for Sylvan Primordial), and medium to medium-low malpractice values.
What I believe made these bans controversial at the time was their malpractice value. In some groups, these cards were powerful, but mostly fine. They weren't any more dangerous than some of the already over-the-top haymakers we see today. In other groups, the cards were being heavily abused, making them just too much. That schism, that difference in the way local groups play with their cards, tends to lead to a lot of arguing online, as people don't really see eye to eye on just how much trouble cards are causing.
Moving forward, the 2-3-1 pattern is pretty much the base argument for cards like Sol Ring/Cyclonic Rift. Effectively 2-3-1 is a "Ban Reason/Clause" of Ubiquity and the belief that Ubiquity in by itself causes a card to bring harm to the format. That's what I would say, until Solemn Simulacrum hit me with essentially the same criteria, but with literally no call for bans.
Yeah, Solemn Simulacrum is an excellent example of how high levels of ubiquity don't increase severity. Demonic Tutor is another great example.
So at this point I'm inclined that in the 2-3-1 pattern, the 2-3 pattern is always executed then the purely subjective issue of 1 rears its form to determine whether a card is powerful enough to cause harm with its existing Ubiquity. As such, Ubiquity's real definition is 2+3.
I'm not sure if I'm following you completely here, but I think I should mention that a card's power does not necessarily correspond to its severity, its potential for causing harm in the format. Weak cards can have high severity scores. For example:
Lightning Bolt's Annoying CousinR Instant Lightning Bolt's Annoying Cousin does 1 damage to target creature or player. Shahrazad — Players play a MAGIC subgame, using their libraries as their decks. If you win the subgame, Lightning Bolt's Annoying Cousin deals 3 damage to that creature or player instead.
This card is not powerful. At best, it's Lightning Bolt, but that won't stop it from sucking all the fun out of a game. Power does not cause severity. At best, there's a correlation. I'm also not sure how you came to the conclusion that malpractice is somehow nested inside ubiquity.
Okay, now to the other issue, what about cards that are missing "2", like Limited Resources (or any card on the List actually since we can't play with them).
A card's ubiquity value corresponds to how frequently it sees plays. In the case of banned cards, it corresponds to how frequently it would see play if it weren't banned. Some banned cards would see more play than others if they weren't banned. I think Protean Hulk is one card that would see moderate to heavy use. Limited Resources? Not nearly as much (though potentially still enough to warrant keeping the card banned).
It's essentially not that much different from the 2-3-1 sequence, except now we're being subjective on "2" as well, which means the sequence would go 1-3-2 instead, because instead of using 2+3 (Ubiquity) to determine whether a card also meets 1 as a result, we know have to use 1+3 to determine so. Except we know 1 is subjective, which makes the 1-3-2 formula a whole lot more trickier to determine. On top of that "3-2" as a formula doesn't really work out effectively, most people socially regulate better if a card is willingly played in the first place (compare Tooth and Nail to Gaea's Cradle), but "3-2" is an assumption one has to make when a card doesn't fulfill condition 2, because it's really difficult to determine whether a card can be socially regulated if we don't even have enough sample sizes.
Sorry, you lost me here.
I think it may be useful for me to mention that ubiquity, at least as it pertains to legal cards, isn't subjective. We have great metrics like EDHREC and scoeri's Statistical Breakdown of the Commander Metagame to determine how heavily cards are being played. When it comes to determining how heavily a banned card would see play, the Rules Committee just uses their best judgment.
Your viewpoint was always the inverse of those who say (2+3 = Ubiquity, meets Condition 1 as a result)
Correct... I think? I believe that a card being popular and played heavily does not necessarily make it harmful, even if the Commander community were to somehow wish to cause harm with it.
You're effectively saying (2+3 not met, means the card can be considered harmless and its fate is solely dependent whether it's capable of meeting Condition 1 without the other 2), which is basically questioning every card currently on the list (that's not the Ubiquitous 3 I mentioned) whether they were capable of meeting Condition 1 on their own.
I'm not sure I understand you completely here either, but to reiterate, I believe there are a number of reasons why a card may harmless in Commander. First, a card is harmless if it's unable to cause harm in Commander games. That much is obvious. A card is also harmless if the card isn't seeing play though. When nobody willingly chooses to play with a card, its harmful effects can't occur. Lastly, when players use potentially harmful cards in a responsible manner, it also becomes harmless since the potential harm those cards could cause never manifests.
I believe continually reaffirming the validity of each card on the banned list is wise. While a card's severity is unlikely to change over time, its ubiquity and malpractice might. If those values change, previously harmful cards may become safe and therefore unnecessary to ban.
Oh my, all that typing and I ended up with the same question as Sheldon - what is your definition of "harm"? Except I also impose this question along with an additional condition "What is your definition of a card causing harm to the format for a card that doesn't quite meet the other 2 Conditions?"
So, a card with high severity, but low ubiquity and malpractice values? Black Lotus comes to mind. Cards that generate too much mana too quickly can definitely cause significant harm. The fact that Lotus is extremely scarce though means players would realistically never bump into it (barring proxies). I would also generally trust the Commander community not to abuse the card. Black Lotus and other cards banned due to perceived barrier to entry are a bit different though. Unlike most cards, they're not banned because they're causing harm. They're banned because the Rules Committee wants to send players a message: you don't need these cards to play in this format. As such, the amount of harm they generate is moot.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
WUBRGMr. Bones' Wild RideGRBUW Trap your friends in an endless game with this 23-card combo!
I really want to quote/kuddos you for posting an awesome, well thought out post. I really find myself in tune with your description of what defines 'harm' and even your mathematical equation for it - I'm an engineer, math stuff makes me stupidly happy
I really want to quote/kuddos you for posting an awesome, well thought out post. I really find myself in tune with your description of what defines 'harm' and even your mathematical equation for it - I'm an engineer, math stuff makes me stupidly happy
I'm currently considering an updated version of my harm model, one that's more accurate and merit-worthy. When I finish it, I'll likely publish it here. My goal is to generate a sort of "storm scale," but for Commander cards, determining how harmful given cards are.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
WUBRGMr. Bones' Wild RideGRBUW Trap your friends in an endless game with this 23-card combo!
Don't worry about the slow response. I'm probably not going to be replying immediately either and on top of that I'm admittedly not putting in as much effort as you are (I can tell the sheer amount of effort you put into the posts and can tell you I'm not replying with as much effort).
In fact, bluntly put, I don't disagree with your point of view at-large, but like you said, your formula/replies aren't perfect and what I'm trying to do is an attempt to help you refine it and if there's anything I learnt that's most efficient at doing that, it's taking the "opposite side" of the view (or at the very least, go and nitpick all the parts I don't agree with individually). I hate to say this, but even wording (something admittedly hard to manage in long posts) do go a long way in interpretation. For example, your original reply had the line "Even if a potentially harmful card sees widespread play" combined together with the vagueness of "harm" pretty much led to my interpretation that your rules were sequential instead of a multiplicative formula (and possibly Sheldon's interpretation as well, but I could only draw conclusions from our same question at the end and can't really tell if he went through the same process I did).
Now that you've established it as a multiplicative formula (which makes a whole lot better sense), it does admittedly "invalidate" a huge portion of my previous post (which was based on said interpretation), but I don't feel bad about it (and neither should you if you felt it so), because if I could interpret it that way, I'm inclined to believe that there are many others who would end up on the same route as well, which means your post would have been "misleading" to a lot of readers. Or perhaps I'm the only one who interpreted it that way, but I'm still thankful that was cleared up. Either way, because of the way I interpreted the that post as well as your newest one, I would see the newer one as a "backtrack/refining" of some sort to the older one and would have to apply it to my own post as well. You've successfully refined your "sequence" to a "formula" instead and since I also feel it does need improvements, I'm going to basically repeat the whole process I did the first time round instead and largely ignore my own previous post since it has more or less been invalidated by/for a much better refined model.
Now on to the actual content (and more refinement), I really think you need to assume a number scale I can adapt on (your only example was a Mountain that no one could really disagree with), because if we use different scales, it'll be a endless round of scale adjustment that doesn't help refine anything. On top of that I think it's important to declare that unlike Harm, Ubiquity can never be a 0 because we are always taking the assumption that the card is not on the Ban List and should always have a minimum of 1.
Malpractice is the real concern here. I'm not sure whether to award it a minimum of 1 criteria as well, because of the potential ways the calculation goes. Let's take the unrealistic extreme example of Channel and its severity to be 10. In the case that it is not banned and turned out to be ubiquitous at 10 as well, but everyone could socially regulate it because we're all miraculously competitive all of a sudden, then the multiplier will end up as a (10)(10)(0) = 0. Likewise, the more "realistic" scenario that the card is not banned, the ubiquity of the card is at its lowest (1) but it cannot be regulated (10), it will end up at a multiplier of (10)(1)(10) = 100. I know I used a rather extreme card and out-of-whack scenarios, but I'm trying to think whether it's better for Malpractice to be floored at (1) rather than (0).
On the other hand, having the formula floored at (1) means a necessity to ban some cards that would otherwise be (10)(10)(0), or even lower, such if we take Sol Ring (remember it's just an example) to be (7)(10)(1) = 70. Is 70 a limit warranting banning? I don't have the actual Standards to compare to and can't make the choice (also, Sol Ring in particular at (1) Malpractice raises some question, what is exactly considered "regulation" for a card like Sol Ring, so there's some arguement that it might not even be a (1) and Total (70) as a result either).
So this brings up the second half of the problem with malpractice - how do we determine the actual regulation for each indivudal card, how long do we need to do so and at what threshold of (Severity)(Expected Ubiquity) do we not let a card out to test its (Malpractice) because its combined (Severity)(Expected Ubiquity) is deadly enough within the time required to collect that data? Using another bad example, if we assume Channel to be (10)(1) = 10, it looks pretty safe to let out to test (even if we all know it's going to fail said test), is it worth is to shake the format just to test that out? Even at Assumed Ubiquity (5), it has a total of 50, which is arguably what Primeval Titan had for during its time out as an assumed (5 Severity) (10 Ubiquity) = 50.
Then there's the issue with tutors (Tooth and Nail included), do we assume it's always at a 5 Severity rating because it can potentially be 0 (fetching a basic land/Squire) and 10 (fetching Mike/Trike/Doomsday) at the same time. If that's the case (if we take TNN to be (5)(10)=50 as well), should Severity be the only factor determining whether a card on the Ban List gets to test its actual ubiquity instead of an expected one... which goes back full circle to how each of us determines severity then.
I'll just leave these factors for you to ponder over while you refine the formula, I really do hope to see a refined one eventually (I don't expect it too soon either, considering there are likely still even more factors outside of all these mentioned, but even I can't cram all of them at one go). Feel free to take your time for this.
I'm not really sure you can make an actual formula considering we don't really have a way to get accurate values. We'd need decklists from all the casual players out there, not just the likely competitively biased online postings. On top of that, there isn't really a good objective way to measure the ratings. We're talking something like trying to get surveys sent out to a presumably representative sample of the commander community at a sample size of 1000+ like a political poll or something. You can't just post it online or give it to your friends.
Yeah, I know the banned list isn't objective but if you're going to make an accurate mathematical formula that is objective. The formula isn't testable or useful unless you can get an accurate sample. If you could reasonably poll a large, representative sample, though, you could actually objectively quantify whether the playerbase feels a card is harming the format, though.
From my experience, Limited Resources is four frustrated players sitting on two lands and hoping to draw an appropriate color of removal over the next ten agonizing turns, and one guy who thinks its fair and justified. Playing magic actually requires the ability to play cards.
3. If a card can cause significant harm to the Commander format AND the Commander community has the will to play the card, for a card to be ban-worthy the Commander community must also not possess the ability to regulate the card socially.
Even if a potentially harmful card sees widespread play, if the Commander community can regulate themselves to the extent that the harmful effects of a card do not frequently occur, I believe it would be unnecessary to ban that card. Tooth and Nail seems like an excellent example. Tooth and Nail is a card that is capable of causing tremendous harm to the Commander format by virtue of being a one card combo, and the Commander community certainly possesses the will to use it. What makes Tooth and Nail currently unbannable is the Commander community's ability to regulate themselves. They won't frequently play Tooth and Nail as a problematic one card combo. As such, banning it is currently unnecessary. If the Commander community were to suddenly have a change of heart and lose their ability to self-regulate, then Tooth and Nail would meet each of the following criteria and become ban-worthy.
I don't think this is true either in a % of how T%N is used but also in the reason it is not banned, but that is not for this thread it just seems like a flawed analogy.
The funny thing to me about your three things is if you were to invert them to be positives they would completely reflect the Banned as Commander List as a thing before it was removed.
I understand where you're going with this - bluntly put it's a question of "Shouldn't the EDH Community at large be able to regulate themselves to the usage of "broken" cards, like they did with Worldgorger Dragon and the cards that should be banned are those that couldn't be regulated, like Primeval Titan and Prophet of Kruphix (I'm still not very convinced Sylvan Primordial actually reached those levels from my own experience).
No offense to the RC nor implying you're "against" them (I know this is just a hypothetical discussion), but bluntly put, it's a base statement of "Does any of the RC's other banning criteria even matter in the first place if a card can be socially regulated by the entire EDH community?" We could run this test on any card on the list that wasn't banned for "not being able to be kept under social regulations" (like the two cards I mentioned above), starting from the likes of Worldfire/Coalition Victory all the way to Griselbrand/Channel (Yeah that's probably a terrible idea considering Primeval Titan, but still we can't prove it). I mean, if we all could regulate our usage of Channel, is there any reason it should even be on the list even if hypothetically & strategically it one of the most broken cards on the list?
To what degree and individuality of each card can we trust the EDH Community to regulate themselves? We have people like myself who don't believe even "casuals" would regulate themselves to not play Coalition Victory as an emergency "I Win" button (please direct specifics over to its specific thread) and others who think they can. Likewise, we have people who think Tooth and Nail isn't being socially regulated because every time they see it is an "I Win" button, whereas we have people who say it's being regulated well because they see a diversity of results with their encounters with the card (Again, don't argue the specifics of TNN here.)
And we've barely scratched the surface, all the cards mentioned above are all "game-enders" to some degree. This forum's favorite example of a card that I think we can all safely say isn't socially regulated, at what degree of "power"/"impact" of a card does it need to have for a "socially-unregulated" card to be considered "safe" for the format despite being unregulated, or is the fact it is socially unregulated a testament to that "power"/"impact" (I mean Solemn Simulacrum isn't as powerful/impactful and subsequently isn't as "unregulated", even if it is a staple of some sort). Then it boils back to the same question, what is the measure of the "social regulation" that determines it's too "powerful/impactful" to stay in the format?
All questions, no answers. I actually sincerely hope an RC member can sort of clarify it, but I can also see that being the huge murky mess it is that it isn't the easiest thing to draw a clear line across.
That being said, Limited Resources (along with Channel) was 1 of the cards I kept banned in my own hypothetical 10-card banlist world and my rationale was that the sheer "stax-impact" it imposes on the game, especially early-game was just too deadly to be left to any measure of Social Regulation and that's where I drew my line. Likewise in non-10-card-world, my whole argument that for Iona was that it was the only card to flexibly capitalize on a mechanical structure (Color Identity) to potentially undermine another (Multiplayer/Inverse Archenemy) and that if they wanted to keep the integrity of these two structures of the format, Iona needs to go regardless of how well its social regulation is.
With that out of the way, you're very close. You might understand me well enough already and you just haven't gone into enough detail to convince me of that, but justifying a card's ban-worthiness goes beyond just being unregulatable by the Commander community. The Commander community must also have the will to play the card, and the card must also be capable of causing significant harm to the format. In fact, I think it would be helpful for me to explicitly spell out what I believe the criteria for banning a card should be. I think my beliefs may actually be a bit more stringent than the Rules Committee's.
This is pretty straightforward. Many cards can be used in some capacity to damage games of Commander, some more than others. From my perspective, for a card to be ban-worthy it must be capable of causing significant harm to the Commander format. If it isn't causing harm, or is capable of causing harm but not at a significant level, players should have the freedom to play that card. What constitutes significant harm? That's for the Rules Committee to decide. I believe the Rules Committee has done an excellent job of detailing what constitutes harm in their philosophy document. How much harm a given card is causing is also up to the Rules Committee's interpretation.
Being able to cause significant harm to the format isn't enough to warrant a card being banned. The Commander community must also have the desire to play with said card. If they have no such desire, than no matter the reason, the volume of harm created by such cards is negligible because nobody is actually putting such cards into their decks. This is something I suspect may be true of Limited Resources. I believe that Limited Resources may be such a disliked and unpopular card that nobody might actually play with the card even if it were legal. A couple of earlier posters disagreed. Regardless, I don't know the truth. I am only suggesting that if the Commander community does not actually possess the will to play with Limited Resources as I believe, banning the card may now be unnecessary as in such case it would no longer be causing harm to the format.
Even if a potentially harmful card sees widespread play, if the Commander community can regulate themselves to the extent that the harmful effects of a card do not frequently occur, I believe it would be unnecessary to ban that card. Tooth and Nail seems like an excellent example. Tooth and Nail is a card that is capable of causing tremendous harm to the Commander format by virtue of being a one card combo, and the Commander community certainly possesses the will to use it. What makes Tooth and Nail currently unbannable is the Commander community's ability to regulate themselves. They won't frequently play Tooth and Nail as a problematic one card combo. As such, banning it is currently unnecessary. If the Commander community were to suddenly have a change of heart and lose their ability to self-regulate, then Tooth and Nail would meet each of the following criteria and become ban-worthy.
I made this thread because I wanted to discuss under what criteria people believe cards should be banned. I believe the three I listed above to be my own. I am humored by the idea of Limited Resources not meeting the second criteria. It meets the first criteria likely more than any other Magic card in existence, and I have little faith in the Commander community to regulate how they play Limited Resources in such a way that it minimizes the harm it is capable of. If the Commander community lacks the will to play the card though, the volume of harm it creates would be minimal.
To clarify, I'm definitely not against the Rules Committee, although I once was. At the time, I was being a cretin. Today, and throughout most of my Magical misadventures, I believe the Rules Committee has done an excellent job of regulating their format. It certainly wouldn't be as successful if they hadn't.
And you are correct. I'm not convinced any of the ban criteria is even relevant if a given card can be socially regulated or won't even see marginal play due to how unpopularity it is. It all stems from how much actual harm a given card is causing. Cards not played are obviously not causing harm because they aren't being played. Potentially harmful cards that are played in unharmful ways aren't harmful because they're being played in unharmful ways. It's only when all three of these elements combine that the Rules Committee need step in and forbid players from using a given card.
I don't think that's a terrible idea. I think reaffirming that all of the cards on the banned list are still deserving of their space is an excellent idea because public perception of cards can change and that change may affect a card's ban-worthiness. While it's unlikely that a card will become less harmful to the Commander format over time, players may lose the will to play the card or be willing to play the card in ways that are no longer harmful. In fact, I think Narset, Enlightened Master is an excellent example of this.
When it first released, I remember seeing Narset everywhere. It was ubiquitous and everyone built it the same way: as an endless series of extra turns and combat steps upon attack. Upon release, the card was almost certainly ban-worthy, but the Rules Committee wisely chose to not take action since the card was still new, and they wanted to get a feel for how the community would play the card. Since its release, Narset has cooled off significantly. Its popularity has since waned, diminishing the volume of harm it creates, and many of the players interested in abusing Narset have since exhausted their interest and left the players who are interested in pursuing fairer builds with the card.
With Primeval Titan specifically, I believe it meets all of my above mentioned criteria. It can cause significant harm to the Commander format (even if it doesn't cause AS much harm as something like say Limited Resources), and players certainly have the will to use it. I think what mostly made some of the more modern bans controversial is my third criteria. Not everyone was convinced that cards like Primeval Titan were being regulated poorly. They felt as though they weren't always being played in ways that caused harm.
If there is a compelling reason, I have yet to find it. Thus far, no one in the thread has offered one. Having said that, I think we can still safely agree that Channel will never be a card the Commander community would even adequately regulate.
I think the best policy would be to always assume the Commander community can regulate themselves unless they prove otherwise. The Commander community's inability to regulate themselves should only be measured on a card by card basis.
I think you're trying to ask a lot of different things here, and I'll do my best to address each of them. First off, I want to say that powerful cards don't necessarily cause harm. Powerful cards also aren't necessarily lacking social regulation. I believe that powerful cards do tend to attract players and increase players' willingness to use the card, but that's it.
On the topic of Sol Ring, I really think it being unbanned has more to do with the amount of harm it produces (or therefore lack of) than anything else. Unlike some folks, I've always been of the opinion that Sol Ring does not cause significant harm to the format. The fact that it's widely played and largely unregulated (sort of like Solemn as you mentioned) becomes moot if the card isn't actually causing any sort of significant harm. It is my belief that a card must possess all three characteristics I outlined above to be ban-worthy, and I'm not convinced Sol Ring meets the first.
As far as measuring social regulation, that's a bit intangible and can't directly be measured, but it likely corresponds with a number of things, namely folks *****ing about cards on the Internet for instance. Those sorts of avenues paint a pretty good picture of the public's overall perception of a card and whether or not they feel it's being used in socially acceptable ways.
I always hope members of the Rules Committee will participate, but I can't blame them for not choosing to. They've got it rough. I would really just be satisfied by having been heard and having been understood by the Rules Committee, even if they disagree with me. Hell, that applies to pretty much everyone. That satisfaction is hard to come by though when folks don't speak up. Still, I know some members of the Rules Committee peruse these boards, so maybe I get lucky and an exchange of ideas does occur.
I actually went back and read Sheldon's article on his hypothetical 10 card banned list. If you wrote your own hypothetical 10 card banned list, I'd actually like to read that too.
I can't blame anyone for wanting to ban Limited Resources. It's just about the most toxic card in Commander. The only case I make for it being potentially unbanned is the same one I've repeated throughout this thread. It cannot cause harm if the Commander community has no will to play the card as outlined in my second criteria.
EDIT: Spelling
Trap your friends in an endless game with this 23-card combo!
First off, you wanted my hypothetical banlist. It's currently at Page 1249 of the General Ban List Discussion Thread, but I'll just leave the excerpt in spoilers here. Disclaimer it was a quick mental exercise I did back then in like 15 minutes after seeing Sheldon's take on it. Considering it's already different from Sheldon's, I don't expect anyone to have the exact same list, so just read it with a pinch of salt, I don't want to divert the topic off, but I'm listing it here for convenience and because I do want to cite some examples from it for the my actual response to the concept you raised:
My list will look like this:
Channel
Gaea's Cradle
Griselbrand
Karakas
Limited Resources
Panoptic Mirror
Time Vault
Tinker
Tolarian Academy
Yawgmoth's Bargain
I'm not going to go through them in great detail, but simply put:
Channel outright breaks in a 40-life format far more than any Lotus/Mox... except Mox Lotus
Gaea's Cradle/Tolarian Academy for pretty much the same reasons. Sure, the academy is magnitudes higher in the format (especially with the Mox around), but I simply think the sheer expansion that the Cradle creates within a single turn is an issue by itself as well (especially the way creatures have been going) that the "Solved by Wraths everywhere" doesn't feel quite valid to me anymore.
Griselbrand/Yawgmoth's Bargain - they pretty much explain themselves in a 40-life format.
Karakas - lots of cards don't work well with the format / go against the concept and if I had to choose a poster child, it would be this.
Limited Resources is the poster child for "unfun" the way Karakas is for "Anti-format".
Panoptic Mirror/Time Vault - Yes, we greatly accelerated the format, but I'm still uncomfortable with some of the easiest infinite turn combos. Mirror stays on because I decided a lone Time Walk is better off free in a 10-card banlist and we just lock the single card that interacts with all the time magic.
Tinker - Unlike Sheldon, I don't think the "1-time" effect saves this card from the list... because the Mox are free on top of the already fast mana acceleration we have in the format. Sure, we can leave it to social contracts, but I still think a competitively-contracted meta will involve the Mox and Tinkering into some quick win-condition. I may have let the Mox free due to their scarcity, but I don't take it into a large account when I account for these scenarios.
A quick recap for the other cards on Sheldon's list, but not mine...
Balance - Well, it's #1 on Sheldon's list, but I don't actually think it's that broken in a 10-card banlist world. Scepter can't imprint it and I have the Mirror on the list. It might cause grief when cast at a low cost, but I really don't see people going all the way out to rapidly Balance-Grief in a 10-card banlist world.
Prophet of Kruphix, Primeval Titan, Sylvan Primordial - All the relatively-recently banned cards in the format... that I honestly think would be too slow in a 10-card banlist world.
Just the clarification (and disclaimer) that I don't take the actual quantity of the released cards into account, I assume that all groups, even those with social contracts will eventually improve to a more-competitive state, the same way I generally see more Mana Crypt arms-races recently (although that was due to Eternal Masters). So bluntly put, I'm ignoring reprint policies and prices as a 10-card banlist requires much more attention to whatever impact a card that isn't on the list has on the format itself, regardless of actual quantity out there (at least I took that assumption for this hypothetical exercise).
Now, onto the main point I wanted to raise - while your three guidelines are great, I don't agree that it has to follow that stringent order, especially when your first guideline (does harm to the format) is highly subjective, something you admitted, but I want to say that since it's subjective, there's nothing wrong for someone to consider a card that flouts the other 2 guidelines to fulfill the first condition as a result, creating a guidelines pattern 2-3-1 rather than 1-2-3. I'll argue that the 3 most recently banned cards (Primeval Titan/Sylvan Primordial/Prophet of Kruphix) actually followed that sequence instead. It's easy for us to look back in hindsight and attempt to justify a 1-2-3 pattern when a card is already banned, but the actual process of banning for those 3 cards felt like they went through a 2-3-1 process instead.
Moving forward, the 2-3-1 pattern is pretty much the base argument for cards like Sol Ring/Cyclonic Rift. Effectively 2-3-1 is a "Ban Reason/Clause" of Ubiquity and the belief that Ubiquity in by itself causes a card to bring harm to the format. That's what I would say, until Solemn Simulacrum hit me with essentially the same criteria, but with literally no call for bans. So at this point I'm inclined that in the 2-3-1 pattern, the 2-3 pattern is always executed then the purely subjective issue of 1 rears its form to determine whether a card is powerful enough to cause harm with its existing Ubiquity. As such, Ubiquity's real definition is 2+3.
Okay, now to the other issue, what about cards that are missing "2", like Limited Resources (or any card on the List actually since we can't play with them). It's essentially not that much different from the 2-3-1 sequence, except now we're being subjective on "2" as well, which means the sequence would go 1-3-2 instead, because instead of using 2+3 (Ubiquity) to determine whether a card also meets 1 as a result, we know have to use 1+3 to determine so. Except we know 1 is subjective, which makes the 1-3-2 formula a whole lot more trickier to determine. On top of that "3-2" as a formula doesn't really work out effectively, most people socially regulate better if a card is willingly played in the first place (compare Tooth and Nail to Gaea's Cradle), but "3-2" is an assumption one has to make when a card doesn't fulfill condition 2, because it's really difficult to determine whether a card can be socially regulated if we don't even have enough sample sizes.
But I said before I understood your point - it was that "if there isn't enough sample size, that in itself is a social regulation of some sort", which is a very murky, murky point to have, because if we take what effectively is the opposite of Ubiquity (2+3 being more or less unknown factors), what we're left if with Condition 1, which is as subjective you can get. When all 3 conditions are murky/subjective, the whole sequence falls apart. Functionally we could say the only reason Limited Resources is on the list while Iona is their differences in Condition 1 from the viewpoint of the RC, if we assume both of them meeting the same "murky" conditions of (2+3), being cards not really played and more-or-less socially regulated as a result.
Your viewpoint was always the inverse of those who say (2+3 = Ubiquity, meets Condition 1 as a result), you're effectively saying (2+3 not met, means the card can be considered harmless and its fate is solely dependent whether it's capable of meeting Condition 1 without the other 2), which is basically questioning every card currently on the list (that's not the Ubiquitous 3 I mentioned) whether they were capable of meeting Condition 1 on their own.
Oh my, all that typing and I ended up with the same question as Sheldon - what is your definition of "harm"? Except I also impose this question along with an additional condition "What is your definition of a card causing harm to the format for a card that doesn't quite meet the other 2 Conditions?"
Your 10 Card Banned List article also suggested this.
Will do. I just need a bit of time to mull things over and type everything out. With multiple exams right around the corner though, it may take me a few days to get out. Having said that, it's probably safe to assume that the sooner I reply, the more I'll have procrastinated.
I'll get back to this comment too. Expect a reply in the next couple of days.
Trap your friends in an endless game with this 23-card combo!
Before going into my definitions, I would like to state that I think this request was really good of you to ask of me. I found it required some introspection. Sometimes we (humans) aren't exactly sure of what we mean when we say things to one another. We've often got a good idea, a good feeling in our gut about what we mean to convey, but actually articulating that feeling out with a high degree of accuracy is another thing entirely. In articulating our feelings, we're really forced to confront exactly what it is we wish to communicate head on, all the way down to the smallest granule. Often, that process can take a bit of time to work through. When you asked me to define harm, I wasn't immediately sure how I would define it. After having done some reflection though, I believe a sufficient amount of time has passed for me to shape my raw idea into something more substantial. It isn't something I've contemplated over a period of weeks, but I think I'm now sufficiently prepared to answer.
So, what is harm? Harm is what happens when a card, a combination of cards, or some source causes a game of Commander to become unfun for some number of players. So, when I say that a card has the potential to cause harm, what I mean is that that card can be the source of grief for somebody sitting at the Commander table. It can suck fun out of the game. There are numerous ways for cards to cause harm, but perhaps the most noticeable is when players use cards in ways they aren't intended for Commander, such as by using Tooth and Nail as a one card combo. Now, I realize I just used the words fun and unfun here, so I want to divert away from harm for a moment to talk about what is fun and what is unfun since that's really important to the conversation at hand.
So, now that I've established that since fun is subjective but that subjectivity really isn't relevant because the fun I'm talking about is an agreed upon version of fun, the Rules Committee's collective interpretation of fun, I feel as though I can continue discussing harm. As I mentioned above, harm is what occurs whenever something, usually a card, causes a game of Commander to become unfun for some party. That isn't a particularly difficult feat to accomplish though given the modularity of most Magic cards. In a game of Magic, we can use cards in many different ways. As such, it should be unsurprising that most cards, dare I say all cards, are capable of causing harm in some way. To make an analogy, imagine a pencil. A pencil is a tool designed to make marks on a surface. A player can use their pencil to make marks on a surface, but that isn't all they can do. A pencil is also a sufficiently pointy implement. If a player wants to, they can also choose to stab other players with their pencil. Now, a pencil isn't a weapon. It isn't designed for stabbing, but it is nevertheless somewhat pointy and can be used in that fashion. This illustrates how a seemingly mundane item can be used harmfully.
So, how does that analogy extend to a card like Mountain? Honestly, I can't say. Off the top of my head, I can't really imagine a way in which a player can use a card like Mountain to cause harm in a game of Commander. Regardless, people are creative, and I think it is safe to say that since Magic cards are sufficiently modular, many, if not most cards can be used in ways that cause harm to games of Commander. Does that actually matter? Well, no. It basically doesn't matter that cards are capable of causing harm. We use pencils all the time, and we never worry about people stabbing one another with them. The fact that a card is capable of causing harm isn't really important because even the most innocent items are capable of causing harm in some way, shape, or form. What is important is the severity of harm a card can cause.
Significant harm is just a high degree of harm. How high a degree? That, I can't say. Different cards make different players (or, from my perspective, the Rules Committee) feel differently, and there are many different reasons why a card could cause the game to become unfun for someone. Sometimes, a card can be mildly annoying. Under different circumstances, the same card could be anger inducing. Generally, the more negative feelings induced by a card, the more harm it's causing. Going back to the pencil analogy, if a player harmed me by stabbing me in the arm with a pencil, that would obviously hurt, but I wouldn't call that a significant injury. It might draw blood, sure, and it would more than likely piss me off, but a player using a pencil that way wouldn't devastate me. The same can't be said for a player misusing a gun though. When guns are misused, the repercussions are significant. Which cards are pencils and which cards are guns? I think the best way of determining that is by looking at how certain cards make players feel. Is, under some circumstance, a card capable of causing someone to feel intense, negative feelings? If so, it's probably a gun; it has the capability of making Commander much more unfun than a pencil ever could.
It's okay to allow people to use guns, even if they're dangerous (rule 1). It's okay to allow people to use guns, even if a lot of people want to use them (rule 2). It isn't okay to allow lots of people to use dangerous items if they're going to use them irresponsibly (rule 3). That's what tends to cause significant harm, when all three conditions are met. When rule 1 isn't met, the harm a card inflicts upon a party isn't significant. When rule 2 isn't met, the total volume of harm is minuscule. When rule 3 isn't met, harm isn't being inflicted because players are using their cards responsibly.
Hey, that's no problem at all. I tend to like dissecting posts because I feel it makes what I'm responding to very clear. When I take the time to write something, I don't like to be misunderstood, so I believe quoting pieces of text helps make what I'm responding to more evident. And yeah, sometimes that can get a bit unwieldy. It often takes me a long time to write out my posts. Hell, it almost always takes me a long time to write out my posts. Writing is one of my hobbies though, so I really tend to enjoy the process. Writing for me is especially useful in that it gives me better tools for conveying my thoughts accurately. Sometimes it takes a lot of words to do that and consequently my posts get ignored by people because of it. If someone should ever want to understand me though, my writing should certainly make what I'm thinking clear to them.
Thanks for sharing this. It's interesting to see Balance absent. I, myself, have really never played with or against the card, and I'm really having a hard time imagining just how scary it is. To me, it looks just like a more severe Smallpox. If it's as bad as Sheldon makes it out to be though, I'll definitely take his word for it. At a glance, it certainly seems innocuous, at least to me.
Sorry for not making this clear, but there really isn't an order to my three rules. Perhaps I did my ideas a disservice by even explaining them as three separate rules. There really aren't three separate rules; there's just one: That's it. That's really the only rule. The three rules I wrote earlier aren't so much rules as they are explanations for how a card may not actually be causing harm in games of Commander, even if it has the potential to do so. Maybe a better way of explaining this whole thing would be through a mathematical model:
Before saying anything else, I would first like to make it perfectly clear that this model is not perfect. It's just something I cooked up that I believe will sufficiently explain how my three rules (variables) interact with one another. I think I've identified every major factor that influences total harm here, but there's always a chance I've overlooked something. Specifically, I'm currently wrestling with the idea of portraying how frequently cards capable of causing significant harm actually do so for reasons beyond malpractice. I'm not exactly there yet though, and I don't really want to table this post any longer though in favor of having a slightly more accurate model, so here it is. The interaction between these variables is obviously more complex than how I've laid them out to be, and I'm mostly certain that some of these variables are actually nested inside one another. That said, I think this model will still be useful for our discussion and should do a fine job illustrating my three rules, at least for now.
As this model demonstrates, there's really only one value that I believe the Rules Committee should be looking at when it comes to determining whether or not a card is ban-worthy, and that's how much harm a card is causing. The three rules I posted previously simply explain how different elements influence a card's total amount of harm. In this model, the total harm of a card is equal to its severity, the degree of potential harm it can cause (rule 1), times its ubiquity, how often players are willing to use the card (rule 2), times its malpractice, how often players fail to regulate the card socially (rule 3). By assigning values to each of these variables, this formula can produce a number, a score, roughly demonstrating how much harm a card is causing in Commander. By increasing a card's severity, ubiquity, or malpractice values, that card's total harm score will increase. Conversely, decreasing these values also decreases the total harm score. Cards possessing high total harm scores should be of great concern to the Rules Committee and those possessing low scores should not.
From here forward, I'll be referring to the three rules I previously wrote as the names I've given them here in this formula: severity, ubiquity, and malpractice. In any examples I use, I will also use values of 0 through 10 to give estimates for what I believe are likely a card's total harm score. Don't look too deep into it though. My gut is providing the values. I haven't actually sat down and considered what super precise values would look like.
I also want to mention that I do not believe a card is causing significant harm just because it is both popular (rule 2) and frequently misused (rule 3). Take Mountain for example. Mountain is one of the most ubiquitous cards in Commander because it is a basic land. Now imagine every player in the Commander community wanting to use the card irresponsibly and abuse it to the fullest extent. No matter how much players wish they could inflict harm by using the card, their ill intentions will never cause it. Why? Because Mountain is a card that cannot cause harm. There's virtually nothing a player can do to abuse the card despite how much they might want to. Here's what Mountain's total harm score would look like if everyone hypothetically sought to misuse the card:
This illustrates how a card's ubiquity and malpractice does not automatically make a card cause harm, let alone significant harm. A card with low severity (greater than zero), but high ubiquity and high malpractice values, would be the kind of card that shows up frequently and is always a minor annoyance, but never anything more than that.
I disagree. The reason these three cards were banned was definitely because they were causing significant harm to the Commander format in some way. If they weren't, there would be no imperative to ban them. If I had to provide values for the three cards, I would give each medium-high to high severity values, high ubiquity values (perhaps a bit lower ubiquity score for Sylvan Primordial), and medium to medium-low malpractice values.
What I believe made these bans controversial at the time was their malpractice value. In some groups, these cards were powerful, but mostly fine. They weren't any more dangerous than some of the already over-the-top haymakers we see today. In other groups, the cards were being heavily abused, making them just too much. That schism, that difference in the way local groups play with their cards, tends to lead to a lot of arguing online, as people don't really see eye to eye on just how much trouble cards are causing.
Yeah, Solemn Simulacrum is an excellent example of how high levels of ubiquity don't increase severity. Demonic Tutor is another great example.
I'm not sure if I'm following you completely here, but I think I should mention that a card's power does not necessarily correspond to its severity, its potential for causing harm in the format. Weak cards can have high severity scores. For example:
Lightning Bolt's Annoying Cousin R
Instant
Lightning Bolt's Annoying Cousin does 1 damage to target creature or player.
Shahrazad — Players play a MAGIC subgame, using their libraries as their decks. If you win the subgame, Lightning Bolt's Annoying Cousin deals 3 damage to that creature or player instead.
This card is not powerful. At best, it's Lightning Bolt, but that won't stop it from sucking all the fun out of a game. Power does not cause severity. At best, there's a correlation. I'm also not sure how you came to the conclusion that malpractice is somehow nested inside ubiquity.
A card's ubiquity value corresponds to how frequently it sees plays. In the case of banned cards, it corresponds to how frequently it would see play if it weren't banned. Some banned cards would see more play than others if they weren't banned. I think Protean Hulk is one card that would see moderate to heavy use. Limited Resources? Not nearly as much (though potentially still enough to warrant keeping the card banned).
Sorry, you lost me here.
I think it may be useful for me to mention that ubiquity, at least as it pertains to legal cards, isn't subjective. We have great metrics like EDHREC and scoeri's Statistical Breakdown of the Commander Metagame to determine how heavily cards are being played. When it comes to determining how heavily a banned card would see play, the Rules Committee just uses their best judgment.
Correct... I think? I believe that a card being popular and played heavily does not necessarily make it harmful, even if the Commander community were to somehow wish to cause harm with it.
I'm not sure I understand you completely here either, but to reiterate, I believe there are a number of reasons why a card may harmless in Commander. First, a card is harmless if it's unable to cause harm in Commander games. That much is obvious. A card is also harmless if the card isn't seeing play though. When nobody willingly chooses to play with a card, its harmful effects can't occur. Lastly, when players use potentially harmful cards in a responsible manner, it also becomes harmless since the potential harm those cards could cause never manifests.
I believe continually reaffirming the validity of each card on the banned list is wise. While a card's severity is unlikely to change over time, its ubiquity and malpractice might. If those values change, previously harmful cards may become safe and therefore unnecessary to ban.
So, a card with high severity, but low ubiquity and malpractice values? Black Lotus comes to mind. Cards that generate too much mana too quickly can definitely cause significant harm. The fact that Lotus is extremely scarce though means players would realistically never bump into it (barring proxies). I would also generally trust the Commander community not to abuse the card. Black Lotus and other cards banned due to perceived barrier to entry are a bit different though. Unlike most cards, they're not banned because they're causing harm. They're banned because the Rules Committee wants to send players a message: you don't need these cards to play in this format. As such, the amount of harm they generate is moot.
Trap your friends in an endless game with this 23-card combo!
Banner by Traproot Graphics
[RETIRED Primers]:
RW Aurelia, The Warleader --- R Daretti, Scrap Savant --- RUB Thraximundar
I'm currently considering an updated version of my harm model, one that's more accurate and merit-worthy. When I finish it, I'll likely publish it here. My goal is to generate a sort of "storm scale," but for Commander cards, determining how harmful given cards are.
Trap your friends in an endless game with this 23-card combo!
In fact, bluntly put, I don't disagree with your point of view at-large, but like you said, your formula/replies aren't perfect and what I'm trying to do is an attempt to help you refine it and if there's anything I learnt that's most efficient at doing that, it's taking the "opposite side" of the view (or at the very least, go and nitpick all the parts I don't agree with individually). I hate to say this, but even wording (something admittedly hard to manage in long posts) do go a long way in interpretation. For example, your original reply had the line "Even if a potentially harmful card sees widespread play" combined together with the vagueness of "harm" pretty much led to my interpretation that your rules were sequential instead of a multiplicative formula (and possibly Sheldon's interpretation as well, but I could only draw conclusions from our same question at the end and can't really tell if he went through the same process I did).
Now that you've established it as a multiplicative formula (which makes a whole lot better sense), it does admittedly "invalidate" a huge portion of my previous post (which was based on said interpretation), but I don't feel bad about it (and neither should you if you felt it so), because if I could interpret it that way, I'm inclined to believe that there are many others who would end up on the same route as well, which means your post would have been "misleading" to a lot of readers. Or perhaps I'm the only one who interpreted it that way, but I'm still thankful that was cleared up. Either way, because of the way I interpreted the that post as well as your newest one, I would see the newer one as a "backtrack/refining" of some sort to the older one and would have to apply it to my own post as well. You've successfully refined your "sequence" to a "formula" instead and since I also feel it does need improvements, I'm going to basically repeat the whole process I did the first time round instead and largely ignore my own previous post since it has more or less been invalidated by/for a much better refined model.
Now on to the actual content (and more refinement), I really think you need to assume a number scale I can adapt on (your only example was a Mountain that no one could really disagree with), because if we use different scales, it'll be a endless round of scale adjustment that doesn't help refine anything. On top of that I think it's important to declare that unlike Harm, Ubiquity can never be a 0 because we are always taking the assumption that the card is not on the Ban List and should always have a minimum of 1.
Malpractice is the real concern here. I'm not sure whether to award it a minimum of 1 criteria as well, because of the potential ways the calculation goes. Let's take the unrealistic extreme example of Channel and its severity to be 10. In the case that it is not banned and turned out to be ubiquitous at 10 as well, but everyone could socially regulate it because we're all miraculously competitive all of a sudden, then the multiplier will end up as a (10)(10)(0) = 0. Likewise, the more "realistic" scenario that the card is not banned, the ubiquity of the card is at its lowest (1) but it cannot be regulated (10), it will end up at a multiplier of (10)(1)(10) = 100. I know I used a rather extreme card and out-of-whack scenarios, but I'm trying to think whether it's better for Malpractice to be floored at (1) rather than (0).
On the other hand, having the formula floored at (1) means a necessity to ban some cards that would otherwise be (10)(10)(0), or even lower, such if we take Sol Ring (remember it's just an example) to be (7)(10)(1) = 70. Is 70 a limit warranting banning? I don't have the actual Standards to compare to and can't make the choice (also, Sol Ring in particular at (1) Malpractice raises some question, what is exactly considered "regulation" for a card like Sol Ring, so there's some arguement that it might not even be a (1) and Total (70) as a result either).
So this brings up the second half of the problem with malpractice - how do we determine the actual regulation for each indivudal card, how long do we need to do so and at what threshold of (Severity)(Expected Ubiquity) do we not let a card out to test its (Malpractice) because its combined (Severity)(Expected Ubiquity) is deadly enough within the time required to collect that data? Using another bad example, if we assume Channel to be (10)(1) = 10, it looks pretty safe to let out to test (even if we all know it's going to fail said test), is it worth is to shake the format just to test that out? Even at Assumed Ubiquity (5), it has a total of 50, which is arguably what Primeval Titan had for during its time out as an assumed (5 Severity) (10 Ubiquity) = 50.
Then there's the issue with tutors (Tooth and Nail included), do we assume it's always at a 5 Severity rating because it can potentially be 0 (fetching a basic land/Squire) and 10 (fetching Mike/Trike/Doomsday) at the same time. If that's the case (if we take TNN to be (5)(10)=50 as well), should Severity be the only factor determining whether a card on the Ban List gets to test its actual ubiquity instead of an expected one... which goes back full circle to how each of us determines severity then.
I'll just leave these factors for you to ponder over while you refine the formula, I really do hope to see a refined one eventually (I don't expect it too soon either, considering there are likely still even more factors outside of all these mentioned, but even I can't cram all of them at one go). Feel free to take your time for this.
But when it comes down to it, this doesn't matter. Determining a banlist is not an objective process.
My Buying Thread
I don't think this is true either in a % of how T%N is used but also in the reason it is not banned, but that is not for this thread it just seems like a flawed analogy.
The funny thing to me about your three things is if you were to invert them to be positives they would completely reflect the Banned as Commander List as a thing before it was removed.