I'm sure the bannings will cause a control deck (grixis cruel or esper) with bitter as well as zoo in the top 16, just because LSV and Kiblar made it very clear fireball is looking into those decks for the protour.
There was no problem with Jund besides the fact that apparently some people don't "like" that style. What if WOTC decides, after aggro absolutely destroys the Modern metagame, that it doesn't like aggro again? Are they just going to keep going back and forth to promote a "healthy" environment? All they are doing is alienating their few players who still play Modern. Jund was not dominating the format, it was a highly liked deck that many people played because they enjoyed it. Do they really think that taking the favorite deck (most played, not the best) out of contention will bring more players into the format than it alienates (pissed off Jund players, and players who don't want to continue to invest in a format where their deck investment may be trampled upon by WOTC if they simply don't like it)? I think WOTC is riding on a very fine line, and the direction they are teetering with this recent B&R announcment is towards the only 2 worthwile formats being standard and legacy.
Jund will survive, and will probably even remain tier 1. It's not going to be 50/50 anymore and will instead have good and bad matchups so it's going to be weaker overall, but it's still going to be one of the formats boogeymen.
Unfortunately I think this alters the meta so much in Melira Pods favor, that my pet deck will be banned next update after a degenerate PT showing. Hopefully I'm wrong.
The absolute worst part of Modern is living in constant fear that your deck is going to be banned. I really do feel for Jund players but they'll survive... this ban wasn't aimed at them, they were just collateral damage.
There was no problem with Jund besides the fact that apparently some people don't "like" that style. What if WOTC decides, after aggro absolutely destroys the Modern metagame, that it doesn't like aggro again? Are they just going to keep going back and forth to promote a "healthy" environment? All they are doing is alienating their few players who still play Modern. Jund was not dominating the format, it was a highly liked deck that many people played because they enjoyed it. Do they really think that taking the favorite deck (most played, not the best) out of contention will bring more players into the format than it alienates (pissed off Jund players, and players who don't want to continue to invest in a format where their deck investment may be trampled upon by WOTC if they simply don't like it)? I think WOTC is riding on a very fine line, and the direction they are teetering with this recent B&R announcment is towards the only 2 worthwile formats being standard and legacy.
Jund will survive, and will probably even remain tier 1. It's not going to be 50/50 anymore and will instead have good and bad matchups so it's going to be weaker overall, but it's still going to be one of the formats boogeymen.
Unfortunately I think this alters the meta so much in Melira Pods favor, that my pet deck will be banned next update after a degenerate PT showing. Hopefully I'm wrong.
The absolute worst part of Modern is living in constant fear that your deck is going to be banned. I really do feel for Jund players but they'll survive... this ban wasn't aimed at them, they were just collateral damage.
According to WOTC, the ban reasoning behind DRS was to stop "attrition based G/B decks", pretty sure Jund was their target with the bannings. I could see Jund remaining competitive if only DRS was banned. Or if only BB/Nacatl were unbanned. But to have both happen at the same time absolutely destroys Jund. They should have done one or the other and saw what would happen with the Meta first. Sure, they could unban / ban things to fix it if they wanted to, but we all know they drag their feet and it'll be another year before we see changes.
Jund was the best deck in the format, people here are saying that it doesnt win the last big tournaments and it was just the most played deck and thats not true.
Yes, it doesnt won that tourneys but lets look at GP prague, there were 4 BGx decks on the top 8, but how many were on the day 1 and 2? Lets look the coverage, there is no data from day 1 except the decks of 49 pros and there were just 10 BGx, thats 20% the meta, and in day 2 there were 185 decks, being 33BGx, thats just the 17.84% of all the decks on day 2...
With this data in hand, jund wasnt all that big in the metagame, but it was 50% of the top8... So yes, jund (with rock and junk) was the best deck in the format.
Jund was the best deck in the format, people here are saying that it doesnt win the last big tournaments and it was just the most played deck and thats not true.
Yes, it doesnt won that tourneys but lets look at GP prague, there were 4 BGx decks on the top 8, but how many were on the day 1 and 2? Lets look the coverage, there is no data from day 1 except the decks of 49 pros and there were just 10 BGx, thats 20% the meta, and in day 2 there were 185 decks, being 33BGx, thats just the 17.84% of all the decks on day 2...
With this data in hand, jund wasnt all that big in the metagame, but it was 50% of the top8... So yes, jund (with rock and junk) was the best deck in the format.
I'm sure Mountain was also well represented. You cannot combine BG Rock and Jund into the same deck, they aren't even close. Jund was a good deck, yes. But so is Pod, UWR, Tron, Affinity, etc. Yet they didn't feel the need to cripple those decks which were jus as winning (if not more), just played less.
Wizards gives that data, they said that there were 33 jund/junk/rock, and that decks arent so different, they play the BG shell wich is the problem and why DRS is banned.
And that decks werent winning more, BG is obviously overrepresented on the top, going from 17% the day 2 metagame to 50% the top its a problem.
Wizards gives that data, they said that there were 33 jund/junk/rock, and that decks arent so different, they play the BG shell wich is the problem and why DRS is banned.
And that decks werent winning more, BG is obviously overrepresented on the top, going from 17% the day 2 metagame to 50% the top its a problem.
It's pretty easy for stats to get skewed when you go from a base of thousands down to 8, and base your numbers off of one tournament.
I think I actually read somewhere that BGx under performed in Prague. That based on the number of people playing the deck coming into the tournament BGx's share of the Top8 and Top16 should have been larger. Not that it matters now though. BGx is probably still a deck, though I'm not sure good it's going to be in the future. My first guess is that it will be in the lower end of the Tier 1.x bracket at worst.
On new unbannings I say hold on! We still haven't seen the impact of these changes (they were announced two days ago!) so let's not jump to conclusions on additional unbanings. While I think Bloodbraid Elf has a much greater chance of getting unbanned then it had before this announcement it might take quite some time before we actually get there. The reason I think it's a safer unban now is twofold:
1) Bitterblossom is unbanned - This, more or less, means that we aren't getting Ancestral Vision back for the foreseeable future, lest it make Faeries too much to handle, and that card was one of the few reasons people had reserves about Bloodbraid Elf.
2) Deathrite Shaman is banned - This one isn't about Jund getting compensation, but rather the fact that now the Elf can't be splashed for as easily. Decks like Jumanji or w.e. don't exist so there's no fear of decks just splashing for BBE. Three color decks and Gruul are still fair game and that's probably for the better otherwise it would have probably been all over the place.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
In my dream, the world had suffered a terrible disaster. A black haze shut out the sun, and the darkness was alive with the moans and screams of wounded people. Suddenly, a small light glowed. A candle flickered into life, symbol of hope for millions. A single tiny candle, shining in the ugly dark. I laughed and blew it out.
Many thanks to HotP Studios. Special thanks to DNC for this great sig.
BGx in 4 most recent GPs:
# BGx in T8/# BGx in T16
Detroit: 6/4
Brisbane: 3/1
Antwerp: 1/2
Prague: 4/2
All in all BGx decks took 23 out of 64 Top 16 slots over 4 GPs: 35%.
Please don't try to argue "Jund is different fron Rock/Junk/A-Jund-i", those deck share like 40+ cards. Don't even think about starting "but what about UWR?", because all the UWR decks put together have nowhere near BGx's stats.
BGx in 4 most recent GPs:
# BGx in T8/# BGx in T16
Detroit: 6/4
Brisbane: 3/1
Antwerp: 1/2
Prague: 4/2
All in all BGx decks took 23 out of 64 Top 16 slots over 4 GPs: 35%.
Please don't try to argue "Jund is different fron Rock/Junk/A-Jund-i", those deck share like 40+ cards. Don't even think about starting "but what about UWR?", because all the UWR decks put together have nowhere near BGx's stats.
Thank you! Were the rest of you not paying attention over the last few months? Every indicator was showing BGx massively over-performing relative to the rest of the field, and as the GP results above show, it was performing at a rate roughly double its metagame share. Yes, it was beatable, but that's like saying creatures are bad because they die to removal; it neglects to mention the overall consistency and power that DRS gave to jund.
DRS' presence in the format was absolutely oppressive. Nearly every deck in the format had to have a plan to deal with BGx, and DRS alone negated entire strategies and archetypes. With DRS gone, we get a whole bunch of strategies back, including gifts (which straight up disappeared), loam strategies, dredge, plus two new ones in faeries and zoo. I also expect that Jund will split into Naya midrange (as opposed to Naya zoo), and Junk midrange, since Knight of the Reliquary is back to being a good card.
The other thing that people are neglecting to mention is that with DRS in the format, fae and zoo could be quite dangerous, since he would slot into those decks and make them much more powerful. It would be the same crap that we've had for the past year, where the colour pie gets polarised because of a one-drop in two colours that happens to be far too good. I mean, how many colours does burn need to splash before it starts looking ridiculous?
Ok, I just take the data of the last GP, look at izzetmages post, there you have data from the last 4 GPs, its overrepresented in at least two of them and it is in all the tops, im just saying that peopple here is crying and arguing that jund was just the most played deck and thats not true.
I own a playset of DRS and I was playing them in various decks at the time they announced that ban, im not just a hater that wants cards I cant afford out of the format, but I think that the meta can be much better and diverse without DRS, now decks like delver, solar flare or dredgevine can be a little better.
If you are asking me, I got them from looking at MTG Goldfish everyday. BGx was at 15% of the meta on there since around August.
That's not entirely accurate. Part of the problem is that MTG Goldfish, like a few other sites, doesn't count 3-1 decks in its metagame percentages. That's a big problem because Wizards probably doesn't consider just the 4-0 decks. It considers all decks that are being played, so if we want to approximate that number, we need to make sure our dataset is as big as possible.
At its "worst", BGx made up about 22% of the format around the time of GP Detroit. That was pretty obscene but it was also temporary. By the time DRS got banned, BGx was only at about 15% of the onlone metagame.
As I see it, the issue with that number is not necessarily that it's particularly high. 22% is probably high in the absolute sense, but 15% doesn't have to be; there are definitely healthy formats where some decks have a 15% metagame share. The issue with that share is that no other deck really came close. Affinity never really exceeded 10%. Twin had shot up in popularity, but from September through January its average prevalence never got over 9%. If I were in Wizards position, I would be worried about such a deck.
Personally, I don't like the DRS ban. I think it sets a bad precedent and I think it's generally unattractive for the format. I also don't think BGx was quite as bad as people thought, and it's likely that Faeries and Zoo would have taken enough out of its share just by being in the format. That said, I understand where the ban came from just as I understand where the previous BBE ban came from.
Nice, dont try to read the data, no matter how overrepresented was the BGx shell on tops, just think that we hate the card and cry...
DRS is a nice ban because it was way over the top, it was splashable, it was maindeck GY hate, acceleration, life gain and pinger just for 1 hybrid mana and being a 1/2 was just ridiculous, almost all black decks played it and lots of decks splashed colors just to use him because it made splashing colors even easier...
Everyone is waiting for Modern to stabilize as if a stable format is more interesting or fun. IMO it's not. Embrace the changing nature of Modern. Be prepared for a sudden nerf or buff. Don't try to overthink the reasons and just let yourself enjoy it like a refreshing summer rain...
Deathrite was banned simply to shake up the pro tour - eventually, zoo and fae would have changed the format, but at the PT, most pros would just have played the safe t1 deck (BGx) instead oftrying to come up with an optimized list for zoo or fae. Now, the meta is up in the air, and everyone will have to brew.
So, yeah, this sucks. I would love to try my hand at playing zoo now that the cat is free, but WotC is just too trigger happy with the banhammer to invest into another deck, so I'll just cross my fingers and hope that my decks stay viable in this new format and hope that both twin and pod dodge the next ban.
Data is all fine and dandy when trying to prove a point, but in hypothetical situation were either Fae and Zoo begin to over represent, are we going to see a double standard? What happens when the people who were for Bitterblossom and Wild Nacatl, plus DRS banned are suddenly the ones now claiming their pet decks aren't as dominate, that there are answers, etc. I doubt there are many people who believe DRS was without blame, but in fact we are questioning the long-term stability of the format if any deck is subject to bans. As of now there is no real guarantee that your deck will not get banned, and this reputation long exceeded this ban announcement.
Those who are happy to have cards unban may scoff at the Jund players for being "butthurt" over the whole DRS ban, just remember, Wild Nacatl and Bitterblossom aren't immune to getting rebanned.
I'm all for a balanced meta, but this whole ban-list fiasco has left me rather disenfranchised with Modern.
I get that BG/x shells were putting lots of people into the top 8 but I think it's relative to how many strong players were registering that deck, now you'll see a big surge of UWR decks coming out of the woodwork which was already the best deck IMO (look at the decks that are actually WINNING these events), there's also going to be more pod which kind of sucks since that deck is better too just way more complicated to play. I don't see anything wrong with playing "goodstuff.dec", it's a midrange strategy that made a lot of players feel comfortable that they weren't completely dead to anything but had quite a few holes in it's strategy and by letting Nacatl out we'd of seen how rough zoo can be for Jund (trust me they have nut draws like crazy without nacatl). I've been testing and without DRS UWR midrange feels pretty hard, they have answers to everything you do and play the 1 for 1 game better than you, they beat aggro decks much easier (hello bolt, path, electrolyze, helix, snapcaster, resto angel, wall of omens, blade splicer, etc) and they've got a much stronger late game PLUS they can easily cram in sweepers and detention spheres to deal with the aggro/bitteblossom meta if it develops that way. I'm just irk'd that they took away half of the "goodstuff.dec" meta and left the other half stronger than ever, snapcaster is going to be such a brutal card now.
Jund didn't get banned, though. That's the point. It'll likely continue to be a competitive deck without DRS or BBE because the nature of the deck is to fill those slots with the next best card. Again, Jund was a thing before DRS.
If you're concerned about a double-standard, there will always be selfish people who just want to play their favorite decks, but by and large the very same people who do not enjoy playing against Jund do not enjoy playing against Fae or midrange Zoo, either. They feel pretty similar on the other side of the table.
it's not like Jund was a combo deck that got a huge piece banned like eggs and storm. It's a good stuff deck that plays a bunch of cards that are individually good. So sure losing arguably the best card in the deck hurts, but it doesn't kill the deck.
Everybody who is upset about the DRS ban is not upset because they think the Jund is unplayable. The GBx Midrange decks will still be very good. The people who are upset, myself included, is because this ban sets the bar low on what a card needs to do to get banned. What happens in 6 months when Birthing Pod is putting up results similar to BGx? Will they ban Pod? Because by banning Deathrite they are saying that they will. They are saying that they are willing to ban cards on the precedent that the card is simply VERY GOOD. And when the do Ban Pod, they WILL have killed an archetype. Same goes for Splinter Twin.
Is that the kind of format you want? A format where the best deck is attacked for simply being good?
Those who are happy to have cards unban may scoff at the Jund players for being "butthurt" over the whole DRS ban, just remember, Wild Nacatl and Bitterblossom aren't immune to getting rebanned.
I'm all for a balanced meta, but this whole ban-list fiasco has left me rather disenfranchised with Modern.
In the same way, remember that DRS can perfectly well be unbanned in one of the the next announcements if the meta stabilizes and he is no longer deemed "harmful".
We are talking about grey area cards here, just as valakutonce was, and now BB and nacatl. So as they may be banned again, so may DRS be unbanned, its not like jund is no longer a tier deck, its not like BBE cant be unbanned in the next announcement, etc.
Yes, the ban list changing all the time is a bit troubling, but look at it from this angle: As things leave modern, other things enter, and the things that left, may very well come back in the future.
So its not as if shaman is now scrap board with no value.
Pros liked playing Modern BGx because it was a deck that promoted the best BGx player in mirrors and had, with the exception of Tron, a 50/50 MU vs nearly every deck in the format.
This is what irritates me most about the DRS banning. I get the impression that most pros don't really like Modern that much (certainly not as much as standard or legacy) but are still gonna play in big tournaments and that requires playing modern some time (just look at SCG or CFB, modern gets a HUGE shakeup and it's barely even mentioned by anyone there). So rather than pick up a deck that relies on a lot of difficult interactions and requires a lot of experience to pilot well (something like Pod or Affinity), they go for the good stuff deck that wins more often than not through sheer card power rather than synergy. BGx was kinda the default there. But just because the most people are playing it doesn't necessarily make it the best deck. When was the last time that BGx won a major event? I agree that DRS is a really really good card and probably does too much for only costing one mana but he wasn't warping the format and it wasn't propelling BGx to victory after victory. It just made BGx a solid deck that was likely not to get blown out by anything in the format except for Tron and Affinity in game one. Instead of neutering that deck by taking its best card, just unban Nacatl and Bitterblossom and see how unleashing two new decks into the meta will shake things up.
Everybody who is upset about the DRS ban is not upset because they think the Jund is unplayable. The GBx Midrange decks will still be very good. The people who are upset, myself included, is because this ban sets the bar low on what a card needs to do to get banned. What happens in 6 months when Birthing Pod is putting up results similar to BGx? Will they ban Pod? Because by banning Deathrite they are saying that they will. They are saying that they are willing to ban cards on the precedent that the card is simply VERY GOOD. And when the do Ban Pod, they WILL have killed an archetype. Same goes for Splinter Twin.
Is that the kind of format you want? A format where the best deck is attacked for simply being good?
They already set that precedent by banning Bloodbraid.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Thanks to blurrycloud, who by the way, is a redonculous artist.
While I didn't agree with the Bloodbraid ban they had more ground to stand on there. The Jund deck was actually just sweeping events. It wasn't as bad as other degenerated formats but it was approaching it.
Many people here finally got what they wanted with Jund/BGx being knee-jerked. So the notion of
unbanning Bloodbraid Elf would be shot down quickly.
Jund will survive, and will probably even remain tier 1. It's not going to be 50/50 anymore and will instead have good and bad matchups so it's going to be weaker overall, but it's still going to be one of the formats boogeymen.
Unfortunately I think this alters the meta so much in Melira Pods favor, that my pet deck will be banned next update after a degenerate PT showing. Hopefully I'm wrong.
The absolute worst part of Modern is living in constant fear that your deck is going to be banned. I really do feel for Jund players but they'll survive... this ban wasn't aimed at them, they were just collateral damage.
According to WOTC, the ban reasoning behind DRS was to stop "attrition based G/B decks", pretty sure Jund was their target with the bannings. I could see Jund remaining competitive if only DRS was banned. Or if only BB/Nacatl were unbanned. But to have both happen at the same time absolutely destroys Jund. They should have done one or the other and saw what would happen with the Meta first. Sure, they could unban / ban things to fix it if they wanted to, but we all know they drag their feet and it'll be another year before we see changes.
Yes, it doesnt won that tourneys but lets look at GP prague, there were 4 BGx decks on the top 8, but how many were on the day 1 and 2? Lets look the coverage, there is no data from day 1 except the decks of 49 pros and there were just 10 BGx, thats 20% the meta, and in day 2 there were 185 decks, being 33BGx, thats just the 17.84% of all the decks on day 2...
With this data in hand, jund wasnt all that big in the metagame, but it was 50% of the top8... So yes, jund (with rock and junk) was the best deck in the format.
I'm sure Mountain was also well represented. You cannot combine BG Rock and Jund into the same deck, they aren't even close. Jund was a good deck, yes. But so is Pod, UWR, Tron, Affinity, etc. Yet they didn't feel the need to cripple those decks which were jus as winning (if not more), just played less.
And that decks werent winning more, BG is obviously overrepresented on the top, going from 17% the day 2 metagame to 50% the top its a problem.
It's pretty easy for stats to get skewed when you go from a base of thousands down to 8, and base your numbers off of one tournament.
On new unbannings I say hold on! We still haven't seen the impact of these changes (they were announced two days ago!) so let's not jump to conclusions on additional unbanings. While I think Bloodbraid Elf has a much greater chance of getting unbanned then it had before this announcement it might take quite some time before we actually get there. The reason I think it's a safer unban now is twofold:
1) Bitterblossom is unbanned - This, more or less, means that we aren't getting Ancestral Vision back for the foreseeable future, lest it make Faeries too much to handle, and that card was one of the few reasons people had reserves about Bloodbraid Elf.
2) Deathrite Shaman is banned - This one isn't about Jund getting compensation, but rather the fact that now the Elf can't be splashed for as easily. Decks like Jumanji or w.e. don't exist so there's no fear of decks just splashing for BBE. Three color decks and Gruul are still fair game and that's probably for the better otherwise it would have probably been all over the place.
Many thanks to HotP Studios. Special thanks to DNC for this great sig.
# BGx in T8/# BGx in T16
Detroit: 6/4
Brisbane: 3/1
Antwerp: 1/2
Prague: 4/2
All in all BGx decks took 23 out of 64 Top 16 slots over 4 GPs: 35%.
Please don't try to argue "Jund is different fron Rock/Junk/A-Jund-i", those deck share like 40+ cards. Don't even think about starting "but what about UWR?", because all the UWR decks put together have nowhere near BGx's stats.
|
|
Big Johnny.
Thank you! Were the rest of you not paying attention over the last few months? Every indicator was showing BGx massively over-performing relative to the rest of the field, and as the GP results above show, it was performing at a rate roughly double its metagame share. Yes, it was beatable, but that's like saying creatures are bad because they die to removal; it neglects to mention the overall consistency and power that DRS gave to jund.
DRS' presence in the format was absolutely oppressive. Nearly every deck in the format had to have a plan to deal with BGx, and DRS alone negated entire strategies and archetypes. With DRS gone, we get a whole bunch of strategies back, including gifts (which straight up disappeared), loam strategies, dredge, plus two new ones in faeries and zoo. I also expect that Jund will split into Naya midrange (as opposed to Naya zoo), and Junk midrange, since Knight of the Reliquary is back to being a good card.
The other thing that people are neglecting to mention is that with DRS in the format, fae and zoo could be quite dangerous, since he would slot into those decks and make them much more powerful. It would be the same crap that we've had for the past year, where the colour pie gets polarised because of a one-drop in two colours that happens to be far too good. I mean, how many colours does burn need to splash before it starts looking ridiculous?
I own a playset of DRS and I was playing them in various decks at the time they announced that ban, im not just a hater that wants cards I cant afford out of the format, but I think that the meta can be much better and diverse without DRS, now decks like delver, solar flare or dredgevine can be a little better.
That's not entirely accurate. Part of the problem is that MTG Goldfish, like a few other sites, doesn't count 3-1 decks in its metagame percentages. That's a big problem because Wizards probably doesn't consider just the 4-0 decks. It considers all decks that are being played, so if we want to approximate that number, we need to make sure our dataset is as big as possible.
At its "worst", BGx made up about 22% of the format around the time of GP Detroit. That was pretty obscene but it was also temporary. By the time DRS got banned, BGx was only at about 15% of the onlone metagame.
As I see it, the issue with that number is not necessarily that it's particularly high. 22% is probably high in the absolute sense, but 15% doesn't have to be; there are definitely healthy formats where some decks have a 15% metagame share. The issue with that share is that no other deck really came close. Affinity never really exceeded 10%. Twin had shot up in popularity, but from September through January its average prevalence never got over 9%. If I were in Wizards position, I would be worried about such a deck.
Personally, I don't like the DRS ban. I think it sets a bad precedent and I think it's generally unattractive for the format. I also don't think BGx was quite as bad as people thought, and it's likely that Faeries and Zoo would have taken enough out of its share just by being in the format. That said, I understand where the ban came from just as I understand where the previous BBE ban came from.
DRS is a nice ban because it was way over the top, it was splashable, it was maindeck GY hate, acceleration, life gain and pinger just for 1 hybrid mana and being a 1/2 was just ridiculous, almost all black decks played it and lots of decks splashed colors just to use him because it made splashing colors even easier...
Cardsphere MTG Draft Simulator
Cardsphere Blog - Original Content
So, yeah, this sucks. I would love to try my hand at playing zoo now that the cat is free, but WotC is just too trigger happy with the banhammer to invest into another deck, so I'll just cross my fingers and hope that my decks stay viable in this new format and hope that both twin and pod dodge the next ban.
Those who are happy to have cards unban may scoff at the Jund players for being "butthurt" over the whole DRS ban, just remember, Wild Nacatl and Bitterblossom aren't immune to getting rebanned.
I'm all for a balanced meta, but this whole ban-list fiasco has left me rather disenfranchised with Modern.
If you're concerned about a double-standard, there will always be selfish people who just want to play their favorite decks, but by and large the very same people who do not enjoy playing against Jund do not enjoy playing against Fae or midrange Zoo, either. They feel pretty similar on the other side of the table.
CG
Is that the kind of format you want? A format where the best deck is attacked for simply being good?
BGStandard Green AggroGB
UWRGModern Saheeli CobraGRWU
UBRGLegacy StormGRBU
Wizards Certified Rules Advisor
In the same way, remember that DRS can perfectly well be unbanned in one of the the next announcements if the meta stabilizes and he is no longer deemed "harmful".
We are talking about grey area cards here, just as valakutonce was, and now BB and nacatl. So as they may be banned again, so may DRS be unbanned, its not like jund is no longer a tier deck, its not like BBE cant be unbanned in the next announcement, etc.
Yes, the ban list changing all the time is a bit troubling, but look at it from this angle: As things leave modern, other things enter, and the things that left, may very well come back in the future.
So its not as if shaman is now scrap board with no value.
This is what irritates me most about the DRS banning. I get the impression that most pros don't really like Modern that much (certainly not as much as standard or legacy) but are still gonna play in big tournaments and that requires playing modern some time (just look at SCG or CFB, modern gets a HUGE shakeup and it's barely even mentioned by anyone there). So rather than pick up a deck that relies on a lot of difficult interactions and requires a lot of experience to pilot well (something like Pod or Affinity), they go for the good stuff deck that wins more often than not through sheer card power rather than synergy. BGx was kinda the default there. But just because the most people are playing it doesn't necessarily make it the best deck. When was the last time that BGx won a major event? I agree that DRS is a really really good card and probably does too much for only costing one mana but he wasn't warping the format and it wasn't propelling BGx to victory after victory. It just made BGx a solid deck that was likely not to get blown out by anything in the format except for Tron and Affinity in game one. Instead of neutering that deck by taking its best card, just unban Nacatl and Bitterblossom and see how unleashing two new decks into the meta will shake things up.
They already set that precedent by banning Bloodbraid.
Thanks to blurrycloud, who by the way, is a redonculous artist.
My other card is a Honden.
Winner of the May 2007 Card Creation League with Colossi Rusting Grounds
I can't believe it's not butter!
BGStandard Green AggroGB
UWRGModern Saheeli CobraGRWU
UBRGLegacy StormGRBU
Wizards Certified Rules Advisor