Flushing players from modern isn't going to save Standard. The only thing that is going to save standard is make better sets. Every year wizards seems to ban more and more cards from modern. They are causing fear and instability in modern in hopes of destroying the format in my opinion.
Simian Spirit Guide, Mox Opal ar as busted cards as those banned. Those cards should be up for discussion as of now going by that logic. We should expect a hit sooner than later and when this does happen we will be saying: "Those are cards that should be banned long ago"
Then we should move on to the Tron lands and Eldrazi Temple.
So where do we stop?
Treasure Cruise, okay, probably makes sense, wasn't really playing the format at the time anyway so I just went with it. I was skeptical about the Twin ban but I figured they had their reasons and there were pretty huge meta shares there. The Eye of Ugin made sense, because with the new cheaper Eldrazi in OGW it was doing things it was never intended to do. But then they announced they were getting rid of the Modern Pro Tour, so: good news! No need to be so heavy-handed with the Modern policing.
And now we have two cards banned with very flimsy justification, and to me it's not an issue of those specific cards because those decks will do fine without them, it's reading between the lines of: (a) unbanning a card they banned two years ago within a year of printing cards to support it, and (b) banning a card that does a slightly broken thing, while all the above cards that are on the edge exist. As far as I can tell, there's no reason not to believe they won't ban everything that makes fast mana or cheats a little bit on one of the core mechanics, and without a clear policy as to where the line is, it's pretty scary to pick up a new deck.
I don't play Standard because I want a format that remains consistent and has a lot of viable decks. Modern as it was before today was very popular and very diverse, despite some people complaining loudly about decks they didn't want to play against. A broad enough field with nothing blatantly broken means people can solve whatever metagame problems they have with the tools that they have, and the new ones that become available in subsequent sets. But if Wizards is so trigger-happy about bans as to issue a surprise ban the weekend after they first finish a spoiler, that makes me a little wary that all these fun and interesting cards are going to get pruned out of the format, and we'll end up with a fairly bland -- but perfectly balanced -- midrange vs. midrange format a few short years from now.
That may be great for some people, but that's not at all to my tastes. I like phyrexian mana. The idea that it gives you something for nothing, when you consider the metagame as a whole, is just false. 56-card decks at the cost of 2-8 life per game makes aggro more viable, creating a dynamic, fast-paced environment that punishes missteps and rewards practice and being able to read your opponent. I like the format as is it is, and I wish they'd stop tinkering with it when there's really no need, especially with the Modern Pro Tour gone.
Lots of people are saying this is going to prevent people from "Buying into Modern".
That phrase really bothers me, because it implies that in order to play in this format, you need to pay up for some very specific things.
I'm hoping that this shakes up the format enough that people have to come up with new decks, and that net-decking might die down for a bit, at least until the next big Modern tournament where people will, doubtless, start copying the pros.
Brewing season is the best season.
I find the "netdecking" vs. "brewing" thing to be a little disingenuous in the first place, but it's even more weird to hear coming from someone on an online forum devoted to Magic in 2017.
It's a false dichotomy. There are no (good) players who brew decks entirely from scratch without bouncing ideas off of others or adapting something they saw somewhere else, or don't bother testing and tweaking and considering what cards others are using to solve similar problems. And there are no (good) players who simply buy someone else's list wholesale and run it week after week without thinking about the component pieces or making any adjustments for their peculiar meta. In reality, deck building is an ongoing collaborative process that occurs in interaction with the other decks being built in the metagame. And if you're being honest and paying attention to those factors, you will (if you want your deck to compete) keep testing it and adjusting it until you arrive at the answer that's closest to "correct." That is why so many people end up playing the same cards. It's not because they're mindless zombies copying each other. It's because deck-building is a deductive process; it only looks inductive because there are so many options. Goyf and bolt are often the best solutions to a variety of problems. So they will be popular and therefore expensive.
Buying into Modern is a real concern for a lot of people, and it becomes more of a concern when cards are suddenly surprise banned. How are you supposed to know, especially as a new player, what cards/decks are going to become "a little too good" and feel the wrath of the faster, more liberal ban cycle?
Why would you want to brew in the format that this move suggests? If I had qualified for the Pro Tour, I would be livid right now. Because I would have spent every waking minute since the complete spoiler went up brewing from Standard, only to look up at my computer and see much of my work had gone to waste because "j/k, the format you were working on isn't going to be the format!" (they could probably have done that on Friday, but I imagine the bad PR would have sullied some of the Aether Revolt hype). I feel bad for the people who have been spending a lot of time thinking about and testing Standard -- not wasting time complaining about what decks they didn't want to play against but problem-solving instead -- who just had the format (I'm assuming) pretty radically changed.
Fortunately, I don't play Standard these days, because I don't have the time, money and energy to start over from scratch every time my deck rotates. That's what Modern is for me: a place where games are fast but metagames move a lot more slowly. It should be a fun place to brew, theoretically, but: I look at a really cool card like Death's Shadow and think: wow, that's interesting design and it would be fun to toy around with and find a way to make it viable. And since the card came out in Worldwake, I missed it, but watching the deck on stream, I was struck by how interesting and different it was and how fun and challenging it looked to play. Fortunately, I didn't get very far buying the pieces before it got nerfed, but I am a little sad that I won't get to try what was a cool an interesting deck. NBD, really, I'm not that salty: I have three Modern decks and am working on a fourth, so I don't lack something to play. What I'm worried about is: what happens to the next card I see that looks like Death's Shadow? That feeling of "Wow, neat card! Now what do we do with it?" will be counteracted by the nagging "eh, might as well not bother, if it gets too good they'll just ban it, and look at the cost..."
That is not a environment that encourages diversity or creativity at all, in my mind. That reads: "just play 'fair' decks. They're boring, but they're safe."
Pardon my asking here, but is it not true that in the State of the Meta thread, almost everybody was asking for better control decks? Is it not true that many, many, MANY players, both professional and not have expressed major dislike of the fact that to be competitive you have to build these non-interactive combo or combo-esque style decks? Many naming Infect, Suicide Zoo, and other similar decks as the examples?
So wizards bans a card that takes care of Infect and suicide Zoo, making said combo decks harder to win with and making it easier to play a midrange/control deck and all everybody wants to do is say that theyre quitting for the attempt at moving a format toward the style of play that the majority of players say they wish that they could have?
I think Ghostwslker, the issue is that many (including myself) want far better communication from Wizards. It shouldnt need to be 'this is our formula' because they CLEARLY dont have one. What we need is open communication. This is the exact same feeling expressed by many (including myself) after the Twin ban.
Bloom = GGT - A ban many felt was on the way and was defendable.
Probe = Twin - A ban that in some ways is questionable (not that great an analog but whatever)
At the end of the day, it still feels like Modern is an after thought, when it could be much more.
EDIT: Feels like the possible unbans are being held hostage honestly. 'In case of rabble, break glass'. A safety valve for when they really screw up, or the format craters.
Their reason for banning probe was as succinct and to the point as it gets...and correct. I don't see how tournament reports are necessary when they are addressing how the card influences gameplay.
You mentioned the Delver deck above. It runs 17 lands and essentially 56 cards b/c Probe enables such a composition to be viable when normally it would not.
This rationale is arbitrary and applies to dozens of cards in the format. Gameplay reasons are all subjective. That is why we should prefer objective reasons like T4 rule violations and format diversity violations. Name a Tier 1 staple in Modern and I'm sure half a dozen people in this thread could knit together a rhetorical argument about why that card is busted because it is too strong in gameplay. We cannot have Wizards start banning cards for those reasons because it's completely unpredictable and doesn't necessarily improve the format.
Here's the Probe rationale I would have written, assuming I had their data:
"Looking at the results of Modern games on MTGO, we found that no single top-tier deck was consistently winning before turn four and violating the turn four rule. That said, many players complained about how fast the format was. We did a deeper dive and also found that too many overall games were ending before turn four as a result of numerous fast, linear, aggressive strategies, although no single deck was to blame. Rather than ban individual cards from each of these decks (no one of which was alone in violation), we looked at cards shared between all of them to decrease the overall number of games won before turn four. Probe was the most offensive of those shared cards, appearing in the greatest percentage of pre-turn four wins relative to any other shared card.
This finding is supported by Probe's gameplay: it gives perfect information, draws a card, fuels delve, and even pumps creatures for basically no investment. Although it is unfortunate other decks will suffer from Probe's removal (e.g. Delver, U/R Storm), we believe Probe's banning will have a net positive on the format as it overall decreases the chance of fast, top-tier decks winning before turn four. Those decks will likely also find replacements and stay viable. In the interest of the turn four rule, Gitaxian Probe is banned."
This took me ten minutes to write and probably summarizes Wizards' analysis of the card. It also would have preemptively addressed most of the anger around the ban.
I feel like they are sending mixed signals about what their standards for bans are, which undermines player confidence. They're also doing that while increasing how often they make ban announcements, which is only going to make players more nervous about investing in decks, because if that deck turns out too good, or merely a card in it turns out to be something that breaks a whole different deck, they won't be able to play it for as long.
I approve of the specific bans.
But the way they've explained their standards for why those cards are getting bans justifies a ton of other bans that they haven't done, or may lead to such justifications being made once the metagame re-settles with whatever new decks are on top and causing trouble now that the previous ones no longer are, because there are still plenty of cards in the format that have potential to cause these sorts of problems now that some of their competition is cut away.
This is exacerbated by the format still not having a wide and deep enough suite of solutions and answers across different colors that suit the 'turn 4' speed they are aiming for in the format (too much of it is only suitable to turn 5+ speeds more appropriate to some Standard environments) in order to have the metagame react in a healthy manner, meaning decks that should be merely good are instead capable of broken meta shares because of the format's lack of answers for them, and thus more vulnerable to potential bans if they shift up in meta shares with ways to react to them appropriately for a healthy format not found for a wide enough array of decks. As long as they restrict how cards enter Modern to be through Standard alone, and keep current standard design policies, Modern will be in danger of instability that results in bans for mere metagame shaping reasons, rather than truly broken cards, and when you get into a habit of relying on banning for metagame shaping reasons, without extensive testing, you simply have new problem decks take over when the previous ones are pushed down by bans.
I don't even play any decks with Probe or Troll and this makes me less confident about the format. Not because I think cards from my decks can be banned, but because I can never be sure about investments in my sideboard if they are regularly killing off major decks. Why should I purchase some/more of X sideboard card in reaction to a metagame shift if that deck might be banned, but if I can't be sure it's going to be banned, what if I sit around and get crushed by it while waiting for the ban, because the banlist criteria can't be analyzed properly with the data available to players?
Here's the Probe rationale I would have written, assuming I had their data:
"Looking at the results of Modern games on MTGO, we found that no single top-tier deck was consistently winning before turn four and violating the turn four rule. That said, many players complained about how fast the format was. We did a deeper dive and also found that too many overall games were ending before turn four as a result of numerous fast, linear, aggressive strategies, although no single deck was to blame. Rather than ban individual cards from each of these decks (no one of which was alone in violation), we looked at cards shared between all of them to decrease the overall number of games won before turn four. Probe was the most offensive of those shared cards, appearing in the greatest percentage of pre-turn four wins relative to any other shared card.
This finding is supported by Probe's gameplay: it gives perfect information, draws a card, fuels delve, and even pumps creatures for basically no investment. Although it is unfortunate other decks will suffer from Probe's removal (e.g. Delver, U/R Storm), we believe Probe's banning will have a net positive on the format as it overall decreases the chance of fast, top-tier decks winning before turn four. Those decks will likely also find replacements and stay viable. In the interest of the turn four rule, Gitaxian Probe is banned."
This took me ten minutes to write and probably summarizes Wizards' analysis of the card. It also would have preemptively addressed most of the anger around the ban.
All that sounds very fair and fits with the data posted in the other thread. If I had read that on Wizards' own page, I would be a lot less worried about them banning things left and right whenever they felt like. Because, as you say, the reasons they listed were subjective, and when you have objective reasons for these things, they're more predictable and less disruptive.
I took some time off to eat my feelings. I'm pretty even about this whole thing. Reread the thread, and I wanted to highlight these posts and bring up my major points about why I DONT MIND THIS BANNING, BUT I HATE WHAT IT MEANS.
Needless to say happy to see Probe gone and happy to see dredge nerf. Don't see infect or dredge dying just becoming more manageable. I'm actually more scared by the fact wizards banned THREE cards from the format they supposedly test for. Fire the entire R&D team?
This hits exactly why I am face palming all the time about this crazy announcement. Because this whole time they said "we dont test for modern, if it breaks it breaks. We focus on standard." Apparently they just suck at testing... since it took just a month to break the first card, less than a week for people to make cheap emis running around without the turn 4 craziness that was found out a set later with new cards, and it took the world... literally 0 real world days to break smugglers copter. Everyone knew it was broke from the spoiler.
They literally must not actually know how to test. The rest of the world hire actual gamer's to test. they apparently dont.
Second, I don't recall seeing a pro list that eschewed the Probes pre ban. If you're calling them poor to mediocre then I've no clue what to say in response.
Ari Lax played infect without probes from the start.
Ari Lax is wholly irrelevant to the format.
Ari lax has been one of my favorite pros for a very long time. As a major player of the old Legacy ANT lists, Lax was a huge inspiration to me as a magic player. He's been in the scene forever.
Side note. I beat him once, because I knew his deck better than him, so I made bad plays to bait him. It was awesome.
But he among all the other pros are like "Infect is fine" because of one single reason... Infect doesnt win against "real control" Well, assuming real control is real. Which its not. So infect is perfectly fine. Because they didnt suddenly make interaction a thing. They banned uninteraction, soon to be replaced with different uninteraction.
The anger at this announcement is unusually overblown and unwarranted, even considering the general Modern outcry at such changes. Although there are definitely some legitimately scary elements of the ban update, most people are complaining about elements that are totally fine, or even heartening.
The GGT ban is perfectly fine. It keeps the deck a top-tier contender without leaving it a Tier 1 mainstay. This lets other GY decks return (remember old faithful Abzan Company?) and lets everyone free up SB slots to fight other decks. The "scary" part about this ban is that it's a reversal of a previous ban, which is unprecedented but not really that scary. I'm fine with companies and organizations changing their minds based on new realities. In these regards, the GGT ban gets top marks from me.
Probe ban gets a B-. Yes, it's effective at taking a little bit off the top of most fast decks without killing any of them outright. In that regard, it's a solid A. Unfortunately, it does this at the expense of very fair Delver decks, which were great for format health. That's C-, unintended consequence ban territory. More importantly, these kinds of silly bans just underscore Modern's problems: WHERE THE HECK ARE OUR GENERIC ANSWERS AND POLICING CARDS/STRATEGIES?? You don't see these absurd bans in Legacy because the format has internal regulation from cards, not external regulations from bans. I'm not saying we need Legacy's exact answers, but we do need answers and we needed them a year ago. Push is a good step in the right direction, but it can't be the final step. If we don't get these kinds of cards, we'll keep stomaching more corner-case bans like Probe and keep inciting even more ban mania and format instability.
So, if the bans themselves aren't that terrible, what's the real problem?
The problem is the update itself. It doesn't cite tournament finishes, doesn't refer back to format guidelines and rules, doesn't anticipate objections to the bans, and overall doesn't build format confidence. It looked like the article was thrown together in less than an hour, when I'm sure Wizards did mountains of testing and analysis before deciding on some of those bans. If Wizards communicated this to their audience, people wouldn't be so up in arms about these changes. Especially if they threw us a bone about how they want to see how the new format shakes out before deciding on possible unbans. That would have been great! Instead, we got a very elementary update with extremely basic reasons. No wonder people are upset: Wizards hasn't done anything to try and build confidence after a big banlist shakeup.
I hope we get some clarification in the coming weeks. I'm sick and tired of delving through AMAs and Twitter posts to figure out Wizards' banlist policy and process. This lack of transparency makes it very difficult to advocate on behalf of the format and entice players to join. With ban mania everywhere, it's hard to stay evidence-based and level-headed, particularly when Wizards doesn't give us any tools to help that fight.
So I even agree. These two bans... are all correct. I'm not mad at that. I'm mad that instead of fixing the illness, they treat the symptoms. Are these banns correct? Yes, because modern apperently cant handle them because the tools to deal with these dont exist.
They treat the ban list like its the control deck of the format. But simply making control viable would infact... fix this problem AND FUTURE ONES. Instead of banning, then banning the next thing that rises in the power vacuum left.
Pardon my asking here, but is it not true that in the State of the Meta thread, almost everybody was asking for better control decks? Is it not true that many, many, MANY players, both professional and not have expressed major dislike of the fact that to be competitive you have to build these non-interactive combo or combo-esque style decks? Many naming Infect, Suicide Zoo, and other similar decks as the examples?
So wizards bans a card that takes care of Infect and suicide Zoo, making said combo decks harder to win with and making it easier to play a midrange/control deck and all everybody wants to do is say that theyre quitting for the attempt at moving a format toward the style of play that the majority of players say they wish that they could have?
And this is one of the problems too. Not blaming you, but most of the magic world seems perfectly fine with these bans. Standard players even going further and going "finally I dont have to deal with Emi every freakin day!" with out realizing that their savors ARE THE SAME PEOPLE THAT BROKE THEIR GAME. And with modern... its been litteral years of this. They refuse to print balanced answers because its unfun or doesnt sell well, and the health sufferes, so they ban. Then it happens again, 3 months later.
This hits exactly why I am face palming all the time about this crazy announcement. Because this whole time they said "we dont test for modern, if it breaks it breaks. We focus on standard." Apparently they just suck at testing... since it took just a month to break the first card, less than a weak for people to make cheap emis running around without the turn 4 craziness that was found out a set later with new cards, and it took the world... literally 0 real world days to break smugglers copter. Everyone knew it was broke from the spoiler.
They literally must not actually know how to test. The rest of the world hire actual gamer's to test. they apparently dont.
This scares me as well. I'll like to think Eldritch Moon, Kaladesh and Aether Revolt testing weren't that terribly far from each other and if they printed Fatal Push because they thought Copter was "fine, but could do with some answers the set after" and now that's a mistake and the only reason we got one of the most high-profile new prints for Modern was because they made that mistake in Standard design...
Not to say it's always bad, Collected Company went through the typical ban-less period in Standard, but the complaints about it in Standard were still vocal (something to take note even if we know vocals tend to be louder than they really represent).
I wouldn't be surprised if R&D decided to retreat in power-level once again because of the Standard bans and we'll never going to get our good generic answers for a long time coming once again because the last time we got one, it was because of a card in Standard they vastly underestimated and had to ban.
In short, it's sort of "Modern only get good generic answers when R&D is "bad" at testing Standard, because when they do, they are effectively "testing" Modern at the same time".
What I cannot understand, is if they have this poor testing process, why is it we read about 'FFL' which is where testing happens? Like, we know Design is different from Dev, how is it that testing is possibly so poor?
EDIT: And i dont even mean Modern testing, we already know from Twin ban/Eldrazi winter time, they dont even test for Modern.
What I cannot understand, is if they have this poor testing process, why is it we read about 'FFL' which is where testing happens? Like, we know Design is different from Dev, how is it that testing is possibly so poor?
Multiple people have left Wizards of the Coast, including multiple Pro's over the years. (You would think this was a sign of something wrong internally). I remember specifically on one of MJ's old streams, where he and Gainsay talk for hours about how horrible they are as a company. Not only in idea implementation, but salary, careers, etc. I also believe when GT left years ago, he claimed that he disagreed with development and testing entirely, and the movement they were implementing going forward.
Regarding this announcement though, I feel a complete shake of consumer confidence has happened. I don't believe any of this was overblown, you cannot defend Magic at all with a straight face. They consistently print threats with no answers, the games are so wildly inconsistent in every format, with haymakers for offence and never defensive purposes. Before this announcement I saw the potential for a minimal banned list, not anymore, and I know I'm not alone when I say that I've lost a lot of love for this game in a mere 24 hours.
I want 3 Set Blocks, minimal banned lists, the old MTGO back (with decent rewards), rewards for FNM, ELO Rating, actual PTQ's, and less products thrown in my face every year. These past 7 years have been seriously rough being a Magic player.
I don't think it can possibly be as efficient as the entire community converging on the problem at once. For one thing, I'm pretty sure the cards are changing as they're testing them, so it's not like getting a spoiler and buckling down and learning more as you go -- adapting to the updates to design makes thing less cohesive, I imagine. Another important factors is that the pros who test heavily to find the best Standard decks have one singular goal and that's placing in the Pro Tour. WotC has less at stake, or at least has more factors to worry about: casual appeal, storyline, etc... given how dedicated Magic players are as a whole, it makes sense that balance issues fall through the cracks.
(not that I think the Standard bans were necessary; I'm just skeptical about how much we can expect from in-house testing)
Unless they think if what is going to happen, happens, then they will unban some cards to help interactive decks. And it will not work. Because if anything is clear as very clear water, is that there's no way fair interactive decks are going to beat Tron, RG Valakut and Bant Eldrazi. There's no way, they are just fundamentally screwed in the matchup, and the only way to beat those decks is to kill them fast, which interactive decks will never be able to do except by giving them cards to cheat out of the problem, like Twin.
Yeah, or like Delver. Oh wait, that card is still legal.
Mutagenic is enough to slow down infect, and liliana will make jund/abzan decks fair and give more decks options in the format to come out of woodwork.
abrupt decay, kholaghan's command, spell snare, list goes on so much to stop it or the equipment it grabs just is meh in meta.
The biggest problem with this update is that I can't just refute posts like these anymore. Probe's role in facilitating turn three kills was so dubious, and so under-explained, that this ban really does make it seem like Wizards goes after the big decks. I agree that Modern would become more interesting if Wizards focused on powering up midrange and control instead of nerfing the many aggro decks.
the card itself really isn't worth the card board its printed on...does it serve a purpose? Sure its a blue 1 drop that might not be a 1/1. I would not put it in a list and expect to win a PTQ or GP though.
If it was someone else, I wouldn't even take the Delver suggestion seriously, Jordan.
Being you... I've played Delver decks extensively over time, including Monkey Grow, a deck I actually love. I'm not going to say anything about their game vs Tron, out of respect.
the card itself really isn't worth the card board its printed on...does it serve a purpose? Sure its a blue 1 drop that might not be a 1/1. I would not put it in a list and expect to win a PTQ or GP though.
I don't think it can possibly be as efficient as the entire community converging on the problem at once. For one thing, I'm pretty sure the cards are changing as they're testing them, so it's not like getting a spoiler and buckling down and learning more as you go -- adapting to the updates to design makes thing less cohesive, I imagine. Another important factors is that the pros who test heavily to find the best Standard decks have one singular goal and that's placing in the Pro Tour. WotC has less at stake, or at least has more factors to worry about: casual appeal, storyline, etc... given how dedicated Magic players are as a whole, it makes sense that balance issues fall through the cracks.
(not that I think the Standard bans were necessary; I'm just skeptical about how much we can expect from in-house testing)
Cards have always fallen through the cracks, but the real issue that these particular ones seem unnecessary. The last two times Standard Bans happened (Affinity/Jace-SFM) tournament attendance were heavily affected and more or less stated as a reason. This recent one doesn't give off that reasoning and felt like they were applying Modern's Banning process towards Standard, something they never really did.
It feels like WotC is now trying to be "pro-active" towards bans before they affect tournament turnouts with the increased rate of announcements, but at the same time, the issue is we'll never know if those 3 cards are capable of actually turning tournament attendance down like their predecessors did. Even if Standard attendance did go down, there were too many variables in Standard Changes recently (2-Block Paradigm, then the rotation change) that it's outright impossible to pin the percentages down. Did they recognize that and decided to just adopt the "Modern Banning Process" for standard since they decided to be proactive? If so, then Standard is in down for an even rougher route then Modern in the future. Or even worse, did they not recognize that and assigned all the attendance drops to those 3 cards, then Standard is in for another whirlwind of changes in the next 6 months.
I know I'm talking a bit too much about Standard considering this is the Modern thread, but my point is they have literally publicly announced that Standard (and Limited) is what they concentrate on, so how they handle Standard in particular still affects Modern, a secondary concern to them in quite the fashion. To put it bluntly, like many of us aren't really confident in their "Modern Banning Processes" and this particular announcement seems to imply Standard is headed down a similar path, which is a legitimate worry for even the Modern player base, even if we don't care too much about the Standard format itself, but we know WotC does.
Okay this is ridiculous. When will this Affinity has to be the best deck in the format mindset from wizards end? Always ban a card or kill a deck because it surpasses a certain deck in popularity or power?!? We just can't have something on par with affinity.(In terms of numbers and sideboard stifling)
HEY WIZARDS!!! IF YOU WANT EVERYONE PLAYING WITH ONE PARTICULAR DECK THEN STOP PRINTING ANYTHING BUT THOSE CARDS!!!
Buying into Modern is a real concern for a lot of people, and it becomes more of a concern when cards are suddenly surprise banned. How are you supposed to know, especially as a new player, what cards/decks are going to become "a little too good" and feel the wrath of the faster, more liberal ban cycle?
Fortunately, I don't play Standard these days, because I don't have the time, money and energy to start over from scratch every time my deck rotates. That's what Modern is for me: a place where games are fast but metagames move a lot more slowly. It should be a fun place to brew, theoretically, but: I look at a really cool card like Death's Shadow and think: wow, that's interesting design and it would be fun to toy around with and find a way to make it viable. And since the card came out in Worldwake, I missed it, but watching the deck on stream, I was struck by how interesting and different it was and how fun and challenging it looked to play. Fortunately, I didn't get very far buying the pieces before it got nerfed, but I am a little sad that I won't get to try what was a cool an interesting deck. NBD, really, I'm not that salty: I have three Modern decks and am working on a fourth, so I don't lack something to play. What I'm worried about is: what happens to the next card I see that looks like Death's Shadow? That feeling of "Wow, neat card! Now what do we do with it?" will be counteracted by the nagging "eh, might as well not bother, if it gets too good they'll just ban it, and look at the cost..."
That is not a environment that encourages diversity or creativity at all, in my mind. That reads: "just play 'fair' decks. They're boring, but they're safe."
You do realize that Death's Shadow wasn't the card that got banned, right? For someone who is preachy about all the cool ways to play a card and how the format now discourages creativity, you seem pretty set on jumping ship without trying to toy around with it and "find a way to make it viable". I get that it sucks, but why not use the opportunity to contemplate a gitaxian-probe replacement or an alternate strategy before hitting the eject button?
Their reason for banning probe was as succinct and to the point as it gets...and correct. I don't see how tournament reports are necessary when they are addressing how the card influences gameplay.
You mentioned the Delver deck above. It runs 17 lands and essentially 56 cards b/c Probe enables such a composition to be viable when normally it would not.
This rationale is arbitrary and applies to dozens of cards in the format. Gameplay reasons are all subjective. That is why we should prefer objective reasons like T4 rule violations and format diversity violations. Name a Tier 1 staple in Modern and I'm sure half a dozen people in this thread could knit together a rhetorical argument about why that card is busted because it is too strong in gameplay. We cannot have Wizards start banning cards for those reasons because it's completely unpredictable and doesn't necessarily improve the format.
Here's the Probe rationale I would have written, assuming I had their data:
"Looking at the results of Modern games on MTGO, we found that no single top-tier deck was consistently winning before turn four and violating the turn four rule. That said, many players complained about how fast the format was. We did a deeper dive and also found that too many overall games were ending before turn four as a result of numerous fast, linear, aggressive strategies, although no single deck was to blame. Rather than ban individual cards from each of these decks (no one of which was alone in violation), we looked at cards shared between all of them to decrease the overall number of games won before turn four. Probe was the most offensive of those shared cards, appearing in the greatest percentage of pre-turn four wins relative to any other shared card.
This finding is supported by Probe's gameplay: it gives perfect information, draws a card, fuels delve, and even pumps creatures for basically no investment. Although it is unfortunate other decks will suffer from Probe's removal (e.g. Delver, U/R Storm), we believe Probe's banning will have a net positive on the format as it overall decreases the chance of fast, top-tier decks winning before turn four. Those decks will likely also find replacements and stay viable. In the interest of the turn four rule, Gitaxian Probe is banned."
This took me ten minutes to write and probably summarizes Wizards' analysis of the card. It also would have preemptively addressed most of the anger around the ban.
They should give you the job of doing this stuff. And consulting on what to ban in the first place.
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Modern: G Tron, Vannifar, Jund, Druid/Vizier combo, Humans, Eldrazi Stompy (Serum Powder), Amulet, Grishoalbrand, Breach Titan, Turns, Eternal Command, As Foretold Living End, Elves, Cheerios, RUG Scapeshift
Okay this is ridiculous. When will this Affinity has to be the best deck in the format mindset from wizards end? Always ban a card or kill a deck because it surpasses a certain deck in popularity or power?!? We just can't have something on par with affinity.(In terms of numbers and sideboard stifling)
HEY WIZARDS!!! IF YOU WANT EVERYONE PLAYING WITH ONE PARTICULAR DECK THEN STOP PRINTING ANYTHING BUT THOSE CARDS!!!
Disclaimer: As an Affinity player only (mainly because I'm too lazy to build the others) this might be slightly biased even if I consciously tried to keep it objective.
Not necessarily. Affinity has always been "fair" (I'm not talking the interactive way, just the general power-level) because the checks to it are relatively nicely printed compared to the likes of the status of generic answers, plus its "worst era" happened right at the starting block of the format, the main offenders being already locked in the List, so it's pretty hard to surpass what already exists, when it is already a "compromised mish-mash Tier 1 deck from it's potentially Tier 0 form". Yes, there are points to be argued about some cards (Mox Opal and Cranial Plating, which I will sit on the edge with my bias they don't ever go away), but the same exist with a more recent parallel in the format - Eldrazi, who were also Tier 0 once (Affinity just had its Tier 0 time in Standard instead) and even with the neutering and compromising to Tier 1, the borderline cards (Eldrazi Temple and maybe TKS) still get raised from time-to-time (although the Eldrazi case is shakier since they follow solely creature removal overall...).
Oh, they don't want anyone to be playing any particular deck, they want you to be endlessly buying packs for different decks. Affinity is lucky enough to be on the borderline that it can't really be pushed higher in power and there's usually someone to steal the spotlight from it. Fortunately, the fact every deck has answers against does make the deck less appealing the some people, so Affinity, along with Burn is more or less the "Midrange" variants of the aggro-decks (meaning they are relatively safe from bans because of their weaknesses and despite being aggro, their popularity is meta-dependent like the Midrange decks).
That's some quality logic right there... I like how you left out the part where those decks were completely broken/stifled diversity/were a deck that Wizards named a broken mechanics scale after/weren't ever very popular in the first place.
Its some logical logic.
Variables aside. Deck got popular. Deck was banned.
Those are the objective facts.
Baloney. No cards from those decks were banned for being popular and there are many decks that have been popular for a long time that are still tier 1 (Jund, Tron, Affinity, Burn). Even Eldrazi is still tier 1 after having a major card banned.
Correlation is not causation. Wizards is not going to ban a card that is not used in a top tier deck, but merely being in a top tier deck does not mean that a card will be banned. Also, having a single card banned will not necessarily knock a deck out of its current tier, let alone kill it (I do feel bad for Storm players, though).
I think these bans will be good for Modern overall but, combined with some people's perception of the Twin ban, have obviously shaken confidence in the stability of the format.
I know I'm talking a bit too much about Standard considering this is the Modern thread, but my point is they have literally publicly announced that Standard (and Limited) is what they concentrate on, so how they handle Standard in particular still affects Modern, a secondary concern to them in quite the fashion. To put it bluntly, like many of us aren't really confident in their "Modern Banning Processes" and this particular announcement seems to imply Standard is headed down a similar path, which is a legitimate worry for even the Modern player base, even if we don't care too much about the Standard format itself, but we know WotC does.
On a positive note, I feel they do an amazing job with Limited -- Booster Draft is by far my favorite format -- but I agree that they seem to be a little hasty lately, changing too many things at once and not waiting to see how they pan out.
You do realize that Death's Shadow wasn't the card that got banned, right? For someone who is preachy about all the cool ways to play a card and how the format now discourages creativity, you seem pretty set on jumping ship without trying to toy around with it and "find a way to make it viable". I get that it sucks, but why not use the opportunity to contemplate a gitaxian-probe replacement or an alternate strategy before hitting the eject button?
I'm not hitting the eject button; I'm lucky enough to have not gotten on the plane. I'm not about to lay down hundreds of dollars for a deck that just got worse. All I had was a single Bauble and some Probes (which I thought were a safe buy precisely because they're used in so many decks, lol) I was out of the game for years and years and have only recently started building back a collection; it's very frustrating to try to buy the pieces for a format bit by bit and then have a deck nerfed before you've actually put it together.
If I had already committed to buying and learning the deck, then sure, make adjustments, it's probably still bad, but whatever. But now, why bother? There are plenty of other cute decks to play; I want one that also has a chance of being successful.
In any case, I'm not brewing with Death's Shadow because that problem's already been solved. That's an example, a stand-in for future interesting cards that I would like to brew with but probably won't, because if my brew's actually good, vaguely reasoned, hasty bans will jettison all my effort and leave me with a pile o random cards nobody wants.
No matter how you feel about the bans or lack of unbans, or standard, or ... 3 set blocks (?) - can we please turn down the melodrama? Some of you act like Wizards' has personally torn your cards up.
With that, I'm assuming that the additional b/r announcements per year will cause them to be a little more experimental with bans/unbans as their effective timeframe is much smaller at a minimum. Something is a dramatic failure? Reverse it.
As for the tools we need - they're not going to come. Yeah, they missed an opportunity for a 'push' styled counterspell but that's not even really what we need. We need the next level of answers - non basic land hate. We need Wasteland. Miracles can exist in Legacy as a control deck because Cloudpost can't go nuts because so many decks have answers for it - so the top end is relatively capped which means the bottom of the format is looking to just outrace the top like we have here. Everyone is concerned about a swing back of Tron and Valakut decks and possibly rightly so as we don't *really* have the answers to fight them effectively. Banning pieces from them is an *awful* solution, but allowing them to stay stretches us into a strange uncanny valley where you're up a creek if you can't close out a game quickly.
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Death to false Value.
GW
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So where do we stop?
Treasure Cruise, okay, probably makes sense, wasn't really playing the format at the time anyway so I just went with it. I was skeptical about the Twin ban but I figured they had their reasons and there were pretty huge meta shares there. The Eye of Ugin made sense, because with the new cheaper Eldrazi in OGW it was doing things it was never intended to do. But then they announced they were getting rid of the Modern Pro Tour, so: good news! No need to be so heavy-handed with the Modern policing.
And now we have two cards banned with very flimsy justification, and to me it's not an issue of those specific cards because those decks will do fine without them, it's reading between the lines of: (a) unbanning a card they banned two years ago within a year of printing cards to support it, and (b) banning a card that does a slightly broken thing, while all the above cards that are on the edge exist. As far as I can tell, there's no reason not to believe they won't ban everything that makes fast mana or cheats a little bit on one of the core mechanics, and without a clear policy as to where the line is, it's pretty scary to pick up a new deck.
I don't play Standard because I want a format that remains consistent and has a lot of viable decks. Modern as it was before today was very popular and very diverse, despite some people complaining loudly about decks they didn't want to play against. A broad enough field with nothing blatantly broken means people can solve whatever metagame problems they have with the tools that they have, and the new ones that become available in subsequent sets. But if Wizards is so trigger-happy about bans as to issue a surprise ban the weekend after they first finish a spoiler, that makes me a little wary that all these fun and interesting cards are going to get pruned out of the format, and we'll end up with a fairly bland -- but perfectly balanced -- midrange vs. midrange format a few short years from now.
That may be great for some people, but that's not at all to my tastes. I like phyrexian mana. The idea that it gives you something for nothing, when you consider the metagame as a whole, is just false. 56-card decks at the cost of 2-8 life per game makes aggro more viable, creating a dynamic, fast-paced environment that punishes missteps and rewards practice and being able to read your opponent. I like the format as is it is, and I wish they'd stop tinkering with it when there's really no need, especially with the Modern Pro Tour gone.
I find the "netdecking" vs. "brewing" thing to be a little disingenuous in the first place, but it's even more weird to hear coming from someone on an online forum devoted to Magic in 2017.
It's a false dichotomy. There are no (good) players who brew decks entirely from scratch without bouncing ideas off of others or adapting something they saw somewhere else, or don't bother testing and tweaking and considering what cards others are using to solve similar problems. And there are no (good) players who simply buy someone else's list wholesale and run it week after week without thinking about the component pieces or making any adjustments for their peculiar meta. In reality, deck building is an ongoing collaborative process that occurs in interaction with the other decks being built in the metagame. And if you're being honest and paying attention to those factors, you will (if you want your deck to compete) keep testing it and adjusting it until you arrive at the answer that's closest to "correct." That is why so many people end up playing the same cards. It's not because they're mindless zombies copying each other. It's because deck-building is a deductive process; it only looks inductive because there are so many options. Goyf and bolt are often the best solutions to a variety of problems. So they will be popular and therefore expensive.
Buying into Modern is a real concern for a lot of people, and it becomes more of a concern when cards are suddenly surprise banned. How are you supposed to know, especially as a new player, what cards/decks are going to become "a little too good" and feel the wrath of the faster, more liberal ban cycle?
Why would you want to brew in the format that this move suggests? If I had qualified for the Pro Tour, I would be livid right now. Because I would have spent every waking minute since the complete spoiler went up brewing from Standard, only to look up at my computer and see much of my work had gone to waste because "j/k, the format you were working on isn't going to be the format!" (they could probably have done that on Friday, but I imagine the bad PR would have sullied some of the Aether Revolt hype). I feel bad for the people who have been spending a lot of time thinking about and testing Standard -- not wasting time complaining about what decks they didn't want to play against but problem-solving instead -- who just had the format (I'm assuming) pretty radically changed.
Fortunately, I don't play Standard these days, because I don't have the time, money and energy to start over from scratch every time my deck rotates. That's what Modern is for me: a place where games are fast but metagames move a lot more slowly. It should be a fun place to brew, theoretically, but: I look at a really cool card like Death's Shadow and think: wow, that's interesting design and it would be fun to toy around with and find a way to make it viable. And since the card came out in Worldwake, I missed it, but watching the deck on stream, I was struck by how interesting and different it was and how fun and challenging it looked to play. Fortunately, I didn't get very far buying the pieces before it got nerfed, but I am a little sad that I won't get to try what was a cool an interesting deck. NBD, really, I'm not that salty: I have three Modern decks and am working on a fourth, so I don't lack something to play. What I'm worried about is: what happens to the next card I see that looks like Death's Shadow? That feeling of "Wow, neat card! Now what do we do with it?" will be counteracted by the nagging "eh, might as well not bother, if it gets too good they'll just ban it, and look at the cost..."
That is not a environment that encourages diversity or creativity at all, in my mind. That reads: "just play 'fair' decks. They're boring, but they're safe."
So wizards bans a card that takes care of Infect and suicide Zoo, making said combo decks harder to win with and making it easier to play a midrange/control deck and all everybody wants to do is say that theyre quitting for the attempt at moving a format toward the style of play that the majority of players say they wish that they could have?
Bloom = GGT - A ban many felt was on the way and was defendable.
Probe = Twin - A ban that in some ways is questionable (not that great an analog but whatever)
At the end of the day, it still feels like Modern is an after thought, when it could be much more.
EDIT: Feels like the possible unbans are being held hostage honestly. 'In case of rabble, break glass'. A safety valve for when they really screw up, or the format craters.
Spirits
This rationale is arbitrary and applies to dozens of cards in the format. Gameplay reasons are all subjective. That is why we should prefer objective reasons like T4 rule violations and format diversity violations. Name a Tier 1 staple in Modern and I'm sure half a dozen people in this thread could knit together a rhetorical argument about why that card is busted because it is too strong in gameplay. We cannot have Wizards start banning cards for those reasons because it's completely unpredictable and doesn't necessarily improve the format.
Here's the Probe rationale I would have written, assuming I had their data:
"Looking at the results of Modern games on MTGO, we found that no single top-tier deck was consistently winning before turn four and violating the turn four rule. That said, many players complained about how fast the format was. We did a deeper dive and also found that too many overall games were ending before turn four as a result of numerous fast, linear, aggressive strategies, although no single deck was to blame. Rather than ban individual cards from each of these decks (no one of which was alone in violation), we looked at cards shared between all of them to decrease the overall number of games won before turn four. Probe was the most offensive of those shared cards, appearing in the greatest percentage of pre-turn four wins relative to any other shared card.
This finding is supported by Probe's gameplay: it gives perfect information, draws a card, fuels delve, and even pumps creatures for basically no investment. Although it is unfortunate other decks will suffer from Probe's removal (e.g. Delver, U/R Storm), we believe Probe's banning will have a net positive on the format as it overall decreases the chance of fast, top-tier decks winning before turn four. Those decks will likely also find replacements and stay viable. In the interest of the turn four rule, Gitaxian Probe is banned."
This took me ten minutes to write and probably summarizes Wizards' analysis of the card. It also would have preemptively addressed most of the anger around the ban.
I approve of the specific bans.
But the way they've explained their standards for why those cards are getting bans justifies a ton of other bans that they haven't done, or may lead to such justifications being made once the metagame re-settles with whatever new decks are on top and causing trouble now that the previous ones no longer are, because there are still plenty of cards in the format that have potential to cause these sorts of problems now that some of their competition is cut away.
This is exacerbated by the format still not having a wide and deep enough suite of solutions and answers across different colors that suit the 'turn 4' speed they are aiming for in the format (too much of it is only suitable to turn 5+ speeds more appropriate to some Standard environments) in order to have the metagame react in a healthy manner, meaning decks that should be merely good are instead capable of broken meta shares because of the format's lack of answers for them, and thus more vulnerable to potential bans if they shift up in meta shares with ways to react to them appropriately for a healthy format not found for a wide enough array of decks. As long as they restrict how cards enter Modern to be through Standard alone, and keep current standard design policies, Modern will be in danger of instability that results in bans for mere metagame shaping reasons, rather than truly broken cards, and when you get into a habit of relying on banning for metagame shaping reasons, without extensive testing, you simply have new problem decks take over when the previous ones are pushed down by bans.
I don't even play any decks with Probe or Troll and this makes me less confident about the format. Not because I think cards from my decks can be banned, but because I can never be sure about investments in my sideboard if they are regularly killing off major decks. Why should I purchase some/more of X sideboard card in reaction to a metagame shift if that deck might be banned, but if I can't be sure it's going to be banned, what if I sit around and get crushed by it while waiting for the ban, because the banlist criteria can't be analyzed properly with the data available to players?
All that sounds very fair and fits with the data posted in the other thread. If I had read that on Wizards' own page, I would be a lot less worried about them banning things left and right whenever they felt like. Because, as you say, the reasons they listed were subjective, and when you have objective reasons for these things, they're more predictable and less disruptive.
This hits exactly why I am face palming all the time about this crazy announcement. Because this whole time they said "we dont test for modern, if it breaks it breaks. We focus on standard." Apparently they just suck at testing... since it took just a month to break the first card, less than a week for people to make cheap emis running around without the turn 4 craziness that was found out a set later with new cards, and it took the world... literally 0 real world days to break smugglers copter. Everyone knew it was broke from the spoiler.
They literally must not actually know how to test. The rest of the world hire actual gamer's to test. they apparently dont.
Side note. I beat him once, because I knew his deck better than him, so I made bad plays to bait him. It was awesome.
But he among all the other pros are like "Infect is fine" because of one single reason... Infect doesnt win against "real control" Well, assuming real control is real. Which its not. So infect is perfectly fine. Because they didnt suddenly make interaction a thing. They banned uninteraction, soon to be replaced with different uninteraction.
So I even agree. These two bans... are all correct. I'm not mad at that. I'm mad that instead of fixing the illness, they treat the symptoms. Are these banns correct? Yes, because modern apperently cant handle them because the tools to deal with these dont exist.
They treat the ban list like its the control deck of the format. But simply making control viable would infact... fix this problem AND FUTURE ONES. Instead of banning, then banning the next thing that rises in the power vacuum left.
And this is one of the problems too. Not blaming you, but most of the magic world seems perfectly fine with these bans. Standard players even going further and going "finally I dont have to deal with Emi every freakin day!" with out realizing that their savors ARE THE SAME PEOPLE THAT BROKE THEIR GAME. And with modern... its been litteral years of this. They refuse to print balanced answers because its unfun or doesnt sell well, and the health sufferes, so they ban. Then it happens again, 3 months later.
No revolt mechanic counterspell feels like a wasted opportunity.
It's such an elegant design. The power level scales perfectly from format to format.
I gotta quit thinking about this because it could have been a slam dunk.
David Ochoa: "Mono-bacon!..."
This scares me as well. I'll like to think Eldritch Moon, Kaladesh and Aether Revolt testing weren't that terribly far from each other and if they printed Fatal Push because they thought Copter was "fine, but could do with some answers the set after" and now that's a mistake and the only reason we got one of the most high-profile new prints for Modern was because they made that mistake in Standard design...
Not to say it's always bad, Collected Company went through the typical ban-less period in Standard, but the complaints about it in Standard were still vocal (something to take note even if we know vocals tend to be louder than they really represent).
I wouldn't be surprised if R&D decided to retreat in power-level once again because of the Standard bans and we'll never going to get our good generic answers for a long time coming once again because the last time we got one, it was because of a card in Standard they vastly underestimated and had to ban.
In short, it's sort of "Modern only get good generic answers when R&D is "bad" at testing Standard, because when they do, they are effectively "testing" Modern at the same time".
EDIT: And i dont even mean Modern testing, we already know from Twin ban/Eldrazi winter time, they dont even test for Modern.
Spirits
Multiple people have left Wizards of the Coast, including multiple Pro's over the years. (You would think this was a sign of something wrong internally). I remember specifically on one of MJ's old streams, where he and Gainsay talk for hours about how horrible they are as a company. Not only in idea implementation, but salary, careers, etc. I also believe when GT left years ago, he claimed that he disagreed with development and testing entirely, and the movement they were implementing going forward.
Regarding this announcement though, I feel a complete shake of consumer confidence has happened. I don't believe any of this was overblown, you cannot defend Magic at all with a straight face. They consistently print threats with no answers, the games are so wildly inconsistent in every format, with haymakers for offence and never defensive purposes. Before this announcement I saw the potential for a minimal banned list, not anymore, and I know I'm not alone when I say that I've lost a lot of love for this game in a mere 24 hours.
I want 3 Set Blocks, minimal banned lists, the old MTGO back (with decent rewards), rewards for FNM, ELO Rating, actual PTQ's, and less products thrown in my face every year. These past 7 years have been seriously rough being a Magic player.
(not that I think the Standard bans were necessary; I'm just skeptical about how much we can expect from in-house testing)
Counter-Cat
Colorless Eldrazi Stompy
Counter-Cat
Colorless Eldrazi Stompy
Cards have always fallen through the cracks, but the real issue that these particular ones seem unnecessary. The last two times Standard Bans happened (Affinity/Jace-SFM) tournament attendance were heavily affected and more or less stated as a reason. This recent one doesn't give off that reasoning and felt like they were applying Modern's Banning process towards Standard, something they never really did.
It feels like WotC is now trying to be "pro-active" towards bans before they affect tournament turnouts with the increased rate of announcements, but at the same time, the issue is we'll never know if those 3 cards are capable of actually turning tournament attendance down like their predecessors did. Even if Standard attendance did go down, there were too many variables in Standard Changes recently (2-Block Paradigm, then the rotation change) that it's outright impossible to pin the percentages down. Did they recognize that and decided to just adopt the "Modern Banning Process" for standard since they decided to be proactive? If so, then Standard is in down for an even rougher route then Modern in the future. Or even worse, did they not recognize that and assigned all the attendance drops to those 3 cards, then Standard is in for another whirlwind of changes in the next 6 months.
I know I'm talking a bit too much about Standard considering this is the Modern thread, but my point is they have literally publicly announced that Standard (and Limited) is what they concentrate on, so how they handle Standard in particular still affects Modern, a secondary concern to them in quite the fashion. To put it bluntly, like many of us aren't really confident in their "Modern Banning Processes" and this particular announcement seems to imply Standard is headed down a similar path, which is a legitimate worry for even the Modern player base, even if we don't care too much about the Standard format itself, but we know WotC does.
One last go-round with THA CHOPPA.
(On a side-note, **** REFLECTOR MAGE HARD)
HEY WIZARDS!!! IF YOU WANT EVERYONE PLAYING WITH ONE PARTICULAR DECK THEN STOP PRINTING ANYTHING BUT THOSE CARDS!!!
You do realize that Death's Shadow wasn't the card that got banned, right? For someone who is preachy about all the cool ways to play a card and how the format now discourages creativity, you seem pretty set on jumping ship without trying to toy around with it and "find a way to make it viable". I get that it sucks, but why not use the opportunity to contemplate a gitaxian-probe replacement or an alternate strategy before hitting the eject button?
Link to Discord server where anybody from MTGS can keep up with thread topics while everything is being sorted out with the new site.
They should give you the job of doing this stuff. And consulting on what to ban in the first place.
Disclaimer: As an Affinity player only (mainly because I'm too lazy to build the others) this might be slightly biased even if I consciously tried to keep it objective.
Not necessarily. Affinity has always been "fair" (I'm not talking the interactive way, just the general power-level) because the checks to it are relatively nicely printed compared to the likes of the status of generic answers, plus its "worst era" happened right at the starting block of the format, the main offenders being already locked in the List, so it's pretty hard to surpass what already exists, when it is already a "compromised mish-mash Tier 1 deck from it's potentially Tier 0 form". Yes, there are points to be argued about some cards (Mox Opal and Cranial Plating, which I will sit on the edge with my bias they don't ever go away), but the same exist with a more recent parallel in the format - Eldrazi, who were also Tier 0 once (Affinity just had its Tier 0 time in Standard instead) and even with the neutering and compromising to Tier 1, the borderline cards (Eldrazi Temple and maybe TKS) still get raised from time-to-time (although the Eldrazi case is shakier since they follow solely creature removal overall...).
Oh, they don't want anyone to be playing any particular deck, they want you to be endlessly buying packs for different decks. Affinity is lucky enough to be on the borderline that it can't really be pushed higher in power and there's usually someone to steal the spotlight from it. Fortunately, the fact every deck has answers against does make the deck less appealing the some people, so Affinity, along with Burn is more or less the "Midrange" variants of the aggro-decks (meaning they are relatively safe from bans because of their weaknesses and despite being aggro, their popularity is meta-dependent like the Midrange decks).
Baloney. No cards from those decks were banned for being popular and there are many decks that have been popular for a long time that are still tier 1 (Jund, Tron, Affinity, Burn). Even Eldrazi is still tier 1 after having a major card banned.
Correlation is not causation. Wizards is not going to ban a card that is not used in a top tier deck, but merely being in a top tier deck does not mean that a card will be banned. Also, having a single card banned will not necessarily knock a deck out of its current tier, let alone kill it (I do feel bad for Storm players, though).
I think these bans will be good for Modern overall but, combined with some people's perception of the Twin ban, have obviously shaken confidence in the stability of the format.
On a positive note, I feel they do an amazing job with Limited -- Booster Draft is by far my favorite format -- but I agree that they seem to be a little hasty lately, changing too many things at once and not waiting to see how they pan out.
-- EDIT --
I'm not hitting the eject button; I'm lucky enough to have not gotten on the plane. I'm not about to lay down hundreds of dollars for a deck that just got worse. All I had was a single Bauble and some Probes (which I thought were a safe buy precisely because they're used in so many decks, lol) I was out of the game for years and years and have only recently started building back a collection; it's very frustrating to try to buy the pieces for a format bit by bit and then have a deck nerfed before you've actually put it together.
If I had already committed to buying and learning the deck, then sure, make adjustments, it's probably still bad, but whatever. But now, why bother? There are plenty of other cute decks to play; I want one that also has a chance of being successful.
In any case, I'm not brewing with Death's Shadow because that problem's already been solved. That's an example, a stand-in for future interesting cards that I would like to brew with but probably won't, because if my brew's actually good, vaguely reasoned, hasty bans will jettison all my effort and leave me with a pile o random cards nobody wants.
With that, I'm assuming that the additional b/r announcements per year will cause them to be a little more experimental with bans/unbans as their effective timeframe is much smaller at a minimum. Something is a dramatic failure? Reverse it.
As for the tools we need - they're not going to come. Yeah, they missed an opportunity for a 'push' styled counterspell but that's not even really what we need. We need the next level of answers - non basic land hate. We need Wasteland. Miracles can exist in Legacy as a control deck because Cloudpost can't go nuts because so many decks have answers for it - so the top end is relatively capped which means the bottom of the format is looking to just outrace the top like we have here. Everyone is concerned about a swing back of Tron and Valakut decks and possibly rightly so as we don't *really* have the answers to fight them effectively. Banning pieces from them is an *awful* solution, but allowing them to stay stretches us into a strange uncanny valley where you're up a creek if you can't close out a game quickly.