Well, Matt Sperling said in his article about the banning at Channel Fireball this about the troll ban:
"
The Dredge deck gets weakened here, not killed, and that’s a good thing. This card was recently taken off the banned list and it was done so on a trial-and-error basis. Modern Dredge became such a consistent and resilient weapon that it made players feel like they had to have a sideboard with plenty of graveyard hate in order to keep up. This is different than Affinity because ____________ (which brings me to….)"
My guess is that the raw number of Dredge hate cards was higher than the raw number of Affinity hate cards. This would be true both as an average % of sideboards, and also in total copies of cards across all sideboards. Speaking of percentages, there is a non-zero percentage I write an article about that difference at some point to see if it's real or not. This is yet another reason Wizards needs better communication around such issues. If I played Affinity, I would very justifiably be worried at the Dredge ban's rationale and Wizards' failure to address the similarities.
The sustantial difference between the both of them is the axis both operate on. One has tremendous inevitability and the other one has a hard time coming back a wave of removal.
There´s no question both require specific SB hate to beat them. Which leads to a simple question: Why does R&D think that Affinity is fine whereas other pillars like Twin,Old Jund,Pod aren't?. Last time i checked Affinity hasn't been below Tier 1 since 2012. That's some longevity right there, on the back of a card that equates the power level of cards from the Power-9.
Yeah, that's exactly why Modern is so volatile. Too many unpredictable and unexplained situations.
You first predict and explain the situation in your first sentence, then you claim they are unpredictable and unexplainable. I dont quite get it.
Affinity is boltable and others, Dredge is not. The banning was a 8/10 for me. Meaning good enough.
Maybe it was quite confusing. What i meant is that Dredge lasted only a few months because it needed specific SB hate and couldn't be answered by common removal. Affinity only marks one of those boxes, the SB one. However, Affinity is a Tier 1 deck since 2012(and could be more), which makes no sense whatsoever in contrast to older pillars. It kind of a mix between the rotation rationale and the SB arguement. It makes no sense the deck is still legal as it is right now.
EDIT: I agree. The ban was likey a 7 or 8/10. That doesn't make it right in all perspectives. Did you saw a Git Probe ban incoming? I didn't. Is that the direction you think the format should be headed? i think not.
There's no transparency in their public relationship at all. They should inform us MONTHLY about their feelings towards the big formats. Not saying they should go and shout "EVERYONE, SFM WILL BE UNBANNED, GO BUY YOUR PLAYSET", but at least "We feel the format is in X place. This is the direction we want to take from now on".
How is the Probe ban reasonable? With the printing of Fatal Push those "T3 win" decks would have too many problems to stay T1. Also, Probe ban hurts delver lists, who were the bane of those 3 decks and could be aggressive enough to handle Tron and/or Valakut decks.
If they really wanted to hurt the Turn 2-3 wins they should've cut Become Immense, since Delve is by itself broken.
Probe is casting a sorcery free version of peek. It takes a lot of the skill out of playing these super fast decks by just getting information for basically free while filling up graveyards for become immense. I really don't feel bad that super fast decks actually have to THINK before they cast their stuff now.
Most of Infect's and Suicide Zoo's godhands were irrelevant of Probe, fetches and growths filled their Graveyards and enabled those 1 mana Become Immenses. With the printing of Push they should've waited with ANY bans on those aggressive decks, since probe or not 8 pieces of 1 mana removal from most interactive decks is too much to handle.
And I'll repeat myself: Become Immense is the real problem not Probe or Growth. With the probe ban the're gutting delver decks that are by design interactive decks.
Those god hands lost to blessed alliance so I wouldn't consider them god hands. They were really good with probe since you had info whether to go for it or not.
God hands by definition can't be answered. They lost to many things (not always to bolt though) and it's why interactive decks were bad match-ups for infect, but if you kept a bad hand knowingly that's on you, not wizards to rectify that. To get ahead of some issues you might have, bad hands happen all the time for both players, so don't fully base your judgement on them, or the god hands for that matter.
The thing tha irks me the most is that you JUST printed the perfect card to have against those archetypes, so hold off on banning and wait and see the meta after it (Sherridan had an awesome post today about push on ModernNexus). If any card should be banned -and that's a huge if- is Become Immense, with a historically broken mechanic.
How is the Probe ban reasonable? With the printing of Fatal Push those "T3 win" decks would have too many problems to stay T1. Also, Probe ban hurts delver lists, who were the bane of those 3 decks and could be aggressive enough to handle Tron and/or Valakut decks.
If they really wanted to hurt the Turn 2-3 wins they should've cut Become Immense, since Delve is by itself broken.
Probe is casting a sorcery free version of peek. It takes a lot of the skill out of playing these super fast decks by just getting information for basically free while filling up graveyards for become immense. I really don't feel bad that super fast decks actually have to THINK before they cast their stuff now.
Most of Infect's and Suicide Zoo's godhands were irrelevant of Probe, fetches and growths filled their Graveyards and enabled those 1 mana Become Immenses. With the printing of Push they should've waited with ANY bans on those aggressive decks, since probe or not 8 pieces of 1 mana removal from most interactive decks is too much to handle.
And I'll repeat myself: Become Immense is the real problem not Probe or Growth. With the probe ban the're gutting delver decks that are by design interactive decks.
Those god hands lost to blessed alliance so I wouldn't consider them god hands. They were really good with probe since you had info whether to go for it or not.
God hands by definition can't be answered. They lost to many things (not always to bolt though) and it's why interactive decks were bad match-ups for infect, but if you kept a bad hand knowingly that's on you, not wizards to rectify that. To get ahead of some issues you might have, bad hands happen all the time for both players, so don't fully base your judgement on them, or the god hands for that matter.
The thing tha irks me the most is that you JUST printed the perfect card to have against those archetypes, so hold off on banning and wait and see the meta after it (Sherridan had an awesome post today about push on ModernNexus). If any card should be banned -and that's a huge if- is Become Immense, with a historically broken mechanic.
Totally agree with this. Wizards would have pissed a lot less people off if they had just banned Golgari Grave-Troll and let the meta sort itself out before banning something else in March if needed. And what was really enabling the turn 3 kills? Become Immense or Gitaxian Probe? Not saying that Become Immense should have been banned, although the collateral damage would have been reduced.
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Modern RGTron UGInfect URStorm WUBRAd Nauseam BRGrishoalbrand URGScapeshift WBGAbzan Company WUBRGAmulet Titan BRGLiving End WGBogles
Having thought about the banlist announcement for a while, I'm thinking they're reprising January 2016 regarding Gitaxian Probe - remove one card to open the field up for another. In this case, Preordain.
I never would have thought this if the announcement had been a week ago. But they just spoilered Fatal Push, and they've known its been coming for probably over a year. I don't think they're foolish enough not to see that Push does the exact same thing they're trying to do by nixing Probe. Why nerf a bunch of sub-tier-2 decks while angering a lot of people (even if many people also support it, I'd wager it's a net loss PR-wise) to slow down a couple of decks that you're fully aware you just slowed down? It just doesn't make any sense to me. Even if I take issue with some of Wizards' policies, particularly in relation to Modern, they're not idiots and they realize the overlap between banning Probe and releasing Push. Even if they're against the principle of Probe, they're against the principle of tons of cards in Modern. They don't ban them unless they have other reasons, and their other reason is redundant and unnecessary.
That makes me think there must be a second reason behind the ban. If anyone was afraid that Preordain was going to power some combo decks up too far, well, most of those decks just got shunted down even further by consistency, information, and often part of their engine. The field was probably safe for Preordain to be unbanned a week ago. Now, they've hamstrung the primary culprits behind its banning. Color me suspicious.
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Playing UX Mana Denial until Modern gets the answers it needs.
WUBRG Humans BRW Mardu Pyromancer UW UW "Control" UR Blue Moon
While I should note I'm not a Dredge player and only played infect that uses Probe I do agree completely with the bans and I think we should look more closely at the ideas behind them instead of the actual cards that got banned.
The banning of GGT is fine, as I believe the deck is too strong at the moment and requires all other decks to devote sideboard or even mainboard space to hate it out. This creates the lottery that we all know (and hopefully hate). The thing I actually like here is the fact they do ban a card that they unbanned. They don't test for modern, ok. But even if they did, how will their, probably small, test team compare to the rest of the modern community that devotes a lot of time on the intricate workings of the deck where the card slots into? I believe there is merrit in unbanning cards and having the 'real world' test them, if they are fine they are fine (AV), sometimes they are fine until other cards come along (GGT). While this means certain decks will be moving in and out of playability there is a deeper problem why the ban announcement is always scary; loss of investments.
A lot of the cards in modern that are considered 'staples' are expensive cards, mostly because of high demand vs low availability. This seems to be the case with the Gitaxian Probe ban as well, it's not that people don't understand the card needed to go but the fact that decks that they invested in are now (in their eyes) obsolete. I think there would be a lot less grumbling if we had decks of 50 euro instead of 10 to 20-fold the price. This then comes back once again to the reprint policy of Wizards. It's now somewhat better because they invented inventions but hopefully more reprints are incoming. Reasoning from my own view, I'm now hesitant to buy into a deck that I think will get banned in half a year because of the investment, if it was only 50 euros for half a year of playing a deck you like and being able to have the cards at hand for other strategies or selling them with a 50% loss would make a world of difference in my own opinion.
While the bans (especially the poster spaghetti of a set) in Standard are really scary (what the hell is R&D doing) I think the design of Fatal Push is spot on and a perfect example of ways to get cards into eternal formats without affecting the Standard format. With the fetch lands being the prime enabler of the card and them not being in standard you create a card that is ok in standard but a really good answer in Modern. Hopefully we will get more of these well-designed cards soon, however it's always difficult to get a card that impacts all formats in the way you want it to, especially an answer-all card that control decks are in need of.
I play dredge and I have to admit GGT ability plus dredge 6 is really awesome. But if you look at tournament result it never really hit the top 8 alot comparing to the percentage of usage. It was powerful enougn that although not hitting the top 8 it make sure not just 1-4 decks consistently makes the top 8. You may call me bias but GGT and dredge specifically make modern diverse that it was able to police the daily MTGO
Someone in here suggested the probe ban
with almost word-for-word the same explanation that Wizards gave.
Well done.
From the old banlist discussion thread
It's not just a matter of knee-jerk bans, but what we expect from the format as time goes on.
So then what opinion do you have of the list for Scenario 1 A)? Is that up your alley? Or is that still too many? Maybe just Gitaxian Probe alone?
Gitaxian Probe definitely powers a lot of fast wins by letting you check to see if it's safe to commit.
/brag
Anyway, Probe enabled powerful starts for lots of decks. It was an auto-include in most degenerate strategies. And it also provided extra insurance to closing a victory for many decks.
Unlike every other card on my short list for bans, Gitaxian Probe also did the most to violate the competitive spirit of the game with how trivially you could gain information on the opponent's hand.
This ban has been long overdue, and I only wonder how long till it's joined by Mox Opal and Simian Spirit Guide.
EDIT: Oh, and Golgari Grave-Troll's unban to begin with was known to be experimental. The following sentiment in the explanation by Wizards I think shows we've come to a clearer understanding.
Dredge, the mechanic and the deck, has a negative impact on Modern by pushing the format too far toward a battle of sideboards.
Dredge and Affinity (One of the main homes of Mox Opal btw) co-existing in the same format of Modern's power level made some people seriously wonder if we should go from 15 to 20 card sideboards.
You don't call "dying to removal" if the removal is more expensive in resources than the creature. If you have to spend BG (Abrupt Decay), or W + basic land (PtE) to remove a 1G, that is not "dying to removal". Strictly speaking Goyf dies to removal, but actually your removal is dying to Goyf.
Why do people think that Fatal Push coming into the format is suddenly going to fix the problem of degenerate early game plays made possible by Probe? The plays are still there. If you don't have the Push, like not having the Bolt, the Path, or the Terminate, whatever, you are going to lose when they Probe your hand, for 0 mana investment, and see that the way is clear to alpha strike win. There is no connection between these two cards so why do people keep making it???
As far as Affinity and Mox Opal, Affinity wants to go all in, every game, on turn one, blindly, and thus throws itself out on a very shaky limb that is easy to knock out from under them, at which point their entire deck and game plan fall into the toilet. Affinity only truly hurts decks with its explosive starts that don't play any interaction at all. If you run interaction, Affinity is not difficult to play against, or deal with, and it's actually quite fun to play against, just like Infect can be fun to play against when they don't draw Probe enabling their early broken plays.
Sphynx what kind of deck do you play that you are so afraid of Mox Opal in Affinity?
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FREE MODERN. Break the Standard link.
I play Magic: the Gathering, not Magic: the Commandering.
Theres a problem that needs to be solved, and its with the lack of testing and balancing wizards does.
This.
It basically comes down to a huge design flaw in their modern paradigm which is making threats better than answers. Formats can't exist if the answers are too weak, because everything then becomes a race to land the biggest, baddest threat. Wizards just banned the top 3 threats out of Standard because there were no answers for them. It's odd to say this when we're finally getting Fatal Push but Magic needs a lot more cards like that. Modern, and by extension Frontier will not work as formats without strong answer cards.
Its like having stupidly awesome powers in any PvP game, but no basic counter checks to it. Literally think of any basic pvp game, and aside from all the old lightning storms and awesome Z moves you can fling, theres always boring, basic but important skills too, like interruption spells or protect.
Counterspells and removals arent winning any beauty contests, but they are are freakin' important.
I don't mean those big mana decks have to be banned, there's other potential ways to attack them, but it's not easy.
Well Wizards hates printing land destruction and doesn't like the sideboard lottery so the only solution is to ban those decks.
This is an extremely dangerous reasoning to ban things. Forcing every deck to interact on a creature/anticreature axis is horrible for the game and deck diversity (as evidenced by standard incredibly low ratings and legacy's continued popularity) The last thing Wizards should be doing is telling you what flavor of magic you should be playing. Dredge is popular and you didn't prepare for it? Good luck at that event. Same thing happens in legacy.
Sideboard lottery is a buzz term for "I didn't scout the meta appropriately." Since when is that an acceptable excuse to get things banned?
Almost no one is talking about this and its implications to this format and the larger game as a whole. You guys complain about good answers, but don't complain enough about efficient creatures. Having the only good decks required to be interacted with by creature removal is a sign of a really, really sick format. Creatures, by their nature, are not interactive. They turn sideways or they block. Spells are what needs to be strong, because that is where the interaction that all of you bemoan comes from.
THIS 100X!!! If you don't agree with this then there is no amount of logic that will ever convince you that good, non-oppressive, combos should be allowed. If you don't agree with it then just don't play this game, and you certainly shouldn't feel entitled to make any comment on ban lists ever.
Why do people think that Fatal Push coming into the format is suddenly going to fix the problem of degenerate early game plays made possible by Probe? The plays are still there. If you don't have the Push, like not having the Bolt, the Path, or the Terminate, whatever, you are going to lose when they Probe your hand, for 0 mana investment, and see that the way is clear to alpha strike win. There is no connection between these two cards so why do people keep making it???
As far as Affinity and Mox Opal, Affinity wants to go all in, every game, on turn one, blindly, and thus throws itself out on a very shaky limb that is easy to knock out from under them, at which point their entire deck and game plan fall into the toilet. Affinity only truly hurts decks with its explosive starts that don't play any interaction at all. If you run interaction, Affinity is not difficult to play against, or deal with, and it's actually quite fun to play against, just like Infect can be fun to play against when they don't draw Probe enabling their early broken plays.
Sphynx what kind of deck do you play that you are so afraid of Mox Opal in Affinity?
Push would have improved it. Legacy is proof positive that that strong generic answers played by top-tier decks are more than enough to reign in fast, degenerate, non-interactive combo decks. I'm not saying we should be Legacy or even adopt their answers. It just shows that generic answers can regulate a format and ensure top-tier decks are not consistently winning before the format's parameters allow. Push would certainly have decreased the number of T2-T3 wins from Probe decks, but by an uncertain margin. Wizards probably thought it was better to ban Probe and then see how Push played out. Maybe we can eventually get the combo cards back but we need more answers before then.
Why do people think that Fatal Push coming into the format is suddenly going to fix the problem of degenerate early game plays made possible by Probe? The plays are still there. If you don't have the Push, like not having the Bolt, the Path, or the Terminate, whatever, you are going to lose when they Probe your hand, for 0 mana investment, and see that the way is clear to alpha strike win. There is no connection between these two cards so why do people keep making it???
As far as Affinity and Mox Opal, Affinity wants to go all in, every game, on turn one, blindly, and thus throws itself out on a very shaky limb that is easy to knock out from under them, at which point their entire deck and game plan fall into the toilet. Affinity only truly hurts decks with its explosive starts that don't play any interaction at all. If you run interaction, Affinity is not difficult to play against, or deal with, and it's actually quite fun to play against, just like Infect can be fun to play against when they don't draw Probe enabling their early broken plays.
Sphynx what kind of deck do you play that you are so afraid of Mox Opal in Affinity?
Push would have improved it. Legacy is proof positive that that strong generic answers played by top-tier decks are more than enough to reign in fast, degenerate, non-interactive combo decks. I'm not saying we should be Legacy or even adopt their answers. It just shows that generic answers can regulate a format and ensure top-tier decks are not consistently winning before the format's parameters allow. Push would certainly have decreased the number of T2-T3 wins from Probe decks, but by an uncertain margin. Wizards probably thought it was better to ban Probe and then see how Push played out. Maybe we can eventually get the combo cards back but we need more answers before then.
As far as I'm concerned, the more games I play that arent magic, the more I'm surprised that every color DOESNT have a good way to deal with crap. Blue should be able to deal with crap like non creature spells with ease. White should have proactive ways to stop crazy stupid things (and they do, with stuff like thalia and RiP) black should have ways to straight up kill creatures (and push finally does it) red should have good damage spells, and green should either get good fight cards, or Beast Within cards.
Every color should offer some unique take on a way to checks and balance, and so far only white, black and red can do that efficiently. Which is half the reason we are in this ***** storm boring cards are boring but have functions.
While I should note I'm not a Dredge player and only played infect that uses Probe I do agree completely with the bans and I think we should look more closely at the ideas behind them instead of the actual cards that got banned.
The banning of GGT is fine, as I believe the deck is too strong at the moment and requires all other decks to devote sideboard or even mainboard space to hate it out. This creates the lottery that we all know (and hopefully hate). The thing I actually like here is the fact they do ban a card that they unbanned. They don't test for modern, ok. But even if they did, how will their, probably small, test team compare to the rest of the modern community that devotes a lot of time on the intricate workings of the deck where the card slots into? I believe there is merrit in unbanning cards and having the 'real world' test them, if they are fine they are fine (AV), sometimes they are fine until other cards come along (GGT). While this means certain decks will be moving in and out of playability there is a deeper problem why the ban announcement is always scary; loss of investments.
A lot of the cards in modern that are considered 'staples' are expensive cards, mostly because of high demand vs low availability. This seems to be the case with the Gitaxian Probe ban as well, it's not that people don't understand the card needed to go but the fact that decks that they invested in are now (in their eyes) obsolete. I think there would be a lot less grumbling if we had decks of 50 euro instead of 10 to 20-fold the price. This then comes back once again to the reprint policy of Wizards. It's now somewhat better because they invented inventions but hopefully more reprints are incoming. Reasoning from my own view, I'm now hesitant to buy into a deck that I think will get banned in half a year because of the investment, if it was only 50 euros for half a year of playing a deck you like and being able to have the cards at hand for other strategies or selling them with a 50% loss would make a world of difference in my own opinion.
While the bans (especially the poster spaghetti of a set) in Standard are really scary (what the hell is R&D doing) I think the design of Fatal Push is spot on and a perfect example of ways to get cards into eternal formats without affecting the Standard format. With the fetch lands being the prime enabler of the card and them not being in standard you create a card that is ok in standard but a really good answer in Modern. Hopefully we will get more of these well-designed cards soon, however it's always difficult to get a card that impacts all formats in the way you want it to, especially an answer-all card that control decks are in need of.
I play dredge and I have to admit GGT ability plus dredge 6 is really awesome. But if you look at tournament result it never really hit the top 8 alot comparing to the percentage of usage. It was powerful enougn that although not hitting the top 8 it make sure not just 1-4 decks consistently makes the top 8. You may call me bias but GGT and dredge specifically make modern diverse that it was able to police the daily MTGO
You're high as hell, dredge didn't police *****
it devolved the format and forced players to playing fast decks
My guess is that the raw number of Dredge hate cards was higher than the raw number of Affinity hate cards. This would be true both as an average % of sideboards, and also in total copies of cards across all sideboards. Speaking of percentages, there is a non-zero percentage I write an article about that difference at some point to see if it's real or not. This is yet another reason Wizards needs better communication around such issues. If I played Affinity, I would very justifiably be worried at the Dredge ban's rationale and Wizards' failure to address the similarities.
As an Affinity-only player, I'm always worried Opal/Plating is next after a ban announcement, prior to the PTs being cancelled, it was the inevitably and now like you said, the reasoning. The only reason I feel these bans are fair is partially because I can sieve the "actual" reasoning by myself and it is further reinforced by said reasoning being supported by posts here (including yours). What doesn't give me confidence is that I don't know if WotC has the same "actual" reasoning behind their vague statements. They could, which is good for me (but I won't know, which doesn't help me from my current perspective), or they don't, which boils back down to inevitability. Inevitability was a thing when the PT bans were around, but now I don't even know whether the inevitability is there makes it doubly worse.
The threat that Mox Opal poses to Affinity is not "now". Like plenty of people say, Affinity is a deck that trades stability and power for speed and can be answered by interactive decks (which is why Jund is one of the decks I find most annoying to face). We may be uninteractive, but at least our weakness is interactive decks. When there are decks that don't interact and aren't affected by interaction around, we prosper because our natural predator is removed and chances are, being uninteractive ourselves, we at least stand a 50/50 chance against those decks. This is proven against Eldrazi and Tron and during Eldrazi Winter.
Infect is along the same lines, except they gained the ability to "scout" from Gitaxian Probe (along with it being a free spell) and when they do, they gain information about interaction and hence the capability to make themselves "immune to interactivity" when the time is right. Affinity doesn't do that, we just rush blindly into interaction. Post-board we might do that with the likes of Thoughtseize, but unlike with Probe, it exists primarily to remove the SB hate which is greatly detrimental compared to the typical MB interaction and Thoughtseize itself doesn't even fuel the game plan like Probe does for Become Immense. We give up "speed" for stability because of the sheer power of SB hate, so the information we gained from Thoughtseize is arguably offset by the speed we gave up, whereas Infect was gaining information in addition to accelerating its gameplan.
The real threat Mox Opal poses to us is its viability in other decks. Someday some popular artifact-combo deck that is immune to interaction will pop up utilizing Mox Opal and that might be the death knell for Affinity if we don't have any other options by then. Yes, Lantern does that, but I think our survival is testament that Lantern itself isn't at the stage where it is considered "that deck", although being the closest thing, improvements to it is a threat to Affinity by extension as a result. Affinity in its current form needs the speed to survive, unlike other decks which use it to propel further, because we literally sacrifice everything else for it in game 1 against interactive decks and we need to sacrifice it (speed) post-SB to survive the detrimental hate stronger than the typical interaction.
Welp, I should have known better than to write long replies on my phone, it just crashed and I lost everything.
Anyway, tl,dr version. I'm tired of the way wizards is handling modern and implementing fake rotation, even if this isn't their goal anymore. Decks are getting gutted only for their former good matchups to dominate everyone else. If tron, eldrazi or valakut get a ban after this I'll lose all my hope of ever returning to modern. The lack of transparency and the fact that they didn't bother writing more than one paragraph after making the ban doesn't help my opinion of them either.
I guess that wizards not wanting anything to do with legacy is a good thing after all, we don't get format shaking bans and the ban mania doesn't hut is with full force. I sold my last modern deck today and I'm going back to legacy and hope that wizards forgets that it ever existed.
Sorry for the rant, but this last update made me lose a lot of faith in this company. That together with the gatewatch focus and how gideon survived the banhammer while reflector mage got hit also tells me they don't plan on banning a main character ever again due to PR, which again I think is an awful decision.
I think top level podcast did an awesome explanation of the bans and you might want to check it out.
On another note I think these expertise cards will be very problematic for modern.
My only doubt is that they should ban both Dredgers(Imp and this) or just ban Prized Amalgam instead.
This ban completely reminds me of the Bloodbraid Elf ban, when Deathrite Shaman was allowed to roam free. When dredge gets busted good again (which it can), they will eventually find out that Amalgam was the culprit, and thet Golgari Grave-Troll had nothing to do with it.
This is exactly what confuses me about Wizards. It's like their bias is so ridiculously intertwined with their ideologies that they can't distinguish actual problem cards anymore.
Cathartic Reunion became Draw 15 instead of Draw 18. That's all this banning did.
Cathartic Reunion became Draw 15 instead of Draw 18. That's all this banning did.
Eh, it also takes away the line of play where Dredge just started casting 12/12 Trolls in grindy games. I think it's fine if Dredge is a Tier 2 mainstay, that's where I want it to be. We'll see if this is enough to accomplish that.
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Cathartic Reunion became Draw 15 instead of Draw 18. That's all this banning did.
Eh, it also takes away the line of play where Dredge just started casting 12/12 Trolls in grindy games. I think it's fine if Dredge is a Tier 2 mainstay, that's where I want it to be. We'll see if this is enough to accomplish that.
It also means Dredge has no Plan B against Grafdigger's Cage and must naturally draw an answer to it. This is huge.
Any deck can play Cage in the side because it's colorless and costs 1. Not really the case with cards like Ravenous Trap and Surgical, which demand pilots also apply pressure as they disrupt Dredge. Or RiP, which is only available in white. Against Troll, Cage wasn't so fantastic, since Dredge could eventually start dredging LftL to get to 5 lands and then start casting a huge GGT every turn as of turn 5. Cage turns off this plan, the Conflagrate plan, the Ancient Grudge flashback plan, AND the Plan A of attacking with Ghasts and Amalgams.
I think this setback alone will hinder Dredge greatly, as now many more decks have a super-relevant, low-commitment hate card to bring in. Even if Dredge sticks around, they won't be able to beat an early cage unless they naturally draw a Claim effect, which is a big change from before. The deck already mulled pretty aggressively to find business hands. Now it has to mulligan more aggressively, not only because its engine becomes less efficient without GGT and hands need more to be keepable, but because a Cage they don't have an immediate answer to is lights out. Throw in Spellskite/Dispel/Welding Jar/Academy Ruins/even Ancient Stirrings, and things become exponentially more challenging for Dredge.
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.
Having thought about the banlist announcement for a while, I'm thinking they're reprising January 2016 regarding Gitaxian Probe - remove one card to open the field up for another. In this case, Preordain.
I never would have thought this if the announcement had been a week ago. But they just spoilered Fatal Push, and they've known its been coming for probably over a year. I don't think they're foolish enough not to see that Push does the exact same thing they're trying to do by nixing Probe. Why nerf a bunch of sub-tier-2 decks while angering a lot of people (even if many people also support it, I'd wager it's a net loss PR-wise) to slow down a couple of decks that you're fully aware you just slowed down? It just doesn't make any sense to me. Even if I take issue with some of Wizards' policies, particularly in relation to Modern, they're not idiots and they realize the overlap between banning Probe and releasing Push. Even if they're against the principle of Probe, they're against the principle of tons of cards in Modern. They don't ban them unless they have other reasons, and their other reason is redundant and unnecessary.
That makes me think there must be a second reason behind the ban. If anyone was afraid that Preordain was going to power some combo decks up too far, well, most of those decks just got shunted down even further by consistency, information, and often part of their engine. The field was probably safe for Preordain to be unbanned a week ago. Now, they've hamstrung the primary culprits behind its banning. Color me suspicious.
You might be on to something here. The only deck that made a Preordain unban look dubious was Bloo. That's no longer an issue, so it looks like an even safer unban than before.
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Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Modern UBR Grixis Shadow UBR UR Izzet Phoenix UR UW UW Control UW GB GB Rock GB
Commander BG Meren of Clan Nel Toth BG BGUW Atraxa, Praetor's Voice BGUW
I play dredge and I have to admit GGT ability plus dredge 6 is really awesome. But if you look at tournament result it never really hit the top 8 alot comparing to the percentage of usage. It was powerful enougn that although not hitting the top 8 it make sure not just 1-4 decks consistently makes the top 8. You may call me bias but GGT and dredge specifically make modern diverse that it was able to police the daily MTGO
It policed decks alright. It policed all the fair decks, which is exactly the opposite of what we want for modern to be a balanced format.
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Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Modern UBR Grixis Shadow UBR UR Izzet Phoenix UR UW UW Control UW GB GB Rock GB
Commander BG Meren of Clan Nel Toth BG BGUW Atraxa, Praetor's Voice BGUW
I play dredge and I have to admit GGT ability plus dredge 6 is really awesome. But if you look at tournament result it never really hit the top 8 alot comparing to the percentage of usage. It was powerful enougn that although not hitting the top 8 it make sure not just 1-4 decks consistently makes the top 8. You may call me bias but GGT and dredge specifically make modern diverse that it was able to police the daily MTGO
It policed decks alright. It policed all the fair decks, which is exactly the opposite of what we want for modern to be a balanced format.
So we should ban Tron, Bant Eldrazi, and Valakut decks.
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Modern RGTron UGInfect URStorm WUBRAd Nauseam BRGrishoalbrand URGScapeshift WBGAbzan Company WUBRGAmulet Titan BRGLiving End WGBogles
While I should note I'm not a Dredge player and only played infect that uses Probe I do agree completely with the bans and I think we should look more closely at the ideas behind them instead of the actual cards that got banned.
The banning of GGT is fine, as I believe the deck is too strong at the moment and requires all other decks to devote sideboard or even mainboard space to hate it out. This creates the lottery that we all know (and hopefully hate). The thing I actually like here is the fact they do ban a card that they unbanned. They don't test for modern, ok. But even if they did, how will their, probably small, test team compare to the rest of the modern community that devotes a lot of time on the intricate workings of the deck where the card slots into? I believe there is merrit in unbanning cards and having the 'real world' test them, if they are fine they are fine (AV), sometimes they are fine until other cards come along (GGT). While this means certain decks will be moving in and out of playability there is a deeper problem why the ban announcement is always scary; loss of investments.
A lot of the cards in modern that are considered 'staples' are expensive cards, mostly because of high demand vs low availability. This seems to be the case with the Gitaxian Probe ban as well, it's not that people don't understand the card needed to go but the fact that decks that they invested in are now (in their eyes) obsolete. I think there would be a lot less grumbling if we had decks of 50 euro instead of 10 to 20-fold the price. This then comes back once again to the reprint policy of Wizards. It's now somewhat better because they invented inventions but hopefully more reprints are incoming. Reasoning from my own view, I'm now hesitant to buy into a deck that I think will get banned in half a year because of the investment, if it was only 50 euros for half a year of playing a deck you like and being able to have the cards at hand for other strategies or selling them with a 50% loss would make a world of difference in my own opinion.
While the bans (especially the poster spaghetti of a set) in Standard are really scary (what the hell is R&D doing) I think the design of Fatal Push is spot on and a perfect example of ways to get cards into eternal formats without affecting the Standard format. With the fetch lands being the prime enabler of the card and them not being in standard you create a card that is ok in standard but a really good answer in Modern. Hopefully we will get more of these well-designed cards soon, however it's always difficult to get a card that impacts all formats in the way you want it to, especially an answer-all card that control decks are in need of.
I play dredge and I have to admit GGT ability plus dredge 6 is really awesome. But if you look at tournament result it never really hit the top 8 alot comparing to the percentage of usage. It was powerful enougn that although not hitting the top 8 it make sure not just 1-4 decks consistently makes the top 8. You may call me bias but GGT and dredge specifically make modern diverse that it was able to police the daily MTGO
You're high as hell, dredge didn't police *****
it devolved the format and forced players to playing fast decks
It did force people to reserve 3-4 side board slot thus making decks like GW tron, grixis control and latern control valuable. I may be wrong with the word "police" but it did create diversity from what the tournament result says. Again I'll emphasize that it did not dominate. It didn't usually did even make top 8 granting it has been utilized alot.
People seriously talking about banning Valakut... Banmania is here. Valakut is by no means breaking any rules. Simian Spirit Guide on the other hand...
...is not found in any winning lists, besides Valakut. WEIRD
lol I went to fact check this, and, of the three decks that run SSG, Valakut has more meta% than Griselbrand and Ad Nauseam combined. ITS ALMOST LIKE YOURE USING BANMANIA TO PUSH YOUR AGENDA BUT YOU WOULD NEVER...
THIS 100X!!! If you don't agree with this then there is no amount of logic that will ever convince you that good, non-oppressive, combos should be allowed. If you don't agree with it then just don't play this game, and you certainly shouldn't feel entitled to make any comment on ban lists ever.
Maybe it was quite confusing. What i meant is that Dredge lasted only a few months because it needed specific SB hate and couldn't be answered by common removal. Affinity only marks one of those boxes, the SB one. However, Affinity is a Tier 1 deck since 2012(and could be more), which makes no sense whatsoever in contrast to older pillars. It kind of a mix between the rotation rationale and the SB arguement. It makes no sense the deck is still legal as it is right now.
EDIT: I agree. The ban was likey a 7 or 8/10. That doesn't make it right in all perspectives. Did you saw a Git Probe ban incoming? I didn't. Is that the direction you think the format should be headed? i think not.
There's no transparency in their public relationship at all. They should inform us MONTHLY about their feelings towards the big formats. Not saying they should go and shout "EVERYONE, SFM WILL BE UNBANNED, GO BUY YOUR PLAYSET", but at least "We feel the format is in X place. This is the direction we want to take from now on".
God hands by definition can't be answered. They lost to many things (not always to bolt though) and it's why interactive decks were bad match-ups for infect, but if you kept a bad hand knowingly that's on you, not wizards to rectify that. To get ahead of some issues you might have, bad hands happen all the time for both players, so don't fully base your judgement on them, or the god hands for that matter.
The thing tha irks me the most is that you JUST printed the perfect card to have against those archetypes, so hold off on banning and wait and see the meta after it (Sherridan had an awesome post today about push on ModernNexus). If any card should be banned -and that's a huge if- is Become Immense, with a historically broken mechanic.
Totally agree with this. Wizards would have pissed a lot less people off if they had just banned Golgari Grave-Troll and let the meta sort itself out before banning something else in March if needed. And what was really enabling the turn 3 kills? Become Immense or Gitaxian Probe? Not saying that Become Immense should have been banned, although the collateral damage would have been reduced.
RGTron
UGInfect
URStorm
WUBRAd Nauseam
BRGrishoalbrand
URGScapeshift
WBGAbzan Company
WUBRGAmulet Titan
BRGLiving End
WGBogles
I never would have thought this if the announcement had been a week ago. But they just spoilered Fatal Push, and they've known its been coming for probably over a year. I don't think they're foolish enough not to see that Push does the exact same thing they're trying to do by nixing Probe. Why nerf a bunch of sub-tier-2 decks while angering a lot of people (even if many people also support it, I'd wager it's a net loss PR-wise) to slow down a couple of decks that you're fully aware you just slowed down? It just doesn't make any sense to me. Even if I take issue with some of Wizards' policies, particularly in relation to Modern, they're not idiots and they realize the overlap between banning Probe and releasing Push. Even if they're against the principle of Probe, they're against the principle of tons of cards in Modern. They don't ban them unless they have other reasons, and their other reason is redundant and unnecessary.
That makes me think there must be a second reason behind the ban. If anyone was afraid that Preordain was going to power some combo decks up too far, well, most of those decks just got shunted down even further by consistency, information, and often part of their engine. The field was probably safe for Preordain to be unbanned a week ago. Now, they've hamstrung the primary culprits behind its banning. Color me suspicious.
WUBRG Humans
BRW Mardu Pyromancer
UW UW "Control"
UR Blue Moon
I play dredge and I have to admit GGT ability plus dredge 6 is really awesome. But if you look at tournament result it never really hit the top 8 alot comparing to the percentage of usage. It was powerful enougn that although not hitting the top 8 it make sure not just 1-4 decks consistently makes the top 8. You may call me bias but GGT and dredge specifically make modern diverse that it was able to police the daily MTGO
From the old banlist discussion thread
/brag
Anyway, Probe enabled powerful starts for lots of decks. It was an auto-include in most degenerate strategies. And it also provided extra insurance to closing a victory for many decks.
Unlike every other card on my short list for bans, Gitaxian Probe also did the most to violate the competitive spirit of the game with how trivially you could gain information on the opponent's hand.
This ban has been long overdue, and I only wonder how long till it's joined by Mox Opal and Simian Spirit Guide.
EDIT: Oh, and Golgari Grave-Troll's unban to begin with was known to be experimental. The following sentiment in the explanation by Wizards I think shows we've come to a clearer understanding.
Dredge and Affinity (One of the main homes of Mox Opal btw) co-existing in the same format of Modern's power level made some people seriously wonder if we should go from 15 to 20 card sideboards.
"OH GOD MY BRAIN IS EXPLOADING AT HOW BAD THE ART IS ON MY OWN CARD"
-A friend's first impression of Ancestral Recall
10/10, I tapped.
Well Wizards hates printing land destruction and doesn't like the sideboard lottery so the only solution is to ban those decks.
RGTron
UGInfect
URStorm
WUBRAd Nauseam
BRGrishoalbrand
URGScapeshift
WBGAbzan Company
WUBRGAmulet Titan
BRGLiving End
WGBogles
As far as Affinity and Mox Opal, Affinity wants to go all in, every game, on turn one, blindly, and thus throws itself out on a very shaky limb that is easy to knock out from under them, at which point their entire deck and game plan fall into the toilet. Affinity only truly hurts decks with its explosive starts that don't play any interaction at all. If you run interaction, Affinity is not difficult to play against, or deal with, and it's actually quite fun to play against, just like Infect can be fun to play against when they don't draw Probe enabling their early broken plays.
Sphynx what kind of deck do you play that you are so afraid of Mox Opal in Affinity?
I play Magic: the Gathering, not Magic: the Commandering.
Its like having stupidly awesome powers in any PvP game, but no basic counter checks to it. Literally think of any basic pvp game, and aside from all the old lightning storms and awesome Z moves you can fling, theres always boring, basic but important skills too, like interruption spells or protect.
Counterspells and removals arent winning any beauty contests, but they are are freakin' important.
This is an extremely dangerous reasoning to ban things. Forcing every deck to interact on a creature/anticreature axis is horrible for the game and deck diversity (as evidenced by standard incredibly low ratings and legacy's continued popularity) The last thing Wizards should be doing is telling you what flavor of magic you should be playing. Dredge is popular and you didn't prepare for it? Good luck at that event. Same thing happens in legacy.
Sideboard lottery is a buzz term for "I didn't scout the meta appropriately." Since when is that an acceptable excuse to get things banned?
Almost no one is talking about this and its implications to this format and the larger game as a whole. You guys complain about good answers, but don't complain enough about efficient creatures. Having the only good decks required to be interacted with by creature removal is a sign of a really, really sick format. Creatures, by their nature, are not interactive. They turn sideways or they block. Spells are what needs to be strong, because that is where the interaction that all of you bemoan comes from.
Push would have improved it. Legacy is proof positive that that strong generic answers played by top-tier decks are more than enough to reign in fast, degenerate, non-interactive combo decks. I'm not saying we should be Legacy or even adopt their answers. It just shows that generic answers can regulate a format and ensure top-tier decks are not consistently winning before the format's parameters allow. Push would certainly have decreased the number of T2-T3 wins from Probe decks, but by an uncertain margin. Wizards probably thought it was better to ban Probe and then see how Push played out. Maybe we can eventually get the combo cards back but we need more answers before then.
As far as I'm concerned, the more games I play that arent magic, the more I'm surprised that every color DOESNT have a good way to deal with crap. Blue should be able to deal with crap like non creature spells with ease. White should have proactive ways to stop crazy stupid things (and they do, with stuff like thalia and RiP) black should have ways to straight up kill creatures (and push finally does it) red should have good damage spells, and green should either get good fight cards, or Beast Within cards.
Every color should offer some unique take on a way to checks and balance, and so far only white, black and red can do that efficiently. Which is half the reason we are in this ***** storm boring cards are boring but have functions.
You're high as hell, dredge didn't police *****
it devolved the format and forced players to playing fast decks
WotC at least has been kind to my wallet over the last few years by making their product less and less desirable.
As an Affinity-only player, I'm always worried Opal/Plating is next after a ban announcement, prior to the PTs being cancelled, it was the inevitably and now like you said, the reasoning. The only reason I feel these bans are fair is partially because I can sieve the "actual" reasoning by myself and it is further reinforced by said reasoning being supported by posts here (including yours). What doesn't give me confidence is that I don't know if WotC has the same "actual" reasoning behind their vague statements. They could, which is good for me (but I won't know, which doesn't help me from my current perspective), or they don't, which boils back down to inevitability. Inevitability was a thing when the PT bans were around, but now I don't even know whether the inevitability is there makes it doubly worse.
The threat that Mox Opal poses to Affinity is not "now". Like plenty of people say, Affinity is a deck that trades stability and power for speed and can be answered by interactive decks (which is why Jund is one of the decks I find most annoying to face). We may be uninteractive, but at least our weakness is interactive decks. When there are decks that don't interact and aren't affected by interaction around, we prosper because our natural predator is removed and chances are, being uninteractive ourselves, we at least stand a 50/50 chance against those decks. This is proven against Eldrazi and Tron and during Eldrazi Winter.
Infect is along the same lines, except they gained the ability to "scout" from Gitaxian Probe (along with it being a free spell) and when they do, they gain information about interaction and hence the capability to make themselves "immune to interactivity" when the time is right. Affinity doesn't do that, we just rush blindly into interaction. Post-board we might do that with the likes of Thoughtseize, but unlike with Probe, it exists primarily to remove the SB hate which is greatly detrimental compared to the typical MB interaction and Thoughtseize itself doesn't even fuel the game plan like Probe does for Become Immense. We give up "speed" for stability because of the sheer power of SB hate, so the information we gained from Thoughtseize is arguably offset by the speed we gave up, whereas Infect was gaining information in addition to accelerating its gameplan.
The real threat Mox Opal poses to us is its viability in other decks. Someday some popular artifact-combo deck that is immune to interaction will pop up utilizing Mox Opal and that might be the death knell for Affinity if we don't have any other options by then. Yes, Lantern does that, but I think our survival is testament that Lantern itself isn't at the stage where it is considered "that deck", although being the closest thing, improvements to it is a threat to Affinity by extension as a result. Affinity in its current form needs the speed to survive, unlike other decks which use it to propel further, because we literally sacrifice everything else for it in game 1 against interactive decks and we need to sacrifice it (speed) post-SB to survive the detrimental hate stronger than the typical interaction.
I think top level podcast did an awesome explanation of the bans and you might want to check it out.
On another note I think these expertise cards will be very problematic for modern.
This ban completely reminds me of the Bloodbraid Elf ban, when Deathrite Shaman was allowed to roam free. When dredge gets busted good again (which it can), they will eventually find out that Amalgam was the culprit, and thet Golgari Grave-Troll had nothing to do with it.
This is exactly what confuses me about Wizards. It's like their bias is so ridiculously intertwined with their ideologies that they can't distinguish actual problem cards anymore.
Cathartic Reunion became Draw 15 instead of Draw 18. That's all this banning did.
Eh, it also takes away the line of play where Dredge just started casting 12/12 Trolls in grindy games. I think it's fine if Dredge is a Tier 2 mainstay, that's where I want it to be. We'll see if this is enough to accomplish that.
UBR Grixis Shadow UBR
UR Izzet Phoenix UR
UW UW Control UW
GB GB Rock GB
Commander
BG Meren of Clan Nel Toth BG
BGUW Atraxa, Praetor's Voice BGUW
Any deck can play Cage in the side because it's colorless and costs 1. Not really the case with cards like Ravenous Trap and Surgical, which demand pilots also apply pressure as they disrupt Dredge. Or RiP, which is only available in white. Against Troll, Cage wasn't so fantastic, since Dredge could eventually start dredging LftL to get to 5 lands and then start casting a huge GGT every turn as of turn 5. Cage turns off this plan, the Conflagrate plan, the Ancient Grudge flashback plan, AND the Plan A of attacking with Ghasts and Amalgams.
I think this setback alone will hinder Dredge greatly, as now many more decks have a super-relevant, low-commitment hate card to bring in. Even if Dredge sticks around, they won't be able to beat an early cage unless they naturally draw a Claim effect, which is a big change from before. The deck already mulled pretty aggressively to find business hands. Now it has to mulligan more aggressively, not only because its engine becomes less efficient without GGT and hands need more to be keepable, but because a Cage they don't have an immediate answer to is lights out. Throw in Spellskite/Dispel/Welding Jar/Academy Ruins/even Ancient Stirrings, and things become exponentially more challenging for Dredge.
Counter-Cat
Colorless Eldrazi Stompy
You might be on to something here. The only deck that made a Preordain unban look dubious was Bloo. That's no longer an issue, so it looks like an even safer unban than before.
UBR Grixis Shadow UBR
UR Izzet Phoenix UR
UW UW Control UW
GB GB Rock GB
Commander
BG Meren of Clan Nel Toth BG
BGUW Atraxa, Praetor's Voice BGUW
It policed decks alright. It policed all the fair decks, which is exactly the opposite of what we want for modern to be a balanced format.
UBR Grixis Shadow UBR
UR Izzet Phoenix UR
UW UW Control UW
GB GB Rock GB
Commander
BG Meren of Clan Nel Toth BG
BGUW Atraxa, Praetor's Voice BGUW
So we should ban Tron, Bant Eldrazi, and Valakut decks.
RGTron
UGInfect
URStorm
WUBRAd Nauseam
BRGrishoalbrand
URGScapeshift
WBGAbzan Company
WUBRGAmulet Titan
BRGLiving End
WGBogles
It did force people to reserve 3-4 side board slot thus making decks like GW tron, grixis control and latern control valuable. I may be wrong with the word "police" but it did create diversity from what the tournament result says. Again I'll emphasize that it did not dominate. It didn't usually did even make top 8 granting it has been utilized alot.
...is not found in any winning lists, besides Valakut. WEIRD
lol I went to fact check this, and, of the three decks that run SSG, Valakut has more meta% than Griselbrand and Ad Nauseam combined. ITS ALMOST LIKE YOURE USING BANMANIA TO PUSH YOUR AGENDA BUT YOU WOULD NEVER...
I love your optimism, unfortunately we all know it's unfounded as reality tells us otherwise.