Don't ban Jace, he's awesome, but not a format destroyer. Valakut is whats hurting this format, Jace's Weakness is Vengevine and burn and Valakut is what keeps those decks from viability.
This is from Zac Hill, a member of R&D's statement on the grand prix:
"We basically had both of these decks. The main problem was our Valakut decks were way worse, meaning there were more Vengevine / Goblin Guide strategies keeping our midrange control decks in check. And obviously our strategies weren't optimized."
I actually find this quite alarming. You mean to tell me they developed Caw Blade in the FFL, but couldn't put Valakut together? Caw Blade takes 10 times more ingenuity to brew and design, Valakut almost builds itself, the cards are so bloody obvious. If the issue is that they don't see such polarizing cards in the FFL, they need to get better deck designers on their team.
That's beyond preposterous. You're telling me, that a board sweep doesn't hurt you whatsoever? I play Vampires competitively online, and I know for damn sure Day of Judgment hurts like hell. Especially when combined with Tumble Magnet, Gideon and Jace.
I am under the firm belief that what you have just said, is definitely not accurate whatsoever.
Wrath of God has been around for a long, long time and aggro has still flourished regardless. Day of Judgement isnt an auto-win against aggro so long as the aggro player plays around it.
Again, UW will dominate aggro decks if both pilots are of equal skill. There is no denying this. This is just the history of the game.
This is inaccurate, history proves the opposite
Valakut does merely crush aggressive opponents, yes we both agree. Yet you seem to forget that there are other options in this particular card pool in standard that hoses aggro more than entices it to be played. My argument is that the delusion of "Valakut is causing this Jace swarm" is false based on the premise that you are comparing something completely left wing, against something completely right wing. Meanwhile Jace is sitting perfectly in the center, and nullifying both sides from co-existing.
Jace himself doesn't beat valakut, it's blue decks and more specifically SoFaF. if anything the sword should be banned before Jace, but it really truly should not be
There is no rock paper scissors as you are imagining, not one single item is directly beating another individual item.
Jace is just beating everything combined. He of course has help from Gideon, Stoneforge, Lotus Cobra, Squadron Hawk, Inferno Titan, Tectonic Edge, Mana Leak, and Preordain, but he is the centralizing piece of what is competitively acceptable and what is not.
For the last time, Valakut is not causing over 90% of Grand Prix Success stories to contain Blue, Valakut is a different problem entirely in itself. Stop combining the issues with false facts.
Jace is not beating everything else combined, he is merely beating valakut, boros and vampires. If valakut did not exist Vengevine and Goblin Guide decks would be viable once more, and would actually have game against UW. Valakut requires our aggro decks to be either weak weenie strategies that UW devours or all-in strategies that UW devours.
Another important thing. If you ban Jace, the Mind Sculptor, UW/x Cawblade and RUG Control WILL still be very very good decks, but if you ban Valaukt, then Valakut ramp decks won't be quite as good
P.S. @Hot_Soup: I really wish I could like that post
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I actually find this quite alarming. You mean to tell me they developed Caw Blade in the FFL, but couldn't put Valakut together? Caw Blade takes 10 times more ingenuity to brew and design, Valakut almost builds itself, the cards are so bloody obvious. If the issue is that they don't see such polarizing cards in the FFL, they need to get better deck designers on their team.
Further, what the hell is he referencing when he says "both". Does he mean RUG? If so, RUG wasn't a "thing" until last March when its invention subsequently destroyed Zendikar Block Constructed. Valakut, on the other hand, was a deck people tried to make work in Block from the release of Zendikar itself. All it would have taken is a quick peek at some of the dailies' deck lists from block play December 2009, for crying out loud, to know that Valakut + Harrow + Khalni Heart Expedition was a thing people tried to do.
Further, what the hell is he referencing when he says "both". Does he mean RUG? If so, RUG wasn't a "thing" until last March when its invention subsequently destroyed Zendikar Block Constructed. Valakut, on the other hand, was a deck people tried to make work in Block from the release of Zendikar itself. All it would have taken is a quick peek at some of the dailies' deck lists from block play December 2009, for crying out loud, to know that Valakut + Harrow + Khalni Heart Expedition was a thing people tried to do.
Apparently they played destructive force in their valakut decks. yup.
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Apparently they played destructive force in their valakut decks. yup.
LOL. It's funny because it's true (they said so themselves). They're not perfect and don't pretend to be... that's why banning happens. There's nothing wrong with that.
Sorry, can't remember the article that was from, but it was published on the mothership for sure.
LOL. It's funny because it's true (they said so themselves). They're not perfect and don't pretend to be... that's why banning happens. There's nothing wrong with that.
This.
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If CAW blade ever becomes 100% dominant it will be the seagulls that are banned not the swords or mystic.
^This.
I wus playtesting like an hour ago and i made a comment bout this thread.
We all got to the conclusion that birds should be banned, not Jace.
And same argument. All broken cards are cards that (mostly) dont (or didn't) cost more than a dolar lol.
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If you run Islands, you either 1. Run Jace. 2. Are poor. or 3. Suck at Magic.
You can not say the same about Mountains and Valakut, or Forests and Primeval Titan.
yes, but over-use of a card isn't a grounds for banning it. Spectral Procession had four different decks that it went in to, and cryptic command went into even more but those weren't ban worthy
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Idk, I dont really see Jace as being all that big of a deal... Yes it is a really awesome card BUT its only one of many components that make Caw Blade good.
Why doesnt anyone ever complain about Gideon? I honestly find him more obnoxious than Jace. Nothing is worse then having to go through multiple gideons just to get rid of one Jace.
Caw Blades success isnt solely because of Jace rather an intricate combination of cards. Its just a very consistent deck that has a lot of favorable match ups. Id rather play against it than against Jund and the cascade lottery last rotation.
yes, but over-use of a card isn't a grounds for banning it. Spectral Procession had four different decks that it went in to, and cryptic command went into even more but those weren't ban worthy
However, it does go to show that Jace is significantly more powerful than either Valakut or Primeval Titan.
I can't recal a time when a money card was banned.
I brought this up before in the thread, but Arcbound Ravager was at the peak of its value (~$25) back in 2005 before Affinity got banned into oblivion. $25 was considered very expensive for a Standard card at the time.
Or how about a more recent banning such as Survival of the Fittest in Legacy? That card was easily pushing $50+ before it got banned.
why do people think vengevine and goblin guides beat w/u?
if valakut didnt exist and it was just aggro and control control would beat aggro every time. controls arsenal is ridiculous against aggro right now. right now cards like condemn,wall of omen,kor firewalker, and even journey just arnt seeing play. and no1 plays life staff main either.
if you think jace doesnt control the whole meta or control decks in general dont control the whole meta i dont know what to say to be honest. control just has all the answers and so much control over their deck right now its stupid. if you like being a sack and drawing 1 card a turn in aggro and hoping you can somehow beat control then... good luck!
I actually find this quite alarming. You mean to tell me they developed Caw Blade in the FFL, but couldn't put Valakut together? Caw Blade takes 10 times more ingenuity to brew and design, Valakut almost builds itself, the cards are so bloody obvious. If the issue is that they don't see such polarizing cards in the FFL, they need to get better deck designers on their team.
Agreed. I just can't believe they discovered both Caw and RUG and not Valakut, especially since the FFL works with preliminary versions of cards. Zac Hill must be using the term "basically" in an extremely loose way -- for example, I can believe they had a Lotus Cobra deck, but I very much doubt it had the Jace/Preordain/Mana Leak package shoehorned into it. RUG is such a difficult deck to play, let alone design, that I can't imagine what must be a very small community managed to come up with it. The same goes for Caw.
I think they are desperately trying to rationalize not banning Jace, because they all love the card and think it's the best thing they've ever printed.
This is a ridiculous argument, Jace Beleren filled with counter magic beats Valakut. Blue in general has Valakut's number. R&D is not the be all end all of testing results. So how you get this impression is beyond me. If you banned Valakut, it would be Day of Judgment Versus Goblin Guide and Vengevine. Trust me, I would rather be on the Day of Judgment team, and so would every other pro player as well.
I have no idea how you think diversity would flourish if Valakut was banned, because it simply would not. You would be taking the power of one scale, and distributing the mass effect towards other archetypes to fullfill the role of shutting down aggro decks. The problem of the format is Jace, because it's not just making aggro moot, it's making valakut and other over the top decks moot.
How this is too difficult to comprehend is beyond me.
That's quite a bold statement, considering UB Control and original Caw Go had a 50/50 match up, at best, against Valakut pre-Beseiged, and that was WITH the Mind Sculptor and playsets each of Spreading Seas and Tectonic Edge. If Jace is banned and blue decks recede to draw go counter permission, Valakut decks will simply go back to main decking four Summoning Traps and calling it a day. In fact, before Besieged, Jace was the only card keeping blue decks treading water. To simply replace Mind Sculptor with Beleren and expect Caw Blade to retain a 60+ win percentage over Valakut is pretty naive.
People seem to have forgotten that UW had basically fallen off the map before Kibler's original Caw Go list at Worlds. The Sword is what really gave UW the edge in the match up, in combination with Jace. Valakut has zero ways of refilling its hand or filtering its draws. Every Valakut player needs a decent mitt to accomplish what they're trying to do. Once UW started ripping their cards away and sitting on plenty of counter mana to Leak+Pierce, it was game over.
That brings me to my next point. Caw Blade has no one culprit, and neither does RUG. Blaming Jace is like blaming Bitterblossom or Bloodbraid Elf. Sure, ban those individual cards and their respective decks take a big hit, but it's what those cards do in relation to the rest of their decks that make them so powerful. It's the Mystic package+Jace; the Bitterblossom+Spellstutter; the Bloodbraid+Blightning, etc. - in short, the synergy itself is the culprit, not one single card. Again, this is why I don't believe banning Jace will make the format any more or less healthy - it's simply taking a powerful card away from the players, which isn't fair to anyone, including the most vehement Jace haters. Why rob a player the opportunity of learning how to play around powerful cards? Part of becoming a better Magic player is learning how to turn a disadvantageous board state in your favor. Banning Jace is just taking all the responsibility away from bad or rookie Magic players. And before the inevitable, "well, there is simply no way to beat Jace" counter punch, that's simply not true. One Grand Prix does not a standard format make. Mono Red doesn't give a rat's ass about Jace, the Mind Sculptor. I 6-3ed at GP Dallas, and two of my losses were against Mono Red. Look at Shiels' decklist and tell me how in the world he beat Mono Red, which leads me to believe he either got highly lucky, ala the Mono Red player punted some games, or he dodged the match up entirely, which is entirely plausible at a Grand Prix. I was 4-0 at one point and had only seen ONE Valakut deck, and zero Caw Blades and RUGs. I ended up not playing one RUG deck through nine rounds of Magic. Stuff like that happens at a tournament that large. Sometimes you need a little luck on your side to win a 1200 man tournament, and me thinks Lady Luck steered Shiels far away from Mono Red all tournament long.
Tangent aside, point is that Jace is not the stone blade against every archetype out there. He doesn't do much against Mono Red, and he 'aint spectacular against Vengevine, either.
The issue I have with the banning of Jace is that Jace himself does not do anything inherently "unfair." Jace's ultimate is a flat out game winner, sure, but that takes multiple turns and very deft piloting to pull off. But Fateseal, Brainstorm, and Unsummon have all existed in healthy formats for years. Now, I understand the ability to "cast" these spells for free, every turn, takes things to an entirely new level, but again, do any one of these effects decisively end the game for your opponent? Absolutely not. Again, it is the effect these abilities have in correlation to the Mystics, Swords, Hawks, and Preordains that turn the tide - the Unsummon that clears the way for a Sworded Hawk, or the Brainstorm that finds the crucial Day of Judgment. Again, the synergy.
In fact, I would argue that a turn four Bloobraid into Blightning blowout is far more "unfair" and degenerate than any number of free Brainstorms or Unsummons. Bloodbraid into Blightning required absolutely no skill or interaction to pull off. You simply needed to draw Bloodbraid and tap your lands and, voila, you would run into the lethal combo on accident. If THAT was not ban worthy, I cannot see any combination of rhetoric, statistics, or conjecture to convince me that Jace the Mind Sculptor is.
I believe we've simply run into the perfect storm of synergistic cards, like Faeries or Jund, that have come together to dominate a format. And just like Faeries and Jund, Caw Blade's reign will not last forever. Pre-WWK, Jund looked absolutely unbeatable. Post-M11, it was lucky to snag more than two top eight slots. Same with Faeries. The format will evolve, new sets will be released, new synergistic spells will be cast, and Caw Blade will eventually join the long list of standard bad guys that players reminisce about.
Jace is simply the easiest target here. He does the most inherently powerful things, in a vacuum, and he costs a lot of money. No one will convince me, not even Patrick Chapin himself - a Magic player I all but worship - that Jace deserves to be banned. For the third or fourth time, Jace existed peacefully and perfectly in a healthy format before the rotation. The problem is in the cards around Jace, not Jace himself. Players need to either have access to efficient answers, ala O Ring or Pulse, or be able to cast spells, on curve, of equal or similar power in different colors.
@LostCondottiere Thank you for attempting to make the obvious points as simple as possible for those who rage-hate, (and possibly rage-quit on a daily basis). The only possible difference of opinion that we have is that I believe Jace is overpowered and has one two many helpful abilities, it just does.
Does overpowered mean it probably shouldn't have existed in it's current form? Yes, possibly...but so what! WoC is not perfect and they messed up a little...which they do consistently, but so does most people I'm not saying just because we can explain it we can excuse it, they hopefully see their errors. I'm saying just because it's overpowered DOESN'T mean it is the specific "problem" in the current standard format.
LostCondottiere made perfect points about the 'why'. Jace in THIS format is pretty warping...in the hands of a very competent player. Jace having each of those abilities in an environment of horrible permanent removal with the card advantage of swords, mystics, etc is what's causing the problem. How about we ban caw-blade as a deck? That's the only 'fair' thing to do. This, of course, cannot happen so we have to take the deck seriously as a whole and realize that jace in it doesn't make it degenerate, it just helps better pilots play better magic.
Jace is a 2-of in most blue decks in extended and isn't even an auto-include in eternal formats...this has to tell us something about the card. Jace just exists in the right world. Keep exhalted around and see how a 5/4 hasty VV consumes jaces. Bring 1.0 elsbeth back and watch a mana birds leave a white rain on the mind-sculpting parade. I could go on and on...but the biggest MISTAKE made, was for wizards to assume the format could survive without an oblvion ring and/or pulse in the format. I personally would love to see red/blue elemental blasts back in the format...along with gloom/wildfire/etc...but I guess protection is too scary...unless they want to put EVERY protection on the swords that jace decks have access to...but thats another rant entirely.
In fact, I would argue that a turn four Bloobraid into Blightning blowout is far more "unfair" and degenerate than any number of free Brainstorms or Unsummons. Bloodbraid into Blightning required absolutely no skill or interaction to pull off. You simply needed to draw Bloodbraid and tap your lands and, voila, you would run into the lethal combo on accident. If THAT was not ban worthy, I cannot see any combination of rhetoric, statistics, or conjecture to convince me that Jace the Mind Sculptor is.
Regardless of how degenerate Bloodbraid was (and it was), there was not a GP with 60 out of 64 possible copies of Bloodbraid in the Top 16, and 32 out of a possible 32 in the Top 8. The issue is not, for the most part, how powerful the card is or how annoying it is to play against. It's whether the card is completely crushing the metagame, and right now Jace is doing that more than any card in a long time. At Worlds 2009, there were 20 copies of Bloodbraid Elf in the Top 8. At PT San Diego, there were 16. At GP Kuala Lumpur, there were 24. At Brussels, there were 24. At DC, there were just 12. Those numbers are pretty serious evidence that the metagame is being screwed with. But none of them comes close to the ridiculousness that is a full playset of Jaces in every Top 8 deck, plus 7 out of 8 of the Top 16.
Keep in mind, also, that at GP Barcelona, there were 20 copies of Jace in the top 8 (well, actually 21, but I don't think we need to count the single copy in Simon Bertiou's sideboard). That, by itself, is comparable to the Bloodbraid situation, and it was in a tournament that hinted (apparently, wrongly) that the variety of successful decks might be more diverse than people had expected.
Now, that does not necessarily mean that Jace has to be banned. They could ban Valakut instead (or in addition, I suppose), and maybe that would fix the problems with the format. I don't know. Or they could print something in NPH that makes Jace less dominant, but if they haven't done that already, then it's too late for it now.
The argument for banning Jace is not that he does something degenerate. He does, to some extent, but he's no Yawgmoth's Will, and no one is under the misconception that he is. The argument is simply that, in the paraphrased words of Aaron Forsythe from way back when, "every deck either has four of him maindeck, or has four of him in the sideboard, or is built to defend against him, and there are a lot more successful decks in the first two categories than there are in the third."
To give a concrete example, consider Jacob van Lunen's column today. He wrote about the Lolaphant deck, and at the bottom noted that he wasn't too pleased with the matchups. However, he thought that with a bigger budget, he could tweak the deck to make it more competitive. And what was his solution? Add fetch lands and Jace, obviously. Now, Lolaphant, with or without Jaces, may never become the metagame-dominating deck. All I'm saying is that this is exactly like what went on back in the day with Skullclamp. If you have a deck that's on the cusp of being a real deck, the immediate suggestion is to make it better by adding Skullclamp Jace (and his best buddies, the fetch lands).
Forsythe also stated that back then, in the top 8 at German nationals, combined with the top 8 at Ohio Valley Regionals, there were 58 out of a possible 64 copies of Skullclamp. Well, top 16 at a huge GP is pretty comparable to a couple of top 8s, and there were 60 Jaces there. Sixty is bigger than 58, and Skullclamp was an artifact and could be easily dumped into any deck, unlike Jace.
Quote from "luciferase" »
Jace in THIS format is pretty warping...in the hands of a very competent player. Jace having each of those abilities in an environment of horrible permanent removal with the card advantage of swords, mystics, etc is what's causing the problem.
We all understand that Jace is only ridiculous in THIS format. No one is calling for Jace to be banned in Extended or Legacy. There are tons of cards that are banned from some formats and not others, and Jace should be one of them. He's warping in THIS Standard, and not in Extended. So ban him in Standard, and not in Extended! Easy.
Quote from "luciferase" »
How about we ban caw-blade as a deck? That's the only 'fair' thing to do.
Why on earth would we ban the Caw cards? It wasn't Hawk, Mystic, or Sword that was in every single top 8 deck. Remember, RUG is pretty good too. No one is saying that the caw cards are overpowering or ridiculous or need bans, so I don't understand why people are bringing it up.
Also, you did a very good job of pointing out some of the mistakes that Wizards made. Well, they cannot fix those mistakes now. They can't go back and print O-ring in SOM. But they can ban Jace (in Standard).
For those who don't realise how valakut's power level helps jace's dominance, I'm writing this as an aside...
Imagine a perfectly balanced rock-paper-scissors metagame. What I mean by perfectly balanced is that rock beats scissors 60% of the time, scissors beats paper 60% of the time, and paper beats rock 60% of the time. It is intuitively obvious (and mathematically provable) that each deck would then occupy one third of the metagame and have a 50% win percentage.
But now suppose the designers mess up a bit, and make rock too good. Not so good that it is indestructable and has no weakness, but good enough that it beats scissors 90% of the time and paper only beats rock 55% of the time. The scissors/paper match remains at 60% in scissors' favour. It is fairly clear that if any deck is 'overpowered' here, it is the 'rock' deck.
So what happens? Most people would say that rock, which is now strictly better than it was before, should become more popular. I mean, its a better deck now, right?
In fact, if you work it out, you find that rock FALLS to 2/11 of the metagame, scissors falls even further to 1/11 of the metagame, and Paper, the (weak) destroyer of rock, rises massively to 8/11 of the metagame. At this point, players would presumably be calling for the banning of 'paper', or whatever it was that made paper good. But the fact is that paper isn't what has improved here compared to the perfectly balanced system outlined in my second paragraph. Its rock. Paper is actually strictly worse than it was; its match to rock is worse, and its match to scissors is the same.
This is a general pattern in rock-paper-scissors systems; if you imbalance the metagame and make one of them too good, it is the counter to that 'too good' deck which massively gains popularity. R&D, being professionals, are presumably aware of this, and it explains the Zac Hill quote.
So what should we conclude when we see jace gaining massive popularity? Unless the jace deck in question has no bad match-ups whatsoever, I don't think it is that jace is too good. I think we should conclude that there is something which is crushing the counters to jace decks, which jace does not crush to the same degree. Enter valakut, and vengevine mid-range, as the rock and scissors to jace's paper.
I actually find this quite alarming. You mean to tell me they developed Caw Blade in the FFL, but couldn't put Valakut together? Caw Blade takes 10 times more ingenuity to brew and design, Valakut almost builds itself, the cards are so bloody obvious. If the issue is that they don't see such polarizing cards in the FFL, they need to get better deck designers on their team.
Wrath of God has been around for a long, long time and aggro has still flourished regardless. Day of Judgement isnt an auto-win against aggro so long as the aggro player plays around it.
This is inaccurate, history proves the opposite
Jace himself doesn't beat valakut, it's blue decks and more specifically SoFaF. if anything the sword should be banned before Jace, but it really truly should not be
Jace is not beating everything else combined, he is merely beating valakut, boros and vampires. If valakut did not exist Vengevine and Goblin Guide decks would be viable once more, and would actually have game against UW. Valakut requires our aggro decks to be either weak weenie strategies that UW devours or all-in strategies that UW devours.
Another important thing. If you ban Jace, the Mind Sculptor, UW/x Cawblade and RUG Control WILL still be very very good decks, but if you ban Valaukt, then Valakut ramp decks won't be quite as good
P.S. @Hot_Soup: I really wish I could like that post
Further, what the hell is he referencing when he says "both". Does he mean RUG? If so, RUG wasn't a "thing" until last March when its invention subsequently destroyed Zendikar Block Constructed. Valakut, on the other hand, was a deck people tried to make work in Block from the release of Zendikar itself. All it would have taken is a quick peek at some of the dailies' deck lists from block play December 2009, for crying out loud, to know that Valakut + Harrow + Khalni Heart Expedition was a thing people tried to do.
Apparently they played destructive force in their valakut decks. yup.
This quote, right here, immediately answers every question or complaint I will ever have about Magic's design for the next several years.
Good lord.
Lol its funny i agree, but cut'em some slack, knowing EXACTLY what players will do is a difficult task
One, I want to know the source of that, since I can't beleive it.
Two, if that's true, oh lord, how can we put our trust in such idiots? Destructive Force does exactly the opposite of what you want Valakut to do.
LOL. It's funny because it's true (they said so themselves). They're not perfect and don't pretend to be... that's why banning happens. There's nothing wrong with that.
Sorry, can't remember the article that was from, but it was published on the mothership for sure.
This.
^This.
I wus playtesting like an hour ago and i made a comment bout this thread.
We all got to the conclusion that birds should be banned, not Jace.
And same argument. All broken cards are cards that (mostly) dont (or didn't) cost more than a dolar lol.
:symw::symb:Steel Wb Weenie
You can not say the same about Mountains and Valakut, or Forests and Primeval Titan.
yes, but over-use of a card isn't a grounds for banning it. Spectral Procession had four different decks that it went in to, and cryptic command went into even more but those weren't ban worthy
And if you don't run Islands you don't want to win.
because valakut will beat you if you run anything else
Why doesnt anyone ever complain about Gideon? I honestly find him more obnoxious than Jace. Nothing is worse then having to go through multiple gideons just to get rid of one Jace.
Caw Blades success isnt solely because of Jace rather an intricate combination of cards. Its just a very consistent deck that has a lot of favorable match ups. Id rather play against it than against Jund and the cascade lottery last rotation.
NPH should really shake things up.
However, it does go to show that Jace is significantly more powerful than either Valakut or Primeval Titan.
So will decks with Islands.
I brought this up before in the thread, but Arcbound Ravager was at the peak of its value (~$25) back in 2005 before Affinity got banned into oblivion. $25 was considered very expensive for a Standard card at the time.
Or how about a more recent banning such as Survival of the Fittest in Legacy? That card was easily pushing $50+ before it got banned.
if valakut didnt exist and it was just aggro and control control would beat aggro every time. controls arsenal is ridiculous against aggro right now. right now cards like condemn,wall of omen,kor firewalker, and even journey just arnt seeing play. and no1 plays life staff main either.
if you think jace doesnt control the whole meta or control decks in general dont control the whole meta i dont know what to say to be honest. control just has all the answers and so much control over their deck right now its stupid. if you like being a sack and drawing 1 card a turn in aggro and hoping you can somehow beat control then... good luck!
I think they are desperately trying to rationalize not banning Jace, because they all love the card and think it's the best thing they've ever printed.
That's quite a bold statement, considering UB Control and original Caw Go had a 50/50 match up, at best, against Valakut pre-Beseiged, and that was WITH the Mind Sculptor and playsets each of Spreading Seas and Tectonic Edge. If Jace is banned and blue decks recede to draw go counter permission, Valakut decks will simply go back to main decking four Summoning Traps and calling it a day. In fact, before Besieged, Jace was the only card keeping blue decks treading water. To simply replace Mind Sculptor with Beleren and expect Caw Blade to retain a 60+ win percentage over Valakut is pretty naive.
People seem to have forgotten that UW had basically fallen off the map before Kibler's original Caw Go list at Worlds. The Sword is what really gave UW the edge in the match up, in combination with Jace. Valakut has zero ways of refilling its hand or filtering its draws. Every Valakut player needs a decent mitt to accomplish what they're trying to do. Once UW started ripping their cards away and sitting on plenty of counter mana to Leak+Pierce, it was game over.
That brings me to my next point. Caw Blade has no one culprit, and neither does RUG. Blaming Jace is like blaming Bitterblossom or Bloodbraid Elf. Sure, ban those individual cards and their respective decks take a big hit, but it's what those cards do in relation to the rest of their decks that make them so powerful. It's the Mystic package+Jace; the Bitterblossom+Spellstutter; the Bloodbraid+Blightning, etc. - in short, the synergy itself is the culprit, not one single card. Again, this is why I don't believe banning Jace will make the format any more or less healthy - it's simply taking a powerful card away from the players, which isn't fair to anyone, including the most vehement Jace haters. Why rob a player the opportunity of learning how to play around powerful cards? Part of becoming a better Magic player is learning how to turn a disadvantageous board state in your favor. Banning Jace is just taking all the responsibility away from bad or rookie Magic players. And before the inevitable, "well, there is simply no way to beat Jace" counter punch, that's simply not true. One Grand Prix does not a standard format make. Mono Red doesn't give a rat's ass about Jace, the Mind Sculptor. I 6-3ed at GP Dallas, and two of my losses were against Mono Red. Look at Shiels' decklist and tell me how in the world he beat Mono Red, which leads me to believe he either got highly lucky, ala the Mono Red player punted some games, or he dodged the match up entirely, which is entirely plausible at a Grand Prix. I was 4-0 at one point and had only seen ONE Valakut deck, and zero Caw Blades and RUGs. I ended up not playing one RUG deck through nine rounds of Magic. Stuff like that happens at a tournament that large. Sometimes you need a little luck on your side to win a 1200 man tournament, and me thinks Lady Luck steered Shiels far away from Mono Red all tournament long.
Tangent aside, point is that Jace is not the stone blade against every archetype out there. He doesn't do much against Mono Red, and he 'aint spectacular against Vengevine, either.
The issue I have with the banning of Jace is that Jace himself does not do anything inherently "unfair." Jace's ultimate is a flat out game winner, sure, but that takes multiple turns and very deft piloting to pull off. But Fateseal, Brainstorm, and Unsummon have all existed in healthy formats for years. Now, I understand the ability to "cast" these spells for free, every turn, takes things to an entirely new level, but again, do any one of these effects decisively end the game for your opponent? Absolutely not. Again, it is the effect these abilities have in correlation to the Mystics, Swords, Hawks, and Preordains that turn the tide - the Unsummon that clears the way for a Sworded Hawk, or the Brainstorm that finds the crucial Day of Judgment. Again, the synergy.
In fact, I would argue that a turn four Bloobraid into Blightning blowout is far more "unfair" and degenerate than any number of free Brainstorms or Unsummons. Bloodbraid into Blightning required absolutely no skill or interaction to pull off. You simply needed to draw Bloodbraid and tap your lands and, voila, you would run into the lethal combo on accident. If THAT was not ban worthy, I cannot see any combination of rhetoric, statistics, or conjecture to convince me that Jace the Mind Sculptor is.
I believe we've simply run into the perfect storm of synergistic cards, like Faeries or Jund, that have come together to dominate a format. And just like Faeries and Jund, Caw Blade's reign will not last forever. Pre-WWK, Jund looked absolutely unbeatable. Post-M11, it was lucky to snag more than two top eight slots. Same with Faeries. The format will evolve, new sets will be released, new synergistic spells will be cast, and Caw Blade will eventually join the long list of standard bad guys that players reminisce about.
Jace is simply the easiest target here. He does the most inherently powerful things, in a vacuum, and he costs a lot of money. No one will convince me, not even Patrick Chapin himself - a Magic player I all but worship - that Jace deserves to be banned. For the third or fourth time, Jace existed peacefully and perfectly in a healthy format before the rotation. The problem is in the cards around Jace, not Jace himself. Players need to either have access to efficient answers, ala O Ring or Pulse, or be able to cast spells, on curve, of equal or similar power in different colors.
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Does overpowered mean it probably shouldn't have existed in it's current form? Yes, possibly...but so what! WoC is not perfect and they messed up a little...which they do consistently, but so does most people I'm not saying just because we can explain it we can excuse it, they hopefully see their errors. I'm saying just because it's overpowered DOESN'T mean it is the specific "problem" in the current standard format.
LostCondottiere made perfect points about the 'why'. Jace in THIS format is pretty warping...in the hands of a very competent player. Jace having each of those abilities in an environment of horrible permanent removal with the card advantage of swords, mystics, etc is what's causing the problem. How about we ban caw-blade as a deck? That's the only 'fair' thing to do. This, of course, cannot happen so we have to take the deck seriously as a whole and realize that jace in it doesn't make it degenerate, it just helps better pilots play better magic.
Jace is a 2-of in most blue decks in extended and isn't even an auto-include in eternal formats...this has to tell us something about the card. Jace just exists in the right world. Keep exhalted around and see how a 5/4 hasty VV consumes jaces. Bring 1.0 elsbeth back and watch a mana birds leave a white rain on the mind-sculpting parade. I could go on and on...but the biggest MISTAKE made, was for wizards to assume the format could survive without an oblvion ring and/or pulse in the format. I personally would love to see red/blue elemental blasts back in the format...along with gloom/wildfire/etc...but I guess protection is too scary...unless they want to put EVERY protection on the swords that jace decks have access to...but thats another rant entirely.
Keep in mind, also, that at GP Barcelona, there were 20 copies of Jace in the top 8 (well, actually 21, but I don't think we need to count the single copy in Simon Bertiou's sideboard). That, by itself, is comparable to the Bloodbraid situation, and it was in a tournament that hinted (apparently, wrongly) that the variety of successful decks might be more diverse than people had expected.
Now, that does not necessarily mean that Jace has to be banned. They could ban Valakut instead (or in addition, I suppose), and maybe that would fix the problems with the format. I don't know. Or they could print something in NPH that makes Jace less dominant, but if they haven't done that already, then it's too late for it now.
The argument for banning Jace is not that he does something degenerate. He does, to some extent, but he's no Yawgmoth's Will, and no one is under the misconception that he is. The argument is simply that, in the paraphrased words of Aaron Forsythe from way back when, "every deck either has four of him maindeck, or has four of him in the sideboard, or is built to defend against him, and there are a lot more successful decks in the first two categories than there are in the third."
To give a concrete example, consider Jacob van Lunen's column today. He wrote about the Lolaphant deck, and at the bottom noted that he wasn't too pleased with the matchups. However, he thought that with a bigger budget, he could tweak the deck to make it more competitive. And what was his solution? Add fetch lands and Jace, obviously. Now, Lolaphant, with or without Jaces, may never become the metagame-dominating deck. All I'm saying is that this is exactly like what went on back in the day with Skullclamp. If you have a deck that's on the cusp of being a real deck, the immediate suggestion is to make it better by adding
SkullclampJace (and his best buddies, the fetch lands).Forsythe also stated that back then, in the top 8 at German nationals, combined with the top 8 at Ohio Valley Regionals, there were 58 out of a possible 64 copies of Skullclamp. Well, top 16 at a huge GP is pretty comparable to a couple of top 8s, and there were 60 Jaces there. Sixty is bigger than 58, and Skullclamp was an artifact and could be easily dumped into any deck, unlike Jace.
We all understand that Jace is only ridiculous in THIS format. No one is calling for Jace to be banned in Extended or Legacy. There are tons of cards that are banned from some formats and not others, and Jace should be one of them. He's warping in THIS Standard, and not in Extended. So ban him in Standard, and not in Extended! Easy. Why on earth would we ban the Caw cards? It wasn't Hawk, Mystic, or Sword that was in every single top 8 deck. Remember, RUG is pretty good too. No one is saying that the caw cards are overpowering or ridiculous or need bans, so I don't understand why people are bringing it up.
Also, you did a very good job of pointing out some of the mistakes that Wizards made. Well, they cannot fix those mistakes now. They can't go back and print O-ring in SOM. But they can ban Jace (in Standard).
Imagine a perfectly balanced rock-paper-scissors metagame. What I mean by perfectly balanced is that rock beats scissors 60% of the time, scissors beats paper 60% of the time, and paper beats rock 60% of the time. It is intuitively obvious (and mathematically provable) that each deck would then occupy one third of the metagame and have a 50% win percentage.
But now suppose the designers mess up a bit, and make rock too good. Not so good that it is indestructable and has no weakness, but good enough that it beats scissors 90% of the time and paper only beats rock 55% of the time. The scissors/paper match remains at 60% in scissors' favour. It is fairly clear that if any deck is 'overpowered' here, it is the 'rock' deck.
So what happens? Most people would say that rock, which is now strictly better than it was before, should become more popular. I mean, its a better deck now, right?
In fact, if you work it out, you find that rock FALLS to 2/11 of the metagame, scissors falls even further to 1/11 of the metagame, and Paper, the (weak) destroyer of rock, rises massively to 8/11 of the metagame. At this point, players would presumably be calling for the banning of 'paper', or whatever it was that made paper good. But the fact is that paper isn't what has improved here compared to the perfectly balanced system outlined in my second paragraph. Its rock. Paper is actually strictly worse than it was; its match to rock is worse, and its match to scissors is the same.
This is a general pattern in rock-paper-scissors systems; if you imbalance the metagame and make one of them too good, it is the counter to that 'too good' deck which massively gains popularity. R&D, being professionals, are presumably aware of this, and it explains the Zac Hill quote.
So what should we conclude when we see jace gaining massive popularity? Unless the jace deck in question has no bad match-ups whatsoever, I don't think it is that jace is too good. I think we should conclude that there is something which is crushing the counters to jace decks, which jace does not crush to the same degree. Enter valakut, and vengevine mid-range, as the rock and scissors to jace's paper.
2011-2012:Bantblade, BantPod
2010-2011:Bant Shaman, Naya Shaman, Naya allies + Scars, URG Turboforce
2009-2010:Naya allies, Mono-White Titan Control