I personally disagree but I'm not a political expert by any means. You seem to be making the classic "dies to doomblade" argument. No Mercy is just one political card, we should be playing lots of other political cards too. It also depends on how your opponents theat assess, using resources to remove a No Mercy that isn't actively messing with their permanents nor advancing a plan seems kinda silly to me. Then again, some people don't like feeling manipulated and may destroy it anyway.
Sorry for the slow reply, I haven't really hopped on MTGS in a while.
I'm not saying No Mercy is bad because it can be destroyed, I'm saying that it's bad because it doesn't actively encourage your opponents to attack people who aren't you; It just discourages people from attacking you until it is eventually destroyed (or until someone can kill you in one swing). And when that happens, No Mercy has bought you basically nothing except for maybe a higher life total than you otherwise would have had, which isn't super good to spend mana or cards on unless it completely puts you out of reach of your opponents. Since No Mercy can't do that, it's probably not worth putting in your deck in the first place for the same reason you wouldn't run something like Blood Tithe.
I think the best way to build Rona is to behave as if her activated ability does not exist, because it's pretty terrible and like 99% of the times you use it will be if you have literally nothing else to do. Paying 4 mana to sort-of half draw a card (she doesn't let you play the lands she exiles) in U/B is ludicrous. I think her ability to just be a Snapcaster Mage for artifacts and synergistic legendary cards (Oath of Jace, for instance) is where she can be made to shine. I'd start with a control shell, keeping artifacts, incidental self-mill, and looting in mind.
I wouldn't waste slots in a Mizzix deck for redundant cost reduction. After you get 4 or more experience counters, Mizzix effectively renders any further cost reduction pointless because you've reduced the casting costs of your spells down to their colored components already.
The best burn commander is Heartless Hidetsugu. Trading cards for life is generally bad in magic and especially bad in commander, so if you want to burn your opponents, you should look for repeatable sources of burn, or burn so big that it wins you the game. Hidetsugu is both of these. Lightning Bolt is a hard sell in commander because it's pretty much only ever strong enough when you can copy it an arbitrary number of times with something like Reiterate and a billion mana.
It is trivially easy to break cards that can repeatably untap permanents. While people often point to other heinous cards as synergistic with Derevi when they complain about her, she isn't broken with only other broken cards; The baseline of turning all of your creatures' combat damage against players into an untapped land is incredibly good. Just playing her as your commander grants you an enormous and difficult to disrupt mana advantage over the course of a game, which leads to Derevi players snowballing into an overwhelming board position and winning disproportionately often. Sometimes she just does it way faster because she untapped Grim Monolith or Gaea's Cradle to cast a 6-drop on turn 3.
My issue is that blue cards apparently don't get tested to ensure that they won't be broken before they get released. My issue is that every ban is either a blue card or specifically mentions something that blue can do. My issue is that I can buy green, red, white, and black and not have to worry about whether my deck will be banned before I can drive to the card shop. Blue? Who knows! If you take all the banlists of all the formats, the majority of those are blue.
My problem is that they keep trying to micromanage the game by banning cards until we'll all be stuck with Grizzly Bears because everything else is too good. Well, then, how about making sure not to print problem cards that will have to be banned in the first place, huh? You know, do the quality control on the front end instead of the back end? BEFORE we spent our money to buy them?
Dude I promise there isn't some WOTC conspiracy to make you feel bad about buying treasure cruise. (It's like a fifteen cent card anyway.) Part of making magic is that sometimes they push cards powerwise. They take risks on cool cards because people will get excited about them. This game is made by people, and people aren't perfect. It's true that treasure cruise is broken in a lot of eternal formats. That's just a function of the game being around for so long. You can't reasonably expect every single cool card to be perfectly balanced in every format. In the pie chart of magic cards, the slice of banned cards is so tiny compared to all of the cool cards we can play with. And like, a fifth of that slice of still-legal cards is blue.
Anyway, this particular change wasn't made by WOTC. Also, this change only affects a few cards in a very minor fashion. People are crapping their pants like little babies and crying that the sky is falling about how their cards are worthless now, but you know what? Hinder still hits almost every single card that it used to hit. Go ahead, it feels good to put an enemy Tooth and Nail where Eternal Witness and Regrowth can't touch it.
This is a good change. Tucking is obnoxious. People who run generals that need to be tucked are also obnoxious and you don't have to play with them if all they want to do is be oppressive.
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Sorry for the slow reply, I haven't really hopped on MTGS in a while.
I'm not saying No Mercy is bad because it can be destroyed, I'm saying that it's bad because it doesn't actively encourage your opponents to attack people who aren't you; It just discourages people from attacking you until it is eventually destroyed (or until someone can kill you in one swing). And when that happens, No Mercy has bought you basically nothing except for maybe a higher life total than you otherwise would have had, which isn't super good to spend mana or cards on unless it completely puts you out of reach of your opponents. Since No Mercy can't do that, it's probably not worth putting in your deck in the first place for the same reason you wouldn't run something like Blood Tithe.
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Dude I promise there isn't some WOTC conspiracy to make you feel bad about buying treasure cruise. (It's like a fifteen cent card anyway.) Part of making magic is that sometimes they push cards powerwise. They take risks on cool cards because people will get excited about them. This game is made by people, and people aren't perfect. It's true that treasure cruise is broken in a lot of eternal formats. That's just a function of the game being around for so long. You can't reasonably expect every single cool card to be perfectly balanced in every format. In the pie chart of magic cards, the slice of banned cards is so tiny compared to all of the cool cards we can play with. And like, a fifth of that slice of still-legal cards is blue.
Anyway, this particular change wasn't made by WOTC. Also, this change only affects a few cards in a very minor fashion. People are crapping their pants like little babies and crying that the sky is falling about how their cards are worthless now, but you know what? Hinder still hits almost every single card that it used to hit. Go ahead, it feels good to put an enemy Tooth and Nail where Eternal Witness and Regrowth can't touch it.
This is a good change. Tucking is obnoxious. People who run generals that need to be tucked are also obnoxious and you don't have to play with them if all they want to do is be oppressive.