I think the main point is not whether it was an "incorrect or correct" banning (because this can be argued until everyone is blue in the face), but the main point is that it already has been banned - nearly for a year now. What can we do to move on from it? (which most people have)
*Heck, I love Tolarian Academy. I love Recurring Nightmare. I wouldn't mind having those cards in Modern, but I do not expect them to be in Modern any time soon. (the same could be said about more harmless cards like Counterspell, Innocent Blood, Prohibit, Baleful Strix, etc.)
This is exactly what frustrates me so much about ban list talk. I get the feeling many of the people who want to see certain cards unbanned want those cards because they have a huge emotional attachment to them. Which is not a valid reason for wanting to unban a card.
Disagree. This kind of transparency on Wizards' part is exactly what I want to see as a consumer.
The transparency really doesn't take away from the fact that the format can quickly become unstable when cards are getting unbanned and rebanned very quickly.
People already lose their **** when they buy into a deck and cards get banned from it. How do you explain to someone who buys into a deck that their investment got banned because Wizards pulled an "oopsie!" in unbanning a card that should have stayed banned from the beginning?
Every election cycle that has passed since 1992, Democrats have been winning fewer and fewer counties. They have concentrated their vote almost exclusively in major urban areas that they heavily rely on to carry elections at both the state and federal level.
Not only that, but more importantly the Democratic party appears to have transformed into a party that caters mostly to wealthy professionals that are a part of the "elite". Usually Republicans have a solid advantage over Democrats when it comes to winning high-income households in elections. But in this election, Trump just *barely* edged Clinton in households with six-figure incomes. Compare this to 2012, when Romney solidly beat Obama in the same demographics. There seems to be a clear trend that Democrats have abandoned many in the middle to lower income brackets and have catered to much more affluent individuals.
To further make things worse, Democrats decided to double down on the same cosmopolitanism that cost them the election by re-electing Nancy Pelosi as US House Democratic leader. Pelosi is literally a caricature of out of touch coastal cosmopolitanism. While Hillary was a flawed candidate in many other ways, certainly one of her flaws was the fact that she was seen as an out of touch, cosmopolitan political elite who could not connect with ordinary Americans. The fact that a billionaire from New York City connected more with people from Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida and Michigan than a Democrat should shock the party to its very core. The Democrats in the house have effectively elected a symbol of the very corruption, hypocrisy and elitism that voters expressly voted against.
What can Democrats do to regain the voters they used to represent? Or has that bridge been burned?
Bloodghast is actually a fair card by itself. Without Dredge, it is very tame. The same goes for Amalgam, Narc, and CR. All of those are fair cards without a broken mechanic enabling them.
The problem is the Dredge mechanic. It always has been. Dredge is the engine of the deck and everyone knows how busted it is. We already have one card (Dread Return) banned specifically because it interacts with Dredge in a degenerate way. If we keep banning cards that piggyback off the Dredge engine, we are going to go back down the road of old Extended when Wizards stubbornly refused to ban Necropotence and instead banned everything that synergized with it. If Dredge needs a ban, the deck just needs to be simply killed off and put to pasture. It's not worth having to keep banning auxiliary cards just so people can still get a kick out of playing with an abusive and broken mechanic.
I mentioned this once before, but calling Twin a "police" deck was a misnomer. It was more like the Gestapo or the NKVD of the format. It was the secret police; i.e. the deck that silently terrorized the rest of the format. Even though it didn't look like the deck had the raw numbers representing an oppressive deck, it was silently oppressive.
From the moment Twin got its third land into play, that deck had you by the balls. You could never afford to tap out for the rest of the game; lest you risk instantly losing to a zero-opportunity cost combo. But not tapping out for the rest of the game also meant you were likely going to lose the attrition war to Snap/Bolt or Keranos or whatever. It was damned if you do, damned if you don't. Twin almost always had the advantage.
Twin was a deck with absolutely zero opportunity cost attached to it. It was a combo deck that had a powerful plan B. It was a control deck that didn't have to grind someone out of the game. It had all the strengths of combo and control, but with none of the weaknesses. I think that's the big reason why Twin was so beloved by Spikes, and why the archetype has what is essentially a cult following. It's a deck that, realistically speaking, had no weaknesses to speak of and could bail out players game after game with an easy-to-assemble combo. Even diligent playtesters and grinders are lazy to an extent. It's always nice to fall back on the Twin combo especially when you're playing 12+ rounds of Magic.
That lack of opportunity cost should not be existing in Magic. Decks need to have actual weaknesses. There need to be actual drawbacks present to playing with combo X or card Y.
This article is the best explanation I've read thusfar for Trump's success. Particularly eye-opening is a map that shows the 2012 election by county (here's the link) as opposed to by state. It taught me two things I had never realized:
1. Lake Michigan really IS shaped like a dick.
2. I never knew just how prevalent Republican voters really were in this country, and how local to urban areas Democratic support is.
And that really emphasizes one of the biggest problems with EVERYONE'S perception of the election. We wrote off the idea of Trump winning because we severely underestimated both the amount of Republican support in the country and the voting power of middle-class white voters. And indeed, the tendency of people to overlook middle-class white voters was one of the reason those middle-class white voters voted the way they did. People will tend to vote the person who doesn't overlook them, even if that person is horrifying.
There were a LOT of people who voted for Trump that were not captured by pollsters because they didn't want to tell anyone that they were voting for Trump. Want to know why? Well, here's a video that came out recently that is a good example of why people keep their support of Trump in secret:
That is just one example, but hopefully you understand where I'm coming from. There are a lot of places in the country where coming out as a Trump supporter is a death wish waiting to happen. Even in Anytown USA, you're better off keeping your support for Trump as a secret because the fear of ostracism is very real. Personally for me I have seen so much backlash on my Facebook feed over people reacting over "hidden Trump supporters". It really is sickening to think about.
It also happens on this very forum. Every time a Trump supporter came onto this forum they were brutally lambasted to the point they left in disgust. Now we're seeing Trump supporters on the forum come out of the woodwork post-election and it turns out there were more of them than this echo chamber was willing to see.
So what were Hillary's miscalculations... what did she do wrong?
And why did the media get it so wrong?
Trump actually carried a higher % of the black and hispanic vote than Romney. The black vote is a little less surprising just because he wasn't running against Obama. But the hispanic vote is pretty interesting. I don't think those were big difference makers, but that's quite an accomplishment for a man that is literally Hitler.
Look at the electoral map. He wiped out Hillary in the Rust Belt.
It's only fitting he won all of the Rust Belt states. Democrats have ignored, and even mocked the white working class at their own peril. This was the one year it finally came back to haunt them in the biggest possible way.
As for why the media "got it so wrong" I'm willing to bet the reason has to do with our own version of the Shy Tory factor.
We vote by mail in Oregon, which I find to be extremely convenient. No waiting in lines at polls, and you can fill out your ballot on your own time. We get our ballots in the mail a few weeks before the election along with a voters' guide covering every single candidate and ballot measure. You can then mail the ballots back or drop them off at a central location (usually a local library or city hall).
Something tells me Trump might be able to pull it all off and win. Every time I try to write off Trump I keep forgetting how Democrats nominated such a fatally flawed candidate... not to mention we could be looking at another Brexit.
At any rate, something being banned because they might one day print something that would break it is absurd. Cards should be banned because they are overpowered in the present, and GGT was completely innocuous in Modern until this year. I strongly support the unbanning of Golgari Grave-Troll at the time it was unbanned.
GGT did nothing for like 1.25 years after it was unbanned. It wasn't until Neonate and Amalgam that it became viable.
Except Dredge was already a proven offender in Modern. That's why Dread Return is banned and has been since the format's inception.
If we are going to have to keep banning every card that piggybacks off of Dredge, you're much better off just killing the engine of the deck completely to save everyone the massive headache.
Nah, unbanning GGT was 100% the right choice and to be honest should have been unbanned years beforehand. The bad idea was printing Prized Amalgam and Cathartic Reunion.
Wizards is always going to print cards like Prized Amalgam and Cathartic Reunion.
The Dredge mechanic always has, and always will be the problem. It's the engine that makes cards like Amalgam and Reunion look so busted.
Y'know, for those of us talking about whether or not the Republican party is finished, we should bear in mind that we're talking about this in a post-Ronald Reagan world. Ronald Reagan being the guy that won with the highest electoral college total ever after having won every state except Minnesota. You will notice the Democrats are still around.
So yeah, I think to speculate the Republican party is finished is a little premature to say the least. Clinton won't win by a landslide victory, even if she won every battleground state.
Right, but the Democratic Party didn't have a series of primaries and other events showing a great divide between the actual party elites and those that said elites thought were a big part of their base during that election either.
And neither did you have the Democratic Presidential nominee proclaim to his die-hard loyalists that, if he lost, then it would be the fault of the elites and the DNC itself for not supporting him hard enough.
It was something a bit different. During the Reagan years there existed a very large faction of Democrats that split their tickets by voting Reagan for president and then voting Democrat down the rest of the ballot. This is why Democrats still were able to have a very tight grip of the House despite Reagan winning in a landslide. So many of these people existed they got the term Reagan Democrats coined after them, and they were a key cog in both of Reagan's wins in 1980 and 1984. You have to keep in mind that the country was FAR less polarized back then and people were far more likely to split their tickets. Nowadays people just do straight-line party voting.
Trump has proven that a firm grasp of the truth is not required for a >40% support in an election. He villifies himself, but it doesn't matter in the eyes of the public. And the simple, if perhaps not completely truthful, arguments are the ones that seem to work against him the best. It seems to me that any one in the commentariate who has ever logic-ed themselves to a conclusion writes off Trump as unelectable regardless of which side of the aisle they sit on. The space where he succeeds is the space where sound bites and emotional platitudes win, where substance is not required to sway.
Trump has the support he does simply because he is the nominee of a major party. Let me put that into context:
- Barry Goldwater got 38.5% of the vote in 1964.
- George McGovern got 37.5% of the vote in 1972.
- Walter Mondale got 40.6% of the vote in 1984.
All three of these people lost in some of the most catastrophic blowouts in US presidential election history. Yet they were still able to get around 37-40% of the vote simply because they represented a major party.
If you want to blame people for supporting Trump, blame the first-past-the-post system. I have argued previously that Trump has represented its complete institutional failure.
When I compare cards, I look at them from a game theory point of view. I don't take expansion symbols, rarity, or any of that into account. I look at the functionality of the cards (ie what it says on the card).
Both elves are the exact same at what they do. The only thing different are their names (which is irrelevant because Meddling Mage can equally block either one from being played).
Tyler Durden, saying Ashcoat Bears is strictly better than Grizzly Bears is just plain incorrect. Maybe you won't come across a crazy Mindslaver situation over the course of a game, but the fact of the matter is, that situation is possible in a game of Magic and it exists. This throws the 100% better in every single situation out of the window, and it completely invalidates the argument that Ashcoat is strictly better than Grizzly.
Mindslaver makes sure that "strictly better" doesn't exist in Magic. It still boggles my mind how people haven't grasped onto that concept yet.
BTW, Murganda Petroglyphs makes it so Grizzly Bears is better than Ashcoat Bears.
This is exactly what frustrates me so much about ban list talk. I get the feeling many of the people who want to see certain cards unbanned want those cards because they have a huge emotional attachment to them. Which is not a valid reason for wanting to unban a card.
The transparency really doesn't take away from the fact that the format can quickly become unstable when cards are getting unbanned and rebanned very quickly.
People already lose their **** when they buy into a deck and cards get banned from it. How do you explain to someone who buys into a deck that their investment got banned because Wizards pulled an "oopsie!" in unbanning a card that should have stayed banned from the beginning?
Not only that, but more importantly the Democratic party appears to have transformed into a party that caters mostly to wealthy professionals that are a part of the "elite". Usually Republicans have a solid advantage over Democrats when it comes to winning high-income households in elections. But in this election, Trump just *barely* edged Clinton in households with six-figure incomes. Compare this to 2012, when Romney solidly beat Obama in the same demographics. There seems to be a clear trend that Democrats have abandoned many in the middle to lower income brackets and have catered to much more affluent individuals.
To further make things worse, Democrats decided to double down on the same cosmopolitanism that cost them the election by re-electing Nancy Pelosi as US House Democratic leader. Pelosi is literally a caricature of out of touch coastal cosmopolitanism. While Hillary was a flawed candidate in many other ways, certainly one of her flaws was the fact that she was seen as an out of touch, cosmopolitan political elite who could not connect with ordinary Americans. The fact that a billionaire from New York City connected more with people from Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida and Michigan than a Democrat should shock the party to its very core. The Democrats in the house have effectively elected a symbol of the very corruption, hypocrisy and elitism that voters expressly voted against.
What can Democrats do to regain the voters they used to represent? Or has that bridge been burned?
Unbanning a card and then having to reban it again is a great way to completely wipe out consumer confidence in Modern.
The problem is the Dredge mechanic. It always has been. Dredge is the engine of the deck and everyone knows how busted it is. We already have one card (Dread Return) banned specifically because it interacts with Dredge in a degenerate way. If we keep banning cards that piggyback off the Dredge engine, we are going to go back down the road of old Extended when Wizards stubbornly refused to ban Necropotence and instead banned everything that synergized with it. If Dredge needs a ban, the deck just needs to be simply killed off and put to pasture. It's not worth having to keep banning auxiliary cards just so people can still get a kick out of playing with an abusive and broken mechanic.
From the moment Twin got its third land into play, that deck had you by the balls. You could never afford to tap out for the rest of the game; lest you risk instantly losing to a zero-opportunity cost combo. But not tapping out for the rest of the game also meant you were likely going to lose the attrition war to Snap/Bolt or Keranos or whatever. It was damned if you do, damned if you don't. Twin almost always had the advantage.
Twin was a deck with absolutely zero opportunity cost attached to it. It was a combo deck that had a powerful plan B. It was a control deck that didn't have to grind someone out of the game. It had all the strengths of combo and control, but with none of the weaknesses. I think that's the big reason why Twin was so beloved by Spikes, and why the archetype has what is essentially a cult following. It's a deck that, realistically speaking, had no weaknesses to speak of and could bail out players game after game with an easy-to-assemble combo. Even diligent playtesters and grinders are lazy to an extent. It's always nice to fall back on the Twin combo especially when you're playing 12+ rounds of Magic.
That lack of opportunity cost should not be existing in Magic. Decks need to have actual weaknesses. There need to be actual drawbacks present to playing with combo X or card Y.
There were a LOT of people who voted for Trump that were not captured by pollsters because they didn't want to tell anyone that they were voting for Trump. Want to know why? Well, here's a video that came out recently that is a good example of why people keep their support of Trump in secret:
https://streamable.com/6nwo
That is just one example, but hopefully you understand where I'm coming from. There are a lot of places in the country where coming out as a Trump supporter is a death wish waiting to happen. Even in Anytown USA, you're better off keeping your support for Trump as a secret because the fear of ostracism is very real. Personally for me I have seen so much backlash on my Facebook feed over people reacting over "hidden Trump supporters". It really is sickening to think about.
It also happens on this very forum. Every time a Trump supporter came onto this forum they were brutally lambasted to the point they left in disgust. Now we're seeing Trump supporters on the forum come out of the woodwork post-election and it turns out there were more of them than this echo chamber was willing to see.
Way back ago in the Trump thread I told you about the silent majority and how it was a thing. You scoffed at the idea ignored me at your own peril. Who's laughing now?
Look at the electoral map. He wiped out Hillary in the Rust Belt.
It's only fitting he won all of the Rust Belt states. Democrats have ignored, and even mocked the white working class at their own peril. This was the one year it finally came back to haunt them in the biggest possible way.
As for why the media "got it so wrong" I'm willing to bet the reason has to do with our own version of the Shy Tory factor.
We vote by mail in Oregon, which I find to be extremely convenient. No waiting in lines at polls, and you can fill out your ballot on your own time. We get our ballots in the mail a few weeks before the election along with a voters' guide covering every single candidate and ballot measure. You can then mail the ballots back or drop them off at a central location (usually a local library or city hall).
Except Dredge was already a proven offender in Modern. That's why Dread Return is banned and has been since the format's inception.
If we are going to have to keep banning every card that piggybacks off of Dredge, you're much better off just killing the engine of the deck completely to save everyone the massive headache.
Neonate
Wizards is always going to print cards like Prized Amalgam and Cathartic Reunion.
The Dredge mechanic always has, and always will be the problem. It's the engine that makes cards like Amalgam and Reunion look so busted.
It was something a bit different. During the Reagan years there existed a very large faction of Democrats that split their tickets by voting Reagan for president and then voting Democrat down the rest of the ballot. This is why Democrats still were able to have a very tight grip of the House despite Reagan winning in a landslide. So many of these people existed they got the term Reagan Democrats coined after them, and they were a key cog in both of Reagan's wins in 1980 and 1984. You have to keep in mind that the country was FAR less polarized back then and people were far more likely to split their tickets. Nowadays people just do straight-line party voting.
Trump has the support he does simply because he is the nominee of a major party. Let me put that into context:
- Barry Goldwater got 38.5% of the vote in 1964.
- George McGovern got 37.5% of the vote in 1972.
- Walter Mondale got 40.6% of the vote in 1984.
All three of these people lost in some of the most catastrophic blowouts in US presidential election history. Yet they were still able to get around 37-40% of the vote simply because they represented a major party.
If you want to blame people for supporting Trump, blame the first-past-the-post system. I have argued previously that Trump has represented its complete institutional failure.