The most baffling thing about this is why ANYONE still plays Standard or Pioneer. People whine about Modern bans, and they do suck, and Wizards SHOULD be yelled at for some of them, but unless I am missing something, they have banned moe cards from STANDARD in the last 12 months than in any 12 month period in Modern with the exception of only the initial announcement of the format. The same goes for Pioneer, also excluding the initial announcement. Buying into the two most hyped and supported formats in the last year is just lighting money on fire in a way Modern has NEVER been.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Project Booster Fun makes it less fun to open a booster.
standard:
teferi and reclamation ban is to late. banning it for the last 2 months of its remaining time in standard is a joke. these cards were dominant in standard since their release
as for cauldron familiar... wtf ? banned because of to many triggers in arena ? gosh, what a stupid excuse. either its a problematic card or its not. dont ban it because of a stupid video game. and we have plenty of answers in the current standard for this deck. just let people interact with it. or did wizards count in the best of 1 format, where you dont sideboard ?
this development is bs... this whole year of wizards is bs
as for pioneer
when i saw the bans i thought: "wow, did they really just ban 4 decks completly?" and than i read the article just to learn it was totally their intent. WTF ???
i highly doubt, that when you have less and less players in a format, banning 4 decks from the remaining players will solve the problem.
from those bannings only inverter of truth was a good ban. for certain decks it is hard to interact with this combo, giving them no real chance, which is why the ban would be ok. this alone would already have let to more diversity in the meta. but banning 4 decks... for real ?
if you ask me, they take bannings way to easy these days. i am very very disappointed by wizards decisions this year. i really love this game, but why does the company that publishes it sabotage themself so hard. i am really considering quitting, which i dont want, but i cant enjoy the game anymore.
The most baffling thing about this is why ANYONE still plays Standard or Pioneer. People whine about Modern bans, and they do suck, and Wizards SHOULD be yelled at for some of them, but unless I am missing something, they have banned moe cards from STANDARD in the last 12 months than in any 12 month period in Modern with the exception of only the initial announcement of the format. The same goes for Pioneer, also excluding the initial announcement. Buying into the two most hyped and supported formats in the last year is just lighting money on fire in a way Modern has NEVER been.
i enjoy playing standard more than modern. i like the constant shift, the automatical force to rethink or change a deck. its a very dynamic format. and to be honest i really liked the old standard showdown booster, which were a really nice addon to these tournaments. sadly wizards even had to ruin those...
and standard usually is a more interactive format than modern or pioneer, where so many decks simply ignore the opponent and just focus on their combo / win con
i know people dont like change, i know standard in long term can be more expensive than modern (but hell, magic as a whole is), but it is my hobby and i am willing to pay for the fun. to me standard used to be a really good format (not just because it sells products for wizards)
When R&D prints cards that make one or several archetypes more dominant than others, it is less a matter of designing overpowered cards and more indicative of simply not designing powerful enough options for other strategies that are considered fringe or unviable. In a vacuum, cards like Cauldron Familiar and Growth Spiral are fairly innocuous. But given the context of the format and the card pool, which enables decks to contain highly recursive value engines and/or backbreaking haymakers that arrive several turns ahead of schedule, other decks just don't have the tools they need to keep up.
The Magic community is solving Standard metagames at an increasingly accelerated speed. Back in the older days of Magic before the internet was so prevalent, it would often take weeks or months for the best decks to be figured out, and metagames varied wildly from region to region. Now that information can be shared so rapidly and online Magic content is everywhere, formats are getting solved in a matter of days. The best decks rise to the top sooner, which leads to more time being spent playing the same metagame. Every now and then you'll see a new deck emerge at a Pro Tour (har har, get it? Like the Temur Emerge deck from PT Eldritch Moon?), but that hasn't been happening nearly as often as of late.
R&D doesn't seem to be playtesting these cards and sets nearly as extensively as they need to be. This sort of goes back to my first point, but also it brings up the potential issue of Wizards not having a large enough pool of people to playtest their upcoming sets. As someone else in this forum pointed out a while ago, the entire Magic community logs far more playtesting time in a single day than R&D's comparatively small team could hope to accomplish in many months of designing, developing, and tweaking. It might not be a perfect fix, but expanding their development/play design team might mitigate some of these oversights.
In other words, I don't really see these bannings as the result of poorly balanced cards, but instead poorly balanced sets.
I had bett4r open some sweet stained glass window walkers in those lairs to make up the loss or I'll never take the bait for one of these overpriced special edition products again!
Bruh why would you still open them instead of just keeping them sealed to resell later
The problem with defining this format by what is "fun" is that everyone seems to define fun as what they don't lose to. If you keep losing to easily answered cards, that means you should improve your deck. If you don't want to improve your deck, then you should come to peace with the idea that you are going to lose because you chose to not interact with better strategies.
The most baffling thing about this is why ANYONE still plays Standard or Pioneer. People whine about Modern bans, and they do suck, and Wizards SHOULD be yelled at for some of them, but unless I am missing something, they have banned moe cards from STANDARD in the last 12 months than in any 12 month period in Modern with the exception of only the initial announcement of the format. The same goes for Pioneer, also excluding the initial announcement. Buying into the two most hyped and supported formats in the last year is just lighting money on fire in a way Modern has NEVER been.
i enjoy playing standard more than modern. i like the constant shift, the automatical force to rethink or change a deck. its a very dynamic format. and to be honest i really liked the old standard showdown booster, which were a really nice addon to these tournaments. sadly wizards even had to ruin those...
and standard usually is a more interactive format than modern or pioneer, where so many decks simply ignore the opponent and just focus on their combo / win con
i know people dont like change, i know standard in long term can be more expensive than modern (but hell, magic as a whole is), but it is my hobby and i am willing to pay for the fun. to me standard used to be a really good format (not just because it sells products for wizards)
the problem is that this dynamic of constant change in standard is pricing out a lot of people out of the format. the problem is not in the dynamic itself but rather in prices of individual cards. buying into any reasonably competitive deck is not an option for a lot of people and the inability to liquidate cards at rotation (cards from standard do not translate well into other formats with few exceptions and in case of banning like those you are left with unsellable cardboard as well) does not help either.
so in the end casual players are driven out of standard and leftover competitive metagame collapses to a handful of decks as we see now.
No, but where would the other 3 combo decks that were nerfed have migrated to? Think of it as a preemptive banning. Slow, infinite combos aren't fun at all to sit through if you are on the losing end. I'm glad they are being proactive for once.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Playing since 1994: Currently MAGS (HomeBrew),Standard & Pauper (Pioneer and Modern are degenerate trash formats)
STOP using "dude/bro" as a pejorative or insult. Grow up.
Margaret Thatcher: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.”
Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Martin Luther King Jr.: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
The issue with magic isn't plain powercreep.
the extremely busted cards are outliers, and the threats are being powecrept all the time, the best answers are still very, very old.
the issue with the game today is that we have ridiculously powerful threats and crappy answers to deal with them.
I mean, Legacy is still fine because no matter how stupid are the new creatures or spells, there's always Force of Will and Swords to Plowshares to keep them in check.
today, WotC keeps making threats more and more powerful all the time, and don't even print Counterspell or lightning bolt because those are "too strong for standard" when answers are crappy and threats are ridiculously powerful, it's only natural the formats won't work well.
if they're going to keep improving threats, then they need to bring better answers or else we'll keep having extensive ban lists every time.
The most baffling thing about this is why ANYONE still plays Standard or Pioneer. People whine about Modern bans, and they do suck, and Wizards SHOULD be yelled at for some of them, but unless I am missing something, they have banned moe cards from STANDARD in the last 12 months than in any 12 month period in Modern with the exception of only the initial announcement of the format. The same goes for Pioneer, also excluding the initial announcement. Buying into the two most hyped and supported formats in the last year is just lighting money on fire in a way Modern has NEVER been.
i enjoy playing standard more than modern. i like the constant shift, the automatical force to rethink or change a deck. its a very dynamic format. and to be honest i really liked the old standard showdown booster, which were a really nice addon to these tournaments. sadly wizards even had to ruin those...
and standard usually is a more interactive format than modern or pioneer, where so many decks simply ignore the opponent and just focus on their combo / win con
i know people dont like change, i know standard in long term can be more expensive than modern (but hell, magic as a whole is), but it is my hobby and i am willing to pay for the fun. to me standard used to be a really good format (not just because it sells products for wizards)
This. And there are ten very large reasons not to play in Modern unless you're an old timer who has never sold their collection.
before dominaria revist you guys were complaining the sets were too weak but now you guys are complaining They too powerful what is happening here.
Are they actually the same people complaining in both circumstances or is it just whichever side is currently unhappy is the one talking? I believe I have consistently been arguing for somewhat lower power level, definitely fewer bombs and against planeswalkers for a while. I havent seen the same posters on both sides of any of those fences. If you have, please elucidate.
My issue with mythic rarity isn't the actual distribution rate of cards, and I understand that rares back in the day were as rare as mythics are today. The issue is how the overall power level of creatures went through the roof, while countermagic was slowed down when the game needs counterspell to properly balance things.
Why should we continue to ignore the elephant in the room?
Ever since counterspell was removed from standard things have been a disaster.
Obviously I don't expect to go back to when I started during Revised and got excited over force of nature. I would never expect such a card to be competitive in any standard format, but at the same time I think there's an obvious issue when even cards like terra stomper never see play at the top of a deck curve because mythics like verdurous gearhulk, carnage tyrant and questing beast are pushed to the point where they simply can't be ignored, and everyone either needs them to be successful, or has to make specific preparations to play against them. Seriously, it's gotten ridiculous! How many keywords and abilities does one beast need?!
Similarly, I'm tired of constantly being teased by the designers and manufacturer with cards which I suspected from the beginning were "too good to be true" (ie: deathrite shaman) but assume are thoroughly tested before they're sold, only to purchase or trade into foil playsets, and then watch their value disappear because the have-nots decide they no longer want such game pieces in the playing environment and complain about my game pieces which were rightfully presented as legitimate to use in sanctioned play and sold under that pretense to me and everyone else who wanted them.
I work hard for my money, rotation already makes the game expensive enough to keep up with without bannings, and It's just a big slap in the face to every consumer when they can no longer use items Wizards sold them because employees there didn't do their jobs properly and essentially sold us all fool's gold.
Exactly! I saw him on the list and honestly wondered if someone at Wizards is racist towards Elvish advisors.
Don't worry though, he and Leovold, Emissary of Trest are working on a legal argument to defend their rights to exist in the formats they were designed and printed for. Balance must be restored!
if they're going to keep improving threats, then they need to bring better answers or else we'll keep having extensive ban lists every time.
It looks like Wizard's recent design philosophy is to make bigger threats, so players simply compete on landing bigger threats, rather than using lower-costing answers to take care of those threats.
Wizards keeps citing their player satisfaction surveys where new players don't like their threats being countered or neutralized before they can use it. So, really good answers are unlikely to be made for Standard. The better creature removals recently seem to be in black. (Cast Down, Heartless Act)
They might scale back on the power creep for creatures, but removal will probably remain not as quick or efficient in Standard.
I love the survey after matches on Arena.
Just yesterday, I was down to 2 life from a nice fair deck with a good player behind it. I drew Uro, played, Escaped it. Gained six life, drew two cards I needed (ugin) and the game was over. I won. That shouldn't happen. When they asked me if I had fun I put the frowny face even though I won.
I play soooo many fun brewed decks in standard, then I get tired of losing, pull out the simic ramp Ugin deck and proceed to win, it's crappy.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Resigned up after getting lost in the Twitch/MTGS whatever crossover
Been on this forum for 10++ years
Playing since '94
After this year, I doubt I would EVER consider playing paper standard again. It is just too volatile. I think Pioneer might wind up the same way once it goes on Arena.
if they're going to keep improving threats, then they need to bring better answers or else we'll keep having extensive ban lists every time.
It looks like Wizard's recent design philosophy is to make bigger threats, so players simply compete on landing bigger threats, rather than using lower-costing answers to take care of those threats.
Wizards keeps citing their player satisfaction surveys where new players don't like their threats being countered or neutralized before they can use it. So, really good answers are unlikely to be made for Standard. The better creature removals recently seem to be in black. (Cast Down, Heartless Act)
They might scale back on the power creep for creatures, but removal will probably remain not as quick or efficient in Standard.
Which has been the biggest problem plaguing Standard for a long time now. The game is far healthier and more vibrant when threats and answers are roughly equal. When threats far outstrip answers, you are left with a shallow game of who can ramp and draw into their threat faster.
Similarly, I'm tired of constantly being teased by the designers and manufacturer with cards which I suspected from the beginning were "too good to be true" (ie: deathrite shaman) but assume are thoroughly tested before they're sold, only to purchase or trade into foil playsets, and then watch their value disappear because the have-nots decide they no longer want such game pieces in the playing environment and complain about my game pieces which were rightfully presented as legitimate to use in sanctioned play and sold under that pretense to me and everyone else who wanted them.
Holy run on sentence, Batman! (I think I agree with you...but I'm only 89.2% sure...)
if they're going to keep improving threats, then they need to bring better answers or else we'll keep having extensive ban lists every time.
It looks like Wizard's recent design philosophy is to make bigger threats, so players simply compete on landing bigger threats, rather than using lower-costing answers to take care of those threats.
Wizards keeps citing their player satisfaction surveys where new players don't like their threats being countered or neutralized before they can use it. So, really good answers are unlikely to be made for Standard. The better creature removals recently seem to be in black. (Cast Down, Heartless Act)
They might scale back on the power creep for creatures, but removal will probably remain not as quick or efficient in Standard.
Which has been the biggest problem plaguing Standard for a long time now. The game is far healthier and more vibrant when threats and answers are roughly equal. When threats far outstrip answers, you are left with a shallow game of who can ramp and draw into their threat faster.
I don't know if Wizards will ever find the balance needed.
Make the answers too good, and nobody wants to play expensive threats. It really depends on how they design Standard. Players won't readily commit to a 6+ mana big monster only to have it taken down by 2-mana removal. It seems Wizards compensates for that scenario by adding ETB or on cast abilities to make those creatures worthwhile to play. Then, you end up with creatures that Mystic_X said previously are "use or lose" in Standard.
Finaly Teferi is getting banned! oh wait!? we are in a pandemic without face to face play tournaments and it just gets banned before 2 m before rotation?
At least we can't say it was greed because war of the spark went out of print some time ago, it is not another oko/hogak...
Better they reprint Uro in 2021 challenger decks... (maybe they ban in after zendikar comes out, who knows)
if they're going to keep improving threats, then they need to bring better answers or else we'll keep having extensive ban lists every time.
It looks like Wizard's recent design philosophy is to make bigger threats, so players simply compete on landing bigger threats, rather than using lower-costing answers to take care of those threats.
Wizards keeps citing their player satisfaction surveys where new players don't like their threats being countered or neutralized before they can use it. So, really good answers are unlikely to be made for Standard. The better creature removals recently seem to be in black. (Cast Down, Heartless Act)
They might scale back on the power creep for creatures, but removal will probably remain not as quick or efficient in Standard.
Which has been the biggest problem plaguing Standard for a long time now. The game is far healthier and more vibrant when threats and answers are roughly equal. When threats far outstrip answers, you are left with a shallow game of who can ramp and draw into their threat faster.
I don't know if Wizards will ever find the balance needed.
Make the answers too good, and nobody wants to play expensive threats. It really depends on how they design Standard. Players won't readily commit to a 6+ mana big monster only to have it taken down by 2-mana removal. It seems Wizards compensates for that scenario by adding ETB or on cast abilities to make those creatures worthwhile to play. Then, you end up with creatures that Mystic_X said previously are "use or lose" in Standard.
the solution would be increase interaction....
print more cards to protect the bombs... stuff like Mother of Runes, Lightning Greaves or similar that is able to protect creautes for a long time....
and better removal.... bring back Lightning Bolt, stop printing removal weaker than Murder, stop printing Cancel and bring back the real Mana Leak....
if you're going to print Uro and 3 mana Teferi, you need to make removal good enough to make the meta bearable.
[*]R&D doesn't seem to be playtesting these cards and sets nearly as extensively as they need to be. This sort of goes back to my first point, but also it brings up the potential issue of Wizards not having a large enough pool of people to playtest their upcoming sets. As someone else in this forum pointed out a while ago, the entire Magic community logs far more playtesting time in a single day than R&D's comparatively small team could hope to accomplish in many months of designing, developing, and tweaking. It might not be a perfect fix, but expanding their development/play design team might mitigate some of these oversights.[/list]
The other issue with lack of playtesting is singular cards. Even with their new play testing team there has been card after card that's a problem. There has been way too many cards slipping through the cracks. It's understandable that they can't solve a meta it's another for things like Oko to keep slipping through.
List tags are malformed.
if they're going to keep improving threats, then they need to bring better answers or else we'll keep having extensive ban lists every time.
It looks like Wizard's recent design philosophy is to make bigger threats, so players simply compete on landing bigger threats, rather than using lower-costing answers to take care of those threats.
Wizards keeps citing their player satisfaction surveys where new players don't like their threats being countered or neutralized before they can use it. So, really good answers are unlikely to be made for Standard. The better creature removals recently seem to be in black. (Cast Down, Heartless Act)
They might scale back on the power creep for creatures, but removal will probably remain not as quick or efficient in Standard.
Which has been the biggest problem plaguing Standard for a long time now. The game is far healthier and more vibrant when threats and answers are roughly equal. When threats far outstrip answers, you are left with a shallow game of who can ramp and draw into their threat faster.
I don't know if Wizards will ever find the balance needed.
Make the answers too good, and nobody wants to play expensive threats. It really depends on how they design Standard. Players won't readily commit to a 6+ mana big monster only to have it taken down by 2-mana removal. It seems Wizards compensates for that scenario by adding ETB or on cast abilities to make those creatures worthwhile to play. Then, you end up with creatures that Mystic_X said previously are "use or lose" in Standard.
the solution would be increase interaction....
print more cards to protect the bombs... stuff like Mother of Runes, Lightning Greaves or similar that is able to protect creautes for a long time....
and better removal.... bring back Lightning Bolt, stop printing removal weaker than Murder, stop printing Cancel and bring back the real Mana Leak....
if you're going to print Uro and 3 mana Teferi, you need to make removal good enough to make the meta bearable.
This.
And ETB stuff is fine, it't the "when you cast" stuff that isn't. As in if you counterspell their hydroid krassis, they still get the cards and life. If you still think ETB is too good (maybe a particular ETB on a particular card, then delay it "at the first end step after this comes into play, if this is still in play do this".
This is also why Adventure needs to have become evergreen a year ago.. If you're deckbuilding and weighing packing more threats or more responses, then it's very nice to have both on one card. Only one half really needs to be worth playing, the other half exists if the situation calls for it. Completely increases interactivity- more back and forth and strategic choices.
It looks like Wizard's recent design philosophy is to make bigger threats, so players simply compete on landing bigger threats, rather than using lower-costing answers to take care of those threats.
Wizards keeps citing their player satisfaction surveys where new players don't like their threats being countered or neutralized before they can use it. So, really good answers are unlikely to be made for Standard. The better creature removals recently seem to be in black. (Cast Down, Heartless Act)
They might scale back on the power creep for creatures, but removal will probably remain not as quick or efficient in Standard.
Which has been the biggest problem plaguing Standard for a long time now. The game is far healthier and more vibrant when threats and answers are roughly equal. When threats far outstrip answers, you are left with a shallow game of who can ramp and draw into their threat faster.
I don't know if Wizards will ever find the balance needed.
Make the answers too good, and nobody wants to play expensive threats. It really depends on how they design Standard. Players won't readily commit to a 6+ mana big monster only to have it taken down by 2-mana removal. It seems Wizards compensates for that scenario by adding ETB or on cast abilities to make those creatures worthwhile to play. Then, you end up with creatures that Mystic_X said previously are "use or lose" in Standard.
the solution would be increase interaction....
print more cards to protect the bombs... stuff like Mother of Runes, Lightning Greaves or similar that is able to protect creautes for a long time....
and better removal.... bring back Lightning Bolt, stop printing removal weaker than Murder, stop printing Cancel and bring back the real Mana Leak....
if you're going to print Uro and 3 mana Teferi, you need to make removal good enough to make the meta bearable.
This.
And ETB stuff is fine, it't the "when you cast" stuff that isn't. As in if you counterspell their hydroid krassis, they still get the cards and life. If you still think ETB is too good (maybe a particular ETB on a particular card, then delay it "at the first end step after this comes into play, if this is still in play do this".
This is also why Adventure needs to have become evergreen a year ago.. If you're deckbuilding and weighing packing more threats or more responses, then it's very nice to have both on one card. Only one half really needs to be worth playing, the other half exists if the situation calls for it. Completely increases interactivity- more back and forth and strategic choices.
Making Adventure evergreen doesn't seem plausible, too tied to Eldraine, however I fully agree with the need of better answer cards, they gave us a nerfed Mana Leak while the oppressive "opponents play Hearthstone while you play Magic" static ability was downcosted to 1WU from a not very splashable 2UUU.
Besides that, and the obvious lack of playtesting for some cards, the "all-upside" design philosophy has to go, let's take Uro as example, it's supposed to be a ramp spell you can later use as a big beater, fine, however, it's as if they had looked at all potential pitfalls of playing a ramp card and made sure to negate each and every of them. Normally the tradeoff for playing ramp spells is that while you're setting up a powerful play down the line, you're losing cards in your hand, so you lose CA vs control, plus you're not building board presence so aggro decks get a free hit in. So what did R&D do? make Uro draw you a card so you don't lose CA vs control and also give you 3 life so the hit you'll take from an aggro deck has less impact...oh, and just in case, the same stupidly powerful effect is repeated when you attack with your 6/6 beater. They could have removed either the card draw or the lifegain and maybe the attack trigger as well and still have a very powerful tournament-level mythic but with a small weak point other decks could leverage against it, but noo, people don't like downsides or tradeoffs in their dumb overpowered threats like poor Nissa, I mean why not pad her already very high loyalty and the ability to increase board presence with her plus ability with a guaranteed untapped 3/3 with vigilance that can protect her while attacking the opponent as well, and the list could go on, at this rate the next Rotting Regisaur will make the opponent discard instead of you.
This is how a ban list should be used. Not just as an emergency fix for obviously broken formats but as a healthy booster for when formats stagnate or as basic quality of play improvements.
Just because you personally fail to appreciate "broken" formats that try to recapitulate on important aspects of Magic history does not mean bans should not potentially address the health of said formats.
I can be brutally subjective too: 75% of the formats impacted are useless fodder and will be soon go the way of extended. See what I did there?
This is how a ban list should be used. Not just as an emergency fix for obviously broken formats but as a healthy booster for when formats stagnate or as basic quality of play improvements.
Just because you personally fail to appreciate "broken" formats that try to recapitulate on important aspects of Magic history does not mean bans should not potentially address the health of said formats.
I can be brutally subjective too: 75% of the formats impacted are useless fodder and will be soon go the way of extended. See what I did there?
I have no idea what you think you've said here. It sounds like you've said "I don't appreciate broken formats but they should still be regulated" which doesn't make sense. Neither did I imply that broken formats shouldn't be regulated nor did I say broken formats can't be fun. If you didn't mean what I interpreted then I actually don't understand how you stand at odds with what I said.
As for your brutal subjectivity, I see exactly what you did there and it isn't brutally subjective, it is objectively wrong. There is subjective such as "X isn't fun"; then there is objectively wrong such as "Nobody likes X and it will soon go away." Your comment is on the objectively wrong end.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
standard:
teferi and reclamation ban is to late. banning it for the last 2 months of its remaining time in standard is a joke. these cards were dominant in standard since their release
as for cauldron familiar... wtf ? banned because of to many triggers in arena ? gosh, what a stupid excuse. either its a problematic card or its not. dont ban it because of a stupid video game. and we have plenty of answers in the current standard for this deck. just let people interact with it. or did wizards count in the best of 1 format, where you dont sideboard ?
this development is bs... this whole year of wizards is bs
as for pioneer
when i saw the bans i thought: "wow, did they really just ban 4 decks completly?" and than i read the article just to learn it was totally their intent. WTF ???
i highly doubt, that when you have less and less players in a format, banning 4 decks from the remaining players will solve the problem.
from those bannings only inverter of truth was a good ban. for certain decks it is hard to interact with this combo, giving them no real chance, which is why the ban would be ok. this alone would already have let to more diversity in the meta. but banning 4 decks... for real ?
if you ask me, they take bannings way to easy these days. i am very very disappointed by wizards decisions this year. i really love this game, but why does the company that publishes it sabotage themself so hard. i am really considering quitting, which i dont want, but i cant enjoy the game anymore.
i enjoy playing standard more than modern. i like the constant shift, the automatical force to rethink or change a deck. its a very dynamic format. and to be honest i really liked the old standard showdown booster, which were a really nice addon to these tournaments. sadly wizards even had to ruin those...
and standard usually is a more interactive format than modern or pioneer, where so many decks simply ignore the opponent and just focus on their combo / win con
i know people dont like change, i know standard in long term can be more expensive than modern (but hell, magic as a whole is), but it is my hobby and i am willing to pay for the fun. to me standard used to be a really good format (not just because it sells products for wizards)
In other words, I don't really see these bannings as the result of poorly balanced cards, but instead poorly balanced sets.
Bruh why would you still open them instead of just keeping them sealed to resell later
so in the end casual players are driven out of standard and leftover competitive metagame collapses to a handful of decks as we see now.
No, but where would the other 3 combo decks that were nerfed have migrated to? Think of it as a preemptive banning. Slow, infinite combos aren't fun at all to sit through if you are on the losing end. I'm glad they are being proactive for once.
STOP using "dude/bro" as a pejorative or insult. Grow up.
Margaret Thatcher: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.”
Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Martin Luther King Jr.: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
the extremely busted cards are outliers, and the threats are being powecrept all the time, the best answers are still very, very old.
the issue with the game today is that we have ridiculously powerful threats and crappy answers to deal with them.
I mean, Legacy is still fine because no matter how stupid are the new creatures or spells, there's always Force of Will and Swords to Plowshares to keep them in check.
today, WotC keeps making threats more and more powerful all the time, and don't even print Counterspell or lightning bolt because those are "too strong for standard" when answers are crappy and threats are ridiculously powerful, it's only natural the formats won't work well.
if they're going to keep improving threats, then they need to bring better answers or else we'll keep having extensive ban lists every time.
This. And there are ten very large reasons not to play in Modern unless you're an old timer who has never sold their collection.
Are they actually the same people complaining in both circumstances or is it just whichever side is currently unhappy is the one talking? I believe I have consistently been arguing for somewhat lower power level, definitely fewer bombs and against planeswalkers for a while. I havent seen the same posters on both sides of any of those fences. If you have, please elucidate.
Why should we continue to ignore the elephant in the room?
Ever since counterspell was removed from standard things have been a disaster.
Obviously I don't expect to go back to when I started during Revised and got excited over force of nature. I would never expect such a card to be competitive in any standard format, but at the same time I think there's an obvious issue when even cards like terra stomper never see play at the top of a deck curve because mythics like verdurous gearhulk, carnage tyrant and questing beast are pushed to the point where they simply can't be ignored, and everyone either needs them to be successful, or has to make specific preparations to play against them. Seriously, it's gotten ridiculous! How many keywords and abilities does one beast need?!
Similarly, I'm tired of constantly being teased by the designers and manufacturer with cards which I suspected from the beginning were "too good to be true" (ie: deathrite shaman) but assume are thoroughly tested before they're sold, only to purchase or trade into foil playsets, and then watch their value disappear because the have-nots decide they no longer want such game pieces in the playing environment and complain about my game pieces which were rightfully presented as legitimate to use in sanctioned play and sold under that pretense to me and everyone else who wanted them.
I work hard for my money, rotation already makes the game expensive enough to keep up with without bannings, and It's just a big slap in the face to every consumer when they can no longer use items Wizards sold them because employees there didn't do their jobs properly and essentially sold us all fool's gold.
Exactly! I saw him on the list and honestly wondered if someone at Wizards is racist towards Elvish advisors.
Don't worry though, he and Leovold, Emissary of Trest are working on a legal argument to defend their rights to exist in the formats they were designed and printed for. Balance must be restored!
I used to be a demigod, but now I'm an omnimage
It looks like Wizard's recent design philosophy is to make bigger threats, so players simply compete on landing bigger threats, rather than using lower-costing answers to take care of those threats.
Wizards keeps citing their player satisfaction surveys where new players don't like their threats being countered or neutralized before they can use it. So, really good answers are unlikely to be made for Standard. The better creature removals recently seem to be in black. (Cast Down, Heartless Act)
They might scale back on the power creep for creatures, but removal will probably remain not as quick or efficient in Standard.
Just yesterday, I was down to 2 life from a nice fair deck with a good player behind it. I drew Uro, played, Escaped it. Gained six life, drew two cards I needed (ugin) and the game was over. I won. That shouldn't happen. When they asked me if I had fun I put the frowny face even though I won.
I play soooo many fun brewed decks in standard, then I get tired of losing, pull out the simic ramp Ugin deck and proceed to win, it's crappy.
Been on this forum for 10++ years
Playing since '94
Which has been the biggest problem plaguing Standard for a long time now. The game is far healthier and more vibrant when threats and answers are roughly equal. When threats far outstrip answers, you are left with a shallow game of who can ramp and draw into their threat faster.
Holy run on sentence, Batman! (I think I agree with you...but I'm only 89.2% sure...)
I don't know if Wizards will ever find the balance needed.
Make the answers too good, and nobody wants to play expensive threats. It really depends on how they design Standard. Players won't readily commit to a 6+ mana big monster only to have it taken down by 2-mana removal. It seems Wizards compensates for that scenario by adding ETB or on cast abilities to make those creatures worthwhile to play. Then, you end up with creatures that Mystic_X said previously are "use or lose" in Standard.
At least we can't say it was greed because war of the spark went out of print some time ago, it is not another oko/hogak...
Better they reprint Uro in 2021 challenger decks... (maybe they ban in after zendikar comes out, who knows)
the solution would be increase interaction....
print more cards to protect the bombs... stuff like Mother of Runes, Lightning Greaves or similar that is able to protect creautes for a long time....
and better removal.... bring back Lightning Bolt, stop printing removal weaker than Murder, stop printing Cancel and bring back the real Mana Leak....
if you're going to print Uro and 3 mana Teferi, you need to make removal good enough to make the meta bearable.
The other issue with lack of playtesting is singular cards. Even with their new play testing team there has been card after card that's a problem. There has been way too many cards slipping through the cracks. It's understandable that they can't solve a meta it's another for things like Oko to keep slipping through.
List tags are malformed.
This.
And ETB stuff is fine, it't the "when you cast" stuff that isn't. As in if you counterspell their hydroid krassis, they still get the cards and life. If you still think ETB is too good (maybe a particular ETB on a particular card, then delay it "at the first end step after this comes into play, if this is still in play do this".
This is also why Adventure needs to have become evergreen a year ago.. If you're deckbuilding and weighing packing more threats or more responses, then it's very nice to have both on one card. Only one half really needs to be worth playing, the other half exists if the situation calls for it. Completely increases interactivity- more back and forth and strategic choices.
Making Adventure evergreen doesn't seem plausible, too tied to Eldraine, however I fully agree with the need of better answer cards, they gave us a nerfed Mana Leak while the oppressive "opponents play Hearthstone while you play Magic" static ability was downcosted to 1WU from a not very splashable 2UUU.
Besides that, and the obvious lack of playtesting for some cards, the "all-upside" design philosophy has to go, let's take Uro as example, it's supposed to be a ramp spell you can later use as a big beater, fine, however, it's as if they had looked at all potential pitfalls of playing a ramp card and made sure to negate each and every of them. Normally the tradeoff for playing ramp spells is that while you're setting up a powerful play down the line, you're losing cards in your hand, so you lose CA vs control, plus you're not building board presence so aggro decks get a free hit in. So what did R&D do? make Uro draw you a card so you don't lose CA vs control and also give you 3 life so the hit you'll take from an aggro deck has less impact...oh, and just in case, the same stupidly powerful effect is repeated when you attack with your 6/6 beater. They could have removed either the card draw or the lifegain and maybe the attack trigger as well and still have a very powerful tournament-level mythic but with a small weak point other decks could leverage against it, but noo, people don't like downsides or tradeoffs in their dumb overpowered threats like poor Nissa, I mean why not pad her already very high loyalty and the ability to increase board presence with her plus ability with a guaranteed untapped 3/3 with vigilance that can protect her while attacking the opponent as well, and the list could go on, at this rate the next Rotting Regisaur will make the opponent discard instead of you.
Just because you personally fail to appreciate "broken" formats that try to recapitulate on important aspects of Magic history does not mean bans should not potentially address the health of said formats.
I can be brutally subjective too: 75% of the formats impacted are useless fodder and will be soon go the way of extended. See what I did there?
As for your brutal subjectivity, I see exactly what you did there and it isn't brutally subjective, it is objectively wrong. There is subjective such as "X isn't fun"; then there is objectively wrong such as "Nobody likes X and it will soon go away." Your comment is on the objectively wrong end.