Right, but...if you have the mana to cast WP AND drop a reasonable threat (lets say a 4/4) wouldn't that be 1.) A lot of mana and 2.) A mana cost where winning is not unreasonable?
Worldpurge empties your mana pool afterwards, preventing you from dropping anything else. You literally have to go "Cast dude, Quicken into Worldpurge" to get something on the table after a WP.
[CARD]Sway is like what 10? A 4/4 follow up (assuming you're even lucky enough to get to it) is probably another 4-6 mana so we're pushing 14-16 mana. I'm not mad if that wins.[/quote]
It isn't hard to ramp into 14 mana (Sway+JMS) in mono-Blue (Extraplanar Lens, Jens, etc).
The problem is Sway can easily end the game outright thanks to some cheap drops or actual Suspend cards (not just Jhoria; consider Greater Gargadon and then saccing enough permanents in response to Sway so he resolves next turn).
So far the best hulk combo I've seen uses flash and hulk in hand to go off turn 2 finding Body double and a sac outlet like carrion feeder, then finds reveillark and a pinger like mogg fanatic, then finishes by recurring BD as lark and your pinger.
That's 5 slots, 6 with flash, in a 5 color deck... restricting enough I'd say. Besides, 5-color combo's broken without it, so I don't think keeping one more combo away from a few bad eggs is worth killing an otherwise fantastic card. Unless. Someone really builds around it... I suppose you might be able to streamline it down to a bant deck, but it'd probably require 2 turns or some other nonsense.
Realistically, I think 'lark is a more disruptive engine to the format than the hulk... Not that I'd give lark the hammer.
Worldpurge empties your mana pool afterwards, preventing you from dropping anything else. You literally have to go "Cast dude, Quicken into Worldpurge" to get something on the table after a WP.
[CARD]Sway is like what 10? A 4/4 follow up (assuming you're even lucky enough to get to it) is probably another 4-6 mana so we're pushing 14-16 mana. I'm not mad if that wins.
It isn't hard to ramp into 14 mana (Sway+JMS) in mono-Blue (Extraplanar Lens, Jens, etc).
The problem is Sway can easily end the game outright thanks to some cheap drops or actual Suspend cards (not just Jhoria; consider Greater Gargadon and then saccing enough permanents in response to Sway so he resolves next turn).[/QUOTE]
When I typed "WP" I meant Sway I'll go fix that.
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Recurring nightmare isn't getting as much resistance as I thought, i should ask, why can't it come off?
Way, way too gross. It's a sac outlet and reanimation in a single card, as you well know. I think the main offenders are Yosei, the Morning Star and Sundering Titan.
Way, way too gross. It's a sac outlet and reanimation in a single card, as you well know. I think the main offenders are Yosei, the Morning Star and Sundering Titan.
Palinchron is also pretty good with Nightmare. But yeah, much too broken. We should be adding more cards on, not taking cards off IMHO.
I can't imagine when you wouldn't want an answer to Panoptic Mirror the instant your opponent plays it. Time Warp makes it pretty broken. Even a Stone Rain could be a huge threat if you don't hit a land drop every turn or don't have other mana sources.
(The first time I saw the card, I thought it was a great EDH card...I grew disheartened when I re-read the banlist.)
I also agree with the unbanning of painter's servant. Ban Grindstone and Iona if you want, but there is so much fun stuff to do with PS that's not comepletely broken.
I also agree with the unbanning of painter's servant. Ban Grindstone and Iona if you want, but there is so much fun stuff to do with PS that's not comepletely broken.
The problem with Servant is that it's an enabler, much like Hulk or Tinker. It is the one card that makes many other cards broken. So the choice is to ban every single card that's broken with it, or just ban the enabler itself. The better answer is obviously the latter, unless all the cards it breaks are terrible otherwise. Yes, these cards have uses that aren't broken, but that's necessary collateral damage.
The problem with Servant is that it's an enabler, much like Hulk or Tinker. It is the one card that makes many other cards broken. So the choice is to ban every single card that's broken with it, or just ban the enabler itself. The better answer is obviously the latter, unless all the cards it breaks are terrible otherwise. Yes, these cards have uses that aren't broken, but that's necessary collateral damage.
I am unaware of any broken combos with PS outside of Iona and Grindstone. Could you enlighten me?
Pro blue? It's now protection from everything. Red Elemental Blast? destroys any permanent Lifeforce? counter anything
It has massive potential, too much in fact.
Pro-everything doesn't break the game (Wrath, Evacuation, Edicts)
Having 2-3 out of 99 cards become instant Vindicate doesn't break the game
Countering anything is pretty strong, but since that isn't likely... you'd pretty much have to play mono-green to support GG for every opponent's spell for the lock, and you still can't stop Krosan Grip or Vexing Shusher, and you can't search for enchantments very easily with mono-green... more power to you if you pull off that combo. Even Painter-Grindstone doesn't necessarily win the game anymore with all the Kozileks and Emrakuls running around. Painter-Iona is really the only hard lock, which still takes some serious commitment to pull off (and technically you could still pull out of it even with mono-color if you hit Mouth of Ronom for Painter and Duplicant/Brittle Effigy for Iona... admittedly highly unlikely).
I don't see the Painter as a serious threat to the format. But I don't necessarily see banning it as a serious loss to the format either, unless someone is hellbent on the Iona-Painter combo. Seems like a viable strategy for someone to want to play. Even that combo has to hit early or after a board sweep to guarantee a win, as it does nothing about a strong board position.
Just my $0.02.
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I hardly think iona painter is broken, it is just another two card combo that costs a fair amount of mana to get. Grindstone...still its 3 mana to kill a guy + 1 to play stone + 2 for servant so figure 3 opponents...thats 9+1+2=12 mana total...plus it will be taking place over the course of three turns most likely...and part of the combo is a fragile creature and another is a slightly less fragile artifact...and the earlisest you can consistently kill someone will prolly be turn 3 or 4, at that point i think the combo is answerable. I think these combos are very very good but not broken and not banworthy. I can think of several better combos.
Painter/Iona prevents your opponents from casting anything, including colorless spells, because they're no longer colorless. You'd need something like winding canyons + 187 creature to actually bust through a Painter/Iona, a vesuvan shapeshifter, or some other form of activated ability to break the lock.
It was annoying, but I personally didn't think it was too much of a threat - the painter is a godawful creature unless you're running multiple color hate cards, I don't really think it's worth the slot to set up an Iona/Painter if you're not actively or passively able to use the thing already (Teysa, Orzhov Scion, really, is the only deck that Painter really makes sense in). Otherwise it's something of a dead slot that'll set you back unless you've already got board control, and Iona backfires more horribly than Emrakul if you're worried about bribery and the like. Threats shouldn't prevent you from running threats of your own, but that's at least part of the reason I stopped running Iona in G/W, it's just too weak against a table running U/B/W, and it's just too strong against me if I'm not allowed to play my stuff.
The same reasoning applies, though. You can happily go off on turn two, and there's once again basically no other reason why you'd play LED.
What are you doing on a theoretical turn 2 going off with Salvagers combo? Your hand is toast, and the best you can do is cast your general. Sliver Queen would let you generate infinite slivers, but that would pretty much be as far as you could go.
It depends exactly what you mean. Would as many people play the card if there was no potential to get infinite mana with it? Probably not. But not many people actively build around the combo, or even make that much of an effort to assemble it. It's just so slow and vulnerable that most of the time it's not worth expending too much effort over.
I'm talking more about the former. Even though a deck might not actively assemble a Palinchron combo because their primary combo outlet is better, that still doesn't exclude Palinchron for what he does. The RC has a criterion of "If this card is used for absolutely nothing but degeneracy, then the card warrants a ban." It's this criterion that has Dragon, Hulk, and Staff on the ban list to begin with. Palinchron may not be the go-to answer for combo decks, but when someone slips it into a deck, it's with the intention of comboing out with it 99.99% of the time.
I just want to see some consistency in how the RC manages the ban list. Having Metalworker banned while Rofellos and Tolarian Academy were unbanned for over a year was a complete and utter joke. It took Sheldon and co. just last June to figure out that Academy and Rofellos were problematic fast mana producers.
Disclaimer: I play a lot of devil's advocate when it comes to EDH ban list discussion. I don't fully agree with the criteria used by the RC to decide what's banned, but I'll argue their criteria in arguing for/against cards for the sake of consistency. When it's all said and done, I want to see the ban list get smaller, not bigger. I don't have a problem with Palinchron being unbanned at all because its power level is totally acceptable, but I can bet there would be very few people complaining if Palinchron did get banned.
Speaking as "the solution guy", colors outside of black have thin access to gy hate. Green has some stuff, but it's pretty suboptimal sorcery speed stuff. (Relic is fantastic and in every deck, of course.)
Moreover even if you run gy hate, not everyone does. If you are the one guy controlling gy's at a table, everyone else is running decks that combo better than yours.
Just my $.02.
The way I see this is that if you're utilizing the graveyard yourself with recursion strategies just like your opponents, but you actually are playing graveyard, then you're one-upping your opponents in denying them a valuable resource yet taking full advantage of it yourself.
I can see your post being true if you loaded down your deck with too much graveyard hate and not enough relevant action cards, and said yard hate didn't do something like cantrip if it was ever a dead card. Dead cards are what get you into trouble.
Hasn't anyone else played a mono-colored deck against slivers? Ward Sliver wrecks your game, and it's the first card they tutor up once Overlord exists.
A shade harder to pull out of the deck, but PS does the same thing to any multicolor deck...and all your opponents.
What are you doing on a theoretical turn 2 going off with Salvagers combo? Your hand is toast, and the best you can do is cast your general. Sliver Queen would let you generate infinite slivers, but that would pretty much be as far as you could go.
You could instawin with Horde + something good, Overlord or Scion, off the top of my head. And yes, this is reasonably unlikely, but it's not completely outside the realms of possibility, and becomes pretty easy once you're looking at turn four or so.
I'm talking more about the former. Even though a deck might not actively assemble a Palinchron combo because their primary combo outlet is better, that still doesn't exclude Palinchron for what he does. The RC has a criterion of "If this card is used for absolutely nothing but degeneracy, then the card warrants a ban." It's this criterion that has Dragon, Hulk, and Staff on the ban list to begin with. Palinchron may not be the go-to answer for combo decks, but when someone slips it into a deck, it's with the intention of comboing out with it 99.99% of the time.
I would argue that the card is not used for nothing but degeneracy. I use it in my Sliver Queen deck mainly to abuse with blink effects. I do have Wake and Reflection in there, sure, but if it were a Rasputin deck instead, I'd still be running it. The important thing though is not this (let's face it, the only cards on the banlist that would be used for nothing except degeneracy are Worldgorger, Biorhythm and LED), but the fact that it's not degenerate enough to start twisting your deck. That's why Hulk, Tinker, Recurring Nightmare, and so forth are there, if my understanding is correct - they are so powerfully degenerate that your deck will get better and better the more it focuses solely on abusing them.
Pro-everything doesn't break the game (Wrath, Evacuation, Edicts)
Having 2-3 out of 99 cards become instant Vindicate doesn't break the game
Countering anything is pretty strong, but since that isn't likely... you'd pretty much have to play mono-green to support GG for every opponent's spell for the lock, and you still can't stop Krosan Grip or Vexing Shusher, and you can't search for enchantments very easily with mono-green... more power to you if you pull off that combo. Even Painter-Grindstone doesn't necessarily win the game anymore with all the Kozileks and Emrakuls running around. Painter-Iona is really the only hard lock, which still takes some serious commitment to pull off (and technically you could still pull out of it even with mono-color if you hit Mouth of Ronom for Painter and Duplicant/Brittle Effigy for Iona... admittedly highly unlikely).
I don't see the Painter as a serious threat to the format. But I don't necessarily see banning it as a serious loss to the format either, unless someone is hellbent on the Iona-Painter combo. Seems like a viable strategy for someone to want to play. Even that combo has to hit early or after a board sweep to guarantee a win, as it does nothing about a strong board position.
Just my $0.02.
It's banned because it's a combo piece, and nothing more. And it's the key piece or a lot of combos
Mentioning how combos get interrupted doesn't mean they aren't broken.
That's why Hulk, Tinker, Recurring Nightmare, and so forth are there, if my understanding is correct - they are so powerfully degenerate that your deck will get better and better the more it focuses solely on abusing them.
It's banned because it's a combo piece, and nothing more. And it's the key piece or a lot of combos
Mentioning how combos get interrupted doesn't mean they aren't broken.
In this format, I honestly don't see many people running Amulet of Vigor without the intent to abuse it in combo or enable their combos. Should that be banned as well? And I honestly can't think of many other combos apart from Iona/Grindstone that are used; hardly "a lot of combos, especially when we look at broken combos. And yes, I'm taking you overly literally, but you've gotta qualify that at least a little more. Sure, it's a combo piece, and nothing more. But the question is, is it truly degenerate enough to warrant banning. That's the real question there, not whether or not it's simply a common combo piece.
Worldpurge empties your mana pool afterwards, preventing you from dropping anything else. You literally have to go "Cast dude, Quicken into Worldpurge" to get something on the table after a WP.
[CARD]Sway is like what 10? A 4/4 follow up (assuming you're even lucky enough to get to it) is probably another 4-6 mana so we're pushing 14-16 mana. I'm not mad if that wins.[/quote]
It isn't hard to ramp into 14 mana (Sway+JMS) in mono-Blue (Extraplanar Lens, Jens, etc).
The problem is Sway can easily end the game outright thanks to some cheap drops or actual Suspend cards (not just Jhoria; consider Greater Gargadon and then saccing enough permanents in response to Sway so he resolves next turn).
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That's 5 slots, 6 with flash, in a 5 color deck... restricting enough I'd say. Besides, 5-color combo's broken without it, so I don't think keeping one more combo away from a few bad eggs is worth killing an otherwise fantastic card. Unless. Someone really builds around it... I suppose you might be able to streamline it down to a bant deck, but it'd probably require 2 turns or some other nonsense.
Realistically, I think 'lark is a more disruptive engine to the format than the hulk... Not that I'd give lark the hammer.
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It isn't hard to ramp into 14 mana (Sway+JMS) in mono-Blue (Extraplanar Lens, Jens, etc).
The problem is Sway can easily end the game outright thanks to some cheap drops or actual Suspend cards (not just Jhoria; consider Greater Gargadon and then saccing enough permanents in response to Sway so he resolves next turn).[/QUOTE]
When I typed "WP" I meant Sway I'll go fix that.
Way, way too gross. It's a sac outlet and reanimation in a single card, as you well know. I think the main offenders are Yosei, the Morning Star and Sundering Titan.
Pauper Cube
I cube, I play EDH, and I can't afford Legacy. The other formats can suck it.
Palinchron is also pretty good with Nightmare. But yeah, much too broken. We should be adding more cards on, not taking cards off IMHO.
Panoptic Mirror + Time Warp means infinite turns. Mirror + Time Stretch means even more nastiness.
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1. Everyone can use it
2. Time Warp effects
3. There would be no reason to NOT run it in every single deck
4. It's REALLLLY good
(The first time I saw the card, I thought it was a great EDH card...I grew disheartened when I re-read the banlist.)
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Two Words: Time Warp.
Literally any blue "Take an extra turn" Sorcery breaks Panoptic Mirror. It becomes an auto-include in every EDH deck (especially if they run blue).
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Auto-include doesn't justify banning. Case in point: Sol Ring.
But I can see where you are coming from.
My H/W list
The problem with Servant is that it's an enabler, much like Hulk or Tinker. It is the one card that makes many other cards broken. So the choice is to ban every single card that's broken with it, or just ban the enabler itself. The better answer is obviously the latter, unless all the cards it breaks are terrible otherwise. Yes, these cards have uses that aren't broken, but that's necessary collateral damage.
I am unaware of any broken combos with PS outside of Iona and Grindstone. Could you enlighten me?
My H/W list
Think of every card that specifies a color
Pro blue? It's now protection from everything.
Red Elemental Blast? destroys any permanent
Lifeforce? counter anything
It has massive potential, too much in fact.
Teysa, Orzhov Scion + PS naming black + 3 other white creatures = exile the rest of the board.
That one isn't really broken though. I think Grindstone + Iona were the main ones. Especially Grindstone/PS, since any color can run it.
Pro-everything doesn't break the game (Wrath, Evacuation, Edicts)
Having 2-3 out of 99 cards become instant Vindicate doesn't break the game
Countering anything is pretty strong, but since that isn't likely... you'd pretty much have to play mono-green to support GG for every opponent's spell for the lock, and you still can't stop Krosan Grip or Vexing Shusher, and you can't search for enchantments very easily with mono-green... more power to you if you pull off that combo. Even Painter-Grindstone doesn't necessarily win the game anymore with all the Kozileks and Emrakuls running around. Painter-Iona is really the only hard lock, which still takes some serious commitment to pull off (and technically you could still pull out of it even with mono-color if you hit Mouth of Ronom for Painter and Duplicant/Brittle Effigy for Iona... admittedly highly unlikely).
I don't see the Painter as a serious threat to the format. But I don't necessarily see banning it as a serious loss to the format either, unless someone is hellbent on the Iona-Painter combo. Seems like a viable strategy for someone to want to play. Even that combo has to hit early or after a board sweep to guarantee a win, as it does nothing about a strong board position.
Just my $0.02.
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It was annoying, but I personally didn't think it was too much of a threat - the painter is a godawful creature unless you're running multiple color hate cards, I don't really think it's worth the slot to set up an Iona/Painter if you're not actively or passively able to use the thing already (Teysa, Orzhov Scion, really, is the only deck that Painter really makes sense in). Otherwise it's something of a dead slot that'll set you back unless you've already got board control, and Iona backfires more horribly than Emrakul if you're worried about bribery and the like. Threats shouldn't prevent you from running threats of your own, but that's at least part of the reason I stopped running Iona in G/W, it's just too weak against a table running U/B/W, and it's just too strong against me if I'm not allowed to play my stuff.
What are you doing on a theoretical turn 2 going off with Salvagers combo? Your hand is toast, and the best you can do is cast your general. Sliver Queen would let you generate infinite slivers, but that would pretty much be as far as you could go.
I'm talking more about the former. Even though a deck might not actively assemble a Palinchron combo because their primary combo outlet is better, that still doesn't exclude Palinchron for what he does. The RC has a criterion of "If this card is used for absolutely nothing but degeneracy, then the card warrants a ban." It's this criterion that has Dragon, Hulk, and Staff on the ban list to begin with. Palinchron may not be the go-to answer for combo decks, but when someone slips it into a deck, it's with the intention of comboing out with it 99.99% of the time.
I just want to see some consistency in how the RC manages the ban list. Having Metalworker banned while Rofellos and Tolarian Academy were unbanned for over a year was a complete and utter joke. It took Sheldon and co. just last June to figure out that Academy and Rofellos were problematic fast mana producers.
Disclaimer: I play a lot of devil's advocate when it comes to EDH ban list discussion. I don't fully agree with the criteria used by the RC to decide what's banned, but I'll argue their criteria in arguing for/against cards for the sake of consistency. When it's all said and done, I want to see the ban list get smaller, not bigger. I don't have a problem with Palinchron being unbanned at all because its power level is totally acceptable, but I can bet there would be very few people complaining if Palinchron did get banned.
The way I see this is that if you're utilizing the graveyard yourself with recursion strategies just like your opponents, but you actually are playing graveyard, then you're one-upping your opponents in denying them a valuable resource yet taking full advantage of it yourself.
I can see your post being true if you loaded down your deck with too much graveyard hate and not enough relevant action cards, and said yard hate didn't do something like cantrip if it was ever a dead card. Dead cards are what get you into trouble.
A shade harder to pull out of the deck, but PS does the same thing to any multicolor deck...and all your opponents.
(U/B)(U/B)(U/B) JUMP IN THE LINE, ROCK YOUR BODY IN TIME
(R/W)(R/W)(R/W) RISING FROM THE NEON GLOOM, SHINING LIKE A CRAZY MOON
(U/R)(R/G)(G/U) STEALIN' WHEN I SHOULD HAVE BEEN BUYIN'
I would argue that the card is not used for nothing but degeneracy. I use it in my Sliver Queen deck mainly to abuse with blink effects. I do have Wake and Reflection in there, sure, but if it were a Rasputin deck instead, I'd still be running it. The important thing though is not this (let's face it, the only cards on the banlist that would be used for nothing except degeneracy are Worldgorger, Biorhythm and LED), but the fact that it's not degenerate enough to start twisting your deck. That's why Hulk, Tinker, Recurring Nightmare, and so forth are there, if my understanding is correct - they are so powerfully degenerate that your deck will get better and better the more it focuses solely on abusing them.
It's banned because it's a combo piece, and nothing more. And it's the key piece or a lot of combos
Mentioning how combos get interrupted doesn't mean they aren't broken.
Viperesque is right
In this format, I honestly don't see many people running Amulet of Vigor without the intent to abuse it in combo or enable their combos. Should that be banned as well? And I honestly can't think of many other combos apart from Iona/Grindstone that are used; hardly "a lot of combos, especially when we look at broken combos. And yes, I'm taking you overly literally, but you've gotta qualify that at least a little more. Sure, it's a combo piece, and nothing more. But the question is, is it truly degenerate enough to warrant banning. That's the real question there, not whether or not it's simply a common combo piece.