Wow, we've gone from banning Gush (or maybe Foil) to banning Augur of Bolas to banning cantrips to banning efficientcreatures to banning basically everything relevant (killing the format and starting one completely different) to banning fogs and now we're banning something as innocuous and necessary as graveyardhate. What a ride.
Wow, we've gone from banning Gush (or maybe Foil) to banning Augur of Bolas to banning cantrips to banning efficientcreatures to banning basically everything relevant (killing the format and starting one completely different) to banning fogs and now we're banning something as innocuous and necessary as graveyardhate. What a ride.
Not really. Gush is busted. Foil isn't. Augur of Bolas is really strong but not necessarily banworthy at all. There are hundreds of overly efficient creatures, the only ones which were suggested for bans were the ones which make all other overly efficient creatures look unplayable by comparison IE "irellevant". Which is two out of thousands of them. That stuff is choking the format, not defining it. Fogs were always the underlying problem and banning the most efficient ones and fog loop enablers would also make a lot of the eternal cardpool relevant again, as opposed to now. And noone said "ban all graveyard hate", just the most ridiculous and efforless bits because without the need to combat really busted graveyard nonsense there's no need for literally every deck to be able to hose any graveyard strat at all without even sideboarding.
Bojuka Bog , Nihil Spellbomb and Relic of Progenitus are not innocuous and necessary, they're hardcore overkill, unanswerable, highly splashable, and easy to maindeck. Withoout fog loops and Angler around all they'd do is make anything that has anything to do with the graveyard unplayable. There's more reasonable graveyard hate, and there isn't anything in the pauper pool that takes this kind of overkill outside of the cards mentioned.
The only reason I ever got to thinking about necessary bans for Pauper is Bojuka Bog. The existance and omnipresence of that card makes even trying to put together a graveyard strat pointless, but right now it can't be banned because of fog loops and Angler. And even decks which have no black cards are playing it, and it's clearly preposterous.
"Masques Block is the worst block ever! There's not one decent card in there! The whole internet say's so, you're literally the only person who ever said it was good!" - random noob in a conversation with an Eldrazi.
Not really. Gush is busted. Foil isn't. Augur of Bolas is really strong but not necessarily banworthy at all.
I know, but I'm biased towards Gush as it's the last format where it's legal and one of the main attractions of Pauper in my eyes. It will surely bite the dust though, I can't imagine them banning a perfectly balanced, format-checking card like Foil that could avoid future problems just for Gush's crimes. About Augur, people have advocated for it's banning a few times, some even in this very thread.
There are hundreds of overly efficient creatures, the only ones which were suggested for bans were the ones which make all other overly efficient creatures look unplayable by comparison IE "irellevant". Which is two out of thousands of them. That stuff is choking the format, not defining it.
For example? I disagree heavily with this reasoning. It's no different from Jund in the era it dominated Modern and where Goyf was the poster child for efficiency. You can go around Angler with a swarm, over it with fliers, ignore it and combo off, burn your opponent, remove it with Skred, Journey to Nowhere, Chainer's Edict or even Thunderous Wrath which would be pretty easy to set up with the current cantrip suite, counter it, and even Affinity can trump it in combat with Atog, Gearseeker Serpent or multiple 4/4s blocking it. Sure it's bigger than anything else, but at the end of the day it's just a vanilla creature in control and midrange's arsenal. And Delver just dies to all kinds of 1 CMC removal or trades with lots of things in the air. Sure they can Foil it or Daze it but then they're behind on cards or tempo respectively, and it's not like you can't play around Daze. The proposition about banning any of them is ludicrous, there's a reason why Boros has game against these decks. What you have to do is print some more efficient creatures that can compete on ground with Angler in other colors. Delver itself has not been a problem for years now, there's a reason why some Izzet Faeries list have been eschewing Delver completely recently.
Fogs were always the underlying problem and banning the most efficient ones and fog loop enablers would also make a lot of the eternal cardpool relevant again, as opposed to now.
Fogs haven't been a problem up until recently where people are abusing Moment's Peace in order to assemble Tron and combo off. Fogs are the equivalent of wraths in Pauper, since we need to have some sort of way to contain swarm strats, otherwise there's no downside to flooding the board like Stompy did with the printing of Burning-Tree Emissary or the various tokens decks that pop up often. Sure, Moment's Peace having flashback is a bit harsh, but it's not bannable, there just needs to be some more graveyard hate on a stick like Dryad Militant or Ash Zealot. Prismatic Strand doesn't even prevent all damage, just from X colored sources, so a multicolor deck or one with colorless creatures should be able to overcome it easily.
And noone said "ban all graveyard hate", just the most ridiculous and efforless bits because without the need to combat really busted graveyard nonsense there's no need for literally every deck to be able to hose any graveyard strat at all without even sideboarding.
Bojuka Bog , Nihil Spellbomb and Relic of Progenitus are not innocuous and necessary, they're hardcore overkill, unanswerable, highly splashable, and easy to maindeck. Withoout fog loops and Angler around all they'd do is make anything that has anything to do with the graveyard unplayable. There's more reasonable graveyard hate, and there isn't anything in the pauper pool that takes this kind of overkill outside of the cards mentioned.
The only reason I ever got to thinking about necessary bans for Pauper is Bojuka Bog. The existance and omnipresence of that card makes even trying to put together a graveyard strat pointless, but right now it can't be banned because of fog loops and Angler. And even decks which have no black cards are playing it, and it's clearly preposterous.
Lol, super disagree. There's both opportunity cost and tempo loss in playing Bojuka Bog in off-color decks, and even in Black decks you can just fire it off once. No one plays Relic or Spellbomb main, and there absolutely needs to be good graveyard hate that can be easily splashed, as all colors need a way to deal with the graveyard, much like there's always the need for artifact hate. We all remember how "fun" Standard was when they decided to not have any relevant graveyard hate on the SoI block so all the cool new mechanics could go on uninterrupted. No thanks, Tortured Existence is grindy and strong enough even with graveyard hate if you run it properly, I don't want to deal with it with only things like Crypt Incursion as available answers. You said you think fogs are destroying the format, yet want to allow a deck recurring Spore Frog to thrive.
To me this sounds like you have a gripe with Pauper and it's overall core rather than the format right now (which is certainly in a bad shape mainly due to Gush) because it doesn't suit your particular vision with the format. I'm pretty sure your response will contain some sort of argument for banning a TortEx piece. This thread has reached ridiculous levels of ban-mania I never thought were possible, and that's coming from someone who frequents the State of Modern thread.
The problem is Gush and only Gush (although I personally wish it was Foil the one to bite the bullet, but let's be realistic), and to a lesser extent Ghostly Flicker. It should've been the banned card back when Peregrine Drake was a thing instead of Drake itself, which is a pretty tame creature when not coupled with blink. It was problematic with Cloud of Faeries (although that one was problematic on it's own), it was problematic with Drake, and it's problematic right now, and will continue to be problematic regardless of what you ban, be it Dinrova Horror or Stonehorn Dignitary, because that sort of card only needs one meager EtB effect to trickle down to common and all hell will break loose again. And it's clear they don't perceive it as a mistake, since they banned Drake and then went on to make a quasi functional reprint in Displace, which is a lot less powerful but still causes problems with any Archaeomancer + strong EtB creature.
About Augur, people have advocated for it's banning a few times, some even in this very thread.
People bring Augur up because any 1/3 that's worth playing makes it difficult to attack with 2 power or 1 toughness creatures. Since most of everything in pauper is vanilla, this is a pretty big deal against any deck which can't effortlessly increase it's creature's power by at least one. That's more difficult than it seems, or rather, finding card slots just for that takes effort for many decks, while playing augur takes no effort as he also draws a card when played. So people get annoyed with him as they have to look at too many cards which might be playable, but aren't because they won't be able to attack into him.
Should he be banned? Probably not, as him drawing/filtering a card is actually less of a problem than what just having a 1/3 guy on the board does, and there's plenty of those around. Who knows, maybe he's too efficient at it, so some other useful 1/3 could be given a chance...
There are hundreds of overly efficient creatures, the only ones which were suggested for bans were the ones which make all other overly efficient creatures look unplayable by comparison IE "irellevant". Which is two out of thousands of them. That stuff is choking the format, not defining it.
For example?
Myr Enforcer, Carapace Forger, Werebear, Hooting Mandrils, Barrow Ghoul, Frogmite, Mogg Conscripts, Goblin Cohort, Mogg Flunkies, Ardent Recruit, Auriok Sunchaser, Glint Hawk, Arrogant Wurm, Reckless Wurm to name a few off the top of my head... 2/2's for 0-1 are dime a dozen and each one is pushed, 4/4's for 0-1-2-3 are also plentiful and they're all pushed as well, and listing 5 powered guys for 4 mana feels completely stupid, regardless of the fact that they're also pretty pushed, because Angler sets the mana cost bar for 5/5 lower than it is for a pushed 4/4. It's quite anomalous, and if you take it out of the equation the playing field becomes way more even.
I disagree heavily with this reasoning. It's no different from Jund in the era it dominated Modern and where Goyf was the poster child for efficiency. You can go around Angler with a swarm, over it with fliers, ignore it and combo off, burn your opponent, remove it with Skred, Journey to Nowhere, Chainer's Edict or even Thunderous Wrath which would be pretty easy to set up with the current cantrip suite, counter it, and even Affinity can trump it in combat with Atog, Gearseeker Serpent or multiple 4/4s blocking it. Sure it's bigger than anything else, but at the end of the day it's just a vanilla creature in control and midrange's arsenal. And Delver just dies to all kinds of 1 CMC removal or trades with lots of things in the air. Sure they can Foil it or Daze it but then they're behind on cards or tempo respectively, and it's not like you can't play around Daze. The proposition about banning any of them is ludicrous, there's a reason why Boros has game against these decks. What you have to do is print some more efficient creatures that can compete on ground with Angler in other colors. Delver itself has not been a problem for years now, there's a reason why some Izzet Faeries list have been eschewing Delver completely recently.
And anyone remotely reasonable disagrees with THIS reasoning. Print more efficient creatures than Tarmogoyf? Because that's what Angler is, it's Tarmogoyf who's somehow legal in an all-commons format, and Tarmogoyf was ridiculous in multiple much more high-powered formats. The number of tools that deal with Angler is significantly smaller than the number of tools that deal with everything else that pushed - not just playable, but pushed! - in the format. Forcing people to play a meta where only things that kill Angler are playable, because he's splashable enough that pretty much anyone can play him, hurts creature strats further. If you took Angler out, the only thing that would happen is that suddenly every other creature available doesn't look like draft chaff.
As for Delver - he's been a problem for years, and the format hasn't had a serious looking at for years, not bans. Sure he trades with plenty of things and dies to plenty of things, but blue cards that were meant to protect your clock weren't meant to be protecting that efficient a clock.
Fogs were always the underlying problem and banning the most efficient ones and fog loop enablers would also make a lot of the eternal cardpool relevant again, as opposed to now.
Fogs haven't been a problem up until recently where people are abusing Moment's Peace in order to assemble Tron and combo off. Fogs are the equivalent of wraths in Pauper, since we need to have some sort of way to contain swarm strats, otherwise there's no downside to flooding the board like Stompy did with the printing of Burning-Tree Emissary or the various tokens decks that pop up often. Sure, Moment's Peace having flashback is a bit harsh, but it's not bannable, there just needs to be some more graveyard hate on a stick like Dryad Militant or Ash Zealot. Prismatic Strand doesn't even prevent all damage, just from X colored sources, so a multicolor deck or one with colorless creatures should be able to overcome it easily.
The difference between fogs and wraths is huge, because fogs are way more agressively priced and there's no way to react to them apart from counterspells. And they're one sided, so what happens is that one aggro deck blows out another by fogging them. We've been over this earlier in the thread, I'd take wraths in pauper over the current situation. And you're seriously misevaluting Prismatic Strands - multicolored decks in Pauper (unless they're blue) are a huge liablity and fold to land destruction for one thing, and for another it works against direct damage (and costs no mana to flashback) which is in practice ridiculous. Pair a fog that's playable from the graveyard with a loot/rummage effect and what you get is a cantrip time walk that also doesn't hurt your board development, and in case of Prismatic Strands it costs no mana to cast and also protects from burn.
And noone said "ban all graveyard hate", just the most ridiculous and efforless bits because without the need to combat really busted graveyard nonsense there's no need for literally every deck to be able to hose any graveyard strat at all without even sideboarding.
Bojuka Bog , Nihil Spellbomb and Relic of Progenitus are not innocuous and necessary, they're hardcore overkill, unanswerable, highly splashable, and easy to maindeck. Withoout fog loops and Angler around all they'd do is make anything that has anything to do with the graveyard unplayable. There's more reasonable graveyard hate, and there isn't anything in the pauper pool that takes this kind of overkill outside of the cards mentioned.
The only reason I ever got to thinking about necessary bans for Pauper is Bojuka Bog. The existance and omnipresence of that card makes even trying to put together a graveyard strat pointless, but right now it can't be banned because of fog loops and Angler. And even decks which have no black cards are playing it, and it's clearly preposterous.
Lol, super disagree. There's both opportunity cost and tempo loss in playing Bojuka Bog in off-color decks, and even in Black decks you can just fire it off once. No one plays Relic or Spellbomb main, and there absolutely needs to be good graveyard hate that can be easily splashed, as all colors need a way to deal with the graveyard, much like there's always the need for artifact hate. We all remember how "fun" Standard was when they decided to not have any relevant graveyard hate on the SoI block so all the cool new mechanics could go on uninterrupted. No thanks, Tortured Existence is grindy and strong enough even with graveyard hate if you run it properly, I don't want to deal with it with only things like Crypt Incursion as available answers. You said you think fogs are destroying the format, yet want to allow a deck recurring Spore Frog to thrive.
You have no idea what you're talking about. If recurring a single card is a problem, there's no need to nuke the entire graveyard. Nihil Spellbomb/Relic main is a must for every single creature deck which doesn't have counters otherwise you'll get destroyed by Prismatic Strands and Moments Peace, or any tron that gets going. Not to mention that it hoses Anglers, Chainer's Edict, Firebolt and Faithless Looting which are also all over the place. And if Crypt Incursion , Faerie Macabre and other things aren't good enough for you all I have to say is that you should under no circumstances be talking in a discussion about power levels. Having said that, I do think proper graveyard hate ought to be more generally available outside of black, just not at Bojuka Bog power level.
To me this sounds like you have a gripe with Pauper and it's overall core rather than the format right now (which is certainly in a bad shape mainly due to Gush) because it doesn't suit your particular vision with the format. I'm pretty sure your response will contain some sort of argument for banning a TortEx piece. This thread has reached ridiculous levels of ban-mania I never thought were possible, and that's coming from someone who frequents the State of Modern thread.
Is it a problem that my vision of the format is that it isn't ok for an eternal format to be dominated by 5-6 design mistakes which hold 20+ years worth of card pool hostage, if it's meant to be all-commons? Because I'm sick of people looking to get into pauper only ever hearing about one, at most two decks, people not coming to tourneys because they can't put Delver together, people only ever asking for Tron pieces and Delver pieces when looking to buy something and me having to win a tourney every time I want to turn the newbies attention to the fact that decks outside of Tron, UB Delver and Boros Bully exist? I've got thousands of cards to sell and 30-odd decks to rent, and the state of Pauper right now is bad for bussiness, bad for player acquisition, bad for player wallets and generally bad. If there's a format that doesn't have to be dominated by design mistakes it's pauper, and it currently is to a laughable degree, and I want that reduced to a tolerable level.
The problem is Gush and only Gush (although I personally wish it was Foil the one to bite the bullet, but let's be realistic), and to a lesser extent Ghostly Flicker. It should've been the banned card back when Peregrine Drake was a thing instead of Drake itself, which is a pretty tame creature when not coupled with blink. It was problematic with Cloud of Faeries (although that one was problematic on it's own), it was problematic with Drake, and it's problematic right now, and will continue to be problematic regardless of what you ban, be it Dinrova Horror or Stonehorn Dignitary, because that sort of card only needs one meager EtB effect to trickle down to common and all hell will break loose again. And it's clear they don't perceive it as a mistake, since they banned Drake and then went on to make a quasi functional reprint in Displace, which is a lot less powerful but still causes problems with any Archaeomancer + strong EtB creature.
Gush is a silly card. I would never in a million years write something like "Part of the draw of the format is that Gush/whatever is legal in it" or "I whish they banned Foil instead, even though I know that would be wrong." That's your problem. I don't enjoy having broken crap in the pool, and as long as pauper is treated as a dumping ground for things that are banned in other formats we'll have eternal format tourneys with 80% of the field playing one deck. If there's any honest and fair discussion to be had about pauper, people who play it for the Gushes , Preordains and Gitaxian Probes need to shut up and back off. Because even if something is so ridiculous that even that sort of person has to get honest about it, they'll still either not see or ridicule other valid points.
And stop trying to paint it like I'd randomly ban stuff for untangible reasons. I dodn't rail against Preordain or Gitaxian Probe at all, even though they are banned in other formats, and I didn't rail against Tangle even though it's a great Fog, or against Faerie Macabre even though it's splashable graveyard hate, or against any number of really strong things. The problem cards in pauper are few and I don't point fingers at them lightly, and understand exactly why they are a problem. And I own stacks of these cards I claim are ban worthy, I played them all in various formats, I build numerous decks for my community which include them and rent them for tournaments, and I know what's mediocre, what's visibly above average and what's just preposterous. I stand to lose money if these cards are banned, in some cases quite a bit of money, but I would not mind that if it meant a healtier more diverse format, and I know it would.
Ghostly Flicker and Displace need to go, for exactly the reasons you wrote, and we wrote before, and it's time wotc understood that. But we've said all that already. And it's not just the flicker loops. The flashback fogs are too strong, Delver and Angler are too efficient, there are pieces of graveyard hate which is too strong, and Fireblast gives mono red Burn/swarm too much reach when you consider everything else that's available to them. That's about 10 cards. For a format that's not had serious bans in a long time, that's not even all that much. And all these bans would do would be to open up the format so it's not "Delver the Anglering" anymore.
"Masques Block is the worst block ever! There's not one decent card in there! The whole internet say's so, you're literally the only person who ever said it was good!" - random noob in a conversation with an Eldrazi.
Well its right back to wall to wall blue decks in the MTGO practice queues. It was nice for a while with the London mull rule but that is over for now and its Blue-fest again.
Until there is a card in pauper that says "this spell can't be countered" I almost don't even want to play.
Give me some decks that can give blue fits or I may just play Burn until things change.
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STOP using "dude/bro" as a pejorative or insult. Grow up.
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We've sucessfuly contained blue in our local metagame for weeks, but he's succintly put down a problem which is terrible - there's Pauper Horizons coming, there's fine cards in War of the Spark and there might be good ones in the core set and in the upcoming sets, but you just can't design reasonable cards that would deal with certain things.
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"Masques Block is the worst block ever! There's not one decent card in there! The whole internet say's so, you're literally the only person who ever said it was good!" - random noob in a conversation with an Eldrazi.
You can play Gush, be the monarch, or play for second place. By keeping these cards legal, Pauper is limiting a wide number of other viable strategies. Modern Horizons is coming but I do not think new cards, even those designed to impact Modern, could keep up. It might be time for something to be added to the banned list for the sake of Pauper’s long term health.
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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."
I think Gurmag Angler is way more of a problem than Gush, mind you. And by "I think" I'm fairly certain that it can be proven by science, and has been sufficiently explained. And I'd ban Gush even if it wasn't identified as a staple of dominant decks, on principle, as it's a ridiculously broken card. Gurmag Angler is just much worse as far as it's effect on Pauper goes. Without Gurmag Angler around picking up 2 Islands off the board is actually a meaningful tempo-loss. It's not if it only takes you one mana to put down the biggest dude in the format nothing can attack into, nothing can trade with, who can kill the enemy on their own and who, due to the combination of size, color and creature type, takes very little protecting.
As for Monarch - I think the guys railing at Monarch are very wrong. And again by "I think" I mean that that can also be demostrated to be a fact. Most "monarch" decks actually side monarch cards out if they can't actually protect it, and they often play games 2/3 without monarch enablers. This means that for plenty of matchups they play two third of their games without what these jokers see as the central element. The problem isn't the monarch, it's whatever they're using to shut down dude strats so completely as to ensure they never take a single point of combat damage. I've certainly won plenty of games against Monarch decks by doing the generally trivial feat of dealing combat damage to my opponent. It's a VERY double-edged sword, Monarch, unless something lets you break the combat game so hard that you might as well use a few card-draw spells instead of whatever gives you Monarch.
So if Gush and Monarch cards are up for review, and actually do get banned, that'll solve nothing. Gush ought to have never been legal, fair enough, but as long as Gurmag Angler is legal UB Delver won't miss a beat, and as long as Prismatic Strands (or whatever's actually the lynchpin of that value pile) are legal neither will Boros / Orzhov Monarch.
"Masques Block is the worst block ever! There's not one decent card in there! The whole internet say's so, you're literally the only person who ever said it was good!" - random noob in a conversation with an Eldrazi.
Still way too much Delver, Spellstutter Sprite, Daze, Snap, Gush, Ninja of the Deep Hours out there. The meta overall is growing stale, individual pocket metas may differ but I see the same ones over and over again online.
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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."
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We may get some good anti-blue commons in modern horizons or just powerful spells in other colors. Short of that I could see a ban, probably Gush.
I hope but somehow I doubt it.
They would have to be along the lines of "this spell cannot be countered" "Hexproof from Blue" or "target player cannot draw more than one card per turn".
I really don't see anything that powerful filtering down to the common level. Some bans will be needed.
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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."
Actually, "this can't be countered" isn't really powerful enough to not be common. The problem is that it confuses people who read it because it's too niche, which is why you don't often see it as common. Otherwise it's a completely irrelevant line of text a lot more often than not. They could print about 3-5 common dudes per set with "can't be countered" and not affect anything, especially since dudes in particular are rarely countered except vs. really counter heavy control decks (more often they're handled with removal).
They could pretty much make "can't be countered" part of a keyword, like they made haste part of riot, and not price dudes any different than they'd price vanilla dudes. The other part of the keyword would have to be something tangible, so that they could justify putting a confusing but often completely irrelevant line of text on many cards. But it could easily be done.
I'm not sure it'd actually help against either UB or UR Delver, though.
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"Masques Block is the worst block ever! There's not one decent card in there! The whole internet say's so, you're literally the only person who ever said it was good!" - random noob in a conversation with an Eldrazi.
It shuts off Daze, Foil, Counterspell and Spellstutter Sprite. Tack on a Hexproof from Black or a Hexproof from Red and now we are talking.
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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."
Sure, just saying that it could easily be done, IMO. The problem though is that what murders dude strats vs UB delver is Gurmag Angler on board making you sacrifice a non-evasive dude every time you attack, and rather good black removal working on most dudes you can possibly play. All the more reason to actually go liberal on "can't be countered", mind you, because it wouldn't actually be overkill.
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"Masques Block is the worst block ever! There's not one decent card in there! The whole internet say's so, you're literally the only person who ever said it was good!" - random noob in a conversation with an Eldrazi.
I would also like to see. "this creature cannot be sacficed" make its way to common as well. So many edicts, zero protection from it.
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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."
Not really. Gush is busted. Foil isn't. Augur of Bolas is really strong but not necessarily banworthy at all.
I know, but I'm biased towards Gush as it's the last format where it's legal and one of the main attractions of Pauper in my eyes. It will surely bite the dust though, I can't imagine them banning a perfectly balanced, format-checking card like Foil that could avoid future problems just for Gush's crimes. About Augur, people have advocated for it's banning a few times, some even in this very thread.
There are hundreds of overly efficient creatures, the only ones which were suggested for bans were the ones which make all other overly efficient creatures look unplayable by comparison IE "irellevant". Which is two out of thousands of them. That stuff is choking the format, not defining it.
For example? I disagree heavily with this reasoning. It's no different from Jund in the era it dominated Modern and where Goyf was the poster child for efficiency. You can go around Angler with a swarm, over it with fliers, ignore it and combo off, burn your opponent, remove it with Skred, Journey to Nowhere, Chainer's Edict or even Thunderous Wrath which would be pretty easy to set up with the current cantrip suite, counter it, and even Affinity can trump it in combat with Atog, Gearseeker Serpent or multiple 4/4s blocking it. Sure it's bigger than anything else, but at the end of the day it's just a vanilla creature in control and midrange's arsenal. And Delver just dies to all kinds of 1 CMC removal or trades with lots of things in the air. Sure they can Foil it or Daze it but then they're behind on cards or tempo respectively, and it's not like you can't play around Daze. The proposition about banning any of them is ludicrous, there's a reason why Boros has game against these decks. What you have to do is print some more efficient creatures that can compete on ground with Angler in other colors. Delver itself has not been a problem for years now, there's a reason why some Izzet Faeries list have been eschewing Delver completely recently.
Fogs were always the underlying problem and banning the most efficient ones and fog loop enablers would also make a lot of the eternal cardpool relevant again, as opposed to now.
Fogs haven't been a problem up until recently where people are abusing Moment's Peace in order to assemble Tron and combo off. Fogs are the equivalent of wraths in Pauper, since we need to have some sort of way to contain swarm strats, otherwise there's no downside to flooding the board like Stompy did with the printing of Burning-Tree Emissary or the various tokens decks that pop up often. Sure, Moment's Peace having flashback is a bit harsh, but it's not bannable, there just needs to be some more graveyard hate on a stick like Dryad Militant or Ash Zealot. Prismatic Strand doesn't even prevent all damage, just from X colored sources, so a multicolor deck or one with colorless creatures should be able to overcome it easily.
And noone said "ban all graveyard hate", just the most ridiculous and efforless bits because without the need to combat really busted graveyard nonsense there's no need for literally every deck to be able to hose any graveyard strat at all without even sideboarding.
Bojuka Bog , Nihil Spellbomb and Relic of Progenitus are not innocuous and necessary, they're hardcore overkill, unanswerable, highly splashable, and easy to maindeck. Withoout fog loops and Angler around all they'd do is make anything that has anything to do with the graveyard unplayable. There's more reasonable graveyard hate, and there isn't anything in the pauper pool that takes this kind of overkill outside of the cards mentioned.
The only reason I ever got to thinking about necessary bans for Pauper is Bojuka Bog. The existance and omnipresence of that card makes even trying to put together a graveyard strat pointless, but right now it can't be banned because of fog loops and Angler. And even decks which have no black cards are playing it, and it's clearly preposterous.
Lol, super disagree. There's both opportunity cost and tempo loss in playing Bojuka Bog in off-color decks, and even in Black decks you can just fire it off once. No one plays Relic or Spellbomb main, and there absolutely needs to be good graveyard hate that can be easily splashed, as all colors need a way to deal with the graveyard, much like there's always the need for artifact hate. We all remember how "fun" Standard was when they decided to not have any relevant graveyard hate on the SoI block so all the cool new mechanics could go on uninterrupted. No thanks, Tortured Existence is grindy and strong enough even with graveyard hate if you run it properly, I don't want to deal with it with only things like Crypt Incursion as available answers. You said you think fogs are destroying the format, yet want to allow a deck recurring Spore Frog to thrive.
To me this sounds like you have a gripe with Pauper and it's overall core rather than the format right now (which is certainly in a bad shape mainly due to Gush) because it doesn't suit your particular vision with the format. I'm pretty sure your response will contain some sort of argument for banning a TortEx piece. This thread has reached ridiculous levels of ban-mania I never thought were possible, and that's coming from someone who frequents the State of Modern thread.
The problem is Gush and only Gush (although I personally wish it was Foil the one to bite the bullet, but let's be realistic), and to a lesser extent Ghostly Flicker. It should've been the banned card back when Peregrine Drake was a thing instead of Drake itself, which is a pretty tame creature when not coupled with blink. It was problematic with Cloud of Faeries (although that one was problematic on it's own), it was problematic with Drake, and it's problematic right now, and will continue to be problematic regardless of what you ban, be it Dinrova Horror or Stonehorn Dignitary, because that sort of card only needs one meager EtB effect to trickle down to common and all hell will break loose again. And it's clear they don't perceive it as a mistake, since they banned Drake and then went on to make a quasi functional reprint in Displace, which is a lot less powerful but still causes problems with any Archaeomancer + strong EtB creature.
I agree with you a lot.
What I'd ban is : Gush, Ghostly Flicker + Displace, and Prismatic Strands.
The graveyard is just a fancy word for discard pile. They're generally supposed to be spent resources, you're not entitled to get a ton of value from cards there. I don't want dumb Exhume stuff getting out of hand, and graveyard hate is the only thing that keeps Tortex reasonable.
Saying that Bojuka Bog should be banned is a lot like my friend that plays exclusively degenerate, non-interactive combo decks complaining about how OP Counterspell is, or about how annoying Boros Monarch is (the only remaining fair deck in the meta).
Cards like Bojuka Bog and Counterspell force one to sit down and actually play the game. They put a damper on whatever stupid shenanigans you're trying to pull and I wish there were more cards like them in the format. I only know Pauper cards, but doesn't Pithing Needle function in a similar manner in other formats?
Having to play parasitic, narrow cards like Disenchant just to maybe beat some degenerate deck isn't viable. I'm not going to play Zombie Cannibal if Relic or Bojuka Bog go away, I'm just not. Relic can be played in any deck and that's a net positive for the format.
Exhume decks not being good because of it is also a net positive for the format. Good riddance.
Cards like Bojuka Bog and Counterspell force one to sit down and actually play the game. They put a damper on whatever stupid shenanigans you're trying to pull and I wish there were more cards like them in the format.
Bojuka Bog types yes, Counterspell types, hell no, there are a plethora of those already in the format and it doesn't need more of them. GY hate I do agree with as there isn't that much out there (playable) besides BB, Relic and Nihil Spellbomb.
I am totally with your suggested bans.
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STOP using "dude/bro" as a pejorative or insult. Grow up.
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Cards like Bojuka Bog and Counterspell force one to sit down and actually play the game. They put a damper on whatever stupid shenanigans you're trying to pull and I wish there were more cards like them in the format.
Bojuka Bog types yes, Counterspell types, hell no, there are a plethora of those already in the format and it doesn't need more of them. GY hate I do agree with as there isn't that much out there (playable) besides BB, Relic and Nihil Spellbomb.
I am totally with your suggested bans.
Counterspell being mildly OP and a catchall is a good thing. It can stop a wide variety of degeneracies. Having to lose game 1 and then play narrow sideboard cards and hope to draw them is not a good thing. Having Counterspell prevents that issue from arising.
The things that beat Counterspell based decks are fair, vanilla strategies like playing around it and flooding the board with grizzly bears or 2/x fliers.
You ban blue and Mono Green Ponza becomes top tier. (I think it's top tier already with some tweaks)
You ban blue and One Land Spy actually becomes a viable game plan.
Before Foil was downshifted, Delver decks were on par or inferior to other fair midrange-y type decks like Mono Black Control, Boros, U/B Control AKA Dimir Alchemy, etc.
The real problem with this format is that Tron is too good at beating what's supposed to beat it- fast aggro (burn is also fast aggro) and is immune to all fair decks. This is due to many, many cards but chiefly Ghostly Flicker/Displace. So the only fair, midrange-y tempo-ish deck that has a chance against Tron is Delver.
Without Tron being invincible and just not caring about what most decks do, plenty of midrange decks become actually viable. Decks that have decent matchups even against the supercharged, Pauper Force of Will version of Delver.
If I could just play my MBC deck and resolve Fog of Gnats without automatically throwing all my games to Tron, U/B Delver wouldn't be the monster it is.
While Gurmag is the best creature in the format, there are a plethora of easily maindeckable options for dealing with it, even at 2 mana. At the end of the day it's just a vanilla creature and can be hit with a Pacifism just like any other creature. Gurmag is also more vulnerable to bounce than most creatures, so things like mist blade Shinobi and snap are good against it.
I have no issue with Counterspell. I do have issue with Foil and Daze that back it up.
Nothing like trying to run out 2 spells on turn 2 with your opponent showing 2 islands, you bait them and draw out the counter then get your second spell hit with a "free" counterspell. Its too much pressure/tempo swing at the cost of too little.
Or don't play anything hoping to save your resources and watch your opponent sift through their deck on your endstep with Ponder/Preodain/Brainstorm and just pick up more filtering/counter or pressure(Delver). Its too easy and to prevalent imho.
As for Tron, ban Moment's Peace and P.Strands and watch them struggle more against aggro/midrange and "fair" decks.
Again I am with your bans, but Blue doesn't need more at all and the top 50 cards in the format bear that out.
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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."
I really like the idea of banning a couple things to make more decks viable. I have everything for every deck in pauper, but I haven’t played for quite some time and I stopped even scanning decklists because they are all the same: Delver, Boros Monarch, Tron. Stale to say the least.
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Not really. Gush is busted. Foil isn't. Augur of Bolas is really strong but not necessarily banworthy at all. There are hundreds of overly efficient creatures, the only ones which were suggested for bans were the ones which make all other overly efficient creatures look unplayable by comparison IE "irellevant". Which is two out of thousands of them. That stuff is choking the format, not defining it. Fogs were always the underlying problem and banning the most efficient ones and fog loop enablers would also make a lot of the eternal cardpool relevant again, as opposed to now. And noone said "ban all graveyard hate", just the most ridiculous and efforless bits because without the need to combat really busted graveyard nonsense there's no need for literally every deck to be able to hose any graveyard strat at all without even sideboarding.
Bojuka Bog , Nihil Spellbomb and Relic of Progenitus are not innocuous and necessary, they're hardcore overkill, unanswerable, highly splashable, and easy to maindeck. Withoout fog loops and Angler around all they'd do is make anything that has anything to do with the graveyard unplayable. There's more reasonable graveyard hate, and there isn't anything in the pauper pool that takes this kind of overkill outside of the cards mentioned.
The only reason I ever got to thinking about necessary bans for Pauper is Bojuka Bog. The existance and omnipresence of that card makes even trying to put together a graveyard strat pointless, but right now it can't be banned because of fog loops and Angler. And even decks which have no black cards are playing it, and it's clearly preposterous.
I know, but I'm biased towards Gush as it's the last format where it's legal and one of the main attractions of Pauper in my eyes. It will surely bite the dust though, I can't imagine them banning a perfectly balanced, format-checking card like Foil that could avoid future problems just for Gush's crimes. About Augur, people have advocated for it's banning a few times, some even in this very thread.
For example? I disagree heavily with this reasoning. It's no different from Jund in the era it dominated Modern and where Goyf was the poster child for efficiency. You can go around Angler with a swarm, over it with fliers, ignore it and combo off, burn your opponent, remove it with Skred, Journey to Nowhere, Chainer's Edict or even Thunderous Wrath which would be pretty easy to set up with the current cantrip suite, counter it, and even Affinity can trump it in combat with Atog, Gearseeker Serpent or multiple 4/4s blocking it. Sure it's bigger than anything else, but at the end of the day it's just a vanilla creature in control and midrange's arsenal. And Delver just dies to all kinds of 1 CMC removal or trades with lots of things in the air. Sure they can Foil it or Daze it but then they're behind on cards or tempo respectively, and it's not like you can't play around Daze. The proposition about banning any of them is ludicrous, there's a reason why Boros has game against these decks. What you have to do is print some more efficient creatures that can compete on ground with Angler in other colors. Delver itself has not been a problem for years now, there's a reason why some Izzet Faeries list have been eschewing Delver completely recently.
Fogs haven't been a problem up until recently where people are abusing Moment's Peace in order to assemble Tron and combo off. Fogs are the equivalent of wraths in Pauper, since we need to have some sort of way to contain swarm strats, otherwise there's no downside to flooding the board like Stompy did with the printing of Burning-Tree Emissary or the various tokens decks that pop up often. Sure, Moment's Peace having flashback is a bit harsh, but it's not bannable, there just needs to be some more graveyard hate on a stick like Dryad Militant or Ash Zealot. Prismatic Strand doesn't even prevent all damage, just from X colored sources, so a multicolor deck or one with colorless creatures should be able to overcome it easily.
Lol, super disagree. There's both opportunity cost and tempo loss in playing Bojuka Bog in off-color decks, and even in Black decks you can just fire it off once. No one plays Relic or Spellbomb main, and there absolutely needs to be good graveyard hate that can be easily splashed, as all colors need a way to deal with the graveyard, much like there's always the need for artifact hate. We all remember how "fun" Standard was when they decided to not have any relevant graveyard hate on the SoI block so all the cool new mechanics could go on uninterrupted. No thanks, Tortured Existence is grindy and strong enough even with graveyard hate if you run it properly, I don't want to deal with it with only things like Crypt Incursion as available answers. You said you think fogs are destroying the format, yet want to allow a deck recurring Spore Frog to thrive.
To me this sounds like you have a gripe with Pauper and it's overall core rather than the format right now (which is certainly in a bad shape mainly due to Gush) because it doesn't suit your particular vision with the format. I'm pretty sure your response will contain some sort of argument for banning a TortEx piece. This thread has reached ridiculous levels of ban-mania I never thought were possible, and that's coming from someone who frequents the State of Modern thread.
The problem is Gush and only Gush (although I personally wish it was Foil the one to bite the bullet, but let's be realistic), and to a lesser extent Ghostly Flicker. It should've been the banned card back when Peregrine Drake was a thing instead of Drake itself, which is a pretty tame creature when not coupled with blink. It was problematic with Cloud of Faeries (although that one was problematic on it's own), it was problematic with Drake, and it's problematic right now, and will continue to be problematic regardless of what you ban, be it Dinrova Horror or Stonehorn Dignitary, because that sort of card only needs one meager EtB effect to trickle down to common and all hell will break loose again. And it's clear they don't perceive it as a mistake, since they banned Drake and then went on to make a quasi functional reprint in Displace, which is a lot less powerful but still causes problems with any Archaeomancer + strong EtB creature.
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People bring Augur up because any 1/3 that's worth playing makes it difficult to attack with 2 power or 1 toughness creatures. Since most of everything in pauper is vanilla, this is a pretty big deal against any deck which can't effortlessly increase it's creature's power by at least one. That's more difficult than it seems, or rather, finding card slots just for that takes effort for many decks, while playing augur takes no effort as he also draws a card when played. So people get annoyed with him as they have to look at too many cards which might be playable, but aren't because they won't be able to attack into him.
Should he be banned? Probably not, as him drawing/filtering a card is actually less of a problem than what just having a 1/3 guy on the board does, and there's plenty of those around. Who knows, maybe he's too efficient at it, so some other useful 1/3 could be given a chance...
Myr Enforcer, Carapace Forger, Werebear, Hooting Mandrils, Barrow Ghoul, Frogmite, Mogg Conscripts, Goblin Cohort, Mogg Flunkies, Ardent Recruit, Auriok Sunchaser, Glint Hawk, Arrogant Wurm, Reckless Wurm to name a few off the top of my head... 2/2's for 0-1 are dime a dozen and each one is pushed, 4/4's for 0-1-2-3 are also plentiful and they're all pushed as well, and listing 5 powered guys for 4 mana feels completely stupid, regardless of the fact that they're also pretty pushed, because Angler sets the mana cost bar for 5/5 lower than it is for a pushed 4/4. It's quite anomalous, and if you take it out of the equation the playing field becomes way more even.
And anyone remotely reasonable disagrees with THIS reasoning. Print more efficient creatures than Tarmogoyf? Because that's what Angler is, it's Tarmogoyf who's somehow legal in an all-commons format, and Tarmogoyf was ridiculous in multiple much more high-powered formats. The number of tools that deal with Angler is significantly smaller than the number of tools that deal with everything else that pushed - not just playable, but pushed! - in the format. Forcing people to play a meta where only things that kill Angler are playable, because he's splashable enough that pretty much anyone can play him, hurts creature strats further. If you took Angler out, the only thing that would happen is that suddenly every other creature available doesn't look like draft chaff.
As for Delver - he's been a problem for years, and the format hasn't had a serious looking at for years, not bans. Sure he trades with plenty of things and dies to plenty of things, but blue cards that were meant to protect your clock weren't meant to be protecting that efficient a clock.
The difference between fogs and wraths is huge, because fogs are way more agressively priced and there's no way to react to them apart from counterspells. And they're one sided, so what happens is that one aggro deck blows out another by fogging them. We've been over this earlier in the thread, I'd take wraths in pauper over the current situation. And you're seriously misevaluting Prismatic Strands - multicolored decks in Pauper (unless they're blue) are a huge liablity and fold to land destruction for one thing, and for another it works against direct damage (and costs no mana to flashback) which is in practice ridiculous. Pair a fog that's playable from the graveyard with a loot/rummage effect and what you get is a cantrip time walk that also doesn't hurt your board development, and in case of Prismatic Strands it costs no mana to cast and also protects from burn.
You have no idea what you're talking about. If recurring a single card is a problem, there's no need to nuke the entire graveyard. Nihil Spellbomb/Relic main is a must for every single creature deck which doesn't have counters otherwise you'll get destroyed by Prismatic Strands and Moments Peace, or any tron that gets going. Not to mention that it hoses Anglers, Chainer's Edict, Firebolt and Faithless Looting which are also all over the place. And if Crypt Incursion , Faerie Macabre and other things aren't good enough for you all I have to say is that you should under no circumstances be talking in a discussion about power levels. Having said that, I do think proper graveyard hate ought to be more generally available outside of black, just not at Bojuka Bog power level.
Is it a problem that my vision of the format is that it isn't ok for an eternal format to be dominated by 5-6 design mistakes which hold 20+ years worth of card pool hostage, if it's meant to be all-commons? Because I'm sick of people looking to get into pauper only ever hearing about one, at most two decks, people not coming to tourneys because they can't put Delver together, people only ever asking for Tron pieces and Delver pieces when looking to buy something and me having to win a tourney every time I want to turn the newbies attention to the fact that decks outside of Tron, UB Delver and Boros Bully exist? I've got thousands of cards to sell and 30-odd decks to rent, and the state of Pauper right now is bad for bussiness, bad for player acquisition, bad for player wallets and generally bad. If there's a format that doesn't have to be dominated by design mistakes it's pauper, and it currently is to a laughable degree, and I want that reduced to a tolerable level.
Gush is a silly card. I would never in a million years write something like "Part of the draw of the format is that Gush/whatever is legal in it" or "I whish they banned Foil instead, even though I know that would be wrong." That's your problem. I don't enjoy having broken crap in the pool, and as long as pauper is treated as a dumping ground for things that are banned in other formats we'll have eternal format tourneys with 80% of the field playing one deck. If there's any honest and fair discussion to be had about pauper, people who play it for the Gushes , Preordains and Gitaxian Probes need to shut up and back off. Because even if something is so ridiculous that even that sort of person has to get honest about it, they'll still either not see or ridicule other valid points.
And stop trying to paint it like I'd randomly ban stuff for untangible reasons. I dodn't rail against Preordain or Gitaxian Probe at all, even though they are banned in other formats, and I didn't rail against Tangle even though it's a great Fog, or against Faerie Macabre even though it's splashable graveyard hate, or against any number of really strong things. The problem cards in pauper are few and I don't point fingers at them lightly, and understand exactly why they are a problem. And I own stacks of these cards I claim are ban worthy, I played them all in various formats, I build numerous decks for my community which include them and rent them for tournaments, and I know what's mediocre, what's visibly above average and what's just preposterous. I stand to lose money if these cards are banned, in some cases quite a bit of money, but I would not mind that if it meant a healtier more diverse format, and I know it would.
Ghostly Flicker and Displace need to go, for exactly the reasons you wrote, and we wrote before, and it's time wotc understood that. But we've said all that already. And it's not just the flicker loops. The flashback fogs are too strong, Delver and Angler are too efficient, there are pieces of graveyard hate which is too strong, and Fireblast gives mono red Burn/swarm too much reach when you consider everything else that's available to them. That's about 10 cards. For a format that's not had serious bans in a long time, that's not even all that much. And all these bans would do would be to open up the format so it's not "Delver the Anglering" anymore.
Until there is a card in pauper that says "this spell can't be countered" I almost don't even want to play.
Give me some decks that can give blue fits or I may just play Burn until things change.
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."
We've sucessfuly contained blue in our local metagame for weeks, but he's succintly put down a problem which is terrible - there's Pauper Horizons coming, there's fine cards in War of the Spark and there might be good ones in the core set and in the upcoming sets, but you just can't design reasonable cards that would deal with certain things.
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."
As for Monarch - I think the guys railing at Monarch are very wrong. And again by "I think" I mean that that can also be demostrated to be a fact. Most "monarch" decks actually side monarch cards out if they can't actually protect it, and they often play games 2/3 without monarch enablers. This means that for plenty of matchups they play two third of their games without what these jokers see as the central element. The problem isn't the monarch, it's whatever they're using to shut down dude strats so completely as to ensure they never take a single point of combat damage. I've certainly won plenty of games against Monarch decks by doing the generally trivial feat of dealing combat damage to my opponent. It's a VERY double-edged sword, Monarch, unless something lets you break the combat game so hard that you might as well use a few card-draw spells instead of whatever gives you Monarch.
So if Gush and Monarch cards are up for review, and actually do get banned, that'll solve nothing. Gush ought to have never been legal, fair enough, but as long as Gurmag Angler is legal UB Delver won't miss a beat, and as long as Prismatic Strands (or whatever's actually the lynchpin of that value pile) are legal neither will Boros / Orzhov Monarch.
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."
JundBGR
RW Blood MoonRW
Pauper
Delver U
Elves G
Control B
Commander
Edgar Markov BRW
Captain Sisay GW
Niv-Mizzet, Parun UR
Tymna and Ravos WB
I hope but somehow I doubt it.
They would have to be along the lines of "this spell cannot be countered" "Hexproof from Blue" or "target player cannot draw more than one card per turn".
I really don't see anything that powerful filtering down to the common level. Some bans will be needed.
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."
They could pretty much make "can't be countered" part of a keyword, like they made haste part of riot, and not price dudes any different than they'd price vanilla dudes. The other part of the keyword would have to be something tangible, so that they could justify putting a confusing but often completely irrelevant line of text on many cards. But it could easily be done.
I'm not sure it'd actually help against either UB or UR Delver, though.
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."
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."
I agree with you a lot.
What I'd ban is : Gush, Ghostly Flicker + Displace, and Prismatic Strands.
The graveyard is just a fancy word for discard pile. They're generally supposed to be spent resources, you're not entitled to get a ton of value from cards there. I don't want dumb Exhume stuff getting out of hand, and graveyard hate is the only thing that keeps Tortex reasonable.
Saying that Bojuka Bog should be banned is a lot like my friend that plays exclusively degenerate, non-interactive combo decks complaining about how OP Counterspell is, or about how annoying Boros Monarch is (the only remaining fair deck in the meta).
Cards like Bojuka Bog and Counterspell force one to sit down and actually play the game. They put a damper on whatever stupid shenanigans you're trying to pull and I wish there were more cards like them in the format. I only know Pauper cards, but doesn't Pithing Needle function in a similar manner in other formats?
Having to play parasitic, narrow cards like Disenchant just to maybe beat some degenerate deck isn't viable. I'm not going to play Zombie Cannibal if Relic or Bojuka Bog go away, I'm just not. Relic can be played in any deck and that's a net positive for the format.
Exhume decks not being good because of it is also a net positive for the format. Good riddance.
Ignoring what Magic players say isn't the answer, it's listening to what they have to say and doing the exact opposite that's correct.
Bojuka Bog types yes, Counterspell types, hell no, there are a plethora of those already in the format and it doesn't need more of them. GY hate I do agree with as there isn't that much out there (playable) besides BB, Relic and Nihil Spellbomb.
I am totally with your suggested bans.
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."
Counterspell being mildly OP and a catchall is a good thing. It can stop a wide variety of degeneracies. Having to lose game 1 and then play narrow sideboard cards and hope to draw them is not a good thing. Having Counterspell prevents that issue from arising.
The things that beat Counterspell based decks are fair, vanilla strategies like playing around it and flooding the board with grizzly bears or 2/x fliers.
You ban blue and Mono Green Ponza becomes top tier. (I think it's top tier already with some tweaks)
You ban blue and One Land Spy actually becomes a viable game plan.
Before Foil was downshifted, Delver decks were on par or inferior to other fair midrange-y type decks like Mono Black Control, Boros, U/B Control AKA Dimir Alchemy, etc.
The real problem with this format is that Tron is too good at beating what's supposed to beat it- fast aggro (burn is also fast aggro) and is immune to all fair decks. This is due to many, many cards but chiefly Ghostly Flicker/Displace. So the only fair, midrange-y tempo-ish deck that has a chance against Tron is Delver.
Without Tron being invincible and just not caring about what most decks do, plenty of midrange decks become actually viable. Decks that have decent matchups even against the supercharged, Pauper Force of Will version of Delver.
If I could just play my MBC deck and resolve Fog of Gnats without automatically throwing all my games to Tron, U/B Delver wouldn't be the monster it is.
While Gurmag is the best creature in the format, there are a plethora of easily maindeckable options for dealing with it, even at 2 mana. At the end of the day it's just a vanilla creature and can be hit with a Pacifism just like any other creature. Gurmag is also more vulnerable to bounce than most creatures, so things like mist blade Shinobi and snap are good against it.
Ignoring what Magic players say isn't the answer, it's listening to what they have to say and doing the exact opposite that's correct.
Nothing like trying to run out 2 spells on turn 2 with your opponent showing 2 islands, you bait them and draw out the counter then get your second spell hit with a "free" counterspell. Its too much pressure/tempo swing at the cost of too little.
Or don't play anything hoping to save your resources and watch your opponent sift through their deck on your endstep with Ponder/Preodain/Brainstorm and just pick up more filtering/counter or pressure(Delver). Its too easy and to prevalent imho.
As for Tron, ban Moment's Peace and P.Strands and watch them struggle more against aggro/midrange and "fair" decks.
Again I am with your bans, but Blue doesn't need more at all and the top 50 cards in the format bear that out.
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."