Quote from Cap75 »Gifts has one answer: counter it. If you don't a well built combo deck should be able to pull up four cards that are invariably going to win, or at least set yourself up hugely, no matter which are chosen to be pitched unless someone else is packing another counter or instant speed GY hate.
Yeah but by doing that, you're playing it in a broken way. If you're using Gifts to get value, then the card is fine. You can't really "accidentally" win by using gifts, which is the criterion for banning in accordance with the EDH banlist philosophy.
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The solution is to ban every card that is broken when built around. Obviously banning every card that gets better when built around will not work, but it bugs me when "it's not broken if you don't build around it" and "it's only broken if you use it to get/cast broken things" are used as arguments to not ban things.
I will state here that I am not on either side for the banning/not banning of survival of the fittest.
I mostly say these things because it is one of the ideas that lead to an inconsistent ban list. People talk about how Kokusho is banned as a commander because if he wasn't, you could build your whole deck around reanimating and sacrificing him and it would be very hard to stop (truth of that statement doesn't matter, only the reasoning). Then we look at cards like hermit druid and ad nauseam, and for some reason, the same arguments don't get any support (again, truth of those arguments are not important). If that's the case, the only thing you can come down to is power level. Is one of these build-around strategies too powerful and the other not? I don't know, but arguments never seem to be about strength of the card when banning them, but always are when unbanning.
Then there's the other one where "things are only broken if you use them for broken strategies". Why is gifts ungiven banned? Because you can tutor a combo with it? So what? If you don't use it to find combos, it is a cool tutor that can be used in reanimator/dredge strategies that can also help find answers for given board states in a pinch. It's the same argument people use for demonic tutor and vampiric tutor.
There's also things like panoptic mirror vs tooth and nail. They can both be used fair and "for fun" or for ending the game as soon as possible, but panoptic mirror is banned and tooth and nail isn't.
Even with Prossh in Sheldon's article, he is trying to show that Prossh is too powerful "when you don't build the deck for him". What the hell is that trying to prove? Why does it matter? Who would build a deck that purposely ignores their commander's abilities, and even if they did, why would it matter if their commander is still powerful? If you want to compare the idea of this argument to something, look at Kokusho. Kokusho is banned for the entirely opposite reason.
Banning cards is always about how casuals can use the cards, but unbanning cards is always about how competitive players can abuse them. It makes no sense.
EDIT:
I want to add that the reason I brought all this up is because cards should be banned for power level. That way, when people ask why panoptic mirror is banned, you can say "it's too powerful" instead of coming up with some weird set of rules that for some reason are ignored on other, similar cards. Note that I am not saying panoptic mirror is too powerful, but that it is the reason it is banned. Some cards could be disagreed upon, but then you are arguing purely about power level and not dancing around all of these inconsistent reasons for banning cards.
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By "free mulligan", I mean for the first mulligan, if you throw away N cards, you draw N cards, and then if you decide to go further, then you only get N-1 cards back (). As I understand, partial paris rules do not allow for a free first mulligan, so this is just some arbitrary rule that got spread around.
It bugs me because I build my decks with the goal of never using any mulligans. I do this because I think it leads to a better overall deck and you don't lose cards by having to mulligan at the start of almost every one. But when you get a free mulligan, decks can be built more greedily and still manage fine because of so much digging.
I don't know if anyone else has had this problem. I was just wondering what other peoples' thoughts on it are.
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Metalworker adds anywhere from 0 to 198 mana (have your whole deck in hand minus metalworker and they are all artifacts - including your commander). The point, however, is that he can easily add very little mana, like 2 or 4. He also has to sit in play for a whole turn before he can add the mana, unlike mana rocks.
Tolarian Academy - Sure, there are 0-mana artifacts. What do these 0-mana artifacts do? Are they still useful without tolarian academy in hand? Some are okay, but most will do pretty much nothing - especially if you don't have the land.
Late game, cabal coffers can add tons of mana as well, and I haven't heard any complaints about that card.
It's actually a better chance than that, since you draw 7 cards (though I don't know the exact chance). Anyway, there are plenty of 4 or 5 drops that are too strong for turn 2, and these cards enable that sort of thing. Mana crypt even enables 3-drops on turn 1.
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Un-cards, ante cards, and manual dexterity (and other silly cards like sharazad which I don't know how to spell) should definitely stay in binders.
Besides. I'd much rather have a format be balanced and more affordable than insane and extremely expensive just so some people could run their moxes and black lotus.
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Those other rocks all have serious draw-backs.
Sure, mana vault's 1 damage per turn is nothing, but you have to pay 4 mana to use it again. To me, it is more like a dark ritual that can stay in play for when you want to use it.
Mox Opal will rarely activate in the first 2-3 turns. I've never seen it do anything on turn 1. On top of all this, it requires a large deck restriction to work at all.
The other 2 mox both 2-for-1 yourself. On top of that, while they give coloured mana, they only give 1. Turn 1 2-drops are not that scary and turn 2 3-drops are much easier to deal with than turn 2 4-drops.
LED requires a lot of working around.
Lotus petal is like a weaker dark ritual, but gives much more versatility in the colour you get. It's essentially a 0-for-1 as well.
Mana elves are much more vulnerable than artifacts, and on top of that, they cannot tap on the turn they are played.
You don't need to ramp after sol ring for it to be broken. Sure, it is one of the most broken things to do, but it's not the only thing you can do with it. There's also the fact that you could ramp after other ramp, but it would just be slower. Banning sol ring and mana crypt is not to say mana rocks are too powerful, it's to say that they shouldn't be that powerful for that little mana.
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Then you could try that
I would also like to suggest using a deck without black or white since you have 2 decks with white and all of them have black. You could go any combination of blue/red/green. Not exactly sure what you'd want to play out of those colours though.
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I usually take 2 thirds of the deck (a little over half) and shuffle that, then swap half of that pile with the remaining pile and shuffle that bunch. I repeat until I'm satisfied. You'll be shuffling roughly 60-70 cards at a time if you do it right, and that's quite manageable.
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I'm already done arguing about worldfire. My points on that card are these:
1) It is way too weak for it to affect competitive groups.
2) It will not be played in casual groups because they don't want to deal with that kind of card (among other commonly disliked strategies such as MLD).
It's banned, but no one would run it anyway, so it doesn't really need to be banned. At the same time, though, no one is gonna run it anyway, so it doesn't matter if it stays banned or not except that the ban list is longer for no reason.
Anyway, I was saying that tooth and nail, hermit druid, and ad nauseam are cards that should be banned for being 1-card wins (or maybe your counterexample cards should be unbanned), but they're not banned because they can be used "fairly". You made some counter examples, and I claimed that those counterexamples are signs of inconsistency in the ban list. Panoptic mirror is banned, yet it is less abusable than tooth and nail is, since you need a card that makes you win in hand to imprint onto it. That's like banning mikaeus because it can go infinite with specific other cards.