A lot of people conflate the format's success with the RC's involvement, which is an understandable logical leap, but there's really no evidence of such. If anything, the format is popular because of WotC's involvement, as there have been incredibly sharp jumps after every Commander set release.
Sheldon took the idea from Adam Staley who created the format up in Alaska, brought it to the rest of the US, and the populace took it and ran with it because it was a good idea. The RC's involvement since then has had a neutral to slightly negative effect on the format, while WotC has smartly thrown their weight behind it and exploded its popularity via constant support.
There's a very good reason that the banlist makes absolutely no sense and seems to be applied inconsistently: the RC's metagame is stagnant, inbred, and trapped in 2010.
The RC likes to play EDH in a very, very particular way, and anything that breaks their trudging Jund-y value battlecruiser meta gets banned or frowned out of the group, so they never have to evolve their play or improve their decks. As such the things that are too good in that exact meta get banned, and things that are too good in evolving, real-world metas stay unbanned.
All of that said, there's nothing inherently wrong with the way they choose to enjoy the game. There is, however, something very problematic with the format's stewards having an incredibly narrow view of it. Their rhetoric very clearly and consistently demonstrates that point, especially in their vitriol for anyone who finds enjoyment in pushing the limits of the format.
Obviously the format is still a ton of fun and very popular, but this is in spite of the above, not because of it. Just because its good doesn't mean it couldn't be even better.
Banning the cards really hurts no one, since they're all fringe playable at best, and makes a portion of the playerbase more comfortable in the community. Seems like a no-brainer win-win to me. Obviously there is a financial motive on WotC's part, but their heart is in the right place too, I know and work with a lot of these folks and this really did come from a good place.
That said, I definitely had to have a few of them explained to me, but they all make sense after that:
Invoke Prejudice: Obviously KKK imagery, from an avowed and vehement racist, with 1488 (a neo-nazi dogwhistle) as its gatherer number. Ouch.
Cleanse: A white card (ok). That destroys black creatures (ok). Named Cleanse (...ok?). Ethnic cleansing (oooooooh).
Stone-Throwing Devils: Apparently an old middle-eastern pejorative, and once you know that the art is super obviously a racist caricature.
Pradesh Gypsies: 'Gypsy' is basically the N-word for the Romani people. It has been appropriated to mean something fairly benign in modern media, but its roots are that of baseless bigotry towards an out-group. A lot of folks with that heritage have repappropriated it and use the word proudly, but at the same time a lot of folks still find it offensive.
Jihad: Name and art reference real-world racist, violent religious war/massacre. Let's not do that.
Crusade: Name and art reference real-world racist, violent religious war/massacre. Let's not do that.
Imprison: What appears to be a starving black man in a torture mask, with a card name that sniffs of slavery.
Both Cleanse and Imprison are a bit of a stretch, but honestly they toe the line enough and are unplayably bad enough that it feels free to axe them just to be safe.
Speaking to the newly found value of these cards, its a temporary bubble with two types of people participating. 1) Speculators who knew that the banning would spike interest due to FOMO, and 2) Actual full-blown racists who want to collect and protect racist iconography. Eventually the price on these will go back down as folks lose interest, and we'll be left with slightly richer speculators and slightly poorer racists, so it all works out. Invoke itself may very well hold its price, since it is the rarest of them and holds a sort of freak-show novelty, but the rest will absolutely fall off a cliff and take a lot of stupid peoples' money with them.
Holy hell what a miss. Horrendous art, no value, what were they thinking here? Could've absolutely done this theme more justice by picking better walkers and/or getting decent art for them. Feels like they just had these arts laying about as jokey warmups from the artists and decided to sell them instead of letting them rot in a file.
It's more than a little frustrating that, aside from the one that's already banned, these companions are severely underpowered relative to the severity of their deckbuilding restrictions. Hopefully at least one of the unspoiled ones will be playable, otherwise the entire mechanic will have been wasted. Such potential...
fwiw: anyone saying that keeping volume low and value high is the way to do business (in singles/sealed/whatever) doesn't understand economics at. all.
The most successful retail companies in the world do insane volume at razor-thin margins. This is a verifiable fact. Printing sets as long as people are buying is the correct business move for WotC. Yes, sure, you don't want to overprint (and thus sit on piles of product) but underprinting is leaving money on the table, and at the margins they're making selling to distributors they'd rather overprint a -tiny- bit than underprint at all. The fact that they ever do limited print runs of insanely popular products (Battlebond for one recent example, and likely UMA given the preorder data) baffles me. Their business analysts are clearly hacks.
Distributors operate on similar principle: move as much as you can as fast as you can.
Singles retailers operate on exactly the same principle. Moving a thousand .10 cards is the same as moving one 100.00 card, and it is -way- easier to sell a thousand units of chaff than it is to sell one heavy hitter. Trust me, I sell gigantic piles of nigh-worthless EDH cards at an exponentially faster clip than I sell legacy staples. Sitting on expensive pieces of cardboard is an extremely slow, relatively safe way to make money way down the road, but moving them from one person's hands to another's and skimming a little profit in the transaction is -way- more profitable. Then you can use that money to do it again. And again.
Opportunity cost is real.
Investing is a coward's game.
People buying to play > people buying for value, as far as sheer volume of sales.
Oversaturation isn't great. Sure. But you want to get as close as you can to that line.
I hate that WotC has the gall to charge what they're charging for this set, but the early numbers are making it look like the demand for UMA is going to easily outstrip the supply. As such ordering as much as you possibly can is looking like a winning bet. I'd prefer to move it all immediately and not be stuck with any overstock, but even then you can just raise the price a little when supply inevitably dries up and recoup the lost opportunity cost.
Honestly anyone who has a problem with combos isn't running enough interaction *shrug*
Most of the decks in my various playgroups have an 'unfair' game-ending combination of cards, infinite or not. This is fine, and any good deck builds to something that ends the game, be it T&N for AvengerHoof, or MikeTrike, or a Stasis lock, or any kind of infinite mana kill. This does not mean that our games end in 10 minutes. When everyone is trying to kill everyone else as quickly as possible while stopping them from doing the same, the games tend to go long. Pure 'put stuff on the table, turn it sideways, hope no one touches my stuff long enough for me to grind out 120 damage' decks are -objectively- the most boring to play with and against. Interaction is what makes Magic fun. The tension of 2-4 players who could kill the table at any moment is exhilarating, and you get the deepest, most satisfying interactions in games like that. And when you've had enough experience with the game, you realize that nothing is unique, everything has been done before, and no card or strategy should surprise you (unless it's hilariously bad), so you can focus on building the most powerful decks and making the tightest plays. Or just -obviously- screwing around. That's good too.
Obviously it is optimal for everyone at the table to be at the same power/skill level, and a game between Craw Wurm.dec and a deck with Lab Maniac in it isn't terribly fun, but I've found that as my players are challenged by powerful strategies, learn to overcome them, and develop their play and deckbuilding skills, the decks and games slowly evolve to the point where everyone is capable of murdering the table within 5 turns if their draw is good and no one tries to stop them. But someone usually does. And then talks smack about it for the rest of the night. It's beautiful.
I would literally take every card off that list, and the official banlist as well, and do some actual testing to see what is too oppressive for the format so that I could come up with a real banlist that makes sense instead of rattling off a completely arbitrary list like the RC does. And reinstate the easily understandable 'banned as general' list. And the sorely-needed ability to tuck generals. That would be refreshing.
My first swipe would in all likelihood look something like this, though maybe I'd be surprised:
-Power 9
-Hermit Druid
-Sol Ring
-Mana Crypt
-Mana Vault
-Derevi/Rofellos/Erayo/Edric banned as generals
I don't really have a problem with anything on your list, and two of them are banned already anyways?
2
Sheldon took the idea from Adam Staley who created the format up in Alaska, brought it to the rest of the US, and the populace took it and ran with it because it was a good idea. The RC's involvement since then has had a neutral to slightly negative effect on the format, while WotC has smartly thrown their weight behind it and exploded its popularity via constant support.
1
The RC likes to play EDH in a very, very particular way, and anything that breaks their trudging Jund-y value battlecruiser meta gets banned or frowned out of the group, so they never have to evolve their play or improve their decks. As such the things that are too good in that exact meta get banned, and things that are too good in evolving, real-world metas stay unbanned.
All of that said, there's nothing inherently wrong with the way they choose to enjoy the game. There is, however, something very problematic with the format's stewards having an incredibly narrow view of it. Their rhetoric very clearly and consistently demonstrates that point, especially in their vitriol for anyone who finds enjoyment in pushing the limits of the format.
Obviously the format is still a ton of fun and very popular, but this is in spite of the above, not because of it. Just because its good doesn't mean it couldn't be even better.
2
Zendikar Rising actually seems like a fairly large power level drop from previous sets so far. Waiting to be impressed.
4
That said, I definitely had to have a few of them explained to me, but they all make sense after that:
Invoke Prejudice: Obviously KKK imagery, from an avowed and vehement racist, with 1488 (a neo-nazi dogwhistle) as its gatherer number. Ouch.
Cleanse: A white card (ok). That destroys black creatures (ok). Named Cleanse (...ok?). Ethnic cleansing (oooooooh).
Stone-Throwing Devils: Apparently an old middle-eastern pejorative, and once you know that the art is super obviously a racist caricature.
Pradesh Gypsies: 'Gypsy' is basically the N-word for the Romani people. It has been appropriated to mean something fairly benign in modern media, but its roots are that of baseless bigotry towards an out-group. A lot of folks with that heritage have repappropriated it and use the word proudly, but at the same time a lot of folks still find it offensive.
Jihad: Name and art reference real-world racist, violent religious war/massacre. Let's not do that.
Crusade: Name and art reference real-world racist, violent religious war/massacre. Let's not do that.
Imprison: What appears to be a starving black man in a torture mask, with a card name that sniffs of slavery.
Both Cleanse and Imprison are a bit of a stretch, but honestly they toe the line enough and are unplayably bad enough that it feels free to axe them just to be safe.
Speaking to the newly found value of these cards, its a temporary bubble with two types of people participating. 1) Speculators who knew that the banning would spike interest due to FOMO, and 2) Actual full-blown racists who want to collect and protect racist iconography. Eventually the price on these will go back down as folks lose interest, and we'll be left with slightly richer speculators and slightly poorer racists, so it all works out. Invoke itself may very well hold its price, since it is the rarest of them and holds a sort of freak-show novelty, but the rest will absolutely fall off a cliff and take a lot of stupid peoples' money with them.
2
1
1
7
The most successful retail companies in the world do insane volume at razor-thin margins. This is a verifiable fact. Printing sets as long as people are buying is the correct business move for WotC. Yes, sure, you don't want to overprint (and thus sit on piles of product) but underprinting is leaving money on the table, and at the margins they're making selling to distributors they'd rather overprint a -tiny- bit than underprint at all. The fact that they ever do limited print runs of insanely popular products (Battlebond for one recent example, and likely UMA given the preorder data) baffles me. Their business analysts are clearly hacks.
Distributors operate on similar principle: move as much as you can as fast as you can.
Singles retailers operate on exactly the same principle. Moving a thousand .10 cards is the same as moving one 100.00 card, and it is -way- easier to sell a thousand units of chaff than it is to sell one heavy hitter. Trust me, I sell gigantic piles of nigh-worthless EDH cards at an exponentially faster clip than I sell legacy staples. Sitting on expensive pieces of cardboard is an extremely slow, relatively safe way to make money way down the road, but moving them from one person's hands to another's and skimming a little profit in the transaction is -way- more profitable. Then you can use that money to do it again. And again.
Opportunity cost is real.
Investing is a coward's game.
People buying to play > people buying for value, as far as sheer volume of sales.
Oversaturation isn't great. Sure. But you want to get as close as you can to that line.
I hate that WotC has the gall to charge what they're charging for this set, but the early numbers are making it look like the demand for UMA is going to easily outstrip the supply. As such ordering as much as you possibly can is looking like a winning bet. I'd prefer to move it all immediately and not be stuck with any overstock, but even then you can just raise the price a little when supply inevitably dries up and recoup the lost opportunity cost.
4
Most of the decks in my various playgroups have an 'unfair' game-ending combination of cards, infinite or not. This is fine, and any good deck builds to something that ends the game, be it T&N for AvengerHoof, or MikeTrike, or a Stasis lock, or any kind of infinite mana kill. This does not mean that our games end in 10 minutes. When everyone is trying to kill everyone else as quickly as possible while stopping them from doing the same, the games tend to go long. Pure 'put stuff on the table, turn it sideways, hope no one touches my stuff long enough for me to grind out 120 damage' decks are -objectively- the most boring to play with and against. Interaction is what makes Magic fun. The tension of 2-4 players who could kill the table at any moment is exhilarating, and you get the deepest, most satisfying interactions in games like that. And when you've had enough experience with the game, you realize that nothing is unique, everything has been done before, and no card or strategy should surprise you (unless it's hilariously bad), so you can focus on building the most powerful decks and making the tightest plays. Or just -obviously- screwing around. That's good too.
Obviously it is optimal for everyone at the table to be at the same power/skill level, and a game between Craw Wurm.dec and a deck with Lab Maniac in it isn't terribly fun, but I've found that as my players are challenged by powerful strategies, learn to overcome them, and develop their play and deckbuilding skills, the decks and games slowly evolve to the point where everyone is capable of murdering the table within 5 turns if their draw is good and no one tries to stop them. But someone usually does. And then talks smack about it for the rest of the night. It's beautiful.
1
My first swipe would in all likelihood look something like this, though maybe I'd be surprised:
-Power 9
-Hermit Druid
-Sol Ring
-Mana Crypt
-Mana Vault
-Derevi/Rofellos/Erayo/Edric banned as generals
I don't really have a problem with anything on your list, and two of them are banned already anyways?