A teammate and me went to neighbouring Italy for the Paupergeddon big tourney in Pisa. There were 214 or people or so, and we went with Rakdos Control (buddy) and Corrupt Control (me). He went 4 - 3 - 1, but would have done better if the universe didn't decide to mess us up and pair him against me in one of the rounds. I did better, and ended up 32.
I certainly could've done better but I ran into an Atog-Fling combo in round 2 - it's an affinity with nothing but Atog, Fling, eggs and filtering, and lost 2 - 0. Then when I climbed up into top 16 I ran into an Izzet Delver and drew with the guy (if I had just a little more time I would've won, and I think I messed up in the game I did lose). This then got ugly because I fell back down and got paired with another Izzet Delver which turned out to be my worst matchup and lost to that too. With a little bit more luck - such as being paired with literally anything else as I was easily handling Tron, for example - I think I could've been at least in the top 8. Well, I hope my luck turns out better next time.
I just wanted to point something out, my crew and I have been discussing it over here IRL. The Gush and Probe ban make Tribe and Blitz less deadly, but they were kinda overly deadly for any format, let alone an all-commons one. But the Daze ban is actually a huuuuuuuuuge boon to either strat. Both decks are spellslinger decks that want to chain a few spells and smack you for 20-ish. Apart from removal, the biggest obstacle to these decks working was actually Daze, as they couldn't really play around it and still be able to chain enough (or the exact necessary) spells as early as they would want. For them, Daze was not only a problem on turn 1 or 2, it just never stopped being a problem throughout the whole game, since what they're trying to do would only leave them with Daze-tax mana up if they were completely flooded. Not being open to getting dazed mid-spellchain (or having your last key spell dazed) despite what the other guy was doing is a pretty big deal, honestly.
It's also quite a bit more difficult for anyone to just counter their early threat while also developing their own board position (something UB Delver was notorious for), which somewhat reduces their need to also be ridiculously fast to keep up.
So yeah, that's what the Daze ban was about. Gush and Probe were "Ok you silly bastards, slow down for a turn, use sensible methods to do your thing" and the Daze ban was "But you don't have to race Delver so hard or try to pull it off against truly silly bush**t disruption".
I think that's how these bans work. And I also don't think any of the three decks affected are done with the meta due to them. It might turn out to be quite the opposite. Blitz and Tribe are still spellchain decks with powerful blue cantrips at their disposal to dig for their chain pieces, and Delver still has the Tarmofish and the silly 3/2 for 1 along with blue digging & counters and black answers.
Fathom Seer is a downgrade, yes, but it also has it's own perks. Can't be countered by Pyroblast, can't be countered by Dispel and Negate, leaves behind a nice blocker or eats edicts. Inside Out lost speed, sure, but that deck in particular never cared about Gush (the card itself), just the effect, and would've both existed and worked even if Gush was banned all along. That's the hilarity of the situation. Unless the Probe ban proves too much due to the loss of information it provides on when the coast is clear, Tribe Combo might have actually gotten more resilient.
Oh and our local running gag about Masques being the worst block ever just got even more hilarious as it gained a punchline - "Masques is the worst block ever, not one good card in it!" - "Yeah, not even half the cards on the Pauper banlist are from Masques! Completely lousy block!"
Savage Swipe looks like it goes right into Stompy. It won't kill Angler... but it will kill just about anything else.
Martyr's Soul seems like it ought to be quite playable. I can imagine him out on turn 3 with open mana for backup, which is pretty good. Turn one Benevolent Bodyguard, turn 2 two tokens, turn three - rather unkillable big dude + whatever you feel like.
The new changelings look good - the white one is very likely useful as one more playable which powers up Griffin Rider. As was mentioned, the black one is a rather good roadblock which you can get back with Ghoulcaller's Chant. If the Green one ends up being Colossal Dreadmaw which is also a beast then maybe Wirewood Savage can finally become a thing. Even a 5/6 for 6 would be fine enough, except I'm a bit sceptical as it'd also be an elf. The blue one is likely to just be a Wind Drake, and the red one is likely to be a 3/2 menace guy for 2R, none of which are terribly exciting.
Headless Specter has the stats that mono-b devotion would love, but mono-b devotion isn't really the kind of deck that goes hellbent easily. Looks like just a nice pile of references, for now. It could make quite a mess if you follow it up with Last Rites, though, and that card's been looking for a deck for a while now.
Goblin War Party is probably quite playable in Goblinstorm as a few-off. As long as you can ramp, and token goblins can indeed ramp, it's like a silly-but-still-lethal Goblin Bushwhacker. Niche, but not to be discounted.
And snow lands make me hopeful for actually useful Snow cards. Not sure where the design space for that would be, exactly, but here's hoping that someone spent some time over the years pondering how you make one or two.
This won't achieve all that much. Still, Gush was unnecessary, and any deck that was using it really can use Fathom Seer and be strong enough. Gitaxian Probe is just a design mistake and not all that great in a Burn heavy meta, and Pauper's always liable to have legacy-grade burn around. And Daze was only really played in one deck and did make it a bit too good (read better than it had to be to still be the strongest deck).
So yeah, some cards which ought to not have been legal anyway aren't legal anymore, Daze is out which is fine, I guess, and not much has changed. Big whoop.
One thing that they did achieve is that if you want a "gush effect" in your deck and thus run Fathom Seer, you'll have fewer things to always draw with Augur of Bolas and to always flip Delver with, so Augur might be the thing that gets replaced in UB Delver and Tireless Tribe. Tribe never needed Gush per se, anyway, just the effect and it can still kill you same as ever on turn 4 (or earlier if on the draw), which is fine, and Delver still has Angler holding the fort. Unless literally nobody even tries, we haven't seen the last of either of them, but they might not be quite as obnoxious as they have been lately.
Lava Dart is silly good, Prohibit is good to have in any pool, the changelings will be very welcome in Pauper where a few tribes really lack one more playable card to get there. The bear fight card is potentially a pauper staple for Stompy (which is loaded with 2 power guys), the white convoke guy might play well with Quirion Ranger in Selesnya convoke builds as it matches Gurmag Angler for power, and the headless specter has devotion friendly cc and 2 toughness (v. important so your Cuombajj Witches don't ping it off as colatteral). This is good stuff for pauper.
I've been around the block, so to speak, and at least some of the posters on these boards know I've got a decent bit of historical perspective ragarding MtG, and some of the stuff I say makes it's way into discussions and articles in other places. So I'd like to use the opportunity to plant an idea in hopes it makes it to more influential folks with more ears to bend.
I've a feeling it's about that time that MtG needs a bit more color pie exploration. This stuff happens every so often, effects get shuffled around. Sometimes it makes sense flavor wise so it's easy to justify it to folks who don't get design necessities, sometimes it's far less subtle and just needs to be done. Happened with a lot of mechanics, really, and it's rather a good thing that it does happen.
---
So here's two suggestions that would likely impact Pauper, can be justified flavor wise and are in line with previous such effect shuffles and expansions:
Idea 1: Give green limited reanimation. Green's been a getting variety of Raise Dead effects lately ("lately" from the perspective of an Eldrazi) but what it could use is an Unearth. Sure, Unearth itself is one of those what-were-they-smoking crazy strong commons from Saga block, so the green variant would obviously have to be less powerful. For example it could return only a 2cc dude for one G, or even only a mono-green 2cc dude for one G.
Flavor and color pie wise, Black and Green fiddle with the graveyard anyway, and regrowing / revitalizing things is very easy to immagine in green. You could justify the limited scope and power of such an effect in green because green can easily replace/patch together a small thing, while it couldn't reanimate something huge because getting huge takes growth and all that good green philosophy stuff. Seedlings are dime a dozen, ancient oaks are gone when they topple, I could come up with flavor texts for such green cards for days. It could also make for a nice thing to associate with Dryads to flesh them out (not as a tribe necessarily, but as a motiff).
Mechanically there's room for several iterations - you can make a weak one cost 2 mana, you could make one of them create a token that's a copy of something small in your yard, whathave you. And the reason for this is that this specific effect would help green keep specific threats / roleplayers on board somewhat through heavy removal, and it would help stompy, and it would certainly help madness decks get Mongrel back after it instantly eats removal. Unearth has the ability to make something cost you more when you cast it then it costs to reanimate it, which helps combat enemy card advantage through redundancy. It'd be strong, sure, but if splashing was easier in Pauper a lot of green decks would be running Unearth for sure and likely will be running it if they ever give us a better common mana base, so actually giving green an Unearth or two might not be a bad idea at all.
It's a powerful effect, to be sure, and there's plenty of silly strong things that could be done and become routine with even a less powerful green unearth but I believe it'd be quite worth it.
Idea 2: Give Black a Rampant Growth, but one which can only fetch basic swamps. Black is already running 2-mana card draw wherever it can, mostly to dig for lands, and it's spells and threats are significantly more expensive than anyone else's threats or answers while not necessarily being that much more powerful. Or rather, black needs to spend turns and mana digging for lands anyway, and it also has to survive long enough to get to 5-6 mana for haymakers, which doesn't really work out in practice often engouh. Being able to ramp a land on turn 2 would mean a lot to mono-black.
It's funny when you think about it - Sign in Blood and Night's Whisper are crazy powerful card draw, likely the most powerful in Pauper and closer to Ancestral Recall than blue ever gets. But black would actually dump them for a rampant growth which fetches a basic swamp into play if it could. It's a bit like how Demonic Tutor somehow always ends up looking for a land
Flavor-wise both black and green are about growth and spreading around, just for different reasons (to green growth is an end and a purpose unto itself, for black it's a means to an end and a result of being competitive towards anything around it). "Spreading the swamp" or "Spreading Corruption" is very easy to grok as a black thing, and as long as it's really limited in what it can get you (never anything other than a basic swamp) it'd be ok in that respect. And there's even precedent, but it costs 2BB to play, and black really needs to be doing other things with 4 lands in play and can't spend all of its mana on turn 4 (or even turn 3 for that matter) fetching that swamp. It needs one earlier to be able to play it's things while it digs / grinds to it's fifth or sixth land.
---
There, if WotC feels like shaking things up a bit, and the power of these effects (especially the first one) is not that big of an issue, those cards would certainly see play. If they're into printing more impactful commons and supporting Pauper, these things would be a godsend.
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.
I certainly could've done better but I ran into an Atog-Fling combo in round 2 - it's an affinity with nothing but Atog, Fling, eggs and filtering, and lost 2 - 0. Then when I climbed up into top 16 I ran into an Izzet Delver and drew with the guy (if I had just a little more time I would've won, and I think I messed up in the game I did lose). This then got ugly because I fell back down and got paired with another Izzet Delver which turned out to be my worst matchup and lost to that too. With a little bit more luck - such as being paired with literally anything else as I was easily handling Tron, for example - I think I could've been at least in the top 8. Well, I hope my luck turns out better next time.
3-4 Boros Monarch
3-4 GW Slivers
2 Kiln Fiend
1 Oops, all instants
So um, blue's definitely not dead after the bans, Kiln Fiend is obviously not dead after the bans. Nice to know.
It's also quite a bit more difficult for anyone to just counter their early threat while also developing their own board position (something UB Delver was notorious for), which somewhat reduces their need to also be ridiculously fast to keep up.
So yeah, that's what the Daze ban was about. Gush and Probe were "Ok you silly bastards, slow down for a turn, use sensible methods to do your thing" and the Daze ban was "But you don't have to race Delver so hard or try to pull it off against truly silly bush**t disruption".
I think that's how these bans work. And I also don't think any of the three decks affected are done with the meta due to them. It might turn out to be quite the opposite. Blitz and Tribe are still spellchain decks with powerful blue cantrips at their disposal to dig for their chain pieces, and Delver still has the Tarmofish and the silly 3/2 for 1 along with blue digging & counters and black answers.
Oh and our local running gag about Masques being the worst block ever just got even more hilarious as it gained a punchline - "Masques is the worst block ever, not one good card in it!" - "Yeah, not even half the cards on the Pauper banlist are from Masques! Completely lousy block!"
Martyr's Soul seems like it ought to be quite playable. I can imagine him out on turn 3 with open mana for backup, which is pretty good. Turn one Benevolent Bodyguard, turn 2 two tokens, turn three - rather unkillable big dude + whatever you feel like.
The new changelings look good - the white one is very likely useful as one more playable which powers up Griffin Rider. As was mentioned, the black one is a rather good roadblock which you can get back with Ghoulcaller's Chant. If the Green one ends up being Colossal Dreadmaw which is also a beast then maybe Wirewood Savage can finally become a thing. Even a 5/6 for 6 would be fine enough, except I'm a bit sceptical as it'd also be an elf. The blue one is likely to just be a Wind Drake, and the red one is likely to be a 3/2 menace guy for 2R, none of which are terribly exciting.
Headless Specter has the stats that mono-b devotion would love, but mono-b devotion isn't really the kind of deck that goes hellbent easily. Looks like just a nice pile of references, for now. It could make quite a mess if you follow it up with Last Rites, though, and that card's been looking for a deck for a while now.
Goblin War Party is probably quite playable in Goblinstorm as a few-off. As long as you can ramp, and token goblins can indeed ramp, it's like a silly-but-still-lethal Goblin Bushwhacker. Niche, but not to be discounted.
And snow lands make me hopeful for actually useful Snow cards. Not sure where the design space for that would be, exactly, but here's hoping that someone spent some time over the years pondering how you make one or two.
Gush , Daze and Gitaxian Probe are banned it seems effective from the 24th.
This won't achieve all that much. Still, Gush was unnecessary, and any deck that was using it really can use Fathom Seer and be strong enough. Gitaxian Probe is just a design mistake and not all that great in a Burn heavy meta, and Pauper's always liable to have legacy-grade burn around. And Daze was only really played in one deck and did make it a bit too good (read better than it had to be to still be the strongest deck).
So yeah, some cards which ought to not have been legal anyway aren't legal anymore, Daze is out which is fine, I guess, and not much has changed. Big whoop.
One thing that they did achieve is that if you want a "gush effect" in your deck and thus run Fathom Seer, you'll have fewer things to always draw with Augur of Bolas and to always flip Delver with, so Augur might be the thing that gets replaced in UB Delver and Tireless Tribe. Tribe never needed Gush per se, anyway, just the effect and it can still kill you same as ever on turn 4 (or earlier if on the draw), which is fine, and Delver still has Angler holding the fort. Unless literally nobody even tries, we haven't seen the last of either of them, but they might not be quite as obnoxious as they have been lately.
Oh, god, yes
I've a feeling it's about that time that MtG needs a bit more color pie exploration. This stuff happens every so often, effects get shuffled around. Sometimes it makes sense flavor wise so it's easy to justify it to folks who don't get design necessities, sometimes it's far less subtle and just needs to be done. Happened with a lot of mechanics, really, and it's rather a good thing that it does happen.
---
So here's two suggestions that would likely impact Pauper, can be justified flavor wise and are in line with previous such effect shuffles and expansions:
Idea 1: Give green limited reanimation. Green's been a getting variety of Raise Dead effects lately ("lately" from the perspective of an Eldrazi) but what it could use is an Unearth. Sure, Unearth itself is one of those what-were-they-smoking crazy strong commons from Saga block, so the green variant would obviously have to be less powerful. For example it could return only a 2cc dude for one G, or even only a mono-green 2cc dude for one G.
Flavor and color pie wise, Black and Green fiddle with the graveyard anyway, and regrowing / revitalizing things is very easy to immagine in green. You could justify the limited scope and power of such an effect in green because green can easily replace/patch together a small thing, while it couldn't reanimate something huge because getting huge takes growth and all that good green philosophy stuff. Seedlings are dime a dozen, ancient oaks are gone when they topple, I could come up with flavor texts for such green cards for days. It could also make for a nice thing to associate with Dryads to flesh them out (not as a tribe necessarily, but as a motiff).
Mechanically there's room for several iterations - you can make a weak one cost 2 mana, you could make one of them create a token that's a copy of something small in your yard, whathave you. And the reason for this is that this specific effect would help green keep specific threats / roleplayers on board somewhat through heavy removal, and it would help stompy, and it would certainly help madness decks get Mongrel back after it instantly eats removal. Unearth has the ability to make something cost you more when you cast it then it costs to reanimate it, which helps combat enemy card advantage through redundancy. It'd be strong, sure, but if splashing was easier in Pauper a lot of green decks would be running Unearth for sure and likely will be running it if they ever give us a better common mana base, so actually giving green an Unearth or two might not be a bad idea at all.
It's a powerful effect, to be sure, and there's plenty of silly strong things that could be done and become routine with even a less powerful green unearth but I believe it'd be quite worth it.
Idea 2: Give Black a Rampant Growth, but one which can only fetch basic swamps. Black is already running 2-mana card draw wherever it can, mostly to dig for lands, and it's spells and threats are significantly more expensive than anyone else's threats or answers while not necessarily being that much more powerful. Or rather, black needs to spend turns and mana digging for lands anyway, and it also has to survive long enough to get to 5-6 mana for haymakers, which doesn't really work out in practice often engouh. Being able to ramp a land on turn 2 would mean a lot to mono-black.
It's funny when you think about it - Sign in Blood and Night's Whisper are crazy powerful card draw, likely the most powerful in Pauper and closer to Ancestral Recall than blue ever gets. But black would actually dump them for a rampant growth which fetches a basic swamp into play if it could. It's a bit like how Demonic Tutor somehow always ends up looking for a land
Flavor-wise both black and green are about growth and spreading around, just for different reasons (to green growth is an end and a purpose unto itself, for black it's a means to an end and a result of being competitive towards anything around it). "Spreading the swamp" or "Spreading Corruption" is very easy to grok as a black thing, and as long as it's really limited in what it can get you (never anything other than a basic swamp) it'd be ok in that respect. And there's even precedent, but it costs 2BB to play, and black really needs to be doing other things with 4 lands in play and can't spend all of its mana on turn 4 (or even turn 3 for that matter) fetching that swamp. It needs one earlier to be able to play it's things while it digs / grinds to it's fifth or sixth land.
---
There, if WotC feels like shaking things up a bit, and the power of these effects (especially the first one) is not that big of an issue, those cards would certainly see play. If they're into printing more impactful commons and supporting Pauper, these things would be a godsend.