Also, don't compare gifts to tooth and nail. Gifts is infinitely more flexible and is capable of searching for any combo in the game.
Oh? Why not painter's servant? There are plenty of fun, nonbroken things you can do with a deck all of the same color.
And yes, I will compare Gifts to Tooth and Nail. Gifts is a blue instant, cheaper by 5 mana, and can tutor for any cards, but they both fit the criteria of "card that can singlehandedly fetch a game-winning combo and win."
Tooth and Nail is totally awesome if it isn't used for a combo. For this reason, it wont be banned. I believe that the people in the RC are smart enough to realize this.
Yeah, that's definitely true. I'm not saying I want it banned personally, just that, like Sol Ring, it probably should be.
Sounds like you just don't like tooth and nail when there are other cards that outright win the same way. If anything all this shows is that tooth and nail can be a fun card that doesn't need to be build around to be useful where as primal surge and ad nauseam do. At the end of the day, tooth and nail becomes anti-climactic when that player decides to run known combo pieces. If you're in a combo meta... you don't care. If you're not in a combo meta, you shouldn't be playing with combo. I don't get what's so hard to understand. Does my play group allow combo? Yes or no? If yes, run combo pieces, if no, don't.......
If you're worried about bullies trolling random games with tooth and nail and combos.... that's not what the banlist is for, it wont fix bullying and wont stop them from trolling and griefing other players with different strategies.
From the banned list update of July 2009:
GIFTS UNGIVEN
We know that this will raise a great cry from some players, but as we previously noted, Gifts is simply broken (especially at the 3U cost and the fact that it's an Instant). The ability to tutor for two combo pieces and two ways to recur them generally makes this a one-card game-ender, which we feel is completely contrary to the EDH vision.
(emphasis mine)
According to your reasoning, there's no reason to ban Painter's Servant, Time Vault, Protean Hulk, or Gifts Ungiven. After all, you're either in a combo playgroup or a noncombo playgroup, right?
They do have prior set up: You built the damn deck.
Look, if you can set up your deck to win with Ad Nauseam or Primal Surge, I can respect that. That means that you took care building your deck, and limited yourself (e.g., by not playing instants and sorceries) in order to achieve a powerful effect with one card. "Prior setup" with Tooth and Nail means throwing in one or two cards so you can go "lulz combo win." Big difference.
Even ignoring how contrived your example is, at that game state, I'd thank someone for ending the game on the spot so we could shuffle up and play again because some idiot used Planar Cleansing without a win condition of his own ready to go.
Wait, what? You'd scoop if someone cleared the board? I hope no one plays Nevinyrral's Disk in your meta...
@Raguel: Trust me, I love using T&N to get out awesome beaters as much as the next guy, but right now the card falls into the same category as Gifts Ungiven.
Stranglehold, Mindlock Orb, Propaganda, Lightmine Field, Humility, well timed spot removal, counterspell, and any other number of things stop this win from happening. This is not anticlimactic.
Right, but if nobody happens to have one of those on hand, the game is quite simply over. Cards that singelhandedly win the game on the turn they're cast, without prior setup, sounds like the definition of anticlimactic to me.
Case in point: let's say the state of the game is like this.
Everyone has 12 lands. Nothing else is on the board. (Perhaps a Planar Cleansing just resolved; doesn't really matter.)
Your opponents are tapped out. You have no hand or graveyard. Everyone has 40 life.
Now, how many cards can you name that will win you the game if you topdeck them? Without using more than, say, 5 cards in your library?
Yes, this is obviously a contrived example, but I just want to showcase how little setup is required to simply pull a win out of your a%$ with Tooth and Nail.
I'm starting to feel gaea's cradle and metalworker are comparable (a bit) because many on here use wipes/sweepers as criteria for the decreased power of Gaea's cradle. How is a creature , not tapping instantly, producing colorless instead of green and the fact that your deck needs to be build around him to work.. banned instead of the cradle?
Seems like they're both stopped on the same way
Seems like they both ramp equally (subjective)
And it seems like not tapping for blue is a factor here.
Yeah, it does seem to me that unbanning Rofellos but keeping Metalworker in the brig seems a bit unjust. Metalworker, after all, requires that you keep artifacts in hand to be able to generate mana, which means that they're not making mana themselves. With being the most vulnerable type of card (artifact creature), costing 3, and having summoning sickness, he hardly seems overpowered anymore.
How can a social format be dominated by anything? I'm serious, that argument is beyond silly. You're arguing a card on the same power level of Mana Crypt and Sol Ring will warp an already broken format.
The ban list does not cater to power concerns. And that is all that you are arguing.
Academy has 0 effect on the EDH community as a whole. And it fails at sending a message (the ONLY reason it's on the list). So logically, it no longer belongs on it.
Well, I'll admit, you do have a point. I looked up the Banned List Philosophy Document, and "competitive balance" is amongst the things they do not ban cards for.
However, here's an excerpt of the things they do take into account:
Quote from Banned List Philosophy Document »
There are several criteria that carry weight in Rules Committee discussions on individual cards. It is sometimes the intersection of these criteria that lead a card to be banned, not a single unified rule. Common criteria include:
* Warps The Format Strategically. Commander decks are about variety, and if a strategy becomes sufficiently omnipresent that the games become very similar even across different playgroups, we may need to try to rein in the presence of that deck.
* Produces Too Much Mana Too Quickly. Commander is a format about epic plays, but the Turn 10 epic play happening on Turn 3 is deflating. Limited acceleration is good, but we don’t want the format to turn into “Who can go off earliest,” so we rein in large quantities of early mana.
It's that first point I've been worried about. I don't know about you, but I see enough artifact combo decks as it is in my meta; the last thing I need is for the Spikes of my shop to start switching from Ghave, Guru of Spores to Arcum Dagsson.
EDIT: Ah, that's another thing - supporting interactive decks. In my experience, I can interact a lot more with the creature deck running Cradle than the artifact deck running Academy.
How does an already oppressive blue combo deck become more degenerate? Decks that will abuse Academy are already "unfair". Banning Academy does nothing to stop them.
...
How does an oppressive blue combo deck become more degenerate? BY GIVING IT A BUNCH OF U, THAT'S HOW! Academy was banned precisely to stop those decks because they were dominating the format!
I'm going to ask again. Does Academy lead to bad games IN A WAY THAT ALREADY DOESN'T EXIST. And does it do this to a large number of players. From everything I've seen in EDH the answer is an emphatic no to both. And to me, that means it does not belong on the list.
YES! Yes it does! And Gaea's Cradle DOES NOT! That's what I've been saying this whole time. "Degenerate is degenerate" isn't an argument, it's a tautology.
Look, the banned list has to balance the format, and make sure each type of deck is getting a fair representation. That's why they banned Jace when Cawblade was completely dominating the format, and it's why Tolarian Academy is banned. If blue can do what green does better than green, why play green at all? Leave Cradle in green, and now people have a reason to play it!
Please note that you're already in two colors to do that. Academy and Cradle work with one. I'm not sure how much of a difference that makes.
See, this is exactly what I was saying! Giving G/W Enchantments a bunch of extra white mana isn't nearly as hazardous to the format as giving Mono U Artifacts a bunch of extra blue! You simply can't clump the two together.
You forgot Humility and Kismet/Frozen Aether or anything that prevents attacks or Spike Weaver or Fog or a hundred other things.
Even if it does win you the game every time it resolves, so what? They don't ban cards based on "it wins the game."
Actually...
...They tend to be anticlimactic wins out of nowhere, unexpected combos that end an otherwise enjoyable game...
...they kind of do. Tooth and Nail is literally a one-card combo, and most of those are banned. It's not like you've set up the graveyards for a game-winning Living Death, or plucked every basic land from your deck and added Narcomoeba and Dread Return to combo off (though Hermit Druid decks in and of themselves are pretty busted, at least you have to sculpt your deck around it).
So we need to ban every card that "wins the game when it resolves" ever?
Omniscience, Dream Halls, Enter the Infinite, Living Death, Patriarch's Bidding, Hermit Druid, Ad Nauseam ...
I think you're misunderstanding that piece of the philosophy. That rule was made for things like Biorhythm and Worldfire and Sundering Titan.
Those things are very powerful cards, and if you've dedicated your deck to it and/or carefully set up the board state, are indeed likely to win you the game if they resolve.
Tooth and Nail is different. All I need is two cards in my deck - say, Deceiver Exarch and Kiki Jiki - and if Tooth and Nail resolves, GG. Doesn't matter what's on the board, except maybe Torpor Orb, but then of course I can choose to pull out Blightsteel Colossus and Hellraiser Goblin, or any number of other things. If your opponents don't have removal, it wins you the game in a vacuum, which arguably makes it better than Biorhythm or Coalition Victory.
This works assuming mono colored decks. What about G/X decks that abuse cradle? Or how about that Academy is strongest in Mono-U. Yes, Academy is stronger, but that doesn't mean Cradle isn't broken as well. Saying "Well green makes mana anyway" doesn't take away from the absurdity that is Cradle and nor does "Blue doesn't produce fast mana" make Academy more busted.
I disagree - color restrictions are important considerations. If green wants creature removal besides Beast Within and "fight" effects, it either has to opt for expensive artifacts (Brittle Effigy, Duplicant) or splash another color, with all the benefits and drawbacks of doing that. If green were as good at creature removal or revival as black, it would start to get overpowered; the same is true for if blue were as good at colored mana generation as green.
Now, you make a good point with G/X decks. "Can't a U/G deck with Cradle abuse Time Stretch, etc. just as much as mono U can abuse Academy?" Perhaps, but now you've got to a) have a UG general instead of Azami or Erayo, and b) you've dedicated yourself to a strategy involving playing lots of creatures.
Splashing green and playing lots of creatures is in itself a cost, one that Tolarian Academy lacks. Do G/X creature decks use Cradle to dominate the format? You might say yes, and that would be its own argument - I'm not saying that Cradle does or does not belong on the ban list based on its own merits and restrictions. However, if Academy were unbanned, would mono-U lists use it to dominate the format? That, I think we can agree, is a bit more likely. The point is, each card is in different colors, generates different mana based on different conditions, and goes in very different decks; you can't say that they should both be banned or not together.
PS: Personally, I agree that Tooth and Nail deserves a ban. Much as my timmy side likes cheating multiple fatties into play, letting one card fetch any number of game-winning combos to the board is pretty overpowered.
I agree with the basics of your argument. However, at the end of the day, EDH is Legacy on some sort of performance enhancing drugs. Colors can do what is not "in their pie" simply because of the card pool allowed. If Academy can get slammed for producing blue then is black imbalanced for having Gate to Phyrexia? I know this isn't exactly on point but I think you get it. It boils down to accepting that Cradle AND Academy are WAY WAY WAY too strong for CURRNT color pie. So using that argument really doesn't matter. We don't use "color intent" for banning cards.
See, that's the thing, though - Gate to Phyrexia is pretty poor compared to, say, Sylvan Primordial. What I'm saying is this: giving a green deck focused on making creatures (else Cradle wouldn't be a problem anyway) a lot of green mana is far less disruptive than giving a blue deck that likes to play artifacts a ton of extra blue mana. Even if a green creature deck already has a bunch of creatures out and plays Cradle, it's not going to be as bad as if a blue deck laden with counterspells drops Academy starts casting Time Stretches and draw spells.
Blue is already the most powerful color in EDH, even with its limited colored mana generation capacity. Allowing a card that gives half of all blue decks access to degenerate mana acceleration for playing artifacts is simply more powerful in the format than giving half of all green decks a card that makes ridiculous amounts of mana based on creatures, because green does a pretty good job at doing that anyway.
"Having counterspells" is 100% NOT a criteria for banning things. Your argument says the blue version is unfair due to a specific situation and at the same time say the green one is balanced due to a different specific situation. This is cognitive dissonance at its finest.
Fine, fine, I'll elaborate. I meant that as a case study, but I believe it holds in general, too.
The thing is, as we said before:
Seriously, though, I agree. The banlist criteria here is "too much mana, too fast." A blue deck full of mana rocks and cheap artifacts is not going to produce any more blue mana with Academy than a green deck full of mana dorks and cheap creatures can produce green with Gaea's Cradle. If the criteria met is "too much mana, too fast," then GC needs to go.
One of these things is not like the other. Green is already excellent at producing mana; getting out lots of creatures and lands, and using mana to make more creatures and lands, is smack dab in the middle of Green's color pie. Earthcraft, Joraga Treespeaker, Citanul Hierophants, Druid's Repository, Elvish Archdruid - though Cradle may be more powerful than most of these, green has a wide variety of ways to use creatures to generate mana.
Now, what can green do with this abundance of G it's got? Well, a lot of things, it's true. But most green manasinks will either a) get you more creatures or b) get you more mana. Sure, you could probably play Tooth and Nail and fetch a game-winning combo, but the extra G won't help a ton in protecting that combo, and there are faster ways to get to T&N anyway.
Meanwhile, let's look at blue. How many cards are there that let you use lots of artifacts to generate blue, or that generate a lot of U at once? High Tide comes to mind, as does Clock of Omens, but one is a ritual and the other is usually not terribly efficient. Blinkmoth Infusion, maybe, but it still doesn't necessarily help you get that much U. A blue deck dropping a lot of artifacts can ramp about as quickly as a green deck dropping a bunch of mana elves or fetching lands, but is still typically limited by their supply of U. Academy's ability to add UUUU... to your mana pool is not something blue traditionally has access to.
And here's the main problem: Blue X cards tend to be much more gamebreaking than Green X cards, because the game developers expect Green to have more mana than Blue. There's a reason Sphinx's Revelation and Blue Sun's Zenith see more play than Strength of the Tajuruu and Wolfrbiar Elemental - the same reason Ancestral Recall is better than Giant Growth. Giving blue a lot of U is a lot more disruptive than giving green a lot of G. Academy and Cradle may look very similar on paper, but in practice one is a lot more powerful and hazardous to the health of the format than the other.
The thing is, though, that when green finds Cradle, puts a bunch of creatures on the board, and generates a bunch of mana, you can wrath and they go back to square 0. On the other hand, blue can drop a bunch of artifacts, each of which produce mana on the turn they're cast, and then if you put an artifact sweeper in your deck and have it in hand and can cast it, they can just counterspell it with their new blue mana source. Then next turn they use any of a dozen ways to refill their hand with all this blue and colorless mana, which finds them more mana artifacts and counterspells...
They're both guilty of "too much mana too fast," but one is way easier to deal with than the other.
I think my favorite would have to be Goblin Flectomancer. I love the mad scientist Izzet, and the art, name, mechanics, and flavor text really come together to embody them.
Oh? Why not painter's servant? There are plenty of fun, nonbroken things you can do with a deck all of the same color.
And yes, I will compare Gifts to Tooth and Nail. Gifts is a blue instant, cheaper by 5 mana, and can tutor for any cards, but they both fit the criteria of "card that can singlehandedly fetch a game-winning combo and win."
Yeah, that's definitely true. I'm not saying I want it banned personally, just that, like Sol Ring, it probably should be.
From the banned list update of July 2009:
(emphasis mine)
According to your reasoning, there's no reason to ban Painter's Servant, Time Vault, Protean Hulk, or Gifts Ungiven. After all, you're either in a combo playgroup or a noncombo playgroup, right?
Look, if you can set up your deck to win with Ad Nauseam or Primal Surge, I can respect that. That means that you took care building your deck, and limited yourself (e.g., by not playing instants and sorceries) in order to achieve a powerful effect with one card. "Prior setup" with Tooth and Nail means throwing in one or two cards so you can go "lulz combo win." Big difference.
Wait, what? You'd scoop if someone cleared the board? I hope no one plays Nevinyrral's Disk in your meta...
@Raguel: Trust me, I love using T&N to get out awesome beaters as much as the next guy, but right now the card falls into the same category as Gifts Ungiven.
Right, but if nobody happens to have one of those on hand, the game is quite simply over. Cards that singelhandedly win the game on the turn they're cast, without prior setup, sounds like the definition of anticlimactic to me.
Case in point: let's say the state of the game is like this.
Everyone has 12 lands. Nothing else is on the board. (Perhaps a Planar Cleansing just resolved; doesn't really matter.)
Your opponents are tapped out. You have no hand or graveyard. Everyone has 40 life.
Now, how many cards can you name that will win you the game if you topdeck them? Without using more than, say, 5 cards in your library?
Yes, this is obviously a contrived example, but I just want to showcase how little setup is required to simply pull a win out of your a%$ with Tooth and Nail.
Yeah, it does seem to me that unbanning Rofellos but keeping Metalworker in the brig seems a bit unjust. Metalworker, after all, requires that you keep artifacts in hand to be able to generate mana, which means that they're not making mana themselves. With being the most vulnerable type of card (artifact creature), costing 3, and having summoning sickness, he hardly seems overpowered anymore.
Well, I'll admit, you do have a point. I looked up the Banned List Philosophy Document, and "competitive balance" is amongst the things they do not ban cards for.
However, here's an excerpt of the things they do take into account:
It's that first point I've been worried about. I don't know about you, but I see enough artifact combo decks as it is in my meta; the last thing I need is for the Spikes of my shop to start switching from Ghave, Guru of Spores to Arcum Dagsson.
EDIT: Ah, that's another thing - supporting interactive decks. In my experience, I can interact a lot more with the creature deck running Cradle than the artifact deck running Academy.
...
How does an oppressive blue combo deck become more degenerate? BY GIVING IT A BUNCH OF U, THAT'S HOW! Academy was banned precisely to stop those decks because they were dominating the format!
YES! Yes it does! And Gaea's Cradle DOES NOT! That's what I've been saying this whole time. "Degenerate is degenerate" isn't an argument, it's a tautology.
Look, the banned list has to balance the format, and make sure each type of deck is getting a fair representation. That's why they banned Jace when Cawblade was completely dominating the format, and it's why Tolarian Academy is banned. If blue can do what green does better than green, why play green at all? Leave Cradle in green, and now people have a reason to play it!
See, this is exactly what I was saying! Giving G/W Enchantments a bunch of extra white mana isn't nearly as hazardous to the format as giving Mono U Artifacts a bunch of extra blue! You simply can't clump the two together.
Actually...
...they kind of do. Tooth and Nail is literally a one-card combo, and most of those are banned. It's not like you've set up the graveyards for a game-winning Living Death, or plucked every basic land from your deck and added Narcomoeba and Dread Return to combo off (though Hermit Druid decks in and of themselves are pretty busted, at least you have to sculpt your deck around it).
Those things are very powerful cards, and if you've dedicated your deck to it and/or carefully set up the board state, are indeed likely to win you the game if they resolve.
Tooth and Nail is different. All I need is two cards in my deck - say, Deceiver Exarch and Kiki Jiki - and if Tooth and Nail resolves, GG. Doesn't matter what's on the board, except maybe Torpor Orb, but then of course I can choose to pull out Blightsteel Colossus and Hellraiser Goblin, or any number of other things. If your opponents don't have removal, it wins you the game in a vacuum, which arguably makes it better than Biorhythm or Coalition Victory.
I disagree - color restrictions are important considerations. If green wants creature removal besides Beast Within and "fight" effects, it either has to opt for expensive artifacts (Brittle Effigy, Duplicant) or splash another color, with all the benefits and drawbacks of doing that. If green were as good at creature removal or revival as black, it would start to get overpowered; the same is true for if blue were as good at colored mana generation as green.
Now, you make a good point with G/X decks. "Can't a U/G deck with Cradle abuse Time Stretch, etc. just as much as mono U can abuse Academy?" Perhaps, but now you've got to a) have a UG general instead of Azami or Erayo, and b) you've dedicated yourself to a strategy involving playing lots of creatures.
Splashing green and playing lots of creatures is in itself a cost, one that Tolarian Academy lacks. Do G/X creature decks use Cradle to dominate the format? You might say yes, and that would be its own argument - I'm not saying that Cradle does or does not belong on the ban list based on its own merits and restrictions. However, if Academy were unbanned, would mono-U lists use it to dominate the format? That, I think we can agree, is a bit more likely. The point is, each card is in different colors, generates different mana based on different conditions, and goes in very different decks; you can't say that they should both be banned or not together.
PS: Personally, I agree that Tooth and Nail deserves a ban. Much as my timmy side likes cheating multiple fatties into play, letting one card fetch any number of game-winning combos to the board is pretty overpowered.
See, that's the thing, though - Gate to Phyrexia is pretty poor compared to, say, Sylvan Primordial. What I'm saying is this: giving a green deck focused on making creatures (else Cradle wouldn't be a problem anyway) a lot of green mana is far less disruptive than giving a blue deck that likes to play artifacts a ton of extra blue mana. Even if a green creature deck already has a bunch of creatures out and plays Cradle, it's not going to be as bad as if a blue deck laden with counterspells drops Academy starts casting Time Stretches and draw spells.
Blue is already the most powerful color in EDH, even with its limited colored mana generation capacity. Allowing a card that gives half of all blue decks access to degenerate mana acceleration for playing artifacts is simply more powerful in the format than giving half of all green decks a card that makes ridiculous amounts of mana based on creatures, because green does a pretty good job at doing that anyway.
Fine, fine, I'll elaborate. I meant that as a case study, but I believe it holds in general, too.
The thing is, as we said before:
One of these things is not like the other. Green is already excellent at producing mana; getting out lots of creatures and lands, and using mana to make more creatures and lands, is smack dab in the middle of Green's color pie. Earthcraft, Joraga Treespeaker, Citanul Hierophants, Druid's Repository, Elvish Archdruid - though Cradle may be more powerful than most of these, green has a wide variety of ways to use creatures to generate mana.
Now, what can green do with this abundance of G it's got? Well, a lot of things, it's true. But most green manasinks will either a) get you more creatures or b) get you more mana. Sure, you could probably play Tooth and Nail and fetch a game-winning combo, but the extra G won't help a ton in protecting that combo, and there are faster ways to get to T&N anyway.
Meanwhile, let's look at blue. How many cards are there that let you use lots of artifacts to generate blue, or that generate a lot of U at once? High Tide comes to mind, as does Clock of Omens, but one is a ritual and the other is usually not terribly efficient. Blinkmoth Infusion, maybe, but it still doesn't necessarily help you get that much U. A blue deck dropping a lot of artifacts can ramp about as quickly as a green deck dropping a bunch of mana elves or fetching lands, but is still typically limited by their supply of U. Academy's ability to add UUUU... to your mana pool is not something blue traditionally has access to.
And here's the main problem: Blue X cards tend to be much more gamebreaking than Green X cards, because the game developers expect Green to have more mana than Blue. There's a reason Sphinx's Revelation and Blue Sun's Zenith see more play than Strength of the Tajuruu and Wolfrbiar Elemental - the same reason Ancestral Recall is better than Giant Growth. Giving blue a lot of U is a lot more disruptive than giving green a lot of G. Academy and Cradle may look very similar on paper, but in practice one is a lot more powerful and hazardous to the health of the format than the other.
They're both guilty of "too much mana too fast," but one is way easier to deal with than the other.