2. The idea that creature based decks should not also run ways to deal with a board gone not in their favor is a break of logical thinking of the utmost degree. Again if you choose not to bring answers for a problem the problem getting out of hand against your stuff is not the fault of the problem it is the fault of your construction, contingency plans are a good thing. Also at least 3 of the cards are not board wipes (Duplicant, Spine, Monolith) so there are options.
But a deck playing contingency plans is a different deck than one not playing them. Making changes like that is transforming the deck into something else, something the owner might not be so interested in playing. If someone can get away with playing a deck without colorless removal or board wipes, why the hell not? The way you keep placing fault, your focus is clearly on the "winning the game" aspect, and it doesn't have to be. I'm willing to bet that 90% of EDH players could throw together a deck that is more effective at winning than their favorite deck for less than 100 dollars. It's not always about being effective, it's not always about playing all the answers, sometimes it's about playing what you want to play.
3. I don't know where you play but every single EDH deck I play against / make has one thing in common, they all run the best instant speed removal they can get their hands on, and that number obviously fluctuates based on colors but in a 4 player game the idea that there isn't enough spot removal is quite frankly INSANE to me on a large level.
And if you enjoy that sort of game, have fun with it. I've played with a half dozen different groups. I've played with people where every deck had 10x spot removal and 5x board wipe. I built my decks differently with them than I do in a different playgroup where I've been in 4 player games where the only creature removal all game was my Seismic Assault. I wasn't a big fan of the removal heavy group, and in retrospect, a lot of that group has since sworn off the format. But it is not difficult to reverse cold war a group of players, to deliberately play decks with less nuclear bombs and format staples, impress people with even mediocre levels of success playing screwball strategies, and inspire players to try something different than building directly to answer each other.
And the best possible situation is where you get the group of players so familiar with each others' decks that you end up with tiers of power that people can swap out decks to maintain the balance of the table such that one game can be counterspell wars in a vicious fight for supremacy and the next game can be the same 4 people all trying to build Rube Goldburg machines on the same table. Which is frankly why if I were designing the banlist, I would unban anything that's banned for it's abuse potential (Braids, Limited Resources, Erayo, etc.) because the people building Rube Goldburg machines don't want to play those cards and can self-regulate them out while people playing competitively are already playing equally degenerate things, and I would ban more things that are pure value (sol ring, mana crypt, really efficient tutors) since they provide such undeniable value regardless of your strategy and give unbalanced advantage to whoever happens to draw them.
I play both, and I don't feel like I've ever had one feel dead in hand.
Also, be careful with Storm Cauldron. It works just fine, but don't play it when someone can make mega mana with a single Cabal Caffers or Gaea's Cradle, because then they can tap for 10, bounce the land, play the land, tap for 10, bounce the land, play the land, tap the land, have 30 mana out of nowhere.
Also, Sapphire Medallion play's really well with the offering mechanic, effectively using a creature as a ritual to get patron out on 5 mana.
I don't think you should assume the reason in which people want to include a card in their decks.
I guess my answer to that is two fold.
1) The EDH ban list is not something to look at if you are playing 1v1
2) There is a similar situation in that RB or R or B decks have the exact same list of cards to deal with enchantments (red having 2 extra in Zealous Conscripts and Chaos Warp).
Now every single person who plays a deck that is those Combinations does not come out and say people should not play Enchantments that ruin their day they plan for the fact that enchantments are strong against the type of deck they play and PLAY ANSWERS.
Banning disruption that is easily removed is flawed because planning for eventualities is part of deck building. Also the phenomenon you are describing of people playing card A and then the group responding by increasing the amount of something else which then the first person responds in kind is known as healthy progression of a format where if a threat comes up there are answers that can be tried to deal with it.
And yes is if you run those cards and don't draw into them than welcome to a 100 card singleton format, there will always be a level of randomness in this game and therefore there will always be games where one player or strategy runs away with things.
That's the healthy progression of a competitive format, and can be a perfectly healthy playgroup, but it doesn't have to be. People can play EDH perpetually without adjusting their decks to answer one another so long as the power levels are comparable. For example, I play with a guy who plays almost exclusively Karn, Silver Golem. If I want to adjust my decks to properly handle his threats, I can just start playing Wave of Vitriol and literally remove him from the game with one spell. Frankly, that would be worse than playing Iona against a mono-colored deck. But I don't do that because removing him from the game with a single card would be outstandingly mean-spirited. His only real response to that spell would be play a different deck. And a mono-green stompy deck's answer to Iona is to play things like O-stone and O-stone accessories, and when you're packing your mono-green stompy deck with "destroy all creatures," you may as well be playing an entirely different deck.
If EDH is not the format where you can try to play something with known competitive weaknesses and politely request that your friends don't deliberately exploit them, then there really is no such thing as casual magic. Luckily, situations like that happen all the time. For a long time, I owned a Hokori, Dust Drinker deck, and I gladly agreed to not play with it when people didn't want to deal with it. Could they beat me with big stacks of instant speed removal? Absolutely. Did they want to play magic that way? No. If the people you're playing with don't want you locking people out of games with Iona, don't lock people out of games with Iona.
You quoted the post, so I know you saw me say that I don't think Iona should be banned. If you're playing against decks that consistently answer her, then she isn't a problem, go ahead and play with her. What I'm saying is that if you find yourself playing against decks that can't consistently answer her and she removes people from games with a single card, you should consider voluntarily taking her out rather than forcing everyone else to make major deck changes to deal with one specific creature in your deck.
I have 40 lands in mine not including glacial chasm. It is really cheap. I haven't spent any money to get any of the pricey good stuff, so the total value of the deck by my estimation is probably like 60 bucks. Of course, your deck will likely be a bit better and more expensive since you're planning and building the deck, where mine came about because I got a bunch of snakes, moonfolk, goblins, rats, and foxes and tossed together a deck for each patron without purchasing any support cards I didn't already own. I still never got an Archangel of Thune for Patron of the Kitsune.
And yeah, wizard tribal is built in. Azami, Lady of Scrolls is a good inclusion. You might even be able to respond to a board wipe by bouncing all of your moonfolk with Riptide Laboratory bounced up and down.
The key piece you want is Amulet of Vigor. It turns Patron and a handful of land into mega ramp right away, and as long as you aren't playing mana doublers, it's still pretty easy to avoid infinite combos. Obviously drawing lots of card is good because you can play all of the lands. Patron can turn Thawing Glaciers into actual land ramp. Throw in the amulet and it becomes rather aggressive ramp. This all goes well with feeding into a big Blue Sun's Zenith which gives you even more lands to toss down with Patron.
Utility lands or etb life gain lands are fun with Patron and the moonfolk. Don't mind me folks, I'm just using Patron and Meloku the Clouded Mirror to bounce this Radiant Fountain up and down. I have only 1 mana open, and it's not like blue can play fog, right? It's a good thing I managed to survive that attack, otherwise I couldn't copy this kicked Rite of Replication 20 times with Uyo, Silent Prophet.
There are more too, all I am saying is that if you do not run enough answers you shouldn't be able to complain if a card easily removed by those answers ruins your game plan.
Building a deck is a much your cards working together as it is disruption for your opponents and when choosing to make a single color deck the weakness inherent should be front of mind.
Ok, so now we're in this position. Someone I'm playing with packs Iona, and I'm playing mono-colored. I get blown out by Iona a couple times, so adjustments must be made. So I pack my deck with a few of these things you mentioned. So he's getting blown out because he can't stick things. Now he has to play through my answers, so he starts playing a suite of sac outlets and recursion so that I can't keep her gone, so then I have to start playing graveyard hate to kill his recursion and suddenly we have spent a lot of time, effort, and money crafting our decks in the best possible way to prevent the other person from succeeding at playing magic the gathering.
OR he can take out Iona, and we can keep our decks largely the same as we originally intended them to be rather than forgoing many cards we really want to play with because we needed the deck space for all the broad answers to narrow problems we've been forced to use so that nobody loses to a single card.
I think one of those situations is preferable, and I think it's up to the person playing Iona to realize the effect playing her will have on the meta. Either a) the other players will shift to answer her, and the consequence will be everyone, the Iona player included, having a more difficult time doing what they want and being forced to forgo screwball cards for more of the most played cards in the format, or b) the other players not adjusting their decks to deal with her because that isn't the game they want to play, and everyone continues playing what they want except for the occasional game where Iona locks the board on someone followed by a sarcastic round of "great job, you really earned that win."
Iona is a pretty ***** card in general too, like all it is normally good for is forcing removal out of hands.
It's almost like the only reason to include the card in a deck is because if it becomes one on one with a mono-colored deck, it basically instant wins.
On an unrelated note, I finally just bought a Rabblemaster and Price, and the cards came in today. So those are going in. I also got a WPN Hellspark (I don't think he's good enough in the two drops) and an FNM Tec Edge (if I played another colourless, Tec Edge would be the choice).
I'm not certain you're into such things, but that Breath of Fury I mentioned turns from spamming a few extra combat steps into spamming infinite combat steps if you have a Goblin Rabblemaster down and can swing uninhibited.
Are you saying your mono colored deck doesn't run a colorless answer or that every single one under the sun already doesn't
Because ability to deal with eventualities is step 2 or 3 when I build any edh deck ESPECIALLY mono-colored because the draw backs are far more steep
Not every mono-colored deck runs colorless answers to creatures. When building a deck with more ambition than cookie-cutter good stuff, there's not guaranteed to be room for Duplicant in every deck. I skimmed the mono-colored decks on the first page of the 2-player forum, and only 4 of the 10 mono-colored decks there had a way to remove Iona once she lands. Then I skimmed the first page of the multiplayer forum, and found colorless answers in 7 of 13. So overall, that's less than half, 11 of 23 decks. Of the 11 decks with colorless answers, 3 were Karn planeswalker and 5 were Duplicant. Only one deck had multiple colorless answers.
But lets be honest, chances are painfully slim they have those answers when Iona hits. Counterspells are the only real answer any of these decks had other than "Really? Scoop." I'm not saying that Iona should be banned. I'm saying people should voluntarily not play it. Because the 12 decks were perfectly right in not taking away from their own gameplan just to have removal for one particular thing. One cannot assemble interplanetary death rays to win with while being able to answer every narrow situation. If someone is insistent on playing Iona against mono-colored decks, they only do themselves a disservice by forcing their friends to pack their decks with answers to her so that nobody gets to have any fun.
Dromar is bad because he force-bounces himself, and Crosis is bad because he's still a clunky Nicol Bolas. Treva is okay, and Rith is pretty solid. Darigaaz is just bad, because even if you hit someone with a full grip of seven cards, three swings still isn't lethal (at 39 damage), and 4 swings from any 6-power general is already lethal.
Okay. IMO, for a card to be noteworthy with Painter's Servant, it must be:
1) Not an infinite combo or other prison piece
2) Not something that Darkest Hour or Shifting Sky can accomplish
3) Not something that can be replicated easily by an existing card
4) Actually strong enough to want to do.
Most of the cards on these lists don't fit those criteria. About the only things I'd put on there are Reap, Compost, Oona, Queen of the Fae, Chaotic Backlash, and maybe a couple of the Ravnica dudes.
There's 11 generals right there genuinely worth considering it with that fit your criteria. Not to mention, they're cards people more likely want to play than most of what you're listing as grief. It's rare I see Deathgrip or Lifeforce, and just about nobody is playing Tidal Control, Gloom, Chill, Anarchy, or Omen of Fire. And if they wanted to, they'd just play Nether Void or Jokulhaups.
As a 4/4 for four, it is well costed. On top of that it is a fine mana sink to generate damage-over-time (and double the blaze counters with a SoFaF). It isn't a terrible choice for a top end (obv it isn't Stormbreath or Purphoros, but they can't all be that).
Worst case: They use their Doom Blade on this and make my Stormbreath good. Best case? They misinterpret it's power level and they can't get out from under the Blaze counters.
But that sounds like you're planning the long game when otherwise the top of your curve is devoted to blasting people's faces off. Reading the thread, given the "all-in" aspect, I was expecting the 4 slot to have something like Furnace of Rath or Breath of Fury that multiply your output and was surprised at that one instance of slow burn.
So platinum angel or gaddock teeg are griefer cards because they make it so your opponent "can't" do something? What you bring up is not griefing, it's called getting blown out and having your strategy countered. It happens.
Countering the strategy of playing mono-colored is silly in a format where using a certain general makes it so you aren't allowed to play other colors, but my point still stands. Iona is not some utility thing meant to counter a strategy. People don't play Iona to stop counterspells like Grand Abolisher number 2. Iona costs 9 mana, it's a finisher, it just finishes by locking people out of the game instead of killing them. Gaddock Teeg is played to counter strategies. It comes down early and punishes people for going too deep into a certain style of play. It's still pretty miserable to play against, but it is played to gain advantage over people, not just win the game through complete denial.
Frankly, I'd argue that Platinum Angel is a griefer card. It does nothing to advance your board unless a 4/4 flyer is enough to end the game. All it does is draw out a game needlessly on the off chance your opponents can't kill it. But I don't think I have ever played against a Platinum Angel anyway, so clearly it isn't very good at its job.
Suppose Painter's + Iona isn't really a problem and therefore Painter's can be unbanned, or that Painter's + Iona is a problem, but only because Iona is a problem and you would prefer to see her banned so Painter can be unbanned.
What do you use Painter's Servant alongside? If the card is such an interesting Johnny card, there should be a plethora of non-griefy options to use with it. Let's see them.
(Note: I can think of a few, but I can think of far more griefy options)
3 of those are griefy: Iona, Teysa, LLawan. And quite a few of them are underwhelming or useless, particularly in their own deck (Patron, Balthor, Crovax, Ascendant Evincar, and Rashka). But even if we count those out, that's still 34 decks that might want to play the card just going by the general.
On top of that, there are Crusade effects that might want to hang out with Dune-Brood Nephilim, there are the 10 cards with radiance, like Brightflame. There are 11 cards with conspire. Things can be made multicolored to interact with cards like Cloven Casting. There's protection from everything using Glory or Akroma's Memorial. There's card draw with Illuminated Folio while revealing lands. I could spend hours digging into all the things it works with, but frankly, that's more than enough already.
Trade Secrets either draws 4 and 2 for someone else or draws 2 people's entire libraries. The potential of it just drawing 4 isn't enough to justify letting it turn multiplayer games into 2 player games, particularly when there are more effective ways to draw cards without that risk. But when you ban Painter's Servant out of fear of someone playing Iona, you're also banning it for the guy who just wants to make Ulasht, the Hate Seed twice as big by making his saprolings red, and that is taking something unique away from the format.
"My criticism of the Izzet is that their impulse for learning seems too much like impulse and too little like learning."
—Trigori, Azorius senator
Hand Size count!
4 -> 6 -> 10 -> 18 -> 34 -> 66 -> Aaaaaand I'm dead!
But a deck playing contingency plans is a different deck than one not playing them. Making changes like that is transforming the deck into something else, something the owner might not be so interested in playing. If someone can get away with playing a deck without colorless removal or board wipes, why the hell not? The way you keep placing fault, your focus is clearly on the "winning the game" aspect, and it doesn't have to be. I'm willing to bet that 90% of EDH players could throw together a deck that is more effective at winning than their favorite deck for less than 100 dollars. It's not always about being effective, it's not always about playing all the answers, sometimes it's about playing what you want to play.
And if you enjoy that sort of game, have fun with it. I've played with a half dozen different groups. I've played with people where every deck had 10x spot removal and 5x board wipe. I built my decks differently with them than I do in a different playgroup where I've been in 4 player games where the only creature removal all game was my Seismic Assault. I wasn't a big fan of the removal heavy group, and in retrospect, a lot of that group has since sworn off the format. But it is not difficult to reverse cold war a group of players, to deliberately play decks with less nuclear bombs and format staples, impress people with even mediocre levels of success playing screwball strategies, and inspire players to try something different than building directly to answer each other.
And the best possible situation is where you get the group of players so familiar with each others' decks that you end up with tiers of power that people can swap out decks to maintain the balance of the table such that one game can be counterspell wars in a vicious fight for supremacy and the next game can be the same 4 people all trying to build Rube Goldburg machines on the same table. Which is frankly why if I were designing the banlist, I would unban anything that's banned for it's abuse potential (Braids, Limited Resources, Erayo, etc.) because the people building Rube Goldburg machines don't want to play those cards and can self-regulate them out while people playing competitively are already playing equally degenerate things, and I would ban more things that are pure value (sol ring, mana crypt, really efficient tutors) since they provide such undeniable value regardless of your strategy and give unbalanced advantage to whoever happens to draw them.
Not sure if use of phrase Wheel and Deal is deliberate for comedy value or not.
Wow, that archive is gonna be played a ton.
Also, be careful with Storm Cauldron. It works just fine, but don't play it when someone can make mega mana with a single Cabal Caffers or Gaea's Cradle, because then they can tap for 10, bounce the land, play the land, tap for 10, bounce the land, play the land, tap the land, have 30 mana out of nowhere.
Also, Sapphire Medallion play's really well with the offering mechanic, effectively using a creature as a ritual to get patron out on 5 mana.
That's the healthy progression of a competitive format, and can be a perfectly healthy playgroup, but it doesn't have to be. People can play EDH perpetually without adjusting their decks to answer one another so long as the power levels are comparable. For example, I play with a guy who plays almost exclusively Karn, Silver Golem. If I want to adjust my decks to properly handle his threats, I can just start playing Wave of Vitriol and literally remove him from the game with one spell. Frankly, that would be worse than playing Iona against a mono-colored deck. But I don't do that because removing him from the game with a single card would be outstandingly mean-spirited. His only real response to that spell would be play a different deck. And a mono-green stompy deck's answer to Iona is to play things like O-stone and O-stone accessories, and when you're packing your mono-green stompy deck with "destroy all creatures," you may as well be playing an entirely different deck.
If EDH is not the format where you can try to play something with known competitive weaknesses and politely request that your friends don't deliberately exploit them, then there really is no such thing as casual magic. Luckily, situations like that happen all the time. For a long time, I owned a Hokori, Dust Drinker deck, and I gladly agreed to not play with it when people didn't want to deal with it. Could they beat me with big stacks of instant speed removal? Absolutely. Did they want to play magic that way? No. If the people you're playing with don't want you locking people out of games with Iona, don't lock people out of games with Iona.
You quoted the post, so I know you saw me say that I don't think Iona should be banned. If you're playing against decks that consistently answer her, then she isn't a problem, go ahead and play with her. What I'm saying is that if you find yourself playing against decks that can't consistently answer her and she removes people from games with a single card, you should consider voluntarily taking her out rather than forcing everyone else to make major deck changes to deal with one specific creature in your deck.
And yeah, wizard tribal is built in. Azami, Lady of Scrolls is a good inclusion. You might even be able to respond to a board wipe by bouncing all of your moonfolk with Riptide Laboratory bounced up and down.
Utility lands or etb life gain lands are fun with Patron and the moonfolk. Don't mind me folks, I'm just using Patron and Meloku the Clouded Mirror to bounce this Radiant Fountain up and down. I have only 1 mana open, and it's not like blue can play fog, right? It's a good thing I managed to survive that attack, otherwise I couldn't copy this kicked Rite of Replication 20 times with Uyo, Silent Prophet.
Ok, so now we're in this position. Someone I'm playing with packs Iona, and I'm playing mono-colored. I get blown out by Iona a couple times, so adjustments must be made. So I pack my deck with a few of these things you mentioned. So he's getting blown out because he can't stick things. Now he has to play through my answers, so he starts playing a suite of sac outlets and recursion so that I can't keep her gone, so then I have to start playing graveyard hate to kill his recursion and suddenly we have spent a lot of time, effort, and money crafting our decks in the best possible way to prevent the other person from succeeding at playing magic the gathering.
OR he can take out Iona, and we can keep our decks largely the same as we originally intended them to be rather than forgoing many cards we really want to play with because we needed the deck space for all the broad answers to narrow problems we've been forced to use so that nobody loses to a single card.
I think one of those situations is preferable, and I think it's up to the person playing Iona to realize the effect playing her will have on the meta. Either a) the other players will shift to answer her, and the consequence will be everyone, the Iona player included, having a more difficult time doing what they want and being forced to forgo screwball cards for more of the most played cards in the format, or b) the other players not adjusting their decks to deal with her because that isn't the game they want to play, and everyone continues playing what they want except for the occasional game where Iona locks the board on someone followed by a sarcastic round of "great job, you really earned that win."
It's almost like the only reason to include the card in a deck is because if it becomes one on one with a mono-colored deck, it basically instant wins.
I'm not certain you're into such things, but that Breath of Fury I mentioned turns from spamming a few extra combat steps into spamming infinite combat steps if you have a Goblin Rabblemaster down and can swing uninhibited.
Not every mono-colored deck runs colorless answers to creatures. When building a deck with more ambition than cookie-cutter good stuff, there's not guaranteed to be room for Duplicant in every deck. I skimmed the mono-colored decks on the first page of the 2-player forum, and only 4 of the 10 mono-colored decks there had a way to remove Iona once she lands. Then I skimmed the first page of the multiplayer forum, and found colorless answers in 7 of 13. So overall, that's less than half, 11 of 23 decks. Of the 11 decks with colorless answers, 3 were Karn planeswalker and 5 were Duplicant. Only one deck had multiple colorless answers.
But lets be honest, chances are painfully slim they have those answers when Iona hits. Counterspells are the only real answer any of these decks had other than "Really? Scoop." I'm not saying that Iona should be banned. I'm saying people should voluntarily not play it. Because the 12 decks were perfectly right in not taking away from their own gameplan just to have removal for one particular thing. One cannot assemble interplanetary death rays to win with while being able to answer every narrow situation. If someone is insistent on playing Iona against mono-colored decks, they only do themselves a disservice by forcing their friends to pack their decks with answers to her so that nobody gets to have any fun.
Or you can finish them with a Needle Drop.
But being serious, you could totally play Darigaaz with extra draws and mana denial to make a sort of Owling Mine edh.
Actually, this sounds like fun. Start with Darigaaz and a howling mine package. Throw in some wheels to keep hands up around 7. I can play Adamaro, First to Desire, Gaze of Adamaro, Entropic Specter, Inquisition, Molten Psyche, Multani, Maro-Sorcerer, Price of Knowledge, Runeflare Trap, Stormbreath Dragon, Sudden Impact, Toil/Trouble, Vicious Shadows, Wolfcaller's Howl, and Tibalt, the Fiend-Blooded. (Go Tibalt!)
Just from the list of "the Ravnica dudes", extra discout with Grand Arbiter Augustin IV, ensured card draw with Lyzolda, the Blood Witch, make Savra, Queen of the Golgari a more consistent Grave Pact, make sure Tibor and Lumia have flying before they burn themselves, give more things buffs with Tolsimir Wolfblood, and make a big Ulasht, the Hate Seed. All the Invasion dragons fit your criteria unless you count Dromar, the Banisher and Crosis, the Purger as locks which I wouldn't since it's really just a lot of work to make a worse Myojin of Night's Reach or a Kederekt Leviathan.
There's 11 generals right there genuinely worth considering it with that fit your criteria. Not to mention, they're cards people more likely want to play than most of what you're listing as grief. It's rare I see Deathgrip or Lifeforce, and just about nobody is playing Tidal Control, Gloom, Chill, Anarchy, or Omen of Fire. And if they wanted to, they'd just play Nether Void or Jokulhaups.
But that sounds like you're planning the long game when otherwise the top of your curve is devoted to blasting people's faces off. Reading the thread, given the "all-in" aspect, I was expecting the 4 slot to have something like Furnace of Rath or Breath of Fury that multiply your output and was surprised at that one instance of slow burn.
Countering the strategy of playing mono-colored is silly in a format where using a certain general makes it so you aren't allowed to play other colors, but my point still stands. Iona is not some utility thing meant to counter a strategy. People don't play Iona to stop counterspells like Grand Abolisher number 2. Iona costs 9 mana, it's a finisher, it just finishes by locking people out of the game instead of killing them. Gaddock Teeg is played to counter strategies. It comes down early and punishes people for going too deep into a certain style of play. It's still pretty miserable to play against, but it is played to gain advantage over people, not just win the game through complete denial.
Frankly, I'd argue that Platinum Angel is a griefer card. It does nothing to advance your board unless a 4/4 flyer is enough to end the game. All it does is draw out a game needlessly on the off chance your opponents can't kill it. But I don't think I have ever played against a Platinum Angel anyway, so clearly it isn't very good at its job.
There are 10 Ravnica champions that care about color. There are 5 Invasion dragons that care about color. Avacyn, Guardian Angel could protect you from everything, Balthor the Defiled could bring back all creatures, Wort, the Raidmother could convoke anything with any creature, Patron of the Orochi could untap all creatures, Yeva, Nature's Herald could cast all creatures with flash, Llawan, Cephalid Empress could lock out creatures, Jaya Ballard, Task Mage could imitate Vindicate, Oona, Queen of the Fae could make more tokens, Irini Sengir makes all enchantments cost 2 more, Crovax, Ascendant Hero and Ascendant Evincar could pump all creatures, Major Teroh could exile all creatures, Purraj of Urborg could get really big, Rashka the Slayer could have Holy Strength, Sol'kanar the Swamp King could gain life, and Xiahou Dun, the One-eyed could recur any card, and of course Iona, Shield of Emeria can hard lock the game. There are 7 commanders with protection from a color, not including Eight-and-a-Half-Tails, Sygg, River Guide, or Jareth, Leonine Titan. By my count, that's 42 commanders that interact with Painter's Servant.
3 of those are griefy: Iona, Teysa, LLawan. And quite a few of them are underwhelming or useless, particularly in their own deck (Patron, Balthor, Crovax, Ascendant Evincar, and Rashka). But even if we count those out, that's still 34 decks that might want to play the card just going by the general.
On top of that, there are Crusade effects that might want to hang out with Dune-Brood Nephilim, there are the 10 cards with radiance, like Brightflame. There are 11 cards with conspire. Things can be made multicolored to interact with cards like Cloven Casting. There's protection from everything using Glory or Akroma's Memorial. There's card draw with Illuminated Folio while revealing lands. I could spend hours digging into all the things it works with, but frankly, that's more than enough already.
Trade Secrets either draws 4 and 2 for someone else or draws 2 people's entire libraries. The potential of it just drawing 4 isn't enough to justify letting it turn multiplayer games into 2 player games, particularly when there are more effective ways to draw cards without that risk. But when you ban Painter's Servant out of fear of someone playing Iona, you're also banning it for the guy who just wants to make Ulasht, the Hate Seed twice as big by making his saprolings red, and that is taking something unique away from the format.