Besides the fact that Treachery is not remotely comparable in power to cards that warrant a ban, I take objection to their description too:
Aside from strong card selection, Treachery is one of the few cards played in nearly every blue deck, largely from its sheer power. When drawn, it’s a card that provides a tempo swing that’s often impossible to recover from, and when looking for ways to weaken this style of deck it’s a clear enough outlier in strength to warrant a ban.
I will add... I thought this format would mean the death of Duel Commander, in very short order. Wizards sanctioning adds a huge credibility to a format, and allows players to easily speak a common language without knowledge of specific web forums or facebook groups or bookmarks to banlists. But the idiotic bumbling around the banlist for Wizards format is going to significantly hinder this process, making for a miserable transition between Duel Commander and their format. I honestly cannot believe how badly this is being botched.
People seem to be responding to my point as though my goal is to improve certain colors against other colors, or certain commanders against other commanders, to bring down Tier 1 decks, or something like that. That isn't it at all. The point of bringing back the tuck rules is to make it less viable (not completely unviable, but less reliable) to play a minimal numbers of creatures and 50+ reactive spells.
I don't think anyone necessarily has issues with your goal. People have issues with the idea because of the collateral damage of it making blue even stronger. It's one step forward and one step back at the same time. Beyond that, I'm not even sure this would change the effectiveness of decks that are 50+ reactive spells and few creatures. Most of them would gain from this change and the real losers would be decks like Titania and Bruse which play a bunch of creatures but also rely on the commander as a finisher in a lot of games.
None of matchups I played in this format (30 or 20 life) were decided on me having/not having force of will.
*Matchups* aren't decided with it, in a 99 card singleton format, but *games* most certainly are. If one has a goal of generally weakening blue decks, I think banning FoW would be pretty effective at that. And to your point, it wouldn't disproportionately harm any individual matchup or deck archtype.
It's stupid when you draw Price of Progress and randomly win a game with it dealing 10 or 12 damage, but it's also stupid that you can play 3 or 4 or 5 colors in this format without ever having to think about whether the mana base is stretched too thin.
In hindsight, it was super annoying to face off against a turn-1 mox. Good for them for making that call.
Yisan shouldn't be nearly as painful in a 20-life format with all of the burn being packed these days.
Riley, Cockatrice seems the same as it always was, though local communities seem to be shifting a bit with some reporting less players and some reporting more.
Tournament formats need sideboards to be viable as a competitive format, otherwise we are back to players getting mad because they have no outs to MLD or certain combos.
If a format caters to players who get mad that their deck has no outs, I wouldn't call it a competitive format.
Geist against Zurgo... so instead of hoping for Chill in your opening hand (7.1% chance), you're hoping for Chill *or* Enlightened Tutor (13.7% chance).
I just don't think people who consciously chose this format would be interested in something intentionally pulled out of it. But it appears I may be wrong.
Some guy said "sadly" and you said "bingo". Sad = upset. It's OK, I'm not meaning this as a negative (I'm upset with the lack of innovation too).
If you believe people "grab what wins" in this format, I don't see why it would be any different than people doing that in other formats.
And if you're spending years trying to innovate with Alesha, and it's not being "grabbed", what else can we conclude other than it doesn't win? And if you spent years on something that doesn't win, that's either an indictment on you and Kriggy and Jivanmukta, or more likely it's just an unfortunate property of the format.
Kriggy, 3drinks, Jivanmukta, I assume you three *are* innovating, since you're so upset about this and you have your decks in your signatures.
So what's the deal with your innovations? Are they good but no one is copying them? (would seem to run afoul of your point of everyone just copying each other) Or are they not good? (in which case maybe it's a hard format to innovate in?)
From MTGtop8, we can see it's only the 19th most popular blue card, behind way more powerful cards like Jace, the Mind Sculptor, Snapcaster Mage, and Force of Will.
I will add... I thought this format would mean the death of Duel Commander, in very short order. Wizards sanctioning adds a huge credibility to a format, and allows players to easily speak a common language without knowledge of specific web forums or facebook groups or bookmarks to banlists. But the idiotic bumbling around the banlist for Wizards format is going to significantly hinder this process, making for a miserable transition between Duel Commander and their format. I honestly cannot believe how badly this is being botched.
Yisan shouldn't be nearly as painful in a 20-life format with all of the burn being packed these days.
Riley, Cockatrice seems the same as it always was, though local communities seem to be shifting a bit with some reporting less players and some reporting more.
Because it was only 25% of the top 8 in a random little tournament somewhere?
I just don't think people who consciously chose this format would be interested in something intentionally pulled out of it. But it appears I may be wrong.
At that point you're basically playing regular commander and hoping you get Sol Ring in your opening hand and your opponent doesn't.
If you believe people "grab what wins" in this format, I don't see why it would be any different than people doing that in other formats.
And if you're spending years trying to innovate with Alesha, and it's not being "grabbed", what else can we conclude other than it doesn't win? And if you spent years on something that doesn't win, that's either an indictment on you and Kriggy and Jivanmukta, or more likely it's just an unfortunate property of the format.
So what's the deal with your innovations? Are they good but no one is copying them? (would seem to run afoul of your point of everyone just copying each other) Or are they not good? (in which case maybe it's a hard format to innovate in?)