It's a little more complicated than that. Here was my thought process:

I expect chancellor of the annex to be a thing, so I wanted at a minimum to have something to pitch to it. Basically, I decided that pitching something to it was better and faster than trying to build in excess mana. HOWEVER, I did not want the card to be useless if I didn't run into chancellor of the annex decks, and I wanted something at a minimum that could take out a chancellor of the forge token to spite foil. This already leaves a limited number of options, but I had OPTIONS. There were multiple things I was considering, from having my threat deal with small creatures to other alternatives.

Then, I looked at what decks I thought were going to see play. 2 big ones right out of the gate that are also reliant on 1/1's are chronomaton and inkmoth nexus. Both were going to be really well placed in the meta, which makes it even more important to be able to kill a 1/1 at instant speed. Our number of options have gone down significantly. When you get to the fact that i expected to see multiple smaller creatures, I decided I needed some sort of way to block and deal with small threats. And..... after a few more decisions down the road we get to scavenger gut shot. I thought I could block most things I would deal with and blow up a few I couldn't for a tie . But I picked the thing to be an anti nexus/chronomaton card, not an anti forge card. Anything that could deal with those via damage can deal with forge.



Razorborne out-thought me even more though . I knew there were going to be very few actual channex decks and almost no foil decks, but I didn't expect anyone to flat ignore the possibility.

I expected very few Foil decks. Basically, I thought Channex had so many variants that it would show up and Mayor was so powerful in several variants it would show up. I figured about 50% of the decks would feature one or the other.

My final decision came down to a second Lotus or Needle. A few things led me to my choice:
1) I forgot wasteland could go into both Mayor and Channex decks.
2) Double Lotus loses to Channex, but Needle still beat most Mayor variants (you know...assuming no Wasteland , Gut Shot in the Mayor deck definitely caught me off-guard too)
3) If I took a second lotus, there was no reason not to play Titan.
4) I wanted to play a card not seen before.

Beyond that, I didn't care about 1/1's because Legion would outpace them. I figured the major threats would keep people conservative and Legion would have time to grow. Theorizing that Foil wouldn't show up meant I lost very few points to countermagic

The secret about Foil is that it's not actually that good. It doesn't win all that much more than Artifact Blast. Is it worth banning? Maybe, but I've never seen Blast win a round, so opening up the possibilities with Foil seems fair game. I'm about 90% sure that the card got banned not long after Chancellor of the Forge was printed and just remained there ever since. (Looking through old threads, this is how it seems.) For comparison, MTGS doesn't band Foil even in rounds with more than 3 cards. (It is admittedly more annoying in 4+ rounds, but that's not important here.) I'm really interested to know if Force of Will is too good. The decks you would build with it aren't all that different than Foil save that there are a few more threats you can run (Torrent Elemental) or you can continue running a free threat and double double free blue spell.

The more I think about it, I really don't think there's such a thing as "too good" in 3CM, especially the more people that are involve. With only 10 people playing, it makes it hard to be competitive with unknown decks, or decks using second tier cards. With 21...you have a lot more room for innovation.

FoW with Torrent Elemental is bad. your third card has to be a storage land, but there's no storage land that can both cast Torrent from hand and from exile. also, even if you switch in misthollow griffin which is just better, you still have to have a turn of vulnerability where you cast Griffin and leave yourself open to whatever it was you wanted to counter, which is a window a lot of decks can take pretty brutal advantage of.

Fow's main strength is its ability to run with a second blue pitch card like snapback or misdirection. you still want the free win-con.

Right, Torrent is bad, I assumed it worked the same as Misthollow Griffin. Just saying that Force doesn't actually offer up that many more options than Blast.

Force of Will decks are a little to easy to force ties with with a second blue pitch card. It's not like , where you still have major holes that can be exploited.

Think about it. If you can counter any spell OR bounce any creature, on top of having a free 1/1 on the board, and you don't have to wait for your opponent's turn to do this........ that hits a **** load of decks doesn't it?

Even though I'm sure it can be beaten and people would play around it, it would be about the level of unbanning barren glory. ,,,,,, Just annoying to have around.

it misses all the 2-threat decks, any land.dec lists, and ties anything with dryad arbor, which becomes the best free win-con anyway. I don't think it'd be that good a deck.

See. Ways to play around it, but as meta-warping as Channex.

says the guy who unbanned Channex.

Also says the guy who warned you that Jack makes very bad decisions sometimes.

I find this round far harder to predict than any of the others...to include WUBRG...that means it's a lot more fun.

So, how many people do you think are going to ignore Chancellor, and how many people do you think are gonna run chancellor?

Trying to sneak Lush Growth through again while people are thinking Sea's Claim and Evil Presence were the only threats, hm?

Lol, Rush's flow chart is exactly what I was thinking...trying to find that tech...I think I'm on to something.

I don't remember if I ever managed to get encroach banned, I should try again sooner or later.

i like that card

I think wasteland is going to be less important next round while chancellor of the annex will be more important.

My silly ideas aren't panning out