The venerable Copy and Paste will serve you well good sir.

Looks like the banned list might get pretty long.

Not surprising, considering that the size of the card pool is comparable to Modern, and that Solphos and Taramir are basically equivalent to Time Spiral and Mirrodin.

I like the idea of playing with no banlist. I think it will be hilarious.

Ah, but which one counts as Mirrodin?

Also, can you run a forum tournament for this? Because if you aren't too busy finishing up fool's gold, that would be cool.

certainly to start off. ban as necessary, but first let's see how hard we can break this thing.

I think it might be worthwhile for those blocks with single designers still around to have a single "retcon" option. Since we don't have a FFL to test these cards out for us, it might be worthwhile to have things subject to flux for a time, after which they become set and can forever after only be banned as a response. Call the first couple months (or whatever designation) a trial period.

For the initial sets of NGA constructed, determining what the cutoff should be would be a bit harry. Later on, it could be that cards can be edited only as long as the set they appear in is the most recent set added to NGA constructed (ie the brokenness is internal and not caused by a later addition)

Since this is 100% digital we could always just edit cards instead of banning. Banning could just be a temporary measure for cards that are awaiting redesign.
Should we have a specific order for the blocks in the NGA format, so we can create different "standard" environments?

I was thinking to start off with a small banlist made of things that are obviously broken, like Ragnarok's Fluent Mind and Taramir's Furnace Tender. (Edit: I misread Fluent Mind. It seems fine.) There's a good argument for starting with no banlist, but I think some of these cards are pretty obviously format-breaking and you might as well nip them in the bud. I dunno. We'll see how it turns out.


That is pretty much what I was intending. I plan to get a subforum for NGA Constructed within the Constructed forum, then hold semi-regular tournaments. The prize could be a custom title, an Invitational-style card design, or both.


Speaking from a competitive point of view, I'm against the idea of "patching" the format. It's a valid choice, one that a lot of serious games like Starcraft II use, but I think it's more interesting to leave powerful designs in place and either ban them if they're too oppressive or work around them if they have answers. There are a lot of things in Solphos that I kind of regret, but I'm not going back to change them. I know the metagame will adapt to accommodate their presence.


I think it's better to have one unified format than a whole bunch of disparate formats. Even if the format ends up really big, you can easily create casual decks or theme decks if you want.

It's nice to subdivide the format, though. Picking out sets of two blocks to play as "Standard" would be neat. I think the best would be "build you own standard": Pick any two blocks (incomplete blocks still count as whole blocks) and you get NGA Masters for free. So BCP1/BCP2 standard could play opposite the (apparently dreaded) Taramir/Solphos standard.

I'm for no starting ban list, but a starting watch list and quick bans of cards on the watchlist if they show the signs of being a problem.

Since nothing's started yet, I should let you know I edited the blue uncommons from Taramir. One of them was causing problems later in my design file by locking off a whole ton of design space. I meant to do it a long time ago, but checked and I hadn't.

I really think the original form of Efaruna Tinkerer was more dangerous that Furnace Tender will ever be.

A quick progress update: I'm in the middle of creating a Cockatrice plugin for NGA Constructed with updated and clarified Oracle text for everything. I'm up to Ragnarok right now and it should be finished in a week or two.


I don't plan to support such a format, but if there's enough interest for it, there's nothing stopping someone else from starting a Build Your Own YMtC Standard league, or Riovard-only league, or something. I would caution against putting in NGA Masters though, because I constructed that set to have a very high power level to be relevant in the format as a whole.


We won't start with a banlist then.


I shudder to imagine.

Rather than banning cards from the format, why not edit the cards? It would simulate the actual process that happens in which they create the cards for a format and the testers play with them. The point of designing cards is for them to be played with, so instead of effectively deleting the cards, the designers can get actual game feedback to how they play.

I think I'll leave editing the cards up to designer discretion then.

yeah I think the best thing to do is let each set creator modify cards as they see fit. maybe set a weekly/monthly/whatever time for those changes to take effect so we don't have to constantly check for errata.

It was at the root of multiple two-card infinite mana combos, including ones that could fire off t2.

Editing: please don't. It will make the format even more of a nightmare to keep track of.
Bannings: I'm ok with bannings under 3 conditions. First, we should play with the format for a couple of months before we ban anything. Second, bannings done every couple of months, the way wotc does them, rather than "whenever we think a card is broken", because then it's easier to keep track of what's on the banlist. Third, we should vote on the bans instead of leaving them up to one person.
Subdividing the formats: I don't think our playerbase is large enough to support multiple formats.

There's some websites we could use to host files and edit them as a team, allowing designers fo edit Op cards without causing too much trouble. There's probably a way to turn a set file into a nice little spread sheet type thing in Google docs or something as well for easy adding of sets or editing cards.

yeah but Royal Alkahest exists

That's why there's a banlist. I don't want to have to reread the rules text on a card every time I play it to see if it's the same as I remember it.