http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/ar ... 2017-06-13

Discuss?

I look forward to the next few Standard seasons where Wizards has done a better job making sets so that they don't have to ban so many cards every time I turn around.

That being said......yay! I don't have to deal with Marvel decks anymore!

EDIT: Oh, and this paragraph freaks me the heck out:


I'd rather they not have considered any of that because that sounds like a terrible patchwork mess.

Those are all great options to explore. I could easily see some of them being better then banning a card in the right situation.

Making Duress legal seems very good idea to me - it's an all-around balanced spell that should be legal anyway, especially if they release combo-themed set.

I sure HOPE they wouldn't take it as a "lesson" that combo themes are bad.
Because the real lesson is that mythics are bad.

Duress feels to me like a card that should be, effectively, evergreen. Print it at least once every two years so it seldom, if ever, leaves standard. Even if you gotta print it in a Planeswalker deck or a Deckbuilder's Toolkit / Welcome Deck to make it standard-legal despite not having it in a draftable environment. Like how Disperse and Borderland Marauder are presently standard-legal despite not having been draftable in any now-standard-legal set (because they were in the SoI welcome decks and toolkit).

I get a lot of perverse pleasure finding ways to put Soul of the Harvest and Borderland Marauder in my Standard decks.

lazy

They will probably start putting Duress and pithing needle and the like in every core set.

Would banning Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger not have been ok?
Marvel is a silly card, I thought the problem is the ludicrous target it can hit and that you get the cast trigger off of ol' Ugly.
Double exiling Vindicate your lands to keep you away from whatever answers you might have and then landing a 10/10 threat that doesn't have to connect to win and is very difficult to get rid of seems more like the problem here to me.

Thoughts?

Yes Marvel cheats things into play, but if the only truly crippling target is Ugly then I'd think Ugly should go and you let other people have fun spinning their wheel on less "oops, I win" threats.

Note: I don't play marvel, nor have I played much against it.

That hamstrings the next few sets as well though, Wizards likes to be able to print Ulamogs and whatnot, and as long as you have Marvel in Standard they wouldn't be able to do that.

Also getting to free-cast cards like Baral's Expertise and various 'Walkers is still pretty good. Ulamog may have been one of the best targets, but he wasn't the only one.

The lesson they took is "Our Development is understaffed", and they already corrected that by creating Play Design.

I can only speak for Liimited, since I don't play constructed, but in Limited, Mythics are actually good for the format. For example, Glorybringer would have been perfectly all right at Mythic, and is very problematic at rare-all from the health of the format perspective. I can live with winning with/losing to a ridiculous bomb once in a while, but not every other sealed. And it adds diversity to Limited games if they can go a bit silly on the power level of some cards, as they know they won't appear often enough to annoy people.

From a judge's perspective, I'd say I hope they never go for pair banning, as that would make deck checks even more of a pain than they already are. Seriously, verifying deck legality and checking for card markings or suspicious patterns within a reasonable time is pretty difficult even without cards being both legal and illegal depending on what else is in the deck.

Also I don't exactly care what gets banned because I don't play Standard, but wow that's a lot of bans.

As long as there are only one or maybe two pair bannings, I imagine it wouldn't be too difficult then your normal legality check. Oh, this deck has Marvel, does it have Ulamog? No? Ok. That said, it would be awful for judges at FNMs.

The bans are getting ridiculous at this point. I feel like Wizards is trying to get around their bad development practices through this. A lot of people put the blame on the rapid availability of data, but things like Felidar Guardian really make me question that assumption.

Also, people hate Combo... with a passion.

People that hate combo are worse than Hitler. Combo is the only good deck to play.

Yeah, that seems to me the most relevant drawback. I wonder if Nicky B. would have been worth trying to spin out of Marvel? Yes, I know he's been leaked, no I haven't looked at the leak and I don't want to.

Those cards are good, but they're not one-hit win conditions (Chandra, Flamecaller comes fairly close I guess, but even that is worlds better than what Ugly does to you). You have the chance to interact and fight back against those. A turn-4 Ugly is gg 99% of the time. I just have a hard time believing that the Marvel deck would be impressive enough to warrant playing competitively without its 3 turn uber resilient win condition that sets the opponent back 2 turns on turn 4. And really it's a 2 turn win condition because unless you have a ridiculously aggressive deck a midrange shell like marvel's should have no problem stalling you out of your last remaining 8 or so cards (and that's assuming you can chump block one or both of those turns). WotC already said it's not statistically overly dominant, just not fun to play against when the opponent goes "oops, I win." Marvel just seems too random to be reliable unless you have a critical mass of cards you can hit that just basically win the game on the spot.

All that being said, banning Ulamog means they'd have banned 2 of the 3 eldrazi. Not a good place to be for the face cards of your sets.

I think you're underestimating the resource hog deck checks are. They're not necessarily difficult, but they're tedious and adding one more angle to look out for is a compounding cognitive check that has to be made when looking at any deck. That kind of nook and cranny checking is both asking for someone to miss something and going to extend the length of time it takes to do a deck check.

To be fair Cat Combo wasn't a "bad development practice" it was an honest mistake. A bad development practice is deliberately pushing a new card subtype that can go in any deck. Yes, they have to promote their new toys, but they've been bitten by colorless/artifacts before. Both of these things are a part of what Play Design is purportedly being created to catch.

Duress in Core '19, please! 7th Edition Duress was the first time I saw a card and was like, "Dang! That's a decent card!" (Also, love the art. Core 19 Duress needs to reuse the 7th Edition art). I agree that it should nearly always be standard legal.

As for Aetherworks Marvel being banned, I can't say I'm surprised. The Marvel archetype was dominating Standard of late.