Community team confirmed these bans will not effect Duels in any way.

Oh.. so I have your permission to play a single two drop, or manlands. Thanks bro. See how not fun that is? You only have to take hits from my two drop until turn 4 or 5 when you can use a 1 or 2 mana removal spell on the two drop your benevolence blessed me with. I hope Wizards continues to stick it to strategies that don't allow you to play the game.

I'm sorry, are you on drugs? Let me repeat your claims back to you;
1) Counters are fine because counters can counter counters. Oh, you want to build a deck without counters? Well, that's okay because
2) You can get a 1 and/or 2 drop down before I start denying every play you make. I will eventually tap 1-2 mana to remove your 1 and 2 drops while still having counter mana open. But that's okay because you can still hit me with manlands because I can't counter them, but that's okay because
3) Now that I've countered every legitimate threat you can play, I'll use my hand full of removal on your manlands and win the game. But look how much I allowed you to participate! Be glad this isn't Hearthstone or we'd have needed to actually interact with each other (albeit mostly by generating random numbers)!

Counters aren't near fast enough to stop aggro. Recursion gets around counters. Ramp can usually overpower counters.

Aggro decks NEED counter decks to slow down tapout control. Counter-based decks complete the Rock-Paper-Scissors nature of Magic. Without counter decks, removal.dec would pummel you far worse than counter decks ever could hope to do.

If you don't like Counterspells, that's one thing, but they're so integral to Magic it's nonsense and ridiculous to complain about them. They're part of Blue's entire core identity.

I don't like having my spells countered, but I was still really mad when they got rid of Counterspell and decided it should cost more.

I wish I could counter the last two posts

I'm glad that instead of counterspells and discard we have interactive and fun cards like Thalia that keep people from casting their spells on curve and also disable their blockers, Selfless Spirit to transform sweepers into single target removal, Avacyn to serve as a counterspell with a bonus flyer for good measure and also giant angels that just plain ban you from casting spells.

It is ridiculous to give one color all of its good cards but keep other colors away from things they're supposed to be good at.

The issue is that they're too efficient and versatile.. unless you're vs aggro. 3 mana takes down Planeswalkers, 10 mana indestructible Eldrazi, 7/6 hexproof tramplers, artifacts, vehicles, enchantments, instant, and sorceries alike. So.. what removal spell does all that at instant speed in the other four colors, while also denying ETB effects? Exactly.. none. This is why unconditional counters like Scatter to the Winds, Broken Concentration.. and of course, y'all's beloved Counterspell are uber obnoxious and unfun to play against. They're too versatile in their available targets. The conditional ones are much more balanced.. and if the game had more uncounterable threats like Gaea and Terra Stomper.. I wouldn't be bitching. The only other uncounterable card in our library is that Simic clone card. So yeah.. play aggro, or 2 other rares or manlands.Dec to get around counter magic.

I'm not saying that there shouldn't be counterspells, but this other guy is arguing a deck full of them is perfectly fine because you can participate in the game for two turns before he shuts you down entirely. Yeah, no.

We don't need to have hard counters for UU, but it would be nice to have a way to counter the Copter (for good, not returning it to hand) while on the play.

I'm fine with the lack of Negate - I don't expect Duels to be kind to control players. But I don't blame people for hoping we'd get something to help blue more consistently keep all the absurd value cards at bay. Green, red and white all have the tools to do a lot of unfair stuff in Duels. Why can't blue do that too?

Even I will admit mono-Blue counters.dec is one of the most agonizing and boring things to go against. Seeing Horribly Awry, Scatter to the Winds and Spell Shrivel multiple times instantly lets you know it's going to be a free win for you...about turn 30 when they run out of anything to say. However if you're playing a less obnoxious control deck, just concede. They have more counters than you, your removal is dead, and your wincons WILL get out countered.

@Beast: 3 mana to counter PWs in our environment is fine since the only other cards that straight-up do so are:

a) 8 total mana (praise the Solvent!)
b) Dual coloured and cost you 3 life.
c) An enchantment that ramps your opponent.

For control there's just no way around a deck with multiple PWs, other archetypes can make fat tramplers, use burn, or have wide boardstates. It's funny you say "too versitile" when unconditional counters for 3 or less total up to 5 copies in our pool. Otherwise we're spending 4 mana+ for fancy effects. The rest of the counters have conditions that are pretty easy to play around, and if you're worried about "unless the pay X" clauses, taking a leaf out of your book you should play Ramp.

Another argument I see is "you can't expect control to answer everything". I'm pretty sure that's the entire premise of control: Have an answer for each of the most likely things in your field at the sacrifice of consistency. I'm not asking for more answers to Gaea's and other such nonsense, we have those and they're narrow (as they should be), but I'm pretty sure PWs are a huge factor in games where they appear...and boy do they appear to be popular.

Your on-curve plays running into counters T2, T3 and T4 sucks. Midrange goodstuff drawing all the mythics and bleeding you to death with value creatures and planeswalkers also sucks. The same goes for aggro wins that don't care about your interaction.

It's a game of rock lobster, paper tiger and scissors lizard and the developers of Duels arbitrarily decided that the lobster should cost 3 more mana than the other two.

1) The counter-the-counter thing is because Beast said counters don't allow "any" interaction, which is untrue.
2) You cannot deny every play I make. You will run out of counterspells. After all, decks with 25 lands, 1 win condition and 34 counterspells do not work. Even a deck with like 10 counterspells is a lot. You need room for removal, sweepers, win conditions, card draw.
3) After getting plinked by the 1- or 2-drops for a while, you can indeed eventually cast removal and still hold counter mana open. But then you can only counter one spell. Me, with five lands as well, can easily play two or more on the same turn, and you can only counter one.
4) Also if countering the opponent's spells is not interacting with him or her, I don't know what is.

@BounceBurnBuff - there are a few others actually: Sorin (his minus can do up to five damage without killing him), Skysovereign (unfortunately the ETB trigger not usually enough to kill), and Ulamog. But I do hope for more planeswalker removal, at the moment there just aren't many ways to kill them.

As far as unconditional (with or without a downside) kill goes, only Ulamog and Sorin apply there. But yes, I can wait to spend 10 mana to kill your Gideon! Such value. Or I play a bigger PW to kill you PW.

There'll likely be an uptick in PWs if aggro gets somewhat more oppressed in AER, but we'll have to wait and see what dominates.

...Congratulations, you just successfully argued against your own points and proved your original argument invalid? Go you?

For planeswalker removal, aren't you guys forgetting about Suppression Bonds?

We need another, "Get off the board now", card for Planeswalkers

Not to mention Suppression Bonds will be bound to get blown up easily from amount of enchantment and artifacts that will be played in a few weeks.

In a world that is going to be FULL with enchant/artifact hate, Suppression Bonds is going to be borderline unplayable.