It is almost March. March means Pro Tour Honolulu, the start of the new Standard season, and the last few snow storms. It also means that Wizards is about to release the quarterly update to the Banned and Restricted list. Now I don’t expect this release to be very interesting, but I think that the effects of Banned and Restricted changes can be. For example, 5Color is in trouble, and the last Banned and Restricted change to that format has been incredibly divisive.
The heads of formats, whether those heads are the DCI (the official Wizards of the Coast ruling body for organized Magic), a group that has organized and unofficial format (like the 5Color Ruling Council or the people who created Peasant Magic), or simply a group that plays weekly around a kitchen table – all these groups use bannings and restrictions only as a last resort, to regain control when a format has stopped being fun.
It’s the same reason – whether it is DCI Standard or the Thursday games at Bill’s – bannings are imposed, because the alternative is worse. It’s a lot like surgery: painful, but better than being dead. (Sure, there are those who volunteer for surgery – but that’s not such a good idea, either.)
Casual groups ban cards all the time – and often unban them again. I remember a long debate about unbanning Eye of the Storm in one group’s multiplayer game. Other casual groups ban and unban things frequently: the “Pauper Magic” Magic Online group used to allow Affinity only at every other tourney. For larger, more formal formats, bannings are much more serious.
The DCI knows that any actions it takes – or fails to take – on bannings will be highly controversial. For the DCI, bannings really are a last resort. However, the DCI has had to resort to the bannings several times over the years. I don’t see that happening this time around – at least, not in the more common formats. Online Prismatic might see some changes, and some old cards in Vintage might be unbanned, but I want to talk only about Standard for this article, just to keep the size semi-reasonable.
Let’s start with a basic explanation of why the DCI bans cards. Here’s a succinct explanation, from the heads of Wizards R&D:
The first part is easy – we ban cards from Constructed formats when we believe they are so powerful that they make the format unhealthy. We look at a number of different things when judging whether or not a format is "unhealthy," but the two big things we try to ensure are that a format is fun and that it is sufficiently skill-testing. For example, if a card is so powerful that it goes into every deck and whoever plays it first always wins, the only skill that is being tested is the ability to draw and play that card. In addition, that format probably wouldn’t be fun either. Similarly, when everyone is playing a deck that can kill by turn 3, there isn’t much opportunity to outplay your opponent and play-skill won’t matter as much as we think it should. – Randy Buehler, The Banning Balancing Act, Nov. 2003.
We ban and restrict cards because we believe there is something worse than not allowing players to use a particular card, and that is having a play environment become so degenerate that the game is no longer fun. Sometimes individual cards have to be sacrificed for the needs of the larger game. – Mark Rosewater, Banned on the Run, Feb. 2003.
Right now, the only real candidate for banning in Standard is Umezawa’s Jitte, but a lot of competitive decks don’t run it. It is nowhere near so dominant as some then-soon-to-be-banned cards were in the past, so I expect no changes. In Extended, the season ended with Rizzo’s Friggorid ascendant, but that deck runs off dredging a ton of cards into the graveyard, and is totally destroyed by the newly minted Leyline of the Void, so I don’t expect to see anything banned there until after the format has shaken out.
So let’s look at the history of bannings – at least the history I remember. I started playing competitive Magic right after Pro Tour Rome, where Academy & High Tide decks prevailed, so that’s where I’ll start.
Tolarian Academy & Stroke for 100
The first broken deck I recall playing against was Academy. It dropped a lot of very cheap artifacts (stuff like Mox Diamond, Mana Vault, Grim Monolith, Lotus Petal, etc.,) then tapped Tolarian Academy for a bunch of mana, often following that with a Time Spiral to untap Academy and draw a new hand. The deck was completely insane: a good draw could result in the player casting Time Spiral several times, generating sixty plus mana, then casting Stroke of Genius to force the opponent to deck him or her self all on the first turn of the game. Tolarian Academy and High Tide decks using the same approach were extremely powerful. They were both fast and resilient – and had Force of Will to stop the opposition. Academy was good. It was very good. A host of other combo decks appeared around the same time: Crab Craft combined Hermit Crab and Earthcraft, while Free Whalie used Recurring Nightmare to swap Great Whales around and generate infinite mana – but Academy was much faster. The period’s control decks combined Tradewind Rider and Survival of the Fittest with Opposition and Living Death, or a variety of counters far more potent that anything we have now – but none of that could run with Academy. Goblins could run with Academy – but only by maindecking eight dedicated anti-Blue spells: four Pyroblasts and four Red Elemental Blasts.
The effect on player morale was bad enough that the period was called Combo Winter. It was widely condemned, and Wizards banned a number of cards, starting with Tolarian Academy and moving on down. As always, some players who really liked playing Academy claimed that the deck was fair, while some Goblins players claimed that the format was fine because their deck could beat Academy, but the majority of players, who saw that nearly everything else in the format was eclipsed by Academy, were happy with the bannings.
Compare that to today: Academy was a complex combo deck. The turns where it went off frequently lasted ten to twenty minutes, during which time the opponent basically sat there and watched. Today, I can only think of three combo decks that have similar effects: the Early Harvest combos, Enduring Ideal, and Warped Enchantress, and only Warped Enchantress is that slow. Warped Enchantress illustrates everything that makes combo reasonable: it is slow, disruptable and inconsistent. Academy was exactly the opposite. Using Academy as a standard, nothing in Standard deserves banning because of a broken combo.
A few months after the Academy bannings, Wizards realized it had an even more annoying combo deck appearing, and took immediate action to ban it. That deck was Jar Grim, and I wrote about it in my Public Enemy series. That article says it all, and it merely reinforces the idea that today’s combo decks are not ban worthy.
I would note that Standard contains plenty of combos – even infinite mana combos (e.g. Dimir Aqueduct, Natural Affinity, Freed from the Real) – but nothing that could conceivably justify a ban. Throwing Guildpact into the mix adds some new combos, some of which are great, but nothing broken.
The Legend of the White Lady: Pro Tour Lin-Sivvi
This was the Masques Block Constructed Pro Tour Qualifier season. Masques block was a generally weak block. It followed the massively powerful Urza’s block and Combo Winter. Wizards tried very hard to avoid printing more broken cards, and the result was a very bland block (much like Mirrodin/Champions, although Masques was worse.)
Masques had a couple mechanics, but the most powerful, by far, was Rebels. Rebels could pay mana to search for another Rebel and put that directly into play. Rebels searched uphill – meaning that Rebels could get Rebels one step up the casting cost chain. Ramosian Sergeant, the one casting cost Rebel, could recruit a two casting cost Rebel, who could recruit a three casting cost Rebel, and so on. Lin Sivvi, a Legendary Rebel, had the ability to find any Rebel: pay X: search for a Rebel with casting cost X and put it into play.
Mercenaries, the competing mechanic, could only search downhill. Your four casting cost Mercenary could search out a bunch of three casting cost bears – which was about as useful as it sounds. No one played Mercenaries outside of Draft.
Basically, Rebel decks ramped up to Lin Sivvi, then pumped out Rebels at the end of the opponent’s turn. The rest of the time, they sat on protection cards (even moreso in U/W Counter Rebels decks.) In a block with weak removal, and where 3/3s for five mana were good cards, the Rebel chain was almost unstoppable. What made it worse was that Masques took place under the old Legends rule – if two identical legends are in play at the same time, the newly cast one is destroyed. That meant whoever got their Lin Sivvi down first kept her. Another plus: Lin Sivvi had a three toughness, and almost all the removal spells did just two damage (including Black’s cheap removal spell, Vicious Hunger.) Lin Sivvi was even immune to the block’s Wrath of God equivalent, Wave of Reckoning.
The only viable strategy to stop Rebels was to control their mana, to prevent searching. The block did have a really bad Winter Orb reprint: Rising Waters. It was overpriced, but it was all that was available. Rising Waters had one hugely important ally: Rishadan Port. Port was a land that tapped other lands. That meant that the one land that untapped via Rising Waters was generally tapped again via Rishadan Port. What made the Rising Waters decks playable was that Blue had some pitch counters, like Thwart, Daze, and Foil, so the Waters deck could counter Disenchant even while tapped out.
The Pro Tour was completely dominated by two decks: the Rebel deck where games were generally decided by who got Lin Sivvi into play first, and the Rising Waters deck that could really only beat Rebels. The countless Rebel on Rebel mirror matches were boring and repetitive, with lots of shuffling as Rebels searched for Rebels.
Wizards immediately banned Lin Sivvi and Rishadan Port from Masques Block play. This was not because Rebels was unbeatable – Rising Waters could beat it. It was because Rebels so warped the format that everything other than Rebels and it’s foil, Rising Waters, were unplayable.
Once again, the current Standard format has no comparable decks. In some respects, Ghazi-Glare could be considered the new Rebels, and the Wildfire decks that have appeared to beat on Ghazi-Glare the new Rising Waters – but, unlike Masques Block Constructed, a ton of other decks are still viable. Nothing warps the Standard format like Rebels did Masques.
Artifact, Artifact, Artifact, Artifact, Artifact, Artifact, Artifact, Artifact, Artifact, Artifact, Artifact, Artifact, Artifact, Artifact, Disciple, Artifact, Artifact, Artifact, you’re dead: Affinity, of course.
I’m not going to say a lot about Affinity, because practically everyone reading this has experienced the Affinity metagame. Affinity wasn’t banned just because it was an amazingly strong deck with great beatdown potential, extremely good card drawing and an alternative “combo” kill that even got around Worship. In the end, Affinity was banned to pieces because it was boring.
I have heard people say Affinity was banned because people had to play artifact kill spells maindeck. I disagree. Sure, before Mirrodin block, artifact kill was almost always a sideboard card – but Mirrodin was the artifact block. Of course you would need to maindeck artifact kill in the artifact block. The problem was that you had to maindeck twelve or more artifact kill spells to even slow Affinity down – that was a little extreme.
It wasn’t that Affinity was unbeatable. You could beat Affinity – and not just with G/R/u decks with maindeck Shatter and Oxidize that splashed for March of the Machines. It was possible to build decks that could stomp Affinity and still compete with all the other good decks. It wasn’t easy, but you could do it.
The problem was that Affinity was so good, even bad players could win with it. It was everywhere. If you played Standard, you played against Affinity every other round – often every round. People got sick of playing Affinity, and playing against Affinity.
That was the problem. People stopped playing tournaments. At the store I frequented, Standard Constructed tournaments, like FNM, which had once saw typical attendance pushing fifty, stopped being sanctioned because we could not get eight players. The tourneys were replaced with Drafts. This was happening – although not always to that extreme – everywhere. Standard was dying.
That’s why Affinity was banned. That is not a problem now.
How Players React to Bannings
I have been playing long enough that I have experienced bannings from all sides.
I remember playing against decks that I wanted banned. Most of you probably remember having an opponent’s turn 2 be something like land, Skullclamp, Frogmite, Frogmite, clamp Worker, Frogmite, Disciple, followed by land, Ravager, Enforcer the next turn. That is, admittedly, broken – but playing against decks like that was never quite in the same league as an opponent opening with Underground River, Dark Ritual, Duress, Dark Ritual, Mana Vault, Necropotence, set aside eight cards, go on the first turn. Their next turn was likely to be something like land, Ritual, Illusions, Mana Vault, Consult for Donate, Necro for a bunch, go – and you would take your turn 2 knowing they had something like thirty life, the kill in hand, and that your first spell would be met with Force of Will.
Affinity had nothing on Trix.
I remember how warping Trix was. You could beat it. You could design decks to stomp on it’s head – briefly. One week, a turn 1 Elvish Lyrist would be game against Trix. The next week, however, Trix would be packing Firestorm and your elf tech would be useless. At the same time, I remember how many cool deck ideas were discarded because they could not beat Trix. My decks had to incorporate a lot of Wasteland effects, plus maindeck Duress and even jank like Emerald Charm. The Wastelands made my deck a wrecking ball against multicolored decks like CounterSlivers and PT Junk – and those decks could not protect themselves against me because they had to devote all their resources to Trix.
At times, I found Trix extremely challenging to play against. At times, I just swore a lot and gave up. From my personal perspective, the best thing about Trix – and the DCI’s three separate attempts to kill it – was that I got to write a bunch of rants about the process (including one of my favorite articles ever.)
For Trix, I was one of the vast hoard of players hating the deck and clamoring for bannings to kill it. When the first round of bannings came out, I was unhappy because I saw other decks dying without, it appeared to me, curing the problem. Maybe I was mistaken, and I misunderstood what fiendishness – other than Trix – was avoided by banning Dark Ritual and Mana Vault in Extended. That reaction – incomprehension – may well be the most common response to bannings. In general, you have to see the banned cards in action – in the broken decks – to understand just how annoying and unfun the banned cards can be.
I see this a lot with new players. I remember reading many discussions, on the old MTG Strategy listserve and various boards today, about how the Banned and Restricted list is pointless and how people’s casual groups do just fine without it. I even have this debate with people via email – and in real life. Generally, their playgroups simply did not have the cards to build abusive decks – and the banned and restricted rule is not important if the cards are not going to be played anyway. In the debates, I asked if anyone in their casual group played Force of Will or turn 1 Nether Void. When they responded that their group did not, I uncorked a deck (or shipped them a decklist) that, quite literally, killed up to eight players on turn 1 around 75% of the time. That generally changed their minds.
That’s an important point: the banned and restricted lists exist because someone, somewhere (usually Zvi), has a totally broken deck that abuse the banned cards. Other people may not see the combo, or see how dominating it can be. Or, one the flip side, people who do not build tourney decks may not understand how constraining the existence of some decks can be on the competitive part of a format. Those people often react to the banning announcements with confusion – and, since it’s human nature to object to changes you don’t understand, those people yell about it.
I have also been in another group of players – people who were hurt and upset because their favorite deck was destroyed by bannings. Whenever a deck is truly broken, a lot of people will have mastered and refined it by the time bannings take effect, and those people will have a lot of good memories of winning with the deck. They won’t want to stop playing it.
Personally, my favorite tournament deck ever was G/B Survival. It was the first deck that took me to the finals of a Pro Tour Qualifier, and the deck that got my first tournament report onto the front page of the Dojo. I had more great games of Magic with that deck than anything I have ever played before or since. I was crushed when DCI banned my deck – and what made it worse was that the offender was clearly the Full English Breakfast deck, not mine. My deck died to “splash damage,” just as CounterSlivers died when the DCI tried to kill Trix by banning Demonic Consultation. Having your favorite deck die because it is clearly broken is bad. Having it die because some other deck is broken is probably worse.
Either way, it really hurts. It’s been half a decade since the DCI slew my poor G/B Survival, and I still feel the loss. Ingrid was a rabid CounterSlivers player, and she has never felt as excited about any deck since, to the point that she spends far more time judging than playing at tournaments nowadays. (Casual is a different issue.) Since every banning may have similar effects on players, thankfully it is rare – and, as I said, it shouldn’t happen in Standard or Extended this time around.
I started this by saying that I was also going to talk about 5Color, and the current dispute over changes to its Banned and Restricted list. I’ll have to save that for next time.
PRJ