An interesting side issue here: I think part of the attraction of singleton formats is that you don’t need playsets. If a card gets banned, or replaced by something strictly better or whatever, keeping hold of one of something you might just be happy to do. A reminder, an emotional connection. Keeping hold of four copies seems less appealing.
Remember when they introduced mythics and said they wouldn’t be tournament staples? Am I remembering that right? It seems like for the most part, they are almost exclusively 50-60% tournament staples now. And they were the minute baneslayer was introduced in m10 which was in the FIRST group of mythics.
Mythics were introduced in Alara, not M10, but close enough. The thing about "mythic" though is that they weren't actually new. Another term for them would be "R1", or "appears 1 time on the [R]are print sheet", as opposed to "R2", which appear twice on the rare sheet. Before Alara, all cards called "rare" were R1. What they actually did was rebrand the R1 cards as "mythic" and add a new rarity at R2, which adopted the term "rare". Or in other words: all "rares" pre-Alara were "mythic" already. They _added_ the less rare "rare" rarity. You're twice as likely to open a fetch land in a Zendikar pack than you are to find one in an Onslaught booster.
That's not quite what they said. They said power wouldn't be a consideration as to whether a card was mythic or not. I.e. they'd be big complicated cards, some of which may be good and some of which wouldn't be. There's instances where this is being flagrantly broken today, but not at that 50-60% rate
I have 3 stories about this: First, i wanted to make a modern cloudpost deck... got my 4 copies and it banned the following week Second, i got my set of metal misstep for my modern decks... got banned during week Third, got Griselbrand for my Ghave Commander... played him once... got banned the following week
I have a friend like you : Buys Baubles -> week later iconic spoilers buys goryos -> week later ultimate spoilers buys snow control with oko -> oko Ban (not played once) now he have to talk to us if he want to buy cards XD
Yup. You can get some really lovely proxies. If you're not playing in a tournament, use them and encourage others to do the same. Heck some proxies look like the real deal when sleeved. Good stuff.
MPC let's gooo. Thankfully, they won't allow counterfeits (no printing using the branded card back), but in general, it's a great service and you can print sweet variants of cards with custom art for non-sanctioned events. The quality is about equal to, or better than, official cards as well (depending on the stock you choose).
The tension between Magic as a collector's investment and Magic as a fun game we like to play only continues to get worse and eventually it's going to tear the game apart. In a way it already is
The only thing worse than WotC banning a card is when they ban the wrong card. Took a hiatus and came back for Battle for Zendikar to play standard. I had fun with a red blue eldrazi deck and it got better with the coming sets. Eldritch moon arrived and gave us Emrakul. Not the best version was a fun card and she went in my deck. No cries of OP. Then Kaledesh arrived with Aetherworks Marvel cheating Emrakul out fast. Emrakul got banned snd the deck shifted to cheat Ulamog. The problem wasn’t answered and it took a long time for Marvel to get the axe. I was pissed.
Marvel was so stupid, I almost felt a bit guilty sometimes at FNM when people would see I was on Marvel and sigh lol. The difference there was with the Marvel ban I wasn't about to build a whole new deck so I just turned it into straight Temur Energy which I told everyone I thought was still a really powerful deck and I got the satisfaction to watch it later go on to become easily the best deck in Standard. Obviously I wasn't the reason for that or the person responsible for making it become so and I only pushed it so hard because I already had the cards lol but damn it felt good to be on something early before most of the pros embraced it, it's the only time that's ever happened in Magic for me haha.
WotC knows exactly what to ban, they just don't want to, they didn't burn Aetherworks Marvel because it was the newest set and that's what's going to make money for them, they did the same thing with Alchemy in Arena, with banning grinning Ignus instead of banning the actual problem cards like Cabaretti Revels and Racketeer Boss because they were the newest Alchemy cards that they were pushing. I don't think you can call them incompetent when they are deliberately ignoring the problem for profits.
Emrakul would get axe proabably due to delirum decks even if marvel was banned. Having her pop on turn 5-6 with traverse and vessle it was easy to do and very, very consistent.
Even Marvel wasn't the issue, the entire goddamn Energy shell was fundamentally nutty because they basically ignored the limits every other deck in the format had. Basically every banning from that format from Emrakul all the way to Energy's enablers getting banned hit cards that were being played most heavily in Energy - Emrakul was banned because of an Energy card, Copy Cat was an Energy shell because they had the best consistent 3+ color on turn 4 access, Marvel was an Energy card, Attune with Aether and Rogue Refiner were Energy cards (and Rogue Refiner was such an obvious fucking mistake too, like, what the fuck, why did they even print that).
Watching this video makes me yearn for the days when formats and banlists didn't matter for my group. When I owned a total of like 400 cards and would make 2 new decks a week out of those to play against friends who were doing the same. When a local store sponsored an FNM at my college's yearly gaming party so I looked up what "Standard" was, looked at the 350 cards I owned that were legal and cobbled together a "mill" deck with no sideboard and whose only "meta" tech was being 80 cards so opposing mill decks couldn't beat me. I went 0-5 and got a pity pack for coming in last, but I treasured every card in that booster. Sometimes it feels like enjoying all aspects of Magic is cursed knowledge and I'd love to go back but whenever I try, I eventually find myself looking at metagame analysis and deck databases to try and improve whatever I come up with.
I'm making a goblin deck thats sole wincon is equipping my goblins with rocks and throwing them at my opponents face. I recommend doing something similar to get out of the meta crap.
@@wesleywyndam-pryce5305 I tried to make a style deck that has no wincon at all - it exists purely to look cool. I still haven't managed to get the main portion of the idea working, but my goal is to make it so that you can retrieve whatever you want from exile by repeatedly flickering or creating token copies of Riftsweeper.
Modern horizons 2 was really the format jumping the shark for me. It's about that point that I realised I just don't want to be pumping the required amount of resources jnto that format on a regular basis just so I Don't fall into obsolescence. I still have a couple of modern decks, I even play them on occasion. But I'm not spending on MH2, and I'm going to think very carefully about whether any vaguely competitive modern event is worth me attending or not (probably not). Modern was supposed to be a non-rotating, relatively stable format. Now based on modern horizons content we pretty much have annual rotations just like standard. (Sure things stay legal in the format, but typically modern horizons sets are pushed enough in power level that they render decks which aren't taking advantage of their stuff mostly obsolete: rotation by proxy). It's not the same format it was at inception, we were expecting legacy without the reserved list, turns out we get legacy with rotations. At this point, keeping up with standard, pioneer, & modern just taxes me beyond the point where I can reasonably justify my spending, (not my financial limit, rather the point where I say "that's enough spending on mtg".) Something has to give, and unfortunately that's modern.
On a related note, I'm really glad Dominaria United is going to open the doors for a Standard with no banned cards in it, since it feels like we haven't had one in forever. Too bad I don't actually play the format.
@@nicmastoridis6177 I do and tbh it is pretty healthy at the moment and nothing ultra worrying has been shown from DU yet. It is way more fun than it was even a year ago, and I think rotation will mostly be a plus this time.
This was the argument during the Birthing Pod ban. Delver was a major player on both legacy and modern during that time, and people claimed that banning delver would kill the deck. Because banning pod didn't killed that deck... And about cards too broken or too expensive, playgroups should engage Rule Zero more often. Hell, i could argue about stores engaging on that too, but that will not end well.
The problem is simple. If WotC prints some new better archetypes, players cry because their good old deck is no more tier1. If WotC doesn't print some new better archetypes, the price of the staples increases to the sky and no new player can afford a whole deck. Everytime anything changes, people get angry for any reason. We want our cards to remain expensive to sell them and we want them to be cheap to buy them (at the same time)
Ban all card on the reserve list. I own a cradle, I own Wheels, I have each dual land, I have multiple copies of grim monoliths. BAN ALL RESERVE LIST CARDS! I want them to be reprinted. But they wont be reprinted while Wizards keeps their "Promise " about not reprinting the reserve list. Ban them all, tank the princes. The "Investors" will be begging for the Reserve list cards to become legal again, to bring back their prices. But hold them to legality must come with accessibility. Allow for special run reprints or secret lair "Special" prints. They did it with Mox Diamond in the From the Vault box, and it didn't destroy the universe. I play MTG for fun and been playing for a long time. I want other to be able to play with older harder to come by cards with out missing a mortgage payment for a piece of cardboard.
When mox opal got banned in modern it definitely took me out of magic for a long time. I had spent all my hobby money and time playing building up to get the nice masterpiece copies. But not long after I accomplished my goal it got banned. I ended up selling them cause I needed money and couldn't play them anymore. It was heartbreaking.
@@wesleywyndam-pryce5305 - Lattice was banned first iirc? Lattice was banned because of Karn, the Great Creator hard-locking opponents out of the game, not because of Whurza combo nonsense. I'm still salty about the Opal banning though. Yes, it's generally a "problematic" card, but in this case, it was clearly banned because of Urza, which didn't even fully die until further bannings. The problem with Opal getting the axe though is that it didn't just hit the Urza decks, it also killed Affinity, Hardened Scales, Hollow One, and the other combo decks people were playing with after KCI was banned (Semblance Anvil was a fun card). The blast radius of the ban was unacceptably wide, and it wasn't even successful at hitting its intended target.
The true lesson here is don't pay an exorbitant price for singles when a single ban can remove all of their utility for you, ESPECIALLY when you don't make a lot as is.
12:20 I sympathize with this part so much. I dropped almost a grand after saving up for a long time on 5 color Humans. It honestly even kinda hurts to write this because I feel so stupid playing the same terrible tier-3 deck every week into 2 thousand dollars worth of fetches, shocks, and elementals. It's not even a terrible deck. It used to be an incredible tier-1 deck...I'm told.
My friends and I play a version of mtg we call Hell in the Spell. No max hand limits, no banned or limited cards, no max deck limit, and we roll a D-20 to see how much life we start out with.
I feel like the solution is to just print enough of cards so none of them are prohibitively expensive, but then everyone with the expensive cards is upset. And can we really bring the price of some cards down? Take tarmogoyf, it is still quite pricey considering it doesn't actually see play anymore? Is that just the people who have them refusing to let them go for a reasonable price ?
As profs said it, most really expensive cards comes from the reserved list. And the reserved list is a lie. Printing more doesn't affect the price of really old cards that much (except when they are very playable and limited to one printing) the memorabilia is what makes the price of most of old cards. Original printing, signatures, history of the cards.
The problem is that speculators control the prices of cards on the secondary market. They also hoard cards to artificially raise prices based on meta decks and just popular cards across formats. If the mtg playerbase can push the speculators out of their hobby then maybe things might change or someone else will step in and rip off the playerbase.
The fact that Emrakul is the #9 most played Creature in Modern only because it's used by Omnath decks to beat other Omnath decks is a depressing reality we live in.
On proxies: They're fine, for me the problem is when someone pubstomps. If I sat with my casual deck and someone goes turn 1 proxy mana crypt into proxy turn 2 dockside, Im not mad becuase they proxied a lot money. In mad because I sat at a casual table, and if we were going to play with this powerlevel I would just pop out my kinda cdeh but not really deck. Proxies are fine. Just be honest about the powerlevel of your deck.
It seems to me game companies trying to avoid backlash creates powercreep - because people get excited over new, strong cards but very upset over $80 cards getting banned. So the power level will increase over time, inevitably. The fact of the matter is that WotC wants their game engineered to generate them revenue, it's not about having timeless cards that you can hold onto anymore. It's about getting you, me, and everyone else to buy their newest thing. So everything is designed to "rotate".
I have two solutions. Solution #1 wizards prints modern pre-cons with the monkeys, and the feactchys, and even the elementals that do flasheys. Solution #2 make a new format that plays with modern's current, and maybe even future ban list, but all cards played in it have to have been standard legal at some point which means no horizons or LOTR sets. Modern is still a thing with this solution people can still play monkey hammer-time vs Gandalf elementals control piles, but there's also just magic with your wholesome force of wills countering charbelchers. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
As a veteran I can say the promo for thess "black thunders" is perfect, I wish this would be the add they used, uncensored of course. I love this channel hahaha
I feel like the gold bordered cards could be a great alternative for WOTC to make some money on official proxies. I would love to see more gold border reprints.
The only time I've ever actually had a card in any of my decks get banned was when Prophet of Kruphix was banned in Commander, it being in both my Simic and Temur decks respectively; I found replacements for them in my trade binders within 5 minutes or so, and that was that.
Someone who works at an LGS where I live... They literally, *literally*, absolute fact, took out a mortgage on their house to afford a legacy deck, and they were *four cards short when that ran out of money*, it took them another 4 months to save up for the spending money for the last 4 cards of the deck. Legacy's for Suckers or people who can purchase your organs without your consent.
I had a foil Primeval Titan from Modern Masters 2015. It was my only copy and I was really excited to put it in a Commander deck and start playing with it. Then I found out it was banned in commander, and it sat in my binder with no place to go. It was then sold off with a bunch of other cards in a bulk sale to an LGS, having never been played and in pristine condition. Bans kill the value of all existing copies of a card as well as all future printings of that card (possibly even dictating whether or not that card will be reprinted due to its banned status.)
Good video Vince. I do think a lot of people don't see the cards surrounding a banned card and how they become less used and/or less valuable. It is bad in arena when a deck isn't playable and you get 4 wild cards due to a ban, it is even worse when the expensive cards in your physical deck can no longer be traded/sold for as much because of a related ban.
In gp vegas I dont remember what year I want to say 2018 or 2017. The year Mani Davoudi won on a mull to five. This was my first constructed gp and I made it to day 2 as well playing the exact same deck. My Dad the first night we were there in vegas so I could play in that event handed me a grand for the weekend when we went to eat. He said I already got lucky and won 5k on a hand pay and this is so if you want to get any cards or sealed product from the venders you can. I decided to foil out the deck I was playing. And I went the full 9 yards. Full playsets of every master piece I needed, Foil wpn promo vault skirge's, and foils of every other copies of cards in the deck. Including original scars foil etched champions. I still love that deck and have it built because it's an amazing deck that shows me what modern used to be. Then while I was at an lgs pre pandemic one week the news that opal is banned due to the urza deck was mind boggling to me. They banned opal and killed a colorless aggro deck archetype that wasn't a problem in modern at all for a new printing of a card from modern horizons 1. This was when I knew modern was not going to be the same anymore. I still try to keep up. I built temur cascade when I heard about mh2. I picked up 2 set boxes, 2 collector boxes, and all the cards missing for crashcade from mh2 since i had every other card. Still like the deck. But I think that modern needs a shakeup that's not a horizons set. I think personally ragavan should be limited to 1 copy instead of banned because it is a good card but banning it like you said in the video would have ragavan with a gun in the deck pilots face. They should unban opal, keep astrolabe banned and limit the mh1 mono blue urza to 1 copy like ragavan. That way the decks they used to fit in can still be powerful, but less of an automatic I win just because of needing 4 copies of a brand new busted staple and more of an I win because I have my combo piece. I love modern but they way its headed rn I think it will crash and burn faster than legacy did.
Cat oven decks just got bodied in historic. No life gain on Meathook, and the familiar can’t block. No wildcard refunds. Those cards were propping up my low tier Jund and Golgari decks too. So there’s a few hard pivots
Literally laughed out loud at the Seinfeld breakdown. Genuinely loved the advert stuff too, it was honest but funny without being cheesy. I also now know what bat wing is, and for that I....thank you, I guess. This one is a funny issue where we all want to be on the good side of specing for format changes but hate the opposite. It is a rough proposition most of the time, and its a bit perverse how closely it compares to gambling.
My favorite deck was Modern Ad Nauseam. When SSG got banned most of my deck plummeted in value. Basically nothing in the deck held it’s value. The worst part was that the SSG ban wasn’t even my deck’s fault.
10:20 - "Sol Ring is pretty much better than the moxen" Kinda, yeah - the advantage of moxen, or what would make them busted in Commander, is the ability to have 5 of them. That just adds consistency to your explosiveness. But one-for-one, Sol Ring is generally a better card. It's why in Canadian Highlander, a singleton format where nothing is banned but a point system is used to limit density of "best cards", has all the moxen at 3 points but Sol Ring (and Mana Crypt) at 4.
I think something like a semi-limited list would be good for modern potentially. There's cards that are "too good" but they aren't really broken enough to justify a banning. Limiting them to something like 2 copies instead of 4 would prevent the build around strategies while not completely devaluing the cards. Things like the pitch elementals, basically most of the MH2 cards that make up probably half the meta would fall into consideration for this in my opinion. I think something like that would promote more creativity and diversity in lists honestly.
The banning of Mox Opal completely ruined my Affinity deck. I had very little options to pivot. I ended up just giving up Modern because of it and moved on cEDH where, if one card gets banned, it can be a little harder to expel an entire archetype...that, and, you know, proxies are baller.
Honestly I got lucky with MH2 I’ve been playing Yawgmoth combo since a bit after MH1 and I only had to get grist’s and endurances which was achievable with trades for me.
The twin ban nearly killed my interest in modern, a 12 year old who saved for a year to build a semi twin deck only to have it immediatly banned out from under me. Even though it was barley a twin deck no fetchs only two vents and one kiki 4 twins, it still took forver to save up for it.
Man, the amount of stories around this really shows how many players can get screw over through bans. While I think that bans can make a format healthier, sometimes the ban is soooooooooo delayed that most people expect the card to stick around. Paradox Engine was legal for 2 and a half years in EDH, so many of my friends started to grab them up at $40 or $50 as it didn't seem like it was going anywhere. Then BANG! They killed the Engine, and dropped its price to ~$5 In. One. Day. #FreeParadox #IonaWTF?
With cards like Gaea's Cradle and other Reserved List cards, just print functionally identical versions but add a unique subtype. The Reserved List document states "Reserved cards will never be printed again in a functionally identical form. A card is considered functionally identical to another card if it has the same card type, subtypes, abilities, mana cost, power, and toughness." Just give the new card a unique subtype, maybe something like "Iteration," then add a line of rules text that says a deck cannot have both the original version and the new version. Bonus points if there's a succinct way to add a rule that makes Iterations inherently forbid both versions without the extra line of text. I get that this kinda feels like cheating, but as almost everyone can agree, the reserved list was a mistake in the first place, so finding a loophole that lets them get more game pieces into players' hands while not opening WotC up to potential lawsuits is something I'm all for.
I H A V E T H E S O L U T I O N ! ! ! ! What Magic needs is more RESTRICTED cards. Remember Vintage? (and sometimes Standard/Historic on Arena?) They get to have restricted cards, why can't any of the other formats? If Wizards don't feel comfortable outright banning something, they can restrict it. If they don't feel comfortable outright restricting something, they even have the power to force a "Restricted to 2 or Less", or even potentially a "Restricted to 3 or Less" rule. In fact, we could probably unban a great selection of cards from Legacy/Modern/Pioneer/Pauper banlists in favour of restrictions. Imagine only ever seeing three or less of each Incarnation a game and/or only every having to worry about three or less copies of Splinter Twin in your opponents deck. When 4 copies of a specific powerful card are not allowed, the deck won't function the same way, it won't be nearly as consistent, and less answers are needed to foil its plan. The market would hopefully balance accordingly to reflect the changes, players will get to play with as many of their favourite toys possible, and LGSs/Wizards can continue selling product worry-free while maintaining diverse, interesting, and healthy formats. Obviously it will be a headache for a while at the start figuring out what needs to be restricted but I sincerely believe this is the only move, that is both fair and fun for the entirety of the magic community, that we can make to keep our game the best it can possibly be.
Arena needs a dust system and in paper Wizards desperately needs to start reprinting things into the ground. Theres so much reprint equity everything is gonna end up being $20+ otherwise (hell it already is)
I recently wanted to see what it would cost to make a deck that was simply all of the best beaters, and a proper mana base. almost every single creature was over $30 and more than 60% were over $45. all in all it was nearly 1.2k for what amounted to good Stompy deck.
Don't reprints have a similar problem as bans from a financial perspective? It can also feel bad to buy a playset of expensive cards just to hear that they're being reprinted so in a few weeks they'll be half their current price. Obviously reprints don't invalidate your entire deck, but they still reduce the value of your "investment".
It feels like the two arguments can't exist at the same time where cards and collections should have value, especially when they are base game pieces instead of rare blinged out versions yet we should have proxying up to and maybe including sanctioned events. I think the fairest thing all around is proxies of cards you own a single copy of especially if we're mostly talking about commander because why does your opponents powerful card matter in a casual format?
12:45 Well, I think you found it. Me: Man, Modern, Legacy, and Commander aren't fun anymore but I still want to play Magic. WotC: Play Arena! Play Arena! Play Arena! Play Arena! Play Arena! Play Arena! Play Arena! Play Arena! Play Arena! Play Arena! Me: Ugh....
This is why I got out of Modern. I already didn’t play a ton, but then RG TitanShift would spike from low tier 1 to garbage with every other set, not to mention how a new set might have had some new addition that may have been expensive to get (as well as Scapeshift just suddenly tanking in price thanks to a reprint). So I just sold out and bought my second EDH deck.
Its interesting to hear MtG players side of a banlist. As a yugioh player, its just standard practise. When a banlist comes out, yugioh players know a rough estimate when the new BL comes out and react to that. IDK how many cards get banned, and if there is a specific time for when a banlist comes out, but it sure looks a lot different.
Physical and Arena, here's the advice to remember - don't rush to build that new dominating deck when it's obvious that the key cards will end up getting banned. For example - in modern, I don't know how many times I told friends "it's your own fault" when they'd whine about losing money on a deck because a card got banned. Some cards, like Splinter Twin, clearly violated the philosophy of the format and were guaranteed banhammer targets, yet people lined up to drop huge amounts of money on playsets of that and other cards they needed for the soon to be banned deck. That being said, the problem is that WotC doesn't playtest properly. They barely care about standard, and don't have time to test in any other format, not to mention they don't have people skillful enough to do the playtesting.
I don't disagree with your overall point, but it's interesting that you bring up Splinter Twin as an example, because many Modern players explicitly bought into Twin due to the fact that it was budget (compared to other tier-1 decks). In its ban announcement, WotC reasoned that the very existence of Twin's instant-win lines gatekept aggro and midrange decks that wanted to tap out every turn, and they were probably correct -- with Twin still in the format, decks like Humans and Hollow One probably wouldn't have gotten a chance to shine. But Twin players counterargued that Twin wasn't especially prevalent in big tournament top 8s at the time it was banned, and in their eyes, Wizards had no reason to do this except to manufacture an artificial set rotation and force them to buy new cards. And because many Twin players were budget players, they were now priced out of Modern entirely. I'm not saying Wizards was wrong to make that ban. And whether players prefer the mid-2010s Modern that forced players into high-interaction decks just to avoid losing to Splinter Twin vs. the late-2010s Modern that turned into an aggro/combo "arms race" has been a subject of heated debate for years. But the Twin ban was hardly telegraphed. It blindsided everyone, even the pros, and compared to the bannings of other cards like Mox Opal or Oko, it didn't leave that much financial ruin in its wake. If anything, it punished POORER players.
@@alexbrangan2885 - Twin wasn't telegraphed? I don't know where you were playing, but in my area and the online communities I frequented it was blatantly obvious that Twin was on the chopping block for violating the founding intent of the format. It's just one of many cards of varying values that has done this and received a ban for doing so. No consistent turn 3 or 4 wins. A deck starts doing that, only stupid people run and spend a lot of money on the cards for that deck unless they can be easily moved over to a new competitive deck when the inevitable happens.
Its interesting coming as a yugioh player where bans happen pretty frequently. The first thing to note is that bans don't have a history of eliminating decks from the format. Most of the time decks get hit but are still playable, cards do eventually get banned but that usually only happens after everyone is so sick of the decks using it. Also they usually had an affordable reprint before that happened, a card has to be real problematic to get hit when its still expensive. Overall people tend to be happy about bans.
Yu gi oh cards are also not as prohibitively expensive as magic cards from what I've heard. Even the most played yu gi oh cards top out at 10 dollars from what I've seen, compare that to Ragavans selling for 50-80 dollars, and magic players just have a lot to lose. Also in eternal formats magic decks are usually EXTREMELY slow to change, some sets in magic history have never contributed a card to eternals, which means that you used to be able to hold onto a deck and play it for a decade with only minor changes over the years. From what I've heard yu gi oh usually changes with each new set and has since the very beginning, so players are far far more prepared for "soft rotations" where the cards become obsolete from a power perspective, eternal magic players are not. Wizards still has very little idea how to correctly handle bans, they're too greedy and want to ban adjacent rather than the actually problematic cards, an example would be bridge from below getting banned before Hogaak.
Would love to see a comparison between the top online card games. What does Pokémon do for cards that you don’t need? Yugioh and hearthstone would be other top ones to look at.
Yu-Gi-Oh you can actually see and I personally experienced this a bit in the online platform for Yu-Gi-Oh called Duel Links, where they banned something powerful like Pot of Greed for an example, and essentially did something similar to the wild card thing they gave us like a rare blank trade card to pick something to replace the card we had lost, our choice pick though but from a limited selection of not the choices you probably wanted for your blank rare. None of these games are so different tbh. I'd still play that game but their customer service wouldn't help get my account back so screw em and duel links 😂🤣
With the most silly part being, I actually paid to open digital packs of trading cards 🤔 yeah I'm good on online trading cards.. mtgo seems legit at least but yeah still good
@@tylerbinder8698 ya mtgo seems legit but I’ve been waiting to see what daybreak games does with it before I dump my collection on there or invest anything more into it
Ah yes. When I came back to magic (started very casually in the Khan's block) I got into competitive built 2 modern decks that interested me. Izzet Phoenix, and grisshoalbrand. I had never spent that much money on something like magic before. Then about a week later, looting was banned for hogaaks sins and it killed both of my new decks
I don’t know the solutions either. I’d personally be just as happy if all the cards in the game were worth $5 or less as I would be if suddenly the value of my cards tripled. I just want to play the game, I don’t care about the value, I don’t view this game as an investment at all. I’m always happy to see cards I have get reprinted and lose value, it means I can afford more copies if I need them.
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Since you own 1 cradle proxy it as much as you want. If anyones a dick about it make em sit around and wait for 20 minutes while you flip through 6 decks to "find" your real one
Honestly I wish wizards made horizon sets priced and printed like normal standard sets. Also include super rare alt art versions of the chace cards. That could drive down the price of the normal versions.
It seems clear that WOTC are positioning modern as a legacy priced format that they can profit from. And then replacing it with pioneer. The question is if they plan on rotating whole formats out of playability on a regular basis. If so this could totally undermine player confidence.
I stopped playing Modern when MH1 came out and priced me out of my deck, for what it's worth. Rotated to focusing on limited for awhile thereafter but I can't imagine trying to keep up monetarily with the rat race WotC has turned every constructed format into with these "premium" (over-priced) supplementary sets.
More evidence that cradle's price would crash is looking at other lands from the same cycle. Tolarian Academy, indisputably the best land in the game is a mere $150 because it is banned everywhere and restricted in vintage. Heck, even Serra's Sanctum which taps for enchantments is twice that price because it is legal and people want to play it. Edit: In short, unban Tolarian Academy please and turn my $150 card into $3000 overnight
I would like to see Wizards start selling cards directly instead of through packs, with pricing based on card rarity (and maybe with limited quantities?). Effectively, this would set a ceiling on card prices. Boosters could still exist for things like draft or collector cards, but I think this would be an improvement in accessibility for constructed. Obviously there is a whole ecosystem built up around the secondary market (e.g. LGSs) that this could potentially disrupt, but I think there are ways around most of the side effects. Would love to hear your and the community's take on this!
Wotc will never acknowledge the secondary market, if they were to do this then it would change the game forever. This will never happen, they’d never be able to make their money on packs again and they wouldn’t have any excuse any longer for not reprinting all cards from all sets and taking down the reserved list.
@@GalatheonIL52NEP you're probably right :) but wishful thinking! Personally I would like to see them move towards more properly aligning incentives for everyone involved, and as the kids say sometimes you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette
"effectively this would set a ceiling" no it wouldn't. just as it is now wotc just gets to decide what it's worth by controlling the scarcity. and they can and would just change the prices of the mythics and rares as groups as they pleased.
if you wanted to go down this line though, just get rid of rarity and packs altogether and instead have everything made to order. print only what is requested by people for those people to play with and have all cards available at all times. every card would be 50 cents as they should be and that would be the end of every financial problem magic has. (no, the special foiling crap would not still exist. just get custom art done)
@@wesleywyndam-pryce5305 I think we may be talking past one another. If Wizards sold any mythic for e.g. $10/card, how would that not enforce a ceiling on secondary market prices for that card? I'd also be open to print-to-demand, but I have a feeling that their contracts with printing companies perhaps would complicate that. But I don't have any actual insight there, just speculation on my part
An easier comparison for "why isnt Gaea's cradle banned?" Is a very simple one Kenobi: Why is Tolarian Academy Banned when Cradle isnt? Also vice versa. They either need to both be banned or both be unbanned, theyre effectively the same busted card but for a different card type.
I honestly think that it will be a persistent problem no matter what happens, either bannings or lack of good cards or reprints, etc. I also can't really say from experience that it bothers me to ban a card an lose money on those scales. Sure I've lost money on cards, but also don't use most of them because I don't like the amount of power they provide. This is good place to mention I only play commander or limited. As for proxies, I don't use them myself except for one exception. Others can use them within limitations I hold personally. Outside those limitations, I do find proxying cards to be dangerous in a vacuum. Luckily I haven't yet run into the kind of scum player I fear to find one day. Regardless, I'm not going to scream from a roof someone is using them unless there is a decent prize on the line and they weren't disclosed beforehand, assuming they're allowed. Some decorum is expected and appreciated.
The answer to that is simple. While Cradle is at many times quite busted and ridiculous good, Academy is still stronger and much more busted, because it allows for even faster starts. A main difference is that you can use mana rocks the turn the come into play and have no summing sickness like mana dorks and that there a lot more usefull 0 mana artifacts then creatures. The combination of artifacts plus Academy simply allows you to vomit out your hand faster then the combination of creatures + Cradle.
The fact that WotC doesn't even give restrictions a try in standard/modern/pioneer is disappointing, they would flat out rather change cards and give more work to the design team instead of saying right 4 once upon a time sucks and add too much consistency, lets get this shit out of here, ignoring the fact that only being able to play 2 would make the card much less of a problem.
MH1 and MH2 should be banned with an apology letter from WotC. Actually, in the way that WotC is conducting its business. We should make something like a "Premordern" before Modern Horizons and stick to it, letting WotC rot
how exactly does that stick it to wotc? the products have been sold the profits have been made. why would they care in the slightest what happens next?
This already happened when Twin was banned. I bought into the deck around 2012 since I wanted to get into Modern, and played the deck until its eventual ban in 2016. I really felt burned since I already had the deck for quite some time and I really couldn't find an alternative that felt quite like the deck since I've played it for so long at that point. After a while I just gave up on Modern completely and spent my time building Legacy decks instead. Nowadays, I really don't play MtG anymore. Ever since MH2, I fell off playing MtG entirely since MH2 really tilted me off of really liking MtG, and since its hard for me to find any Legacy players around where I live, I really don't play anymore. Feels like MH2 is pretty much creating a set-rotation without there being a set rotation.
Sol Ring is super busted. I played a few copies in a casual deck once since I had extras from all the commander precons, and it was absurd, even in a garbage morph deck! I mean, the card's basically a repeatable Black Lotus.
The day before I made red white vehicles in standard copter was banned that deck needed copter without it lost a ton of games. I think copter was fine in standard and really hurt my trust in why should I invest in a game if you going to ban what I build. IN STANDARD of all things the one format your supposed to play test.
My only ban story so far was Amonkhet/Ixalan Standard. Built a gruul dinos deck and bam, next week rampaging ferocidon got banned, because aparaently it was teh shit in some burn deck. My poor Dinos never recovered :(
Honestly right now the problem cards that are pushing the decks don't really feel like the expensive MH2 cards tbh Obviously ragavan, murktide and the elementals are pushed to hell and back and there is a huge problem of just every deck gets to jam free spell elementals just because which i do hate quite a bit (they feel like the new fetch lands in some respects) but i think that they are playing second fiddle right now wrenn and six makes greedy mana bases completely free and resilient to blood moon if you play around it expressive iteration holds the glue of a lot of decks together and pushes decks even further towards playing four and five color omnath is just an egregious piece of cardboard unholy heat is a complete color pie break the combination of unholy heat, prismatic ending and counterspell makes black obsolete as a color for removal dragon's rage channeler and ledger shredder make your entire deck into two for ones and also just kill the opponent companions are freerolls mishra's bauble is a freeroll that needs like 1% synergy to be worth it i guess the best way i can put it is that playing modern right now feels like a poorly constructed house of cards sure, things are pretty fun in modern right now, I can technically play goblins, silly decks are kept in check, neat but i am constantly worried that the format will just keel over and become a non format and there will be no reasonable amount of bannings that will actually fix anything
By far the most broken creatures are overwhelmingly the ones which provide active hand filtering, like dragon's rage or ledger shredder, and do so cheaply. In the right decks such abilities basically turn into repeatable brainstorm effects while also providing fuel for delve, which was also put on a broken card. Wizards should have a policy on never printing more of those. Though I will say expressive isn't that much of a problem imo, just that all these cheap removal and creature spells basically supercharges it from something like a normal draw spell into being broken. The thing is that being able to play a land off it isn't even that great, but that when you have a 2 mana murktide, a 1 mana ragavan, etc. Expressive gains massive utility extremely early into the game, ensuring that basically you can never whiff.
none of those things seems even slightly "broken" but okay go off. honestly if modern wasn't banning things based on usage and whining but actual mechanics then almost nothing would be banned in modern. the fact that the new hotness gets banned before people even attempt to counter brew is your real problem. of you're lucky ragavan will stick around long enough for you to figure out how to reliably overcome it.
@@wesleywyndam-pryce5305 Modern horizons 2 has been out for over a year at this point. People have tried counter brewing yet the MHII decks just keep climbing up in usage as more people buy into them. If anything the meta has become stale at this point, and some previously tier 1/2 decks (now tier 3 or irrelevant) have resorted to running weird cards just to stay slightly relevant, like infect running mutate/teferi, humans running tourach, among other things. When such decks can run off pick cards and do well with them, that's a bad indicator. Another bad indicator is when top tier decks start running sideboard cards solely for mirror matches, like emrakul in elementals. Also it's sad that MHII is both the problem and the solution. Ragavan's best answer is always going to be prismatic ending or solitude. It's honestly sad the meta has become so centric around MHII cards.
Bans should be rare like standards without banning multiple back to back as the norm. Wotc got greedy, if they stuck to the plan of modern is legacy we can make bank on and printed modern reprint sets at the same price as standard ones we would have no issue
I think it's funny that I called modern MH block constructed repeatedly on social media and caught a lot of heat for it, but a youtube personality says it and BAM, 1k updoots.
Wotc will never do this but eternal formats should allow a certain number of proxies. there is no excuse for this at LGS commander events, free the proxies!
It really amuses me to see mtg players experience this sort of thing where other games have been banning cards to keep a healthy game for years. Players know the broken cards are going to get banned eventually and buy them anyway for the time that they can win tournaments with them. They know it's a game not a long-term investment.
Something I hated about Yugioh and something that prevented me from spending money more in it. Why would I want to buy a card if itll likely just get hit by a banlist in 3 months?
I'm personally in favor of wild and common bannings. Cards can always be unbanned at a later date if the archetype they were enabling becomes less toxic. But when a single archetype, like black control in standard, is so dominant, and so toxic to play against, it needs bans. I don't give a FUCK about card value. Screw the secondary market, print all cards and sell them in a store at 10 cents a piece, make the game more accessible to those of us who don't want to dump tons of money into fetch lands and shit just to be competitive.
For a minute here I thought it was going to go down the rout on how banned cards on arena give you wild cards but banned card on paper give you nothing but a card you can’t play making dealing with banned cards on arena an improvement from paper. Hahaha… silly me.
![เปิด อาณาจักร หมื่นล้าน "สาระตั้ม" l [Nickynachat]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/3XE0nPF4YkQ/mqdefault.jpg)
An interesting side issue here: I think part of the attraction of singleton formats is that you don’t need playsets. If a card gets banned, or replaced by something strictly better or whatever, keeping hold of one of something you might just be happy to do. A reminder, an emotional connection. Keeping hold of four copies seems less appealing.
I dunno. My four set of Lillian of the Veil from Innistrad and my four set of Mox Opal from Scars of Mirrodin are very appealing to hold on to.
@@raiserofchickens As are my Yawgmoth Bargin's.... and chaos orb!
Remember when they introduced mythics and said they wouldn’t be tournament staples? Am I remembering that right? It seems like for the most part, they are almost exclusively 50-60% tournament staples now. And they were the minute baneslayer was introduced in m10 which was in the FIRST group of mythics.
Mythics were introduced in Alara, not M10, but close enough.
The thing about "mythic" though is that they weren't actually new. Another term for them would be "R1", or "appears 1 time on the [R]are print sheet", as opposed to "R2", which appear twice on the rare sheet. Before Alara, all cards called "rare" were R1. What they actually did was rebrand the R1 cards as "mythic" and add a new rarity at R2, which adopted the term "rare". Or in other words: all "rares" pre-Alara were "mythic" already. They _added_ the less rare "rare" rarity. You're twice as likely to open a fetch land in a Zendikar pack than you are to find one in an Onslaught booster.
I remember that too. Mythics would be huge Timmy cards, not something competitive players would want. And then we got Planeswalkers.
@@jamesgasik3424 Planeswalkers weren't mythic in Lorwyn when they were introduced. Mythic only started in Alara Block, like a year later or so.
That's not quite what they said. They said power wouldn't be a consideration as to whether a card was mythic or not. I.e. they'd be big complicated cards, some of which may be good and some of which wouldn't be.
There's instances where this is being flagrantly broken today, but not at that 50-60% rate
@@tsuruchibranwen8579 That's true, but it didn't stay that way for long.
I have 3 stories about this:
First, i wanted to make a modern cloudpost deck... got my 4 copies and it banned the following week
Second, i got my set of metal misstep for my modern decks... got banned during week
Third, got Griselbrand for my Ghave Commander... played him once... got banned the following week
Let me know when you're buying a card next so I can short it
Bought paradox Engine for my jhoira deck. Got banned a week later.
@@brandons1411 Forgot about that Engine... i atleast played it for 6 months.
I have a friend like you :
Buys Baubles -> week later iconic spoilers
buys goryos -> week later ultimate spoilers
buys snow control with oko -> oko Ban (not played once)
now he have to talk to us if he want to buy cards XD
I remember right before the "eldrazi winter" in 2016, a buddy of mine dropped 1500 bucks for a splinter twin deck.
The next day the mfr was beaned
Yup. You can get some really lovely proxies. If you're not playing in a tournament, use them and encourage others to do the same.
Heck some proxies look like the real deal when sleeved. Good stuff.
Crazy alternate arts and even foils, since foil bulk is cheap
MPC let's gooo.
Thankfully, they won't allow counterfeits (no printing using the branded card back), but in general, it's a great service and you can print sweet variants of cards with custom art for non-sanctioned events. The quality is about equal to, or better than, official cards as well (depending on the stock you choose).
The tension between Magic as a collector's investment and Magic as a fun game we like to play only continues to get worse and eventually it's going to tear the game apart. In a way it already is
The only thing worse than WotC banning a card is when they ban the wrong card. Took a hiatus and came back for Battle for Zendikar to play standard. I had fun with a red blue eldrazi deck and it got better with the coming sets. Eldritch moon arrived and gave us Emrakul. Not the best version was a fun card and she went in my deck. No cries of OP. Then Kaledesh arrived with Aetherworks Marvel cheating Emrakul out fast. Emrakul got banned snd the deck shifted to cheat Ulamog. The problem wasn’t answered and it took a long time for Marvel to get the axe. I was pissed.
Marvel was so stupid, I almost felt a bit guilty sometimes at FNM when people would see I was on Marvel and sigh lol. The difference there was with the Marvel ban I wasn't about to build a whole new deck so I just turned it into straight Temur Energy which I told everyone I thought was still a really powerful deck and I got the satisfaction to watch it later go on to become easily the best deck in Standard. Obviously I wasn't the reason for that or the person responsible for making it become so and I only pushed it so hard because I already had the cards lol but damn it felt good to be on something early before most of the pros embraced it, it's the only time that's ever happened in Magic for me haha.
WotC knows exactly what to ban, they just don't want to, they didn't burn Aetherworks Marvel because it was the newest set and that's what's going to make money for them, they did the same thing with Alchemy in Arena, with banning grinning Ignus instead of banning the actual problem cards like Cabaretti Revels and Racketeer Boss because they were the newest Alchemy cards that they were pushing. I don't think you can call them incompetent when they are deliberately ignoring the problem for profits.
Emrakul would get axe proabably due to delirum decks even if marvel was banned. Having her pop on turn 5-6 with traverse and vessle it was easy to do and very, very consistent.
This is what I went through with the Opal ban. Urza was the problem but they didn't want to ban their shiny new toy that was selling packs for them.
Even Marvel wasn't the issue, the entire goddamn Energy shell was fundamentally nutty because they basically ignored the limits every other deck in the format had. Basically every banning from that format from Emrakul all the way to Energy's enablers getting banned hit cards that were being played most heavily in Energy - Emrakul was banned because of an Energy card, Copy Cat was an Energy shell because they had the best consistent 3+ color on turn 4 access, Marvel was an Energy card, Attune with Aether and Rogue Refiner were Energy cards (and Rogue Refiner was such an obvious fucking mistake too, like, what the fuck, why did they even print that).
Watching this video makes me yearn for the days when formats and banlists didn't matter for my group. When I owned a total of like 400 cards and would make 2 new decks a week out of those to play against friends who were doing the same. When a local store sponsored an FNM at my college's yearly gaming party so I looked up what "Standard" was, looked at the 350 cards I owned that were legal and cobbled together a "mill" deck with no sideboard and whose only "meta" tech was being 80 cards so opposing mill decks couldn't beat me. I went 0-5 and got a pity pack for coming in last, but I treasured every card in that booster.
Sometimes it feels like enjoying all aspects of Magic is cursed knowledge and I'd love to go back but whenever I try, I eventually find myself looking at metagame analysis and deck databases to try and improve whatever I come up with.
I'm making a goblin deck thats sole wincon is equipping my goblins with rocks and throwing them at my opponents face. I recommend doing something similar to get out of the meta crap.
@@wesleywyndam-pryce5305 I tried to make a style deck that has no wincon at all - it exists purely to look cool. I still haven't managed to get the main portion of the idea working, but my goal is to make it so that you can retrieve whatever you want from exile by repeatedly flickering or creating token copies of Riftsweeper.
Modern horizons 2 was really the format jumping the shark for me. It's about that point that I realised I just don't want to be pumping the required amount of resources jnto that format on a regular basis just so I Don't fall into obsolescence.
I still have a couple of modern decks, I even play them on occasion. But I'm not spending on MH2, and I'm going to think very carefully about whether any vaguely competitive modern event is worth me attending or not (probably not).
Modern was supposed to be a non-rotating, relatively stable format. Now based on modern horizons content we pretty much have annual rotations just like standard. (Sure things stay legal in the format, but typically modern horizons sets are pushed enough in power level that they render decks which aren't taking advantage of their stuff mostly obsolete: rotation by proxy). It's not the same format it was at inception, we were expecting legacy without the reserved list, turns out we get legacy with rotations.
At this point, keeping up with standard, pioneer, & modern just taxes me beyond the point where I can reasonably justify my spending, (not my financial limit, rather the point where I say "that's enough spending on mtg".) Something has to give, and unfortunately that's modern.
On a related note, I'm really glad Dominaria United is going to open the doors for a Standard with no banned cards in it, since it feels like we haven't had one in forever. Too bad I don't actually play the format.
Can’t say I know a single person who unironically plays standard lmfao
@@nicmastoridis6177 I do and tbh it is pretty healthy at the moment and nothing ultra worrying has been shown from DU yet. It is way more fun than it was even a year ago, and I think rotation will mostly be a plus this time.
@@nicmastoridis6177 how do you play standard ironically?
This was the argument during the Birthing Pod ban.
Delver was a major player on both legacy and modern during that time, and people claimed that banning delver would kill the deck. Because banning pod didn't killed that deck...
And about cards too broken or too expensive, playgroups should engage Rule Zero more often. Hell, i could argue about stores engaging on that too, but that will not end well.
@@XCodes That's basically Rule Zero. If something is too oppressive or too unfun, the group can decide to ban it
The problem is simple.
If WotC prints some new better archetypes, players cry because their good old deck is no more tier1.
If WotC doesn't print some new better archetypes, the price of the staples increases to the sky and no new player can afford a whole deck.
Everytime anything changes, people get angry for any reason.
We want our cards to remain expensive to sell them and we want them to be cheap to buy them (at the same time)
Ban all card on the reserve list. I own a cradle, I own Wheels, I have each dual land, I have multiple copies of grim monoliths. BAN ALL RESERVE LIST CARDS!
I want them to be reprinted. But they wont be reprinted while Wizards keeps their "Promise " about not reprinting the reserve list. Ban them all, tank the princes.
The "Investors" will be begging for the Reserve list cards to become legal again, to bring back their prices. But hold them to legality must come with accessibility. Allow for special run reprints or secret lair "Special" prints. They did it with Mox Diamond in the From the Vault box, and it didn't destroy the universe.
I play MTG for fun and been playing for a long time. I want other to be able to play with older harder to come by cards with out missing a mortgage payment for a piece of cardboard.
As someone who used to play Splinter Twin and Affinity, that thumbnail makes me irrationally angry. Thank you Kenobi
When mox opal got banned in modern it definitely took me out of magic for a long time. I had spent all my hobby money and time playing building up to get the nice masterpiece copies. But not long after I accomplished my goal it got banned. I ended up selling them cause I needed money and couldn't play them anymore. It was heartbreaking.
I was buying into the whurza deck at the time opals were banned. then lattice was banned. I still don't think it needed to be banned either.
@@wesleywyndam-pryce5305 - Lattice was banned first iirc? Lattice was banned because of Karn, the Great Creator hard-locking opponents out of the game, not because of Whurza combo nonsense.
I'm still salty about the Opal banning though. Yes, it's generally a "problematic" card, but in this case, it was clearly banned because of Urza, which didn't even fully die until further bannings. The problem with Opal getting the axe though is that it didn't just hit the Urza decks, it also killed Affinity, Hardened Scales, Hollow One, and the other combo decks people were playing with after KCI was banned (Semblance Anvil was a fun card). The blast radius of the ban was unacceptably wide, and it wasn't even successful at hitting its intended target.
The true lesson here is don't pay an exorbitant price for singles when a single ban can remove all of their utility for you, ESPECIALLY when you don't make a lot as is.
I love how much you've been uploading lately, keep up the great content!!
and STILL i much more like the "lets try and ban" then teh "lets be super safe and boring"
12:20 I sympathize with this part so much. I dropped almost a grand after saving up for a long time on 5 color Humans. It honestly even kinda hurts to write this because I feel so stupid playing the same terrible tier-3 deck every week into 2 thousand dollars worth of fetches, shocks, and elementals.
It's not even a terrible deck. It used to be an incredible tier-1 deck...I'm told.
trade out? if the cards didn't plummet then like why hold?
My friends and I play a version of mtg we call Hell in the Spell. No max hand limits, no banned or limited cards, no max deck limit, and we roll a D-20 to see how much life we start out with.
I feel like the solution is to just print enough of cards so none of them are prohibitively expensive, but then everyone with the expensive cards is upset. And can we really bring the price of some cards down? Take tarmogoyf, it is still quite pricey considering it doesn't actually see play anymore? Is that just the people who have them refusing to let them go for a reasonable price ?
If cards were cheap the ppl wouldn’t open to sell, which means cards cant be cheap
@@Rayquaza894 interesting paradox
@@Rayquaza894 If only the cards had some other use other than money, perhaps some kind of group activity with friends, a game if you will.
As profs said it, most really expensive cards comes from the reserved list. And the reserved list is a lie. Printing more doesn't affect the price of really old cards that much (except when they are very playable and limited to one printing) the memorabilia is what makes the price of most of old cards. Original printing, signatures, history of the cards.
The problem is that speculators control the prices of cards on the secondary market. They also hoard cards to artificially raise prices based on meta decks and just popular cards across formats. If the mtg playerbase can push the speculators out of their hobby then maybe things might change or someone else will step in and rip off the playerbase.
The fact that Emrakul is the #9 most played Creature in Modern only because it's used by Omnath decks to beat other Omnath decks is a depressing reality we live in.
On proxies: They're fine, for me the problem is when someone pubstomps. If I sat with my casual deck and someone goes turn 1 proxy mana crypt into proxy turn 2 dockside, Im not mad becuase they proxied a lot money. In mad because I sat at a casual table, and if we were going to play with this powerlevel I would just pop out my kinda cdeh but not really deck. Proxies are fine. Just be honest about the powerlevel of your deck.
That's the great thing about cube, no one can ban anything from it.
It seems to me game companies trying to avoid backlash creates powercreep - because people get excited over new, strong cards but very upset over $80 cards getting banned. So the power level will increase over time, inevitably. The fact of the matter is that WotC wants their game engineered to generate them revenue, it's not about having timeless cards that you can hold onto anymore. It's about getting you, me, and everyone else to buy their newest thing. So everything is designed to "rotate".
I have two solutions. Solution #1 wizards prints modern pre-cons with the monkeys, and the feactchys, and even the elementals that do flasheys. Solution #2 make a new format that plays with modern's current, and maybe even future ban list, but all cards played in it have to have been standard legal at some point which means no horizons or LOTR sets. Modern is still a thing with this solution people can still play monkey hammer-time vs Gandalf elementals control piles, but there's also just magic with your wholesome force of wills countering charbelchers. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
I remember the first 3 modern decks I built were twin, then pod, then eggs, and then I stopped playing modern after the third kick in the balls
As a veteran I can say the promo for thess "black thunders" is perfect, I wish this would be the add they used, uncensored of course. I love this channel hahaha
I feel like the gold bordered cards could be a great alternative for WOTC to make some money on official proxies. I would love to see more gold border reprints.
The only time I've ever actually had a card in any of my decks get banned was when Prophet of Kruphix was banned in Commander, it being in both my Simic and Temur decks respectively; I found replacements for them in my trade binders within 5 minutes or so, and that was that.
At least its only a single card, and not a full playset.
Printing new cards outclasses entire decks every bit as much as bannings do.
if you buy broken cards knowing you'll get free wins you shouldn't feel bad when the cards get banned.
You SHOULD feel silly though.
Trying to be smart when you should’ve been smarter than that…. Its a great way to feel dumb
Modern Horizons 2 is still in print and cheaper to get than the premium priced products that have released this year.
Someone who works at an LGS where I live... They literally, *literally*, absolute fact, took out a mortgage on their house to afford a legacy deck, and they were *four cards short when that ran out of money*, it took them another 4 months to save up for the spending money for the last 4 cards of the deck.
Legacy's for Suckers or people who can purchase your organs without your consent.
I had a foil Primeval Titan from Modern Masters 2015. It was my only copy and I was really excited to put it in a Commander deck and start playing with it. Then I found out it was banned in commander, and it sat in my binder with no place to go. It was then sold off with a bunch of other cards in a bulk sale to an LGS, having never been played and in pristine condition. Bans kill the value of all existing copies of a card as well as all future printings of that card (possibly even dictating whether or not that card will be reprinted due to its banned status.)
Good video Vince. I do think a lot of people don't see the cards surrounding a banned card and how they become less used and/or less valuable. It is bad in arena when a deck isn't playable and you get 4 wild cards due to a ban, it is even worse when the expensive cards in your physical deck can no longer be traded/sold for as much because of a related ban.
In gp vegas I dont remember what year I want to say 2018 or 2017. The year Mani Davoudi won on a mull to five. This was my first constructed gp and I made it to day 2 as well playing the exact same deck. My Dad the first night we were there in vegas so I could play in that event handed me a grand for the weekend when we went to eat. He said I already got lucky and won 5k on a hand pay and this is so if you want to get any cards or sealed product from the venders you can. I decided to foil out the deck I was playing. And I went the full 9 yards. Full playsets of every master piece I needed, Foil wpn promo vault skirge's, and foils of every other copies of cards in the deck. Including original scars foil etched champions. I still love that deck and have it built because it's an amazing deck that shows me what modern used to be.
Then while I was at an lgs pre pandemic one week the news that opal is banned due to the urza deck was mind boggling to me. They banned opal and killed a colorless aggro deck archetype that wasn't a problem in modern at all for a new printing of a card from modern horizons 1. This was when I knew modern was not going to be the same anymore. I still try to keep up. I built temur cascade when I heard about mh2. I picked up 2 set boxes, 2 collector boxes, and all the cards missing for crashcade from mh2 since i had every other card. Still like the deck. But I think that modern needs a shakeup that's not a horizons set. I think personally ragavan should be limited to 1 copy instead of banned because it is a good card but banning it like you said in the video would have ragavan with a gun in the deck pilots face. They should unban opal, keep astrolabe banned and limit the mh1 mono blue urza to 1 copy like ragavan. That way the decks they used to fit in can still be powerful, but less of an automatic I win just because of needing 4 copies of a brand new busted staple and more of an I win because I have my combo piece. I love modern but they way its headed rn I think it will crash and burn faster than legacy did.
Cat oven decks just got bodied in historic. No life gain on Meathook, and the familiar can’t block. No wildcard refunds.
Those cards were propping up my low tier Jund and Golgari decks too.
So there’s a few hard pivots
Literally laughed out loud at the Seinfeld breakdown. Genuinely loved the advert stuff too, it was honest but funny without being cheesy. I also now know what bat wing is, and for that I....thank you, I guess.
This one is a funny issue where we all want to be on the good side of specing for format changes but hate the opposite. It is a rough proposition most of the time, and its a bit perverse how closely it compares to gambling.
I still keep my Masterpiece Paradox Engine on my desk
My favorite deck was Modern Ad Nauseam. When SSG got banned most of my deck plummeted in value. Basically nothing in the deck held it’s value. The worst part was that the SSG ban wasn’t even my deck’s fault.
10:20 - "Sol Ring is pretty much better than the moxen"
Kinda, yeah - the advantage of moxen, or what would make them busted in Commander, is the ability to have 5 of them. That just adds consistency to your explosiveness.
But one-for-one, Sol Ring is generally a better card. It's why in Canadian Highlander, a singleton format where nothing is banned but a point system is used to limit density of "best cards", has all the moxen at 3 points but Sol Ring (and Mana Crypt) at 4.
I think something like a semi-limited list would be good for modern potentially. There's cards that are "too good" but they aren't really broken enough to justify a banning. Limiting them to something like 2 copies instead of 4 would prevent the build around strategies while not completely devaluing the cards. Things like the pitch elementals, basically most of the MH2 cards that make up probably half the meta would fall into consideration for this in my opinion. I think something like that would promote more creativity and diversity in lists honestly.
Congratulations on 100k subs daddy Kenobi!
That is the best first 5 seconds of any video ever
The banning of Mox Opal completely ruined my Affinity deck. I had very little options to pivot. I ended up just giving up Modern because of it and moved on cEDH where, if one card gets banned, it can be a little harder to expel an entire archetype...that, and, you know, proxies are baller.
Honestly I got lucky with MH2 I’ve been playing Yawgmoth combo since a bit after MH1 and I only had to get grist’s and endurances which was achievable with trades for me.
The twin ban nearly killed my interest in modern, a 12 year old who saved for a year to build a semi twin deck only to have it immediatly banned out from under me. Even though it was barley a twin deck no fetchs only two vents and one kiki 4 twins, it still took forver to save up for it.
Congrats on the 100k!
Man, the amount of stories around this really shows how many players can get screw over through bans. While I think that bans can make a format healthier, sometimes the ban is soooooooooo delayed that most people expect the card to stick around. Paradox Engine was legal for 2 and a half years in EDH, so many of my friends started to grab them up at $40 or $50 as it didn't seem like it was going anywhere. Then BANG! They killed the Engine, and dropped its price to ~$5 In. One. Day. #FreeParadox #IonaWTF?
With cards like Gaea's Cradle and other Reserved List cards, just print functionally identical versions but add a unique subtype. The Reserved List document states "Reserved cards will never be printed again in a functionally identical form. A card is considered functionally identical to another card if it has the same card type, subtypes, abilities, mana cost, power, and toughness." Just give the new card a unique subtype, maybe something like "Iteration," then add a line of rules text that says a deck cannot have both the original version and the new version. Bonus points if there's a succinct way to add a rule that makes Iterations inherently forbid both versions without the extra line of text.
I get that this kinda feels like cheating, but as almost everyone can agree, the reserved list was a mistake in the first place, so finding a loophole that lets them get more game pieces into players' hands while not opening WotC up to potential lawsuits is something I'm all for.
What if we made "original G modern"? Just Modern without modern horizons. Reports are cool though, they can stay.
Never thought about it that way. Good points all around.
One of the funniest videos you’ve ever made. I laughed loud multiple times.
Cheers
I H A V E T H E S O L U T I O N ! ! ! !
What Magic needs is more RESTRICTED cards. Remember Vintage? (and sometimes Standard/Historic on Arena?) They get to have restricted cards, why can't any of the other formats?
If Wizards don't feel comfortable outright banning something, they can restrict it. If they don't feel comfortable outright restricting something, they even have the power to force a "Restricted to 2 or Less", or even potentially a "Restricted to 3 or Less" rule. In fact, we could probably unban a great selection of cards from Legacy/Modern/Pioneer/Pauper banlists in favour of restrictions. Imagine only ever seeing three or less of each Incarnation a game and/or only every having to worry about three or less copies of Splinter Twin in your opponents deck. When 4 copies of a specific powerful card are not allowed, the deck won't function the same way, it won't be nearly as consistent, and less answers are needed to foil its plan.
The market would hopefully balance accordingly to reflect the changes, players will get to play with as many of their favourite toys possible, and LGSs/Wizards can continue selling product worry-free while maintaining diverse, interesting, and healthy formats.
Obviously it will be a headache for a while at the start figuring out what needs to be restricted but I sincerely believe this is the only move, that is both fair and fun for the entirety of the magic community, that we can make to keep our game the best it can possibly be.
The lurrus sound effect had me looking for my cat
Arena needs a dust system and in paper Wizards desperately needs to start reprinting things into the ground. Theres so much reprint equity everything is gonna end up being $20+ otherwise (hell it already is)
I recently wanted to see what it would cost to make a deck that was simply all of the best beaters, and a proper mana base. almost every single creature was over $30 and more than 60% were over $45. all in all it was nearly 1.2k for what amounted to good Stompy deck.
Don't reprints have a similar problem as bans from a financial perspective? It can also feel bad to buy a playset of expensive cards just to hear that they're being reprinted so in a few weeks they'll be half their current price. Obviously reprints don't invalidate your entire deck, but they still reduce the value of your "investment".
It feels like the two arguments can't exist at the same time where cards and collections should have value, especially when they are base game pieces instead of rare blinged out versions yet we should have proxying up to and maybe including sanctioned events. I think the fairest thing all around is proxies of cards you own a single copy of especially if we're mostly talking about commander because why does your opponents powerful card matter in a casual format?
12:45 Well, I think you found it.
Me: Man, Modern, Legacy, and Commander aren't fun anymore but I still want to play Magic.
WotC: Play Arena! Play Arena! Play Arena! Play Arena! Play Arena! Play Arena! Play Arena! Play Arena! Play Arena! Play Arena!
Me: Ugh....
This is why I got out of Modern. I already didn’t play a ton, but then RG TitanShift would spike from low tier 1 to garbage with every other set, not to mention how a new set might have had some new addition that may have been expensive to get (as well as Scapeshift just suddenly tanking in price thanks to a reprint). So I just sold out and bought my second EDH deck.
Its interesting to hear MtG players side of a banlist. As a yugioh player, its just standard practise. When a banlist comes out, yugioh players know a rough estimate when the new BL comes out and react to that. IDK how many cards get banned, and if there is a specific time for when a banlist comes out, but it sure looks a lot different.
Physical and Arena, here's the advice to remember - don't rush to build that new dominating deck when it's obvious that the key cards will end up getting banned. For example - in modern, I don't know how many times I told friends "it's your own fault" when they'd whine about losing money on a deck because a card got banned. Some cards, like Splinter Twin, clearly violated the philosophy of the format and were guaranteed banhammer targets, yet people lined up to drop huge amounts of money on playsets of that and other cards they needed for the soon to be banned deck.
That being said, the problem is that WotC doesn't playtest properly. They barely care about standard, and don't have time to test in any other format, not to mention they don't have people skillful enough to do the playtesting.
I don't disagree with your overall point, but it's interesting that you bring up Splinter Twin as an example, because many Modern players explicitly bought into Twin due to the fact that it was budget (compared to other tier-1 decks). In its ban announcement, WotC reasoned that the very existence of Twin's instant-win lines gatekept aggro and midrange decks that wanted to tap out every turn, and they were probably correct -- with Twin still in the format, decks like Humans and Hollow One probably wouldn't have gotten a chance to shine. But Twin players counterargued that Twin wasn't especially prevalent in big tournament top 8s at the time it was banned, and in their eyes, Wizards had no reason to do this except to manufacture an artificial set rotation and force them to buy new cards. And because many Twin players were budget players, they were now priced out of Modern entirely.
I'm not saying Wizards was wrong to make that ban. And whether players prefer the mid-2010s Modern that forced players into high-interaction decks just to avoid losing to Splinter Twin vs. the late-2010s Modern that turned into an aggro/combo "arms race" has been a subject of heated debate for years. But the Twin ban was hardly telegraphed. It blindsided everyone, even the pros, and compared to the bannings of other cards like Mox Opal or Oko, it didn't leave that much financial ruin in its wake. If anything, it punished POORER players.
@@alexbrangan2885 - Twin wasn't telegraphed? I don't know where you were playing, but in my area and the online communities I frequented it was blatantly obvious that Twin was on the chopping block for violating the founding intent of the format. It's just one of many cards of varying values that has done this and received a ban for doing so. No consistent turn 3 or 4 wins. A deck starts doing that, only stupid people run and spend a lot of money on the cards for that deck unless they can be easily moved over to a new competitive deck when the inevitable happens.
Its interesting coming as a yugioh player where bans happen pretty frequently. The first thing to note is that bans don't have a history of eliminating decks from the format. Most of the time decks get hit but are still playable, cards do eventually get banned but that usually only happens after everyone is so sick of the decks using it. Also they usually had an affordable reprint before that happened, a card has to be real problematic to get hit when its still expensive.
Overall people tend to be happy about bans.
Yu gi oh cards are also not as prohibitively expensive as magic cards from what I've heard. Even the most played yu gi oh cards top out at 10 dollars from what I've seen, compare that to Ragavans selling for 50-80 dollars, and magic players just have a lot to lose.
Also in eternal formats magic decks are usually EXTREMELY slow to change, some sets in magic history have never contributed a card to eternals, which means that you used to be able to hold onto a deck and play it for a decade with only minor changes over the years. From what I've heard yu gi oh usually changes with each new set and has since the very beginning, so players are far far more prepared for "soft rotations" where the cards become obsolete from a power perspective, eternal magic players are not. Wizards still has very little idea how to correctly handle bans, they're too greedy and want to ban adjacent rather than the actually problematic cards, an example would be bridge from below getting banned before Hogaak.
@@bunnyben5607 ragavan is just the new hotness, but its nowhere near the ceiling not even counting reserve list. just look at mana crypt
Arena is a MTG simulator and if the economy wasn't so brutal anyone could play any deck and the simulation would be ruined
Very interesting take here.
Cockatrice?
Would love to see a comparison between the top online card games. What does Pokémon do for cards that you don’t need? Yugioh and hearthstone would be other top ones to look at.
I know Pokémon uses packs as currency and allows trades and even cosmetics can be traded towards packs
Yu-Gi-Oh you can actually see and I personally experienced this a bit in the online platform for Yu-Gi-Oh called Duel Links, where they banned something powerful like Pot of Greed for an example, and essentially did something similar to the wild card thing they gave us like a rare blank trade card to pick something to replace the card we had lost, our choice pick though but from a limited selection of not the choices you probably wanted for your blank rare. None of these games are so different tbh. I'd still play that game but their customer service wouldn't help get my account back so screw em and duel links 😂🤣
With the most silly part being, I actually paid to open digital packs of trading cards 🤔 yeah I'm good on online trading cards.. mtgo seems legit at least but yeah still good
@@tylerbinder8698 ya mtgo seems legit but I’ve been waiting to see what daybreak games does with it before I dump my collection on there or invest anything more into it
Ah yes.
When I came back to magic (started very casually in the Khan's block) I got into competitive built 2 modern decks that interested me. Izzet Phoenix, and grisshoalbrand. I had never spent that much money on something like magic before. Then about a week later, looting was banned for hogaaks sins and it killed both of my new decks
I don’t know the solutions either. I’d personally be just as happy if all the cards in the game were worth $5 or less as I would be if suddenly the value of my cards tripled. I just want to play the game, I don’t care about the value, I don’t view this game as an investment at all. I’m always happy to see cards I have get reprinted and lose value, it means I can afford more copies if I need them.
Don't forget to go to thld.co/sheath_kenobi_0822 and use code kenobi at checkout to get 20% off your order! Thanks to SHEATH for sponsoring today’s video
I am a bit disappointed that you didn't mean a literal cock. Guess it still is shotgun time to scare the foxes away.
Not going to lie, out of majority of MTG content I may watch... your channel is the only one it makes sense for this ad.
Since you own 1 cradle proxy it as much as you want. If anyones a dick about it make em sit around and wait for 20 minutes while you flip through 6 decks to "find" your real one
Honestly I wish wizards made horizon sets priced and printed like normal standard sets. Also include super rare alt art versions of the chace cards. That could drive down the price of the normal versions.
When Faithless Looting was banned, I lost about 5 decks, total of $1500 at least. Never touched those cards again, basically.
You should be more careful with your cards
I can see Kenobi still big mad about Luminarch Aspirant making him wait a half a turn longer.
It seems clear that WOTC are positioning modern as a legacy priced format that they can profit from. And then replacing it with pioneer. The question is if they plan on rotating whole formats out of playability on a regular basis. If so this could totally undermine player confidence.
I stopped playing Modern when MH1 came out and priced me out of my deck, for what it's worth. Rotated to focusing on limited for awhile thereafter but I can't imagine trying to keep up monetarily with the rat race WotC has turned every constructed format into with these "premium" (over-priced) supplementary sets.
More evidence that cradle's price would crash is looking at other lands from the same cycle. Tolarian Academy, indisputably the best land in the game is a mere $150 because it is banned everywhere and restricted in vintage. Heck, even Serra's Sanctum which taps for enchantments is twice that price because it is legal and people want to play it.
Edit: In short, unban Tolarian Academy please and turn my $150 card into $3000 overnight
i just wish they wouldn't put me into the alchemy queue when i start mtg arena....
I would like to see Wizards start selling cards directly instead of through packs, with pricing based on card rarity (and maybe with limited quantities?). Effectively, this would set a ceiling on card prices. Boosters could still exist for things like draft or collector cards, but I think this would be an improvement in accessibility for constructed.
Obviously there is a whole ecosystem built up around the secondary market (e.g. LGSs) that this could potentially disrupt, but I think there are ways around most of the side effects.
Would love to hear your and the community's take on this!
Wotc will never acknowledge the secondary market, if they were to do this then it would change the game forever. This will never happen, they’d never be able to make their money on packs again and they wouldn’t have any excuse any longer for not reprinting all cards from all sets and taking down the reserved list.
@@GalatheonIL52NEP you're probably right :) but wishful thinking! Personally I would like to see them move towards more properly aligning incentives for everyone involved, and as the kids say sometimes you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette
"effectively this would set a ceiling" no it wouldn't. just as it is now wotc just gets to decide what it's worth by controlling the scarcity. and they can and would just change the prices of the mythics and rares as groups as they pleased.
if you wanted to go down this line though, just get rid of rarity and packs altogether and instead have everything made to order. print only what is requested by people for those people to play with and have all cards available at all times. every card would be 50 cents as they should be and that would be the end of every financial problem magic has.
(no, the special foiling crap would not still exist. just get custom art done)
@@wesleywyndam-pryce5305 I think we may be talking past one another. If Wizards sold any mythic for e.g. $10/card, how would that not enforce a ceiling on secondary market prices for that card?
I'd also be open to print-to-demand, but I have a feeling that their contracts with printing companies perhaps would complicate that. But I don't have any actual insight there, just speculation on my part
An easier comparison for "why isnt Gaea's cradle banned?" Is a very simple one Kenobi: Why is Tolarian Academy Banned when Cradle isnt? Also vice versa. They either need to both be banned or both be unbanned, theyre effectively the same busted card but for a different card type.
Very different cards.
I honestly think that it will be a persistent problem no matter what happens, either bannings or lack of good cards or reprints, etc. I also can't really say from experience that it bothers me to ban a card an lose money on those scales. Sure I've lost money on cards, but also don't use most of them because I don't like the amount of power they provide. This is good place to mention I only play commander or limited. As for proxies, I don't use them myself except for one exception. Others can use them within limitations I hold personally. Outside those limitations, I do find proxying cards to be dangerous in a vacuum. Luckily I haven't yet run into the kind of scum player I fear to find one day. Regardless, I'm not going to scream from a roof someone is using them unless there is a decent prize on the line and they weren't disclosed beforehand, assuming they're allowed. Some decorum is expected and appreciated.
The problem with Cradle is Tolarian isn’t also allowed.
The answer to that is simple. While Cradle is at many times quite busted and ridiculous good, Academy is still stronger and much more busted, because it allows for even faster starts. A main difference is that you can use mana rocks the turn the come into play and have no summing sickness like mana dorks and that there a lot more usefull 0 mana artifacts then creatures. The combination of artifacts plus Academy simply allows you to vomit out your hand faster then the combination of creatures + Cradle.
The fact that WotC doesn't even give restrictions a try in standard/modern/pioneer is disappointing, they would flat out rather change cards and give more work to the design team instead of saying right 4 once upon a time sucks and add too much consistency, lets get this shit out of here, ignoring the fact that only being able to play 2 would make the card much less of a problem.
MH1 and MH2 should be banned with an apology letter from WotC. Actually, in the way that WotC is conducting its business. We should make something like a "Premordern" before Modern Horizons and stick to it, letting WotC rot
how exactly does that stick it to wotc?
the products have been sold the profits have been made. why would they care in the slightest what happens next?
This already happened when Twin was banned. I bought into the deck around 2012 since I wanted to get into Modern, and played the deck until its eventual ban in 2016. I really felt burned since I already had the deck for quite some time and I really couldn't find an alternative that felt quite like the deck since I've played it for so long at that point. After a while I just gave up on Modern completely and spent my time building Legacy decks instead.
Nowadays, I really don't play MtG anymore. Ever since MH2, I fell off playing MtG entirely since MH2 really tilted me off of really liking MtG, and since its hard for me to find any Legacy players around where I live, I really don't play anymore. Feels like MH2 is pretty much creating a set-rotation without there being a set rotation.
Sol Ring is super busted. I played a few copies in a casual deck once since I had extras from all the commander precons, and it was absurd, even in a garbage morph deck! I mean, the card's basically a repeatable Black Lotus.
The day before I made red white vehicles in standard copter was banned that deck needed copter without it lost a ton of games. I think copter was fine in standard and really hurt my trust in why should I invest in a game if you going to ban what I build. IN STANDARD of all things the one format your supposed to play test.
My only ban story so far was Amonkhet/Ixalan Standard. Built a gruul dinos deck and bam, next week rampaging ferocidon got banned, because aparaently it was teh shit in some burn deck. My poor Dinos never recovered :(
Modern only looks balanced because the best decks are impossible to play with rentals except for the most wealthy options.
I'd rather buy new pants than buy/up date my old modern decks.
Pants would probably last longer to!
Bought into the urza whir deck a few years back and it definitely felt bad to lose the value of the four mox opal I traded in to
Honestly right now the problem cards that are pushing the decks don't really feel like the expensive MH2 cards tbh
Obviously ragavan, murktide and the elementals are pushed to hell and back
and there is a huge problem of just every deck gets to jam free spell elementals just because
which i do hate quite a bit (they feel like the new fetch lands in some respects)
but i think that they are playing second fiddle right now
wrenn and six makes greedy mana bases completely free and resilient to blood moon if you play around it
expressive iteration holds the glue of a lot of decks together and pushes decks even further towards playing four and five color
omnath is just an egregious piece of cardboard
unholy heat is a complete color pie break
the combination of unholy heat, prismatic ending and counterspell makes black obsolete as a color for removal
dragon's rage channeler and ledger shredder make your entire deck into two for ones and also just kill the opponent
companions are freerolls
mishra's bauble is a freeroll that needs like 1% synergy to be worth it
i guess the best way i can put it is that
playing modern right now feels like a poorly constructed house of cards
sure, things are pretty fun in modern right now, I can technically play goblins, silly decks are kept in check, neat
but i am constantly worried that the format will just keel over and become a non format
and there will be no reasonable amount of bannings that will actually fix anything
By far the most broken creatures are overwhelmingly the ones which provide active hand filtering, like dragon's rage or ledger shredder, and do so cheaply. In the right decks such abilities basically turn into repeatable brainstorm effects while also providing fuel for delve, which was also put on a broken card. Wizards should have a policy on never printing more of those.
Though I will say expressive isn't that much of a problem imo, just that all these cheap removal and creature spells basically supercharges it from something like a normal draw spell into being broken. The thing is that being able to play a land off it isn't even that great, but that when you have a 2 mana murktide, a 1 mana ragavan, etc. Expressive gains massive utility extremely early into the game, ensuring that basically you can never whiff.
none of those things seems even slightly "broken" but okay go off.
honestly if modern wasn't banning things based on usage and whining but actual mechanics then almost nothing would be banned in modern. the fact that the new hotness gets banned before people even attempt to counter brew is your real problem. of you're lucky ragavan will stick around long enough for you to figure out how to reliably overcome it.
@@wesleywyndam-pryce5305 Modern horizons 2 has been out for over a year at this point. People have tried counter brewing yet the MHII decks just keep climbing up in usage as more people buy into them. If anything the meta has become stale at this point, and some previously tier 1/2 decks (now tier 3 or irrelevant) have resorted to running weird cards just to stay slightly relevant, like infect running mutate/teferi, humans running tourach, among other things. When such decks can run off pick cards and do well with them, that's a bad indicator. Another bad indicator is when top tier decks start running sideboard cards solely for mirror matches, like emrakul in elementals.
Also it's sad that MHII is both the problem and the solution. Ragavan's best answer is always going to be prismatic ending or solitude. It's honestly sad the meta has become so centric around MHII cards.
We all should thank Pleasant Kenoby for not only caring about the health of the game, but also caring about the health of our balls
Bans should be rare like standards without banning multiple back to back as the norm. Wotc got greedy, if they stuck to the plan of modern is legacy we can make bank on and printed modern reprint sets at the same price as standard ones we would have no issue
I think it's funny that I called modern MH block constructed repeatedly on social media and caught a lot of heat for it, but a youtube personality says it and BAM, 1k updoots.
Wotc will never do this but eternal formats should allow a certain number of proxies. there is no excuse for this at LGS commander events, free the proxies!
I got burned with dredge bannings twice, so that was an easy $1000 down the drain
obvious solution is that cards should just be cheap enough that this doesn't matter
It really amuses me to see mtg players experience this sort of thing where other games have been banning cards to keep a healthy game for years. Players know the broken cards are going to get banned eventually and buy them anyway for the time that they can win tournaments with them. They know it's a game not a long-term investment.
if only we could get rid of all the finance assholes.
"other games have been banning cards to keep a healthy game for years"
MTG started banning cards (like Shahrazad) way back in January 1994.
Something I hated about Yugioh and something that prevented me from spending money more in it. Why would I want to buy a card if itll likely just get hit by a banlist in 3 months?
I'm personally in favor of wild and common bannings. Cards can always be unbanned at a later date if the archetype they were enabling becomes less toxic. But when a single archetype, like black control in standard, is so dominant, and so toxic to play against, it needs bans. I don't give a FUCK about card value. Screw the secondary market, print all cards and sell them in a store at 10 cents a piece, make the game more accessible to those of us who don't want to dump tons of money into fetch lands and shit just to be competitive.
I kinda feel like the solution to Modern being fucked is Pioneer. So long as they don't start printing Pioneer Horizons that is.
For a minute here I thought it was going to go down the rout on how banned cards on arena give you wild cards but banned card on paper give you nothing but a card you can’t play making dealing with banned cards on arena an improvement from paper. Hahaha… silly me.
most cards don't get banned in every format and you can still resell for like 20%. how would arena be an improvement?