SHOULD ELESTRALS SWITCH TO A DUEL LINKS BANLIST?
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 10 ก.พ. 2025
- Maybe!
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#Elestrals #MBT #banlist
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The biggest problem with this style of banlist is that sometimes limitations effectively become bans. About half of the currently Limited cards in Duel Links are cards that no one would ever consider playing, but they are theoretically mildly annoying, so they’re limited so that you can’t play them alongside the other slightly annoying cards or more powerful bosses
I actually like that it force you to get creative if you want to play annoying cards
That is why i think combining the two is a good idea. Some cards are not a problem because of how they combine with other cards but because they are able to be used so regularly, in which case a limit (or in a rare case a semi-limit) would suffice. Other cards tend to be a problem not because of themself, but because they combine too well with some other cards. If you were forced to choose between a number of staples, all of which have at least one deck where they fit better than any of the other ones, then putting those on the master duel style banlist seems like a better idea to me
While that is an issue, imo it's workable and has wiggle room. For limited or new play, by keeping these cards legal at 1/2/3, it means that if you find one of these cards, even if they aren't played in constructed, you can still use them for their presumably good function. This was a strength of DL, where for example Amazoness Onslaught and Swordswoman were put to 2. Any actual deck would just use 2 Onslaught, but new players who needed utility or normals could still use Swordswoman while they built. There's also the fact that it can encourage deck creativity. If made carefully, you can easily end up with a wide variety of interesting decisions of removal vs consistency vs utility and when to settle for weaker options. Any banlist system will inevitably have issues and annoyances, this one just has the most potential for keeping goodstuff down and weakening top decks without murder.
Except it doesn’t hurt strategies that need those specific cards at 3, while still hurting the “good stuff” decks allowing more decks to be playable.
@@JonathanMandrakeI think they might not want to commit to it becuase it’s inherently confusing, whail it may be way superior
I think I would prefer a points list over a dl banlist, since it's more customizable and is less likely to lead to people just playing the best card in each limit category. Admittedly my only experience with this style of list is in a Highlander format, so it might not translate well
i feel like this is even less intuitive
Point lists are the worst type of b/r lists
I think the main thing bringing "goodstuff" to the top is the Big Three counter runes, Shield, Gorgon's, and PTA.
They exist as weird pseudo-removal that overwhelmingly punishes gameplan decks, not because of spirit economy, but card economy. 3-costs don't get played because the 1- and 2-cost needs to dodge all removal/interruptions or you die.
The Big Three also hurt the player that's behind more than the player that's ahead. They're all reactionary, so the player that can afford to not attack/cast/use effects can sit on their board while the player behind must push. Laurels was meant to help, but the condition was too easy to meet.
And lastly, while you can put 5 or 6 elements in a single deck to use all those good Elestrals, it would be a LOT less feasible if the Big Three weren't all Omni element. If you had to save some of a specific spirit for your backrow, you might be less inclined to boymath too close to the sun. But instead everyone gets to play 9 Solemn Strike that are almost always live. Why does non-generic Counter Counter with downsides not see play?
All of this leads to a meta where the best way to mitigate being hit by one of these is for your deck to be an Endless Conga Line of Assholes. Putting any more than 1 egg in each basket is a great way to lose.
THANK YOU this is what I’ve been feeling for ages
Could be a deckbuilding keyword or something like that for super powerful cards, like "Loyalty: Thunder" so you can only play it if every card in your Main and spirit deck are Thunder for example.
Or the other way around, where it cannot be used if you have X/Y element on the deck.
So the card becomes unplayable, doesnt really seem like a good solution
@tame1773hearing this makes me think of Hearthstone's highlander stuff, but those were generally immediate benefits for lowering your deck's consistency, this mechanic has to be a power boost for lowering your utility, a thing that seems very difficult to accomplish
Somewhere between Loyalty and Companion for sure. Its definitely a tricky space to design for, but Elestrals is pretty simple when it comes to its type organization, so I could see it working their better than in Magic
The closest comparison I could think of from my own experience are the “complex bans” in competitive Pokemon. One infamous example is that in Gen 5, you could not use a Pokemon with the ability Drizzle nor a Pokemon with the ability Swift Swim in the same team. Such examples don’t occur much anymore, but it’s something that I was reminded of when you talked about the Duel Links style banlist.
Honestly, I really wish they'd do complex bans more often in Competitive singles. The trickle down from something like the sleep status or King's Rock Bans are absolutely infuriating. I absolutely adore the decision made for Gems in Gen 5 where it was ONLY banned from OU and not from lower tiers because with basic pieces of the game, like status conditions or held items, they're really only broken on very specific Pokemon.
I just think Banlists can only ever be half of a solution. As you mention about Limit 2, every new card risks breaking whatever balance this kind of list enforces. If the point is to restrict generic tools, then the Dev Team won't be allowed to print much generic utility going forward still, which isn't good long term.
I see two real roads. Introducing those hard lanes inside the card pool ala archetypes. Or change the core rules in a way that makes the Spirit Deck less mixable or some other rule that accomplishes a similar result. A lot of new games introduce hard walls (Lorcana, One Piece, Star Wars, Flesh and Blood) for this exact problem.
So speaking as someone intimately familiar with another game, Final Fantasy actually started having a similar issue, especially once they started printing multi-element cards that were extremely pushed - it just no longer was worth it to not play 2 or 3 or even 4 of the game's 6 elements, especially with the fetching and color engines the game had produced in 8 years as an eternal format.
However, at the most recent world championships, mono-earth, mono-water, mono-wind and mono-ice all had a significant presence and it was a game design decision from the developers to reward playing mono-decks for more than their stability and speed. The best way I could describe it is, imagine if you had a free effect veiler hand trap but only if you had 80% wind spirits in play or break zone (not exactly how it works but close enough). What about Earthquake on a massive cheap body but you need every one of your spirits to be water? If Elestrals really wants to prioritize these, it's a card design angle in the same way YGO archetypes work, but they can find ways to be creative and still push individual pantheons. I also think it'd help if they'd stop doing the Pokemon thing of making elements not work against themselves. While the Tsunami counterplay of enchanting water spirits is very, very cool, it also leads to water having an even larger presence in the game. And let's be real, the gameplay of "my deck isn't weak to Tsunami because it happens to have a blue spirit in the middle" isn't... very fun or engaging. And how bad does it feel when you do have a set Tsunami that effectively doesn't have text. And this runs through all of Elestral's design language. Specteris doesn't suppress lunar elestrals iirc. All this leads to is situations where the best counterplay to the good stuff is to play the good stuff which is absolutely a problem.
I'm excited to be able to play Elestrals when Clash is done - been following it lightly ever since it was announced and more so through you and creators like Jess. And I think that for the early part of the game, it's probably not a bad thing for good stuff piles to... be good and fun to play with. It's just going to be some learning quirks to the way that Spirits work which is great - that's a really good selling point that Elestrals has over any other card game.
Well the Dopplegator Full Moon deck might be the one to make turbo better, but that's what some people thought about the 3 cost solar boys and what most people thought about Morphrost. It turns out combo is bad when you have finite turn actions and that eats your hp too. I like the Duel List style list. It would be a headache in Elestrals since the gap between cards is already so big. To make a "diverse" format, you would have to go pretty ham on that type of list. I think Elestrals just needs more thoughtful design and to start printing archetypes to be okay power creeping just one level to get a nicer foundation
I think you can quite easily fix this by just implementing a hard 2-3 element limit to decks.
Another way they could work do this is by introducing what would be Commander Elestrals, which would work like the Commander in MTG. These Commander Elestrals would be 2 to 4 elements and give benefits to those elements, but lock you into it. Like, a Water/Earth Commander Elestral could allow you to do 2 Spirit actions a turn, but one of them has to Summon a 1 Spirit Elestral. Or a Fire/Earth/Thunder Commander Electral could make it so that whenever an Elestral goes to your opponent's Underground, you can nexus 1 Spirit to send a Spirit from their Spirit Deck to the Underground.
One quick resolution I found to the issue of explaining it was adding some kind of rank indicator to the Limit N sections end of explain them as points.
IE
1 GOLD, 2 SILVER, 3 BRONZE
You get that number of "slots" for the corresponding rank. So you can use UP TO 3 bronze cards, but no more. Something like Earthquake or ROYL would be a "gold rank" card and you can afford only 1 of them.
Honestly, I love the premise of the Duel Links banlist, allowing you to play any card you want, no matter how strong... just stopping you from stacking specific combos. Like having three semi'd cards meaning you can run two of them at 1, but not have all three of them. It forces you to choose where you want the cards to work, like if you wanted Jet Synchron to work with Junk cards or if you wanted to summon a lesser tuner off Halq. More TCGs should do a payment banlist system.
Also room for experimentation with like a Limited 5 list. Like under a limited 5 list you can run a full playset of a powerful card but would be locked out of potentially worthwhile synergistic cards. If you put all Fives for example decks that play Fire still get their Necruffs but then you can’t jam every other generically good beater
Honestly, rather than that, I think that the kind of banlist that should be done is banning/limiting card *interactions*, like "you can't play this card if you're playing this other card in your deck" for example
i think a better system might be a "Your deck can only contain 10 points worth of cards" with most cards costing 0, and some going all the way up to 3. This would mirror the existing resource system of the game, making it easy enough to intuite for players. "Yeah, Ambrosia has a Competitive Cost of 1, so if you want to run all 3 copies, you gotta consider what other powerful cards your cutting"
this would FUNCTIONALLY make it the same as the duel links system. Since if you make a card cost 3, it's basically going to be the ONLY card you get to play among these powerful cards. This wouldnt straight up be limit-1. But I think a format where... sure, you can run 3 copies of pot of greed in your deck... and nothing else, would result in some interesting deck building. "Do i want to efficiently have access to 3 copies of earthquake in my deck at the cost that i cant run a single other powerful card in this game?"
this might result in like people playing powerful 1-ofs like they are now. But even then, you still only end up with 3 1-ofs and the rest cut off. and if a card really is so broken you cant be allowed to run more than 1 copy period?? well at that point just ban it.
I think this system provides all the same pros of the duel-links system, BUT makes it easy for new players to understand since it functions so similarly to the existing spirit system
I think the problem here isn't the choice of banlist. It's that, currently, there is no downside (well, very few downsides) to having more types of runes.
Magic is actually having a problem with this in older formats. Due to the ubiquity of fetch lands and the introduction of triomes (lands that remember trapped with three basic land types), splashing for two even three extra colors isn't that hard to do. It makes only the most aggressive of strategies stick to only one or two colours.
The solution to both is: make playing less colours more appealing. Make new cards that punish having multiple colors/runes. Make rules that increase the cost of playing multiple colors. Make it more inconsistent, make it more punishable.
Theres a similar, but different, system in the Canadian Highlander MTG format (dw it is NOT commander) that might also be a neat idea.
The term I tend to use is Choice Restriction, cuz almost all Bandai and Bushiroad games have a similar style of restriction, and this is the term they use.
I like the Duel Links Banlist but it needs to be well managed and not...the Duel Links Banlist, where its functionally mini-rotation where new staples arent on the list and new decks get to use the Limit 3 Staples temporarily to have an artificial power boost over older decks that get their archetype cards put in Limit 3 jail.
I like that Digimon shoots the gap with this kind of ban list. It isn’t one or the other, cards can be limited and then there are cards that cannot be played in the same deck.
That’s an interesting idea but I do think it plays against Elestras strengths as pointed out in the video. Thinking about it I believe “good stuff” should be a thing and my hope is that as we get more sets the synergies for game plan strategies becomes the thing that makes them a strong option.
I think having to make the choice of forgoing potentially stronger cards with higher ceilings that necessitate heavy investment into a specific element or type of elestrals, over efficient but outclassed the longer the game goes on generic good stuff could be an interesting way of balancing the game while not having to restrict deck building.
I think every card game should at least partially use this system. The limit 3 of list insures that more strategies can exist in the same format by locking the more powerful, generic options away from the more powerful decks. This allows cards like say, Pot of Prosperity or Called By the Grave, to continue to support weaker strategies without stronger decks also getting those benefits. Heck, systems like this have seen some really interesting, occasional success in Competitive Pokemon throughout multiple different formats. From Agility and Partial Trapping, to Drizzle and Swift Swim; these sorts of complex bans do wonders for preserving a strategy, while also keeping it in line.
An alternative but maybe annoying mechanism might be by doing the “Point buy” ban style, where you provide a point limit on your deck and each card costs points. I don’t have a well thought good faith argument for this system but it is something I considered when I tried brainstorming banlist styles before.
I really hope good stuff piles don’t become a main stay of this game, mostly because it really hurts people who want to commit to a certain element or deck archetype but have to get walled by wet 5s all the time.
The last tournament the only really fun and interesting game I had was against Penterror, the rest were just “out my Galaxea lmao”
I find the duel links style banlist a headache, especially with rules as to how siding with those cards would work. Would you be allowed to put an extra limit 3 card in the side if you swap a limit 3 card out in deck in exchange during siding? It's just not super straightforward compared to "This card is at one. You can only have one in your deck" or "This card is banned. You can't play it".
I personally favor trying to make gameplan decks capable of outpacing the midrange goodstuff piles but not to the point goodstuff dies out entirely. A good example of that kind of balance, oddly enough, would be Yugioh's HAT format. HAT pretty much is a goodstuff deck, but dedicated gameplan decks like Mermail or Spellbook thrived, and more middle of the road decks, like Geargia, also flourished. I think card design is the key to solving this issue
It's main and side together in paper speed duels
I think that that would be a great idea!
So another way they could make cards less splash-able is to ban Ambrosia.
When earthquake was at 3 plenty of decks would run only 2 earth, and just play the odds that you'd find 1 Ambro before you get 2 Earthquake, and you see it now with Cryoblast, you can run 3 copies and just hope you get an Ambro before you need it.
Ambrosia being so flexible means you can run tiny spirit counts at no cost, if you open multiple of a card with only a few spirits you use Ambro, but if you don't then Ambro can just be your main element.
Unrelated, but where can I get that shirt? Asking for a friend. Or, more like a friend of a friend. My friend’s friend. Me, I’m asking for me.
i think some goodstuff is fine but i think all they need to do is just print cards that fallcilatate different "archetypes" like mill or Chronodile or whatever instead of way too generic stuff like Lavalith. though i think some goodstuff is fine.
i also think duel-links style banlist would go against aDrive's visions too since this game is supposed to be an alternative pokemon or whatever which i guess means it would be best if you can get to use all your favorites in a deck.
Maybe my solution isn’t fun or creative, but I think if they’d add a three color limitation to decks it’d work out
What if...the gameplan in my gameplan deck...was leagues better than a pile of good stuff? Oh no wait I've reinvented archetypes again damn. I mean I'd like gameplan decks to actually do something that can't easily be removed...like some way to protect something so your opponent needs two answers in a row instead of flipping Sakuretsu Armor and undoing all your work. There's gotta be a balancing point....like I want Pantheons outside Earth and Thunder to be good enough to play outside of casual tables. Give Trish some busted-ass Solar cards or something idk, he's been a good boy he deserves it.
The issue is the duel links banlist is good because of the deck size... your more likely to use that limited one then a limited one in a 40 card deck compared to 20.
I feel like the best answer to this and some sort of loyalty system for the issue cards. Play X amount of this element in the spirit deck and your now able to play with X card from that element in your main deck. The only issue i see with this is how would the opponent know if you can run X card. My answer is to maybe Make the spirit deck public info at the start of the game but then private afterwards.
I really hope elestrals doesn't implement a duel links style banlist. A lot of banlists styled like this just lead into situations where your gameplan is entirely focused on your limited card of choice, leading to sacky games that end with "he drew tth/(insert autowin here) so i lost instantly". Another problem I rarely see mentioned is the expectation that cards just won't be banned. Why ban one finisher when you can limit 2 enablers that functionally kills the deck in a comp sense, but still lets it crush people if you open well.
Im only here to hear this man yap
I adore how DL does the ban list but id want to have bans up to limit 5 tbh.
I loved the duel links banlist I mentioned I wish they used duel links banlist in your banlist video
I actually like Digimon’s form of banned/limited.
Where they will limit/ban a card. But, if a piece is important to a certain deck, there’ll be a rule where you can’t play two certain cards together.
So, example, if someone had Galaxea and Astrabbit and if that’s an op combo, the creators of Elestrals can put up a rule that those two can’t be played together.
I love the Banned Pairs system so much and think it should become a standard across all card games. It's such a great way to get rid of problematic interactions without without all the unnecessary collateral damage that comes with binary 'yes/no' hits. And no, it does not make banlists needlessly complicated.
it makes it way harder to enforce, and you need to trust your opponent is not playing any banned combination
@@TheCringeDad if you are playing on a tourney the judges would verify your deck. banned pairs are easier to verify than the duel-links style banlist.
if you are just playing against your friends you probably wouldnt care anyway
That's basically like cardfight vanguard banlist right?
@@TheCringeDad We already need to trust that our opponents are playing tournament-legal decks anyway. An event that is being properly run will catch infracting decks when they're submitted and before they become a problem, as will random deck checks throughout the event itself.
This also remind me of choice restrictions in cardfight vanguard but I am not sure if that is a good choice for elestrals
The "difficult to explain to new players" reason is the best reason to never do this. One of the biggest boons of elestrals is ease of access
Im also on the "wait until end of year 2" train until big changes to structure like that are made
It's definitely a weird spot. Every deck in Elestrals right now starts with that fat core of good runes, and then branches from there. I think the fact that so much room is taken up in a deck in the first place limits creativity a LOT in this game. I think pulling back these staple base set runes a bit allow for players to add In-Element Elestrals into their decks that attempt to solve the same problems. Such as Frostmite becoming a more popular answer for Galaxea because runes barely deal with it. This is the ideology I would like to see, rather than relying on the same 15 cards in every deck to solve your problems.
If you use the duel links system, or what's known as "Choice-Restricted List" in Bandai games, it can run into the problem of what's the next best rune or Elestral, but I think that's just an eternal card game problem. I don't want archetypes to solve this in Elestrals personally, it's lazy and centralizing.
What's unique about this game is that it's very much about being the first person to establish a board presence. But, we don't want decks that fully establish boards in 1 turn. It we limit the runes that make the back and forth more Elestral-choice focused more-so than "I drew more PTA's and Gorgon's" focused, I'd like to believe that it's better for the game in general, because now your Elestral choice and deck building matters more.
A lot of the issues Elestrals has rn is just due to the card pool. Nothing fundamentally. If this game reaches the longevity, it's going to have as much speed as yugioh. Mark my words. Special spirits, way more focus on special casts, archetypes, using the underworld as a 2nd hand, etc. It's really promising but we unfortunately have to just slug through the early eras and wait for the power creep to ramp.
Interesting idea
Only thing i see the would require testing with the dl style list is the deck size. How does a 40 card v 20 card effect the lists impact
Could an additional list of cards thats basically the "Good Card" list where if a card is on the list, you can only have X amount total of good cards. like, 6 or 8 or whatever. That many cards off the good card list.
If/when they have actual archetypes I might be willing to give the game a try. Doesn’t seem as fun when the “best deck” is really just the best cards.
lock the spirit deck to 2 elements via master rule
From a future proofing perspective how would this hold up 2-3 years from now? Say it does make mono colour strategies more of a thing you'd start having competition at each slot for other limited cards.
Also deck size is very relevant. A limited list like duel links works in a small deck size game but in this surely actually filling the deck with not dogshit cards gets harder? Also what stops just splashing weaker cards?
I think this would lead to a more swingy but lower power format that wouldn't be fun personally. I think good stuff is an oversight in a poor mana system
I think the Duel Links banlist is a little fiddly and weird, but I can't deny that the system would work wonders.
prob going to have to do what lorcana does eventually and just lock decks to X colors max to stop multcolor good stuff piles (Lorcana your locked to 2 colors max) since I don't see them ever fixing this issue with how they design cards it to free to just splash a bunch of colors
Should there be limited 4 and 5 in that case maybe?
Probably. Even a 1900 vanilla seems like it would be good in this game. Best to keep duel links banned.
The issue, and i'm using the word issue very lightly is that the spirit system as is kinda means that 'best card tribal' will always be one of the most viable options. Why jump through hopes for synergies when you can slap down 2 for 1's every turn. I don't think there is a Solution that will ever 'sort the issue' (If you think it is an issue) outside of printing synergies that are broken with a capital B.
I have a lot of love for the duel links ban list style, especially as duel links was really my entry into playing tcgs but I honestly hate the idea of it being done in literally anything else. I am personally of the opinion that goodstuff isn't really a problem and rather just a thing that happens when a card game is in its infancy but I personally think that the best solution if it really is seen as a problem would just be to do what a lot of the more niche card games have done and have a limit on the number of elements you can be in (for elestrals I think the most reasonable number would be 3) and in addition they need to just kinda start phasing out the generic good backrow and actually give each element a reasonable amount of decent backrow. This is a solution I have spoken of elsewhere before and every time I have been called crazy and/or stupid but ultimately if this is a real problem that needs to be fixed this is the most reasonable way to do it.
i think they just need to print cards that are worth playing that lock you into 1-2 types in deck building. otherwise i think the fact you can play a little bit of everything is great. one of the dumbest things about pokemon tcg is that you can only realistically play 1-2 types of pokemon even though in the video games, they encourage you to build a diverse team of types. colorful elestrals decks seems very purposeful.
What if we all just calmed down and let the game breathe and print more cards? We are literally only 3-4 sets in
Idk maybe
Knowing absolutely nothing about Elestrals (and mostly commenting for the Engagement): what if the player doing the damage had some level of control over what spirits get destroyed when they deal damage? Want to splash Earthquake off of a few measly Earth spirits? Hope your defences are rock solid for when my aggro deck comes after them!
The issue with that is, that the problem decks ARE the aggro decks. Decks that effectively just summon Gene Warped Warwolf every turn.
yes
lmao i love your shirt
Wow it's almost as if the core design of elestrals is flawed! Maybe taking life as damage *and* being able to play any cards for virtually free is...broken by concept??
Okay but seriously maybe the presented solution can help, at the very least it makes decks more...diverse
A points banlist is probably better tbh.
No please god no
What about a Gwent ban list?
Has nothing to do with the video... buuuuut... what does the shirt say?
"An evil Black Dentist"? "By the name Kakaud"?
I cant make it out... :(
"In this house we believe an evil black scientist by the name of yakub living on the isle of patmos created the white race six thousand years ago by means of eugenics" im pretty sure its this
Paraphrasing, but it says "In this house we believe: an evil black scientist by the name of Yakub living on the island of Patmos created the white race." It's an ironic reference to the Nation Of Islam's hilarious mythology that white people were made in a lab by Yakub (biblical Jacob i think?) as punishment to all the black people that were mean to him. He does not believe this, it's just super funny.
Luckily elestrals made the change we all really needed and put Galaxea on the unlimited list so we can play 10x copies. This is really crucial for the community's ability to play 3x of each available art +1 for their favorite to support the amazing artists behind the game an usher in the format we have all desired.