Hello Zoners. I am Grandpa Growth, your regular Sunday writer. This is In General, your regular Sunday column. In General focuses on discussion of higher level strategy, player psychology, game theory, and other loosely related topics. In General is not the place for my thoughts on individual cards...usually.
You see today, I am at home watching coverage of the Top 8 of Pro Tour Born of the Gods in Valencia, Spain. The Constructed format for this tournament is Modern. Wizards has established a pattern of wanting to showcase a "fresh" format for the Pro Tour, so that everyone at home can watch the top players in the world design and play decks for an unexplored metagame. *BUZZ WORD ALERT*! Metagame huh? Metagame is the umbrella for all the things that relate to the game, but are outside of an actual game of Magic. In this context I am referring specifically to the metagame composition - the breakdown of all the viable decks available to players. In a solved format this is a known quantity. There will be statistical analysis available that documents each major deck's win percentage against the other major decks and what percentage of the total player base at recent tournaments have been playing each deck. No such information exists for Commander, but that is the nature of a casual format. Next week, in fact, I will be discussing how the idea of the metagame influences Commander as a format, but that is not what I am talking about today.
Today, I am talking about how Wizards accomplishes the task of taking a solved format and essentially wrecking it. You see, this is how you make a "fresh format" out of an existing one. In Standard, cards rotate on a yearly basis and new cards are coming out every few months. Because the card pool is sufficiently small, each of these changes makes a significant impact on what decks are viable in the format. Modern has a much larger card pool, so new cards are much less likely to be powerful enough to impact the format at large. Cards also don't rotate out, so the only way Wizards can remove something from Modern is to put it on the Banned list. This is the exact tactic that they have chosen to control the Modern metagame and it is an interesting decision that I believe has applications to Commander.
Wizards unbanned Bitterblossom and Wild Nacatl just weeks before the Pro Tour, ensuring that new (old) decks would become viable and the Pros would need significant amounts of testing with and against these previously unusable archetypes. With Modern, Wizards has adopted the unwritten policy that whenever the Banned and Restricted List is updated, they will typically ban the best card in the best deck at that time. Once established, this meant that players who invest in the format could expect it to change more frequently than Legacy and also expect that any deck dominant enough to win consistently, would not stay legal for more than a few months at a time.
This was essentially all preamble to a simple question. What if Commander was managed this same way? It is no secret that I am not a supporter of the so-called "Official" Banned List. There is simply nothing official about casual Magic. If you have issues with a particular card, deck, or person in your local metagame then you should deal with those issues individually. Don't rely on, and certainly don't endorse, other people putting rules on they way that you have fun with your friends. That is how I feel at least. Anyway, the point I am making is that this could provide a much more intuitive guiding principle for establishing a banned list. Instead of listing all the cards that commander.net moderators don't like, we could have a more objective and democratic system.
For example, Nekusar, the Mindrazer is popular in my group these days. Keep in mind this just an example, I don't think these decks are even good, much less worthy of a ban, but for argument's sake let's say I started an open-ended poll. I want to shake up my metagame, so I ask people what they think the best card in the best deck is. If people feel like I do, they will inevitably start naming cards that are in these Nekusar decks. Winter Orb, Back to Basics, maybe Phyrexian Tyranny, or even Nekusar himself. If the consensus is to ban a card that is popular in Nekusar decks, we know Nekusar is a problem in my group. If the group consistently points out a particular card, then we should think about banning that card to put the power level and popularity of Nekusar decks back in line with the rest of the format. Every six months-to-a-year we could re-examine the list and use the same system to take cards off the list. If the majority of people seem to think that allowing Braids, Cabal Minion as a Commander would help diversify the format, then heck, we can give it a go.
This is more of a thought experiment than anything. The idea intrigued me and I think that there is potential for it to supplant the Official Banned and Restricted List in my sphere of influence. So, rather than asking if you support this idea since that isn't really the point, I want ask: what do you think the best archetype in Commander is and what single card could you take away that would make you stop wanting to play, or hate playing against, that archetype?
-GG
Funny. We were having a discussion in my group about evolving our banlist.
ReplyDeleteDue to the fact that we mostly play in a shop though, that's a little difficult. Our compromise is essentially extra bans- just adding to what we already have, and not taking cards off of the one that's already there. Keeping things uniform with Joe Magic Player walking through the door at the shop helps to foster and manage expectations so that they can coexist easier. We have some young guys that come in the shop from time to time, and we can't always maintain regular contact with them. But I can definitely see the advantage to making it more specialized in close-knit groups who don't play in public.
There isn't necessarily an "archetype" that I think is stronger or weaker, but in my group, two of our major bans are Avacyn, Angel of Hope and Triumph of the Hordes. With the new Legend rules, we find Avacyn to be boring and force games and decks alike to make this card a major focal point in design. Taking it out has only improved our games, as far as I can tell.
Triumph was a card GG and I had actually banned when we were playing 1v1 simply because it made games too quick. In multiplayer, it won't end the game for the whole table either, as it powers up Elf-ball and only hates one player out of a longer game when there are more options for better consistency and substitutes. After discussion in our group, the general consensus has been to ban this card, and again, I think it enhances the game.
Other notable cards I think worth discussing are Genesis Wave, Exsanguinate, and Debt to the Deathless. It's not that these cards aren't good, or even ban-worthy- just boring in the sense that they don't create games with collectively satisfying outcomes. Losing to these cards makes people feel bored and cheated out of the game it could've been, which is important if you're interested in making games worth remembering. So if you have a lot of games where one of these is resolving and forcing scoops, it's probably worth talking about. The game should be a challenge, so even if you aren't going to ban them, take the initiative. Pull the card out and re-tool the deck. Challenge yourself. It not only makes you better, but also works to increase scarcity and increase the value of spells like this. Banning the card is great for self-control though, if you have none. You can always unban it after a while.