while i do not agree with splinter twin example but you are correct about everything else.
i might add that while there is a lot of answers to problematic cards/combos the problem is that most of them are not maindeck cards. no one sane would maindeck lost legacy or return to nature. cards like thoughtseize can be maindecked but they do nothing against topdecks and library manipulation. also filling your deck with answers after sideboarding dilutes your deck and lets your opponents do other stuff their deck is trying to accomplish unimpeded.
The fact that people were unironically calling Twin a "police" deck while largely acting like the strategies that it pushed out of modern did not deserve to exist by virtue of losing to Twin is, to me, evidence enough that the deck warped Modern. Threats do not police formats, answers do, and that players treated its banning as the removal of a Force of Will-caliber format cornerstone is proof of the myopic effect that personal preference has on perceptions of format health.
That's just warping the meta though. If every viable deck has to include the same set of counters to one or two decktypes, you end up with matches that might as well just be two players flipping a coin since they play out the same way over and over.
One of my biggest pet peeves in ban discussions is when people talk about counterplay as if it were, by its very existence, a valid rebuttal to a ban argument. The fact that a card or strategy is beatable is irrelevant because every strategy in the game is beatable if things go good enough for one player or bad enough for the other. If a bannable card or deck actually does reach the point of being unbeatable, then the metagame has problems deeper than what can be solved with a few bans.
This is because ban (and nerf, in other games) decisions are based in the metagame, which should take a much wider view of the game than what players get in a game-to-game basis. It's perfectly possible for a strategy that feels 'fair' game-to-game to be a metagame black hole (as was the case of Splinter Twin), or a deck that feels totally broken in individual games to not make a splash in the broader meta (like Neoform combo decks). As such, questions of whether and how a deck can be beaten are not near as important as the question of what effect a deck has on the metagame.
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The fact that people were unironically calling Twin a "police" deck while largely acting like the strategies that it pushed out of modern did not deserve to exist by virtue of losing to Twin is, to me, evidence enough that the deck warped Modern. Threats do not police formats, answers do, and that players treated its banning as the removal of a Force of Will-caliber format cornerstone is proof of the myopic effect that personal preference has on perceptions of format health.
This is what got Golgari Grave-Troll (re)banned in Modern.
One of my biggest pet peeves in ban discussions is when people talk about counterplay as if it were, by its very existence, a valid rebuttal to a ban argument. The fact that a card or strategy is beatable is irrelevant because every strategy in the game is beatable if things go good enough for one player or bad enough for the other. If a bannable card or deck actually does reach the point of being unbeatable, then the metagame has problems deeper than what can be solved with a few bans.
This is because ban (and nerf, in other games) decisions are based in the metagame, which should take a much wider view of the game than what players get in a game-to-game basis. It's perfectly possible for a strategy that feels 'fair' game-to-game to be a metagame black hole (as was the case of Splinter Twin), or a deck that feels totally broken in individual games to not make a splash in the broader meta (like Neoform combo decks). As such, questions of whether and how a deck can be beaten are not near as important as the question of what effect a deck has on the metagame.