I don't think Humans is oppressive. Its good. Its also fair. It has bad matchups that sure, bugler makes a bit better if it wants to give up points against other decks (and look we're talking the difference between being a two to one dog to mardu or jeskai vs being a slight underdog). It also created space for these fair midrange and control decks to appear and be more successful. Tron still beat them down a good bit, but it created a rock/paper/scissors sort of situation.
Heard someone this week at one LGS refer to leyline of the void as the FOW of modern. Starting to believe that.
The situation we are in is I don't see Wizards banning burning inquiry, because "the card is too random and create non games".
I know there is a disagreement with @ktk and me in that there is an unfun criterion, but to claim that WOTC will ban, because of the previous statement is a stretch. To make such a ban for such an obscure reason, would create a lot of upset in the modern player base. I think Burning Inquiry is safe.
Would you accept the statement "While Burning Inquiry is a random symmetrical card, it's cost of a single R and ability to enable huge plays on T1 while potentially hosing the opponent has pushed us to ban it. Other symmetrical affects do not create such one sided outcomes so early in the game nor do they lead to wins that are faster than should be allowed in Modern. We see the removal of Burning Inquiry as a mix of relief to players against these types of decks, and the weakest card to remove from those types of decks." Maybe some stretched talking points in there, but it's better than just "random and non-games", which is still basically what it says.
I doubt they'll ban Inquiry as well, but the logic all stands, in my opinion.
The situation we are in is I don't see Wizards banning burning inquiry, because "the card is too random and create non games".
I know there is a disagreement with @ktk and me in that there is an unfun criterion, but to claim that WOTC will ban, because of the previous statement is a stretch. To make such a ban for such an obscure reason, would create a lot of upset in the modern player base. I think Burning Inquiry is safe.
Would you accept the statement "While Burning Inquiry is a random symmetrical card, it's cost of a single R and ability to enable huge plays on T1 while potentially hosing the opponent has pushed us to ban it. Other symmetrical affects do not create such one sided outcomes so early in the game nor do they lead to wins that are faster than should be allowed in Modern. We see the removal of Burning Inquiry as a mix of relief to players against these types of decks, and the weakest card to remove from those types of decks." Maybe some stretched talking points in there, but it's better than just "random and non-games", which is still basically what it says.
I doubt they'll ban Inquiry as well, but the logic all stands, in my opinion.
It is very easy to write a legitimate sounding ban update for most of the semi-controversial cards in Modern. The rationale of most of those hypothetical updates, however, does not align with known ban criteria. Modern cards have never been banned for creating one sided games or nongames. With the some exception of GGT, they are banned for metagame dominance, logistical reasons, T4 rules violation, or otherwise reducing diversity through a measurable standard. GGT was banned for the so called battle of sideboards issue. Unfunness is never its own factor. Inquiry is safe by all those metrics and is very, very unlikely to be banned.
The situation we are in is I don't see Wizards banning burning inquiry, because "the card is too random and create non games".
I know there is a disagreement with @ktk and me in that there is an unfun criterion, but to claim that WOTC will ban, because of the previous statement is a stretch. To make such a ban for such an obscure reason, would create a lot of upset in the modern player base. I think Burning Inquiry is safe.
Would you accept the statement "While Burning Inquiry is a random symmetrical card, it's cost of a single R and ability to enable huge plays on T1 while potentially hosing the opponent has pushed us to ban it. Other symmetrical affects do not create such one sided outcomes so early in the game nor do they lead to wins that are faster than should be allowed in Modern. We see the removal of Burning Inquiry as a mix of relief to players against these types of decks, and the weakest card to remove from those types of decks." Maybe some stretched talking points in there, but it's better than just "random and non-games", which is still basically what it says.
I doubt they'll ban Inquiry as well, but the logic all stands, in my opinion.
It is very easy to write a legitimate sounding ban update for most of the semi-controversial cards in Modern. The rationale of most of those hypothetical updates, however, does not align with known ban criteria. Modern cards have never been banned for creating one sided games or nongames. With the some exception of GGT, they are banned for metagame dominance, logistical reasons, T4 rules violation, or otherwise reducing diversity through a measurable standard. GGT was banned for the so called battle of sideboards issue. Unfunness is never its own factor. Inquiry is safe by all those metrics and is very, very unlikely to be banned.
And this all makes sense when looked at through the eyes of being a business. Even if a card is horrible and degenerate to play against frequently, if there are options that let people get around it they have no reason to ban the card. That and big businesses hate making decisions on pure speculation. It's pretty sure fire that the only reason wizards unbanned Jace, the Mind sculptor was because they didn't have a choice. Iconic Masters bombed and they had nothing in Masters 25 that could help it fair better.
That's why I feel that it's very unlikely we will ever see an unban of StoneForge Mystic, or see arbitrary bannings of disliked cards.
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1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
Wouldn't that be reason to unban Stoneforge Mystic? They can use it similarly to Jace in that it would boost sales?
They could, but the situation would have to be really dire to force them into doing something like what they did with Jace, the Mind Sculptor. Keep in mind that they just had iconic masters price collapse to half of it's MSRP, a huge amount of social media drama, and had little reason to assume that masters 25 wasn't destined for a similar fate. If that kind of situation happened and SFM was the card in the set they probably would have unbanned SFM in a heartbeat. I just don't see them doing some kind of unban on next to no information when the format isn't looking too bad.
Now banning a card is way safer since they have data to support a ban decision, and dropping a card from the modern card pool is less likely to break the format than adding a new one or reintroducing an older one.
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1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
@arkmer: The purpose of those games is pretty clear. Punishing manabases. Now you may not like that blood moon hits all your utility lands or whatnot but Blood Moon and similar effects are one piece of the puzzle to stop modern and eternal formats from being 4-5 color goodstuff decks and to create a cost for building multiple colors to remove weaknesses.
For example, the grixis dealing with enchantments discussion earlier in this thread shows us that without white or green it's very difficult for those decks to reliably deal with enchantments. Without effects and cards like BM you'd see more and more splashes of lands for utility cards and the decks may not be 5 color but would certainly start melding more into a 3 mana deck with a splash way more easily.
One of the other complaints even earlier in this thread was about humans and it's ability to cast whatever human they want, whenever. Now imagine the 4 color monstrosities you'd probably get from control/midrange players who are not punished at all by BM. That's why it exists. It's a mechanism to stop that reality from happening and I am OK with paying the cost of non games for that.
To me, one of the most powerful arguments in favor of Blood Moon is Khans-Battle Standard, where someone had the bright idea to put fetchlands and fetchable dual lands into the same Standard but without any decent hate for the interaction, resulting in a format so bad I was finally driven away from Standard. Had Blood Moon been legal, it would've given more incentive to not play ultra-greedy manabases and the decks wouldn't have almost all felt the same, resulting in a much better format (it also would've taken the wind out of Siege Rhino's sails, another plus). It's an indication of what happens when you have color fixing as fantastic as the fetchlands+shocklands but without cards to properly hate on it.
Wouldn't that be reason to unban Stoneforge Mystic? They can use it similarly to Jace in that it would boost sales?
They could, but the situation would have to be really dire to force them into doing something like what they did with Jace, the Mind Sculptor. Keep in mind that they just had iconic masters price collapse to half of it's MSRP, a huge amount of social media drama, and had little reason to assume that masters 25 wasn't destined for a similar fate. If that kind of situation happened and SFM was the card in the set they probably would have unbanned SFM in a heartbeat. I just don't see them doing some kind of unban on next to no information when the format isn't looking too bad.
Now banning a card is way safer since they have data to support a ban decision, and dropping a card from the modern card pool is less likely to break the format than adding a new one or reintroducing an older one.
Seems very unlikely that Wizards added JTMS to the set in the 2 months following Iconic Masters' failures and before the B&R update which was itself merr months before the release of Masters 25. Set selection and development, especially packaging and the like, takes longer. This also wouldn't address why they unbanned BBE in the same update when that clearly wasnt a sales move. Seems more likely that at least one of those was an unban to open Modern decks than some corporate conspiracy that indicates SFM is an unlikely unban. I know you like alleging such conspiracies but the evidence is scattered and circumstantial at best, complete biased conjecture at worst
Then it was just coincidence. Hopefully there is another coincidence that Stoneforge Mystic is in a Modern legal set and then it is unbanned.
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Legacy - Sneak Show, BR Reanimator, Miracles, UW Stoneblade
Premodern - Trix, RecSur, Enchantress, Reanimator, Elves https://www.facebook.com/groups/PremodernUSA/ Modern - Neobrand, Hogaak Vine, Elves
Standard - Mono Red (6-2 and 5-3 in 2 McQ)
Draft - (I wish I had more time for limited...)
Commander - Norin the Wary, Grimgrin, Adun Oakenshield (taking forever to build) (dead format for me)
Seems very unlikely that Wizards added JTMS to the set in the 2 months following Iconic Masters' failures and before the B&R update which was itself merr months before the release of Masters 25. Set selection and development, especially packaging and the like, takes longer. This also wouldn't address why they unbanned BBE in the same update when that clearly wasnt a sales move. Seems more likely that at least one of those was an unban to open Modern decks than some corporate conspiracy that indicates SFM is an unlikely unban. I know you like alleging such conspiracies but the evidence is scattered and circumstantial at best, complete biased conjecture at worst
While I don't disagree with your overall argument, they needn't have done it that way in the first place. Jace could have been included in the set from day one, but when IMM tanked and then they realized that the EV of M25 was pretty low and changed the B&R Announcement from a "No Changes" to a "Jace and BBE Unbanned". Unbanning a pair of cards that solely slot into underplayed archetypes could have been an attempt to bolster those archetypes, certainly. Or it could have been them desperately grabbing at a method of massively boosting a sets EV after it had already been sent to the printers.
The important part here is that these two theories are not mutually exclusive. In fact, it is entirely possible that they support one another! If we assume that they wanted to bolster Blue decks and also breath a little more life into conventional midrange decks at the same time, unbanning this historic pair makes perfect sense. If we assume that they decided to have Jace be one of the cards that was unbanned by virtue of him bolstering sales of a very weak product, then BBE makes sense as both a historical counterweight (rightly or wrongly) to Jace, and as a card that wouldn't slot into any "existing" archetype.
Of course, to me that makes it more likely SFM eventually gets off the list, not less. If Wizards is willing to use unbans to bolster sales of a set that has weak EV after it goes off the to the printers, and they are committed to their current course regarding Masters sets, then I think it is only a matter of time until we have a set that hits both needed criteria. Namely, a set that has SFM in it, and also is otherwise to weak on the EV front to sell itself. It might not even need to be a Masters set either. If the Signature Spell Book sets or any other non-Multiple Release (ie, multiple Commander decks, because no one wants a second True Name Nemesis) supplemental product is projected to fail and it has a banned card in it that would otherwise be a candidate for an unban in a given rotation, then they very well could decide to pull the trigger on an unban that otherwise...... wouldn't necessarily make sense.
SFM aint coming off until nex year. There is no product to print it in.
Pick something that could be technically printed in Ravnica. Ravnica has no Kor and lacks Artifacts especially with Kaladesh being consigned to the void in rotation.
Bridge from Below should be banned instead. That card is just plain stupid in the vengevine deck
There are no good arguments to support banning any card exception Ancient Stirrings. That card actually has a significant metagame presence enough to warrant some ban talk. Bridge, however, does not. Bridgevine strategies are relatively new to Modern and have had no chance to prove themselves on the paper stage. Recent MOCS and Challenge results from today show they have just been adopted into the metagame like any other Modern strategy. Unless we see a huge, breakout performance at upcoming GP, these strategies are just fine.
There are no good arguments to support banning any card exception Ancient Stirrings. That card actually has a significant metagame presence enough to warrant some ban talk. Bridge, however, does not. Bridgevine strategies are relatively new to Modern and have had no chance to prove themselves on the paper stage. Recent MOCS and Challenge results from today show they have just been adopted into the metagame like any other Modern strategy. Unless we see a huge, breakout performance at upcoming GP, these strategies are just fine.
According to mtgtop8.com, Ancient Stirrings is on the 20th place (with 14,6%)of the most played cards in Modern (from the Decklists in their Database). Doesn't sound like Ban-Worthy to me, if you want to support that Argument by Metagame Presence.
Those metagame stats do not matter for banlist purposes. We already know that GP/PT are the most important, followed by MTGO. Random SCG and local events do not appear to contribute to banlist decisions and have never been cited in Modern banlist updates. GP/PT/MTGO, however, are regularly cited.
Again, here are the top decks of 2018 by GP T8 presence, i.e. the metric Wizards most frequently cites in B&R updates and seems to care about most.
If you want to ignore the Team PT events, which Wizards might value differently, go -1 KCI, -2 Humans, -1 H1. No matter how you cut that, however, Stirrings decks are heads and shoulders the most consistent 2018 GP/PT finishers and it's not super close. If this trend continues in 2018, these decks will reach and likely exceed Twin levels of GP/PT dominance by the end of the year. Gx Tron alone could do it with a few more sustained finishes, even ignoring the other decks.
I don't really see the trend continuing though, at least in the short-term. Tron is not nearly as well-positioned as it was 2 months ago when it was putting up tons of finishes, and KCI is not gonna be making many top 8s when every other deck is packing a set of Leylines and/or other hate to fight Bridgevine.
I don't really see the trend continuing though, at least in the short-term. Tron is not nearly as well-positioned as it was 2 months ago when it was putting up tons of finishes, and KCI is not gonna be making many top 8s when every other deck is packing a set of Leylines and/or other hate to fight Bridgevine.
The metagame could certainly self-correct itself, but with an announcement coming up in a week Wizards only has past data to look at not speculative future data. Stirrings decks have consistently overperformed at large scale events during the months leading up to this announcement.
I would personally have no qualms with a Stirrings ban, but if Wizards instead decides KCI is guilty of causing rounds to go extra long ala eggs they may just ban KCI on those grounds instead.
We shall see.
In addition, I am always in favor of the Mox Opal <-> artifact lands swap, which would conveniently also neuter KCI. However, I have no idea if Wizards would be on board with this or is even considering this as a possibility
Wouldn't that be reason to unban Stoneforge Mystic? They can use it similarly to Jace in that it would boost sales?
They could, but the situation would have to be really dire to force them into doing something like what they did with Jace, the Mind Sculptor. Keep in mind that they just had iconic masters price collapse to half of it's MSRP, a huge amount of social media drama, and had little reason to assume that masters 25 wasn't destined for a similar fate. If that kind of situation happened and SFM was the card in the set they probably would have unbanned SFM in a heartbeat. I just don't see them doing some kind of unban on next to no information when the format isn't looking too bad.
Now banning a card is way safer since they have data to support a ban decision, and dropping a card from the modern card pool is less likely to break the format than adding a new one or reintroducing an older one.
Seems very unlikely that Wizards added JTMS to the set in the 2 months following Iconic Masters' failures and before the B&R update which was itself merr months before the release of Masters 25. Set selection and development, especially packaging and the like, takes longer. This also wouldn't address why they unbanned BBE in the same update when that clearly wasnt a sales move. Seems more likely that at least one of those was an unban to open Modern decks than some corporate conspiracy that indicates SFM is an unlikely unban. I know you like alleging such conspiracies but the evidence is scattered and circumstantial at best, complete biased conjecture at worst
KtK they didn't add the card to the set and then unban it. They had it planned for reprint and realized after Iconic that there was no way the other set was going to go over well, so they took the risk of unbanning JTMS to try and boost sales. There was a massive number of people arguing back and forth on this on the basis of dollar value, but the reality is that the average consumer doesn't care about EV, they care about pulling things they can play in existing formats. I don't really know what else they could have done on such short notice to try and save it because it isn't like they could reconfigure the card selection last minute. The choices they made were just horrible in that set and ultimately, when even unbanning Jace failed, they made the decision to stop masters sets for the time being. If the original draft of Masters 25 included SFM in it we would have seen the same unban behavior with that card.
This is a very rare situation borne from factors completely outside the health of the format itself and it was a gamble that didn't pay off. Also, to put this bluntly I was someone who did buy sealed product from WoTC. Masters 25 is the set that put me strait into buying nothing but singles. There was nothing that felt good about canceling a huge planned out pre-order, especially as it was the first dive I was going to take into masters products.
1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
KtK they didn't add the card to the set and then unban it. They had it planned for reprint and realized after Iconic that there was no way the other set was going to go over well, so they took the risk of unbanning JTMS to try and boost sales.
Do you have hard proof for this, or is this just speculation on your part?
While it's possible they "only" unbanned Jace to sell packs, it's also possible that they had him on their minds as a possible unban for a while, and decided to put him in the set so that whenever they did decide to unban him, he wouldn't hit $200 on the spot. Or it's possible it's a combination of the two, i.e. that they put Jace in the set with a possible unban in mind for him, and then realized the set wasn't worth much and they decided to therefore time the unbanning in accordance with its release.
I don't think it's proper to assert that a particular explanation is correct unless you have real evidence. And maybe you do, but you didn't present it in this post, you just asserted this without backup.
Although:
I don't really know what else they could have done on such short notice to try and save it because it isn't like they could reconfigure the card selection last minute.
Well, they could've dropped the price of booster packs a little.
Wouldn't that be reason to unban Stoneforge Mystic? They can use it similarly to Jace in that it would boost sales?
They could, but the situation would have to be really dire to force them into doing something like what they did with Jace, the Mind Sculptor. Keep in mind that they just had iconic masters price collapse to half of it's MSRP, a huge amount of social media drama, and had little reason to assume that masters 25 wasn't destined for a similar fate. If that kind of situation happened and SFM was the card in the set they probably would have unbanned SFM in a heartbeat. I just don't see them doing some kind of unban on next to no information when the format isn't looking too bad.
Now banning a card is way safer since they have data to support a ban decision, and dropping a card from the modern card pool is less likely to break the format than adding a new one or reintroducing an older one.
Seems very unlikely that Wizards added JTMS to the set in the 2 months following Iconic Masters' failures and before the B&R update which was itself merr months before the release of Masters 25. Set selection and development, especially packaging and the like, takes longer. This also wouldn't address why they unbanned BBE in the same update when that clearly wasnt a sales move. Seems more likely that at least one of those was an unban to open Modern decks than some corporate conspiracy that indicates SFM is an unlikely unban. I know you like alleging such conspiracies but the evidence is scattered and circumstantial at best, complete biased conjecture at worst
KtK they didn't add the card to the set and then unban it. They had it planned for reprint and realized after Iconic that there was no way the other set was going to go over well, so they took the risk of unbanning JTMS to try and boost sales. There was a massive number of people arguing back and forth on this on the basis of dollar value, but the reality is that the average consumer doesn't care about EV, they care about pulling things they can play in existing formats. I don't really know what else they could have done on such short notice to try and save it because it isn't like they could reconfigure the card selection last minute. The choices they made were just horrible in that set and ultimately, when even unbanning Jace failed, they made the decision to stop masters sets for the time being. If the original draft of Masters 25 included SFM in it we would have seen the same unban behavior with that card.
This is a very rare situation borne from factors completely outside the health of the format itself and it was a gamble that didn't pay off. Also, to put this bluntly I was someone who did buy sealed product from WoTC. Masters 25 is the set that put me strait into buying nothing but singles. There was nothing that felt good about canceling a huge planned out pre-order, especially as it was the first dive I was going to take into masters products.
Seems more likely that they looked at the questionable state of blue and unbanned him to boost blue decks, not sales. You have zero evidence of this claim and we have plenty of evidence to suggest Wizards historically unbans cards that have nothing to do with sales.
I'm not going to deny that there is little direct evidence to support the claim and it is completely possible it was sheer coincidence that they decided to unban Jace during a period of downed sales, a failed iconic masters, and horrible social media feedback. We're both looking at his unbanning from different directions, and my evidence is the history of other companies and what they do when products flounder while your evidence is based on the reasons expressed by WoTC itself through articles.
There are several factors that lead most people on the financial arguments to believe jace was a financial decision based upon classic strategies to save a dying business.
1) Rebranding.
2) Pivot and Change of Direction.
3) Niche Down and Focus
4) Create New Marketing Plan
5) Take more Risks.
Wizards of the Coast has done basically every single one of those things over the last twelve months and accelerated the effort as can be seen in Q3-Q4 this year. The last few years have been hard on the company due to decisions made on the direction of standard and simply not understanding the market properly. The first sign of failure is best illustrated by Tarmogoyf: Looking at the graph found at MTG Goldfish, it is abundantly clear that reprinting him repeatedly even in a higher MSRP product still results in price degradation as the market becomes saturated. This is why the company was doing such a great job at NOT reprinting the same cards every modern masters set despite people wanting them to. However, they sort of got glued to it and expanded it to legacy, because it still looked like the market could take reprints of played cards. Except it can't with legacy being such a small group.
Then they swapped strategies, went back to modern for 2017, and got tangled up with Hasbro needing a hot selling set for Hascon. So, since Hascon was a general toy exhibition the company decided to go with an anniversary style set that didn't target any specific format. This got advertised way ahead of it's release and was spoiled much earlier than prior sets, both of which contributed to its failure. At the same time we also had Hour of Devastation becoming one of the worst selling standard sets of all time, eventually leading to it's print run being cut short. Basically, Iconic failed both due to early advertising and a lack of focus.
Now, months earlier Mark Rosewater mentioned that they created the Play Design Team to assure constructed standard would be a viable tournament format.
However, the results of this team could not actually be seen until far later. This was mentioned in the article from Mark a while back with him stating that Dominaria would be the first set where the team would truly be felt.
However, Masters 25 came before Dominaria and did not have this teams input, meaning it was still going to carry the same unfocused nature that helped lead to Iconic Masters failing. The only other product coming before it was the dual deck Elves vs Inventors, which was a product they were discontinuing since it wasn't deemed successful. On the upside, they did have the challenger decks coming April 6th that were guaranteed to sell and Dominaria was coming out on April 27th. They knew that Masters 25 was probably going to do poorly thanks to Iconic Masters and the general negative energy going from Q2, so what would you do to try and prop up the gap between Unstable and Dominaria? Rivals was not exactly selling gangbusters as is evident by the price movement on the market for various staples, Elves vs Inventors was sure fire to be luke warm on arrival, and they're at least a couple weeks out from the "fix" to standard.
At the end of the day, they know that making a card modern viable makes it attractive to a larger group of players and would help add at least some focus to the set. All they have to do is say that they think it's fine and healthy for the format, that it makes blue stronger, or whatever they want, and unban the card. And at the end of the day, whether they did it for financial reasons or not it's really just fine. There's absolutely nothing wrong with wizards making a decision on a financial basis, especially if they can justify it and get support from internal staff. Maybe the Play Design team also pushed for it to get unbanned: We'll never know.
In the end they rebranded the summer set to be a commander set with a team focus with Battlebond, created Brawl to try and make the game less tournament driven, took a risk with adding Challenger decks, and discontinued masters sets in favor of bringing back core sets. They even changed to a one block structure so they can now freely swap between settings and react faster. I'd say if one takes all that into consideration it isn't a big leap of logic to assume that the unbanning of Jace was done with the companies success in mind.
To challenge this assertion, there has to be an example of Wizards of the Coast not expressing the desired behavior during a point of financial downturn. The only thing I could really find to counter this was potentially Lorwyn block during the Great Recession. However, modern wasn't a format officially until 2011. They did ban cards before this point and one could go back into legacy days. I'm not really sure that's a good point of reference because of how different the company was back then compared to now. Additionally, my logic may have issues due to missing information. There was something expressed by Rudy at Alpha Investments that has born fruit in that other companies also changed their print runs for Q3-Q4, such as Force of Will Co and Buddy Fight. Unfortunately, I only have anecdotal evidence of this because that isn't a number that is shared openly with anyone. I have seen supply changes with the FoW card game because in general they make smaller runs than Wizards does for their sets and the change is noticeable.
I'd say the behavior is a bit like with Ty Warner when the company oversold the market on Beanie Babies, ironically. Masters sets selling for half of what they are supposed to be going for is pretty bad. Also, apologies for the extra long post. I'm not sure I could make this shorter if I tried since there is a lot of explaining that had to be done.
1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
Not just that sales are down and gee we get Dominaria and Three Sets of Ravnica in a row? Not to mention suddenly Bolas Arc is ending at lightning speed. Seems like we went to the two greatest Planes and wrapped the Bolas Arc so WOTC can plot a new direction for Magic.
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Heard someone this week at one LGS refer to leyline of the void as the FOW of modern. Starting to believe that.
I doubt they'll ban Inquiry as well, but the logic all stands, in my opinion.
"Reveal a Dragon"
It is very easy to write a legitimate sounding ban update for most of the semi-controversial cards in Modern. The rationale of most of those hypothetical updates, however, does not align with known ban criteria. Modern cards have never been banned for creating one sided games or nongames. With the some exception of GGT, they are banned for metagame dominance, logistical reasons, T4 rules violation, or otherwise reducing diversity through a measurable standard. GGT was banned for the so called battle of sideboards issue. Unfunness is never its own factor. Inquiry is safe by all those metrics and is very, very unlikely to be banned.
And this all makes sense when looked at through the eyes of being a business. Even if a card is horrible and degenerate to play against frequently, if there are options that let people get around it they have no reason to ban the card. That and big businesses hate making decisions on pure speculation. It's pretty sure fire that the only reason wizards unbanned Jace, the Mind sculptor was because they didn't have a choice. Iconic Masters bombed and they had nothing in Masters 25 that could help it fair better.
That's why I feel that it's very unlikely we will ever see an unban of StoneForge Mystic, or see arbitrary bannings of disliked cards.
1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
"Reveal a Dragon"
Yes, eventually. It's equity.
Spirits
They could, but the situation would have to be really dire to force them into doing something like what they did with Jace, the Mind Sculptor. Keep in mind that they just had iconic masters price collapse to half of it's MSRP, a huge amount of social media drama, and had little reason to assume that masters 25 wasn't destined for a similar fate. If that kind of situation happened and SFM was the card in the set they probably would have unbanned SFM in a heartbeat. I just don't see them doing some kind of unban on next to no information when the format isn't looking too bad.
Now banning a card is way safer since they have data to support a ban decision, and dropping a card from the modern card pool is less likely to break the format than adding a new one or reintroducing an older one.
1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
Seems very unlikely that Wizards added JTMS to the set in the 2 months following Iconic Masters' failures and before the B&R update which was itself merr months before the release of Masters 25. Set selection and development, especially packaging and the like, takes longer. This also wouldn't address why they unbanned BBE in the same update when that clearly wasnt a sales move. Seems more likely that at least one of those was an unban to open Modern decks than some corporate conspiracy that indicates SFM is an unlikely unban. I know you like alleging such conspiracies but the evidence is scattered and circumstantial at best, complete biased conjecture at worst
Premodern - Trix, RecSur, Enchantress, Reanimator, Elves https://www.facebook.com/groups/PremodernUSA/
Modern - Neobrand, Hogaak Vine, Elves
Standard - Mono Red (6-2 and 5-3 in 2 McQ)
Draft - (I wish I had more time for limited...)
Commander -
Norin the Wary, Grimgrin, Adun Oakenshield (taking forever to build)(dead format for me)While I don't disagree with your overall argument, they needn't have done it that way in the first place. Jace could have been included in the set from day one, but when IMM tanked and then they realized that the EV of M25 was pretty low and changed the B&R Announcement from a "No Changes" to a "Jace and BBE Unbanned". Unbanning a pair of cards that solely slot into underplayed archetypes could have been an attempt to bolster those archetypes, certainly. Or it could have been them desperately grabbing at a method of massively boosting a sets EV after it had already been sent to the printers.
The important part here is that these two theories are not mutually exclusive. In fact, it is entirely possible that they support one another! If we assume that they wanted to bolster Blue decks and also breath a little more life into conventional midrange decks at the same time, unbanning this historic pair makes perfect sense. If we assume that they decided to have Jace be one of the cards that was unbanned by virtue of him bolstering sales of a very weak product, then BBE makes sense as both a historical counterweight (rightly or wrongly) to Jace, and as a card that wouldn't slot into any "existing" archetype.
Of course, to me that makes it more likely SFM eventually gets off the list, not less. If Wizards is willing to use unbans to bolster sales of a set that has weak EV after it goes off the to the printers, and they are committed to their current course regarding Masters sets, then I think it is only a matter of time until we have a set that hits both needed criteria. Namely, a set that has SFM in it, and also is otherwise to weak on the EV front to sell itself. It might not even need to be a Masters set either. If the Signature Spell Book sets or any other non-Multiple Release (ie, multiple Commander decks, because no one wants a second True Name Nemesis) supplemental product is projected to fail and it has a banned card in it that would otherwise be a candidate for an unban in a given rotation, then they very well could decide to pull the trigger on an unban that otherwise...... wouldn't necessarily make sense.
Pick something that could be technically printed in Ravnica. Ravnica has no Kor and lacks Artifacts especially with Kaladesh being consigned to the void in rotation.
Bridge from Below should be banned instead. That card is just plain stupid in the vengevine deck
There are no good arguments to support banning any card exception Ancient Stirrings. That card actually has a significant metagame presence enough to warrant some ban talk. Bridge, however, does not. Bridgevine strategies are relatively new to Modern and have had no chance to prove themselves on the paper stage. Recent MOCS and Challenge results from today show they have just been adopted into the metagame like any other Modern strategy. Unless we see a huge, breakout performance at upcoming GP, these strategies are just fine.
Those metagame stats do not matter for banlist purposes. We already know that GP/PT are the most important, followed by MTGO. Random SCG and local events do not appear to contribute to banlist decisions and have never been cited in Modern banlist updates. GP/PT/MTGO, however, are regularly cited.
Again, here are the top decks of 2018 by GP T8 presence, i.e. the metric Wizards most frequently cites in B&R updates and seems to care about most.
1. Gx Tron: 8 (11.8%)
2. KCI: 7 (10.3%)
3. Humans: 6 (8.8%)
4. Burn: 4 (5.9%)
5. Abzan: 4 (5.9%)
6. Jeskai Control: 4 (5.9%)
7. Affinity: 3 (4.4%)
8. RG Eldrazi: 3 (4.4%)
9. Mardu: 3 (4.4%)
10. UW Control: 3 (4.4%)
11. Hollow One: 3 (4.4%)
12. GDS: 2 (2.9%)
13. Elves: 2 (2.9%)
14. Traverse Shadow: 2 (2.9%)
15. Bogles: 2 (2.9%)
16. Amulet Titan: 2 (2.9%)
If you want to ignore the Team PT events, which Wizards might value differently, go -1 KCI, -2 Humans, -1 H1. No matter how you cut that, however, Stirrings decks are heads and shoulders the most consistent 2018 GP/PT finishers and it's not super close. If this trend continues in 2018, these decks will reach and likely exceed Twin levels of GP/PT dominance by the end of the year. Gx Tron alone could do it with a few more sustained finishes, even ignoring the other decks.
The metagame could certainly self-correct itself, but with an announcement coming up in a week Wizards only has past data to look at not speculative future data. Stirrings decks have consistently overperformed at large scale events during the months leading up to this announcement.
I would personally have no qualms with a Stirrings ban, but if Wizards instead decides KCI is guilty of causing rounds to go extra long ala eggs they may just ban KCI on those grounds instead.
We shall see.
In addition, I am always in favor of the Mox Opal <-> artifact lands swap, which would conveniently also neuter KCI. However, I have no idea if Wizards would be on board with this or is even considering this as a possibility
KtK they didn't add the card to the set and then unban it. They had it planned for reprint and realized after Iconic that there was no way the other set was going to go over well, so they took the risk of unbanning JTMS to try and boost sales. There was a massive number of people arguing back and forth on this on the basis of dollar value, but the reality is that the average consumer doesn't care about EV, they care about pulling things they can play in existing formats. I don't really know what else they could have done on such short notice to try and save it because it isn't like they could reconfigure the card selection last minute. The choices they made were just horrible in that set and ultimately, when even unbanning Jace failed, they made the decision to stop masters sets for the time being. If the original draft of Masters 25 included SFM in it we would have seen the same unban behavior with that card.
This is a very rare situation borne from factors completely outside the health of the format itself and it was a gamble that didn't pay off. Also, to put this bluntly I was someone who did buy sealed product from WoTC. Masters 25 is the set that put me strait into buying nothing but singles. There was nothing that felt good about canceling a huge planned out pre-order, especially as it was the first dive I was going to take into masters products.
1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
While it's possible they "only" unbanned Jace to sell packs, it's also possible that they had him on their minds as a possible unban for a while, and decided to put him in the set so that whenever they did decide to unban him, he wouldn't hit $200 on the spot. Or it's possible it's a combination of the two, i.e. that they put Jace in the set with a possible unban in mind for him, and then realized the set wasn't worth much and they decided to therefore time the unbanning in accordance with its release.
I don't think it's proper to assert that a particular explanation is correct unless you have real evidence. And maybe you do, but you didn't present it in this post, you just asserted this without backup.
Although:Well, they could've dropped the price of booster packs a little.
What is on the ban list that is borderline that WOTC can actually print in Ravnica?
Seems more likely that they looked at the questionable state of blue and unbanned him to boost blue decks, not sales. You have zero evidence of this claim and we have plenty of evidence to suggest Wizards historically unbans cards that have nothing to do with sales.
There are several factors that lead most people on the financial arguments to believe jace was a financial decision based upon classic strategies to save a dying business.
1) Rebranding.
2) Pivot and Change of Direction.
3) Niche Down and Focus
4) Create New Marketing Plan
5) Take more Risks.
Wizards of the Coast has done basically every single one of those things over the last twelve months and accelerated the effort as can be seen in Q3-Q4 this year. The last few years have been hard on the company due to decisions made on the direction of standard and simply not understanding the market properly. The first sign of failure is best illustrated by Tarmogoyf: Looking at the graph found at MTG Goldfish, it is abundantly clear that reprinting him repeatedly even in a higher MSRP product still results in price degradation as the market becomes saturated. This is why the company was doing such a great job at NOT reprinting the same cards every modern masters set despite people wanting them to. However, they sort of got glued to it and expanded it to legacy, because it still looked like the market could take reprints of played cards. Except it can't with legacy being such a small group.
Then they swapped strategies, went back to modern for 2017, and got tangled up with Hasbro needing a hot selling set for Hascon. So, since Hascon was a general toy exhibition the company decided to go with an anniversary style set that didn't target any specific format. This got advertised way ahead of it's release and was spoiled much earlier than prior sets, both of which contributed to its failure. At the same time we also had Hour of Devastation becoming one of the worst selling standard sets of all time, eventually leading to it's print run being cut short. Basically, Iconic failed both due to early advertising and a lack of focus.
Now, months earlier Mark Rosewater mentioned that they created the Play Design Team to assure constructed standard would be a viable tournament format.
http://markrosewater.tumblr.com/post/160771962008/play-design
However, the results of this team could not actually be seen until far later. This was mentioned in the article from Mark a while back with him stating that Dominaria would be the first set where the team would truly be felt.
https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/vision-design-set-design-and-play-design-2017-10-23
However, Masters 25 came before Dominaria and did not have this teams input, meaning it was still going to carry the same unfocused nature that helped lead to Iconic Masters failing. The only other product coming before it was the dual deck Elves vs Inventors, which was a product they were discontinuing since it wasn't deemed successful. On the upside, they did have the challenger decks coming April 6th that were guaranteed to sell and Dominaria was coming out on April 27th. They knew that Masters 25 was probably going to do poorly thanks to Iconic Masters and the general negative energy going from Q2, so what would you do to try and prop up the gap between Unstable and Dominaria? Rivals was not exactly selling gangbusters as is evident by the price movement on the market for various staples, Elves vs Inventors was sure fire to be luke warm on arrival, and they're at least a couple weeks out from the "fix" to standard.
At the end of the day, they know that making a card modern viable makes it attractive to a larger group of players and would help add at least some focus to the set. All they have to do is say that they think it's fine and healthy for the format, that it makes blue stronger, or whatever they want, and unban the card. And at the end of the day, whether they did it for financial reasons or not it's really just fine. There's absolutely nothing wrong with wizards making a decision on a financial basis, especially if they can justify it and get support from internal staff. Maybe the Play Design team also pushed for it to get unbanned: We'll never know.
In the end they rebranded the summer set to be a commander set with a team focus with Battlebond, created Brawl to try and make the game less tournament driven, took a risk with adding Challenger decks, and discontinued masters sets in favor of bringing back core sets. They even changed to a one block structure so they can now freely swap between settings and react faster. I'd say if one takes all that into consideration it isn't a big leap of logic to assume that the unbanning of Jace was done with the companies success in mind.
To challenge this assertion, there has to be an example of Wizards of the Coast not expressing the desired behavior during a point of financial downturn. The only thing I could really find to counter this was potentially Lorwyn block during the Great Recession. However, modern wasn't a format officially until 2011. They did ban cards before this point and one could go back into legacy days. I'm not really sure that's a good point of reference because of how different the company was back then compared to now. Additionally, my logic may have issues due to missing information. There was something expressed by Rudy at Alpha Investments that has born fruit in that other companies also changed their print runs for Q3-Q4, such as Force of Will Co and Buddy Fight. Unfortunately, I only have anecdotal evidence of this because that isn't a number that is shared openly with anyone. I have seen supply changes with the FoW card game because in general they make smaller runs than Wizards does for their sets and the change is noticeable.
I'd say the behavior is a bit like with Ty Warner when the company oversold the market on Beanie Babies, ironically. Masters sets selling for half of what they are supposed to be going for is pretty bad. Also, apologies for the extra long post. I'm not sure I could make this shorter if I tried since there is a lot of explaining that had to be done.
1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!