I'm curious to see what the format would be like without DEN or Prophet (not necessarily both at the same time). Before Prime Time was banned the community was really divided about it just like we are now, and once it got banned a lot of people voiced their opinion that it was a stupid ban. But after a fee months without PT people realized that the format was more diverse. I'm curious if we have a similar scenario with Prophet.
There is pretty much 0 of both of these cards where I play. They'd just die from spot removal before anything crazy happens.
Why wouldn't you hit the offending cards? These kinds of threads are where people will bring up arguments about cards that should be banned, and then they can be analyzed. You can also find other cards by finding similar cards and comparing the differences. If you run boarderline cards in your decks and ask other people to do so as well, you can get a feel for how the card performs. You can't just make a complete ban list from scratch in a small amount of time, so it would be fine if it took a while to flesh it out.
I was tying to say that any criteria that is as definitive as you were proposing is either way to lax, to keep the ban list small, or hits way too many "medium" powered cards because it is overly aggressive to get all the offenders.
As always I appreciate a thoughtful debate. I don't think power level is the kind of thing that can be quantified to improve the ban list, but I have been wrong before
Hmmm. I feel like quantifying the power level of cards is indeed very hard (possibly too hard). Anyway, in the end, I think the ban list would be fast mana, cheap tutors, and a handful cards that are just bad for the format. With this, many of the ridiculous combos that happen way too early would be impossible to create due to inconsistency. With that in mind, the power level of most problem cards would be reduced substantially, simply because they rely on being cast early every game. If you build your whole deck around a card that is not your commander, then you won't be able to win with it reliably. If there is a commander that is too problematic (Kokusho, maybe?), then it can be banned as a commander.
Edit:
Someone else already beat me to it, so I deleted this part of my post.
By this criteria, you can approach cards more objectively. Tooth and nail wins at 9 mana whereas panoptic mirror can win at 5. Maybe that is enough to have the mirror banned and tooth and nail not banned. Who knows. At least you are arguing something rather than saying things about banned cards that you can say about unbanned cards or vice versa. That's most of what I've seen in arguments about banning/unbanning cards.
You can't really be suggesting boiling down the ban list to how much mana it takes to win, right? I know that was an example, but my point is if you don't have a bunch of these "criteria" (wins with less than 7 mana to randomly pick something) you won't hit the offending cards. And when you add criteria you get inconsistencies.
If what you want is Protean Hulk is banned because it does X, and Tooth and Nail does not do X, so it remains legal the cards are too nuanced to do so effectively. Maybe I am wrong but I have yet to see anything close to a list that accomplished that goal and catches the worst cards without axing way too many.
If you start working on one let me know, I would love to be part of the process.
Yes, it was an example, and probably the biggest issue with it is that it doesn't capture why panoptic mirror is banned in the first place. Because of that, all we are comparing is mana cost and the ability to win the game with them on the spot. There's much more to say about the cards, but that can be left for its own discussion. In any case, I am definitely not saying that mana cost of winning spells should be what determines if a card should be banned or not.
Why wouldn't you hit the offending cards? These kinds of threads are where people will bring up arguments about cards that should be banned, and then they can be analyzed. You can also find other cards by finding similar cards and comparing the differences. If you run boarderline cards in your decks and ask other people to do so as well, you can get a feel for how the card performs. You can't just make a complete ban list from scratch in a small amount of time, so it would be fine if it took a while to flesh it out.
I wasn't planning on working on one, but I'll let you know if I do.
On the issue of power level as ban list criteria, what defines it? A card like Deadeye Navigator might not meet a competitive players criteria for a broken card, but it might for a casual player. The reverse is true for a card like Hermit Druid, so you'll still have people arguing inconsistency. Different people have different definitions of broken, and the argument of Survival of the Fittest more than proves that.
This is why there are house bans. If you ban every card that a casual player can't deal with/doesn't like in their games, the ban list would be massive. The house ban rule is to help casual players fix their play groups, but how about more competitive groups?
You missed my edit (stupid phone submitted before I was finished messing with the post) ;P
You already know my feelings on competitive groups and house bans. I also believe that the ban list should try to represent both groups to a degree, but like I said, broken is subjective. There are people who run Hermit Druid to self mill while running basics, so why one group over the other.
I think the ban list should be at least a little longer, but I also don't want it to be obscenely long.
This is why banning enablers is brought up so much and is a good idea. By banning enablers, building a deck entirely to rely on 1 card (that is not the commander) is pretty much impossible. You'd have to wait many turns to get enough mana to cast expensive tutors for hermit druid. Then you can re-evaluate other powerful cards (ie look at them with respect to how the format plays).
The resistance to banning enablers is actually surprising to me. I thought sol ring was cool for maybe 2 days, and then I realised that whoever drew it first would win (in a 1v1 - I mostly played 1v1s when I first started out in EDH). Fast tutors are fun when you search for answers, but then you could run card draw or more answers. I think the main thing that surprises me is that enablers are very uninteresting. Tutoring for whatever card you want gets dull once you know which cards to go for and when, and fast mana is blatantly unfair (which is why it requires the entire table to gang up against you when you play it).
Power level of combo cards is typically measured by what turn they kill. Smashing the consistency of these hard, dedicated decks will lower the power level of these cards by lowering the consistency (meaning an on-average later combo).
On the issue of power level as ban list criteria, what defines it? A card like Deadeye Navigator might not meet a competitive players criteria for a broken card, but it might for a casual player. The reverse is true for a card like Hermit Druid, so you'll still have people arguing inconsistency. Different people have different definitions of broken, and the argument of Survival of the Fittest more than proves that.
This is why there are house bans. If you ban every card that a casual player can't deal with/doesn't like in their games, the ban list would be massive. The house ban rule is to help casual players fix their play groups, but how about more competitive groups?
I think there would still be room for other criteria, but "power level" being ignored when banning cards is what leads to such inconsistency.
I just don't think that is true. The issue is any useful ban criteria applied to the whole set of Magic cards will return some inconsistent results. I think tolarian academy would be banned in this 'power only' list despite fast mana not being a criteria. 'Power level' really seems like a catch all for cards that do broken junk, but that list is always going to have holes. If they switched the list to power levl but still left metalworker on as too powerful, the complaint would be that it is not, but no one would have anything to back that up, as 'power level' is just as subjective as 'too much mana too fast'.
Fast mana is broken (so fast mana cards would be banned), and tolarian academy is probably too powerful for this format. There is an abundance of artifacts that are very useful (namely ramp outside of green), so this will just accelerate pretty much any deck too easily. However, the point is that I am arguing about its power level, and not "it depends on what you cast with it" or "it's only good if your deck is built around it".
By this criteria, you can approach cards more objectively. Tooth and nail wins at 9 mana whereas panoptic mirror can win at 5. Maybe that is enough to have the mirror banned and tooth and nail not banned. Who knows. At least you are arguing something rather than saying things about banned cards that you can say about unbanned cards or vice versa. That's most of what I've seen in arguments about banning/unbanning cards.
The solution is to ban every card that is broken when built around. Obviously banning every card that gets better when built around will not work, but it bugs me when "it's not broken if you don't build around it" and "it's only broken if you use it to get/cast broken things" are used as arguments to not ban things.
How long do you think that list would be? How is 'it gets better when built around' vs 'its broken when built around' going to be consistent?
It's consistent because then we are banning cards for being too powerful. There will obviously be some borderline cards that are questionable on either side, but the reasoning would be much more consistent (ie this card is not too powerful vs this card is too powerful).
I want to add that the reason I brought all this up is because cards should be banned for power level. That way, when people ask why panoptic mirror is banned, you can say "it's too powerful" instead of coming up with some weird set of rules that for some reason are ignored on other, similar cards. Note that I am not saying panoptic mirror is too powerful, but that it is the reason it is banned. Some cards could be disagreed upon, but then you are arguing purely about power level and not dancing around all of these inconsistent reasons for banning cards.
Using one criteria, power, that is so ill-defined and not allowing anything else you just get inconsistent results with less criteria. "It is too powerful for EDH" is not a defined thing.
With this kind of criteria, when you see a card that is not banned, you can assume it is not considered too powerful for EDH rather than not knowing why it isn't banned when other, similar cards are banned. Each card would still have to be debated, but we don't need anything like magic rules of thumb that allow us to ban mana rocks that are too powerful. You simply ban the cards that are too powerful for the format.
I think there would still be room for other criteria, but "power level" being ignored when banning cards is what leads to such inconsistency.
Now I don't agree with everything on/off of the banned list(fast mana is one of them), but Survival is hardly a card ban worthy. You still have to cast the cards you get with it, plus you have to discard a card to use it and that is a hefty cost. Sure that cost and be useful when built around but this is the case for many, many cards. Lots of cards become powerful when built around, is the solution to ban every card that gets better when it becomes better when built around?
The solution is to ban every card that is broken when built around. Obviously banning every card that gets better when built around will not work, but it bugs me when "it's not broken if you don't build around it" and "it's only broken if you use it to get/cast broken things" are used as arguments to not ban things.
I will state here that I am not on either side for the banning/not banning of survival of the fittest.
I mostly say these things because it is one of the ideas that lead to an inconsistent ban list. People talk about how Kokusho is banned as a commander because if he wasn't, you could build your whole deck around reanimating and sacrificing him and it would be very hard to stop (truth of that statement doesn't matter, only the reasoning). Then we look at cards like hermit druid and ad nauseam, and for some reason, the same arguments don't get any support (again, truth of those arguments are not important). If that's the case, the only thing you can come down to is power level. Is one of these build-around strategies too powerful and the other not? I don't know, but arguments never seem to be about strength of the card when banning them, but always are when unbanning.
Then there's the other one where "things are only broken if you use them for broken strategies". Why is gifts ungiven banned? Because you can tutor a combo with it? So what? If you don't use it to find combos, it is a cool tutor that can be used in reanimator/dredge strategies that can also help find answers for given board states in a pinch. It's the same argument people use for demonic tutor and vampiric tutor.
Even with Prossh in Sheldon's article, he is trying to show that Prossh is too powerful "when you don't build the deck for him". What the hell is that trying to prove? Why does it matter? Who would build a deck that purposely ignores their commander's abilities, and even if they did, why would it matter if their commander is still powerful? If you want to compare the idea of this argument to something, look at Kokusho. Kokusho is banned for the entirely opposite reason.
Banning cards is always about how casuals can use the cards, but unbanning cards is always about how competitive players can abuse them. It makes no sense.
EDIT:
I want to add that the reason I brought all this up is because cards should be banned for power level. That way, when people ask why panoptic mirror is banned, you can say "it's too powerful" instead of coming up with some weird set of rules that for some reason are ignored on other, similar cards. Note that I am not saying panoptic mirror is too powerful, but that it is the reason it is banned. Some cards could be disagreed upon, but then you are arguing purely about power level and not dancing around all of these inconsistent reasons for banning cards.
Except that with normal mulligans, people are more likely to just keep their hand, since pitching your whole hand can be very risky.
I'd totally read this btw. I love probabilities and statistics.
Eh, honestly you could argue that either way. The other side of the coin is that, if the player decides to mulligan, it might take more iterations to get an acceptable hand.
Also, I realized my model for the regular partial paris is inaccurate as well. I've got some friends helping me calculate these numbers using a Monte Carlo simulation... aka, brute forcing it with millions of trials.
Possibly. That would be an interesting thing to see.
And sweet! I did some Monte Carlo stuff last year for my AI course. It's a rather hilarious method.
If anything, the bird feels weak. Because it is a creature.
It's still a second torpor orb, and having flash makes it like a weird stifle. Certain decks can definitely get a creature back more easily than an artifact (and also being a creature opens it up as an additional option for tutors).
I've run it in the past and I can sum up my feelings for it:
"Man, look at all these green players with their lands. I sure wish I had Balancing Act in my hand right now."
"I'm doing pretty good right now. Full grip, good board state. What'll I draw next? Balancing Act? #$*@&!"
Two extremes, and it felt like that's all I ever experienced with it so I cut it. Occasionally I cast it and it was a good play, but as you say they get to choose what permanents they keep. It plays best when you're in a meta full of people who like to vomit onto the field and you tend to play more conservatively.
I'd say give it a play and see how you like it. It's good enough that you shouldn't dismiss the card completely.
I can definitely see this being the case, but if I have a full hand and a decent board state, I am usually in very good shape. I think armageddon can often have the same effect (though it would be the other way around, I guess).
I would think that you would want to have a deck that actively looks to keep its own board presence and/or hand size low either by the nature of its strategy or due to the inherent weakness in the colors the deck is employing. The first thing I thought of was a / deck. Mostly because these colors have issues with raw card advantage, but also because red has some of the best sacrifice outlets available to it. If you have something like Greater Gargadon, Magmaw, Shivan Harvest, Goblin Bombardment in play, you can surely make Balancing Act into a game-swinging effect. These cards already play into some of what white is good at as well with Land Tax or Martyr's Bond, so its not that far of a stretch.
I think you might also be able to play the card in a / deck that utilizes a stax-ish strategy.
I plan to use it in WR
Since there are so few duel commander players here, I am thinking of changing my Tajic deck into a regular EDH deck. With that in mind, I want some spells that can bring the game back to my kind of game (so I am running keldon firebombers as well - need to get a cataclysm but they're impossible to find ). I like these effects because they bring everyone back to a set number (including armageddon) so it doesn't matter how far you are ahead before they hit.
Garruk Relentless is mostly just to constantly dump out tokens which can eventually win on their own. He also evades board wipes and can repopulate your board afterwards. Being able to punch utility guys like dark confidant is very handy as well.
Though I don't think soul of ravnica is all that good, Kozilek, Butcher of Truth is definitely not an appropriate comparison. Tons of decks will hit the 6 and 7 mana mark, but 10 is kind of a stretch. Most decks don't want THAT much mana. On top of that, being usable from the graveyard (which tons of people seem to be forgetting) is quite significant (even if the card is still rather weak).
It is more appropriate than the other cards mentioned due to the mana required to make it work. It does nothing at 6 mana, and if you only hit 7, then you've spent 2 turns and 13 mana to draw 1 or more cards. Or you've spent dredge or tutor options to put it in the graveyard, making it 7 mana + dredge/tutor to draw one or more cards. Most of the time, it's going to cost 13 mana to cantrip, or 6 and then 7 plus waiting around a turn tapped out. I'm not going to further debate that point.
Being useable from the graveyard is a moot point, if you're playing this in a dredge/mill deck (like Mimeoplasm) you're not going to Entomb for Soul of Ravnica...or sanely put it in your deck for that matter.
The biggest strike this card has against it is the color. Blue is awesome at drawing cards, and this guy is not.
You don't have to go for the draw the next turn. You have a 6/6 flying that can attack. You can activate it for the draw on an opposing player's turn so that you have mana open for spells if need be. It's an activated ability, not an echo cost.
Of course you won't entombsoul of ravnica, but if it's in your graveyard due to mill or maybe windfall, then you can potentially use it for cards. I said that the graveyard ability is significant because it puts it apart from other cards that are similar. You can't just compare it to consecrated sphynx since the sphynx does nothing in the graveyard.
All that said, the card is too weak, so it doesn't really matter. It won't be used in many decks.
My wort deck is decent enough vs 1-2 opponents that I think I mostly want to keep it as is, so I don't need answers based solely in red/black.
That said, I rather like Purphoros. Everytime I land him it's pretty brutal. What about Mogis as a general that punishes the enemy? I could include all the stax cards you mentioned. I used to play Mono-black Pox back in the day when Nether Spirit was a win condition, so I can get behind that idea.
I have a Mogis deck like this. Basically, you get mogis/other damaging enchantments into play and then blow up a whole lot of stuff. It's kind of an all-in deck and can get hosed by well-timed spot removal if I don't have a strong setup.
There is pretty much 0 of both of these cards where I play. They'd just die from spot removal before anything crazy happens.
Also regarding the low-mana wins with gifts ungiven, you could grab hermit druid, lightning mauler, unearth, and noxious revival. It only costs 5 mana total. (This discussion was a bunch of pages back)
As for more serious use, it is nice if you can copy the spell without much effort (ie no forking it, but rather something like riku of two reflections or melek, izzet paragon).
Hmmm. I feel like quantifying the power level of cards is indeed very hard (possibly too hard). Anyway, in the end, I think the ban list would be fast mana, cheap tutors, and a handful cards that are just bad for the format. With this, many of the ridiculous combos that happen way too early would be impossible to create due to inconsistency. With that in mind, the power level of most problem cards would be reduced substantially, simply because they rely on being cast early every game. If you build your whole deck around a card that is not your commander, then you won't be able to win with it reliably. If there is a commander that is too problematic (Kokusho, maybe?), then it can be banned as a commander.
Edit:
Someone else already beat me to it, so I deleted this part of my post.
Yes, it was an example, and probably the biggest issue with it is that it doesn't capture why panoptic mirror is banned in the first place. Because of that, all we are comparing is mana cost and the ability to win the game with them on the spot. There's much more to say about the cards, but that can be left for its own discussion. In any case, I am definitely not saying that mana cost of winning spells should be what determines if a card should be banned or not.
Why wouldn't you hit the offending cards? These kinds of threads are where people will bring up arguments about cards that should be banned, and then they can be analyzed. You can also find other cards by finding similar cards and comparing the differences. If you run boarderline cards in your decks and ask other people to do so as well, you can get a feel for how the card performs. You can't just make a complete ban list from scratch in a small amount of time, so it would be fine if it took a while to flesh it out.
I wasn't planning on working on one, but I'll let you know if I do.
This is why banning enablers is brought up so much and is a good idea. By banning enablers, building a deck entirely to rely on 1 card (that is not the commander) is pretty much impossible. You'd have to wait many turns to get enough mana to cast expensive tutors for hermit druid. Then you can re-evaluate other powerful cards (ie look at them with respect to how the format plays).
The resistance to banning enablers is actually surprising to me. I thought sol ring was cool for maybe 2 days, and then I realised that whoever drew it first would win (in a 1v1 - I mostly played 1v1s when I first started out in EDH). Fast tutors are fun when you search for answers, but then you could run card draw or more answers. I think the main thing that surprises me is that enablers are very uninteresting. Tutoring for whatever card you want gets dull once you know which cards to go for and when, and fast mana is blatantly unfair (which is why it requires the entire table to gang up against you when you play it).
Power level of combo cards is typically measured by what turn they kill. Smashing the consistency of these hard, dedicated decks will lower the power level of these cards by lowering the consistency (meaning an on-average later combo).
This is why there are house bans. If you ban every card that a casual player can't deal with/doesn't like in their games, the ban list would be massive. The house ban rule is to help casual players fix their play groups, but how about more competitive groups?
Fast mana is broken (so fast mana cards would be banned), and tolarian academy is probably too powerful for this format. There is an abundance of artifacts that are very useful (namely ramp outside of green), so this will just accelerate pretty much any deck too easily. However, the point is that I am arguing about its power level, and not "it depends on what you cast with it" or "it's only good if your deck is built around it".
By this criteria, you can approach cards more objectively. Tooth and nail wins at 9 mana whereas panoptic mirror can win at 5. Maybe that is enough to have the mirror banned and tooth and nail not banned. Who knows. At least you are arguing something rather than saying things about banned cards that you can say about unbanned cards or vice versa. That's most of what I've seen in arguments about banning/unbanning cards.
It's consistent because then we are banning cards for being too powerful. There will obviously be some borderline cards that are questionable on either side, but the reasoning would be much more consistent (ie this card is not too powerful vs this card is too powerful).
With this kind of criteria, when you see a card that is not banned, you can assume it is not considered too powerful for EDH rather than not knowing why it isn't banned when other, similar cards are banned. Each card would still have to be debated, but we don't need anything like magic rules of thumb that allow us to ban mana rocks that are too powerful. You simply ban the cards that are too powerful for the format.
I think there would still be room for other criteria, but "power level" being ignored when banning cards is what leads to such inconsistency.
The solution is to ban every card that is broken when built around. Obviously banning every card that gets better when built around will not work, but it bugs me when "it's not broken if you don't build around it" and "it's only broken if you use it to get/cast broken things" are used as arguments to not ban things.
I will state here that I am not on either side for the banning/not banning of survival of the fittest.
I mostly say these things because it is one of the ideas that lead to an inconsistent ban list. People talk about how Kokusho is banned as a commander because if he wasn't, you could build your whole deck around reanimating and sacrificing him and it would be very hard to stop (truth of that statement doesn't matter, only the reasoning). Then we look at cards like hermit druid and ad nauseam, and for some reason, the same arguments don't get any support (again, truth of those arguments are not important). If that's the case, the only thing you can come down to is power level. Is one of these build-around strategies too powerful and the other not? I don't know, but arguments never seem to be about strength of the card when banning them, but always are when unbanning.
Then there's the other one where "things are only broken if you use them for broken strategies". Why is gifts ungiven banned? Because you can tutor a combo with it? So what? If you don't use it to find combos, it is a cool tutor that can be used in reanimator/dredge strategies that can also help find answers for given board states in a pinch. It's the same argument people use for demonic tutor and vampiric tutor.
There's also things like panoptic mirror vs tooth and nail. They can both be used fair and "for fun" or for ending the game as soon as possible, but panoptic mirror is banned and tooth and nail isn't.
Even with Prossh in Sheldon's article, he is trying to show that Prossh is too powerful "when you don't build the deck for him". What the hell is that trying to prove? Why does it matter? Who would build a deck that purposely ignores their commander's abilities, and even if they did, why would it matter if their commander is still powerful? If you want to compare the idea of this argument to something, look at Kokusho. Kokusho is banned for the entirely opposite reason.
Banning cards is always about how casuals can use the cards, but unbanning cards is always about how competitive players can abuse them. It makes no sense.
EDIT:
I want to add that the reason I brought all this up is because cards should be banned for power level. That way, when people ask why panoptic mirror is banned, you can say "it's too powerful" instead of coming up with some weird set of rules that for some reason are ignored on other, similar cards. Note that I am not saying panoptic mirror is too powerful, but that it is the reason it is banned. Some cards could be disagreed upon, but then you are arguing purely about power level and not dancing around all of these inconsistent reasons for banning cards.
Possibly. That would be an interesting thing to see.
And sweet! I did some Monte Carlo stuff last year for my AI course. It's a rather hilarious method.
It's still a second torpor orb, and having flash makes it like a weird stifle. Certain decks can definitely get a creature back more easily than an artifact (and also being a creature opens it up as an additional option for tutors).
I can definitely see this being the case, but if I have a full hand and a decent board state, I am usually in very good shape. I think armageddon can often have the same effect (though it would be the other way around, I guess).
I plan to use it in WR
Since there are so few duel commander players here, I am thinking of changing my Tajic deck into a regular EDH deck. With that in mind, I want some spells that can bring the game back to my kind of game (so I am running keldon firebombers as well - need to get a cataclysm but they're impossible to find
You don't have to go for the draw the next turn. You have a 6/6 flying that can attack. You can activate it for the draw on an opposing player's turn so that you have mana open for spells if need be. It's an activated ability, not an echo cost.
Of course you won't entomb soul of ravnica, but if it's in your graveyard due to mill or maybe windfall, then you can potentially use it for cards. I said that the graveyard ability is significant because it puts it apart from other cards that are similar. You can't just compare it to consecrated sphynx since the sphynx does nothing in the graveyard.
All that said, the card is too weak, so it doesn't really matter. It won't be used in many decks.
I have a Mogis deck like this. Basically, you get mogis/other damaging enchantments into play and then blow up a whole lot of stuff. It's kind of an all-in deck and can get hosed by well-timed spot removal if I don't have a strong setup.