This deck made me rattle my mind for when a format really was warped beyond recognition and reminds me of the old 2005 banning of Skullclamp way back when I was a wee lad:
The points that stick out most to me from the article are:
As Magic R&D Director Randy Buehler likes to say, “We're better off pushing cards than making another Homelands.”
And from the beginning:
What we're not ok with is having one card be the focal point of every viable strategy.
to
The whole development process of a TCG only works if there are doors left open for players to exploit, and that's naturally going to be the case due to unavoidable human error. You outnumber us several million to under 20.
"We used two criteria to guide us in choosing what cards to ban. First, we have a rule of thumb about Legacy that we don't like consistent turn-two combination decks, but that turn-three combination decks are okay. We modified that rule for Modern by adding a turn to each side: we are going to allow turn-four combination decks, but not decks that consistently win the game on turn three."
couple that with
We also have the goal of maintaining a diverse format.
TL;DR From WotC Quotes on past bans, they encourage players to try and experiment with new ideas, try and break the format if they can, and then intervene only when they see one of their expressed rules of what denotes a broken environment occurs.
In my opinion, Eldrazi dominance hinges on land interaction; removing one of these key components would reduce the overall effectiveness of the deck.
1
2004 WotC Article Explaining the Skullclamp Ban in Standard
The points that stick out most to me from the article are:
And from the beginning:
to
Nowadays the definition of bans have changed as indicated in this 2015 WotC article on banned cards in Modern.
couple that with
TL;DR From WotC Quotes on past bans, they encourage players to try and experiment with new ideas, try and break the format if they can, and then intervene only when they see one of their expressed rules of what denotes a broken environment occurs.
In my opinion, Eldrazi dominance hinges on land interaction; removing one of these key components would reduce the overall effectiveness of the deck.