January 18, 2016 Banned and Restricted Announcement

[Spiderman]

January 18, 2016 Banned/Restricted Announcement
　
Modern
　
Summer Bloom is banned
Spinter Twin is banned

Pauper

Cloud of Faeries is banned

 

[Mooseman]

Okay, what in Pauper does COF make so good?

 

[Oversoul]

Well, I don't think that the card should have been banned. I don't actually play MTGO, but some of the people who do have been pretty critical of this decision as well. Two main decks were using CoF in Pauper...

-Delver decks, which didn't mind having a free, flying creature, especially since it could be used to activate Ninja of the Deep Hours and boost Spellstutter Sprite. Not bad, but many Delver decks didn't even use CoF and Delver will still be a top deck, easily.
-Combo decks that used Nightscape Familiar and Sunscape Familiar to reduce the cost of cards in order to build loops of spells. Banning CoF kills this deck.

 

[Spiderman]

No one reads the article?

Yes, that is pretty much the goal from this

The Esper Familiars deck uses Sunscape Familiar and Nightscape Familiar to reduce the cost of blue spells, which include "free spells" such as Cloud of Faeries and Snap. Combined with the bounce lands, this means the "free spells" effectively produce mana. Here is a typical winning position: One casts Ghostly Flicker targeting Cloud of Faeries and a Mnemonic Wall, netting mana and getting back the Ghostly Flicker. Once enough mana is produced, the Ghostly Flicker can target a Sea Gate Oracle instead of the Cloud of Faeries, repeatedly looking for Sage's Row Denizen. From there, the flickering mills the opponent's deck.
Because of all the card-drawers here, it is difficult for non-blue decks to defeat this deck. It pushes the metagame to the imbalanced state where blue is heavily overplayed. Cloud of Faeries is likely the most problematic card in the deck.

 

[Oversoul]

No one reads the article?

You got me there, but I think I have pretty damn good excuse on this one...

They'd already made the announcement several days ago. They accidentally leaked their own bannings because the beta MTGO already had the cards unavailable, so people figured it out and they went ahead and made an official announcement earlier than originally planned. I read it at that time. I assumed that you were linking to this same announcement, but it would appear that they reposted another version of it a bit more recently.

 

[Spiderman]

I did a search on the word "banned" and couldn't find anything between the Sept and January announcements...

 

[Oversoul]

Go on Magic message boards that aren't this one, then look for threads about banned list announcements. There are posts from the 16th discussing the bannings, even though when they link to an announcement, the link now comes up as the same one you linked to. I'm guessing that they edited the page or just dated it for the 18th even though it actually showed up on the website a couple of days earlier.

 

[Oversoul]

Also...

 

[Spiderman]

Can't see the image attachment but okay, I'll take your word for it.

 

[Melkor]

Image attachment was poking fun at how WOTC doesn't seem to think variety in the Standard environment is all that important, what with the prevalence of Siege Rhino, but the image is no longer appearing.

 

[Oversoul]

They banned those cards in Modern in time to stop the Pro Tour from being overrun by the same two dominant decks, Splinter Twin and Amulet Bloom. Top 8 from Pro Tour Oath of the Gatewatch...

1. Eldrazi
2. Eldrazi
3. Eldrazi
4. Affinity
5. Eldrazi
6. Eldrazi
7. Affinity
8. Eldrazi

At this point, I'm just about convinced that a ham sandwich could do a better job managing banned lists than Wizards of the Coast.

 

[Terentius]

What do you mean? What does that show other than deck type B became dominant as the next best choice after deck type A became nonviable due to card bans?

 

[Oversoul]

What do you mean? What does that show other than deck type B became dominant as the next best choice after deck type A became nonviable due to card bans?

It doesn't actually show that. If previous results were, say, half Amulet Bloom and half Twin Exarch, then that'd be one thing. But that was never the case. Like, I just looked up the last large tournament from before the bannings, and there were eight different decks in the Top 8. Well, that's an SCG tournament and those tend to be weird and not representative of other environments. But looking back, it generally wasn't the case that either Twin Exarch or Amulet Bloom decks were dominating Modern at any point...

Now, I'm being hyperbolic by citing one extreme case, but this is high-profile and also lines up with what players in this format were predicting and were worried about. In reality, players given some more time will adapt, and I'd guess that Modern will stabilize into something less extreme. But the results are still there. For a major tournament, that's got to be one of the least diverse top eight results I've ever seen. And it's coming on the heels of bans that purport to be in the interest of format diversity. What the goals are for a format, what it should look like, and how banning cards should be used to control environments is all dependent on the goals of whoever is in charge. I happen to disagree with the official decisions a whole lot, and I think they're incredibly wrongheaded, but that's subjective. Someone with a different outlook from mine could try to defend a lot of the choices that have been made over the years. But in a case like this, if you're going to officially declare that banning cards is in the interest of diversity, and then diversity drops to an all-time low following your changes, it's pretty hard to get people to swallow that.