July 13, 2015 Banned/Restricted Announcement

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
Nothing was unbanned either. We're back to the doldrums of "no changes" in Eternal formats. Khans of Tarkir showing up and provoking some actual attention got my hopes up, but that was silly. If Erik Lauer can no longer be bothered to give Eternal formats any consideration whatsoever, they should at least find someone else to look at the problem. The unfinished article I had planned to conclude my set of articles on the Legacy banned list (still saved on one of my hard drives and I'll recover it some day) got into this, but the situation in Legacy, at least, is irksome. For example, Survival isn't remotely ban-worthy now, regardless of whether it was back when they banned it. The usual argument I head from opponents of unbanning is that Survival was the broken card that enabled the rise of Vengevival dominance and that some other card in the future could break it again. This is special pleading because hypothetical future interactions aren't applied in other cases, even though they could theoretically apply to any card. Also, it's pretty dubious in light of today's metagame. Other example: Black Vise should never have been banned in the first place. That ban was a mindless carryover from the Vintage restriction, which was a historical relic from the mid-1990's style of playing Magic, corrected when it was long overdue.
 
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