November 26, 2018 Banned/Restricted Announcement

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
Also this marks Week 740 of Earthcraft being unnecessarily banned in Legacy. Got to keep track of that! :p
 

Melkor

Well-known member
The only reason I can think of that Mind Twist remains banned is that it is a feel bad card; but Legacy is full of feel bads, it wouldn't even be close to the feelingest bad thing that can be done in Legacy.
 

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
My real point with the "X consecutive weeks" gimmick is that there are cards that were on the initial ban list back when no one knew what the format would look like and it was all guesswork, but despite it being obvious to the players that those cards are safe unbans, they've remained on the list for over fourteen years. And yet we get announcement after announcement of "No changes." So even if WotC don't want to be very involved in Legacy, even if they don't like the idea of experimenting with interesting unbans, at the very least they could unban the cards that have absolutely no place on the list. If a card was once a problem in some way and things have changed but there's still trepidation, that's one thing. But these are cards that have been banned from the beginning. And some of them are so safe I'd comfortably dismiss naysayers as being ignorant of the format.

Mind Twist would very likely not even be viable in today's Legacy. I can't think of a deck where I'd want to run it. Earthcraft might be a splash utility card, but most of the decks that could use it aren't even very strong anymore.

The other two most common suspects I hear mentioned in this context are Goblin Recruiter and Frantic Search. I think Goblin Recruiter is also 100% safe, but it would probably boost Goblins slightly, and at least that's a real deck. Frantic Search I'm not 100% convinced on, but it's reasonably close. Conventional wisdom is that it's only worth it if the card is used synergistically with cards that exploit the land-untapping, such as High Tide. I think there's a slight error in that line: free filtering is good on its own and the use of dual lands makes it easy to use the card to grab extra mana of a specific color. Frantic Search is good in a way that makes it the converse of why Deathrite Shaman is (was) good. Dig Through Time is banned, so Frantic Search can't help that card, but it can act as another tool in the same obnoxious stew that's been plaguing the format. On the other hand, current Legacy decks are so low-to-the-ground that a three-drop needs to do something special, and Frantic Search outside of mana-production engines is pretty bland.
 

Ferret

Moderator
Staff member
Playing MTGO I can think of a few cards that need banning like Ajani's Pridemate, Ajani's Welcome (see previous), all FISH - and any Planeswalkers that are responsible for me losing...
 
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