February 12th, 2018 Banned/Restricted List Announcement

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
And yesterday! :p

Also, this marks Week 702 of Earthcraft being unnecessarily banned in Legacy.
 

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
I'll save the Eternal rant for another occasion. Probably.

The Modern changes, mostly the Jace unban, have been polarizing. We don't really have Modern tournament barnacle grinders around here, but elsewhere, I've seen the following opinions...
  1. Jace is broken and will dominate the format. The unban is a mistake.
  2. Jace is not broken, but the unban is bad for the health of the format because it will homogenize blue-heavy control decks.
  3. The unban is a blatant cash grab, an attempt to boost the sales of Masters 25 because the set will reprint the newly unbanned Jace. And this is bad.
  4. The unban is at least partially motivated by an interest in selling more packs, but that's not a bad thing: WotC are in the business of selling packs, after all.
  5. Because demand for Jace will rise with the unban (and indeed already has), it just makes practical sense to reprint the card.
  6. JTMS isn't actually as strong as most people seem to think.
Who's right? I dunno.
 
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Psarketos

Guest
Bloodbraid Elf seems like a genuinely interesting card that, as a Nayan mage at heart, I would enjoy building around (even though competitive players might say, "play Jund and git gud scrub").

Jace, as an overly powerful planeswalker card and, separately, a fateseal control deck win, is everything that not-for-tournaments Modern needs less of.
 

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
Bloodbraid Elf was originally banned due to its role in Jund decks, but it's pretty good in almost any red/green archetype. Probably relevant: at the time, Ancestral Vision had been banned for all of Modern's history. Until just recently, the two cards never existed together in the format.

I'm assuming JTMS will run somewhere in the $100 price range. So how relevant will that even be for people who play Modern in a casual setting? I say this as the jerk who would totally bring The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale to a casual Legacy setting if it looked like a good opportunity, but I assume that this sort of thing is, outside of my own villainy, relatively rare.
 
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Psarketos

Guest
Temur may be a close second for the archetype of my heart after Naya, and I am already reading some interesting articles regarding Temur decks featuring both of these cards in powerful shells. I have never built a deck with a planeswalker, and doubt I would if it were not Teferi, Ajani, Tamiyo, or Windgrace (he will be on Dominaria again, I can feel it!) - definitely would never build fateseal outside theory.
 
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Psarketos

Guest
Counterspells and discard, and hard control strategies generally, definitely have a role to play in the game. Just not a role I find fun to play or play against personally, with one exception. I built a zero nonland permanents Nayan burn deck based around Reverberate and Reforge the Soul as a response to the counterspell and discard heavy decks in the "Just for Fun" section of MTGO, and winning by casting Reverberate in response to an opponent casting Dash Hopes will always be one of my fondest memories of Magic as a game.
 
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Psarketos

Guest
Having revisited MtGO to get an updated perspective, I found that metagaming against Thoughtseize made me the most happy. Turn 1: Spell Pierce that Thoughtseize. Turn 2: Mana Tithe that Kitesail Freebooter. Remainder of Turns: Win.

Which made me realize that the card I would most like to see reprinted in Masters 25 or Dominaria is one of your least favorites, Oversoul: Leyline of Sanctity. A deck running Sanctity + Mana Tithe is just strong shutdown for "I am going to ensure you never use your hand" strategies, which brings me joy. Aggro strategies can play right around that, so I guess my strong Naya biases are just my defining element, because I think that is totally fine. Spell Piercing Mana Leaks and Remands made me similarly happy, fwiw.

My only real problem, on returning to MtGO and looking at the metagame more broadly, is how much money one would have to spend to get the right solutions like Leyline of Sanctity. You were right, and I was wrong in context if not absolutely, about the price of Modern - building specific strategies that a reasonable casual player might want to play is crazy expensive. I built a Selesnya shell for four copies of Gaddock Teeg before realizing that the deck would cost me well over $100 due to his cost alone - a price for which I could build a half dozen decks, at the cost of those decks being less interesting or not precisely what I wanted to play. That is a real problem for the Modern format, and I see it now much more than before you wrote about it.
 
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