Yeah, especially in hindsight, it seems weird to let Tinker run amok for so long. Even when it wasn't broken it was "just" very good. PT: New Orleans really demonstrated how nuts the card was. The card was always such a ridiculous design combining the most broken mechanics- cheating on mana AND tutoring. Like, what? I guess the weird history of the Extended banned list, Tinker was somewhat overshadowed by Necro which had been around for longer and had that historical dominance so a lot of the bans were just "ban cards to put The Skull back in line", banning Hippie, Rit and Vault before finally banning Necro and Consult.
One of the earlier threads I did in this series was on Necropotence, and I think that at some point I broke down my own mixed feelings on that. Necropotence is one of my favorite cards ever, but I was always more fond of the stuff before Necropotence became tied to the Illusions + Donate combo. I really liked the "Lauerpotence" deck. It seems that Necropotence transitioning from an engine card for control decks and suicidal hand-sculpting tool for high-risk aggro decks into a dedicated combo enabler was inevitable, so I can't really be too sore about the card getting banned. I also always thought that a lot of great tools existed to beat Trix decks in Extended back when WotC started banning cards to curtail them. Sometimes it's wrong to say that we should just let the metagame adjust rather than banning a card, and I've only ever had very limited information on this, so it's possible that I'm just wrong, or that the problem would still eventually have warranted a ban. I also think that it's crazy to ban Dark Ritual before banning Necropotence, so there's that too.
Perhaps if Necropotence had been banned earlier, the use of Mana Vault as a Tinker enabler would have gotten Tinker banned sooner. Then again, they'd already banned Memory Jar instead of Tinker before that, so probably not.
It's also really difficult to figure out what was actually broken at the time, even with hindsight: they printed a lot of really fucked up cards in the first decade of the game so there were Necro decks, Academy-based decks, other combo decks based on other broken cards, Tinker decks after the fact, Oath decks (which really aren't problematic till Orchard is printed but it's banned at the same time as Recruiter) Gobbo Combo decks with a bunch of ridiculous cards, etc etc etc. So I'm a willing to give them a benefit of the doubt that, at the time, I can see why they did what they did. Still, I think something like Monolith and Oath didn't need to be banned. Monolith IMHO was possibly overkill and Oath was able to be combated by the decks that existed and even with the addition of Orchard over the next few years could have been combated and maybe even a healthy part of the metagame, able to combat the rising Affinity menace that surfaced only a few months later.
I agree that it's tough to untangle what the real problems were in that era, and what the best solutions would have been, even with hindsight.
I also think that there's an unfortunate pattern on display with these bans over time, where WotC decided that a card was too big of a problem, banned it, then after the deck continued to be a problem, they'd forever afterward still view the card as a problematic one. In the case of the Trix deck, they banned Dark Ritual and Mana Vault in March of 2000, and the deck stuck around with strong enough performances that a year later they banned Necropotence too. But they never unbanned Dark Ritual, and eschewed reprinting it in any products that would place the card into a tournament format. Would Dark Ritual have necessitated a ban in some later Extended rotation? Maybe. Would it have been banned in Modern? Well, Seething Song is banned in Modern, so I suppose so. But I find it suspicious that the deck that seemingly took the card off the table and flagged it as "broken" forever afterward was also a deck that kept going strong in Dark Ritual's absence, and even got Necropotence banned.
This also happened with Goblin Lackey. There's a case to be made that Goblin Recruiter really was a problem, really did warrant a ban. But Goblin Lackey was never unbanned and
was never reprinted in any regular Magic products. It makes the situation look like WotC still held a grudge against the card, even though banning it didn't do anything to stop the deck it had been a part of. As with other cards like this, there's some plausible deniability involved. Perhaps the performance of Vial Goblins in Legacy made WotC wary of Goblin Lackey. It's just weird that it seems like it's happened a lot. There's an innocent explanation for any given example I could name.
Honestly, this is super off-topic but what the fuck Tinker? Even after the recent Initiative craze in Vintage Tinker is still the top deck and has been, mostly, that way at least since around Mirrodin block. At least when the egregiously broken Gush isn't legal as a 4-of. Which says a lot about that card. anyway.
Heh. Yep. Tinker and Tolarian Academy are two cards that have remained the most egregiously broken for the longest amounts of time. I remember other cards being cited as some of the most broken, like Yawgmoth's Will, Gush, Fastbond, Skullclamp, Demonic Consultation, Necropotence, and even Lurrus of the Dream-Den. But eventually some change happens that diminishes the relevance of those other cards. Aside from some obvious cards from 1993, Tinker and Tolarian Academy are the two that just keep being comically overpowered, no matter how much time passes.
This is absolutely revisionist history. Though IIRC I remember seeing arguments about not unbanning Recruiter before Top's ban based on logistical issues (on The Source) so it might have been around for even longer. I think the "time" arguments are just garbage. Any large tournament is going to run to time each round, doesn't matter if Top exists or not. People love taking a million years to resolve Brainstorm and Ponder and add in DRC it is just obnoxious. I don't think trying to combat these sorts of issues is very productive because it is a player/skill issue and not really a problem with the cards. Top was just broken with Mentor and Miracles. It's that simple. You don't (and SHOULDN'T) invent reasons (other than they're just not true and don't reflect reality) to strengthen your argument to ban cards because they have all sorts of knock-on effects like muddying the waters for the discourse of banning cards. The "logistical" issues has bled out into every single argument about whether or not you should ban or unban something. Not good.
I'm perhaps a bit of an extremist on this matter, because I contend that even Shahrazad should not be banned over logistical concerns, and I think that most people are willing to concede that one. But yeah, my point was more that even if one grants that certain cards need to be banned over logistical issues, Goblin Recruiter isn't one.
Yeah the piles are pretty inconsequential and as long as you have a Ringleader hitting a Ringleader it doesn't matter how you stack 'em. If you're getting disrupted its a little bit more tricky. But these days it wouldn't matter because Recruiter only needs to be a Worldly Tutor. If you expect weird things you can just put more Recruiters in the stack or more Snoops. Recruiter into Kiki, 1 million Snoops and finally Recruiter into Sling-Gang. EZ PZ. It's about the same as Doomsday or even more compact. But, anyway, control decks can't really beat Snoop regardless. Two draw-4 Ringleaders is enough to put 'em in the trash.
I'm not super annoyed they banned Recruiter and Tomb at the time in Extended because I had a decent amount of success against decks with just Vial Goblins. I think the deck was pretty good. Better with Recruiter for sure but it wasn't unplayable at least.
Yeah, and that carried over to Legacy.
Though I must say I never considered them banning fewer cards during late 2003. All those cards are broken but maybe they could have balanced the broken decks yet to come? An interesting idea, at the very least.
If I were retroactively given all the changes that I thought sensible in the ban list decisions back then, I'm sure that some broken deck would have emerged that would have changed the format and still impelled some ban at some point, whether one of the cards I chose to leave untouched or some other card. Still worth it.
I think Stephen Menendian called the principle "narrow tailoring."
There is a lot to respond to in this thread that I'm still trying to process but a lot of really great stuff! I would like to say that my interactions with you about MTG have been the best, bar none, on the internet over the last 20+ years. You're very thoughtful and knowledgeable about these topics which, to be completely honest, delights me. Great, great stuff.
Thanks!
Getting back to the topic of specifically Goblin Recruiter himself, I think I've come around to the position of unironically unbanning him in Legacy. I think with the lightning speed printing of sets, giving more tools to non-Tribal decks, that Recruiter would be healthy (at least in the sense of deck diversity) in Legacy, occupying a sort of niche like Elves but being much better at grinding out card advantage. I think it's finally time for the king (hehehe) to reclaim his throne. The new norm is just really busted stuff happening very quickly and then some decks trying to take advantage of the Tomb decks and also not losing to Delver. I think Recruiter Goblins could easily do both if it takes inspiration from the Vintage version that is basically just Turbo Snoop. That deck has had pretty decent success in modern Vintage even with all the broken stuff though it is still underplayed IMHO.
I don't think I'd said so yet, but my position on Goblin Recruiter nowadays is that it deserves to be unbanned because it would enable Goblin decks
to do their best and I don't think that they'd be dominant. At the very least, it would act as an upgraded version of Boggart Harbinger. And more realistically, I think that it would shift Goblin decks into leaning more on Turbo Snoop combos. I think that this would make Goblins generally the better tribe for creature-based combos, but Elves would still have stuff like Natural Order, Gaea's Cradle, and Glimpse of Nature. There'd still be room in the format for both archetypes to exist.
Notably, the printing of a Squee that combos with Food Chain would seem to make Food Chain Goblins possibly a relevant deck again, but I don't think that Food Chain is still worth the cost it imposes in deck construction, so Food Chain Goblins would remain a historical relic.
