When will the hammer fall?
February 24th 2010 06:28
“Stop! Hammer time!”
-- MC Hammer
Magic slang, which I have in the past warned you against using too much, nonetheless managed to produce one phrase I actually like: banhammer. When a card is banned or restricted from a constructed format, people speak of “the banhammer falling on it.” You may note that we haven’t had cause to say that for a while now. The last cards banned in Standard were the core of the Mirrodin-era Affinity deck: Ancient Den, Seat of the Synod, Vault of Whispers, Great Furnace, Tree of Tales, and Arcbound Ravager, which faced the hammer in mid-2005. The last card banned in Extended was Sensei’s Divining Top, in September 2008.
Wizards of the Coast has what seems to be a clear policy on banning cards. It is, after all, a serious step, a de facto admission that a certain card should not exist and that gameplay (at least, competitive gameplay) is better without it. If a card is some combination of drastically overpowered, drastically overused in competitive play, and/or drastically disruptive to running tournaments (like Sensei’s Divining Top, which pro players used to stretch out games where they were ahead and generally waste time), it is a candidate to be removed from the environment.
Fine. So why have there been no cards banned in Standard since 2005?
After all, both Umezawa’s Jitte and BItterblossom were both drastically overpowered and drastically overused. By the numbers, Alara Reborn’s Bloodbraid Elf is even more popular than the Affinity offenders. Arid Mesa and the other rare lands from Zendikar can be used to waste time almost as effectively as Sensei’s Divining Top, since they require their user to shuffle their deck, and people’s definition of “sufficiently randomized” becomes more stringent as the time left in the round decreases.
Affinity was banned largely because of popular demand, but popular demand was never strong enough for Umezawa’s Jitte or the Faerie deck. Those decks also had eloquent advocates and lobbyists in the community, who overstated their favorite cards’ beatability while downplaying their format-warping properties. Advocates of a more fair or balanced tournament environment have allowed their opponents to smear them as bad players or “scrubs,” while failing to point out that powergamers enjoy playing with overpowered cards precisely because they are overpowered and thus better for humiliating their opponents.
Now, as I alluded to above, I no longer have a personal stake in the tournament environment. Magic, to my mind, is more like art which there is a way to play with than a game with illustrated pieces. But if you are not quite ready to come over to my way of seeing things, and you care about this problem, you need to take action. You need to learn from your opponents, and you need to learn from the world outside Magic as well, because there is no shortage of examples of terrible messages which succeeded because of their superior marketing. And you, in fact, have a good message: fairness. Don't you think Luis Scott-Vargas and Chris Jobin are going to look like even bigger douchebags when they find themselves lined up opposing fairness?
-- MC Hammer
Magic slang, which I have in the past warned you against using too much, nonetheless managed to produce one phrase I actually like: banhammer. When a card is banned or restricted from a constructed format, people speak of “the banhammer falling on it.” You may note that we haven’t had cause to say that for a while now. The last cards banned in Standard were the core of the Mirrodin-era Affinity deck: Ancient Den, Seat of the Synod, Vault of Whispers, Great Furnace, Tree of Tales, and Arcbound Ravager, which faced the hammer in mid-2005. The last card banned in Extended was Sensei’s Divining Top, in September 2008.
Fun fact about me #395: I own zero copies of this card that are not from From the Vault: Exiled.
Wizards of the Coast has what seems to be a clear policy on banning cards. It is, after all, a serious step, a de facto admission that a certain card should not exist and that gameplay (at least, competitive gameplay) is better without it. If a card is some combination of drastically overpowered, drastically overused in competitive play, and/or drastically disruptive to running tournaments (like Sensei’s Divining Top, which pro players used to stretch out games where they were ahead and generally waste time), it is a candidate to be removed from the environment.
Fine. So why have there been no cards banned in Standard since 2005?
After all, both Umezawa’s Jitte and BItterblossom were both drastically overpowered and drastically overused. By the numbers, Alara Reborn’s Bloodbraid Elf is even more popular than the Affinity offenders. Arid Mesa and the other rare lands from Zendikar can be used to waste time almost as effectively as Sensei’s Divining Top, since they require their user to shuffle their deck, and people’s definition of “sufficiently randomized” becomes more stringent as the time left in the round decreases.
Fun fact about me #396: I don’t play in high-level tournaments, because high-level tournament decks are designed to be unfair by definition.
Affinity was banned largely because of popular demand, but popular demand was never strong enough for Umezawa’s Jitte or the Faerie deck. Those decks also had eloquent advocates and lobbyists in the community, who overstated their favorite cards’ beatability while downplaying their format-warping properties. Advocates of a more fair or balanced tournament environment have allowed their opponents to smear them as bad players or “scrubs,” while failing to point out that powergamers enjoy playing with overpowered cards precisely because they are overpowered and thus better for humiliating their opponents.
Now, as I alluded to above, I no longer have a personal stake in the tournament environment. Magic, to my mind, is more like art which there is a way to play with than a game with illustrated pieces. But if you are not quite ready to come over to my way of seeing things, and you care about this problem, you need to take action. You need to learn from your opponents, and you need to learn from the world outside Magic as well, because there is no shortage of examples of terrible messages which succeeded because of their superior marketing. And you, in fact, have a good message: fairness. Don't you think Luis Scott-Vargas and Chris Jobin are going to look like even bigger douchebags when they find themselves lined up opposing fairness?
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