The Reserve List - The Reddest Red Herring
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https://twitter.com/maro254/status/812042770957275137
Do Snow Duals fix the problem or do the best decks just have both?
They have some sort of strange internal deliberations that they refuse to discuss outside WotC at all, but MaRo has said repeatedly that he hates that Reserve List. If he's asking the question in the first place, advocating specifically and directly for snow duals is almost certainly the best place to focus your energy if you want the List circumvented.
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@ambivalentduck said in The Reserve List - The Reddest Red Herring:
advocating specifically and directly for snow duals is almost certainly the best place to focus your energy if you want the List circumvented.
Exactly! Kind of. The place you need to put your energy is into new cards that substitute for RL cards. That is precisely the point I'm making in this thread!
However - Snow Duals specifically don't work. They violate the printed text of the RL. Remember, it says:
A card is considered functionally identical to another card if it has the same card type, subtypes, abilities, mana cost, power, and toughness
So, if you add the supertype Snow to a Tundra:
Does it have the same card type? Yep.
Same subtype? Yep.
Same abilities? Yep.
Same mana cost? Yep.
Same power and toughness? Yep, and yep.The supertype never enters into it.
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But if they supported it tribal duals would be legal because it's a card type not a super type or tub type.
Elf palace
Forest swamp tribal elfTotally legit under current rules. Mostly better unless people are casting destroy all elf catds
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@maximumcdawg said in The Reserve List - The Reddest Red Herring:
@ambivalentduck said in The Reserve List - The Reddest Red Herring:
advocating specifically and directly for snow duals is almost certainly the best place to focus your energy if you want the List circumvented.
Exactly! Kind of. The place you need to put your energy is into new cards that substitute for RL cards. That is precisely the point I'm making in this thread!
However - Snow Duals specifically don't work. They violate the printed text of the RL. Remember, it says:
A card is considered functionally identical to another card if it has the same card type, subtypes, abilities, mana cost, power, and toughness
So, if you add the supertype Snow to a Tundra:
Does it have the same card type? Yep.
Same subtype? Yep.
Same abilities? Yep.
Same mana cost? Yep.
Same power and toughness? Yep, and yep.The supertype never enters into it.
If you were right they'd have never printed Prairie Stream. Or do you count the drawback as an ability?
Also, Snow Duals are obviously too close. But Legendary Duals are not IMO.
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@fsecco said in The Reserve List - The Reddest Red Herring:
@maximumcdawg said in The Reserve List - The Reddest Red Herring:
@ambivalentduck said in The Reserve List - The Reddest Red Herring:
advocating specifically and directly for snow duals is almost certainly the best place to focus your energy if you want the List circumvented.
Exactly! Kind of. The place you need to put your energy is into new cards that substitute for RL cards. That is precisely the point I'm making in this thread!
However - Snow Duals specifically don't work. They violate the printed text of the RL. Remember, it says:
A card is considered functionally identical to another card if it has the same card type, subtypes, abilities, mana cost, power, and toughness
So, if you add the supertype Snow to a Tundra:
Does it have the same card type? Yep.
Same subtype? Yep.
Same abilities? Yep.
Same mana cost? Yep.
Same power and toughness? Yep, and yep.The supertype never enters into it.
If you were right they'd have never printed Prairie Stream. Or do you count the drawback as an ability?
Also, Snow Duals are obviously too close. But Legendary Duals are not IMO.
I think you're fundamentally misunderstanding me, or I'm not being clear. I am not saying that Snow Duals would be "too close." I am saying that they violate the strict, black-and-white test set out by the RL. Once again: the specific language of the RL prohibits reprinting "functionally identical cards." That term is defined as follows:
A card is considered functionally identical to another card if it has the same card type, subtypes, abilities, mana cost, power, and toughness.
So, if you want to brainstorm a potential new printing, you must ask these questions:
For each card on the RL:
- Does this new card have the same type?
- Does this new card have the same subtype?
- Does this new card have the same abilities?
- Does this new card have the same mana cost?
- Does this new card have the same power?
- Does this new card have the same toughness?
If the answer to all of those questions is "Yes," then the card may not be printed. End, full stop. We're done. There's no debate. So, whether or not a card has a new supertype or is in a premium form or whatever is just never even relevant. (Since Legendary is a supertype, too... you can do the math.)
As to Prairie Stream, that is fine because you can answer "No" to question 3. It has different abilities, just like Steam Vents does. You may consider them "drawbacks," but that is a value judgment; the printed card text defines various abilities which you might see as good or bad.
Now, if you really want to talk about what is "too close" even if it does pass this test, that's the dark and shadowy world of the "Spirit" of the Reserve List which I can't even venture to comment on except to crinkle my nose like I smelled something bad.
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I know wizards will never do this, but here is what is would recommend if I had any say in the matter (which I don't)
People really only seem to want the duals re-printed or removed from the list. Or at least that is the primary focus for getting rid of the list.
I would recommend reprinting the duals as WHITE bordered reprints/promos. This would still allow the black border duals to retain high value for collectors, while allowing people more access to tournament playable duals. Seems like it would be a good compromise.
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I like this Cdawg. I always think about this kind of thing.
How on earth are you missing Brainstorm for Ancestral Though? :p
Also, i very much and sincerely doubt Angus has anything to do with Forcefield. They are only similar in that they can save you some life, and a million cards do that.
@fsecco said in The Reserve List - The Reddest Red Herring:
If you were right they'd have never printed Prairie Stream. Or do you count the drawback as an ability?
Also, Snow Duals are obviously too close. But Legendary Duals are not IMO.
Legend is also a supertype, also does not work. And like Cdawg describes, yes the other text on Stream makes it very different (functionally) than Tundra.
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I just thought of a good shell for new duals that make them similar to Legendary Duals.
Imagine this:
Land - Plains Island
<Card name> comes into play tapped unless it's the only land you control.EDIT:
This feels better in Modern than Eternal since you need to fetch basics first a lot in Legacy and Vintage. So it could actually be:
"Land - Plains Island
<Card name> comes into play tapped unless it's the only nonbasic land you control"
so you can fetch basics first against Wastelands.
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@mourningpalace said in The Reserve List - The Reddest Red Herring:
I know wizards will never do this, but here is what is would recommend if I had any say in the matter (which I don't)
People really only seem to want the duals re-printed or removed from the list. Or at least that is the primary focus for getting rid of the list.
I would recommend reprinting the duals as WHITE bordered reprints/promos. This would still allow the black border duals to retain high value for collectors, while allowing people more access to tournament playable duals. Seems like it would be a good compromise.I completely respect your opinion here, and it's a common one, but this is exactly the kind of thinking I'm trying to discourage. The idea that we need to get the specific cards on the RL reprinted is toxic, because WotC CANNOT do this. There's no point in wasting time thinking about ways to get Tundra specifically reprinted. It just won't happen.
HOWEVER... there's not this kind of existential barrier to doing what @fsecco says. Just add abilities to cards. Make them different from the RL counterparts. This is super easy to do, in theory. Add "When Supertundra enters the battlefield, each player may Scry 1." Boom, there you go, no RL problems.
Except, it's not that easy. The really difficult part with lands is this: How do you print new cards that are legitimate replacements or competition with ABUR duals -- not just strictly worse versions - without being completely bonkers broken?
Luckily, the barrier to printing non-functional substitutes of RL cards is not the RL itself. It's a design and development challenge.
@Sovarius The reason I didn't list Brainstorm is that, for me, it's actually too different. It's not suggesting you are drawing 3 cards for 1 mana like the other versions. But, I admit that it might be best to list it as a "1," since it certainly harkens back to Recall. Perhaps I'm just too used to thinking about them as tactically so different that I'm overthinking it.
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They probably need to be a bit worse, because the true duals are actually ridiculously good.
This is probably as close as you could come
Not tundra
Land island plains
If you control a tundra lose the gameAlmost the same, but it is technically worse since a tundra player could theoretically side in donate in the "mirror"
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@walking-dude said in The Reserve List - The Reddest Red Herring:
They probably need to be a bit worse, because the true duals are actually ridiculously good.
Do they? That's the design challenge.
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Just add an extra effect that's mostly irrelevant like. If ~ entered the battlefield from you hand gain 1 life.
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@benjamin_berry Ah, yes, but now the issue is whether someone who can run 8 tundra has a leg up over someone who does not. With duals, Ive seen a lively debate over this.
The problem is more apparent with, say, Moxen. How do you crack THAT one?
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That's easy, from a buisiness/lawsuit perspective. You ban them.
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@benjamin_berry said in The Reserve List - The Reddest Red Herring:
That's easy, from a buisiness/lawsuit perspective. You ban them.
Turning the original reserved list cards into purely collectors items seems like a reasonable solution to paper cards. However, they now exist online as well. That bridges me into my feelings on the reserved list...
Online is the future of Vintage. While paper will always have its loyal players, the format can not grow that much with such an enormous price barrier for major tournaments like Worlds.
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I have had this discussion locally as well. Wizards never needs to reprint RL cards. The exact moment they need to, they print something better.
The card I came up with is
"Tarnished Lotus"
Artifact
Tap, Sacrifice [this]: Choose oneAdd three mana of any color to your mana pool
Or
Add <><><> to your mana pool
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@vaughnbros Going online only is indeed the path of least resistance. And, yet, it's basically acknowledging the inevitable decay of paper vintage...
As for banning three original power; Yeah, that would work, but be unpopular. Is there a way to design cards such that they replace or compete with power without supplementing them?
Like @xxHazardxx s suggestion. That one also technically isn't a List violation. But it's just lotus #2, so you still need the first one.
Heres some questions to help understand what I'm driving at.
- What games rules do Power break? Could you get competition by breaking other rules instead? (Dredge does this)
- What are the deckbuilding limitations of using power? Can you exploit cards that power up decks outside this range?
- How direct can a new card be about invalidating the original? Can you just print a self-banning clause on new lotus that prevents you from using the old one?
- What can you change about RL cards other than abilities? Wizards changes the type to creature all the time. Can this be used to differentiate?
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I heard an idea at one point was adding a new "Banned" list to the formats. But it was called a "Combo Banned" meaning, this combination of cards is banned, you can have one or the the other, but you can't have both. So to use your question specifically, Black Lotus and Black Lotus 2.0 would be "combo banned". Both would be on the restricted list, and both would be banned in conjunction with each other.
An interesting point about your question 2 (What rules do the power break), and basically the main rule is "1 mana per turn" (Whether that is straight up free mana or ridiculously undercosted spells.) Workshop decks have always been the deck design to make all those players play by the same rules (Chalice, spheres, nullrods etc) and slowly over the course of Vintage, even those strategies have been deemed too strong. My point being that they tried "nullifying" the power and that hasn't done really well.
While falling asleep last night, I was attempting to change the P9 so as to have an equally power level (but different). Note, these would all have to fall into a Combo Banned system. Obviously if you have access to both it just exasperates the problem.
"Tarnished Lotus"
0
Artifact
Tap, Sacrifice [this]: Choose oneAdd three mana of any color to your mana pool
Or
Add <><><> to your mana pool"Wasted Mox [Color]"
0
Artifact
Tap: Add 1 [color] to your mana pool.
Tap: Add <> to your mana pool."Recall of the Ancestors"
U
Instant
Draw three cards. <not, NOT Target player draws three cards. 98% the same, but fundamentally different>"Time Waltz"
1U
Sorcery
Target player takes another turn after this one.I loved the idea of Tribal Duals...
Sirens Cove
Tribal Land- Island Swamp SirenThe question that I find interesting is, lets use my examples of the "Tarnished" Jewelry/Lotus. If you had access to both, which one would you use? The new ones are technically more powerful, no opportunity cost to using... but, not our original pretty old school pieces.
Thoughts?
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@maximumcdawg said in The Reserve List - The Reddest Red Herring:
How direct can a new card be about invalidating the original? Can you just print a self-banning clause on new lotus that prevents you from using the old one?
You'd could do something like Shadowborn Apostle. A deck can't contain ~ and X. It doesn't seam right to me though.
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@benjamin_berry said in The Reserve List - The Reddest Red Herring:
@maximumcdawg said in The Reserve List - The Reddest Red Herring:
How direct can a new card be about invalidating the original? Can you just print a self-banning clause on new lotus that prevents you from using the old one?
You'd could do something like Shadowborn Apostle. A deck can't contain ~ and X. It doesn't seam right to me though.
Yeah, it faces some practical problems; do you want every game to start with a deck check? How, as a player, will you know to call a judge on someone who might be using both versions of the P9 card? Shadowborn allows you to do something, so there's no need to check the deck, but restrictions on deck building certainly do.
Now, you could do things like allowing your opponent to Jester's Cap for the original when you play the substitute, but then you've still got a higher density of the P9 card in your deck to start with, so that doesn't really work either.
What about something like this:
Memory of the Lotus 0 Artifact
When this enters the battlefield, choose an opponent. That opponent searches your library for a card named "Black Lotus." If the opponent can find the card, then you lose the game. Shuffle your library afterwards.
T: Sac for three $$$That's probably still a suboptimal version of Lotus given the shuffle and free information, but it's closer.
@xxhazardxx said in The Reserve List - The Reddest Red Herring:
The question that I find interesting is, lets use my examples of the "Tarnished" Jewelry/Lotus. If you had access to both, which one would you use? The new ones are technically more powerful, no opportunity cost to using... but, not our original pretty old school pieces.
If you wanted to play optimal decks, you'd always run both. So, like, Delver would run two Sapphires and two Lotuses and two Rubies. Paradoxical Outcome would run all 12.
(I mean, unless you did that "combo ban" thing you were talking about. )
