@maximumcdawg said in B&R Announcement - May 18, 2020:
I don't think the statement is too short, but I think a lot of Vintage players will be annoyed it didn't reference two things:
1. The Gravitas of the Moment.
It took Vintage about, what, 26 years to finally have to ban a card for power level reasons? It took awhile. Congratulations, WotC. you did it! Anyway, the fact that this is so unprecedented probably means players would have expected something in the banned and restricted announcement acknowledging this. It's kind of like if Grandma dies and you just a get a quick text messages saying "Oh also Nana died."
- When Will Cards Get Banned in the Future?
What exactly was the philosophy behind the Lurrus ban, and when will the rule be applied again? I feel like I know why Lurrus was banned because I observed the format with it, but I don't know exactly what the criteria will be for bannings in the future.
It truly is a historic day. But it really doesn't feel like it, does it?
Why is that?
I have to say that I was prepared to pounce on any flaw in the announcement, but I found it to be well-written and well-reasoned. I like the explanation provided, but I dislike that the historic nature of the banning wasn't mentioned.
It doesn't feel like this is an "open the floodgates" moment, for the simple reason that restriction was an ineffective tool to deal with this particular problem.
I went back and looked at the last banning, and it's interesting to note that Mind Twist was restricted for nearly two years before it was finally banned. And when they unbanned it, they simply said that Channel and Mind Twist would no longer be unbalancing.
All of that is readable here: https://www.eternalcentral.com/history-of-vintage-schools-of-magic-an-alternative-history-of-the-banned-and-restricted-list/ And the links to the official announcements are embedded herein.
A few other responses:
@brianpk80 said in B&R Announcement - May 18, 2020:
This is a good observation. In my two weeks playing the Lurrus format, what stood out to me most was how much it illuminated how degenerate Paradoxical Outcome and to a lesser extent Underworld Breach are.
I don't mind the grindy Lurrus decks so much. Often the most explosive (and seemingly problematic) plays are not the best ones, as rushing him out prematurely where this environment is so prepared to remove or neutralize him is a recipe for disaster. Testing is showing me that patience is rewarded.
Although I've been enjoying Vintage recently, this seems to be a minority view and the intensity of dislike fueling abandonment is severe. Banning Lurrus as a Companion seems to be the most narrowly tailored solution. I'd be happy with action on PO as well. It's never a bad time to clean up the few remaining blights that escaped the more urgently needed restrictions in the past year.
There is alot of nuance here, and I agree with much of it. But that underscores one of the reservations I have about this banning. It feels like the problems in the format right now aren't actually Lurrus caused or even Lurrus significant, but rather Lurrus is an ephiphenomenon, that is a symptom rather than the cause. We'll see what happens now, but if Breach and PO continue to perform at those levels, or near to it, then maybe Lurrus wasn't really a "problem" so much as those two decks were problematic.
It feels very much like the Gush v. Mentor debate. Granted, they were both dealt with in the end, but many people projected Mentor's problems onto Gush, mistakenly in the first instance.
That aside, the core of my reservation on this particular point (and aside from how swiftly this occured) is that Lurrus isn't really "dominant" in the sense that a key engine part of a dominant deck is dominant. Lurrus doesn't drive or really make PO or TX Breach combo the powerhouses they are. It's mostly just an add-on - the cherry on the top or the icing on the cake. So to say that because those decks are dominant, that so too is Lurrus is really, in my view, a mistake.
In short, in the case of Lurrus, prevalence is being conflated with dominance, and they aren't the same thing. Yet people like chubbyrain conflated them in his public comments.
Stephen raises a good point about the difference in relative adaptation velocity between more frequent players and players who enjoy Vintage as an occasional pastime. It was not necessary to truncate one of Matt's threads to misrepresent him as inconsistent, but the point remains valid.
I appreciate the affirmation about my concerns, but on the point about Matt's tweets, I don't believe I misrepresented anything. Matt says I misrepresented one of his tweets by not linking directly to the tweets, or by omitting the other parts of the tweets in that thread, but it's not really a misrepresentation of any material fact (or even immaterial one). All I was trying to do was show how quickly someone who plays alot of MTGO could change their mind about this, and nothing in either thread appears to contradict that. Matt may try to elide this, but he really did have a change of opinion within those 10 days (specifically, about what should be done and on what time frame). I don't see the problem with that, or why he got so upset when I juxtaposed those tweets. It's perfectly fine and normal for one to revise one's views as evidence accumulates. I can't explain why he lashed out for doing that, and became so angry, except that I've observed in conversations like this he gets very heated/emotional.