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Wizards' new motto should be "Damned if you do.  Damned if you don't."

People bitched and moaned since DAY ONE that 12-post should be banned. Now they finally ban it and people complain.

People bitched and moaned since DAY TWO that combo decks were off the rails.  Now they banned the enablers and people complain. 

My philosophy has always been that bannings are outside of my sphere of influence.  I'm not responsible for the bannings, I can't change them, so I'll try not to bitch. 

That said, I'm not too surprised about Ponder and Preordain, it seems as if combo enablers like these always end up getting banned.  Just annoyed.  GSZ, like most people, strikes me as an odd banning, but whatever.  

I disagree when people state that Zoo will be the only deck still viable.  If you look at the actual top 8 placings in tournaments, most of them were SplinterTwin variants or Pyromancer decks.  ShoalInfect and Cloudpost were also ubiquitous.  From this standpoint, the bannings all make sense, well except for GSZ.  

I also don't think banning Preordain/Ponder ruins SplinterTwin decks.  I always thought Gifts Ungiven was a better combo enabler anyway.  They do hurt Pyromancer decks though.  Banning Rite of Flame is also annoying.  I think the most annoying thing is that Pyromancer relies on Ponder and Preordain (both commons), Storm relies on Rite of Flame.  It seems as if all the 'budget' decks for the format are being hurt more than any others.  This is both ironic and annoying.  Oh well.   

WotC were entirely justified and they were needed - we all knew something was going from Storm and 12 Post, stop crying about it!  Having a new format entirely centric around Storm, aka “Magic masturbation”, or who can get Emarakul out first was just tedious.  At least we now have a format that is roughly even in power.

 

Blazing Shoal had to go.

Cloudpost isn’t what I’d have banned personally, but it saves banning the 3 cards I would have gone for over it.  I would have tried to have kept it as a deck but whatever, something needed to go.

Green Sun's Zenith is overpowered due to the fact that it’s a recurring tutor, Zoo etc. would nearly always have what they needed each turn if not for the ban and they are now one of the strongest decks in the format.

Rite of Flame was the correct choice out of cards to ban, it doesn’t destroy combo it just slows it down enough to warrant not having to mulligan your hand until you have a Mindbreak Trap in it.

Ponder and Preordain I didn’t originally suspect would be banned but I can see why they’re banned.

Sep 19, 2011 -- 10:49PM, Obstidon wrote:

There will always be the "popular decks" banning cards for this format only angers players that cant play with the
cards they paid for and want to play with. It just forces them to shift to the next best set of cards!!!

Whats the next step wizards ban all the key cards in every deck thats ever going to be played??? Its a slippery slope your dealing with here.

You're missing the point on bannings. The purpose of bannings is to create a diverse metagame.

So they don't go around always banning the cards that are used in the most successful decks. It's when there's one kind of deck that can't be beaten with different kinds of decks that there's a problem. There have to be several different deck archetypes in the running.

Bannings sometimes are just a roll of the dice - cards were banned, but a single best deck still resulted: 12-post. So they're trying again.

They'll win the toss long before they run out of cards.

Sep 19, 2011 -- 11:34PM, pygmyallosaurus wrote:

All Blue producing lands: we realized blue decks were played more than we liked. We feel this will create the type of meta game that we can stand behind.

Actually, you might be on to something there.

If Blue is so terribly powerful, maybe what Wizards needs to do is change Magic's color scheme.

Take two colors that need help - say Green and White - and combine them into one color, let's call it Yellow. That gives that new color a bigger slice of the color pie, and so if those parts of the color pie had been weak, now they're much stronger since it only takes one color of mana to get both of them.

Take Blue, which has been too strong, and split it into two colors - let's call them Orange and Purple. Orange gets card draw, but not counterspells. Purple gets counterspells, but not card draw. Other blue abilities, like milling, generally go to Orange. Purple gets the terrible old Blue creatures, while Orange, since it doesn't have the counterspell, Blue's most potent weapon, gets relatively decent creatures, although still behind the other colors.

So now to use Blue's potent part of the color pie, you need to run two colors, not just one.

There are generally three topics that get more than five pages of responses: religion, politics, and banned & restricted list announcements.

Anyway, my two cents in an inflated market:

It seems Wizards is getting more and more transparent in their decision-making process around banning / restricting cards. I've been reading these sort of announcements for many years, but I don't recall as simple a statement as 'we're banning this card because it's upsetting players' in the case of this instance of bannings in Extended. There were no numbers presented to back up the case; the people have spoken (presumably with their absense from tournaments), and Wizards heeded the call with no rationalization based on some higher philosophy. I love it!