Wednesday, June 15, 2011

The Standard Banhammer and A Better Choice (Part 1)

Hello everybody; today I bring you a two-part article. As a quick overview, in the first section I will speak about what cards seriously hurt Standard, and what must be done to fix it. In the second half, I will talk about my choice to combat the current "boring" standard. I know it's been a while, but with summer break upon us, I am ready to blog more often.

Let's get started today with some Standard talk. Standard has become a very boring format lately. Caw-Blade is destroying any chance people have of piloting any other deck to victory. Recently, the SCG Denver Open was upon us. This tournament specifically showed how bad standard has become. This was not because Caw-Blade won (because it didn't), but because only 3 made top 8. I say "only" with major emphasis and there lies the problem. When 3 top 8 slots is considered a poor performance for a deck, something is wrong. It seems we are resorting to a much worse version of the original Mirrodin Standard format (coincidence: maybe, maybe not). I may not have played then, but I have heard many stories. For those who didn't play then, Affinity ran rampant. It was the best deck, and the only other deck that won were decks that consistently beat it. Back to today, Wizards has been screwing up and slowly making Caw-Blade more and more unbeatable. As a quick timeline overview, here was Caw-Blades lifespan:

Pre-Mirrodin Besieged- Not a bad deck. Tier 1 to 1.5 with some pretty cool synergies. Still has trouble with Vengevine decks. Unfortunately, they have trouble with Valakut. I guess this a healthy meta-game.

Pre-New Phyrexia- This deck is so good. Sword of Feast and Famine both gives tempo against Valakut, and a lot of protection against Vengevine decks. Hopefully NPH will bring some way to take this deck off it's throne.

Post-NPH- WTF WIZARDS!!!!!!!!!!!!! Batterskull. Are you guys letting 3 year olds make your sets. No offense to the Future Future League or the Design Team, but I want to know how many drugs you were on when you made this set. Thanks for making Caw-Blade unstoppable against everything. Please never do this again.

So, that is basically what happened with Caw-Blade. Wizards must not have been paying attention to anything when they printed that. It has come so far as to force cards to be banned, which is what the first part of this article is about.

Twitter has been on fire lately with the debate on what to ban. The two major choices are Jace, or Stoneforge Mystic. Let's go over each one:

Jace- If you refer back to the time-line, you'll see that pre-Sword of Feast and Famine and Batterskull, Caw-Blade had it's weaknesses. There is no doubting that Jace is absurdly powerful, but it doesn't seem to be the real problem. This brings us to the second choice:

Stoneforge Mystic- Alone, Stoneforge Mystic is irrelevant, but when combined with amazing equipment, it is always a two for one. Imagine this best-case-scenario situation- Your opponent plays Stoneforge Mystic, searching for Batterskull. You Duress the Batterskull away from their hand. Not bad right, except that you got two-for-one'd, even in the best-case-scenario. We could ban one of the equipments, but other decks utilize the equipment as well, and the equipment are only problems when they come into play on turn 3 of every single game. So obviously Stoneforge seems to be the problem. As a testimony to my thoughts, I got my favorite professional magic player, and weekly Building on a Budget columnist for Wizards of the Coast (read it every Wednesday, it is really good) Jacob Van Lunen.

Me: So, what do you think needs to be banned, if anything, from type 2?

Jacob: Stoneforge Mystic, it makes aggressive strategies unplayable.

Me: So Jace isn't the problem, it's Stoneforge...why do you think that?

Jacob: It comes out ahead against literally every hate card against it. Jace is obviously insane, but it wouldn't be out of hand if it wasn't alongside Stoneforge. Remember how it was before Sword of Feast and Famine? You could beat jaces by playing fast red strategies or Vengevines, but now you can't, but that's not because of Jace, that's because of Stoneforge Mystic.

Thank you Jacob. Your opinion is very valuable to the Magic Community. So as you can see, Jace is absurd, but Stoneforge makes things that beat Jace bad. At this point, I am going to end this part of the article before I quit Magic. Next time, I will return with part 2 (yes, I've decided to save it for next time) as well as an update on how the ban list changes (since the ban list update goes up soon).

Before I go, I am going to leave you with some foreshadowing of the next post:

http://magic.tcgplayer.com/db/deck.asp?deck_id=851103

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