July 2010 Banlist Update

Library of Alexandria

We want to test how the unbanning of LoA will influence the highlander meta.

We unbanned LoA and Mind of Matter on 01.10.2008. The card was about one year and nine months legal. Now we’ve decided to ban it again. Why? Similar to the Survival of the Fittest ban multiple reasons occurred to justify the re-banning:

1. Availability: The card is very expensive and each player who decides to play a control deck needs this card.
2. Frustration: Players get frustrated if their opponent reveals a 1st turn (lucky draw) LoA and if they don’t have a fast aggro deck or an immediate answer they feel upset about it even though a early LoA doesn’t lead to an automatic win.
3. No LoA means no “optimal” control deck: People want to play optimal decks there for they need the best cards available for the archetype. So a lot of players decide not to play a control deck since they don’t have the optimal cards for their decks. If they don’t want to play aggro or combo builds they don’t play anyway which means less players for the format.
4. Type 1 is not sexy: We’ve spoken with many players who are interested in highlander and they are concerned about the card pool. A lot of people who play Legacy are not willing to invest so many resources into Vintage (which has already a small pool of players) since its way too expensive. LoA is one of the cards which are a “must-have” card if you decide to play T1. We don’t want to scare people away from highlander with cards like this.
5. Randomness: A LoA in a control mirror increase the odds of winning a lot. As Umezawa’s Jitte in aggro matchups determine the win by pure randomness the same is true for LoA in a control mirror (In my opinion Jitte is much more devastating).

In summary, we can say LoA is a) not necessary and b) harmful for our format. A lot of players are not willing to play highlander if LoA is legal so we’ve decided after many discussions to re-ban it. Four of five members of the council voted for the ban.

Life from the Loam

This card was for a long time on the watch list. We’ve decided to delete it from the list just to put it on again. We don’t ban it because of the power level but for the following reasons:

1. LftL is dominating most of the control mirrors. Only if a player can answer an LftL with some graveyard hate or hand disruption the match is going to focus on other cards. The resource advantage which LftL is generating is way too much. A game can simply end on turn 3 if a player can resolve a turn 2 Intuition which is finding Wasteland, LftL and a cycle land. Dredging the LftL and wasting the nonbasic land of an opponent on turn 3 is a very frustrating play. This monotone cycle is not healthy for the format so we want to change that.
2. Life from the Loam is destroying two Archetypes: Land Destruction and Discard which are for the most part are not represented in the format because of this card.
3. LftL is making Gifts Ungiven and Intuition way too powerful. We want to keep these cards in the format. With the banning of LftL players need in the future more skill to get the full value out of the cards. Some decks will not even play Intuition anymore because the huge advantage LftL was generating is gone. Of course this will consume more time to find the correct piles but we think it’s important that the cards can fulfill their roles; to find answers or threats.
4. We have a lot of powerful lands in the format: Bazaar of Baghdad, Volrath’s Stronghold, Academy Ruins, Karakas, Maze of Ith, The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale, Wasteland, Mishra’s Workshop. LftL find these cards way to easy. With the banning of LoA we took one very powerful land out of the format and with other cards like Crop Rotation, Knight of the Reliquary or Sylvan Scrying players can still find the good lands. But Gifts Ungiven and Intuition find these lands en passant together with Life from the Loam!

In summary we think without these two cards the format will be a lot more diversified and is still very interesting for players. Finally since both cards weren’t necessary for the control vs. aggro matchup we don’t weaken control with these decisions.

Protean Hulk

Not too much to say but we’ve decided to unban the Hulk since most cards which provide an early, constant and safe abuse are banned (Flash, Entomb, Buried Alive, Survival of the Fittest). Some Finnish players tried to abuse the Hulk but weren’t able to do so. We thought also about an unbanning of Wordlgorger Dragon but decided not to because it offers some random turn 2 or turn 3 kills. Additionally it doesn’t need 4-5 combo pieces and is easy to implement into reanimator decks.