Standard needs bans. But which ones?

Where should the banhammer fall in Standard?

Right now, Standard is actively driving away players.  Standard tournament attendance is dropping, and people are frustrated.  People are staying home rather than play frustrating mirrors and barely interactive matchups all day, and I cannot blame them.  Recently, many believe a ban to be almost inevitable.  However, there’s been much debate over what should or should not be banned.  I think there are currently two cards that need to go, another that should probably go, a fourth that may be a good idea, and a fifth that some have wanted to see banned, but I would like to see given time in a new format.  The first of these, however, I believe to be a non-negotiable.

Public Enemy Number One- Stoneforge Mystic.

Once a nice, friendly card advantage engine for Boros in Standard, and a Sword-protector in Standard, this little guy has turned into a monster, rivaling Bitterblossom  in the amount of frustration he can create when played by an opponent?  How did this happen?  There are two big reasons why.

a) He’s a tutor.  One big problem with the current environment is Mystic’s ability to tutor up a protection Sword for all 5 colors in the game or a Living Weapon capable of acting as a removal spell (Mortarpod) or a Baneslayer Angel (Batterskull.)   This tutoring ability is a huge problem, because alongside Preordain, the redundancy in these decks is huge.   And when combined with the next set of problems, the Mystic’s tutoring ability can blow games out in ways Bitterblossom only dreamed of.

b) He lets you ignore costs.  Costs matter to game design.  Players  evaluate the tradeoffs between various costs and benefits, and make decisions accordingly in an attempt to win. The game does not just revolve around the positive benefits, as a system of checks and balances have to be put into place to keep the game fun, interesting, and interactive.   In Magic, cards, mana, and time are all resources, and Mystic allows one to cheat all 3.  The “Card” cost is cheated via his Tutor ability.  He doesn’t “cost” a card, as he replaces himself when cast.  The Mana cost is cheated via his activated ability.  His ability allows you to put any size equipment into play for two mana. This was not so problematic when the equipment you could put into play with the ability only cost one or two mana.  However, as the Swords and Batterskull cost 3 or 5 mana, he is now allowing players to cheat mana costs and obtain access to powerful abiliies at least one or two turns ahead of when they should.

The third thing he lets you ignore is time.  None of the equipment in Standard has flash.  However,  due to his ability, Stoneforge Mystic allows a player to play equipment during his opponent’s end step.  And now, due to the living weapon mechanic, he allows you to play creatures during your opponent’s end step as well.  This reduces the “opportunity cost” of playing equipment severely, as you no longer have to tap mana during your main phase to play it.  It also reduces the potential risk of your opponent playing counter spells against you.  He creates a very similar situation to what was present to the one the Faeries deck creates, which is that while he is in play, you get “The Button”, and are able to act last.  Instead of having to proactively  put out threats, he lets you wait until the last possible moment to do so, and in a way that makes it very difficult for your opponent to interact with you.

The sad thing is that these problems were likely avoidable.  The concept of the card is awesome.  A blacksmith dreams up a weapon, then makes it for you!  Had his ability been XW, tap, (where X is the CMC of the equipment), and not 1W, tap, he would have been “future proofed”, and still a very, very good card.  But by not recognizing the benefits provided by his  ability, and not forcing it to scale  to the size of the equipment being “dreamed up”,  he has become a  destructive force, and one that needs to be removed from the Standard format for the good of the game.  He is the biggest blunder in Standard contained in a single card.  However, he is likely not the biggest blunder, when considering card combinations.  That would go to the following fellow and his friend Deceiver Exarch.

Public Enemy Number Two: Splinter Twin.

I feel bad for Splinter Twin.  He shoudn’t be a part of this discussion.  Deceiver Exarch never should have been printed with that casting cost at this point in time.  If he was a 4 or 5 mana critter with a smaller butt, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. But he was, and so we must have it.  Splinter Twin is a problem because it prevents one’s opponents from actually playing a game of Magic.  Once the Splinter Twin player has 3 mana open, you can no longer tap out.  Doing so puts you at risk of the other player simply going “EOT Flash Exarch in, Main Phase Twin, you lose!”  While there are indeed many ways to go after this deck, because the Splinter Twin deck is often running disruption and/or counterspells, there’s quite a large chance that they will be unfazed, and simply swat them away.   Another consideration is that one of the biggest problems with this format has been its hostility to agressive creature-based strategies, normally one of the keystones of a healthy metagame.  They often have no choice but to tap out each turn to play threats, and this non-interactive combo actively punishes them for doing it.  If Mystic were to be banned, this deck would almost certainly just take its place at the top of the food chain.  And unfortunately, that would be as equally bad a situation.   This lack of aggro decks has been the primary reason for the next card’s dominance, and it is a situation that a few well-placed bans would hopefully correct.

Mr. Misunderstood:  Jace, the Mind Sculptor.

Jace, the Mind Sculptor is an overpowered card.  His Brainstorm ability NOT having a loyalty cost attached to it is one of the most absurd decisions made by R&D in recent years.  Would an legendary enchantment that let you brainstorm once during your main phase be overpowered?  Most would say yes.  And combined with the rest of his abilities, Jace has become a problem in many formats.  But I do not believe Jace to be the true cause of Standard’s problems.  His ubiquity is merely a symptom of the lack of aggro decks in the format, and the design problems created by the introduction of planeswalkers.  While he is good, he’s also very soft to his older self, Mr. Jace Beleren, who is also quite absurd at the moment.  Even if Big Jace were banned, Little Jace would simply take his place, as the same things making Big Jace good are making Little Jace, and planeswalkers in general, quite insane right now.  Let’s take a look at why that is.

The Planeswalker Problem

Planeswalkers were designed to allow players to play with Storyline characters in ways that weren’t previously possible, and have been a success on many levels.  However, their introduction has changed the way we have to evaluate many strategies, and this has created an imbalance in the current Standard environment tilting it in their favor.  Planeswalkers are designed to be dealt with either by damage, or via a spell or ability that takes them out in a single shot, like Maelstrom Pulse.   When Alara left the Standard format, almost all of the non-direct damage ways to kill a Planeswalker left the format.  This created several problems.  The first is that Planeswalkers have haste, while most creatures do not.  This means that a Planeswalker will immediately make an impact on the battlefield and be able to interact with a non-haste creature before the  creature can interact with it.  I believe this to be a big reason as to why creatures have suddenly found it “necessary” to have haste in recent years in order to be viable in constructed.  As annoying as Bloodbraid Elf was, it quickly became a necessary evil in order to allow the beatdown decks a sledgehammer to throw against the planeswalkers.  He nearly single-handedly kept Jace in check while he was in Standard, alongside Maelstrom Pulse, Vengevine, and Blightning.  Planeswalkers were designed to be killable by an army of dorks.  However, players’ ability to play agressive strategies has not been solely limited by the existance of Planeswalkers.  I believe the following card has been the biggest issue for them in standard, and unfortunately, until the Splinter Twin deck replaced it, been the biggest combo problem around.

The Phantom Menace- Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle.
Valakut is essentially a long-form combo deck.  It does not interact often with the opponent’s deck.  It seeks solely to assemble a set of lands that allow it to first wrath an opponent’s board, if necessary, followed by massive shots to their opponent’s dome.   The Valakut deck wants to interact with its opponents deck as little as possible, as that time spent interacting is time it isn’t spending searching out ways to kill you.  Valakut has enabled Jace-based decks in two ways – the non-interactive nature of the Valakut demolished the ability of agressive strategies to compete in the format, while at the same time, the blue-based Jace decks provided the best set of tools (counterspells) to fight off the deck.  Jace doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and again, the same problems that led to his dominance originally would still be present even if he was gone.  Jace Beleren would move to a 4-of, and similar cards would take his place.  However, there is one other blue card I believe deserves a hard, hard look, especially if one decides to keep Jace in the format.

The enabler:  Preordain. 

Mark Rosewater has often made a point of how Variance is one of the positive attributes to magic- how it forces you to adapt to different situations because you won’t always face the same situation twice.  Preordain is allowing players an unhealthy level of control in what they see out of their decks.  Combined with Mystic, Jace, and the various equipments running around,  it is increasing the amount of redundancy in decks while reducing variance to levels unseen in many, many years.  Being able to ensure you don’t draw a second squadron hawk, aren’t going to see two more lands, or being able to see 3  fresh cards the next time you brainstorm are turning out to be incredibly marginal advantages in the right hands.  Players are currently able to leverage this card to do incredible things at the moment, and it is entirely possible that the card is creating a situation where it’s too “easy” to find an answer to aggressive decks, which have normally had the drawback of being at the mercy of their deck, compared to control or combo decks.

Wrapping up

The complete lack of competitive aggressive decks in Standard has been a huge issue with Standard for quite a long time.  I believe any attempts to rebalance the format need to take that into account.  Jace-based decks were able to dominate in large part because of the lack of pressure brought on by those strategies.  A Jace ban would be a problematic situation for many reasons, and I believe there are far more elegant, if not immediately obvious, ways to weaken his position in the field without an outright ban of the card.  Bans however, are necessary right now, as doing nothing and continuing to let player turnout hemorrhage, is the last thing the game needs right now. The post-M10 era has given the game an unprecedented boom, and it would be a shame if the Scars block led to yet another bust.

To summarize- I would ban Mystic, Twin, and Preordain with no hesitation.  I would like to see Valakut banned as well, attempting to achieve the same “palate cleanse” that was aimed for with the PT: Amsterdam Extended format bans.  And I would leave Jace alone, hoping that this would be enough to temper him.