then again, the cards you list are definitely on the fairer side of things and it looks like you don’t want to just unban everything. This is a much tamer approach and I think a lot of us here would agree with at least some of those unbans. I still don’t think the cards you listed would do much against eldrazi, however, so that would still need to be addressed.

I think banning eldrazi and unbanning x, y, and z are two unrelated questions as I still think an eldrazi ban would be still needed if you unbanned the cards you mention.

No hate, normally these kinds of posts don’t incite hate, just eye rolls because of how broken and I fun of a metagame we would have.

Honestly, we just don’t have the hate or counters in modern to legitimately police the decks that would arise from a total unban. It would just be race city and no interaction (because, again, there isn’t any good interaction). Why don’t you just try legacy? Once you try legacy, you will see what a fast metagame really is and realize that modern wouldn’t be able to handle a total unban. I think you would also appreciate modern’s uniqueness over the older and faster formats.

As an aside, I use “faster” as a goldfish term. With all the free interaction in legacy, many games do go longer, but I think we can all agree that legacy is a faster and more consistent goldfish format than modern.

Clearly, Legacy without Duals is what i was going for here. That’s why i was talking about Force of Will, Blazing Shoal, Brainstorm, Daze and Lion’s Eye Diamond. I highly appreciate the amount of thought you put into your well articulated response.

That’s what Legacy is for.

FINALLY someone who remembers the Mirrodin block/Standard farce that was Vial Affinity! Banning a card here and there for Eldrazi variants is fine, I guess. It’s not like they’d be banning an entire deck! I don’t like the saturation levels, but it’s not nearly as bad as dealing with Vial Affinity. I’m more than a bit surprised that no one has come up with a solution for it, given the card pool available for Modern.

See, this is why I love this site. Most other writers would have made a “crumble to dust” or “reality smasher” pun, but you guys spare us the eye roll

The problem with wanting them to stop this before it starts is that there isn’t a clean way to do it. Consider the broken interaction:
“colorless Eldrazi spells” on both lands.

In order to combat this, they would have to either:

A) Color the Eldrazi (Remove Devoid and C mana)
B) Nerf the offending creatures
C) Pre-ban one or both lands
D) Errata the lands

Let’s just throw out Option D right now. WotC doesn’t like to errata and I don’t blame them.

Option C sounds nice, because it gives us the same solution only faster. The problem there is that there is such a backlash for the supposed ban-happy nature of WotC in regards to Modern that any sort of pre-ban would have been met with outrage at the lost opportunity to “let the format handle it.”

Option B makes every format that can handle the Eldrazi less fun. When the card isn’t modern playable anymore because of said nerfs, the EV and power level for the set having dropped makes the playerbase upset (see BFZ, JOU, etc.). Wizards needs to sell packs, and if their set can’t generate interest for the Standard and Limited it will underperform and everyone loses.

Option A would be a poor decision, in my opinion. Devoid is a fun mechanic. Devoid cards and C mana helped fill new areas of card design and didn’t have us repeat the RotE problem of “cheap Eldrazi you don’t really want and giant beatsticks everyone wants to ramp to.” I’d rather have better four- and five-drops than feel like I have to play a ramp strategy (or a See the Unwritten one). The deck diversity gained, the flavor gained, and the design space filled are all reasons to keep Devoid and C mana in, despite the unfortunate consequence of the Eye/Temple interaction.

Ultimately, their best option was to try and let the format solve it. At the end of the day, a post-ban Modern metagame might still allow for some Reality Smashers, Thought-Knot Seers, and Eldrazi Displacers due to their unique designs and reasonable playability, which is a good thing. Modern needs playables.

or design a hate card for eldrazi decks like how stony silence is killing em’ robots.

It’s not a good long-term plan to upset your customers like this.

To be clear, I’m not saying they should just design anything and not consider Modern at all. As I said, some of the more powerful cards should at least be evaluated and theory-crafted into the metagame to gauge potential effects (I’m talking Treasure Cruise / TKS / Reality Smasher level cards), but given that internal WotC testing often misses things for STANDARD, which they do test, and has much smaller cardpool, I just don’t see how setting up some Modern testing changes much of anything.

Just to clarify about Legacy Nexus, I didn’t mean running a whole other site, I meant just hi-jacking this one from time to time for a peek at Legacy, in times like these or Modern off-seasons when there just isn’t much Modern to discuss. Although, if you’re not already intimately familiar with Legacy, I can see how that would be very time consuming anyway.

I wouldn’t say design for modern but consider what the cards may do in the format.

We have all these eldrazi standard legal but not eye or temple. Quite likely it was tested internally at some point and quickly deemed too powerful for T2.
But all those cards are in the Modern and, unlike Legacy, it doesn’t have tools like FoW or Wasteland to keep degenerate things mostly in check (although the eldrazi are shaking a few things there too).
Between the powerful hosers of legacy and avarage low potential of standard, I think, of all constructed formats, modern has the least potential to regulate itself

Yeah, I figured Legacy Nexus was wishful thinking, but I had to try. Still, 3/4 sounds great, and I’m really looking forward to it.

I’ve been thinking about SfM lately and although I think it might be safe/fun in a Esper Stoneblade type deck, I’m wondering if I wouldn’t find space in my Affinity deck for it, making it effectively Cranial Plating 5-8 + a body + the option to run 1 Batterskull. Considering the deck can fairly easily drop the Mystic on turn 1, turn 2 Batterskull might be a tad too good. Testing will tell!

Absolutely. If anything, the eyebrows that were raised should make us even more meticulous about our data and methodology, to ensure that we are very accurate in describing such pointed subjective observations as we had right after the pro tour.

That being said, I think, as you mention in many of your articles, that sound qualitative theory is also important to give context and guide the process. My harshest criticisms were not so much that we should just immediately ban cards (although, certainly many people’s yearly gp was just ruined and thrashed by eldrazi, which are real consequences to the measured approach. It’s easy for us statisticians and academics to sit back in our ivory tower and muse about the “correct” way to do things when real people are actually going to deal with this), I do think it was very wrong to downplay the eldrazi brokenness in any way. As I said earlier, if you soundly analyzed the theory, instead of anecdotally pointing to some decks that MAY or even did beat eldrazi in one tournament or one daily, then the eldrazi brokenness was beyond clear. This is not really directed to you, Sheridan, as you have been more leveled and willing to accept the qualitative once you started to see some early trends in the data. This is more generally to commenters and posters on this and many other websites (Melissa DeTorra? Really? How foolish did she, and others, look still downplaying the eldrazi so close to this past weekend).

I guess what it comes down to is that the people who consumed the most about eldrazi (pros, commenters and posters who actually played the deck or tested against it a lot, who watched every single eldrazi video on every magic website), were being told by those who barely saw or played the deck (or count “testing against it” as queuing up a league to see if I play them lol) that we were just over exaggerating, needed to stop being lazy deckbuilders, or were just whining.

Agreed. Cards like SFM/JTMS/AV/Sword/BBE are worth testing and considering. Misstep? Clamp? No thank you.

I think it’s tempting to blame Wizards for this issue more than they deserve. I sincerely doubt it was intended, even if it makes for a snazzy story. It’s much more likely this was just the function of typical corporate and management oversights in a process (i.e. bad testing and bad communication). As for unbanning everything, there’s no way Wizards will do this. It doesn’t fit any of their past format management, and doesn’t fit the power level of the format they are creating.

We can’t fault Wizards too much for trying to make money from their products. How else are they supposed to bring us the game we love? That said, more testing could have avoided this, and we know they don’t test because they don’t view it as an efficient allocation of resources. As for the bans, I’m sure they ban one land and maaaaybe one Eldrazi. Probably Mimic, if I had to guess, but I also haven’t done any testing on this question yet.

Unban testing will definitely come soon. The same can’t be said of Legacy Nexus. Gotta sleep sometime!

Interesting ideas! While I definitely won’t be involved in Legacy Nexus due to time issues and personal interests, I can promise we’ll see more unban testing in the future. The Eldrazi ban article will also include the Eldrazi-related testing. Shadows cards will also definitely get some love next week!