From a practical standpoint, asking for a Top unban is a complete waste of time. The card is bad for Wizards’ goals, not just for the format, but for Magic in general. It ruins tournament experiences and does horrendous things to coverage. Wizards knows this (and has basically said as much), and if you’re familiar at all with their statements on banlist philosophy, you know Top is a hard lock to stay banned.

As an Infect player, I wouldn’t really care much if BI was banned. Honestly, it would mean I could skip worrying about filling my yard w/fetches and I would run a set of Botanical Sanctum in the deck. Less fetches also makes Groundswell less good in the shell, so it’s possible the list would remain fetch heavy to bring that card back in. Might, Vines, Mutagenic, and Defense are likely enough pump spells tho, so maybe a couple of Serum Visions would find their way back into the list again. Preordain would certainly find its way in over Visions if it was unbanned.

What’s funny is that banning 8th wouldn’t get rid of Tron and Blood Moon, they would need to get rid of both 8th and 9th for that. Or just ban the cards that are issues and leave the rest alone. Choke, and Boil would be gone, but Boiling Seas and Flashfires would still be around.

A few other more fringe cards that would be lost to Modern (not a complete list):

Bribery
City of Brass
Dingus Egg
Merchant Scroll
Obliterate
Plow Under

While it may sound as easy as extending rounds ten minutes, understand that you are talking about adding an entire hour per day to larger events. Those are already a grind as is.

Ouch, no!

Every six rounds, adding another hour to a tournament? It would make larger tournaments ridiculous. It’s already nearly 10 or 11 at night quite often when a cut to top8 is made, and everyone is hungry and exhausted. The time constraints thing is a very real and legit reason to keep top banned.

It would be fine online because of the personal timer. I wonder if a future online format could allow it to be played. Who knows.

Id like to see them both go, but id also like to see either the consistency or speed of infect dredge and ds zoo reduced so more decks can keep up. We no longer have to always keep mana up like we did vs twin, but we still often have to have a specific answer on t2 or t3 or else lose the game anyways.

Yes two simian spirit guides can put a blood moon turn one, but you need to spend 4 cards of your inicial hand to do that and if the oponnent has basics in hand probably the game will not swing towards the 1st turn bood moon player it happened to me and i won over a blood moon on 1st turn only attacking with two creatures with 7 cards locked out on my hand except for those two creature.So i understand the problema but is as much problematic as when affinity drops the whole hand with four creatures and a plating on turn one or a etched champion turn one followed by plating to be equipped on turn two

chalice of the void trick is less significant since on turn two is still good and the decks that play that kind of trick already have good matchups against burn infect and death shadow which seems to be in my opinion, the matchups where the chalice is at his best.

If used past those turns with other cards is just a worst mana ramp with some advantages when it comes to pay for a spell Pierce or mana leak or pay is cost as creature which might indicate you are not winning the game.

Jace unban would be bad, decks would be constructed around having him safely enter on turn 3 4 or 5 (whatever would be the best shell for him) and after that is a crazy advantage on the long game

That being said, i do disagree on a few things. First, Preordain can totally come off. It powers up the 3 most suppressed archetypes, combo, control and tempo. It helps them in the right way, consistency, not speed. It is only a slight upgrade, so it is extremely safe. If anything is actually a Preordain away from needing a ban, it was not long for this world anyway. Second, stoneforge mystic feels incredibly safe. Testing on this site showed it made almost no impact on any matchups, most importantly even jeskai could handle it, and they don’t even have access to k commamd, the cleanest answer to her in the format. Jtms may be safe now due to the formats speed, but if the format EVER slowed down he becomes a monster. Basically, for the same reasons you say BBE cant be unbanned, jtms cannot. Finally, saying ssg should be banned for doing nothing fair while putting up next to 0 results is silly considering earlier you said mox opal and dredge are fine, cards with much higher results that also do nothing fair. Being unfair is not ban criteria, and you do a great job avoiding this argument in the rest of the article.

All in all, despite a few disagreements on my end, well written. Even the few things i disagree on largely come down to opinion and i can see why you went the way you did (except ssg, he is fine, this is not opinion, it fills 0 ban criteria and the loose things you could ban it for can be applied to aboit half the format atm)

On a side note. You are awesome on coverage. Big fan.

Oh and bloodbraid elf wasn’t banned for being too good. Go back and look at wizards’ official statement!

It was banned because they felt Jund was overperforming (deathrite was the cause) and they needed to axe a card that *only* Jund was playing, to minimise splash damage. They picked bloodbraid bot because of power bur because it was a card other decks weren’t using at the time.

And yes, it became abundantly clear in the following weeks/months that banning bloodbraid elf had no effect. The card was fine, and banning it didn’t solve anything. They had to ban deathrite shaman to finally achieve what they wanted for the deck. Bloodbraid should come back off the banlist 100%.

The only deck playing SSG now (with any real frequency) is ad nauseam, which isn’t a problem deck and isn’t making anyone hate modern.

I’ve heard the rhetoric along the lines of “SSG does unfair things & should be banned” but as you very clearly stated with Mox Opal, if nobody’s actually using it, or doing unfair things with it, it’s fine and should remain legal.

I think you sort of backed yourself into a corner with this one, because the logic you applied to Mox Opal very much applies to simian spirit guide here (I.e. It could *potentially* be broken, but at the moment it isn’t, I mean when was the last time a guided-out blood moon was a serious dominant problem?), and your argument to ban SSG just comes over as a rant about the card’s future potential rather than what it’s actually doing.

For that reason, I think SSG is fine. “Don’t try to fix what isn’t broken” seems to spring to mind. Nobody ever called out for an ad nauseam ban, which is what an SSG ban would amount to.

The issue being is non control blue decks will run it also. Remeber when infect ran serum visions? Now imagine preordain in its place. Its actually really good. I used to run ponder in my infecr decks when it was standard legal.

About preordain, im confused too. Why decks like death’s shadow, infect, dredge, rg titan and a big etc can have consistency in form of raw power and blue decks cant have good card selection?