Impossible wrote: ↑4 years ago
onering wrote: ↑4 years ago
Tsunami is a poster child for this, not because it's necessarily the worst thing that can be wished out, but because it checks all the boxes.
I'd argue that a player that plays
Tsunami is a player I don't want to play with full stop, regardless if they put it in their mainboard or Wishboard. That's what the social contract is for. I'm pretty sure the majority of players don't enjoy MLD, so I have a hard time believing that if Wishes were legal suddenly everyone is packing nothing but Tsunami variants.
I would expect most Wishboards to end up being something along the lines of:
Obviously that's just my opinion but I simply refuse to accept that the only reason people don't play Tsunami right now is because sometimes it's a dead card. I've heard that the secret to EDH is to not break it. So give us the chance to prove we can play Wishes responsibly.
Your absolutist approach to argument is childish. I never said that everyone would suddenly be running Tsunami, and trying to exaggerate a position rather than engage with it is insipid. You might think that's "nuking" and argument, but most posters here aren't 12 so they see past that %$#%. Most people wouldn't start running Tsunami, or similar cards (not all of which are mld), at the very least because I suspect that most people wouldn't play wishes because most suck, and the ones that don't aren't generally worth the effort to most people. For those that do play them, I imagine they'd take the narrow answers silver bullet approach rather than the %$#% over players silver bullet approach. The temptation will be there to use the last couple spots for cards that randomly %$#% over players, and there are people who will absolutely take that chance that wouldn't without wishboards removing the opportunity cost.
The kind that of wishboard you describe is ideal. Unfortunately, most wishes are pretty damn narrow, and can't grab the full suite of options. This requires either running multiple wishes, or running one of the very few universal wishes. I'd suspect that this will usually result in a handful of answers plus a bunch of filler, but some people will see the flashfires in their binder and think "why not."
Personally, I think the two things mostly cancel eachother out. You get a handful of cards that can search for narrow answers (the wishboard of answer silver bullets, like you described) and I'd consider that a mild positive, and you also get some players using those new tools to run Tsunami type cards, a mild negative if the numbers are small, a moderate negative if they are more significant. But allowing for these sorts of cards requires the adoption of new rules to allow for wishboards (sideboards are kind of problematic in a casual format because they encourage tournament thinking and cause players to assume that if it's in their sideboard they can just swap it into their deck before a game as a meta play against an opponents deck, and that's the sort of behavior the RC doesn't want to encourage). Ultimately, it doesn't seem like it's worth it to create rules to make wishes work at this time (especially when doing so would necessitate an auto ban for new Karn, since a self contained hard lock is %$#%$#%). Even if you add in spawnsire shenanigans and making Masterminds Acquisition better than diabolic tutor, it's still not enough.
I could see the RC revisiting their stance if we have more than a dozen wish effects. If wizards keeps on printing these effects with some regularity, then we'll eventually hit a point where the RC has to consider the benefit of allowing so many cards to function and may decide that it's worth complicating the rules to do it. It remains to be seen if WotC will indeed do that. We've had 3 in three years, after a long hiatus (I think since 04), but Karn is one of them and would likely eat a ban. That, to be frank, is what has changed between 2010 and now. Companions would count, if wizards didn't work with the RC to make special rules for them to work in commander, doing that took them out of the equation. Given the rate they've been releasing these cards, if the rate is maintained, then we're looking at a few years before we hit that mark. Advanced knowledge of what's coming could move the RC to act sooner, but I suspect that WotC doesn't have advanced knowledge of what wish style cards are coming. Both Karn and Fae were too down designs based as much on flavor as anything else, so you are only going to know about them a year or so ahead of time with no certainty they see print like that. It would take R&D being committed to a wish style card a year to create the kind of certainty that may move the RC to early action. Conspicuously, we haven't seen these cards in commander products yet, or brawl, and should wizards put one there it could force the issue.