Post
by onering » 4 years ago
I had an idea a couple of years ago that was similar, but instead of being divided by power tiers it was more of a modular create your own banlist. The idea was that there would be groups of cards that would be banned, or unbanned, together. You'd start by narrowing down the baseline banlist by taking out a couple groups of cards that would form their own modules, like the win out of nowhere cards (Biorythm et Al) and the repetitive cards (recurring Nightmare and Panoptic Mirror for example). Then have fast Mana as its own module (Sol ring, Mana crypt, Mana vault, ancient tomb), slow play inducing cards (Top mainly), a module that would be essentially a cEDH banlist focused on competitive balance). I abandoned it because I was lazy, but also because I realized that it was more of an interesting thought experiment than something that would actually be valuable to people.
One issue I could see with banning by tier is that power level has less to do with the cards than how they are used. I have a red etb matters deck helmed by Dong Zhou. It uses a number of strong cards like fast Mana and Kiki jiki, but it's mid powered at best. Take out zealous conscripts and it loses its combo, which it already lacks a consistent way to find (Kiki and conscripts coming together has to rely on luck, but they're both in the deck for what they do on their own rather than with the objective to get them together). Jam a bunch of fast Mana into an otherwise weak deck with a legends vanilla as a general isn't going to be a problem. I feel like the only tier that would really benefit is cEDH, because it's the most likely to be beset by a problem card that doesn't cause issues in other tiers, and several cards could be straight up unbanned for them without causing problems. All the big Mana win from nowhere cards, Panoptic Mirror, Paradox Engine, Prime Time, Sylvan P, Sundering Titan, Prophet, Recurring Nightmare, Rofellos, Braids, Balance, Emrakul, Library, Iona, Grislebrand, Gifts, and Academy could all be unbanned and be fine, some might even help the subformat by strengthening strategies that are borderline. Granted, a few of those could probably be fine generally, and people will disagree on which ones (personally I'd say mirror, nightmare, and Gifts), but that's still a ton of cards that are bad for casual that cEDH could make use of.