metalmusic_4 wrote: ↑1 year ago
@idsurge I just saw your tweet about cards to consider banning and you named nature's claim as one of them. That is not the first time I've seen that card mentioned as a ban target but I do not understand the idea behind banning nature's claim. It seems to me that there are many many easy replacements for it so the ban would do little good. Could you, or anyone else, please explain the reason to ban specificly that card to me please?
I am a huge proponent of what I am calling "nerf-bans," i.e. bans that hit decks at their fringes without hurting core deck elements. You can still play a lot of broken strategies without Claim. See Tron, Infect, Dredge, and others. But then you can't have a 1 mana, effectively no-extra-cost answer to some of the best hate pieces. There's a HUGE difference between Claim and the significantly less efficient Naturalize (and variants). Wizards can ban out overly-efficient answers from sideboards that disproportionately help busted decks (looking at you too, Force of Vigor). This will rein in powerful but potentially unhealthy decks while still allowing them to be played.
Yawgmoth wrote: ↑1 year ago
Tweeting at WotC is definitely more effective than whining about things here. But we need to have a clear message/request. The problem is that even the dozen or so regular posters on this thread cannot reach a consensus about what they want changed in Modern.
A handful of people tweeting about random cards they want banned/unbanned is nothing more than the regular rabble that makes up mtg social media. This is very easy to ignore; WotC and most players do this every day.
I think it's a lot more than a handful at this time. There is an outrageous degree of ban discussion in my Twitter feed from most prominent pros who are still even talking about Modern. Add in Reddit's ban mania (also feels higher than usual) and the vastly diminished amount of Modern content available in the last 1-2 months with a GP literally a few days away, and it's clear there's a huge push for bans. When this happened with Standard's Oko fiasco, Wizards banned four cards in the span of about a month even though people all disagreed about what to ban. We saw the same with the energy nightmare a few years ago. We'll see a similar response with Modern and some combination of Oko/Veil/Urza/Mox/Lattice/etc. will get banned. The specific bans aren't terribly important as long as they are hitting egregious offenders (e.g. Oko) and addressing offensive decks (e.g. Urza).
A bunch of people all asking for the same thing stands a much better chance of getting noticed.
I think we need to ask WotC for a statement about the future of Modern. Once we know what WotC thinks Modern is, then we can start asking them for specifics. If they are going to stop supporting the format in 6 months then who cares if they ban card XYZ?
Am I wrong? Don't we need this first before we can start thinking about what specific changes to ask for? I tried to bring this up a few pages back but it got buried in 3 days worth of ban Oko/urza/opal unban Twin tail chasing.
TLDR: how can we ask WotC for changes to Modern without knowing what Modern means to WotC?
At the same time, you and I are on the same page. I stand by what I said earlier: Wizards
MUST release some form of format direction statement/vision/mission update/etc. about Modern. This needs to happen ASAP and it needs to align roughly with the swift banlist decision. As you said, bans are totally irrelevant if player confidence remains where it is and Modern keeps hemorrhaging players every time unhealthy decks emerge. Wizards needs to rebuild Modern capital and commit to supporting and managing the format. If they don't do that, it's a format death sentence.
To that end, I am finalizing a Modern Metrics post that I will soft-launch here prior to full release on Reddit. These types of articles have been helpful in the past at putting a voice to Modern issues. I have no direct evidence that they lead to action, but some of my past articles have proceeded those changes and/or been directly in dialogue with a change that happened shortly after publication. If nothing else, it will get a larger subset of the visible Modern community talking about key problems and not distracted by bans.
. The pioneer did state all formats would be discussed on the 13th.
