I want to talk about three things today: Magmatic Channeler, Omnath, and I guess just bannings in general. Everyone has an opinion on Wizards design as of late, but whatever.
I've added Magmatic Channeler to the Historic deck. Having taken out Murderous Rider already, the only thing to do was throw in a few more instants and sorceries and we were off to the races. Bonecrusher Giant is a great card, but I haven't missed it.
Channeler certainly has that Tarmogoyf feel to it, where it's a 2-drop but it's a good draw step late in the game as well as early. That is certainly a welcome addition, but the other thing that's good with Channeler is that we play cards that are versatile, so it's likely that one of the two cards you hit off of it will be something you want. Maelstrom Pulse is great here, but so is Inscription of Ruin, which is a card I really hoped would be good that has exceeded expectations. Kazandu Mammoth fits in this category as well, being a land drop if you need it or a threat that's perfectly serviceable. Late game Thoughtseizes and extra lands can turn into gas, plus it turns dead cards in your hand into action that's outside of your hand, which helps with Castle Locthwain and Liliana.
Gifted Aetherborn was certainly a card I liked, but it's just a role player. I mean, so is Channeler, but I think it's better. Double-black on turn two isn't exactly the best thing, especially with Kazandu Mammoth in the deck, so Channeler is definitely better on that front.
So this thing was clearly too good for Standard, but in Historic we were beating it pretty well. Omnath the card is absolutely a mistake to print, just kind of an unprecedented combination of rate and synergry potential. However, as a deck, I don't even think it was the best deck with Uro in it. In a format where you can have your best pieces Thoughtseized, you can have them countered, you can have your mana-generating creatures killed easily and have your expensive cards stuck in hand, or you can just be attacked for 30 out of nowhere via Neoform or Bolas's Citadel or Muxus, Omnath turns from the clear best deck to a deck that's explosive but not necessarily much better than others. It absolutely could have been the best deck in the format, looking at win rate numbers, but so much so that it had to be banned?
As far as we're concerned, I was able to beat Omnath pretty regularly with Jund. Not 100% or anything, but for a deck that plays out like a Vintage deck, I wasn't awfully scared of it. I never really made any significant changes to the list to try to beat it, save maybe being one factor in swapping Murderous Rider for Maelstrom Pulse. The Omnath experiment was silly.
Bans
This rant is going to get off topic. There's a lot to talk about in regards to WotC's decisions over the last few years. I think it's important to view everything that's happened from a lens that identifies that Wizards is a company that is making an effort to make money. Also, there has been a well-documented push in the last four years or so to take a profitable company and make it more profitable, as requested by Hasbro, the corporation that owns Wizards.
This important for a few reasons, but it's important to diagnose the problems with Wizards' actions with that in mind. I'm absolutely not in favor of attacking or criticizing the game designers themselves, many of whom are Twitter active and formerly public pro players, not necessarily to protect them, although there's that, but also because they're most likely just following orders, or at least under different pressures than they were 8 years ago when Magic was at its peak. When I order a drink from a bartender and they put well vodka in it instead of Grey Goose, it's tough to blame the bartender instead of the owner who told them what they can and can't do, or how much of a margin they need to be hitting.
Another thing that comes up a lot in this discussion is that, in their articles about game design, Wizards designers introduced a design philosophy called FIRE, which stands for Fun, Inviting, Replayability, and Exciting. Folks I've seen are critical of the philosophy, but I really don't think it means much of anything. Magic was all of those things in 2012 and 2006, and isn't anymore. If you put an article on the website about how we want to make Magic fun and inviting and then the best deck in the format wins by casting multiple spells for free each turn and stealing all of your lands, then it's not the philosophy's fault, you just didn't do the philosophy.
There's also the myth that Magic Arena has made Standard too easily solved and players don't get the experience of discovering what is and isn't good. Folks have been saying this for years across multiple formats, and I have never bought into it. Consider the card Death's Shadow. It was printed in Conflux, in 2009, and it became popular around 2016 in Modern. It existed, alongside Shocklands, Fetchlands, and Street Wraith, in Extended and Legacy for seven years before being identified as pretty much the premier threat of the format. Magic players aren't as smart as we think we are. Omnath is a pretty in-your-face busted card that's hard to miss, but we left a one mana 7/7 on the sidelines for seven years. There's no way of knowing, because there's no AI that you can put all the cards of a format into and have it spit out the best decks in the metagame, but I am unconvinced that the Omnath decks we saw at the Grand Finals were even tuned that well. It didn't take a ton of games to see that WURG for a 4/4 that draws you a card, generates four mana a turn, and casts Soul Feast every turn would be too good. Same with Wilderness Reclamation, Lurrus and Yorion, Oko, Uro, even Lucky Clover is obviously busted once you've seen it in play one time.
We have to remember that, in addition to having over 50% of the Standard bans in the last 20 years taking place in 2020 (in addition to the companion nerf, which we shouldn't overlook), in the last 15 years there have been only 2 cards banned before Wizards switched up their set release schedule with the printing of Battle for Zendikar. In my personal opinion, Battle for Zendikar is when Standard went from fun to not fun, and it must have been the opinion of other players, too. Tournament attendance went way down and something had to be done to the format. I don't consider those 2016 bans to be design philosophy problems, I consider them to be oversights. Maybe they could have seen that Emrakul was going to be unfun and broke a bunch of rules, the same with Reflector Mage, maybe Smuggler's Copter was too obviously going to be ubiquitous, and they straight up missed Felidar Guardian. Did anyone just put a bunch of Energy producers and Ulamogs and Emrakuls in a deck with Aetherworks Marvel to make sure it wasn't too good? Doesn't seem like it. It would be strange for the design and development team that gave us Magic's best years around 2012 also to have begun a downward spiral to ban frenzy land we're in now. That's why my theory is that the set release schedule change is the most important culprit for the state we're in. The design team is great, unless they're under a set of new pressures, be it time or financial.
And I also can't assume that I'm the only one to come to this conclusion. When you make a big change, then you start losing money, the easy thing to do is say, "that change didn't work." You know, unless your job is to be Hasbro Corporate's voice inside Wizards and if you ended up making the decision that cost the company millions of dollars, it's tough for your employment status for you to later diagnose the problem as yourself. Clearly, there are just a few more changes that need to be made to make the new big change work, like FIRE, or four big sets a year instead of Large Set - Small Set release schedule, or a change to Magic's tournament structure. Right?
It's wild to me that a company, that supposedly makes good decisions and therefore has become a big corporation, can see something like Magic, the greatest game in the world, and try to tinker with it. It's just a card game, but it's pretty emblematic of a lot of problems we have in society, in my eyes. So before I go too far off the deep end and start talking about how many yards of linen it takes to make a jacket, let me just say that I just hope Hasbro can start listening to Magic designers, who understand that sets are ecosystems and cards don't individually need to be super splashy to make a format Fun and Inviting and ultimately sell. I hope they see Omnath and Oko and companions and set release schedule bungles as what they are: huge failures, and a breach of trust with its players, that needs to be fixed.
I think there are some cards that have been banned in the last few years that shouldn't have been and they're pulling the trigger more frequently than maybe they should, but the root of the problem is that Magic sets have been less fun since Hasbro got more hands-on, and the cost of that is on us.
Anyways, thanks a lot for reading, and check out the twitch stream.
