So I understand that there are two camps on the issue of Tinker in EDH.
The first group is ignoring the banning, and saying that it was unwarranted.
The second group is all cheers and happiness at the departure of an 'unfun' card.
I personally belong to the first camp, with my feelings that the banning was unnecessary.

My question is therefore directed at the people who are happy with Tinker's banning.
What have you seen this card do that was so terrible?

Personally, I have never seen this card do anything unanswerable, or excessively broken. The cards that everyone seems to bring up are Sundering Titan, Mindslaver, Darksteel Colossus, Darksteel Forge, and Magister Sphinx. These cards can be a pain in the ass, yes, but what's the worst they can do?

Titan is a topic in and of itself, but I feel it is more of an issue of people being lazy when building their manabases.
Mindslaver is just plain bad in multiplayer, and easily answerable.
Colossus is just a fatty, and in multiplayer, everyone can just gang up on the guy until they're dead.
Forge can be difficult when things like Lattice and Obliterate/Disk are involved, but that requires more big spells, so getting it out early is a bit of a liability when people know your plan, therefore Tinker might not be the best choice for getting it into play. Also, Return to Dust is your friend.
Sphinx will knock one player down to 10. But who doesn't have creature kill in their deck? 1v1 it ends the game soon, but again, in multiplayer it takes even more cards to be effective.

What have you seen that hurts so much?
What plays made this card deserve to be banned?

I really really really dislike the banning of Tinker. I can understand the arguments (turn 2-3 DSC/ST can be devastating), but i do not like the ban.

In my playgroup (mostly a threesome) 2 of us use tinker (i am one of them). The other guy uses tinker to get annoying things, but probably would never get a ST since he knows we'll nag about it so much he'll be forced to take out the Titan, plus he likes playing a cat and mouse game till he locks someone (really annoying to have someone have 2 5/5 fliers, you none, and him not attacking even though you're at 10 life).

I play Tinker usually to sack a mindstone or the like to get a Gilded Lotus/Doubling Cube.


In my eyes, Tinker is a wonderfull, really powerfull card that is as much part of EDH as Insurrection, Sol Ring or Decree of Anihilation

well
tinker is a restrictive tutor which puts the card for free into play

and is therefor very strong early game.

in a few occasions its tinker for the 10 life critter....
and thats 30 life loss in turn 3...

the question never is, "how you aren't abusing tinker" but more on "how some ""can"" abuse tinker"

my 2c...

I'm sad to see Tinker go and it was always fun for me, but I totally agree that it is a broken tutor. There are reasons the other Highlander format has a larger banlist than this one.

I just think that if they are actually trying to achieve some balance with the banlist, about 15 more cards would need to go on it with Tinker.

I'm sad to see it go, but its very true that it deserves to go.

Forget Colossus, forget Titan. Both are answerable by StP or Innocent Blood.

The thing to grab with your Tinker is Darksteel Forge.

you forget ward of bones

I was dorking around once - blue artifact land - sol ring

next turn tinker - sac the artifact land - ward of bone - never play a land that i didn't sac to a zuran orb.

Anyway - there are 2 more card in print that are more balanced versions of the card ( reshape / transute artifact )

I view it sorta like timewalk - way undercosted for what it does - the effect it fine just balance it a bit

I don't think it was any single play that resulted in the banning of tinker, but the multitude of powerful plays the tinker could become depending on the situation.

If Darksteel Colossus cost only 2u, and had the additional cost of sacrificing an artifact, it would be a very powerful card. Tinker is even more powerful than that.

It was the fact that tinker could become a gilded lotus, a memory jar, a sundering titan, a combo piece, a mindslaver, or even just a phyrexian processor, makes it greater than the sum of a single play. Maybe your deck can handle the turn one darksteel colossus off a mana crypt, but can it handle the inkwell leviathan?

The fact that tinker was so cheap made it very easy for the caster to defend their play, even if you had the answer in hand. This made other powerful but expensive cards even more difficult to deal with.

The culmination of the low mana cost and the huge variety of threats makes tinker a powerful card that warps card interactions, deck building, and game states in an unhealthy way. It needed to go.

When a player has to restrict himself to a less powerful play in order to not get booted from the game, you know that the card he is playing with is too powerful.

Turn 4 twincast for forge and disk, turn 5 lattice, table concedes

That's the worst I've seen, but a turn 2 Memnarch is almost as unpleasant

1) Sundering Titan is CLEARLY too powerful, not to mention annoying, hard to answer with anything but a counter, and totally anti-social. It's completely against the nature of the format (just as much as Upheaval, Sway of the Stars, etc) and should have been banned a long time ago if for no other reason than the fact that the format encourages multi-color play.

It is in no way a correct comment to say that the Sundering Titan issue is just people being lazy when building their manabases because, in the end, people will always have lands on board for Sundering Titan to ace. It doesn't matter if you toss in a bunch of filter lands and pain lands. In the end, everyone runs basic land, dual lands, or both and having some painlands in play alongside those basics/duals doesn't make those basics/duals any more safe. Therfore Sundering Titan is almost always going to 10 for 1 mid to late game, not to mention completely ruin the game if played early enough.

2) Mindslaver is in no way a bad card in multiplayer, is almost impossible to answer without a counter, and if you'd actually played with it in multiplayer, you'd realize these things. Never once have I used Mindslaver in either single or multiplayer games and not been way better off for it. There's almost always a player at the table who's doing better than you and/or is focussing you. Just because Mindslaver only hits one player doesn't change the fact that you get to even the odds against your #1 target.

People also seem to ignore the fact that, while a player may be immune to his own removal spells and thus immune to massive card disadvantage with Mindslaver, another player won't be. You still get to use their removal spells and creatures to kill the cards on board that are threatening you and assist you in killing your focus fire target. If you actually have used the card before and weren't better off for it, quite frankly, you got unluckly.

3) Regarding Darksteel Collosus, people tend to not team up on someone until they feel they're in danger. If a player isn't turning their DSC sideways towards you, isn't the player with the DSC just doing you a favor by killing your opponent for you? I would let him keep swinging until that player was dead personally, then afterwards I'd Swords it or whatever. That doesn't change the fact that one player was eliminated early by a hard to answer creature due to Tinker. Was that fair?

4) Forge was your go-to with Tinker after you played the deck for a while and realized that your early game ridiculousness wasn't actually winning you games. There's usually plenty of idiotic things you can do with artifact decks. The problem they run into is they're easy to answer. Forge sort of solved that problem. Afterwards, you could cast Obliterate, or whatever, but up until that point your stuff was almost invincible, making it easy to set up Nev's Disk or Lattice or Memnarch etc.

I in no way agree that putting Forge in play early is a liability. If anything, it's let's you feel more secure with your board position. If it's drawing more damage towards you (and it's safe to assume it will), then you should be playing more cards that are defensive. Examples include: Crumbling Sanctuary, Platinum Angel, Loxodon Warhammer, Umezawa's Jitte, Sun Dropplet, Nev's Disk, and Tangle Wire. There's no shortage of defensive artifacts that are going to probably save you when they're indestructible. And then there's the cards you can add of your color/s on top of that.

5) I feel pretty much identical about Magister Sphinx as I do about Darksteel Collosus, except that with the Sphinx I feel that you've finally made a compelling argument. Just not AGAINST Tinker. If this thing hits early, the damage has been done, regardless of whether or not you have Swords/Path to Exile. Again, just because you only kill one player with an early Tinker, or even Tinker + a couple more cards, doesn't mean Tinker wasn't degenerate. It still ruined the game for that one player.


To answer your questions, besides the above listed cards, I've wrecked quite a bit of face just putting Phyrexian Processor in play and pumping out 20/20s. Remember that the drawback on Processor is essentially halved, while a 20/20 is no easier to answer just because you have extra life. Removal didn't scale, only your lifetotal did. The fact that it kills them half as fast is doesn't matter that much. Remember, we're not talking about a one shot card win, as with the Atog type cards. You still have the creatures at full strength after they've done their damage, and if left unaswered, you'll eventually be killing more than one player a turn.

If you want to play conservatively, you just get Mind's Eye and sit on it until someone answers it. If you draw enough cards, eventually a well built deck won't lose.

I guess if none of those plays made people believe Tinker deserves to be banned, my questions are as follows:

What made Kokusho deserve to be banned, especially when he's vulnerable to RFG creature/graveyard removal, the General rule directly contradicts his leaving play effect, not to mention that his "combo mechanisms" don't even win the game immediately (unlike dozens of other 2 card combos that don't involves cards that cost 6+ mana)?

Why was Recurring Nightmare banned, when it's actually harder to set up an early game combo with, and is way more fragile to all kinds of control cards (graveyard hate, creature removal, counters, hand destruction)?

Why isn't Upheaval legal while Obliterate remains unbanned, just as anti-social, and harder to answer?

I am totally fine with Tinker getting the axe. Friends of mine who I introduced to EDH where literally laughing out loud when playing with one of my decks containing blue (aggressive Rafiq and controllish Vorosh) and drawing Tinker. As myself many of them played or are still playing Vintage, and Tinker is a hell of a broken tutor there.

I have to agree though that getting an early Sundering Titan is more of a problem than getting something along Darksteel Colossus. This in turn is more a problem of ST beeing allowed in a format designed for fun and in which multicolorod decks are used heavily.

Trevor, this is a bit off topic, but why would someone be immune to their own removal if a mindslaver was used against them?

What I meant by immune to their own removal was if you were holding a bunch of creature removal but didn't have creatures of your own in play. The advantage to a multiplayer format and using mindslaver is, unlike in one on one, you'll usually have another opponent on which to use your mindslavered target's creature removal. Thus, he was immune to his own removal spells, but someone else wasn't.

Obliterate doesn't put your stuff back in your hand. Sure, you can float/Obliterate/drop stuff, but you actually have to have them in your hand already. With Upheaval, you know you'll always have stuff to drop back on the board in a similar situation.

I don't want to hijack this thread into an "Obliterate should be banned if Upheaval is" thread. My group I play with allows Upheaval so I've had some experience playing with it. I've found that Obliterate to be a much more difficult card to answer than Upheaval if only due to the fact that no one is mana screwed for extended periods of time after Upheaval (since they get to set their hand), unlike with Obliterate. The game reaches normality (and by that I mean a state of game where everyone is able to play lands and cast spells again) much more quickly after an Upheavel than an Obliterate.

All these things could also be said about Jokulhaups, but it's the counterable one, so it's technically easier to answer.