Sid the Chicken wrote:
What Spacemonaut is saying is that there are a number of cards that have 2 traits;
1. They look like great EDH cards, because they're big, splashy effects
2. They are NOT great EDH cards, because they turn the game into Suckapalooza 2019.
He is saying such cards should go on the banned list so as to prevent people from making the mistake of seeing number 1 and not recognizing number 2.
That is correct. Thank you for the concise summary. I am also suggesting the Suckapalooza additionally manifests in a specific ugly social pattern for those cards:
The player sees #1 and doesn't recognise #2, builds with the card (let's say
Expropriate) and plays it. That player suffers social reprisals and shame from their opponents. These social reprisals include requiring them to change their deck and/or not use the card again a second time. (
Shabbaman's “don't be a douche, don't play it more than once” tact is not an uncommon response I've seen in EDH groups; it is one of the only ways we have available of managing use of these cards.) Everyone at the table now feels bad: the opponents for having the Suckapalooza inflicted on them, the player for the social reprisal and shame now being directed their way. The social ramifications the player has experienced may last the rest of the night even after the game is over, or longer than that.
I believe if these cards are that bad, then if the format leaves them available, it is laying down all of this as a trap for people to walk into. If I've got dangerous things in my home I should lock them away or warn people not to touch them, I shouldn't just leave them lying around for unknowing people to pick up and hurt themselves with. EDH is a format about making memorable fun casual games with (among other things) big splashy cards: the format should not include big splashy cards known to reliably instead make games unfun between Suckapalooza gameplay and social reprisals/shame.
Expropriate is an excellent example of this category. Vorinclex is too. So might Iona, Sire of Stagnation, and Consecrated Sphinx, among some others.
papa_funk wrote:
spacemonaut wrote:
This is more or less saying "we can't do all the things, so let's not bother doing even a bit of the things." That's not how it works: the RC can do some things, such as ban cards on the level of Iona and Expropriate, vastly reducing the number of tools with which to create those experiences.
I'm quite confused. the game, as described, sounds like it was miserable. Iona appeared and gave the rest of the table a chance, then someone made a bad move that got Iona off the table, returning the game to sucking.
There are reasonable arguments why Iona is a pretty miserable card, but this one isn't one of them.
Just so we're clear, I am not actually making an argument to ban Iona there, I am instead saying that if Iona was banned it would not have zero effect on the format.
In
the message you're quoting from I am responding to InkEyes22's resigned argument that bans do nothing because people can always find ways to make the game suck. I disagree with that: yes, while people will find tools to make the game suck, a ban on very reliable funsuck cards will reduce the number of powerful tools available to them to make it suck, and that would be significant and positive. InkEyes22 quotes
that game Gath described but I have not actually responded to that game yet.
(I dislike oppressive stax decks, and I have thoughts on how that issue can be managed, but that's a problem worth addressing in a whole separate discussion. This is a topic about whether Expropriate is banworthy and I am merely focusing on an issue that I believe indicates it
is banworthy, an issue Sid has neatly summarised for me, and I'm not trying to fix all the things.)
I will respond to that game Gath describes now.
In the game Gath described, yes, the mono-W player was a jerk and stealing their Iona out of their library sounds like an awesomely satisfying comeuppance. Ideally it should have stuck and the Evacuation player made a mistake.
However if Gath had not played or drawn that one specific miracle of a card, or the Mono-W player had drawn Iona first, then the game would've simply involved the mono-W player having one additional super-oppressive tool with which to shut people out of the game. As much as oppressive stax decks need to be addressed, the solution to them is not Iona being in the format.
I am not making an argument that Iona needs to be banned in these paragraphs. I am making that argument elsewhere, in response to other posts. Here I am suggesting that this specific scenario where Iona briefly did something good is not a reason to keep Iona or a suggestion it does anything good for the format overall.
I would also point out that Iona was singularly responsible for (a) making the stax player miserable, then (b) making everyone else even more miserable than they were beforehand in that game (because it was now on the battlefield under the mono-W player's control), and bent the entire game around itself in its infliction of miserableness. So it remains a card that, by existing, primarily makes people miserable and created a game people would like to forget.