That sounds like a miserable game. I would have been pretty unhappy with that as well. You know that it was 100% a person problem though, right? Had you banned Iona, or really anything short of everybody has to play all Gray Ogre and Mountains format they would have found some way to make the fun a Zero Sum Game

This is a perfect example of why bans do not work in a social setting. You can ban all the cards you want, but people will find other annoying cards and honestly if you ban too many too frequently then people will just not know or house rule or the format dies. I think the RC is cautious when they ban cards and they should be.

They would've found far less tools to do it with though, and certainly wouldn't have had Iona available to do it.



Sorry, you seem to be arguing bans don't do anything? They do quite a lot: they say "you can't play Iona in this format". Ok, they'll find other annoying cards, but they won't find single cards that do as much as Iona.

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.

Inkeye's point - which I agree with - is not that they'll just find other replacements for Iona; it's that they'll just find other ways to be an annoying prick to play against.

Sure, you won't be playing against Iona, but your game experience will still be the same ol' suck fest.

It will be a suck fest that doesn't have Iona in it, which is a preferred outcome.

Y'all seem to be responding like I'm suggesting banning a few cards will magically prevent all games from ever sucking forever. Let's put that straw man down now, please. This is what I said:



That's an out of context quote, you can read the full post here and note how I never propose this prevents everyone from ever producing a funsuck game.

That experience is what I'm interested in seeing cut out. The one where everyone gets miserable at everyone else for playing cards that almost always make people miserable, including the person who played them.

Will it prevent all possible avenues of misery? No. Nor do I say it will.

Will it reduce the likelihood of encountering a certain common staple interactive experience of misery that is fairly reliably created by specific cards we can and do call out directly by name? Yes, because those cards will no longer be around in the format to prompt this to occur.

I also say here:

It might just be a suckfest with Teferi, and Knowledge Pool. Or Deadeye Navigator and Mystic Snake. Or Stasis. Or any number of other things.

I feel like you're not reading the posts I'm writing, on account of me repeatedly saying I'm not trying to fix all possible ways to make games suck, and repeatedly saying I am trying to prevent one specific experience which certain cards fairly reliably cause. I am not sure what to do here. Is my description of that experience just not very good/clear?

And you're not reading mine (or Inkeyes) where we're not trying to prevent one specific encounter - all you do by doing that is treat the symptom, not the disease.

You're always free to not play when Iona shows up, and pretend you lost to something else.

You seem to be saying that because there is a broader issue we cannot meaningfully tackle specific pain points that represent a certain subset of it.

I can't get on board with that.

There is one specific issue which is a symptom in the format:



This is a different thing to "games suck sometimes". The cause of this symptom is the cards that cause this experience. The cards where you play Sphinx, and get shamed out of being allowed to play it ever again:



I am remembering one of the RC saying no one person arguing on the internet ever convinced them to do anything. I think I'm going to stop spending my energy on this thread, I don't think there's more I can say. If you want to construe this as an untreatable symptom of a broader disease go ahead. :/

Again, I don't agree.

I am not trying to make Iona a target, or talk past you. Iona or Expropriate or whichever 9 mana costing boogyman you want to name getting removed may in a small part help, but there is a non-zero cost whenever you ban a card as well.

I would wager that the vast majority of EDH players do not come to this website, or if they do it is when there is a ban list update at max. This means that whenever a card is banned, the cards are likely to sit in the decks until game night. The unexpecting victim packs up his cards and heads to the shop, where he plays a fun game until... Opps he has Prophet of Kruphix in his deck and that card was banned X months (years) ago! Is that a feel bad moment? Yup, and he is likely to be called a cheat or worse. Not to mention the aforementioned time where people buy cards right before the ban or worse post-ban.

Now I am not saying the RC should un-ban everything, but I feel that there are several cards that could come off the list. Protean Hulk and Kokusho, the Evening Star are both cards that people would (and probably still do) argue should have stayed banned. If I had Recurring Nightmare in my Izoni deck it would do great things, but I would still be incredibly weak to graveyard hate. And they keep printing colorless g'yard hate in every block it seems.

Now I guess I will leave this topic alone for a year or so again, but it seems that there are far more people crying ban than the other side of the coin saying it is fine. If you look at the track record of those crying for bans vs. those that say it is fine... it is heavily skewed towards the sky is not falling.

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.

These are not reasons not to ban things. If a card is problematic, the fact that people just bought it, or that people might not know it has been banned is completely irrelevant.

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.


What are the reasonable arguments for keeping that steaming mound legal? Because this quote has never happened... "And then he cast Iona, and it was AWESOME!"

In your opinion sure, but if you are one of those people, or worse you had regular copies and just spent $80 on a foil Expropriate to pimp out your deck replacing the $35 copy, wouldn't you be pretty pissed? What is worse wasting an hour or wasting $100? For me that $100 takes about 3 hours to make so I would be more upset about the wasted money. Remember many of these cards get played in nothing else, so if you open a foil Biorhythm, guess what you got a steaming pile of nothing... congrats! If Precognitive Perception gets banned right out of the gate and that is your promo from the prerelease are you going to be happy?

It always amazes me when people feel that those that have a different opinion are catagorically and completely wrong. "If you don't agree with me you're an idiot." That sentiment is generally very false and surrounding yourself with people that have differing opinions is ultimately a good thing. You may learn a thing or two. "You use steel to sharpen steel, and one friend sharpens another" or at least that is how it is supposed to be, if you live in an echo chamber then you are really losing out.

To be fair, I don't get the idea anyone here thinks you're an idiot.

Your point that it is sad when you spend big bucks on a card and it turns out to suck/frowned upon, but would banning Expropriate make owners of foil Expropriates happy? It wouldn't either. The last few months I've read an article by Sheldon and one by Bennie Smith on what cards you probably shouldn't be playing; maybe that is something that needs sequels? Maybe it is something we as a community should promote? I'd rather have that than some humongous ban list... (and yes, that is mainly because it would spoil my chances of getting Recurring Nightmare unbanned).

My observation on those articles is that people tend to get too wrapped up in them and have a difficult time separating "this is merely my opinion" and "this is how I approach managing the format". I find them interesting such that I learn more about him, but for a great many people these opinion pieces he writes just serve to confirm their biases towards him and the RC.

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.


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.