Just to give another point of view on this article or whatever this is ...
The straight-up ban of Tolarian Academy made me sad
Which "
straight up"
BAN? '
Tolarian Academy' was on the
BAN WATCHLIST for how long? 1 year, 2 years or longer?
That is what I already said in the other thread about the
BAN is coming really late but deserved.
First off, it severely reduces the overall deck diversity in the format
Banning out oppressive Combo-Decks opening up the format for more "fair" decks, so in the end it offers more deck diversity.In my opinion there are some more who need to go ... this was just the beginning, I hope so.
there were Affinity-Brews developing left and right that drew on Academy as a boost helping them to compete against more established decks
Affinity decks relying on '
Tolarian Academy' as keycard? As far as I know
Affinity trying to operate on a very little amount of mana. Are you sure, you aren't talking about
Stax builds?
I am also not an expert, but I don’t think this ban has a large fall-out effect to constrain the Oracle-Breach deck
'
Thassa's Oracle' and '
Underworld Breach' are already on the
BAN WATCHLIST, the future will show if they will remain in the format.
if the council were to pursue a more visionary and structural approach in curating the banlist, we could actually decrease the amount of bannings we would need to force through (and trust me, under the current model, there will inevitably follow more bans as the format gets watered down more and more).
In my opinion
BANNINGS are not bad for a format. They just need to be done correctly to protect the format from decks which use an oppressive playstyle or enforcing players to play specific cards to be competitive.
first to unban a few cards in order to make other archetypes more viable and attractive
The first point I can agree to a lttle bit. Cards like '
Mystical Tutor' and '
Treasure Cruise' are not
BAN worthy cards in my opinion. If you want to hurt the
BLUE dominance
BAN cards like '
Dig Through Time' and '
Mana Drain' Some long time
BANNED cards should be reconsidered again, too. For example '
Strip Mine' or '
Umezawa’s Jitte'
second to ban generically playable tutor (such as Demonic Tutor and Tainted Pact) to decrease the consistency of combodecks to a level where more decks can actually compete.
Here I disagree again. You hurt more different decks with a
BAN of certain tutor cards than you hurt with the specific keycard
BANs. In my opinion
BANs need to be as specific as possible to take out or hurt the least amount of decks in the format.
This text seals many extremely valid points so well and clearly, that I wanted to share it on few places (like this) after i red it.
For me this text shows only a bias point of view. I don't see any valid points for an
UNBAN of '
Tolarian Academy' here.
In the end I would like to say that I'm not against Combo-Decks in general, for example at the moment
ProteanHulk-Combodecks or
Reanimator-Decks are totally fine because most of the time they are slower and easier to disrupt than a turn 3-4 kill from an
Academy- or
Hermit-/Oath-Combodeck. My wish for the future of the format is "make it fair again".