upcoming Ban list votes ChristophO

[berlinballz]

On another note, it's super hard to argue with you if you keep posting random decklists and ignore, what people say.
Unfortunately you do not seem to understand that he is the only player who is playing these decks to their full potential
and the fact that his exceptionally high win percentage is not perfectly mirrored in every tournament that he played in that
is on mtgpulse is simply a normal result of variance.

The online league results are very different from what we have seen in real life on a weekly basis. There are many possible reasons for this,
but as long as you just post tournament results like they mean anything in this very special one-player-case it feels like we are speaking
different languages. 

[tonytahiti]

Vazdru, you get accused of oversimplifying cards/decks, overall concepts and presenting basic arguments. What do you do now? You present the most simplified micro data argument, you just point to some Top8 lists - you make it real easy on yourself- and present even more basic arguments than you usually do. You have a history of not going deeper into a thought/a deck/ a problem, but just pointing to lists tops it all. I am sorry to say this, and i know it sounds harsh, but the way you present arguments is not worthy of a council member.

"maybe the only way to convince me is if you play in next online league to prove the data is useless and your opinion/experience is right
looking forward facing some Staxx, Artifact-Combo-Decks, Fastbond-Combos in next season" - thats not a good look, vazdru. cause you imply that "your 6months complains havent convinced me one bit, i need more" (Shocker: here in berlin, we are not facing SOME of that deck, but ONE, a fact that you totally never talk about), you also say "maybe the only way to convince me.." - like you do not even know what would convince you and what not. and like its our job to convince you and we havent been doing that correctly. maybe this is new to you, vazdru, but its your job as a council member to take feedback seriously, to listen to the community, the cities . its just so weak and entitled to say "maybe the only way to convince me is xyz". if you do not know what convinces you, how would we know? you have taken this berlin-problem not serious from the beginning and i think you are slowly realizing that this has resulted in many players not taking you very serious. something needs to change.

now to your incredibly weak arguments/lists: do you know that somewhere out there, in 2011, lets say nevada, dakota, somewhere in the nowhereland - there was probably an online league somewhere where a good player only went 10-9 with caw blade. the most busted standard deck of the last 10 years. a deck that HAD to be banned. 10-9? are you serious? this is your argument? this micro data means nothing in the overall sphere of things. we told you that paul has a win percentage of 75-80% over 6 months now. thats probably something like 60 games he won, maybe with about 10 lost (an estimation). and you come knocking with silly 10-9, just because its more available than going into the berlin results forum and seeing how well paul did there (that one time where i wrote he won 5 times in a row - nobody said anything - as a council member I expected to be curious there and find out whether there is a problem). Instead you point to finish nationals, which, for me, is the peak of the whole trainwreck you presented here. Finish nationals? Did you expect me to buy Paul a plane ticket to Finland? That proves absolutely nothing - that they have not picked that deck up. It only proves that you often go to the most basic, simplified data/arguments and present it as something that has value. Vazdru, it has no value. MGM top8, yes, paul went 5-0 in swiss there and lost in quarters - WE ARE TALKING ABOUT ONE PLAYER - he went 5-1 there and in games 11-3 (i have micro-data too as you can see) - so you are presenting a tournament where Artifacts went 11-3 (a win percentage way higher than healthy) and present it as an argument AGAINST THE STRENGTH OF THE DECK. This is kind of comical to be honest. I really have no words for some of this anymore, but I tried and I hope you take this critisism to heart(I know some of it sounds harsh but something must change with this style of presenting arguments).

[ChristophO]

Metagame Masters V:

4c Blood: 4 in tournament
placed: 1, 21, 41, 50 out of 52 total

5c artifact combo: 4 in tournament
placed: 5, 22, 35, 39

The perfect storm (5c oath storm): 2 in tournament
placed: 9, 11

---------------------
midrange: 15 in tournament (28,8% of field)
placed: 1, 6, 7, 10, 16, 21, 24, 26, 27, 30, 41, 44, 45, 46, 50

combo: 13 in tournament (25% of field)
placed: 3, 5, 8, 9, 11, 19, 22, 25, 35, 38, 39, 43, 48


I personally would not place to much relevance in the last third of the placings. Results there will most likely be skewed by drops, byes, inexperienced players and so on.
Posterchild of a tournament to prove that 4c blood is too strong and combo weak. In my opinion that metagame there was right on the brink of being really unhealthy with 7 decks not giving a shit about creature removal (corner cases excluded) and 3 reanimator decks that only cares for some of the lines avaible to the deck.  
It would be really great to have the same data for finnish nationals and the HL GP in Frankfurt (now and for the future).
Big thanks to Dr. Opossoum for putting in the time and effort to make the data from the MGM avaiable in our forum!


online results:
That is one person winning 50% of his matches. Doenst prove anything one way (deck op) or another (deck underpowered). Would it have been clear cut proof if he went 6w 2l that the deck is too strong? I dont think so. So dont try to make me believe the opposite with 50% win percentage.


tony/berlinballz:
You are underselling the problem by saying it is only one guy. First of all it is not true. See results from MGM 5. There have also been placings in Frankfurt as well. One of them from Christoph A. from Nuremberg, for example. Which Vazdru decided not to show here by only posting 2016 results.

[ChristophO]

Just as a heads up:
I want to add two cards to our Ban watch list - nothing more (nothing less) which has jumpstarted this discussion. Keep in mind that as a council member I look at different metas not just the one next to your home.

[Vazdru]

@ berlin guys

sorry, I haven't made sufficient effort to express my thoughts clear enough this time
I was expecting the message would be understandable anyway
my bad I've asked too much and baffled you

______________________________________________________________

the message was:
give me some facts to underline your claims and I am happy to follow your approach
as long your statements sounds implausible to me based on the available data I am sorry to say: I can't

There are a lot of ways (not only the online league - i missed to use a " ") how you can try to convince me obviously. The online league would be one of it to show that your arguments are right.

But I'm not the guy choosing the easiest way and follow always the ones shouting out loudest.
As professional auditor analyzing available data just runs in my blood, my bad either.


@ ChristophO

Paul (edit: Silberhase) in Berlin has a Win Percentage that is about 82-83% (thats a guess, a generous one even, it might be higher) and at the recent MGM5 he went 9-3 in Games (75% win percentage, thats still very high, eventhough low for this freakin insane standards). It is important that we focus on this Man, this Man named Paul Templin since he invented the deck, tuned it to insane heights, is the most skillfull with it and, maybe most importantly, knows how to mulligan with this deck - he mulligans aggressively. To make it short: Paul Templin is a completely different animal with this deck! Now you say "so its the player?" It is not the player, it is the deck, that gets flawlessly by this certain player. Like Blood gets played pretty flawlessly by about 10 People in Germany, this deck gets played flawlessly by one. Thats important to realize.

that was the reason why I picked out Silberhase's performance in the Online League
it is better than mine but far away from being frightening to me
sure this has no fundamental statistical significance, so get more data (e. g. via Online League) seemed the easiest way for me to check the claims

And thanks for the MGM review - that's the approaches I appreciate much.

[Kenshin]

So someone who is really really good with a deck that attacks a specific meta wins repeatedly. That is probably how it should be.

I see that you are uncomfortable with that and want to change it by banning vital cards. You might be right or wrong, but to me it looks like every game ever where someone else gets stomped by a superior player and deems something is broken and needs fixing. Sometimes that is true but generally it is just renitence to adapt. The available data suggests that it is a local problem but I am the first to admit that the amount of data in highlander is small.

You are getting way too aggressive and insulting just because someone else does not flop over and assimilates your opinion. You think whoever shares your views is smart and whoever does not is dumb.

I may be mistaken, but whenever I check the Berlin FNM results all I see is creature and midrange decks and mostly tier2 decks at that. I am an outsider looking in and to me it seems just to be a really good player preying on a meta his deck can not be contained by and whose players are unwilling to adapt to or accept what is happening. With all the praise silberhase is getting I can not stress enough how normal it is for a good player with a favourable matchup to win a match.

[Silberhase]

Hey Guys,

now after I went on holiday and was thinking about this actual problem, I wanna tell you my opinion about this now. First I wanna tell some beackground information about this deck. As far I can remember I've been working on this deck since 2.5 years, nearly the same time when the first eggs combo decks apeared. And I also did many many testgames with that deck. My experience with artifact decks in general is even longer. I've been playing artifact decks in Highlander since I'm playing Highlander. And as you can see, you need much experience with that deck when you look the the performance of other players with that deck. And there are only few people who could have that eperience with that deck, like ChristophO, Tabris, etc. The same goes for TPS. It's really strong, but very few people can play this. In general there is one question left: Does a deck break a format cause only one or two people can pilot such a deck? A very hard question to answer imo.

Please note, this was only the indroduction of my post, the rest I will finish tonight of maybe the next days.

[Promole]

I read a lot about crying for the need of banning tolarian academy in the last months (years ?). But I totaly agree in Vazdru´s and DerStefan´s Statements. In Frankfurt the guys are crying because they get rid of playing against 4C an there are voices to ban fetchlands or duals just to weaken one deck. Overall we have to have Combo Deck in our format and due to the fact that we have no sideboard you always have to think about the richt mix of your spells.

If the council acts like Wizards for banning decisions they rely on tournament results and Metagame presence. So what is wrong to act in the same way ?

From this point the council has to make more thoughts of getting rid of that 4C Blood deck because it is by far the most played deck and wins big tournaments very often.

This discussion about banning single cards (Academy) which allows single strategies is exhausting. In Frankfurt we talked about the Artefact Combo Deck and tested a bit with it. In my opinion it is a strong deck, but as every combo deck it has problems with counterspells and disruption plus it has to kill on turn 4 constantly because for example RDW or even 4C Blood have suche a hard clock.

Overall, I can understand that it is annoying to play against this deck sometimes but I don´t think its is unhealthy for the format. 

[ChristophO]

Thx to all community members for their replies in recent days.

silberhase:
Good to have you here! looking forward to your input on how to tone done 5c artifact combo a bit without destroying the deck.

kenshin/promole:
I understand that you guys do not have a lot of combo in your formats but a lot of 4c blood. Let's take a step back.


Imagine 100 people having to make a deck choice for a big tournament. If you leave out "soft" choice factors like card availability
and deck preference due to fun piloting it players pick what they perceive to be the best deck (or at least best deck for their playing skills).
Now perception is a strange animal. It very much depends on your personal peer group. On the opinion of your RL friends that you talk with.
Of your play experience in smaller weekly/bi-weekly or monthly tournaments. But also of highly respected players that perform especially
well. Tabris/silberhase/Maqi/Christian Hauk are such examples of players. They tend to do well irrespective of which (good) deck they pick because
they are strong Highlander players. So if those guys champion a deck the community tends to follow at least in part. That is just fine. That process happens
in many different aspects of life in general (e.g. "small-ball" in NBA basketball right now). 
The culmination of that is that at the latest MGM in Berlin Midrange and Combo were almost represented in equal numbers. I have posted about that tournament
prior in this thread. It is also very showing that Vazdru's cited the first place finish of a 4c blood deck to prove his point while I pointed out why I see
that completely differently in my prior post in this thread. The fact of the matter is that many Berlin players are unhappy with due to the perceived strength of
5c artifacts and have been vocal about this since ~mid 2015 (at least it has been on my radar since then). It is not a "new" development at all. 
In the past the discussion has always been very polar on the topic of this deck. For Berlin it is abviously a big problem while the rest just shrugs their shoulders
and blames it on bad players/bad decks or their own superiour knowledge/skill/etc. That doesnt help to resolve the perceived situation for the Berlin players at all.     

Which is why I think talking about "Combo meta" is important. A notion of mine that has been strongly reenforced by the repsonses to this thread.

promole:
I dont want to ban Tolarian Academy. I want to add two 3cmc draw 7 effects to the ban watchlist (Wheel of Fortune/Timetwister) which also doenst necessarily mean I would
vote to ban them come october. But I want to talk about it to be able to reflect on my opinion and upcoming decision. I also decided to this pupblicly because there was
demand from the communtiy to be more open and democratic.

4cblood topic:
Since it has come up several times in this thread my opinion on that. I would like the deck to be less strong. Since it is a goodstuff deck that is hard to achieve with
banning single cards. I also dislike pure "metagame" bans because they look extremely strange on a ban list and therefore criticism of the format. That being said the best card I currently know would be "Tainted Pact" and i have voted for watchlisting that in march and will (most likely) do so again in June. For further discussion please use a new thread If you want.

fetchland topic:
I would like to have a HL format without Duals and fetchlands just due to deck cost reasons. That being said our current format would feel extemely stupid with all-time allstar cards int he format but a purposely gimped mana base. I would go for two two different Hl formats under "one roof" to offer nice Highlander experience for players who can afford decks >1000€ as well as for players who cant do that. Would also make it possible to have big weekend tournaments with two HL events. Same as with the 4c blood topic pls discuss this in a different thread (maybe the one where MMD last talked about banning fetchlands).

[Promole]

Don´t get me wrong. I personally don´t want o get fetchlands or duals banned. My point is that I think, that only a few of experienced players are able to play these Combo decks with success but neither dominate each tournament with it. So why is there a need to ban cards played in these decks ?

Silberhase explained that he put a lot of work in his Deck and played it for about 3 years. He gets rewarded sometimes with good results in some tournements others don´t.

My point is, if the council decides to add "draw seven spells" or key cards for some decks (Academy, Bazaar etc.) to the banned list, we get a Meta full of Goodstuff Decks and nothing else. I want diversity in our format.

I understand that the Berlin players are unhappy to have one, in their view dominating Deck (or well Combo player) in their field and try to fix that problem.

There are two points:

1. Berlin thinks everybody don´t see the problem because nobody trys the deck or understands how broken those combo decks are.
2. Everybody else shrugs the shoulders because these decks just play a minor role in their enviroment (which does not mean that nobody had tried it)

I tried this artefact deck at some HL events in Frankfurt and in my point is not the most consistent deck. Sure sometimes you have the nuts but most likely you don´t. And even if you have the nuts you sometimes loose to a well pointed counter or discard spell or a wasteland... 

Sure, if you play a deck full of creature hate it gets hard to win against combo. But isn´t it a kind of metagamecall ?

The key question is:

Do we want to have combo decks in our format or not ?

If not, the right weapon is to ban "draw 7" spells. But again I am more afraid of a scissor, stone, paper format than of the existence of combo decks which (played by experienced players) get some good results.

If that decks have a high % in the metagame and consitently wins tournaments or place guys in top 8, we could think about it again. But at this point it doesn´t.

[ChristophO]

I tried this artefact deck at some HL events in Frankfurt and in my point is not the most consistent deck. Sure sometimes you have the nuts but most likely you don´t. And even if you have the nuts you sometimes loose to a well pointed counter or discard spell or a wasteland... 

Now imagine having the guy with 3 years experience sitting next to you and pointing out all the missed avenue's, the incorrect mulliganing etc. Your impression might have been very different. That deck certainly is one of the tougher decks to pilot.

Do we want to have combo decks in our format or not ?

I dont know a single person playing Highlander that wants to have no combo decks in the format. I have also stated several times in this thread that I do want to have combo in the format and competitive (able to win tourny) at that. It is just that I strongly feel that uninteractive stack based combo decks are bad for the enjoyment of the format if their share of the metagame is too big. In the Berlin metagame their share is the biggest compared to other metagames and has aproached a share size that is unhealthy (in my opinion). At the last MGM the artifact combo deck and 4c Blood had the same amount of players and were tied for first (+ second) place of the metagame. Maybe TPS and 5c Artifacts are complicated enough to keep the numbers down even without a ban. But that limit works best if no good players is helping out the gyus going "tried it three times, didnt win with it, therefore it must be bad" too really see all their mistakes. And combo decks tend to be rather unforgiving when doing mistakes. 

[Promole]

I mean you say:

Normaly everbody has to play this deck because it is by far the best deck. It is just not that dominant because nearly everyone plays it wrong (except maybe Silberhase ;-))

BUT:

Do you really think the whole players (except players in Berlin who recognize the strength) are not able to build their own opinion and they all are wrong because the deck plays a minor role in their metagame ?

I still don´t get the point. Vazdru showed the results from the last couple of (big) tournaments. And the deck was not nearly as dominating as 4C Blood was and is. So why do we discuss all the time about niche combo decks which play a minor role in the overall metagame ?

I still think it is a kind of berlin thing and the metagame is healthy (except the high numbers of 4C Blood decks) :-)

I do not want do defend combo decks but I think the council does not good weaken combo with adding key cards to the banned list.

I mean if this changes, the council can react and change something but at this point I still do not feel this is necessary.

[ChristophO]

Evaluating how strong a deck is is really difficult. Different people will have different opinions. There have been Pro Tour Top 8 MU where both Sides believed they were advantaged. That is just analyzing Deck A vs Deck B after 2 weeks of testing to really know your deck and a whole night of testing that single MU by the brightest people. That is why I have a problem when you write stuff like "I tried this artefact deck at some HL events in Frankfurt and in my point is not the most consistent deck. Sure sometimes you have the nuts but most likely you don´t. And even if you have the nuts you sometimes loose to a well pointed counter or discard spell or a wasteland...".

Like I said in my last post it is two things. You have tried it very briefly and did not suceed on your own. Therefore you stick with your initial bias which seems to be 4c blood = best deck. The second thing is you lack a person capable with the deck and willing to share and champion the deck. Regarding Vazdru's "statistics". Top 8 results alone are completely irrelevant. 2/8 making Top 8 with 4c blood is awful if the meta had more than 2/8 4c Blood decks for example. A statement that might very well be true for HL GPs in Hanau. Having a deck make Top 8 just shows that the respective archetype is somwhat viable. Now if the deck is really strong it will reach Top 8 with a larger % of its players than other deck archetypes. 2 out of 2 in Top 16 (MGM 5c Storm) is much more impressive than 1 of 4 winning and the other 3 in bottom half (MGM 4c blood). I doubt 4c blood would do well on that metric - but since the data for the 50+ non-berlin tournaments simply isnt there nobody can check. Either way we lack data to come to any fact based result and we will always lack the necessary amount. It would be nice if people like Vazdru could agree on that.

Either way thanks for the input. I am acutally able to play in Frankfurt this weekend and looking forward to start/continue discussing there in person. Also I will not be able to play the non interactive combo decks because I also lack proficiency . Maybe Silberhase is willing to do 20 games with me using skype on Cockatrice and I can swap decks for the next MGM which I hopefully can finally attend for the first time as well.

[Promole]

I never argumented in a way that I said I had no good results with the deck therefore it is bad. I said that I tried in a couple of tournaments and played with it a while to get an impression how strong the deck is after all that complainments here in this forum.

In fact I played it in 3 tournaments with 10, 8, 16 players and became 1st, 2nd and 4th with this deck but I never had the feeling it is unbeatable. I lost 2 games in three tournaments to 4C Blood and Scapeshift. But in several other testing games I lost games in the described way in one of my former posts.

I also did´t say that 4C is the best deck. I said it is not good for a format where one deck is all around plus it finishes well in top 8s often plus winning big tournaments...

Nevertheless it would be a plessure to continue this discussion in Maintal on Saturday.

CU there :-)

[derStefan82]

What I don't like is the assumption that there is only one player who is able to play the deck and build a good Academy Combo deck.

One of our best players in Würzburg build and played an Academy Deck for 2 years as well, I would say the deck he build is really strong and he is able to play it.

He switched to UR Control now and won the last 3 monthly tournaments in a row.

For our meta it felt not over the top because if you put enough pressure against it there are games where you just not assemble fast enough.

But back to topic and being constuctive.

I thought a lot about this decks, and I personally think there could be 2 cards that could be removed probably easy which could improve things.

For the Academy the additon of Fastbond worried me a lot because it allows extrem broken starts + it gives this deck another combo with Crucible, Zuran Orb, Fastbond for a much lower price then other Decks.

Fastbond starts always feels unfair and so removing it will weaken the deck but still keep it strong.

There are no decks which require Fastbond so you will not destroy whole deck types and I think it will not have a big influence in variance.

As we have seen it's usage is almost always in pure combo decks.

The second card you could think about if you worry about TPS and Eggs would be LED.

This card is as well only used in pure combo builds, it allows TPS earlier kills, Doomsday piles etc. and Eggs the addition of Oath for the Salvager kill.

So removing this as well will not kill one of the decks, weaken stack based combo decks and will not have an influence on the variance of decks.

The opposite will happen I assume if you ban cards like Demonic Tutor or Oath of Druids. My feeling is that those cards both keep the deck variance high and are required to have a good balance between strategies.

But again for me / us in Würzburg the actual format feels really good and we have with ~15 players a preety equal amount of Combo, Aggro, Control and Midrange.

We have HighTide, Academy, ComboOath, TwinShift, Blood, UR, Jeskai, Boros, RDW etc. and everything can compete.

For me UWx/URx and Blood feel like the strongest Decks in the format because of there pure consistency, that's why I not weaken those edge decks to hard because that will result in more UWx/URx and Midrange (Blood) decks.