Open letter to Finnish hl community regarding banning policy

[Vazdru]

With regard to this Finnish poll http://vaihdetaan.kapsi.fi/forums/index.php/topic,60085.0.html concerning their approach to highlander in Finland and the question if their opinion might have any influence on the banning policy here in Germany the hl council of magicplayer.org explains its poistion to this question as below:

There is a huge variety of different views in the HL community which cards should be added to the banned list and which cards ought to be cut. Due to this fact there are endless discussions what should be done to improve the banned list with different approaches. So it’s clearly hard for us to filter the useful entries from that mass.

Discussions are necessary but often not very viable when you face a huge group. So Sturmgott decided to found a HL council in which he invites only people who have proven constant dedication to the HL format for years. We're grabbing as much information from the community as we can but the final discussion about ban or not ban must and will remain up to this council.

One of the most important goals of our banning policy is diversification so the main indicator is evaluations of larger tournaments. Thus your support from Finland is greatly appreciated and will be of course welcome in the future too.

So let us have a look at the last GP (126 players):

We’ve had lots of different decks in the Top 8. Aggro is still able to deal with all the huge threats of control-decks. The proof:

A WW made it to the top without playing Survival, Oath, Gifts, Demonic, Workshop or Library. After 7 rounds of Swiss a Suicide-Black stood on top of the field. There were lots of good players around able to abuse defects in the banned list (André Müller, Simon Görtzen, Alex Fanghaenel, Dan Florea are all participants of DCI Pro Tour Events).   

So the main question is: Why would we actually ban anything?

And what would happen if we banned Survival? Lots of archetypes would vanish â€" the good players playing Survival actually would maybe grab the next best deck â€" lets say Staxx or Oath (or a combination of both) - so exactly the opposite of what we strive for would be achieved. So in the next step we'd have to ban Workshop and Oath also?

Of course we have certain cards standing right on top of our personal watchlists but as long as we do not have any proof that they are needed in a deck to dominate the game we won’t change the banned list in that respect.

Have a look at the metagame breakdown of the last three GPs and our evaluation in conjunction with the latest GP.

http://www.magicplayer.org/forum/index.php?topic=162.0
http://www.magicplayer.org/forum/index.php?topic=154.0

Sturmgott and Vazdru representing hl council

[pyyhttu]

At the end of July we have a major HL-tournament in Helsinki (no top-8, 60 min-round times) and as a tournament organizer can promise to provide the deck archetype statistics with other relevant info etc. The number of players attending atm. is unknown.

Roughly a month onwards, so_not and "Orja" have planned to hold the first HL-nationals in Helsinki Safe Haven for 50 people or so. I'll persuade the guys and other brainstormers behind the idea so you can expect the same deck/card breakdown statistics from there as well.

[Nastaboi]

When we had this poll and discussion, we came to conclusion that a working solution would be a council that actually listens players, and that the best way to affect your decisions is to prowide tournament data.

I'll be playing Battle of Wits next mayor tournament, but for HL-nationals I'll take Survival-Gifts combo like everybody and their brother.