1st. of October 2010 - New HL bans

[pyyhttu]

I don't have posting rights to the Announcement subforum of this board so here goes. The new Highlander unbannings have been announced at magicplayer.org.

Valid during October 15th, 2010 0:00 CET until April 14th, 2011 24:00 CET.

Changes to the present list, effective 10/15/2010:

Banned:

   * -

Unbanned:

   * Worldgorger Dragon

Watchlist:

   * Protean Hulk
   * Worldgorger Dragon

Unban-Watchlist:

   * Cephalid Illusionist

Other Changes:

With the format's originator Sturmgott standing down, the remaining four members of the council started to look for a replacement for him. It gradually dawned to us that no-one can really fully replace our former chairman. At the same time, we had two potent applicants as core members for the council. So in the end, we decided that we'd wanted them both.
Mark Hildebrandt (MarkusMagic) received good references from Sturmgott and his long experience of the format and merits as a prominent HL tournament organizer should speak for themselves.
Another international addition comes from Finland. Juha Ihonen (Nastaboi) was one of the first early adopters of the format locally and has ever since shown commitment by actively partaking into discussions as well participating in tournaments.
We feel these changes will continue to even out the workload among the remaining members as well as strengthen the demographic decision making policy.

New sets legal from release date onward:

In order to streamline and lessen the past confusion with the release dates, highlander format will now also include the standard set legality and allow sets to be legal as of its worldwide release date, instead of the 20th. day of the current month as per the old policy. We already had a well received but unofficial announcement from format's father Sturmgott on this, and it was applied in M11 set for the first time. The release date set legality has been originally applied in DCI Floor Rules since Morningtide. So as of writing this, the Scars of Mirrodin expansion will be legal in Higlander from its official relase date onward, (October 1, 2010).

Single card Explanations:

Worldgorger Dragon

Locking down Entomb and Survival of the Fittest earlier, enabled other cards to be put on a pedestal for a closer review. Among them is a card with a peculiar mechanic from Torment. Worldgorger Dragon. Earlier Dragon was being abused in vintage as part of an interaction with various Animate Deads and e.g. Bazaar of Baghdad where Dragon is part of a chain of events netting large amounts of mana and cards (win condition) for the player.
When Wizards initially announced their Singleton format axioms, the Worldgorger Dragon was not placed onto their banned list as they didn't want to eliminate all the combos but went after the heavier tutor banning instead. Although the two formats aren't near the same, (highlander still has those tutors) we feel that Dragon shouldn't significantly tilt the meta, partly because the combo has failed to make any kind of a show in its digital form.
Encouraged by this, we decided to put the card under community peer review. While testing the combo, we noticed couple of things:
*Worldgorger might potentially be explosive (e.g. with Doomsday), but it can be disrupted rather easily with timed, instant answers: grave hate, creature removal, bounce, as well as with enchantment removal. Anticipating these, the card promotes play skills on both sides of the table.
*Basically as a three card combo (likewise Grim Monolith/Power Artifact), tutoring or drawing the combo in time against aggro is challenging
However, we acknowledge that using Dragon one may be able to create a loop and get intentional draws if game state looks hopeless. We are following very closely should the Dragon enter the meta and cause this kind of an undesired show.

Protean Hulk

Now that Flash, Entomb and Survival of the Fittest are gone, Protean Hulk is back. It already caused a slight stir in Finland by winning the Nationals with Pattern of Rebirth/Academy Rector and sacrifice synergies, but other than that, we haven't seen much of the Hulk. Because of this, we wait for the results and give the necessary time to see whether this card could be taken off from the watchlist.

Cephalid Illusionist

The banned Dread Return keeps currently in check two powerhouses: Hermit Druid and Cephalid Illusionist. So in that sense the ban has been spot on. While the format has the seemingly more powerful Hermit Druid allowed, Cephalid Illusionist on the other hand is still behind the bars. And this has been legitimately been addressed. But because the Worldgorger Dragon was prepared this long, we don't want to cause too many changes all of the sudden, so we felt it was purposeful to introduce the Illusionist on the unban watchlist first, rather than to toss it straight into the format.