Tolarian Academy

[LasH]

Today i wanna discuss the ban of tolarian academy in the current format.

Back in 2006, it was one of the strongest mana producer in the format. Stax was a deck to beat and this card was a cruel part of it. I dont remember much other decks abusing it.

So in my opinion, the strongest use of the card will still be stax.

2011, we have alot of new cards, thats why i wanna put the light on this card again.

Reasons why it should get unbanned

Statement 1:
Producing alot of mana is now viable for alot more decks (lotus cobra, more 1 drops for mana producing), which makes all green based decks alot faster than back in 2006, sometimes faster or even with artifact producer.

Statement 2:
There is ALOT more hate for handling lands (Phyrexian revoker, fullminator mage, tectonic edge, dust bowl (was banned before), goblin ruinblaster, magus of the moon, ajani etc).

Statement 3:
There is alot more hate for handling artifacts (maelstrom pulse, o-ring, quasali pridemage, new uktabi apes (renegades, viridian shaman etc), which can make it less effective.

Statement 4:
You need at least 2 artifacts + something to untap a land to really "abuse" tolarian academy.

With the ban of LFTL its much harder to get specific lands online. There are only 4 playable "searcher" currently (crop rotation, sylvan scrying, demonic tutor, expedition map, which usually search workshop in the early stage of the game), and ofc, in lategame they would get the academy.

Back in old days, it was incredible insane to abuse the academy after all lands got destroyed with LFTL + crucible, because you still had massiv mana with only one land after "geddon-effect". This point leads back to statement 4, no more LFTL makes searching and reviving for this combo MUCH harder.

I dont see TA to be broken-overpowered anymore. I see it extremly strong in a lategamephase, i see it boosting a currently dead archetype back in the meta, without making stax unbeatable.

Opinions?

[Thibir]

Your arguments convinced me and I think, that it is worth testing at least

[so_not]

My 5 cents (or cards): Time Spiral, Mind over Matter, Candelabra of Tawnos, Memory Jar, Timetwister etc.

[MarcMagic]

Afair Academy got banned because of Storm but maybe I'm wrong. Academy will boost Combodecks like Storm and can be used to get tons of mana with cards so_not already listened. I don't think this land will see play in the next few years, although I'd support unbanning it

[LasH]

Afair Academy got banned because of Storm but maybe I'm wrong. Academy will boost Combodecks like Storm and can be used to get tons of mana with cards so_not already listened. I don't think this land will see play in the next few years, although I'd support unbanning it

Yep you're right. TPS used academy, too. I forgot about that deck. This might be really the reason for the ban, and i would support the ban for combo. When i read old articles correctly, they could win in turn 3.

[Kassow-Rossing]

I think the HL Council should take this card up for testing again and I will support their decision 100% because I, for one, have not tested the card in any way and can see it be either really dangerous or more like a Cradle.

[pyyhttu]

Banning of Academy: http://www.magicplayer.org/forum/index.php?topic=14.0
Some reasonings: http://www.magicplayer.org/forum/index.php?topic=31.0

[coldcrow]

Umm. There are basically 2 decks abusing TA: TPS and any kind of Stax. What it does again is increasing the percentage of busted hands/draws. Question is: Does the diminishing fundamental turn / utility of aggro/control validate the increased probability of said hands?
Right now creatureless combo is all but dead. I tried to play TPS at various occasions , but if you barely get a Turn 4-5 kill without disruption there is no incentive to play it. Dreamhalls does marginally better but is also very soft to the good aggro/control decks.

Imho the format needs a major boost in combo, to put aggro/control into place and in return enable true control to become better = unbanning of jar, yawgwill and eventually academy.

[Mythrandir]

My 5 cents (or cards): Time Spiral, Mind over Matter, Candelabra of Tawnos, Memory Jar, Timetwister etc.

this!

But i'm all for testing it, if it's not broken anymore, unban it

[Kassow-Rossing]

Banning of Academy: http://www.magicplayer.org/forum/index.php?topic=14.0
Some reasonings: http://www.magicplayer.org/forum/index.php?topic=31.0

Thx for the reasons Pyyhttu. That just shows there is no real reason why Tolarian Academy should be banned any longer At least not from what the link tells us.

[Tiggupiru]

Yeah! As long as we ban Crop Rotation at the same time, everything is going to be just fine.

In all seriousness, I don't even think you need to test this, but if you go for it, be sure to include Frantic Search in the deck. You know, in addition of the other quite the solid cards mentioned already.

[Helle]

Thx for the reasons Pyyhttu. That just shows there is no real reason why Tolarian Academy should be banned any longer At least not from what the link tells us.

I think your argumentation is biased by a stax-players view.

Playing lots of land destruction and preventing your opponent to resolve spells is not fun. TA both helps to accelerate into such spells and recover faster from them than your opponent does. So you have the opportunity to play Nether Void, Smokestack or Crucible/Waste afterwards to lock him/her down entirly, so he/she cannot resolve a single spell for the rest of the game.

Unlike Vintage, we don't have 4 Forces, lots of fast artifact mana in every Deck and a Sideboard in Highlander to fight such strategies.

Stax tries to remove interaction from the game, just like combo decks do. So, in order not to grow combo or stax any stronger, I'm perfectly fine with the ban. (By the way, I think it still will be absued by the aforementioned cards/decks).

[coldcrow]

But are creatureless combo / stax really that strong? I admit unbanning TA is quite risky and there would be other candidates like Jar or even Ywill which are less abusable.

[Kristian]

I'm kind of split on the topic of unbanning Tolarian Academy. I'm worried that it might warp the format, however it has been almost 4 years since it was banned. Perhaps some testing would be in order. As always, if it turns out not be too broken/awesome/good, I wouldn't mind the ban being lifted. That being said, I have no real clue about the card's potency since I really never had a deck that could properly benefit from it.

[LasH]

I just wanna say some more words about my thoughts:

For several years, the council did ban to powerful cards. It was always comprehensibel for me and i think i agree on all decisions so far.
The metagame did change a lot over the last 4 years. Different people already said the trend: creatures getting better and better.
This background is the reason to think about the banlist again.

1. Creatures getting better and better, but on the other hand, control cards don't.

With the absence of combo and lockdown, aggro lost his natural bad matchup (stone, paper, scissors etc, even if it will never be so one-sided in highlander). This issue did work for several years, because creatures were just creatures and you had only a very limited number of toolbox creatures (just compare viridian zealot to quasali pridemage to understand this thought). That leads me to the point, that its time to bring some combo and lockdown back to buisness to balance out the metagame again.

I do agree, that unbanning TA might be a step to far, since we all remember the brokeness in old days.
But since nobody did play the card for several years with all the new stuff, i suppose to create a "test" month to find it out. For myself, its hard to find players besides this forum, which would accept playing vs my deck, if i play banned cards. So testing would be hard for me. Thats why i ask for this month of unban.  The more players participate, the more decks we'll see and the more information we get. Thats only possible with a time-based unban.

Since there are some more cards affected by this issue (i speak mainly of yawgmoth's will), it would be nice to have more possibiltys to test such cards (since even the council has a real life :-) ). But besides my proposal, i dont know how. Maybe some1 else has more input or ideas.