Banning Season I/2012 Announcement as of April 1st, 2012

[Vazdru]

Valid during April 15th, 2012 0:00 CET until October 14th, 2012 24:00 CET.

Changes to the present list, effective 4/15/2012:

Banned:

   * Birthing Pod

Unbanned:

   * Dread Return
   * Life from the Loam
   * Yawgmoth's Will

New Watchlist:

   * Dread Return
   * Intuition
   * Life from the Loam
   * Stoneforge Mystic
   * Worldly Tutor
   * Yawgmoth's Will
 
New Unban-Watchlist:

   * Enlightened Tutor
   * Lion's Eye Diamond


Single card Explanations:

Birthing Pod

At the time when Survival of the Fittest was considered ban worthy, we started to pay attention to cards which allowed with one mechanic a constant card advantage and an access to the most diverse and best creatures, for any given play situation. We came to notice that those mechanics can be quite damaging to our format, especially if one can save both mana and supply bodies for more activations.
Now that we've had Birthing Pod in our format for almost one year, the tournament data, supplemented by player base feedback, has been gathered and analyzed. We've come to notice that Pod has been actively used, mainly in various multi-color midrange builds.
The artifact can be used to build a route for a straight combo kill, as well as a method to ramp up to titans. With its Phyrexian mana, there's no real conventional mana restrictions on which archetype this tutor artifact can be deployed either.
We also noticed a disturbing pattern in which a player first resolving and activating the Pod, gained tremendous advantage (especially with a first turn mana creature forming the starting point for the perfect curve), and after a couple of activations it was very difficult to win against an active Pod anymore.
We have decks that play more creatures than ever before, so having a Pod in an environment where just drawing it into opening hand and then resolving is no longer sustainable, and has to be dealt with in a similar manner we dealt with Survival of the Fittest.

Dread Return

It has been pointed out before, that the original ban reason for Dread Return was the Hermit Druid or Cephalid Illusionist/Shuko interaction, which enabled a player to dump his whole graveyard, and then flashback Dread Return for the kill package (e.g. The Mimeoplasm/Terravore/Murderous Redcap) with Narcomoeba, Dregscape Zombie, or similar to help with flashback cost.
This was just one example, but the question: how strong the Dread Return as the combo enabler actually is, and can it introduce a new contending archetype? We investigated into this and threw the deck against a gauntlet that consisted of the RDW which won the latest GP IX Hanau, plus other well known and played archetypes. The findings were that the combo performed quite inconsistently, so there was no reason in the end not to release the card for community review. As with Buried Alive/Reanimate, the potential for a third turn kill is there (Worldly Tutor, Hermit Druid, then activation), but like with any dedicated combo in Highlander, it becomes a totally different game when an opponent knows that he is playing against just one win strategy and then plays accordingly.
We believe the same is true with this combo, as it can be quite effectively disrupted with creature hate, counters, or grave hate, among others. For the combo to find answers around with its own weapons (hand disruption, cheap anti-counters, bounce-spells), we start to have interaction. The amount of slots this combo eats from a deck is quite big, so there's not much room for alternative win condition, or backup plan.
Metagame today is quicker than it was at the time Dread Return was banned, so we feel it's a safe call for the format to have this card back. If not for the combo and a new archetype it can potentially create, then just as another reanimation spell. Dread Return has wider applications than the combo it got banned for.

Life from the Loam:

Life from the Loam has taken a lot of time to investigate properly, and it is one of the cards that has been on and off from the watchlists periodically, and with its many usages it is a difficult card to analyze. The card was announced on July 1st. 2010, with the following three main reasonings:

-LftL is dominating most of the control mirrors.
-Life from the Loam is destroying two Archetypes: Land Destruction and Discard.
-LftL is making Gifts Ungiven and Intuition way too powerful.

The modern control mirrors nowadays, involve a lot of efficient planeswalkers and creatures, which put on the board pressure. The traditional control mirrors were often won with card advantage, but the times have changed. While the player trying to utilize the Loam's draw engine would get slow card advantage, he would have to at the same time deal with the board in order not to lose. This is a restriction how much the player can dedicate resources on his Loam-engine.
The archetypes mentioned, land destruction and discard, are at best fringe archetypes at the moment and haven't made a dent when speaking about tier decks, so we don't expect them to be pushed out. Life from the Loam has some unique capabilities of its own too, so the argument here goes both ways.
The last argument is half true, as now banned Gifts piles were more commonly used to get other packages and Life from the Loam wasn't necessarily one of them. More potent enabler is a third, or with acceleration a second turn Intuition, but is it alone enough in today's meta, is unknown as the draw engine setup would still require some turns.
Loam-packages with Intuition come in many shapes and forms, and the card advantage engine above is just one example. Now that Loam has been unbanned, it has been also added to the watchlist.

Yawgmoth's Will

Many of the established pure combo decks played in other eternal formats have been able to deliver steady results, but for Highlander it has not yet happened. One of the reasons is that the consistency required to build the fast mana base and find the key cards in time is not that easy while racing against aggro decks, as it would be e.g. in Legacy.
In our opinion the poster boy of combos, Yawgmoth's Will, would not bring much difference, as the framework described earlier would still apply. Building the mana, getting the cards to graveyard and then resolve this while staying alive is not an easy setup. The current pure combos that would play this in Highlander would be few, High Tide and Dragonstorm among others, but we don't consider them very popular, or something to be considered as tier-1 decks at the moment.  
So where this card can then employed? That's an interesting question, and we expect to see the card from time to time in various control builds that can build up that late game explosive turn, like MBC for example.
Yawgmoth's Will has known to be one of the most broken cards in the history of this game, and we respect this by leaving the card on the watchlist until we have the certainty via tournament results.

Intuition

As it was said above with Life from the Loam, the inclusion of the Intuition on the watchlist is to verify whether the fetched Loam-package is something that will get out of hand because of this card. This is the first time when we introduce a ban candidate that is closely tied to another card. With both Intuition and Loam in the format, we are able to gather data and see how it plays out first with both the cards available. Intuition is ideal to fetch Loam-piles, but it also serves in this format as a universal tutor, especially with strategies that involve graveyard interaction. Intuition is also very strong played turn before casting now unbanned Yawgmoth's Will. The power level of the card is not up to par with Gifts Ungiven, but with one less mana cost and little bit watered down tutor effect gets close.

Stoneforge Mystic

The Online 100 card Singleton variant of Highlander has now taken the move with this card, and banned it as can be read from WotC's latest announcement. We have been more patient with the card, mostly because of three things: As a minor effect, Pod is exiting our format, which was often used to fetch this as its first target. More important is that we've seen the format to adapt to this somewhat; Stoneforge has proven not be format defining or dominant, but a very good card and somewhat manageable. Despite its omnipresence in deck lists, players know to fight against this card with artifact and creature hate, both which are currently plenty. Third thing is that we haven't seen much rise of any odd tutors, like Sylvan Tutor to be played purely because of this.
But because other formats have addressed the card heavily, and because we don't expect Stoneforge to get any worse as long as Wizard's continues to print equipments, so we are constantly vigilant with this.

Worldly Tutor

Compared to the last watchlist announcement, we haven't yet moved with this card though we have made progress with certain another 1cc-tutor. Worldly Tutor however, divides the opinions of the council so we are looking what to do with the card, if anything. The combo decks this card support, are reasonably fair in our format and there aren't many aggressive usage patterns for this tutor, outside a second turn Stoneforge Mystic. The much debated and tier-1 status of various midrange/"good stuff-decks", have their tier status for other reasons to blame, and Worldly Tutor wouldn't have much role with that, so the ban would be disputable from the power level point of view. The card is manageable at the moment, but on the edge in a sense that a series of good creature printings and/or changes in meta might tip this over.

Enlightened Tutor

Enlightened Tutor was added to banned list back in July 2009. This was done to correct the environment in which this instant was used to fetch Survival of the Fittest, Back to Basics or Blood Moon, and from artifact side Winter Orb. Enlightened Tutor had to go, as it was felt that these cards decided the games too quickly. As the cards used in the reasoning back then suggest, times have changed (and by we do not refer to the currently played 4c-5c decks and how Blood Moons would help), but there's a strong hypothesis from council's part that the search targets are now probably broader, and not that game tilting. If it's a good or bad thing for the format to have potential tutor on the expense of possible key card banning later on remains to seen, but we feel obligated to investigate Enlightened Tutor closer: what archetypes would it serve best, or even help creating. Highlander format right now has plenty of non-permanent creature tutors, but not so many competitive non-permanent tutors to fetch artifacts or enchantments. Enlightened Tutor could easily fill that gap, but should it, remains to be investigated.

Lion's Eye Diamond

We are opening up the format more and doing so fairly determined with Yawgmoth's Will, but we still want to make sure things stay under control by not introducing too many changes at the same time. While Yawgmoth's Will gets melted in the format and gets as data, we can turn our eye to Lion's Eye Diamond. Could the format bear this card too? We have a pretty good case built of Yawgmoth's Will and LED individually, but not together. So we decided to play things safe for now and take the extra time to see if these could be released gradually. Traditionally outside Highlander, LED has seen usage in explosive storm/Doomsday decks, or in some graveyard utilizing dredge builds, both which haven't made a show in our format, yet. What we do have seen have been combo/control builds of Salvager-Oath, but the amount Oath sees play now, it is doubtful if LED could suddenly make this combo to perform disturbingly well with Emrakul's, and various Show and Tell effects out there.