Banning Season II/2012 Announcement as of October 1st, 2012

[Vazdru]

Valid during October 15th, 2012 0:00 CET until April 14th, 2013 24:00 CET.

Changes to the present list, effective 10/15/2012:

Banned:

   * -

Unbanned:

   * Enlightened Tutor
   * Lion's Eye Diamond

Watchlist:

   * Demonic Tutor
   * Enlightened Tutor
   * Lion's Eye Diamond
   * Natural Order
   * Stoneforge Mystic
   * Worldly Tutor
 
Unban-Watchlist:

   * Mystical Tutor    


Single card Explanations:

Enlightened Tutor

As we stated in our last watch list announcement in April 1st. 2012, Enlightened Tutor was banned in 2009 to correct an environment in which the tutor was "used to fetch Survival of the Fittest, Back to Basics or Blood Moon, and from artifact side Winter Orb". We've come to notice during the last few years that the format has evolved greatly from those time, so the statement does not to carry its weight that much anymore. As the format has gotten faster, we've also chosen an approach to ban overpowered keycards than to touch tutors, with Gifts being an exception. We anticipate that Enlightened Tutor's role in the format is to strengthen various combo strategies, in which color white hasn't been playing much role so far, as well as control decks alike. We do have plenty of non-permanent creature, and all-purpose tutors, but not so many competitive non-permanent tutors to fetch solely artifacts or enchantments.
However, the inclusion of Enlightened Tutor to the list of allowed cards comes with a watchlist tag. Main concern we've come to recognize is that Oath based decks get a significant boost from Enlightened Tutor. With lots of creature based decks around, it is now easier than ever to trigger Oath for Emrakul or even for same turn kill if bomberman shell is used. But since Oath hasn't been seen in the top-8 lists much, we're cautiously optimistic to see the impact.


Lion's Eye Diamond

Fast mana has always been bane pushing this game into an unwanted direction, often involving early turn swingy plays to the fundamental turn kills in degenerate combos. However, in this format we believe Lion's Eye Diamond is an exception as setting it up in a graveyard centric manner with big decks is more difficult than in other eternal formats. Thus we're ready to put the card back into test. Latest appearance of the card was back in 2007 in GP3, when the card reached as the only copy the top8 in a TPS build. Note that we're going against the original ban clause here which was specifically to ban LED due to its interaction in combo. So why exactly are we unbanning the card now?
Yawgmoth's Will has already been legal for 6 months, but seen very little play. That has been one motivator for us to push this package further to see if TPS (the main motivator behind the original ban) manages to evolve into a real deck which so far has been missing from top-8 lists.
However, LED introduces some other potential combo scenarios, and that's why we want to keep the card on the watchlist. One reason is the bomberman shell (even more now that Enlightened Tutor re-enters the format) which could enable third turn wins from play with Oath, Salvagers, LED and Pyrite Spellbomb. Another vector is how well Doomsday manages to take advantage of piles in which Lion's Eye Diamond has seen use in Vintage and Legacy. Then there are the few rogue, graveyard centric decks like Dredge and Madness which LED gives an additional boost, but we don't expect them to poise a problem. The coming three months before the next watchlist announcement should tell us where things are heading.


Demonic Tutor

People might think something drastic has happened to the format if one of the untouchables has finally gotten on the list. Quite frankly, we've pondered this move for some time now, and with this watchlist addition want to ignite discussion of the role of the tutors in our format at present, or more specifically, what kind of tutors we should permit, and if we should heed any experiences from other formats.
One well known fact is that the less powerful Imperial Seal is not tolerated in the format largely due to it's availability and price, but Demonic is. From power level standpoint, this is lopsided. We also have evidence that players are willing to splash just for Demonic, but we haven't seen that kind of deckbuilding with other tutors.
With this, we want to challenge the traditional thinking by asking if the format would be better if one of its strongest tutors is dismissed for the benefit of weaker one-mana Mirage instant tutors, or if the tutor policy we're driving is completely wrong.


Natural Order

Tinker for green creatures. While the format doesn't have moxes (and probably never will), we do have several first turn mana dudes. In fact, we have so many of them, that pressure to ban Natural Order grows, especially since it has been seen quite a lot in top 8 lists. We don't know yet what's the standard "recovery percent" if Natural Ordering is achieved in matches on third turn, but judging from the top-8 lists it can't be good. That is the reason why we've taken the card under supervision and determine if something should be done, at earliest in 6 months.


Stoneforge Mystic

Nothing much has changed with this dude, so it's being kept on the list. Main applications for Mystic are still Sword of Fire and Ice and Batterskull.


Worldly Tutor

The same status quo is with Worldy Tutor, mainly due to reason already stated in our last announcement.. Things are now a little bit different as we also have Demonic and Mystical Tutor on the watchlist, Enlightened unbanned and several other tutors undecided. All but one cards on the watchlist currently have tutor capabilities, so we want to give enough time both for community peer review as for the top-8 lists to be collected to show what route should be taken.


Mystical Tutor

Adding one last Mirage tutor to the mix, we've taken seemingly the most powerful Mystical Tutor in to see what are the ramifications hypothetically if Demonic Tutor were to exchanged to Mystical and to spark discussion (see Demonic Tutor above). In comparison to Demonic, Mystical has an advantage in how it can be used to setup miracle cards like Entreat the Angels, Temporal Mastery and Bonfire of the Damned. On the other hand, one has to ask if we really want to have a format in which cards can be tutored at instant speed EOT, prior having preserved the counter deterrent during opponent's turn.


Other announcements:

Council roster changes:

The longest time member of the current roster, Timo Barwisch a.k.a. Malz77 has implied his willingness to step down as the member of the council and make room for others to carry on the torch. We've approached Maqi, who has not only been actively reporting tournaments, but also participating into discussion and showing dedication for Highlander in general. With these changes, we want to thank Timo for his hard work, and in return wish Thomas welcomed to the council.


Unplanned downtime:

Some of you may have noticed late evening (CET) a slight downtime with magicplayer.org domain, in form of standard 404 http error message or alternatively "Domain is disabled" error.

This was due to a human error caused by accidentally dropping the DNS mapping of magicplayer.org's account. It was fixed in matter of hours once our webmaster (derStefan82) was notified about his.