@fsecco said in [Free Article] Menendian's Suggested Banned and Restricted Lists (2018):
@maximumcdawg Non-interactive, for me, is a deck that ignore most of what you're doing, except for a few key interactions.
Right, but that's completely relative. A dredge deck can "completely ignore" Noble Fish in the sense that Noble Fish's usual game plan of deploying creatures and grinding out advantage while beating down is not interacting on the same vector as what the dredge deck is doing. A dredge deck cannot "completely ignore" a deck that plans to win using Leyline of the Void + Helm of Obedience.
So either you have an specific, hard to get interaction with it, or you're dead right now. Trinisphere fits that bill perfectly. Either you have Force of Will turn 1 (and only FoW matters) or you're dead.
Again, this is relative. Take Infect. Either you have a way to stop a 1 drop from swinging into you or you are potentially dead on turn 1 or 2. The difference is that there are more decks in the metagame with creatures or ways to interact with creatures, that's all.
In the Trinisphere example, sure, Force of Will interacts with Trinishphere on the stack vector. So does Artifact Blast or Annul, really. You could also use a midrange deck that uses Sol Lands or Spirit Guides to power out 3/4 drops to the exclusion of cheaper spells. Again, the "interactivity" of Trinisphere is totally dependent on what kind of decks it is facing.
We only think of cards that stop decks like dredge as "specific" and "hard to get" counters because the decks running them would not normally do so except for the need to hedge. That's as much a complaint about how those decks are constructed as it is against the allegedly "non-interactive" deck.
Possible Future @fsecco objection: "Don't try to defend Trinisphere, that card is garbage."
I agree, but not based on "interactivity" in a vacuum. Rather, I think the question is: If you create a metagame where decks have to interact on a particular vector, is the resulting format healthy and fun? That's a fair question to ask, and I think it, it's the right one.
So, we restrict Trinisphere not because it is "un-interactive" but because we realize that it leads to a format that we don't like. Games between Trinisphere and Force of Will become coin flips - we don't want THAT much variance in the games, do we? Hypothetical midrangey decks sound like they'd be complete dogs to decks running cheap Vintage cards, which would go under them. That'd lead to a silly Rock-Paper-Sissors game that I don't think we want.
Why do I care? Because the argument about a deck being bad because its "non-interactive" is easy to expand to any deck you don't want to have to sideboard against. Dredge? Non-interactive because I don't want to interact with the graveyard vector. Shops? Non-interactive because I don't want to interact with cost-increasing effects.
See the danger there?