The article is good, and I also like your banned and restricted list better than WotC's. That said, a few points:

(1) Interactivity

You mention that this is hard to define, but you don't actually give us your definition. It feels like you're using the old definition of "interactive = creatures" in your reference to slow and durdly decks.

What makes more sense is to talk about "interactivity" as being a scale that gets set based on the two decks at issue. The question is: what vectors are the decks using for resources or as a win condition? Creatures on the battlefield? The graveyard? Life totals? Cards left in your library? No single deck is ever "non-interactive" in a vacuum. It is only "non-interactive" if it is paired against a deck that is ignoring its preferred vector.

Example 1: Dredge is non-interactive if any only if the opponent is not interacting with the graveyard. If you're full of graveyard-relevant effects, like a in post-side board game, the deck is very interactive.

Example 2: Vintage combo decks are non-interactive if and only if the opponent is not able to interact with or clog up the stack. If you're full of counterspells and/or sphere effects, then the game is very interactive.

What I see too often is people hand-wave the word "interactive" to mean "decks that don't interact using creatures on the battlefield." I think people do this because (1) creatures are central to the design of the game, and (2) creatures automatically interact with other creatures. So, there's a bias in decks towards making sure the creature vector is covered.

So, I'm having a hard time with your discussion of Trinisphere as "non-interactive." As you point out, big mana / midrange decks or decks with first turn countermagic interact with it just fine. Are you not really saying that you simply don't want a format where people have to pack Artifact Blasts or Annul? I'm not saying these are bad things to want, but anytime you ban something as "non-interactive," what you're really doing is saying "a format that interacts primarily on this vector is not a format I want to play."

(2) Ravager

I don't like your reasoning here, which basically mirrors WotC's reasoning that they want to keep restricting the best card out of shops until it stops being a good deck. This sounds like a giant exercise in futility. Every time you restrict the best card, the deck just re calibrates and gets a new best card.

Here's a serious question: can you build Highlander Shops? I'd love to see someone try this out because I suspect that you could. And, if so, that pretty much blows up any idea of trying to control the deck through restrictions.

@maximumcdawg Non-interactive, for me, is a deck that ignore most of what you're doing, except for a few key interactions. 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. Dredge is also like that: either you have GY in your first 2 turns or you're dead.
Uninteractive cards and decks thrive on exploring these scenarios. And the less cards they need to do that, the less interactive the game/deck is. Trinisphere only took itself to make the game uninteractive. Nowadays Shops needs 2 or 3 Spheres to do that.

Annnnnd, cue thread-lock.

@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?

@maximumcdawg said in [Free Article] Menendian's Suggested Banned and Restricted Lists (2018):

The article is good, and I also like your banned and restricted list better than WotC's. That said, a few points:

(1) Interactivity

You mention that this is hard to define, but you don't actually give us your definition.

Intentionally. In my view, "interactivity" is a folk taxonomy, like "race," which can't actually be scientifically defined in Magic, or it quickly begins to break down. I wrote several articles about this many years ago for starcitygames. I won't recapitulate them now, but you can find them easily using google.

So, what I'm really capturing when I say "interactivity" as a factor, is the situations, decks and circumstances that most people regard as non-interactive, to such a degree that it merits DCI intervention. I don't have a definition from that - it emanates from the crowd. And I don't think it can be parsed in a scientifically defensible way.

@smmenen Doesn't that kind of cut against what you are trying to do, though? I thought you were looking for objective and consistent metrics, not mob justice, when it comes to the B&R list?

Related:

@maximumcdawg said in [Free Article] Menendian's Suggested Banned and Restricted Lists (2018):

Possible Future @fsecco objection: "Don't try to defend Trinisphere, that card is garbage."

I don't even understand what this means, so I'll just laugh along. But anyway, I think when people say a deck is not interactive they mean that either they have that specific answer or they just lose immediately. Dredge and 4 Trini/Stax and a bunch of glass-cannon decks are meant to not interact. If they interact they probably lose. Randy's VSL Oops All Spells deck is exactly that. It wants a non-interactive game to just win. If the opponents has a way to interact, they win. I don't think this is hard to see.
You analysis of vectors is interesting and can be applied to a lot of stuff, but it doesn't tell me what's interactive or not - Oops All Spells being an example of an uninteractive deck that uses both the stack and the gy. Anyway, I agree with Steven that this is not a metric that's absolute: it changes from person to person, but in my book the least players are allowed to interact, the less interactive a deck is. Almost ridiculous but yeah...

If you look at recent B&R explanations, Wotc has moved away from the term "interaction" to the term "counterplay".

In the banning of Aetherworks Marvel, Aaron Forsythe says,

The best games of Magic are ones that involve counterplay on both sides.

Now this is still somewhat subjective, but I think it is a better descriptor of what games of Magic should be like than "interactivity". It gets past the argument that "prison pieces are interactive, just not on the stack". It gets past the false dichotomy of "is there any difference between locking an opponent out and countering every spell they play?" (both are undesirable play patterns). It means both players should make relevant decisions in a game of Magic, beyond whether or not to mulligan to find Force of Will or "relevant hate piece X". Now eliminating broken plays isn't the point of Vintage - however, reducing or minimizing them is a reasonable goal. It's what gives me pause when it comes to unrestricting potentially broken cards like Fastbond or restricting cheap interactive cards like Mental misstep.

I like focusing on the aspect of decision making. Ideally, in my opinion, games of Magic should allow both players to make decisions that impact their board and the decisions the opponent is making.

@smmenen said in [Free Article] Menendian's Suggested Banned and Restricted Lists (2018):

@maximumcdawg said in [Free Article] Menendian's Suggested Banned and Restricted Lists (2018):

The article is good, and I also like your banned and restricted list better than WotC's. That said, a few points:

(1) Interactivity

You mention that this is hard to define, but you don't actually give us your definition.

Intentionally. In my view, "interactivity" is a folk taxonomy, like "race," which can't actually be scientifically defined in Magic, or it quickly begins to break down. I wrote several articles about this many years ago for starcitygames. I won't recapitulate them now, but you can find them easily using google.

So, what I'm really capturing when I say "interactivity" as a factor, is the situations, decks and circumstances that most people regard as non-interactive, to such a degree that it merits DCI intervention. I don't have a definition from that - it emanates from the crowd. And I don't think it can be parsed in a scientifically defensible way.

One way to scientifically define interactivity is this: an interactive decision point is one where cheating by looking at your opponent’s hand will improve your probability of winning.

A game with zero interactive decision points is basically a game of solitaire - all your decisions are independent of your opponent’s plans.

Increasing the expected number of interactive decision points, and increasing the associated expected winning probability improvements, would satisfy those wanting more interactivity.

@dshin I'm not sure hidden information is the right litmus test for interactivity. I would consider a complex board state with many deep lines available to both players "interactive" even in the absence of any hidden information.

Well...

It depends on how you define "correct." My preference for restricting Power Artifact over Consult in Old School '96 is a perfect example of a counter-intuitive narrow tailoring approach.

As I said above

Narrow tailoring assumes that there are multiple ways to solve a problem (which is usually true when it comes to B&R policy), and that the means by which you accomplish that end should be that which has the least collateral harms. Therefore, narrow tailoring will often lead to restrictions that seem facially absurd, in the sense that the restriction target is a less seemingly 'powerful' or salient card.

Demonic Consultation is used by a number of Old School decks in Old School formats with Ice Age. It makes Reanimator more consistent in Old School '95, and MaskNaught more consistent in Old School '96, thereby diversifying both metagames. It boosts mono black decks and a number of other decks that tend to be homogeneous as well.

On the other hand, Demonic Consultation makes Power Artifact combo decks too good (and even better in Old School '96, when Force of Will is available). Restricting Consult instead of Power Artifact collaterally harms Reanimator, MaskNaught and other decks unnecessarily. The more narrowly tailored choice is restricting Power Artifact, which is the best thus-far-proven use of Consult in environments with Necro restricted, and which used to be restricted in Swedish Old School anyway.

It's possible that Consult is so good that other decks can become too good by abusing it. If it were proven true, then the calculus would shift, and I'd prefer to see Consult restricted instead. But I haven't seen that to be the case in Old School '95 of '96 tournaments. And, part of my methodology is evidence-based decision-making rather than theory crafting around the power of a super-efficient black tutor. I invite folks to try to abuse it, and make a deck that is too good. If they do, then I'd restrict Consult instead. But until then, I'll go with the choice that maximizes strategic diversity while minimizing the number of cards restricted.

@evouga said in [Free Article] Menendian's Suggested Banned and Restricted Lists (2018):

@dshin I'm not sure hidden information is the right litmus test for interactivity. I would consider a complex board state with many deep lines available to both players "interactive" even in the absence of any hidden information.

I agree that it’s not quite the right litmus test. What’s nice about the test, however, is that it can easily be formalized mathematically. We can assume the players follow Nash Equilibrium strategies (game theoretic optimal), both in the true game state and the hypothetical game state involving extra information - these have associated winning probabilities that in principle can be computed mathematically.

An alternative test that might address your objection is this: an interactive decision point is one where cheating by reading your opponent’s mind will improve your probability of winning. If the players are game theoretic optimal agents, then the two tests are identical. But if you are a human, they differ precisely due to humans’ propensity to mis-process perfect information.

I want to be direct with this: the idea of mathematically formalizing this concept of interactivity might be academically interesting, but is completely not relevant to the goal of trying to make this game fun for humans with squishy feelings.

@ribby It is potentially relevant. Someone might say, “interactivity cannot be defined; thus it is not a valid consideration for restriction decisions”. Demonstrating a definition, however academic, legitimizes the concept as a criterion for restriction decisions. The fact that the definition is purely mathematical shows the criterion can be completely objective rather than a form of mob justice.

@dshin This is a game played by real people in the real world. History in every endeavour involving real people in the real world suggests that more nuance is required.

@dshin quantifiable and objective can be very different things.