Un-restricting cards
-
I know Joe Dyer did an article about un-restricting cards in Vintage a while back - https://www.mtggoldfish.com/articles/vintage-101-unrestrictable
Looking at the format now and listening to the most recent MTG Goldfish podcast about unbanning cards in Modern, I have to ask about some of the more recent restrictions.
Why are these cards restricted today: Gitaxian Probe, Gush, Narset Parter of Veils, Karn the Great Creator and Mental Misstep
Even Thorn of Amethyst and Chalice of the Void need a second look based on the meta of today. Honestly, I'd like to see a real evaluation on Monastery Mentor being un-restricted
I know none of these card probably will be un-resticted but take a good look at the meta and I am doubtful that the cards I list above will "warp" the meta.
New cards like - Ragavan, HullBreacher, Archon of Emeria, and Urza's Saga are defining the format now. The new cards are so powerful that I really think there should be some sort of re-assessment of why these cards were restricted in the first place.
-
It’s almost pointless to discuss. Everyone has their opinions. My MTG Arena handle is “UnrestrictGush”, but unrestricting Gush for the 4th time might be a classic case of not learning from the past. All we can do as players is just play what our overlords tell us we can play.
-
@lienielsen said in Un-restricting cards:
It’s almost pointless to discuss. Everyone has their opinions. My MTG Arena handle is “UnrestrictGush”, but unrestricting Gush for the 4th time might be a classic case of not learning from the past. All we can do as players is just play what our overlords tell us we can play.
4 Gush WITH 4 Fastbond???!!!! Ah-no thank you.
-
Narset and Karn are incredibly unsafe unrestricts miserable play patterns and extremely forcing, I honestly think unrestricting mox emerald would be better, gush being unrestricted would instantly break doomsday. Chalice may be balanced but also creates miserable play patterns and makes the format worse, 8 spheres is probably too many but unrestricting thorn is probably doable as long as you restrict sphere. Git probe is another doomsday card which also has a habit of greatly decreasing the impact of skill on the game.
-
@botvinik I'm not sure I follow your logic. Ragavan and Hullbreacher are just as bad as Karn and Narset. Chalice was legal for a very longtime. We live with dumb broken cards anyway. If I'm going to get Vintaged as they call it, then I want to play my way and Vintage someone else.
Ragavan is 74tix on cardhoarder. If I could play Gush, then it cost .01 tix and I can be just as broken and dumb as the Blue Red deck without playing cards that I just don't like and I get to play cards I like.
I am over the play pattern argument. I don't enjoy the Ragavan, Hullbreacher, Urza's Saga play patterns but we are stuck with it.
-
@marland_moore
Hullbreacher doesn't cast impulse twice and dodge swords narset does the difference between the two in power level is colossal. Once again chalice is in theory unrestrictable but it makes a worse format so I would vote against. Gush is MASSIVELY better than ragavan in blue decks in general and when doomsday enters the picture comparing the two becomes laughable. -
@stormanimagus And Mystic Sanctuary. It will be glorious.
-
@botvinik I keep reading and listening to people say that Vintage is "fun". It is "fun" because you can do broken things. Then let's do broken things!
-
@chubbyrain1 Until they flash in Hullbreacher.
@chubbyrain1 glad to see a comment from you. Happy to see you still reading.
-
@marland_moore Thank you! I've been more a passive observer right now because of school but I still try to keep tabs on the format and occasionally put together brews that I goldfish in the Practice Room.
To contribute more to this thread, Vintage is going to be a broken format because of the restricted list. It has the Moxen, it has Ancestral, it has Bazaar. Karn, Chalice, and Narset are unique because of how they attack the fundamental aspects of Vintage in a one-sided manner. They are good cards in other formats but they are substantially more powerful in Vintage. Because of the Moxen. Because of Ancestral, Draw 7's, PO, Bazaar, Cruise, etc. They create game states where 1 player is still playing Vintage and the other is playing Legacy with dead cards. And that has an extremely warping effect on the format. Before Karn was restricted, every deck that had fast mana was playing it. Even DPS. The most played creature when Chalice was legal was Ingot Chewer with even LSV playing it in Oath. And Narset created a pretty significant skew towards UGx as creatures were the most effective way of winning the Narset battles.
Unrestricting these cards won't really create a more broken Vintage but it will accentuate current trends. Urza's Saga mirrors already have a play-draw skew as one player gets to activate the Saga twice then grab a Needle or whatever. They would have larger constructs and more of them. Throw in a turn 1 Chalice or Karn and it would be impossible for the player on the draw to win the Saga mirror. Chalice is particularly brutal with Hollow One and Bazaar can pitch redundant copies. That deck was perhaps the strongest in UX when I played. Ragavan can get countered by Misstep but it also is protected by Misstep. It leads to a pretty rough mirror in that you need both the removal spell and enough Missteps to stop the opponent. Decks also wouldn't have to choose between Gush and Ragavan. They could easily play both if they wanted to.
It think of the cards listed, Lodestone Golem and Mentor would be among the safest unrestrictions as they enter a more crowded field of power-creeped win conditions. Mentor's competition used to be Young Pyromancer and that is a card that has become fringe. Witch was popular initially but became a bit outclassed with MH2. I don't think Mentor is as farfetched as you seem to think.
-
@chubbyrain1 The argument that someone is playing the game and someone else is not due to certain cards and play patterns is not lost on me.
I think that pretty much defines modern Vintage. There was a dramatic shift in Vintage when Khans was released and that shift has accelerated with MH1 and MH2. I have had to re-learn how to play Vintage and overall that has been enjoyable.
This latest shift may be too big of a gap for me and I may need to re-assess my level of participation. I have not had fun playing Vintage this year.
Looks like I need to accept Vintage as a meme and just buy into the expensive cards on MTGO and try to out "Vintage" everyone else.
-
I take a fully different stance on this topic and think that we should have more restricted cards, and would be completely content with the format being a singleton format outside of those brave souls who would play a persistent petitioners deck.
It used to be that this could not work because you remove too many of the safety valves in restricting FOW and Leyline of the Void, but I think there is enough redundancy in answers now coupled with the removal of consistency from linear strategies for this to create a healthier format.
Some decks would be lost were this change made, as I don't think PO could work without 4x copies, but I think many staple decks could still exist in modified versions and that a slew of new decks could pop up in a format with less consistency, including linear decks like Sligh/Burn that were simply outclassed in older versions of the format. I even think that it would have the knock on effect of making some of the currently restricted cards less mandatory to most decks, as I can imagine a work where lotus and off color moxen do not compliment the spread of things your deck does or has to cover.
-
@protoaddict I do not think that there is any appetite for more restrictions at this time. I believe allowing some of the "broken" cards to become unrestricted will cause the type of shake up that I am looking for in Vintage.
What are you looking for with more restrictions? The community wants a "broken" format with some level of variance. Adding restrictions increases the variance and creates a sense of that person just got all of their bombs this game - you got "Vintaged".
I want to get away from the sense that someone can just draw all of their bombs and win. Un-restricting cards adds a sense that everyone is playing a broken deck with all bombs, so play Vintage if you ok with that.
In my opinion that is where we are currently, I just want to play with broken cards I like that don't cost a fortune on MTGO.
-
@chubbyrain1 I can't really speak to saga mirrors as I haven't played saga much myself but I actually think saga was great for the format in that it made things a lot more interactive. Saga, and to a lesser extent ragavan, making it more important to interact with permanents on the board helped increase the range of viable decks. I had a really good run with jund during that time because suddenly tinker decks cared about you interacting with their board. I haven't found ragavan mirrors to be that bad either. As a 2/1 ragavan can't attack through anything so even if you can't immediately remove it you can just keep it from attacking by having a blocker. I think a lot of these cards like hullbreacher and Narset that suck to play against in the mirror are really not that bad if you just play a different deck. That doesn't help so much when the decks you want to play are hosed by those cards but I think they have plenty of counterplay. I agree lodestone golem is probably a safe unrestrict in a force of vigor world but since I am biased against shops I would still rather not see it happen. Unrestricting mentor on the other hand I think would just make every non mentor non combo deck completely unplayable.
-
@marland_moore I didn't say my opinion was popular or going to happen, it is just what I would prefer.
I actually disagree with you though that games would degenerate into bombs only. I think forcing singleton actually forces player to play at a higher skill level as resource management (options you have left in your deck) becomes harder to track and plan for.
There are plenty of cards that have redundant effects but that offer different play against different strategies and being able to understand that is going to be the thing that wins you the game more often than not.
The closest parallel we have to singleton is commander, specifically cEDH, and if you watch those games you'll see decks filled with 2 card combos but also extremely smart plays and resource management, tons of counterplay, and games that do not come down to who drew a bigger bomb first but rather games where the winner was the person who was able to best position themselves in the race.
It also opens the format up to things like Dredge decks that use actual mana and cast spells, workshop decks that have to use a much wider range of cards buy then by necessity have a larger range of counter play against decks they did not otherwise have it against, and pure keeper style control decks that we have not had in some time.
-
@chubbyrain1 Give me 4 Chalice and I'll consider it. Call it a prisoner exchange lol!
-
I wasn't expressing much of an opinion on Saga or Ragavan, I was just pointing out that if you don't like the play patterns of Saga or Ragavan (like OP), unrestrictions such as Misstep and Chalice might exacerbate those play patterns. The format could still be defined by Saga and Ragavan, but those decks would then take advantage of Misstep and Chalice.
While the position that "people should play different decks" makes sense on the surface, it doesn't really happen when those mirrors are "decks that run fast mana" and "decks that draw cards" in a format that has been defined by fast mana and drawing cards. I think Narset was in 7/8 decks the Eternal Weekend before it was restricted. People just warped their card-drawing decks around dealing with Narset and that reduced the diversity of the format.
-
@chubbyrain1 said in Un-restricting cards:
While the position that "people should play different decks" makes sense on the surface, it doesn't really happen when those mirrors are "decks that run fast mana" and "decks that draw cards" in a format that has been defined by fast mana and drawing cards.
I think vintage more than any other format in magic is very guilty of presuming that swapping 4-5 cards around in a single list constitutes a new deck. There are decks and then there are broader archetypes and like you pointed out, a there is so much commonality between the structures of these things that very often even decks that are different on paper feel and play basically the same.
Ragavan decks are typically better than lists still using delver, but at the end of the day the archetype of stick a creature, counter and draw is what it is. Playing a different deck within that structure, even if it has totally different match ups, may wind up feeling very samey and to your point, just feel like your playing a "deck that does X".
-
The deck that won the Mox Ruby event reminds me of Team ICBM’s Gush Meloku deck from 2007-2008ish. Just a collection of good cards that don’t necessarily conform to some pre-existing archetype definition. If Gush was the culprit before, I think Saga AND Ragavan are now filling that role.
Looking at spoilers, no one probably thought they were going to play Ragavan and Saga in the same deck, however they actually boost each other up. (Well Ragavan boosts constructs and is by itself an incredible early game strategy)
Well here we are. It’s like we’re nearly playing Workshop and Mana Drain in the same deck. It’s like there aren’t any deck building restrictions anymore that can’t be overcome. Your deck can be Aggro/control/combo all in one and you can play any color with a plethora of cards that don’t cost any mana at all.
-
Can anyone please help me understand why the card Flash is restricted in Vintage?
