I will start with a proposal for a green anti-aggro-Workshops planeswalker. The key ability for vintage relevance is the bolded one; I didn’t put much thought into any other aspect of the card.

Nissa, Wolf Whisperer
1GG
Planeswalker - Nissa
3
+1: Create a 2/1 green Wolf creature token.
+1: Put a +1/+1 counter on each creature you control.
-2: Move all +1/+1 counters in play onto target creature.
-6: All creatures you control gain first strike and trample until end of turn.

We already have an “anything goes” card design thread. I’d like to start a similar thread that is a bit more focused. I’d like for this thread to be for cards that, if published, would likely result in an improved vintage metagame and improved vintage gameplay.

Improving the vintage metagame means that the card should either reduce the effectiveness of current dominant strategies, or increase the effectiveness of current second-tier strategies. A good litmus test here is to see which cards are a hot discussion for potential restriction. But the effect should not be too violent (e.g., a card that says “I win if you have Mishra’s Workshop in play”).

Improving vintage gameplay means that the card improves the interactivity and skill-level of the game as a whole. The publishing of the card should increase the likelihood that the more skilled player wins. This can be achieved either by designing a card which requires skill to play with/against, or by designing a card which neuters the effect of existing skill-reducing cards. To illustrate, highly skilled players are better able to reason about hidden information, so cards like Gitaxian Probe which reduce hidden information reduce the skill advantage, making it a poor design choice. A card that somehow makes Gitaxian Probe less playable would be a good entry for this thread by virtue of neutering a skill-reducing card.

To put further constraints on design, the card should not introduce power creep. Ideally, the card is not playable in Standard. This makes it more likely that Wizards might adopt some of the popular proposals without worrying about the effect of the card on more important formats.

WoTC essentially maintains 4 different lists: the max-0 list (banned), the max-1 list (restricted), the max-infinity list (basic lands), and the max-4 list (other). What if they added max-2 and max-3 lists? This gives them more tools to achieve their goals.

I would then propose bumping Mishra’s Workshop from max-4 to max-3. Compared to a full-on restriction, it wouldn’t cause as much economic damage to current owners, and would represent a more gradual approach to curbing Workshops strategies.

@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.

@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.

@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.

@smmenen said in [Article] 100 Matches with the Best Deck in Magic:

Actually, Max's article is a devastating argument against the case for restricting Misstep. Restricting Misstep will just replace those slots with other cards that are bad against Shops, so restricting Misstep will have no net effect on Shops.

Restricting Misstep won't make Shops weaker in the metagame.

If Missteps get replaced by Pyroblasts, that indeed will have little effect on the blue-vs-blue match, and also on the blue-vs-shops match. However, there can be effects on other matchups that can theoretically have cascading effects.

Misstep differs from Pyroblast in that it has utility against non-blue decks, some of which might match up favorably against shops. For example, Vintage Lands. Restricting Misstep could make a deck like Vintage Lands more playable, which could force shops to devote more sideboard slots to that matchup, which could weaken shops as a whole.

As it stands, shops decks are effectively able to pack hate against Vintage Lands without using up a single slot in their 75. Instead, they are packing the required hate in the 75 of their blue opponents.

Maybe some sort of synergy with Chains of Mephistopheles?

@ChubbyRain said in Designing a hate card against Mental Misstep, Gitaxian Probe, Gush:

I normally avoid topics like this as it makes little sense to me to speculate on cards WotC hasn't and likely will never print. That said, I have a question for the OP, @dshin: do you believe that printing overpowered, difficult to interact with hate cards for certain strategies leads to more interesting gameplay? Because I don't believe that. It turns MTG into the card game War with better artwork

I agree with you 100%, and I proposed the card I did as a reflection of that principle. I think hate cards should require skill to use, and that there should be good, interesting ways to interact against them. I honestly can't think of many hate cards that exist currently that beat my proposal when judged by these measures.

To illustrate some of the potential decision making - do you tap out to cast your Jace the Mind Sculptor, or do you wait for another mana source to keep your Hate Island live? Do you tap it to play your opponent's Gitaxian Probe when he also has a Mental Misstep in his graveyard, or do you permanently keep it up for that Misstep? As the opponent, if you have Mental Misstep in your graveyard, every one mana spell you cast represents a potential bluff, as Hate Island can only be used once per turn. That's a ton of nontrivial decision points that get created for both players, and the more nontrivial decision points that get created, the less War-like your game becomes. With delve cards or Snapcaster Mage in hand the decisions become even more complex.

By contrast, cards like Grafdigger's Cage, Rest in Peace, or Trinisphere offer no interaction - those are the types of cards that make Magic more like War.

I wonder if you agree with my overriding principle - that printing a strategically-rich hate card that makes it risky to run the blue cards that people are asking to be restricted might improve the metagame and gameplay. Again, not to beat a dead horse, but I think in the past Time Vault and Tinker were real problems - it didn't make any sense for any blue deck not to run them; this had a homogenizing effect on the metagame and made for uninteresting game play. This problem got fixed because those cards ceased to be as effective. And the reason was because of new card printings.