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.

Very nice write up, @ChubbyRain.

@childe_roland said in February 12, 2018 Banned and Restricted Announcement:

I just want to understand why the restricted card isnt Workshop itself. Doesnt this card singlehandedly enable the problem?

I am fairly new to the format (and I only play on MTGO, not paper), but my overall understanding is that Workshops is a card that is expensive in paper and if it were restricted then that would anger collectors.

I'm not sure how much good restricting another shops piece (say Foundry Inspector, for example) will do in the long run. As others have pointed out, WotC will print more artifacts and eventually something will get printed and run as 4x in the shops deck and we will be right back to the starting point. Long term, however, what happens when this cycle repeats itself over and over again and shops is full of 1x restricted bombs like Trinisphere? Is the only endgame solution to restrict Workshops itself? Maybe a better solution would be to restrict Inspector now and hope that Wizards can have the prudence to not print any more broken artifacts down the line. shrug