So far I've been discussing this mostly with Team Meandeck, but obviously you guys are very interested as well. I will cut and post my two posts on the subject so you guys can read them too:

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I hope you're saying "wow" because of how closely Forsythe's logic matches Gottlieb's. Somehow I don't think you are, which is unfortunate, but if you actually read what both guys are saying, it amounts to the same thing. We do not errata to fix power level. We only issue errata when cards are so confusing that we are forced to clarify how they actually work. In pretty much all cases of errata, we look at the printed wording and do our best to assess what that wording seems to say and then fix it so the card actually functions in the way the wording seems to imply it should function.

Worldgorger Dragon works exactly the way it seems to work to anyone who reads the printed wording (and knows the rules halfway decent). Time Vault does not. (Well, "did" not anyway.) Kevin seems to grok this logic pretty well ... if you look at the printed wording of the card and try to figure out how it should work under modern rules, you arrive at what both Gottlieb and Kevin wound up with. I could imagine a case that Twiddle should be a good combo with it, but I think the phrase "to untap it, you must skip a turn" is straight-forward enough (in English) that the time counter stuff is called for. I just don't see a case for a wording that supports a Flame Fussilade combo other than "The current Oracle wording must be respected even if it's dumb" or maybe "You shouldn't change Oracle wordings on cards that affect tournaments" which pretty much amounts to the same thing. Our actual policy is to try to keep Oracle up to date as the way we would word cards now if we were reprinting them. (And we always try to preserve the functionality of the previously printed wordings whenever we reprint something.)

Why are you guys so convinced that this errata was intended to bust up the combo when we said the exact opposite Friday, have previously said the opposite, and our actions (for at least the last 6 years) support a consistent policy of using the B&R list to address power-level while reserving errata to address confusion?

Randy

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AH -- good, thank you, I understand your complaints much better now. I'm glad we could get by the "where the hell did this wording come from" stage so quickly and I'm also delighted to see how much faith you guys have in our ability to (usually?) figure out what's in the best interests of the game. Hopefully I explain explain how this too makes sense when you apply the full utilitarian calculus to it ...

There seem to be four basic questions:

1) Who benefits from this decision? (Also known as "Why the f*&% would you do something that you know is bad for the secondary market value of my Time Vaults when the deck isn't a problem?!")

2) Why is the printed wording given such special status?

3) Why now?

4) How do I know you aren't going to do this again?

I will deal with these one at a time but my answer to 1 is going to blur into my answer to 2 and my answer to 3 is goign to blur into my answer to 4.

I like Steven's suggestion of a utilitarian calculus being applied to decisions to make sure that they maximize total happiness once added up across all players. We don't usually do each calculation from scratch, of course. What we actually do is to adopt the policies that we think will maximize happiness in the long run and then make decisions based on those policies. Because our fans have clearly indicated over the years that they like to understand why we do what we do, it turns out that adhering to coherent policies is better than making seemingly arbitrary decisions on a case by case basis anyway. I could defend the TV errata based just on adherence to policy, but that would be too easy. You guys have demanded, and deserve, a more sophisticated answer.

The person that benefits from this errata is the person who does not currently play Eternal formats, but might someday in the future. Think about the next ten years of Magic ... future players are going to discover Legacy and Vintage all the time and when they do, if they discover a bunch of crazy rulings that don't make any sense to them, they're more likely to walk away. If, on the other hand, they can look at the cards and understand what they do, the format will be perceived as much more accessible. In other words, we think synching up the wording of Time Vault with the printed wording of Time Vault is good for the long-term health and growth of Eternal formats. I will grant you that it is bad for you guys in the short term. But I honestly believe the short-term pain is justified by the improved happiness of future generations of players. You can't really think it's good for the format when your opponent asks you what a card does and you answer "You won't believe me ... let's go ahead and call a judge."

The segue into my answer to question #2 should be pretty obvious -- in general, we believe it is good for Magic if players can trust the printed wordings. It sucks that our game requires a giant databse of "real" card wordings that one must learn and it would be way better if people could just look at the card wordings and be confident that that's all the information they need to figure out what happens in a given situation. Whenever possible, we try to make sure that Oracle matches the functionality that a reasonably intelligent player would deduce based on the printed wording of a card. I think this is a tremendously important goal for the long-term health of the game. (Important enough to out-weigh the short-term pain of this TV errata, for example.)

"Why now?" is a question I don't have a great answer to, but I do have an ok aswer. The truth is that we only update Oracle when new sets come out. The details of database management mean we can't realistically implement a change, run it through editing, get Gatherer updated, etc more often than about every three months. So we accumulate changes and release them all at the same time whenever we are adding a new set worth of cards to Oracle anyway. By the time we learned about the TV-Fusilade combo it was too late to get anything into the Ravnica Oracle update. We probably should have gotten this into the Guildpact Oracle update, but we didn't get around to sorting through the situation in time for it. So it wound up in the Dissension update. In my mind, we only really missed one opportunity to do this and, truth be told, I didn't realize how rare our Oracle updates actually were at the time or I would have pushed this issue a little harder in December so it could have been resolved with Guildpact.

I actually think that last sentence implies an answer to question #4 ("How do I know you won't do this again?"). It is extremely rare for Oracle updates to affect tournaments. It's so rare that not only do you guys not know our schedule for updating Oracle, but *I* didn't even know the schedule. I can't give you any guarantee that we won't affect you with some future decision, but hopefully by clarifying our policies and the logic behind them, I have restored some faith. You only need to worry when a card's functionality seems not to match its printed wording.

Randy

Rich Shay won the tournament, with Slaver. It was an all-Slaver finals with him and Anand.

I gave away 24 packs of Russian 9th by 11am and none for the rest of the day. Kevin Cron and I both Top 16ed with our team's Friggorid design. I'm disappointed not to Top 8, but the deck put one in the top 8 and two more in the top 16 ... it was the right call for today and the deck is quite savage. 8 mulligans in those first two rounds for me, and I think I still should have won one of them. Oh well, there's still tomorrow ...

Randy

Answering assorted questions ...

Regrowth is awesome. In this deck it's a very powerful spell to draw *and* it's an amazing Gifts target. I would never cut it from any Gifts deck with access to green mana.

I agree that a better name for this deck probably exists. I called it "Hybrids, Baby, Hybrids" since that is how Toad pitched it initially, but I was also glad that either Ted or Andy added "Meandeck" to the title since for me the whole point of that interview was to give them props.

In theory, the Slaver matchup seems to me to be favorable because you have the same basic control skeleton, but you have threats whereas they have answers. Threats are better than answers in general when playing Magic. Unless the 'Slaver deck can punish you for junking up your manabase, the Gifts-Oath hybrid is just more powerful. That said, I do think Blood Moon would be a beating against this deck. Blood Moon has the drawbacks of being counter-able and blast-able, but a deck running both Blood Moon and permission (like Control Slaver can) can both force down a Blood Moon and also defend it. Someone asked how much more vulnerable this is than previous builds I have played ... extremely. 'Slaver and classic Meandeck Gifts only run 4-6 islands, but the big difference is they can fetch them out consistently. This hybrid build has to fetch out whatever duals match the spells you draw. Sure you could squeeze a third island in, maybe, but that isn't goign to let you fetch them out on turns 1, 2, and 3.

Note that against combo a similar thing happens ... you have fewer answers and more threats so you are on the hook to play more aggressively on average, but you still have plenty of control elements so what you really have to do is listen to whatever your draw is telling you to do this game.

I agree that the deck doesn't *require* white mana, but at the same time I think it is correct to run that Tundra. Not only do you get to board Sacred Ground, which is really powerful, but you also get to sideboard Balance. There is no better creature control spell than Balance and I felt a lot more secure knowing it was only one Burning Wish away. Plus, as I argued before, this deck just isn't built to fetch out Islands on the first few turns like Meandeck Gifts can. Once you put 3 x Duress and 3-4 colors in your maindeck who are you kidding? You just *are* vulnerable to Wasteland. You can add a whole color with just one dual land so you should.

Meanwhile I remain chagrinned that I might have upset the members of Team Meandeck. I have tremendous respect for them and would never have agreed to do this interview if I thought they would feel it was on balance bad for them.

Randy

I wouldn't have leaked the deck if anyone had told me not to. After I won the tourney I e-mailed Steve, offering to do an interview where I gave Team Meandeck mad props for an awesome deck. I knew the team would like the publicity, but I honestly wasn't sure if they'd want the decklist outed. Steven offered to do the interview himself, but since he's on hiatus from Type 1 articles Ted wound up asking Andy to do it instead before Steven and I worked out an article. I told Smemmen I was doing the interview and at no point did he say anything resembling "We'd rather keep the deck quiet." Heh ... it seems like I'm getting all sides of the internet team experience.

Randy