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First of all, sure, in principle Gush + Fastbond is still a great combo. So is Dark Ritual and Necropotence. But the question isn’t whether two cards interact well, it’s whether they can support a deck anymore in an actual metagame.
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However, killing Brainstorm, frankly, *completely* murdered that engine.
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I probably would have tried to continue to play GAT with 1 Imperial Seal, 4 Ponder, and 3 Opt if just Brainstorm and Scroll got the axe, but the deck would have been much., much, much weaker.
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With Ponder dead, there is *nothing* in Vintage that could support Gush. Not even GAT can exist. With Scroll and Brainstorm restricted, restricting Gush was completely unnecessary. With Ponder restricted, it’s like restricting Tarpan.
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However, killing Brainstorm, frankly, *completely* murdered that engine.
...
I probably would have tried to continue to play GAT with 1 Imperial Seal, 4 Ponder, and 3 Opt if just Brainstorm and Scroll got the axe, but the deck would have been much., much, much weaker.
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With Ponder dead, there is *nothing* in Vintage that could support Gush. Not even GAT can exist. With Scroll and Brainstorm restricted, restricting Gush was completely unnecessary. With Ponder restricted, it’s like restricting Tarpan.
I have been thinking on these changes for the past few days and this statement really just pulls it all together for me. My problem with what they did isn't that they targeted some format central decks as being too important, it is that they decided to completely gut them into unplayability. Wouldn't it have been more tolerable if the goal was to simply cripple overwhelming strategies to put them back into the pack of tier 2?
For example, Flash is a great card that can compete on the Vintage stage, but cards like Hulk are not. Kill Hulk and Flash suddenly becomes a lot less scary. Flash/Hulk loses consistency and becomes less of a viable option, but you leave Flash to try and find its way into other strategies and Vintage loses access to an otherwise unused tutor.
Scroll has been high on people's lists for a while and restricting it I think was the only good choice for restricting. It cripples a variety of broken blue combo strategies and creates some breathing room for new decks to enter the format.
Really, though, the restrictions of Gifts, Brainstorm, and Ponder seem to indicate that the folks restricting Vintage aren't happy with complex decision trees. They slow down games and make it hard to play top-tier decks. The barrier for entry ends up being pretty high and I have seen players break down at the task of choosing FoF stacks.
