A radical restriction proposal explained

[Dr. Sylvan]

Last night Steve IMed me and we talked about these issues more. His theme question was whether people are upset about people winning on turn one or is it just that people are upset that there aren't any reactive control decks. I said both, and it forced me to articulate something that's been brewing in the back of my mind for a while.

All, or nearly all, player dissatisfaction with Magic comes from feeling helpless. The most fundamental example is mana screw: absolutely no one is having fun when he's mana screwed, and even his opponent isn't really enjoying it except that he gets a little closer to the T8. I think this is because when you're mana screwed, you feel that no matter how prepared you are, there is nothing at all you can do.

Extend this a little---how does combo make you feel? Helpless! What could be more frustrating than sitting down with an elaborately prepared deck only to be killed before playing a card? The answer, of course, is to sit there locked out of the game, hoping to come back but only rarely able to do so. Hence, why Trinisphere should make you feel dirty when you play it. Combo winning so fast you don't feel you're in the game, and Workshop decks locking you down at a similar pace, both make you helpless and frustrated.

Every Magic player wants to be in the game, to have a chance to fight back, and to prove the cleverness or at least competence of his deck and play skills. I believe that B&R advocacy arises from these feelings, in almost every case. Crucible elicits many of these feelings, because its effect is just like mana screw. It doesn't matter whether it's the first turn or the fiftieth, if Crucible undoes your built-up game state, you feel pretty helpless. Crucible has received less hatred lately because it may be an example where people learned how not to be helpless, but no matter how you feel about it, you must recognize that it probes the borderline of acceptable helplessness. Tendrils of Agony when it came out showcases the same thing: there is no card that can stop it except a fortuitous Stifle, so you feel helpless against anyone playing it. This is made much worse by the suddenness of the entire Storm chain: you feel like all of your hard work comes down to whether you are able to guess which mana source to FoW, and even if you pick the right one you can still be crushed by an avalanche of unfairness that you have no way to deal with.

Yawgmoth's Will may be the ultimate example. People, including myself, wish it were banned because of the way it turns the world upside down. Over a year ago when Long was still legal, I remember Bram (then Kaervek) posting a pic of a game state where he had nothing and the opponent was about to win, but he was holding Yawgmoth's Will over an enormous graveyard, and proceeded to win. The opponent is helpless before it, like The Eye of Sauron, except more powerful. It can either end the game immediately in something like a Tendrils deck, or it can just undo many turns of effort by a control deck's opponent. No matter what, it takes you out of the game and makes you feel helpless.

There is a corollary that many of you probably think is a separate issue: lack of options. When Skullclamp has to be in every deck for it to be good, you have no options. You feel helpless to its power and are compelled to play it. You never got to be "in the game" of designing your own deck. Any time that potential opposing cards are constraining your deckbuilding too much, this will bring out frustration from the masses of Magic players, who generally want to be as creative as they can be, starting with their deck reg sheet.

Of course there is always an answer to any card that makes you feel helpless, usually FoW in our format. The question is whether the existence of an answer makes it okay for the egregious offenders to keep running around causing trouble.

The first turn is just an exacerbating factor in all of this. Feeling helpless on the first turn is much much worse than feeling helpless on the tenth, but the latter will still make you feel like you were cheated out of a game of Magic. It's just more likely that you feel you had a chance to respond than if the only issue is FoW-or-no. So it's not simply that people are shut out on the first turn, and it's not simply that people love reactive control decks. It is that players have different thresholds for how helpless they are willing to feel, and playing the odds of Force of Will does not make them feel like their efforts are rewarded fairly. They don't so much love reactive control decks as they love decks that let them engage in the back-and-forth seesawing that makes for a really good Magic game.

Interaction isn't just a phantom, nebulous and empty of meaning. It is the heart of the game's fun. In Vintage we walk a tightrope because our interaction is hardly ever with creatures, which other formats use as the center of their interactivity. We have to make sure that even though FoW is important, it is not the only card that can save you. And that means giving players a chance to play, and pushing decks back away from sealing the game on turn one.

My most recent article said that I don't have a position. That is BS. I think the power level is too high and should be brought down. This will not make us Legacy---it is a straw man fallacy to suggest so, because there is a very long continuum between the two. It will not lead to some kind of catastrophic cascade of B&R action, even if it does take six months or more to sort out the power shift, because at some point the format will not make people feel helpless. That point will be sooner than later, because there are only a small number of truly egregious offenders.

My specific belief is that Mana Drain, Workshop, Trinisphere, Dark Ritual, and Goblin Welder should all get the ax. I'm sick of the debate and I think everyone else is, too.

[Bastian]

That would be a very interesting change to the format, but even with those restricted wouldn't combo and oath become too powerful then? And then we'd proceed to another role of restrictions because of those decks...

Hmm... does this mean that type 1 has finally reached its critical mass (for the time being)?

[JACO]

That would be a very interesting change to the format, but even with those restricted wouldn't combo and oath become too powerful then? And then we'd proceed to another role of restrictions because of those decks...

Hmm... does this mean that type 1 has finally reached its critical mass (for the time being)?

No, what it means is that most people feel 'helpless,' as Dr. Sylvan put it, because they simply don't play enough.

Why would I say that?? Most of the complaints I see about 'nuke the format,' do this, do that, are from people who don't play enough to see how balanced the format is at the moment, or don't play enough to figure out how to beat the decks or cards that are dominating them.

I wanted to write an article about this, but don't have time this month, regarding the following two posts (one is from my own teammate TracerBullet):

We are the retired competitive players. We are the guys with girlfriends, jobs, kids, and lives.

My biggest dissapointment is that our format has shifted to a new level of haves and have-nots. This is going to be hard to explain, and I might fail, but I feel as though the community is greatly fractured. We have a select few that are "in the loop", assuming there is such a loop, and others that are not. I feel as though I am out of the loop in almost every respect. The group that is "in the loop" is on a team, has playtest partners, has good information, has money and has access to good cards.

Those that are not "in the loop" have no playtest partners or team or good information. They check TMD daily and may goldfish on a regular basis, tinkering with their decks, but they cannot keep up with the rampant shifts in the metagame. They cannot keep up because they have jobs or families or other committments that make it difficult to stay competitive. In the past these people could log on to BD or TMD and stay up-to-date. That's impossible now, for whatever reason. In fact, TMD has made it even harder for guys "out of the loop" to remain competitive. This site is great for beginers, and great for those who are "in the loop", but not great for those trying to keep their heads above water.

Reading Pat and Milton's posts has made me realize that most people don't understand that Type 1 has become a format where you need to playtest regularly, pay attention to what's being developed, and actually think of strategies to neutralize what you expect. For so long, Type 1 had been a format where people 'settle down with their wives and houses,' and pick up their cards every 3 to 6 months for some occassional playing, and maybe even play in a big event like GenCon. It's no longer a format where you can just pick up your cards and expect to do well. It has finally become that competitive format, that for so long, we were searching for.

My point is, you have to put in work to figure out how to beat strong early game strategies like Workshop + Trinisphere, or Volcanic Island + Goblin Welder, or second turn Forbidden Orchard + Oath. Sure, that's a great start, but it is nowhere close to unbeatable. Every good deck tries to execute some type of play, or series of plays, most of them during the early game, that will give them an edge for the next few turns or the rest of the game.

From the posts I've seen in all of these quarterly restriction threads, most of the people who don't play weekly, who occassionally step into a few hours of playing or a tournament, and then encounter a great start from their opponent, think the format's broken. Those are most of the voices that want radical restrictions (not all, mind you, but a great majority I would suspect). I suspect that if these people played more games and matches, and had people analyzing their deck choice, in-game decisions, or helping them play against a certain deck or strategy, they would see that the format doesn't need fixing.

[Anusien]

Do not listen to everyone else's thoughts on the matter.  They are not as good as me so they shouldn't be listened to.

DrSylvan: That was a very very good way of putting it, and I think you're right.  I would also add that most Magic players love the challenge finding the right play.  It's part of the reason why we play tricky control decks with 20 tutors and 15 minute Yawgmoth's Wills.  This is part of the reason why people get frustrated with mana screw because it limits our proper plays, and the same with Trinisphere.  This is probably why the coombo matchup is so good for the combo player and so bad for the control players.  The control player not have any correct play but guess and Force.  But the control player gets the entire experience compressed over one turn.

[Jacob Orlove]

From the posts I've seen in all of these quarterly restriction threads, most of the people who don't play weekly, who occassionally step into a few hours of playing or a tournament, and then encounter a great start from their opponent, think the format's broken. Those are most of the voices that want radical restrictions (not all, mind you, but a great majority I would suspect). I suspect that if these people played more games and matches, and had people analyzing their deck choice, in-game decisions, or helping them play against a certain deck or strategy, they would see that the format doesn't need fixing.

I'm hideously jetlagged, thanks to an early flight this morning, so I still have to postpone my other points until tomorrow, but I have in fact been playing weekly Type One since the beginning of this semester:
Waterbury
SCG: VA
YMG alpha mox
Vintage Evolution (mox event sat, P9 event sun)
Mykeatog's Mox

I'd say I have a pretty decent handle on the state of the current format.

[Kowal]

I've played in a tournament every weekend since october, with exceptions for major holidays and one weekend I was sick.  I also play often enough to realize what's going on, and have enough results to prove I know what I'm doing.

I still think the format is shitty at the moment.

[Smmenen]

With the restrictions that Jacob is calling for, it is impossible to predict the outcome.  Jaco has given it a good faith effort - but the havoc it would wreck would certainly be deep.  I think if you are going to wreck the format, I would start with your list.  It would accomplish many of the goals you seek to acheive, but I would have to ask: is it worth it?  

Dr. Sylvan basically says: look, the problem with Vintage is that sometimes players feel helpless.  

Jaco's reply is basically the issue: you know what, you are right Sylvan - players are helpless and they hate feeling that way - but you know why?  It's not becuase of Trinisphere or Dark Ritual - it's becuase they didn't do their homework.  This format is hard.  It's harder, I think, by a significant margin, to top 8 at a SCG event than to top 8 at a PTQ.  I picked up a deck and played it for less than a week and went undefeated in the first five rounds of Columbus PTQ and then lost only becuase a) in round 6 my desire for 9 fizzled and b) i played the winner of the tournament playing "Teen Titans" for the firsrt time in round 7 and got my ass kicked.  I was almost a lock for top 8 and I never play Extended.  

The point is that the quote from Justin is dead on: T1 is brutal.  Blink for a moment and your dead.  BUT, it is the most skill intensive constructed format.  Decks in this format are enormously complicated to play and the variety of skills that you have to acquire to even begin to win combined with the mastery of your own deck is increasingly absurd.  You can't possibly play a mana drain deck without first acquiring a basic approach to control that you get only through long experience.  But then, you have to learn the naunces of every individual control deck as well.  And when you consider the skill needed to pilot combo - I'm not sure where that bound is becuase I hit the wall.  Even Workshop, the supposedly skill less deck requires technical play knowledge on all the lock parts, but also, and most importantly, a carefully honed sense of risk that you need MORE with workshops than with combo.  Without that experience, you might make a critical play error that costs you the game becuaes you'll be locked under your own stuff or a key card got countered.  Workshops are the riskiest archetype to play.  You have no way to recover if your lock is broken, your draw is horrible, you have no counterspells or Duress, and you have no way to control what your opponent does on their first turn.  

Point is: players are helpless not becuase of any given card, but becuase they haven't tested and thought about how to deal with certain plays.  If you have, you shouldn't lose matches, even if you do lose games.  

It would be interesting to see if the anger at helplessness stems from a sense of vintage history.   People who play Limited probably feel helpless every time your opponent plays that bomb rare they drafted that they didn't know about.

[virtual]

Point is: players are helpless not becuase of any given card, but becuase they haven't tested and thought about how to deal with certain plays. If you have, you shouldn't lose matches, even if you do lose games.

This is an important point in this discussion.  It's part of the idea I was trying to touch upon with my "metagame responsibility" thread a while back, but with a different spin.

if a metagame Isn't responding to a certain trend, but it could, should bannings/restrictions be the thing to fix that, or should it be the metagame's "problem."  What if that metagame isn't of a particular region, but it is actually the global metagame

For instance.... lets suppose that everyone in a particular region likes control slaver or whatever the control flavor of the month is (hypothetical situation)  If the meta-game is flooded with the cards from that, and that metagame isn't adjusting... whose responsibility is it to fix it.  

Note:  Although there may be a bit of humor in my above statement, my purpose is really to get the question in bold answered....