Should Moonfolk be banned in MANA STORM? You decide...

[Mr. Type 4]

So, it looks like we've hit a few cards that are in the "really broken, but not like Horn of Greed" category.  I refer to these guys collectively as "The Moonfolk" and they include a number of guys from Kami Block and the similar enchantment Trade Routes.  Here they all are for you to see:

Decent ones (probably fair):

Soratami Rainshaper 2U
Flying
3, Return a land you control to its owner’s hand: Target creature you control can’t be the target of spells or abilities this turn.

Moonbow Illusionist 2U
Flying
2, Return a land you control to its owner’s hand: Target land’s type becomes the basic land type of your choice until end of turn.

Oboro Envoy 3U
Flying
2, Return a land you control to its owner's hand: Target creature gets -X/-0 until end of turn, where X is the number of cards in your hand

Soratami Mirror-Guard 3U
Flying
2, Return a land you control to its owner’s hand: Target creature with power 2 or less is unblockable this turn.


Soratami Savant 2UU
Flying
3, Return a land you control to its owner’s hand: Counter target spell unless its controller pays .

Unfair?


Soramaro, First to Dream 4UU
Flying
Soramaro, First to Dream’s power and toughness are each equal to the number of cards in your hand.
4, Return a land you control to its owner’s hand: Draw a card.


Soratami Cloudskater 1U
Flying
2, Return a land you control to its owner’s hand: Draw a card, then discard a card.


The really dangerous ones:

Trade Routes 1U
Enchantment
1: Return target land you control to its owner’s hand.
1, Discard a land card: Draw a card.

Oboro Breezecaller 1U
Flying
2, Return a land you control to its owner’s hand: Untap target land.

Soratami Mirror-Mage 3U
Creature — Moonfolk Wizard
2/1
Flying
3, Return three lands you control to their owner’s
hand: Return target creature to its owner’s hand.

Soratami Mindsweeper 3U
Flying
2, Return a land you control to its owner’s hand: Target player puts the top two cards of his or her library into his or her graveyard.



Now, the problem with the bottom three is that they either allow you to get infinite mana with one Hi-tide effect or, in the case of the Mindsweeper, go infinite for a killer effect.  Mr. Nightmare schooled me with that Mindsweeper, and it seemed awfully ridiculous.  At least Trade Routes requires you to have a kill card(although it gives you access to the cards you played as land), Mindsweeper is a two card combo. 

So what do you guys think?  Do any of these guys need banned?  I think combo would still be good, but then the games would be less defined by resolving one of these monsters.  My personal opinion is that the bottom three need to go, and that the others are ok, but I'd like to hear what the rest of you think.

[jpmeyer]

Meloku is a Moonfolk!

[Harlequin]

Meloku is a Moonfolk!

Meloku also is a 1 card winconndition like horn of Greed and Recycle  That suckers out wheather we keep the folk in or not.

Personally I don't like them.  They seem like win conditions that just too easy.  I think the Draw 1, discard 1 should go on the dangerous list.... he lets you filter your entire deck with a single hightide (not to mention he can filter against your lands in play as well).  Clearly extremely powerful.  Even if you only have 2 or 3 cards in hand, you can filter your entire deck up until you find another hightide effect and then go infinite then hit a Fireball or torch or some other win condition. 


Maybe a better solution to the problem is make a maximum of 6 Superduels a turn.  Easy to keep track of on a 6 sided dice, and it would erase some fairly savage/simple combos.  6 is a nice number because it means you can still more or less empty a hand to play one spell.  I think this would curb decks away from easy combo-wins.

[AJFirst]

The last three definitly need to be banned. Breezecaller is borderline, but the other two are just too ridiculous. I like the idea of banning the bottom three and just keeping an eye on the rest, although none of them go infinit or auto-win with a high-tide.
-AJ

[carlossb]

So what do you guys think?  Do any of these guys need banned?  I think combo would still be good, but then the games would be less defined by resolving one of these monsters.  My personal opinion is that the bottom three need to go, and that the others are ok, but I'd like to hear what the rest of you think.

I think the decent ones should not be banned.

About the others, have you considered that maybe they're so broken because there isn't enough creature control in decks?.

Have we seen/tested enough strategies so far to consider that combo decks should be slowed down?


Would it be correct to pre-ban those three cards (or everyone you listed) to make room for more decks to have a chance, or is it that this format is still underdeveloped?

[Mr. Type 4]

Yeah, Meloku is extremly banned already.  As Harlequin said, that guy doesn't even ask for a Hi-tide to be broken, he just is anyway.  

Breezecaller is borderline

Breezecaller will essentially give you the same infinite mana as Trade Routes 98% of the time.  I know that AJ isn't advocating Breezecaller remaining unbanned, but I wanted to make sure you're all aware.  

So far it looks like we have three votes towards removing the bottom three, and I promoted the Cloudskater to questionable.  We also have Harlequin's 6 land/turn limit idea(or any number for that matter, 6 seems decent, though) on the table.  

Carlos makes a very interesting point.  Are the Moonfolk putting constraints on deckbuilding? This is something we would be looking at if we were the DCI and thinking about banning cards, so we should do it here. It is my opinion that they probably are, but I think that's also up for debate.  i think that the format would have a better chance to grow if it was a little bit harde rto combo out (although I'm SURE that combo will still be good post banning).  I also think that combo is the most obvious deck to build in this format, and that people haven't gotten around to trying a lot of other strategies yet.  Does that mean the format is just too new, or does it mean that Moonfolk are putting constraints on deck building?

Does anyone out there think Breezecaller, Trade Routes and Mindsweeper should remain legal? That Cloudskater sounds pretty brutal as well, I'm leaning towards him being banned, too, but I feel that he is slightly more debateable than the others.  

[Mr. Nightmare]

Soratami Mirror-Mage 3U
Creature — Moonfolk Wizard
2/1
Flying
3, Return three lands you control to their owner’s
hand: Return target creature to its owner’s hand.

This guy makes Infinite Storm count/Infinite mana, with Tide as well.  With Ovinomancer, he goes infinite Storm without a High Tide effect.

[Mr. Type 4]

That guy is missed by my "return a land" search on Gatherer.  He is DEFINITLY on the list. 

[Matt]

Trade Routes, Oboro Breezecaller, Soratami Mirror-Mage, and Soratami Mindsweeper should all be banned I think. I am definitely against limiting the amount of lands you can play. Keeping track of extra numbers is a huge pain in the ass, and anyway it defeats much of the fun of the format.

[Jacob Orlove]

It's hard to realize, but Soramaro, First to Dream is a strictly better Cloudskater if you have Tide out. Look at the two side by side (assuming each land taps for 2):

Cloudskate: Tap a land, return it to your hand, draw a card, discard a card, replay land untapped. Net effect: you drew and discarded a card for free.

Soramaro: Tap 2 lands, return 1 to hand, draw a card, replay both. Net effect: your number of tapped lands increased by 1, and you get the same hand-sculpting benefits of drawing and then discarding a card.

If Cloudskate is borderline, Soramaro should be clearly too good.

[Mr. Type 4]

Jorlove is right, HOWEVER, does it make a difference that Soramaro costs 6 to cast?  He gets promoted to questionable for sure.

[Upinthe]

All of the problem cards are blue. Why not just ban the entire color?

[AJFirst]

Yeah, let's make the superduals not produce blue. Basic Island for the win? I think so...

Anyway, nobody's advocating for any of those to stay legal, so I think we should throw them on the list if it remains this way in the next couple of days. Deck's can be more creative now, and thus the format becomes more fun due to innovations appearing.
-AJ

[parallax]

So, the problem is High Tide + Moonfolk = infinite combo. Only Soramaro, Cloudskater and Mindsweeper win the game on their own. The others: Trade Routes, Breezecaller and Mirror-Mage all require one more card to win. Are three card combos really that degenerate in this format?

[Mr. Type 4]

The big problem with the trade-Routes, "infinite mana" Moonfolk is that they also return your lands to your hand, so basically you have infinite mana, and every card you've played as land since the beginning of the game.  You can almost always find a win condition from that point. 

I'm going to let it go for another day and see if anyone else has any comments, but these guys are probably going to get the ax.  I've already taken these guys out of my decks, and honestly, I don't miss them.

                   

[That0neguy]

If all of these cards interact negativly high tide effects, which only produce mana.

most of these cards have at least a semi interesting effect.  And the fact that you can store cards for latter seems like an interesting way for control decks to be able run powerful narrow cards that could make the game interesting.  Combo already has a ton of card drawing that can act as mana excellerants.  Besides who actually likes playing against combo in a "casual" format.

Ban the fast mana not the cards themselves

[Mr. Type 4]

I'm a bit surprised no one has brought this argument yet.  I have weighed this one a lot, and it is a fair argument. 

I think that the reason to ban the Moonfolk instead of the Hi-tides is two fold-

1. The hi-tide effects are symmetrical and are often risky as they would benefit the opponent.  I lost multiple games to Mr. Nightmare because my mana effect helped him win. Also, the Oboro effects are often broken in other aspects, such as Lifegift or Vinelasher Kudzu.

2. I think the moonfolk are messing with the fundamental challenge of Manastorm - Which cards do you play as land?  I believe that these cards make it too easy to not think about which cards should be played as mana.  I think this is ok if you have to actually pay mana to return some lands to hand, but in the case of the most abusive cards here, the effect is essentially free, and it is an awfully powerful effect to be free.

[cssamerican]

To me it seems like the easiest way to handle the potential problems involved with going infinite with lands is by just saying you can only play lands during your untap step. No one gets priority in the untap step; therefore, no one could use all of these abilities to cycle through their deck. Then most of them just become good ways to convert a played land into a playable card in hand. Even cards like Horn of Greed would be weakened because the person playing them would rarely get to use the effect first, and even if they did by the time the triggers resolve you won't be able to play anymore lands that turn to keep the engine going.

It just seems like a really simple fix that keeps the spirit of never being mana screwed intact while making it so you don't have to worry about banning cards.

[Mr. Nightmare]

I think the retardedness of the land is one of the most endearing qualities of this format.  I would rather have the Moonfolk banned than to have the infinite land rule nerfed.  There are so many cool things you can do with unlimited land drops per turn, and I feel like losing that would be pretty detrimental to the appeal of Mana Storm.

[Mr. Type 4]

I think I also agree with Mr. Nightmare, the "amazing plays" that make the format appealing almost always seem to stem from one of two things: You can draw cards which you can play as land, OR interesting abuses of the fact that each land counts as all basic types OR both (like in the case of Sweep).  Although this suggestion is useful for helping us understand the nature of the format we are developing here.   

I would agree that nerfing the land rule would probably make the format less appealing.  Does anyone else have comments to that end?

Right now I think we probably want to ban the Mindsweeper, Mirror mage, Breezecaller, Trade Routes, Cloudskater and Soramaro.  this is a pretty large banning, but I think it may open the door to new, more creative decks.  I believe that Soramaro is debateable because he costs 6 mana, which does make him a good bit more difficult to get online.  Should we save him, or just get rid of him and put an end to unbalanced Moonfolk altogether?

[LordHomerCat]

This format would certainly lose much of the appeal if the whole land-thing disappeared.  Banning those moonfolk seems quite fine with me, my combo deck was much more "fair" anyway (in that it drew a ton of cards and only ran one infinite mana card, Trade Routes) so I won't miss them =]

I recall Doug Linn bragging about his combo-smashing aggro deck, has anyone seen it in action yet?  Can it really keep these monster decks in check?

[Mr. Nightmare]

I believe that Soramaro is debateable because he costs 6 mana, which does make him a good bit more difficult to get online.  Should we save him, or just get rid of him and put an end to unbalanced Moonfolk altogether?

I think He's ok, because the issue with the Moonfolk is parity in mana to activate/lands returned.  You'd need 3 tide effects to get that, and if you have 3 tide effects, you should have won already.

[carlossb]

I would agree that nerfing the land rule would probably make the format less appealing.  Does anyone else have comments to that end?

It would be another completely different format. And I suspect than less funny and enjoyable.

[Mr. Type 4]

I think He's ok, because the issue with the Moonfolk is parity in mana to activate/lands returned.   You'd need 3 tide effects to get that, and if you have 3 tide effects, you should have won already

Soramaros is certainly dangerous, he's just less "turn 1" dangerous than the others. Here's how to break Soramaro (and it only requires 1 tide effect):

Pay 6 mana to bring him out.  This is probably the bulk of all the action you will do in that turn.  Without something like Meditate that costs negative mana it will be extremely difficult to play Tide and then run out Soramaro FTW.  That move requires at least 9 cards. 
Anyway, the turn following Soramaro, you can play out Tide and then begin returning a land to draw, and then playing the card you returned and the card you drew down as land tap 4, draw again etc.  Youll do this until you draw another tide effect and then you have massive mana potential.  This is a bit more complicated if your tide effect has been played down as land, but it will actually work because you'll generate extra cards when you eventually draw Meditate or something similar that draws more than it costs. 

In all seriousness, I think that by that analysis, Soramaro is weak in comparison to the others.  He will be great in the late game, but until then he might be fair.  Thoughts?