[MTG article] Cards are for playing, not banning.

[jcb193]

http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=mtgcom/daily/af95

Vintage is currently ruled by the Unholy Trinity of Mishra's Workshop, Mana Drain, and Tendrils of Agony, but it's stable.

How is this true, as almost no deck needs more than one copy of Tendrils anyway?  Isn't Dark Ritual the third part of the holy trinity?  To me it seems, if any of these cards have to go: Workshop, Mana Drain, Or Dark Ritual, they all have to.  They are all the fastest unrestricted mana enablers left, and each does so in its own way. 

[Limbo]

Isn't Dark Ritual the third part of the holy trinity?

That is probably what he meant. Or at least it is what I thought when I read it. IF the DCI decides to cut Drain and Workshop, they will be probably smart enough to kill Ritual too, not Tendrills. They have shown enough understanding of the format to do the correct stuff over the last couple of years.

But lets not get onto the "Restrict Drain / Workshop / Ritual"-train again. That has been beaten to death over and over again and in the end, the DCI will do something / nothing about them when the time is right.

[sean1i0]

Personally, I think that vintage is ruled by Mana Drain, Mishra's Workshop, Dark Ritual, and Bazaar of Baghdad, but that's neither here nor there really.  I'm really happy that the DCI finally seems to be realizing that none of the above listed cards are more broken than each other.  Outside of the P9, they're why many of us love vintage.  They make this wonderful format that we have now possible.

[Fall-Titan]

Not to mention that with the banning or restricting of these 3 or 4 cards, we lose a big percentage of cards currently being played.... in which case, vintage turns into legacy and we all become big sell-outs... but we dont make money so wheres the fun in that

[Imsomniac101]

There must be a grievious mistake because neither Tendrils nor Ritual are part of the Trinity. Now I'm not going to start yelling restrict Workshop, restrict Drain, but something must be done about the state of combo in Vintage because I can safely say that the format is heavily skewed towards Workshop and Drain. There also seems to be some bias towards Dark Ritual in the format. Players don't mind getting beaten by Drain/Workshop decks, but when it comes to getting beaten by combo you will here them screaming the word restrict like the sky has fallen on their heads. Frankly, I am quite annoyed at this.

[AmbivalentDuck]

They did scream about 3sphere, to be fair.  Further, losing on turn 1 because you didn't mull into a FoW has never been fun.  At least with Gifts or Uba Stax, you feel like you're still playing while you lose.

[Imsomniac101]

That has been discussed to death in the "Limits of Interactivity" articles, so I won't delve into that.

The key to that statement is in bold:

They did scream about 3sphere, to be fair.  Further, losing on turn 1 because you didn't mull into a FoW has never been fun.  At least with Gifts or Uba Stax, you FEEL like you're still playing while you lose.

It is the illusion that you're still in the game when you're actually not. To me, if I had already lost the game then I'd rather my opponent finish me off quickly than waste the time going through formalities.

[wraith985]

Is it really that the format is biased against combo, or is it that there just aren't enough people willing to put in the time and effort it takes to run a combo deck really really well? JDizzle and Smmenen's results (with Belcher and Grim Long, respectively) prove that combo can still win when piloted correctly. I don't think the format is skewed inherently; I think it's all about the pilots who don't really want to (or have the time to) learn the nuances of complicated decks, a trait that I think can safely be lumped in with the word 'combo'.

But yes, Dark Ritual should clearly have been the third 'pillar' of Vintage.