I've already put alot of thought into the topic you wrote about. I'm not sure I agree with some of your categorizations... for reference:
http://www.starcitygames.com/php/news/article/13755.html The Values Behind Restriction No a priori logical argument for or against restriction can be made: like all law it is reducible to some value judgment. You cannot separate the value from the policy. The problem, for Vintage, is that the values are sometimes in tension. The decision to restrict or not restrict will depend upon which value triumphs.
On the one hand, the most apparent principle of Vintage is that you get to play with all of your cards. That’s what makes Vintage unique and why it has a restriction rather than a banning policy. This desire to be able to play all of your cards operates most forcefully against banning anything, but it also applies against restriction. Restriction is still, in some way, taking away cards that players can use. Sure, they can still play one, but we’d rather let them play four if at all possible.
On the other hand, there is a need to maintain competitive balance. In sports economics it is often decried that big money markets like NYC can literally buy teams and create a competitive imbalance. In Vintage, cards that are just too damned good can theoretically create decks that are too damned good. Thus, Gush is restricted. In this way, the policy of letting people play all of your cards is trumped by the need for competitive balance.
Yet, there are other values. Most often they are articulated in terms of “fun.” The value of having fun and maintaining fun is what drove the restriction of Trinisphere. Forsythe acknowledged that Trinisphere didn’t actually affect the metagame or distort the competitive balance, but that too many players felt it was too non-interactive.
The truth is that “fun” is the category into which all arguments for restriction exist. A competitive balance is important because it maintains a healthy diversity of deck options. It is not fun to be able to only play one deck. Similarly, it is more “fun” to be able to play with all of your cards. It sucks to have a card you own or enjoy banned.
The problem, then, is that all arguments for or against restriction are ultimately utilitarian: it is about maximizing the fun that everyone has. Vintage, more so than any other format, has a very high tolerance for brokenness. After all, you wouldn’t play Vintage with such egregious mistakes as Black Lotus and Yawgmoth’s Will unless you weren’t attracted to that aspect of the game.
Ultimately then, there is a certain futility in arguing about the restricted list because it comes down to value judgments – something that are subjective. Logical arguments cannot undermine the starting value premise. You can attack a restriction as illogical from a particular point of view or starting premise, but not if the decision was based on a different value (say fun instead of competitive balance). This is why logical arguments for or against restriction are really implausible: they devolve and are reducible to the subjective value judgments that motivate them. One man’s fun is another man’s boredom. And sometimes, the constituent and identifiable elements of “fun” – such as competitive balance (metagame diversity) and the desire to interact – come into conflict. The DCI then has the onerous duty of choosing which value should trump.
At certain times in Vintage history the player base seemed certainly content with the notion that we should restrict everything until Drain is the best deck. Oscar Tan seemed to propound that view (and certaintly Weissman) (there is an Oscar Tan article I’m thinking of but can’t find right now where he asks 12 major Vintage players their opinions on like 12 different cards – there is a table that shows where we all come out). However, the notion that we should restrict until we make Drain best is now seen as antiquated and actually quite pernicious. Mana Drain is an utterly broken card and its dominance is no more healthy than that of any other card.
Where once I was of a particular point of view on restriction, I remain agnostic as to whether a particular value should trump and when. It’s simply too subjective for me to judge. I can tell you when a deck or a card becomes dominant, but my view of fun is going to be different from any other persons view of fun. My bias has always been against arguments that restrict on grounds other than competitive balance and stopping single-deck dominance. The reason for that bias is that I felt that too many Vintage players reasoned from a love for Mana Drain decks rather than what was truly best for the format. I no longer have that bias because the old guard of people who just played Drain decks are gone. The best players in Vintage switch from Drains to Combo to Workshops with ease (see Tommy Kolowith, Andy Probasco, myself and many others).
Dominance and Monopoly PowerThe most obvious and legitimate use of the restriction device arises is the case of a “dominant” or “best deck.” A useful way of thinking about this is the corollary to monopoly power. We use antitrust regulations and laws to ensure the fair competition of business in the marketplace. Similarly, we use the restriction policy to regulate the fair competition of decks in the Vintage metagame. When a deck becomes too dominant, we restrict a key component to restore competitive balance.
Monopoly power in Vintage would be the “best deck” theory of the metagame. We’ve all seen this in the past. Many times in magic history the DCI has restricted or banned cards in other formats to kill off a “best deck.” Thus, a slew of cards were banned in succession to stop Extended Trix. And even in cases in which there isn’t an unbeatable deck, a deck with essentially monopoly power may be so metagame warping that it in effect makes the metagame best deck versus the anti-best decks. Thus, Lin Sivvi was banned in Masques Block Constructed.
The last time we had anything resembling dominance in Vintage it was GroAtog composing about 40% of the market (i.e. the Vintage metagame) from Feb to June of 2003. A single deck making 40% of top 8s consistently across the board is pretty astounding metagame power in a format as large and diversified as Vintage. Gush was restricted to kill it.
As a practical matter, it is almost impossible for a “best deck” to emerge in the sense of really dominating the metagame. GroAtog was one of the most intuitive decks to play ever created and the best. That’s why it was so popular. It was easy to build and easy to play. And it only got up to about 40% of top8s and its restriction was supported by one of the broadest consensus ever seen in modern Vintage.
Original long.dec (arguably the best Vintage deck ever - don’t believe me? See this) was a miniscule part of the market when Burning Wish and Lion’s Eye Diamond were restricted. Even if neither card had been restricted, I think it unfathomable that Long.dec would ever have composed more than 15-20% of the Vintage metagame. And yet Burning Wish and LED were restricted.
But perhaps there has been a culture change in magic and in Vintage in particular. Compared to the early days there seems to be much less enthusiasm for restrictions and bannings and the last seven years of magic featured far fewer restrictions or bannings than the first seven by many orders of magnitude. Perhaps that is a sign of fewer mistakes, and I’m sure that it is, but I think there is also a sense that metagames are sufficiently dynamic that they should be given a chance to adjust first.
Antitrust laws were passed at the end of the Populist era and the Gilded Age in which incredible concentrations of wealth and power were drawing steel cartels and the like together. The government power was harnessed to break apart these great monopolies. In recent years, government regulators and antitrust prosecutors seem much more hesitant to deal a death blow to monopoly power. Threatened with being broken into two companies, Microsoft – the archetypical monopoly – was merely enjoined from pursuing certain practices and ordered to unbundle its software and browser technology. There is a sense among regulators and economists that our markets are far more dynamic than they were a century ago. Today’s monopolist might not be so successful a few years from now (see IBM).
There has been a similar shift in thinking in Magic. There is now a view that it is best for the market to let itself play out. In other words, let the markets adjust rather than exercise the antitrust power to level the playing field.
I sense that there were many times in the last couple of years where some of the major cards in Vintage were almost restricted. In 2004 I argued vigorously not to restrict Mishra’s Workshop. I felt that there was a public clamor and even a demand for it in the DCI itself (I could be wrong about that). No one seriously argues it should be restricted today.
It’s sort of like the tide of public opinion. It reaches a crescendo and a restriction either happens or it doesn’t. So far all of the recent crescendos for restriction have resulted in nothing and there doesn’t seem to be a strong demand for restricting anything. A few months ago there was some call to restrict Gifts, but that seems now, in retrospect, premature. The call to restrict Gifts may grow louder in time and eventually, it could be restricted. It’s hard to tell. I personally don’t think that restricting Gifts would do much since Merchant Scroll can find the single Gifts quite easily and players would probably just play 3 Thirst for Knowledge in the three opened slots. The metagame wouldn’t really change.
The dynamism of the Vintage metagame is so abundantly evident. In retrospect, the restriction of Gush – a clear case at the time, might not have been needed. Stax was just emerging as a threat when Gush was restricted. Moreover, Chalice of the Void and Trinsiphere were still 6 and 9 months from seeing print respectively. Both cards would have wreaked havoc on the small land mana base of GroAtog.
Similarly to the Lion’s Eye Diamond insanity of Long.dec, virtually no one in the metagame played the deck and it was banned just a month after Chalice of the Void had entered the format and three months before Trinisphere saw print. Long.dec wasn’t that popular to begin with – it may not have even been that prevalent as players were powering out Trinispheres on turn one.
Note that this isn’t to say that Lion’s Eye Diamond and Gush didn’t deserve restriction. In regards to Gush, if ever a clearer case for restriction has been made since *I’ve* been playing Vintage and writing about it (I’ve been playing it continuously since 2001), I cannot think of it. 40% market share of a single deck in top 8s for 4 months is certainly enough to warrant restriction if you are ever going to have a viable and workable (i.e. not theoretical) “dominance” criterion for restriction.
There is also a sense that interventions into markets and metagames, while well-intended, could produce unintended consequences.
Consider the restriction of Trinisphere. A statistical analysis I ran at the time demonstrated an actual decrease in competitive balance after the restriction of Trinsiphere, but in a counterintuitive way By taking Stax out of the picture, Mana Drain decks just dominated the month of April 2005. The first metagame shift was to Mana Drain dominance. Fish emerged as the Mana Drain foil. UW Fish was the Waterbury in late April. Then, oddly enough, Stax decks emerged and had their best performing year ever, including winning the Vintage Championship six months later.
The restriction of Trinisphere liberated Stax players to innovate rather than rely on the power of Trinisphere. We saw a profusion and proliferation of Stax variants.
However, the metagame did remain less diverse than before the restriction of Trinisphere. Pre-Trinsiphere, Vintage TPS was (according to Dr. Sylvan’s stats). Here were the Jan and Feb of 2005 breakdowns:
10 Trinistax (1,1,1,1,3,3,4,7,8,8)
10 TPS (1,1,2,2,2,3,3,5,8,8)
7 Mud / Welder Mud* (1,2,4,4,4,6,7)
7 Control Slaver (2,3,5,5,5,7,7)
7 Landstill (2,2,2,3,4,7,7)
7 Oath of Druids (3,3,5,5,6,6,6)
5 Dragon (2,4,7,7,8)
5 4C Control (3,4,4,7,8)
5 Fish (5,5,7,8,8)
That is EXTREMELY diverse. TPS is the only Dark Ritual deck on that list. Yet, after Trinisphere’s restriction, TPS disappeared entirely. It wasn’t until 6 months after Grim Tutor became legal that Dark Ritual decks clearly made up the upper tier of Vintage again.
What’s the point? The argument against restricting Trinisphere was that it would free Dark Ritual decks to dominate the metagame. Instead of making Dark Rituals dominant, the restriction of Trinisphere actually killed Dark Ritual. What actually happened was that Drain decks dominated for a little while and then Fish and Stax entered into a competitive equilibrium with the control decks.
This is just plays into the arguments of lassez-faire, free market economists (of which I’m definitely not, although I’m sympathetic to the better parts of their theory): restrictions (or market interventions) are not only unnecessary, but they produce negative, untinended consequences. Who the hell could have predicted that by restricting Trinisphere you’d kill TPS, not Stax!?
The reason why this happened was this: TPS was a deck built using Force of Wills, basic lands, fetchlands, and lots of Bounce that could survive the Trinisphere assault. It just played land and then Rebuilded and won the game. Restricting Trinisphere caused Mana Drain decks to flood the format and Fish decks became the best answer to Drains (this is why UW Fish won the April Waterbury after Trinisphere was restricted). Once the metagame adjusted and started making corrections, the three clear best decks were Drains, Fish, and newly constituted Stax – the constitution of this upper tier completely drove TPS (and Dark Rituals) from the metagame. Thus, in terms of diversity of archetypes, the metagame actually narrowed after the restriction of Trinisphere.
If Trinisphere were unrestricted today, it would have to contend with Ichorid decks that don’t need to play spells in order to win the game. They can just summon up Ichorids and the like by dredging off a Bazaar of Baghdad.
Vintage has sort of become this free market economists dream of self-regulating market dynamics. It’s self-regulating for many reasons. The first reason its self regulating is that the Vintage card pool is so deep that no deck could really remain dominant for very long. Not only would people begin to attack it as a strategy, but people would also master how to play against it. I would argue that Yawgmoth’s Will, as a strategy, is dominant in Vintage (and did argue that two weeks ago). The reason this isn’t dominance in the classic sense is that there is a proliferation of opinion as to how to implement it. We have half a dozen decks that different wildly in their implementation tactics and in there general reliance on Will.
