[Free Article] So Many Insane Plays -- Exploring Possible Unrestrictions

[Neonico]

That's basically my view of the situation.   It's not clear that Balance decks, particularly if it just helped Workshop the most, and 5c Stax in particular, wouldn't actually -- counterintuitively -- help Fish decks.  Here are some ways that could happen:

1) Workshop decks will be very interested in running 4 Balances, which really hurts Workshop Aggro.  Right now the ratio of Workshop Aggro to Stax is about 2 to 1.   That ratio would invert, in all likelihood.  Fewer Juggies around is only good for Fish.   Slower Stax decks means more opportunities for decks like Fish to win with cards like Energy Flux, etc.   
2) If Worshop decks get a nice little boost, then Drain decks -- and others -- will have to devote more sideboard space to them, which means potentially less for Aggro. 
3) Finally, Fish decks can always answer Balance with Force, Daze, Meddling Mage, etc, just as they do right now.   Fish decks combat Oath with Duress, and the same can be true of Balance. 

I really don't think -- as a practical matter -- that the proprtion of Fish decks as the % of top 8s would really change that much if Balance were unrestricted.  There really aren't any aggro decks in top 8s, even though I've tried to make new budget decks.   And I don't think that Balance would really affect the Budget decks I've been proposing in any significant measure.   Elves still can combo out on turn two before Balance can be played and Goblins can use Vial to topdeck creatures to win the game.   

I really don't see how you can say such things and defend such arguments.....
5c stax played ONE BALANCE only, and has to tutor up for it to wreck fishies, the main difference with 4 balances is the ressource management to play balance, and mostly the fact that a fish deck can make a come back after one balance, it's allmost impossible when you can be balanced a second time 2 turns later....

On a side note about that, your parfait list with 4 balances is kind of bad for me... What's the point of playing 3 swords to plowshares when you have 4 balance and 4 tutors for moat in the deck ?

It's clear that balance unrestrict will kill the format diversity more than it will create it... Lowering drain deck performance by killing all creatures based strategies (Fishes, Gobelins, Taiga, GW, MonoB) is clearly wrong. Especially when it's really easy for drain decks to face a balance metagame, playing cards such as spellsnare (giving up to 8 early counters to face a Fast mindstiwt like balance, being a really good card in our actual metagame)

My fianl point of view about that : unrestrict balance is the best way to keep drain in check, but the worst possible idea for vintage diversity.

[Odd mutation]

Thank you Steve for your interesting and well thought through articles. It's amazing to have someone write with such effort and enthousiasm. Banking on your personal experience and willingness to go through a lot of trouble to obtain meaningful and useful data, you've again succeeded in writing a great article. Even though I disagree...

After reading the posts made in this thread and both your articles on the subject, I'm still convinced that, if there's a problem, it's Time Vault. Not Thirst for Knowledge, not Mana Drain. Time Vault with Voltaic Key/Tezzeret is put together too easily, for too small a mana cost, is not as easily disrupted as other kills and requires no playskill in itself (compared to a Tendrils of Agony kill, like in the Gifts Ungiven decks of some time ago for example). As you said so yourself in the article, Time Vault has unified a lot of different Drain Decks (Bomberman, Painter, Drain Tendrils, Control Slaver). Where diversity used to be, now only (or mostly) Time Vault remains.

I would like to see the effect of the DCI banning Time Vault. If the problem remains, I would be interested in looking at other possible actions and Time vault could be set free again if necessary. I don't have a problem with reversing decisions if they have proven to be wrong/inadequate. i'm also for unrestricting cards that don't belong on the list.
I just don't think you're going to solve the problem, if there is one, with unrestrictions. I remain unconvinced, even after reading all the arguments made by Steve (in his excellent articles or in his posts here and elsewhere) or by others.

Note: of course, the DCI should never make decisions on a whim but rather only after thorough consideration and study. Vintage bannings and (un)restrictions aren't an exact science, even though all the numbers do bear their significance. Statistics is a wonderful science/tool/art if used and interpreted correctly. Changing/forcing the metagame through bannings and (un)restrictions can be dangerous and annoying, so handle with care and only if truly necessary.

Robrecht

[LordHomerCat]

I really wish people would stop complaining about Mana Drain.  The only reason they're doing well is because the best players in the format usually tend to play drain decks. 

Because its the best deck.  The best players in the format are smart enough to recognize drains win tournaments. 

I find this statement to be a downright lie.  If the best players in the format recognize drains are winning tournaments, and thus playing drains, we wouldn't see TK playing Shops, or Fish, or his bastardized U/R deck.  We wouldn't have ever seen Paul play Rituals.  I wouldn't have played GWSx, and you would never play chimpanzee.dec.

I mean to be fair Soly, I think that a lot of the best players do play drains, AND drains are the best deck which leads to even more winning for them.  Tommy plays those random decks because he is bored with just playing Drain control (I've been doing the same recently), not because he thinks that they are the best deck.  Paul played rituals when they were good (and when he was able to beat everyone with them), but now he is playing whatever random stuff he feels like.  If I was trying my hardest to win every event, I would probably not play anything but Tezzeret over and over again, but that's boring and not worth it in small events.  A lot of other people feel the same way.  That doesn't meant that if Ben's P9 were tomorrow I wouldn't play Drains.  A lot of people would because it gives the best chance to do well.  I accept that good players like drains, but good players like the best deck even more and when those are the same, you see way more drains than is healthy.

Edit:  Also, Rich, Europeans have made pretty good use of unrestricted Mind Twist in that strange Euro Control deck.  In the US its unrestriction has had basically no effect, but that is not true overseas where it has made more of an impact.  It is quite a bit less than most of us expect from Balance, but it is a lot more than Mind over Matter or Dream Halls or other cards which are pretty obviously bad.

[Smmenen]

   Also, if drain were restricted, you would see a HUGE surge in people playing Storm combo.

Dark Ritual decks were 7.5% of top 8s in March/April.    A huge surge would be a doubling to 15%.    If Dark Ritual decks were 15% of top 8s, that would be a great thing!  It's very unlikely that if Drain were restricted Ritual decks would even reach *half* the level that Drains currently are, as a percentage of Top 8s.    Which means that would be perfectly fine.   Drains are currently 42.5% of top 8s.  It's very, very difficult to imagine Storm ever being more than 20% of top 8s, even if Drain were restricted.

Also, if Storm decks start doing well, then decks that beat Storm decks will also surge.   Unlike Drain decks, Ritual decks are much easier to silver bullet and are naturally self-correcting. 

[Smmenen]

That's basically my view of the situation.   It's not clear that Balance decks, particularly if it just helped Workshop the most, and 5c Stax in particular, wouldn't actually -- counterintuitively -- help Fish decks.  Here are some ways that could happen:

1) Workshop decks will be very interested in running 4 Balances, which really hurts Workshop Aggro.  Right now the ratio of Workshop Aggro to Stax is about 2 to 1.   That ratio would invert, in all likelihood.  Fewer Juggies around is only good for Fish.   Slower Stax decks means more opportunities for decks like Fish to win with cards like Energy Flux, etc.   
2) If Worshop decks get a nice little boost, then Drain decks -- and others -- will have to devote more sideboard space to them, which means potentially less for Aggro. 
3) Finally, Fish decks can always answer Balance with Force, Daze, Meddling Mage, etc, just as they do right now.   Fish decks combat Oath with Duress, and the same can be true of Balance. 

I really don't think -- as a practical matter -- that the proprtion of Fish decks as the % of top 8s would really change that much if Balance were unrestricted.  There really aren't any aggro decks in top 8s, even though I've tried to make new budget decks.   And I don't think that Balance would really affect the Budget decks I've been proposing in any significant measure.   Elves still can combo out on turn two before Balance can be played and Goblins can use Vial to topdeck creatures to win the game.   

I really don't see how you can say such things and defend such arguments.....
5c stax played ONE BALANCE only, and has to tutor up for it to wreck fishies, the main difference with 4 balances is the ressource management to play balance, and mostly the fact that a fish deck can make a come back after one balance, it's allmost impossible when you can be balanced a second time 2 turns later....

On a side note about that, your parfait list with 4 balances is kind of bad for me... What's the point of playing 3 swords to plowshares when you have 4 balance and 4 tutors for moat in the deck ?

It's clear that balance unrestrict will kill the format diversity more than it will create it... Lowering drain deck performance by killing all creatures based strategies (Fishes, Gobelins, Taiga, GW, MonoB) is clearly wrong. Especially when it's really easy for drain decks to face a balance metagame, playing cards such as spellsnare (giving up to 8 early counters to face a Fast mindstiwt like balance, being a really good card in our actual metagame)

It's clear?   You know this?   Have you been paying attention to the metagame data over the last half decade?    The printing of Forbidden Orchard was supposed to kill Fish.  It didn't.    It's wild hyperbole to say that unrestricted Balance will "kill" Fish, etc.    To say that it's "clear" that such a move would is impossible to say, and wild speculation, at best.    Your post is pretty loose.   

It's really easy to imagine a metagame with 4 Balance were Fishes are doing fine.  For example, if Workshops only make up 20ish% of top 8s (the likely peak for 4balance Stax), Fish decks will still have plenty of Drain decks to prey upon.   

[Diakonov]

It's by no means 'risk-free', just as mind twist and doomsday were not risk free unrestrictions.   If I recall correctly, you (shockwave) oppossed the unrestiction of mind twist for similar reasons.

I did oppose the unrestriction of Mind Twist for, more or less, the same reason. It turned out that Mind Twist was not good enough to spawn a competitive archetype, so nothing was lost. In the end, nothing was gained either, since the unrestriction of Mind Twist added next to nothing to the metagame.

So prior to the unrestriction, there were the following possible outcomes:

1. Mind Twist spawns a new archetype which is heinous, unfun, and hurts the player base.
2. Mind Twist spawns a new, fair, interesting archetype.
3. Mind Twist does nothing.

Now let's think about this: What was the probability of Mind Twist creating a new, playable archetype? I would say that the probability of something good coming from Mind Twist was far lower than the probability of it having a detrimental effect or no effect at all. Therefore, my choice was to leave Mind Twist restricted since it likely offered very little in return, but could have potentially made the format awful for a long while.

I put Balance in the same category, except I feel it has a greater potential than Mind Twist to spawn something awful. I am not saying that it will, but rather that it does not make sense to take that risk without exploring other options first. There are at least 3-4 cards that can come off the list without having to touch Balance. Will they lead to the dethroning of Mana Drain? Probably not, but why not start there?

My $0.02.

Why does it have to be the last card off the list?  I don't really see order mattering all that much.  That there is stuff like Grim Monolith or whatever that is still restricted isn't really important.  The closest analog we had to Balance was Mind Twist, which proved fine.  There is no other card that we could unrestrict (I guess you could Burning Wish for Balance) that would prove anything one way or the other.

So I don't really see this as an argument, but just apprehension.  And as much as people didn't like the Trinisphere era, would you really want a pre-emptive restriction on the card?  Because to me that's what you are asking to happen, because there is not a singular strategy or deck that you are pointing towards.  We really don't know what modern Vintage can do with the card because it never really had the opportunity.  

We don't know if it'll be a positive.  But it could be.  And what exactly be a negative?  Someone plays Balance and and someone doesn't like that?  And what exactly is the future of Vintage if every time a potentially bad card comes down the line, we just restrict it "just in case."  Are we even playing Vintage anymore?

Balance is potentially restriction worthy, sure.  A lot of cards are.  But I don't think it's pre-emptive restriction worthy.

It appears that it's coming down to two main camps:

A.) We are in desperate need of change.  Balance is the most dangerous unrestriction, but also the most likely to combat Control.  It's worth the risk.
B.) We want change, but need to be cautious.  Even though there is a lack of diversity, unrestricting a card like Balance could potentially create an even more degenerate metagame.

So this is all really hinging on a few separate arguments:

1.) How powerful would Balance actually be
2.) How fun would games be with Balance decks in the format
3.) Various degrees of opinions on what constitutes a necessity for change

Just trying to keep things organized.

Fortunately, we can all agree for the most part that diversity = fun & good.

My opinion: I think that we need to initiate some change, but that we should not go into Panic Mode.  I prefer to look at it like putting in golf, with the hole being the "ideal metagame" (which philosophically doesn't really exist, but bear with me). 

On the green, the amount of force you use to hit the ball should be counter-weighted by how accurate you are with your shot.  If you have really great accuracy, then you should just go for the hole.  If you know that you don't have great accuracy, your shot should be more reserved and your goal should instead be to "get closer to the hole."  It's better to use too little force than too much.  If you've ever seen someone putting who doesn't really know what they're doing, you can watch them walk back and forth around the green all day as they keep over-shooting. 

This is what the DCI has done last June, and we need to be careful that we don't do it again.  Again, this hinges on my opinion of how urgent we need to be.  I don't think we are in dire straits just yet, and it is best to take our time with this.  We can always unrestrict Balance afterward if the other unrestrictions don't work.

We do have other options.  Gush, Flash, Ponder, Burning Wish, Library of Alexandria, etc.

[Implacable]

We do have other options.  Gush, Flash, Ponder, Burning Wish, Library of Alexandria, etc.

Seems like some of those cards create new archetypes, and some of those cards facilitate old ones.  Put another way, some are motors, and some are grease.  Unrestrict the motors: let's reintroduce Flash, Wish, and Library, at the least.

[Smmenen]

A.) We are in desperate need of change.  Balance is the most dangerous unrestriction, but also the most likely to combat Control.  It's worth the risk.

That's a pretty clear mischaracterization.    Who said Balance is the most dangerous unrestriction?   There are others that are much more dangerous. 


I don't think it's really that risky, frankly.   The effects are pretty predictable: an uptick in Workshops % of Top 8s, an increase in Workshop tournament victories, and the creation of several sub-archetypes built around Balance.   Result: an overall increase in the metagame diversity by engine.   

[Diakonov]

A.) We are in desperate need of change.  Balance is the most dangerous unrestriction, but also the most likely to combat Control.  It's worth the risk.

That's a pretty clear mischaracterization.    Who said Balance is the most dangerous unrestriction?   There are others that are much more dangerous. 


I don't think it's really that risky, frankly.   The effects are pretty predictable: an uptick in Workshops % of Top 8s, an increase in Workshop tournament victories, and the creation of several sub-archetypes built around Balance.   Result: an overall increase in the metagame diversity by engine.   

That was a very vague statement I made, I should have been more clear.  I should have said, "a potentially dangerous restriction."  (When I wrote that originally I meant in comparison to other cards that have been discussed in a serious manner like Ponder, Gush and Burning Wish.)

I think your predictions of its usage sound reasonable, but the likelihood that we are spot on is probably low.  I know that you disagree on this, but there is a possibility that if it's good enough to take down Vault/Key, then its resulting prevalence could be enough to push creature-based strategies out to the edge of what's playable.  So, if this did happen, then technically you would have more diversity, but in the realm of what's competitive it might not be much different from what we have right now. 

I guess what I'm afraid of is that we might discover a certain build which abuses Balance best, then that deck pushes every creature-based archetype to the outer tiers.  The card is just extremely powerful, and could easily become degenerate.  Why not try the other unrestrictions first, since they don't run the same level of risk?

[FlyFlySideOfFry]

A.) We are in desperate need of change.  Balance is the most dangerous unrestriction, but also the most likely to combat Control.  It's worth the risk.

That's a pretty clear mischaracterization.    Who said Balance is the most dangerous unrestriction?   There are others that are much more dangerous. 


I don't think it's really that risky, frankly.   The effects are pretty predictable: an uptick in Workshops % of Top 8s, an increase in Workshop tournament victories, and the creation of several sub-archetypes built around Balance.   Result: an overall increase in the metagame diversity by engine.   

Maybe it is just me but if Balance does nothing against fast decks like Storm and Ichorid, and Drains are the natural pillar to destroy Workshops, how does your hypothetical situation of Balance not being broken enough to snap the format and best finding a home in Shops solve our problem? Unless you are assuming that people truly are just playing Drains because they like them (and would like playing Balance more than Drains) then it seems to me that it accomplishes nothing but creating another deck that loses to Drains while pushing out decks like Fish and Ichorid (which usually has a crap record against good Shop lists/players) that are naturally built to attack Drains. Either it will help Drains or it will create a beast that destroys our format. Either way I don't understand what unrestricting Balance accomplishes even if you're correct that Vintage could handle it. This becomes even worse when coupled with unrestricted Gush because Shops beat Gush and they were already at 25% t-8 without a 2 mana board sweeper to destroy decks like GAT.

What is the ideal fallout of unrestricting Balance that I seem to be incapable of seeing?

[Purple Hat]

A.) We are in desperate need of change.  Balance is the most dangerous unrestriction, but also the most likely to combat Control.  It's worth the risk.

That's a pretty clear mischaracterization.    Who said Balance is the most dangerous unrestriction?   There are others that are much more dangerous. 


I don't think it's really that risky, frankly.   The effects are pretty predictable: an uptick in Workshops % of Top 8s, an increase in Workshop tournament victories, and the creation of several sub-archetypes built around Balance.   Result: an overall increase in the metagame diversity by engine.   

Maybe it is just me but if Balance does nothing against fast decks like Storm and Ichorid, and Drains are the natural pillar to destroy Workshops, how does your hypothetical situation of Balance not being broken enough to snap the format and best finding a home in Shops solve our problem? Unless you are assuming that people truly are just playing Drains because they like them (and would like playing Balance more than Drains) then it seems to me that it accomplishes nothing but creating another deck that loses to Drains while pushing out decks like Fish and Ichorid (which usually has a crap record against good Shop lists/players) that are naturally built to attack Drains. Either it will help Drains or it will create a beast that destroys our format. Either way I don't understand what unrestricting Balance accomplishes even if you're correct that Vintage could handle it. This becomes even worse when coupled with unrestricted Gush because Shops beat Gush and they were already at 25% t-8 without a 2 mana board sweeper to destroy decks like GAT.

What is the ideal fallout of unrestricting Balance that I seem to be incapable of seeing?

forcing drain decks to realign to deal with a new contender resulting in making them more vulnerable to other strategies.  Balance confronts the strategy of drain decks in a fundimental way by curtailing their ability to generate long term card and mana advantages.  These decks will have to realign themselves to work around that, and hopefully that will open them up to attack along other axies such as fast combo and aggro strategies.

[voltron00x]

I guess I am just failing to understand the arguments in favor of Fish and/or Aggro as a reason to leave Balance restricted.  The idea that Balance will "kill" these decks seems comical - how can you kill what's already dead?  Failing to acknowledge that Fish is currently a poor strategy doesn't change the fact that it is, well, a poor strategy.  It hasn't been winning big events.  It hasn't even been making Top 8s.  Let the shambling corpse that is the current incarnation of Fish finally meet its sweet, merciful end.

In the last 6 Vintage events I've played over the last 4-5 months, I've played 37 matches with Oath, winning 23 of 33 matches with 3 IDs and 1 unintentional draw.  Keep in mind that this is my return to a format that I haven't played in 11 years and that I had to learn the format from scratch.  During that time I've played against Fish 8 times, and have won every time except the 8th (when I had to stare down considerable hate for my deck in the form of Duress, Spell Snare, Force of Will, Meddling Mage, Stifle, and Extirpate).  Granted, this is a good match-up for me, but what I've found interesting is that time after time my opponents have said something along the lines of "I can't even beat Tezzeret / my 'good' match-up, let alone Oath".  Meanwhile, I've gone 6-5 vs Tezz strategies, although I would note that the pendelum is swinging against me as the more Duress / TS Tezz uses, the harder it is for me to win.

If Fish has existed in the past to keep Drain decks in check, it is now failing at that task.  Tezz has too many quality Draw spells and too quick and powerful of a win condition.  Beating down with Bears just isn't going to cut it anymore.  A few months back at Blue Bell, there was a surge of Fish decks - people reacting to the upswing in Tezz players and thinking they could ride Fish to victory.  They were wrong, but it sure made my day a lot easier. 

If Balance is the final nail in the coffin of what we currently consider Fish, then so be it - the deck is already dead and ready to be buried.  Let's just get on with the funeral, shall we?  We all know that Fish will rise again in the future as a meta-game foil to whatever deck supplants Tezz as the dominant deck, and this WILL happen through either B&R changes or the printing of new cards.  Perhaps not as quickly as we want, but it will happen.

Meanwhile, Balance has the potential to invigorate an archetype that IS still relatively competitive and would be seriously strengthened by that card's unrestriction.  Further, people will no doubt explore balance as an engine, creating further innovation.  The more I've thought about it, the more I'm in favor of this change.  I think my previous feelings were colored by the fact that my first competitive tournament deck was a Balance deck back in 1994.

[FlyFlySideOfFry]

A.) We are in desperate need of change.  Balance is the most dangerous unrestriction, but also the most likely to combat Control.  It's worth the risk.

That's a pretty clear mischaracterization.    Who said Balance is the most dangerous unrestriction?   There are others that are much more dangerous. 


I don't think it's really that risky, frankly.   The effects are pretty predictable: an uptick in Workshops % of Top 8s, an increase in Workshop tournament victories, and the creation of several sub-archetypes built around Balance.   Result: an overall increase in the metagame diversity by engine.   

Maybe it is just me but if Balance does nothing against fast decks like Storm and Ichorid, and Drains are the natural pillar to destroy Workshops, how does your hypothetical situation of Balance not being broken enough to snap the format and best finding a home in Shops solve our problem? Unless you are assuming that people truly are just playing Drains because they like them (and would like playing Balance more than Drains) then it seems to me that it accomplishes nothing but creating another deck that loses to Drains while pushing out decks like Fish and Ichorid (which usually has a crap record against good Shop lists/players) that are naturally built to attack Drains. Either it will help Drains or it will create a beast that destroys our format. Either way I don't understand what unrestricting Balance accomplishes even if you're correct that Vintage could handle it. This becomes even worse when coupled with unrestricted Gush because Shops beat Gush and they were already at 25% t-8 without a 2 mana board sweeper to destroy decks like GAT.

What is the ideal fallout of unrestricting Balance that I seem to be incapable of seeing?

forcing drain decks to realign to deal with a new contender resulting in making them more vulnerable to other strategies.  Balance confronts the strategy of drain decks in a fundimental way by curtailing their ability to generate long term card and mana advantages.  These decks will have to realign themselves to work around that, and hopefully that will open them up to attack along other axies such as fast combo and aggro strategies.

So the hope is that Balance makes Shops JUST (as in not a complete wrecking ball) good enough against everything else so that Drains need to change the slots normally devoted to the decks 4xBalance now dominates to dealing with 4xBalance and in this shift anti-Drain strategies now have a narrow window to hope they don't get paired against 4xBalance (or in Storm's case Shops in general) for 8 rounds to have a slightly better matchup against Drains? I'm going to have to be honest here it doesn't seem like Drains will really have to give up that much to combat a fair Balance Stax. Just run a playset of Spell Snares along the Drains/FoWs (which would actually improve Drain's matchup against Fish [and Oath/Stax] strategies since everything Drains care about cost 2) and tweak room for a few Energy Fluxes in the SB poof done Drains go up. Either that or once again, Balance is stone-cold broken and actually allows Shops to take down their natural predator (Drains) in which case we have a worse problem than when we started.

Did I miss something or are we just picturing different outcomes because it still doesn't seem to help things at all from my point of view. I mean at least Gush/Ponder/Burning Wish directly boosts the power of anti-drain strategies.

@voltron: The draw (not counting Gifts/Scroll since they are tutors) engines of Drain decks haven't changed since TfK was printed. Brainstorm, TfK, AK, Dark Confidant, Mystic Remora have basically always been in Drain decks. In fact rewind back to when Merchant Scroll, Brainstorm, and Gifts were all unrestricted. It wasn't difficult at all to design a Fish deck to take down Drains (Slaver and Gifts) with up to an 80/20 pre-board matchup. It isn't that Fish is a bad deck or some kind of stupidly insane draw engine has emerged. In fact the exact opposite is true as Drains have had engines restricted and Fish has had new amazing creatures printed. The fact is that Key/Vault+Ichorid is just too dumb for Fish to be able to spread across and cover all the angles. Invigorating archetypes that Drains naturally destroy while killing anti-drain archetypes is just a horrible idea. If Balance were to solve all the problems and create the diversity we had back in the Gush era I'm sure everybody would be on board with "screw Fish it sucks anyways." However, it seems like it will just make things a lot worse by making Drains better and pushing new players out of the format. Despite what some people may think it is actually really fun taking down a $5,000 deck like Drains with a $400 Fish deck. This is the only reason people play Ichorid (fun+cheap) and the format is only better with more viable monetarily cheap strategies.

[Purple Hat]

your argument that storm would fear playing stax is almost identical to the arguments used when people were talking about restricting trinisphere.  everyone thought storm would run wild since the only thing holding it down was fear of facing workshops.  It turned out that Drains were the primary beneficiaries of the restriction of trinisphere, because it was reasonably easy to tweak TPS to beat workshops even with 3 extra trinispheres.  Balancing someone who's deck is 50+% mana but contains only 12 lands and contains multiple copies of hurkyl's recall...lets just say it's a risky proposition.


Spell snare, while good against balance, is terrible against most combo decks.  If drain decks were forced to move to spell snare then we would have a rise in combo which would create a more diverse metagame.

I don't think stax is the only deck that would play Balance though.  There most likely exists some kind of G/W bazaar deck that has 4 balances in it and is decent enough.  I haven't paid my Smennen tax, so i don't know what he's proposed but it sounds like he's got some untuned concept in his article, and I have little doubt that there is something along those lines that is viable.

[Smmenen]

My analysis of Balance is basically summarized as thus:
1) I identify the two basic conditions under which Balance would be viable in Vintage as a 4-of
2) breakdown those conditions into further subconditions
3) explore design options that meet those conditions, and four mana accelerators in particular are the focus of my efforts: Mox Diamond, Chrome Mox, Mishra's Workshop and Dark Ritual.

[Sean Ryan]

Creative Destruction   

Initially, I thought unrestricted Balance would eliminate aggro strategies and reduce viable archetypes.  After more consideration, and some of the posts here, I agree that we should at least try and see what happens with Balance in the format...just a bit of a pun   Gush provides the precadense for unrestriction-rerestriction.  Why not Balance?

Unrestricting Balance is contentious.  The only way I see this being resolved is to go ahead with unrestriction for a trial period and then evaluate it's effect.  The arguments being made against Balance focus on it's direct impact, but fail to address the systemic indirect effects, which are much more difficult to accuratley predict.

As someone who had much success with fish I am sensitive to the concerns, but doubt it will lower it's performance any more than where it currently is at right now.  Fish as it is currently conceived is forced to try and plug too many holes to be effective across the metagame.  Even if fish dies, there will always be the oppurtunity to design a metagame deck possibly revolving around Balance itself.

 

[voltron00x]

@voltron: The draw (not counting Gifts/Scroll since they are tutors) engines of Drain decks haven't changed since TfK was printed. Brainstorm, TfK, AK, Dark Confidant, Mystic Remora have basically always been in Drain decks. In fact rewind back to when Merchant Scroll, Brainstorm, and Gifts were all unrestricted. It wasn't difficult at all to design a Fish deck to take down Drains (Slaver and Gifts) with up to an 80/20 pre-board matchup. It isn't that Fish is a bad deck or some kind of stupidly insane draw engine has emerged. In fact the exact opposite is true as Drains have had engines restricted and Fish has had new amazing creatures printed. The fact is that Key/Vault+Ichorid is just too dumb for Fish to be able to spread across and cover all the angles. Invigorating archetypes that Drains naturally destroy while killing anti-drain archetypes is just a horrible idea. If Balance were to solve all the problems and create the diversity we had back in the Gush era I'm sure everybody would be on board with "screw Fish it sucks anyways." However, it seems like it will just make things a lot worse by making Drains better and pushing new players out of the format. Despite what some people may think it is actually really fun taking down a $5,000 deck like Drains with a $400 Fish deck. This is the only reason people play Ichorid (fun+cheap) and the format is only better with more viable monetarily cheap strategies.

Well, firstly I'd point out that Dark Confidant was printed after TFK, making your first statement a bit of revisionist history, and certainly Remora is experiencing significantly more play than in the recent past, but that's neither here nor there.  With Ponder and Brainstorm being restricted, legitimate card DRAW becomes considerably better, and my point was that Tezz has access to and actually plays multiple card draw engines.  Look at Paul's deck from The Philly Open 3 - he's got Confidant + Top AND TFK AND Remora plus all the restricted cards.  I'm not sure I agree that the actual win condition matters - and I think this is what Steve has tried to argue in various places.  The shell of the deck is going to attack from multiple angles and outclass Fish whether or not it has Time Vault.  The format was already shifting in this direction - and Steve has shown this repeatedly.  To some extent it is unfortunate that multiple decks (Painter, Slaver, etc) collapsed into this one superior archetype, but that's typical Magic evolution at work.  Slaver and Gifts had specific areas of weakness that Tezzeret - Vault or no - doesn't really have as it doesn't rely as much on the graveyard, and frankly if the deck had to resort to, say, Painter + Grindstone as win conditions, it could do so easily and only be marginally less effective.  For example, Josh P. ran Empty the Warrens at Blue Bell and seemed to be slaughtering people all day with it, as the field is no longer prepared (Inkwell replaces Darksteel, Echoing Truth leaves the format).

I think my real issue is this:  What you're saying is that, despite having access to every non-banned answer card that exists, Time Vault in and of itself, a restricted artifact that can be shut down in more ways than I care to list, is single-handedly ruining the viability of Fish?  That's the part of the pro-Fish argument that I don't consider accurate.

Further, your statement re: Ichorid is an unfair and inaccurate stereotype.  Plenty of people play the deck because it is actually good, especially in this particular metagame that is infested with Drain decks more concerned with getting an edge in the mirror than with combating Ichorid game one.

I think that, more than anything, you're missing the point of my statement.  What I said is that the version of Fish you're supporting - the one that used to be 80/20 against Drain, is on life support.  Pull the plug.  Let budget players play Steve's Xmas Beats.  That deck is, frankly, just Fish with different colored scales.  Ditto the budget G/W.  Budget decks haven't left the format, they just have to look different because their target is different.  It isn't right to say that Fish needs to be protected because its prey is too good and it no longer wins, but rather that Fish needs to evolve into something so that it becomes the predator again.  If you don't believe me, check out the mono-red deck that made top 8 at the Philly Open.  That deck busts out T1 Moon effects all day long and plays Jaya Ballard main deck and actually beats Tezzeret, because that's what it was designed to do, from the ground up.

[FlyFlySideOfFry]

your argument that storm would fear playing stax is almost identical to the arguments used when people were talking about restricting trinisphere.  everyone thought storm would run wild since the only thing holding it down was fear of facing workshops.  It turned out that Drains were the primary beneficiaries of the restriction of trinisphere, because it was reasonably easy to tweak TPS to beat workshops even with 3 extra trinispheres.  Balancing someone who's deck is 50+% mana but contains only 12 lands and contains multiple copies of hurkyl's recall...lets just say it's a risky proposition.

I think Balance Stax would have a significantly more favorable combo matchup than Drain. I think a surge in Stax would be enough to push forms of combo other than TPS (or Key/Vault as the case may soon be) out of the metagame which while may lead to a rise in combo would further kill the diversity.

Spell snare, while good against balance, is terrible against most combo decks.  If drain decks were forced to move to spell snare then we would have a rise in combo which would create a more diverse metagame.

I think you're correct here not just because Drains would run weaker counters against combo but also because Fish (a massive wrench in combo's gameplan) will likely become almost extinct. However, as I said I am quite sure that it won't increase the diversity in the sense that everyone will be playing nearly identical combo lists. ANT and Grim Long get eaten alive by Stax as it is.

I don't think stax is the only deck that would play Balance though.  There most likely exists some kind of G/W bazaar deck that has 4 balances in it and is decent enough.  I haven't paid my Smennen tax, so i don't know what he's proposed but it sounds like he's got some untuned concept in his article, and I have little doubt that there is something along those lines that is viable.

The thing is that Balance is anything but a balanced card in my opinion. I think it will either flop or dominate as a standalone engine. I have serious doubts that it would just create another generic tier 1 deck (as in not THE deck like tezz seems to be enjoying) though I am quite sure it would push certain existing decks back up to tier 1. I mean if Balance were to be unrestricted I'm positive it would take months to perfect a Balance shell to adapt to the changing metagame so nothing we can propose now really means anything. Balance is a much more subtle card to break than say, Channel. Of course I mean to take nothing away from Smmenen's analysis as it is still very useful to show what would happen and I'm quite positive that everyone would start where he did. (though most with less understanding than him of course) Remember, Balance doesn't need to be broken in this metagame, it needs to be broken in the metagame around it.

@Sean Ryan: The problem is that the potential disadvantages of having Balance unrestricted seem to far outweigh the potential advantages. I just don't think Balance would be healthy for the format in terms of diversity even if the card itself is not directly ridiculous. I agree with you that people shouldn't be concerned with the death of one archetype so much as the overall format health.

@voltron: I'll be typing a response right now that sure is a lot of interesting discussion.

[FlyFlySideOfFry]

Well, firstly I'd point out that Dark Confidant was printed after TFK, making your first statement a bit of revisionist history, and certainly Remora is experiencing significantly more play than in the recent past, but that's neither here nor there.  With Ponder and Brainstorm being restricted, legitimate card DRAW becomes considerably better, and my point was that Tezz has access to and actually plays multiple card draw engines.  Look at Paul's deck from The Philly Open 3 - he's got Confidant + Top AND TFK AND Remora plus all the restricted cards.  I'm not sure I agree that the actual win condition matters - and I think this is what Steve has tried to argue in various places.  The shell of the deck is going to attack from multiple angles and outclass Fish whether or not it has Time Vault.  The format was already shifting in this direction - and Steve has shown this repeatedly.  To some extent it is unfortunate that multiple decks (Painter, Slaver, etc) collapsed into this one superior archetype, but that's typical Magic evolution at work.  Slaver and Gifts had specific areas of weakness that Tezzeret - Vault or no - doesn't really have as it doesn't rely as much on the graveyard, and frankly if the deck had to resort to, say, Painter + Grindstone as win conditions, it could do so easily and only be marginally less effective.  For example, Josh P. ran Empty the Warrens at Blue Bell and seemed to be slaughtering people all day with it, as the field is no longer prepared (Inkwell replaces Darksteel, Echoing Truth leaves the format).

I think my real issue is this:  What you're saying is that, despite having access to every non-banned answer card that exists, Time Vault in and of itself, a restricted artifact that can be shut down in more ways than I care to list, is single-handedly ruining the viability of Fish?  That's the part of the pro-Fish argument that I don't consider accurate.

You're correct I added in Dark Confidant more on a whim though it is least run in Drain shells and I hope my point is not lost that there are plenty of viable draw-spell options that make it pointless to directly attack the draw engines of decks. In addition to that a new engine has not emerged for quite a while so logically the engine is not why Fish decks are doing so poorly. The fact is that Vault just seems to be the straw that broke the camel's back in terms of busted win conditions. I think you could accomplish a similar thing by banning Tinker that you can by banning Time Vault. However, as I have stated repeatedly things that answer Tinker actually answer Tinker in addition to being useful against other things while answers to Vault just delay it. I don't want this to turn in to another ban/don't ban discussion though. As for your other comment I agree that Tezz is the natural evolution of Drain decks and the absolutely most optimal shell in a vacuum. However, whether for surprise factor or to dodge hate or just fun people can run other variants and win conditions simply on the back of blue's power. I disagree that if Painter/Stone became THE win condition that it would do anywhere near as much damage as Key/Vault simply because it is infinitely easier to effectively hate than Vault. Simply put whatever blows up Tinker also blows up Painter so you can load up on it without punting the matchup. The stuff that hates on Vault is either far too narrow or vulnerable to bounce.

Further, your statement re: Ichorid is an unfair and inaccurate stereotype.  Plenty of people play the deck because it is actually good, especially in this particular metagame that is infested with Drain decks more concerned with getting an edge in the mirror than with combating Ichorid game one.

I hope I didn't send the wrong message with my Ichorid comments. My first mention of it was to show that there isn't a Fish deck out there that can viably beat Drains+other aggro decks. Before this wasn't really a problem since other aggro decks usually meant other Fish decks. However, Ichorid demands a ton of attention to handle which just stretches Fish too far apart. My second comment was even more far off and yes it is certainly a viable deck. However, I seriously doubt a person goes in to a tournament knowing everyone's sideboards in and out. While it is a metagame call, I think the fact that it is a cheap deck and fun to actually play is what gets it more attention than it's own viability. However, yes it is certainly a good deck that can dominate unprepared metagames.

I think that, more than anything, you're missing the point of my statement.  What I said is that the version of Fish you're supporting - the one that used to be 80/20 against Drain, is on life support.  Pull the plug.  Let budget players play Steve's Xmas Beats.  That deck is, frankly, just Fish with different colored scales.  Ditto the budget G/W.  Budget decks haven't left the format, they just have to look different because their target is different.  It isn't right to say that Fish needs to be protected because its prey is too good and it no longer wins, but rather that Fish needs to evolve into something so that it becomes the predator again.  If you don't believe me, check out the mono-red deck that made top 8 at the Philly Open.  That deck busts out T1 Moon effects all day long and plays Jaya Ballard main deck and actually beats Tezzeret, because that's what it was designed to do, from the ground up.

When I say Fish I don't mean blue I mean it in a much broader sense of any aggro/control deck. My point is that there is too much of a swing for there to be a stable Fish deck out there. Smmenen himself admits that his G/W deck just punts the Ichorid matchup. I don't think the problem is that you can't beat Tezz, its just that you can't beat Tezz without just giving up far too many of your other matchups. I have no problem if Fish is 5-color, it just needs to be capable of taking out the top dog while still being able to live the rest of the metagame. As I stated earlier I don't care if Fish dies, I care about the health of the metagame. If Balance solves all our problems I want it off the list. I just don't think it does.

[Diakonov]

I think that, more than anything, you're missing the point of my statement.  What I said is that the version of Fish you're supporting - the one that used to be 80/20 against Drain, is on life support.  Pull the plug.  Let budget players play Steve's Xmas Beats.  That deck is, frankly, just Fish with different colored scales.  Ditto the budget G/W.  Budget decks haven't left the format, they just have to look different because their target is different.  It isn't right to say that Fish needs to be protected because its prey is too good and it no longer wins, but rather that Fish needs to evolve into something so that it becomes the predator again.  If you don't believe me, check out the mono-red deck that made top 8 at the Philly Open.  That deck busts out T1 Moon effects all day long and plays Jaya Ballard main deck and actually beats Tezzeret, because that's what it was designed to do, from the ground up.

I don't think it matters much whether or not the deck titled "Fish" dies or not.  Every archetype moves in and out of the format.  The problem is that Balance could severely weaken all creature-based strategies, including those that supposedly beat up on Tezz.

I mostly agree with you on Time Vault.  I don't think it is single-handedly the culprit of our situation, but it sure helps.  The main problem is that combo isn't doing so hot right now (I think because they lost Brainstorm), which made room for Control strategies to take over.  It's a combination of great counters, great draw, and great win conditions.  All of them are great, no single one is alone to blame.  If I was forced to rank them I'd say TFK is the worst offender, followed by Vault/Key and then Mana Drain.

I will say that at least with Painter/Grindstone you can sideboard Gaea's Blessing to stop it.

[Shock Wave]

I mostly agree with you on Time Vault.  I don't think it is single-handedly the culprit of our situation, but it sure helps.  The main problem is that combo isn't doing so hot right now (I think because they lost Brainstorm), which made room for Control strategies to take over.  It's a combination of great counters, great draw, and great win conditions.  All of them are great, no single one is alone to blame.  If I was forced to rank them I'd say TFK is the worst offender, followed by Vault/Key and then Mana Drain.

I strongly disagree that Key/Vault is anything other than the main culprit for the current circumstances. It is not the only problem, but it is far and away the major reason that control is so dominant right now. It is unfair that control can now combo you out even faster than Meandeck Gifts. With all the tutoring and fast mana, control can too easily assemble the combo. Why bother playing combo, when you can play control and combo out at your leisure? There is no need to try to go all-in with a combo deck when you can play an archetype that has both the resiliency of a classic draw/control deck and a brutally efficient combo finish. TFK is a problem? It is an excellent draw spell, but it does not warp metagames. Nobody was complaining about TFK before the advent of Key/Vault. I think it is about time we concede that Time Vault has had a detrimental impact on the metagame, beyond what many had predicted. It is natural for Drain decks to be very powerful, but for them to be as dominant as they currently are is unacceptable, and a direct result of recent changes we have made to the B&R list.

Let me ask this: Since Time Vault was "changed", is it conceivable that it could be returned to the way it was before, or possibly banned, or are these things that the powers that be no longer consider?

[voltron00x]

I think that, more than anything, you're missing the point of my statement.  What I said is that the version of Fish you're supporting - the one that used to be 80/20 against Drain, is on life support.  Pull the plug.  Let budget players play Steve's Xmas Beats.  That deck is, frankly, just Fish with different colored scales.  Ditto the budget G/W.  Budget decks haven't left the format, they just have to look different because their target is different.  It isn't right to say that Fish needs to be protected because its prey is too good and it no longer wins, but rather that Fish needs to evolve into something so that it becomes the predator again.  If you don't believe me, check out the mono-red deck that made top 8 at the Philly Open.  That deck busts out T1 Moon effects all day long and plays Jaya Ballard main deck and actually beats Tezzeret, because that's what it was designed to do, from the ground up.

I don't think it matters much whether or not the deck titled "Fish" dies or not.  Every archetype moves in and out of the format.  The problem is that Balance could severely weaken all creature-based strategies, including those that supposedly beat up on Tezz.

I mostly agree with you on Time Vault.  I don't think it is single-handedly the culprit of our situation, but it sure helps.  The main problem is that combo isn't doing so hot right now (I think because they lost Brainstorm), which made room for Control strategies to take over.  It's a combination of great counters, great draw, and great win conditions.  All of them are great, no single one is alone to blame.  If I was forced to rank them I'd say TFK is the worst offender, followed by Vault/Key and then Mana Drain.

I will say that at least with Painter/Grindstone you can sideboard Gaea's Blessing to stop it.

Granted, but Tezz can always SB in Extract, or Stifle, or the Tormod's Crypt / Relic that is already in the SB for the Ichorid match-up, and still win easily through Gaea's Blessing...  or simply kill you with Inkwell or Tezz's ultimate.  This isn't so different than right now, just as I can SB into Pithing Needle and name Time Vault.  That doesn't protect me from Inkwell nor does it stop Tezzeret's ultimate ability.  Both combos are vulnerable to Krosan Grip, but Tezz runs Duress and can play around this, too.  The main difference is just the minimal mana investment of vault + key.  Further, Painter / Grindstone can play up to 4x of both pieces.

Also, we know what Balance did to creature decks in the past... let's see what it does now that Spell Snare, Meddling Mage, and Thoughtseize / Duress / Cabal Therapy + Extirpate, etc etc all exist, and furthermore how the format reacts.  A Null Rod / Moon based creature deck may still be able to beat Balance.  If it is proven that Balance is still too good, its nothing that can't be undone.  We're not talking about a card that has considerable value, at least.  I would imagine dealers would be happy if Balance became legal as a 4-of.  

[FlyFlySideOfFry]

I think that, more than anything, you're missing the point of my statement.  What I said is that the version of Fish you're supporting - the one that used to be 80/20 against Drain, is on life support.  Pull the plug.  Let budget players play Steve's Xmas Beats.  That deck is, frankly, just Fish with different colored scales.  Ditto the budget G/W.  Budget decks haven't left the format, they just have to look different because their target is different.  It isn't right to say that Fish needs to be protected because its prey is too good and it no longer wins, but rather that Fish needs to evolve into something so that it becomes the predator again.  If you don't believe me, check out the mono-red deck that made top 8 at the Philly Open.  That deck busts out T1 Moon effects all day long and plays Jaya Ballard main deck and actually beats Tezzeret, because that's what it was designed to do, from the ground up.

I don't think it matters much whether or not the deck titled "Fish" dies or not.  Every archetype moves in and out of the format.  The problem is that Balance could severely weaken all creature-based strategies, including those that supposedly beat up on Tezz.

I mostly agree with you on Time Vault.  I don't think it is single-handedly the culprit of our situation, but it sure helps.  The main problem is that combo isn't doing so hot right now (I think because they lost Brainstorm), which made room for Control strategies to take over.  It's a combination of great counters, great draw, and great win conditions.  All of them are great, no single one is alone to blame.  If I was forced to rank them I'd say TFK is the worst offender, followed by Vault/Key and then Mana Drain.

I will say that at least with Painter/Grindstone you can sideboard Gaea's Blessing to stop it.

Granted, but Tezz can always SB in Extract, or Stifle, or the Tormod's Crypt / Relic that is already in the SB for the Ichorid match-up, and still win easily through Gaea's Blessing...  or simply kill you with Inkwell or Tezz's ultimate.  This isn't so different than right now, just as I can SB into Pithing Needle and name Time Vault.  That doesn't protect me from Inkwell nor does it stop Tezzeret's ultimate ability.  Both combos are vulnerable to Krosan Grip, but Tezz runs Duress and can play around this, too.  The main difference is just the minimal mana investment of vault + key.  Further, Painter / Grindstone can play up to 4x of both pieces.

Also, we know what Balance did to creature decks in the past... let's see what it does now that Spell Snare, Meddling Mage, and Thoughtseize / Duress / Cabal Therapy + Extirpate, etc etc all exist, and furthermore how the format reacts.  A Null Rod / Moon based creature deck may still be able to beat Balance.  If it is proven that Balance is still too good, its nothing that can't be undone.  We're not talking about a card that has considerable value, at least.  I would imagine dealers would be happy if Balance became legal as a 4-of.  

You really don't see the difference between a card that you have to draw+cast+resolve+keep on the table and a card that you don't need to draw? Or a card that has an activated ability and a card that has an activated ability+is a creature+costs more? By your logic TfK and Dark Confidant are almost as good as Ancestral Recall. I mean Painter/Stone now needs to give up 4+ deck slots and that still only answers 1 Blessing. At a 4:1 ratio I'll just board in 4 Blessings and you just lost your whole sideboard or you lost a win condition without me even having to try. Even assuming I don't run Blessing lets say maindeck I can now run a ton of Diabolic Edict effects and that takes out 2/3 of your win conditions while still being good against Oath/aggro decks or a playset of Rebuilds for Shops also. You can't do that with Vault because it is 100x better.

Fish has enough problems as it is why would you unrestrict another card that rapes Fish if it doesn't solve the problem in the current metagame? I mean as far as I can tell we may as well unrestrict LED and we'll have an equally sick format as with unrestricting Balance.

[voltron00x]

I think that, more than anything, you're missing the point of my statement.  What I said is that the version of Fish you're supporting - the one that used to be 80/20 against Drain, is on life support.  Pull the plug.  Let budget players play Steve's Xmas Beats.  That deck is, frankly, just Fish with different colored scales.  Ditto the budget G/W.  Budget decks haven't left the format, they just have to look different because their target is different.  It isn't right to say that Fish needs to be protected because its prey is too good and it no longer wins, but rather that Fish needs to evolve into something so that it becomes the predator again.  If you don't believe me, check out the mono-red deck that made top 8 at the Philly Open.  That deck busts out T1 Moon effects all day long and plays Jaya Ballard main deck and actually beats Tezzeret, because that's what it was designed to do, from the ground up.

I don't think it matters much whether or not the deck titled "Fish" dies or not.  Every archetype moves in and out of the format.  The problem is that Balance could severely weaken all creature-based strategies, including those that supposedly beat up on Tezz.

I mostly agree with you on Time Vault.  I don't think it is single-handedly the culprit of our situation, but it sure helps.  The main problem is that combo isn't doing so hot right now (I think because they lost Brainstorm), which made room for Control strategies to take over.  It's a combination of great counters, great draw, and great win conditions.  All of them are great, no single one is alone to blame.  If I was forced to rank them I'd say TFK is the worst offender, followed by Vault/Key and then Mana Drain.

I will say that at least with Painter/Grindstone you can sideboard Gaea's Blessing to stop it.

Granted, but Tezz can always SB in Extract, or Stifle, or the Tormod's Crypt / Relic that is already in the SB for the Ichorid match-up, and still win easily through Gaea's Blessing...  or simply kill you with Inkwell or Tezz's ultimate.  This isn't so different than right now, just as I can SB into Pithing Needle and name Time Vault.  That doesn't protect me from Inkwell nor does it stop Tezzeret's ultimate ability.  Both combos are vulnerable to Krosan Grip, but Tezz runs Duress and can play around this, too.  The main difference is just the minimal mana investment of vault + key.  Further, Painter / Grindstone can play up to 4x of both pieces.

Also, we know what Balance did to creature decks in the past... let's see what it does now that Spell Snare, Meddling Mage, and Thoughtseize / Duress / Cabal Therapy + Extirpate, etc etc all exist, and furthermore how the format reacts.  A Null Rod / Moon based creature deck may still be able to beat Balance.  If it is proven that Balance is still too good, its nothing that can't be undone.  We're not talking about a card that has considerable value, at least.  I would imagine dealers would be happy if Balance became legal as a 4-of.  

You really don't see the difference between a card that you have to draw+cast+resolve+keep on the table and a card that you don't need to draw? Or a card that has an activated ability and a card that has an activated ability+is a creature+costs more? By your logic TfK and Dark Confidant are almost as good as Ancestral Recall. I mean Painter/Stone now needs to give up 4+ deck slots and that still only answers 1 Blessing. At a 4:1 ratio I'll just board in 4 Blessings and you just lost your whole sideboard or you lost a win condition without me even having to try. Even assuming I don't run Blessing lets say maindeck I can now run a ton of Diabolic Edict effects and that takes out 2/3 of your win conditions while still being good against Oath/aggro decks or a playset of Rebuilds for Shops also. You can't do that with Vault because it is 100x better.

Fish has enough problems as it is why would you unrestrict another card that rapes Fish if it doesn't solve the problem in the current metagame? I mean as far as I can tell we may as well unrestrict LED and we'll have an equally sick format as with unrestricting Balance.

Of course I see the difference - the point is that saying "you can just SB against Painter / Grindstone" isn't a valid argument to me.  You can SB against anything - I can SB Null Rod and Needle now, both of which are also effective against Vault & Grindstone AND have other applications.  You can run all the Edict effects you want, and they'll be effective to some extent, but the last time I checked the deck still runs Duress, Drain, FoW, and Misdirection.  The number of Gaea's Blessing isn't relevant as they're ALL blanked at once by one TC/Relic activation with the GB triggers on the stack.

Basically your argument doesn't work for me because right now, I can play Needle on Time Vault and you need to add a 3rd card to deal with my needle.  SO, Vault plus key plus h. recall.  This is no different than Painter + GS + T. Crypt, except for the mana difference.  Yes, Painter is more vulnerable because its a creature as well as an artifact, and I get that.  I'm not arguing that they're the same - you're restating what I said incorrectly.  I'm saying that the difference between the two is small enough that banning Vault - which would require a change in what has been a successful policy for, what, 9 years? - will only marginally decrease the power of the best deck and will do nothing to displace it from its current position.

Again, the main difference between the two combos is simply mana investment.  TV + Key is superior in that it hardly costs any mana, whereas Servant + GS + activation costs 6 mana - twice as much.  The difference is that it actually, you know, wins the game on the spot most of the time.  It's not like you HAVE to just run Servant out there on turn one any more than you need to expose vault or key to being destroyed.

Your comment re: TFK/Confidant vs Ancestral makes no sense to me, but I will respond if you can articulate it a little more clearly as far as how it relates to Vault/Key vs Servant/GS.

Also, LED should not even be considered, as it makes Ichorid the best deck in the format.  4x LED plus Lotus, plus 4x Bazaar and 4x Fatestitcher gives the deck legitimate turn-one kill capability.  That clearly swings the pendelum way too far in the other direction.  There is no way that Balance will be nearly that format-warping.

Further, I still go back to my point - you're arguing that Balance invalidates decks that are already invalidated.  I just don't see why that's relevant.

I'm not trying to be combatitive or argumentative just for the sake of being so, I just fundamentally disagree that banning Vault is the answer, and similarly I don't see an issue with potentially eliminating a style of deck that is for all intents and purposes already eliminated from legitimate play.  4x Balance should open up new decks and strengthen one existing deck, and aggro decks that function using turn-1 Moon / Chalice / Null rod type plays should still have a place in that metagame, as they do now.

I was in the "ban Vault!" camp very recently, but I actually think Steve's article hammers home that a change in the ban policy is not what we want.  He doesn't say so in the article, but we've seen what WotC does with their willy-nilly restricting.  You really want them to start a policy that allows them to outright BAN problematic cards at their leisure?  Personally I'd rather keep that Pandora's box closed, wouldn't you?

[Smmenen]

From the article:

7) Time Vault is really to blame

I made a mistake by trying to address this point in my previous article. The short answer is: even if this is true, it is completely irrelevant. We do not ban cards in Vintage, so the DCI has to look for other answers.

Although the question of the role of Time Vault is irrelevant to the issue of what to do about it, I do want to address the question of to what extent Time Vault really is responsible for the current predicament. I will concede that the data does suggest that Time Vault is a contributory factor to the current degree of Mana Drain dominance. It is impossible to disaggregate the data in a regression analysis since there are multiple factors intertwining that produce the system/metagame outcomes. My analysis suggests that Time Vault has impacted the metagame in several ways:

1) I believe it is responsible for 5-8% of the current degree of Drain dominance. Without Vault, Drains would still be far and away the best performing engine by Top 8. In the three months before Time Vault was legal but after Gush was restricted, Drains were already trending upward at a dramatic rate around 35+ % of the field.

2) The major difference is that in the pre-Time Vault field, Mana Drain decks were broken up into many different archetypes, such as Painter, Slaver, Bomberman, Drain Tendrils, etc. Now, they are consolidated into a single archetype or one major archetype with several variants.

3) The most important difference might be that Drains percentage of tournament victories would be lower. In the two months data set before Time Vault really took off, Dark Rituals actually were the most tournament winning archetype.

Time Vault has contributed to the current performance of Drains. Time Vault has helped create an archetype that is basically a hair away from Meandeck Gifts in terms of its metagame presence and tournament dominance/power. That said, Drains would still arguably be above the acceptable level of format dominance even if Time Vault were not around.

Even if banning were on the table, why would Time Vault be the most sensible target? How would banning Time Vault make more sense than banning, say, Tinker? Tinker and Yawgmoth’s Will are both more powerful than Time Vault.

[Guli]

They need to give fish another effective weapon, not just stuff like Qasali Pridemage (which is fine but still perhaps not strong enough) but something that is cumulative (hence never dead so it can be run 4x, not legendary), relevant (against blue), cheap (so it is fast enough), competitive (so it can help fish to get top 8 more often).

They aren't afraid to print cards like Y Will and Tinker. Or to make things like vault playable again. I want something really good that will give me a strong chance to compete in a tournament but still something that stays fair of course. Not my job to find the right balance. But if you talk about things like unrestricting balance, you have to be ready to pay the prize, to give something back for the classical fish player who likes to drop bears that can beat and disrupt in a RELEVANT way. Relevant means able to answer the existing meta fully. Would the meta have dramatically changed if Qasali was easier to cast/splash and there was no mana cost to activate him for example. I don't think it is that dangerous to print cards like that in the current meta. Fish needs fast cheap answers to be able to react. Hey I don't mind a fast meta really, I don't mind that people play drains and draw lots of cards and have their fun, but I do need something to defend myself with.

[LordHomerCat]

They need to give fish another effective weapon, not just stuff like Qasali Pridemage (which is fine but still perhaps not strong enough) but something that is cumulative (hence never dead so it can be run 4x, not legendary), relevant (against blue), cheap (so it is fast enough), competitive (so it can help fish to get top 8 more often).

They aren't afraid to print cards like Y Will and Tinker. Oto make things like vault playable again. I want something really good that will give me a strong chance to compete in a tournament but still something that stays fair of course. Not my job to find the right balance. But if you talk about things like unrestricting balance, you have to be ready to pay the prize, to give something back for the classical fish player who likes to drop bears that can beat and disrupt in a RELEVANT way. Relevant means able to answer the existing meta fully. Would the meta have dramatically changed if Qasali was easier to cast/splash and there was no mana cost to activate him for example. I don't think it is that dangerous to print cards like that in the current meta. Fish needs fast cheap answers to be able to react. Hey I don't mind a fast meta really, I don't mind that people play drains and draw lots of cards and have their fun, but I do need something to defend myself with.

What are you even saying?  We can't print cards or affect that in any way, so it's not relevant.  For that matter, Tinker and Will were both gigantic design mistakes in a block which was just one huge design mistake.  Nothing that you wrote has anything to do with this discussion.

[Guli]

What discussion? Unrestricting balance? Instead of discussion how we can give fish decks another thing to worry about, let's discuss how we can give the appropriate tools/weapons to actually give the archetype a boost, i am sure it will also give the meta more color.

Don't talk to me about not being relevant and being of topic. I have been reading this thread closely. 'The discussion' is actually shifted a lot from topics to topic.

[Diakonov]

From the article:

7) Time Vault is really to blame

I made a mistake by trying to address this point in my previous article. The short answer is: even if this is true, it is completely irrelevant. We do not ban cards in Vintage, so the DCI has to look for other answers.

Although the question of the role of Time Vault is irrelevant to the issue of what to do about it, I do want to address the question of to what extent Time Vault really is responsible for the current predicament. I will concede that the data does suggest that Time Vault is a contributory factor to the current degree of Mana Drain dominance. It is impossible to disaggregate the data in a regression analysis since there are multiple factors intertwining that produce the system/metagame outcomes. My analysis suggests that Time Vault has impacted the metagame in several ways:

1) I believe it is responsible for 5-8% of the current degree of Drain dominance. Without Vault, Drains would still be far and away the best performing engine by Top 8. In the three months before Time Vault was legal but after Gush was restricted, Drains were already trending upward at a dramatic rate around 35+ % of the field.

2) The major difference is that in the pre-Time Vault field, Mana Drain decks were broken up into many different archetypes, such as Painter, Slaver, Bomberman, Drain Tendrils, etc. Now, they are consolidated into a single archetype or one major archetype with several variants.

3) The most important difference might be that Drains percentage of tournament victories would be lower. In the two months data set before Time Vault really took off, Dark Rituals actually were the most tournament winning archetype.

Time Vault has contributed to the current performance of Drains. Time Vault has helped create an archetype that is basically a hair away from Meandeck Gifts in terms of its metagame presence and tournament dominance/power. That said, Drains would still arguably be above the acceptable level of format dominance even if Time Vault were not around.

Even if banning were on the table, why would Time Vault be the most sensible target? How would banning Time Vault make more sense than banning, say, Tinker? Tinker and Yawgmoth’s Will are both more powerful than Time Vault.

This all seems very reasonable to me, in particular the last sentence.  Time Vault is incredibly powerful, and happens to fit into a Control shell.  It is yet another bomb that you can draw into.  Banning would help, most certainly, but it might not fix the problem completely.

I mostly agree with you on Time Vault.  I don't think it is single-handedly the culprit of our situation, but it sure helps.  The main problem is that combo isn't doing so hot right now (I think because they lost Brainstorm), which made room for Control strategies to take over.  It's a combination of great counters, great draw, and great win conditions.  All of them are great, no single one is alone to blame.  If I was forced to rank them I'd say TFK is the worst offender, followed by Vault/Key and then Mana Drain.

I strongly disagree that Key/Vault is anything other than the main culprit for the current circumstances. It is not the only problem, but it is far and away the major reason that control is so dominant right now. It is unfair that control can now combo you out even faster than Meandeck Gifts. With all the tutoring and fast mana, control can too easily assemble the combo. Why bother playing combo, when you can play control and combo out at your leisure? There is no need to try to go all-in with a combo deck when you can play an archetype that has both the resiliency of a classic draw/control deck and a brutally efficient combo finish. TFK is a problem? It is an excellent draw spell, but it does not warp metagames. Nobody was complaining about TFK before the advent of Key/Vault. I think it is about time we concede that Time Vault has had a detrimental impact on the metagame, beyond what many had predicted. It is natural for Drain decks to be very powerful, but for them to be as dominant as they currently are is unacceptable, and a direct result of recent changes we have made to the B&R list.

Let me ask this: Since Time Vault was "changed", is it conceivable that it could be returned to the way it was before, or possibly banned, or are these things that the powers that be no longer consider?

Continuing off what I wrote above the quote, I consider TFK to be the "main offender" because it seems to be the most efficient way to burn through your library these days.  Control has so many bombs now, Time Vault included, that all it needs is some quick, powerful draw to get to them.  I'm guessing that its replacement would end up being Int/AK, but this engine could be just slow enough to make the deck more fair. 

Just to be clear, I'd probably be on board if banning Time Vault were viable.  It would certainly help the situation.  If that's impossible, though, some people have suggested that the DCI simply print a new card that owns it.  Eastman came up with an example that was something along the lines of this:

Anti-Time Vault
Enchantment

If Anti-Time Vault is in your opening hand, you may begin the game with it in play under your control.
If an opponent would begin his/her third consecutive turn, that player loses the game.

...very inelegant right now, but the idea could be refined to something reasonable.

[Shock Wave]

Continuing off what I wrote above the quote, I consider TFK to be the "main offender" because it seems to be the most efficient way to burn through your library these days.  Control has so many bombs now, Time Vault included, that all it needs is some quick, powerful draw to get to them.  I'm guessing that its replacement would end up being Int/AK, but this engine could be just slow enough to make the deck more fair. 

You don't "burn through your library" with TFK. You draw 3 cards and it has a very reasonable drawback. Before Meandeck Gifts, Control Slaver was the deck that best abused TFK and it had plenty of foils. Null Rod beat it up. Combo beat it up. Enter Time Vault, and all of a sudden a deck shell that was already a strong contender has been tipped over the edge. Really, it does not matter if it is Slaver or Gifts or Tezz that is abusing the Key Vault combo. The fact of that matter is that it too easily facilitates a combo finish in a control archetype.

I mean, if Meandeck Gifts was deemed to be too resilient and combo-esque, how are the current control/combo incarnations permissible?