Messages

Jonny 9 UW-"only lose to above average top decks"Control
Christoph 9 BigRed
Luca 9 Beatable Jund
Benjamin 9 Bant Midrange
Stefan 6 4Cblood
Leon 6 RDW
Paul 6 Hypergenesis
Florian 3 5c Midrange
Marvin 3 Merfolk
Benny 0 RDW

Jonny 10 UW Control
Niklas 8 RG Beatz
Florian 7 4c (w/o white) AggroControl
Jan 7 5c Midrange
Paul 7 Artifact Combo
Christoph 6 4c Midrange
Paul 4 4cBlood ?
Cedric 3 Reanimator
Benny 3 RDW
Daniel 1 Grixis

I dont want to hijack that thread with my nonsense more than necessary but I was kind of referring to OPs weird hate for facebook (where we have a lot of discussions nowadays because it is easy to reach and convinient for a lot of people) I do understand when people have reservations in regards to facebook in general but I think the HL groups there helped us way more in terms of visibility than the forum ever did. We have vivid discussions and people do come in contact with most of the council members which, I find is an important step to make the whole ban/unban/development of the format/ more transparent and comprehensible.

To give you some input to the actual topic as I said trillion times already any thoughts about bannings/unbannings etc. are fruitless unless you have clear criteria where those decisions should lead to. As in what are your parameters for cards to be seen as problematic or what do you want to achieve by doing xyz. Without any guidlines all the decisions/reasons seem arbitrary to people no matter how well reasoned it is. If the council has a goal/standards and the decisions lead to that, its way easier to defend those and prevent those tilting discussions every time.

It looks like the forum participation isnt what you hoped for.

Never lucky.

I really like the decklist from Paul W. He seems to have quite an understanding what he wants to do and manages to let staples, which would be "no brainer" for others, go. Really like the out of the box thinking which shows in his choices.

Hey

since we are all living in 2017 and the canadians have it too, I thought of creating our own discord channel for all highlander things related. Its not a replacement for the fb-groups or forums but rather a place to quickly exchange ideas, just talk or arrange games on cockatrice (and of course memes). If you have any ideas for more specific voice- and/or textchannels (city specific channels) just put them in here. If thats only a fancy tool for all the lonely no-lifer out there, we can drop it later but I am eager to see if we as a community maybe have a use for it.

For everyone who doesnt know what it is. Think of it as a mixture of group Skype with chatroom, voice, screensharing and a lot more. Its free and also usable on mobile

Here is the link to the server


https://discord.gg/fDc5Cs4

@DarkLight

What difference does it make if we "beef" on facebook or here around? Also the reach of this website is laughable in comparison to FB. And suggestions on how to fix this mess were made. What are you talking about?

There is a discussion on facebook going on and I posted a response there. For the people who are not part of that group I post that text here aswell.

I must say I felt quite overwhelmed when I was reading your text. Sadly not in a good way. In my eyes your thoughtprocess shows an immense lack of basic knowledge about matchups and the ability to see the greater picture of how a metagame works. Dont get me wrong I think you are a good magic player who has many years of experience but when reading stuff like "the only rival to izzet is rdw" I wonder how often did you actually play both side of this matchup and even other decks which are out of your comfort zone?

To speak in such absolute ways like "Emperion Izzet beats RDW" presents a really simplified way of looking at things.That you think
because of a silly tech you drastically change the outcome of 100 matches for instance makes me think you never played a match of highlander. I would expect such a statement from someone
who comes from legacy/standard/modern and is used to static matchups and limited ways of permutations how those decks interact with each other but not from someone who played a singleton format for so many years. And which is even worse, you take this premise to ban a card which is not even close to be the problem.

Also your assessment that decks without a plan dont play any meaningful role. I mean really? Like we are not even close to having the format solved and with that limited view on it
that will never be the case. There are so many decks possible and our choices are heavily influenced by other factors than pure powerlevel of cards (and I feel silly that I even have to mention this).

That you think you can make such a statement shows a serious lack of understanding how potent the format actually is. Some months ago you couldnt imagine anything else than Blood being the best deck now its of course only its "counter" is capeable to do it. (Another really simplified way of thinking that UR would dominate Blood just because of its nonbasic hate package.

Unlike UR BLood has many lines which close to immediatly beat an avagerage draw of izzet because every elve or 4 toughness or t3 walker challenges UR to have an answer real quick while UR always
need very specific cards to even come ahead)

Other decks are not just at the sideline in your picture of Ur vs Ux vs RDW. We have so many potent decks which can easily come on top of tournaments and were already there. When you look at tournament results I really hope you take more into your analysis than just the winner. The difference between T16 decks is mostly one game/opp score influenced by IDs and of course so much fucking variance.

Like we had this discussion before the data our format provides is laughable and nothing else in comparison to 30 GPs a year with thousands of players which after playing thousands of games come to a conclusion what deck the "actual" best deck is. To think you can assert this and even pin it down to 2 cards in one deck is such a ridiculous claim.

Also its quite ironic when I see you talking about powerlevel while you want to make sure Tolarian Academy and Oath of druids stays in the format while answers to that should go (B2B, Moon)
NonBasic hate is so crucial for healthy metagame. And why would you ever unban Pod how is that adding more diversity to the metagame (if that would be a criterion you desire) with getting more and more busted creatures skipping the balancing factor, mana cost. Those kind of statements make me doubt you really have the health of the metagame in mind when looking at your ban/unban decissions

And how is pod unbanning keeping blue at bay? If anything they find it faster than other colors and I did an actual statistical research back when pod was legal (low samplesize of some weeks and 2 big tournaments) and 70% of the games were won by the player resolving pod first, but that just as a sidenote.

So Keeping greed in check should always be desirable look at the 1v1 Commander. They just smash 4c commanders with ancient tombs and have silly midrange value battles. Far less decission making involved just throwing good stuff at each other (which is the way standard works since the powerlevel rises and rises) and of course in an eternal format that all becomes even worse. That is btw the reason why so many decks are capable of beating "your" best deck. Because cards got so efficient so versatile and so powerful that a lot of random decks work just fine.

You need very specific answers real quick against most threats these days. I can live with a different opinion about how a metagame should look like. Of course those things can differ (very generous of me I know) but your way of looking at things come to me more as a bias than an actual analysis of how decks/matchups work in our format.

There is so much more but as I said at the begining I am simply overwhelmed when adressing all the flaws in your thinking. Sorry for the harsh tone but since you are at part responsible for how the format looks and decide how people have to play the format I have to adress that.

@Thomas

Your deck looks really cool. Do you have some more artifacts on your maybe-pile which didnt end up in the deck and how reliable was the trisk combo ?

I agree with Christoph here. The data (even if handled with care and the note from steffi that the conclusions we might draw are fragile) shows, if anything, that it shows nothing and might lead to false deductions. Since steffi provided the SDs we can see that the mean variation is so huge for the single values that every statistic handbook will tell you the data is simply not good enough to deduct anything.

@Christoph I agree with stefan here. Banning LED/Will would hurt spell based combo way more than banning oath esp. in the grizzel list from kötter (which is inferior to the creatureless version but thats not the point and he still made easily top8 three times (and lost in the  quartefinals against UR which he would have won if he didnt have grizzel in his list...but again thats not the point)

@Tazi/Bat as MacGyver already stated you can find most of the berlin lists (including pauls 5c artifacts) on pulse and the berlin community has its own thread about weekly tournament which gives a nice insight about the development of the local meta.

Now to the eggs deck and artifacts in general. The remark that Tom got lucky is close to a tautology in this context since every deck/player needs to have some luck to get to t8. Every t8 participant can tell you about the one game were he/she got that lucky topdeck/missed lethal by opponent/ one outer silver bullet on the starting hand and so on. So diminishing Toms result by saying "he got lucky" (which I imagine is not your intention but your proposition implies that) does not help when we try to acess how strong those single cards are. I played with and against the deck many times I ve tested different builds with Toffel and had some discussions with Tiggu who presented the deck some time ago in the forum. So my experience with it is sufficient I would say and while I dont think the deck is on the same
level as the 5c artifact combo decks (due to consistency issues and the all in approach) its still very strong (rendering a lot of cards in the opposing deck useless and having sometimes 8+ mana on t2/3) While I agree that knowing what the deck wants to do take some win percentage away it doesnt mean you magically beat the whole "I laugh about your Lightning Bolt/Flametongue Kavu/Swords/Path/ etc." approach. You still need to have specific answers right on time to beat eggs. Now as Luca already said its only the stepchild and it brings other problems to the table besides the obvious ones (academy fastbond)

The first time I proposed the ban of Academy was because of the experience with this deck (at that point I never played against but with it). Since its very non interactive (which was the reason why I loved this deck so much. You are most of the time playing a solitaire game and laugh about the silly midrange value cards from your opponent) and time issues (even if you are lightning fast and experienced with this deck (sidenote: no one knows how to play that deck to its full potential) you will face turns which will take 10 minutes or more if you get your "crack egg crack egg into draw 7 into untap into crack 3 eggs into sunrise into draw 7 draws" (which are the draws which will win you the game) during tournaments. Now I dont want to repeat myself. I wrote about the deck some time ago and now it got even stronger with Fastbond (having the side-combo with infinite life or infinite mana is icing on the cake ) and let me assure you we are not some lazy scrubs who dont know how to play against combo decks in fact berlin had always a strong "combo" field so to assume we are just too dumb/inexperienced (while paul is crushing us in his local meta he can only beat 8ys old and tier4 decks online) is  very short sighted. It would require a lot of "metagame warping" to fight this deck, making your deck weak against 75% of the rest of the field and I would say if Artifact Combo decks had the same numbers in appearance as Blood or Ux Value decks a lot more people would rise their voices. As I alrady said in the other thread about banning/unbannings WotC to this day thinks fast mana is the worst thing you can do to the game and with good reason they try to stay away from it. The opportunity costs to enable academy are just way too low

Dear community,

I just wanted to let you know that I will leave the council.
I had a lot of fun and enjoyed shaping the format with you guys.

cheers Jonny

Before I talk about my votings I want to make clear that I am strongly in favor of making those decisions transparent before the
actual voting procedere is happening. So members of the community can interact with our considerations and opinions can change.



Fastbond [Ban]: I voted for a ban. Simply put this cards breaks one of magics core rules. Playing a land on each of your turns. Its from an era were card
evaluation and powerlevel consideration were not present at all. In magics history we encountered several instances of "fast mana enviroments" that broke their
respective metagame. Necropotence+Bloom, Urza Cycle, Affinity, to name just a few. Even recently we saw what can happen if the focus is put only on standard and people
try to abuse fast mana cards in older formats (modern with summer bloom/eldrazi). So WotC itself said it numerous times, fast mana is always bad for a competitive environment.

Fastbond is the GODEMPEROR of fast mana, giving storm a powerful tool to make yawgmoths will even stronger. Now I admit I voted for the unbanning back then. I was naive
enough to think/wish that some niche land decks could make good use of this card. I was wrong, very wrong. So keeping this card in the format is a mistake and you cant adept to
this since its ridicolous cost of one mana allowing you to hold it back until the turn you are going to abuse it (and please dont say discard...we have 3 or 4 if you are generous,
staple discard spells) or you just play it t1/2 and all the damage is already done before you can do anything about it.

Mystical Tutor [No Ban]: I dont see that card as problematic as some other council members. Its an important tool for control decks and will always play a huge role
in spell based combo decks (which I want to have in the format). Surely its instant speed and mana cost make it very strong. We play an eternal format after all (meaning
we always will have powerful cards) and while I embrace the singleton idea I also like consistency and possibility to build niche/weird decks which need
such cards (high tide, scapeshift, staxx,). If you deny those consistency/redundant tools we are all doomed to play boring goodstuff decks which are simply playing the
best cards from all five colors and therefore generate a very redundant deck.

Oath of Druids [No Ban]: This card is ridiculous. One could say I am very biased since I ve won a HLGP on the back of this card (how is brag-camp going?). The Oath control shell
I played was fitting my playstyle very much. I love flexible cards and controlish blue based decks. Oath of Druids was helping me to have some kind of cheap win option while
fighting the goodstuff/control/aggrocontrol battles pretty much on my terms. Now since storm became a force (and I am in favor of the creatureless Storm builds which will simply
win if there is no counter/hate element on the table) this card created the occasional "ups I win" games. Those are frustrating and I want players to have fun. Its a long time
since I ve seen Oath Control as a deck and last time I played the card was it was in Eggs (since you got a 50/50 chance of winning with LED+Salvagers). That being said I dont identify this card
as too strong to ban it but absolutely see its potential to be there and therefore want to watchlist it. It doesnt need much to convince me to also vote for a ban tbh.

Natural Order [Ban]: Here we go again with mistakes and stuff. I ve voted for a ban back in the day, voted for the unban last year and now I voted for a ban again. So you could say
I didnt learn my lesson the first time but let me assure you I did it this time. I saw some comments regarding the "weird" fact that we just unbanned it so why would we ban it right away.
Well maybe because we arent wizards and shit. We need to evaluate a format with 18k cards (I think?) and the interactions in a highly diverse meta and we thought we could
bring that card back into the format to make certain strategies stronger. Well let me tell you thats now what happend but instead we pushed goodstuff lists even more
to the point were the format got even more random since many matches were decided who resolved NO first (very close to birthing pod where the person who resolved a Pod first had a 70% chance to also win that game).

In the future there will be even stronger targets than Titan.
So its only a matter of time until we need to ban it. Since the core mechanic of this card is skipping mana costs (again, mana is a balancing factor) and its not that hard to
set it up with new mana elves coming every four editions. Its sad that we cant make ramp strategies stronger but tbh I think we didnt even scratch the possiblities regarding this archetype
so maybe people need to invest more hours into their decks if they really love ramping so much they shouldnt rely on the card and wait until NO arrives so they can get ahead with little to no work whatsoever.

Mana Drain [No Ban]: This card is strong. very strong I am not questioning it. Its also the only unconditional hard counter besides actual counterspell. So I like to have strong control
decks in my meta. Not only because it fits my playstyle but because I think its necessary to have that archetype in a healthy meta. With Ugin/Karn we see that Mana Drain got more
application but you still need to have something to have it really matter and the trend is going to 3c+ decks where the color restrictions are reason enough to keep Mana Drain in check.
Additionally I want to take the lazy route and say its an eternal format where the powerlevel will always be high (it seems convenient that I take this argument when it fits my "busted"
cards but not for others for example Fastbond. If someone makes this kind of objection I would say that the one cards breaks the structure of the game and doesnt allow much interaction or close to no work while the other cards are just powerful but dont allow you to do that without any cost (oath requires you to play no utility creatures, drain has heavy mana costs + follow up card and so on).

Senseis Divining Top [No Ban]: I was against the ban since I am in huge favor of consistency (which allows on the long run the better player to win more games) and also liked the idea
that we give non blue decks a tool for library manipulation (other than sylvan library, mirris guile etc.). Its also a fine tool for control an a very good tool for combo decks. I
see the time argument and tbh I am not too upset the card is gone since it also allows for some new cards to shine (staple blindness etc. but thats another issue). I will for sure
miss it in my UW control deck were I was unreasonably happy like a child when I could instant Terminus my opponents board.

Demonic Tutor [No Ban]: I dont want to waste much time on this. Its one of the best cards available to us. Its cheap its easy to splash and it gives some sweet sweet consistency. I am
sure I am not the only one who searched 90% of the time a land with this card. Now thats not an excuse to distract you from the powerlevel of the card. Its ridiculous but then
again I had never the feeling "wow my opponent is playing DT how unfair" it was fine and gave some decks reach it otherwise wouldnt have also combo decks got better with it and so on.

I think this card is iconic, its stylish and maybe its too powerful but I dont think it will lead to a healthier meta not having this card anymore. As always we have to ask ourself do we
want to sacrfice the power of tier 2 decks to weaken tier 1 decks. Because an UB control deck will profit way more from this card than lets say 4cblood. I didnt answer that question
for myself but banning DT right now seems wrong (no hard counter arguments as you can see so I would be interested what the community has to say about it). Oh I did waste some time on this.

Dig Through Time [No Ban²]: Sorry I cant say much but this. If you think this card is problematic you need to ban Treasure Cruise first. If you do I will tell you why its wrong.


Entomb[No WL]: I would love to see that card in the format but it would generate even more T2 wins that we already have enough of. Yes I am fan of LftL, of reanimator as a niche deck and so
on but I fear it would enable too many broken scenarios instead of cute things (like you want to have a fluffy pet but get a crocodile instead).

Stoneforge Mystic [Unban]: We need to unban that card. We have all the tools to handle it. We got so many flexible cards which enable a lot of decks to handle the sfm itself or the skull
and the powerlevel is not even close to a lot of other cards we have in the format right now and they dont even allow interaction. I can see that many decks would implement it
as an autoinclude. So what? We already have a creature driven meta and have so many high quality cards why stop here?

Gifts Ungiven [WL]: I was in favor of unbanning it but tbh in the current state of the meta I dont want another easy splashable value/game closing generating card. Storm and Artifacts would
love to get their hands on this card. It would have a lot of sweet value midrange applications but it would also allow the busted decks doing even more busted things. So not decided until
we weaken Artifacts and Storm.

Skullclamp [No Unban No WL] hahahahahaha.NO.

Tolarian Academy [Ban³]: I said it many many times. This card is very unhealthy for our format not just because of Eggs, which kind of doesnt exist since no one is playing it but because of
the Artifact combo deck. This card doesnt allow interaction (yes..wasteland..sure I am interested to see how you are getting your wasteland in response to playing the Academy and creating
a billion mana and even if so...the only option you have is the one (maybe two) card out of the deck in the right moment+ hoping your opponent doesnt play the academy just in the turn hes going
off and can on top of it even get it back with crucible/ywill).

So yea it fits pretty much the whole rules breaking theme I am speaking off. Getting artifacts in play before t4 (which is a generous estimation) is
not difficult, having multiple ways to untap it is also very easy and difficult to prevent (a lot of cheap tutor cards for lands). As an opponent you are constantly challenged to have answers and this card destroys everything cute you ever imagined in HL. You need to interact with your opponent from turn 1 have your specific answers also have a clock, A FAST clock and lose in the meantime to 75% of the field with your specialized hate cards. If you only have two types of decks in the meta, the deck which is the boogeyman and the decks who can beat that, you have a very bad meta especially without
any sideboard (no I am not in favor of a sideboard in HL). So I could write days and days about how broken that card is. I encountered it, I played with it, it fits the definition
of fast mana (maybe IT IS the definition of fast mana)its even restricted in Vintage (strong indicator for its powerlevel) and its hard to interact with. So yea...we need to get rid of it. asap.

Yawgmoths Will [Ban]: I voted for the unbann back in the day. I was again very naive to think it would give some niche decks some sweet applications. It didnt. No one played
that card in BG-something or Grixis Artifacts or WB Pox or whatever. NO it wasnt played at all until Storm and Artifacts embraced the full brokeness of the card. Especially in combination
with Fastbond it showed its power. This card is an enabler for all the busted things happening and we could ban a lot of other cards to make this card less broken, but since no one ever played it
outside of the busted decks I dont see any reason to have it in the format.

Mishras Workshop [NO Ban]: If pricetags ever become a critera for our bannings this card needs to be banned. I wouldnt miss it but I dont see its brokeness since I like it when
very narrow strategies get their reward. But again I think of staxx for instance which was never opressing or anything but right now only the Comboartifact deck uses this card but its not even that important. So kind of neutral.

All Draw 7 Spells [No Ban]: I can see banning them to weaken artifacts. But why would we ban so many cards when all the problems would be solved by banning one card. So a clear no
also I am eager to see the day where a RDW players plays a wheel of fortune and just destroys me with the new drawn cards. Also High tide.

Tainted Pact [No Ban]: I just love seeing people losing because they are too greedy with tainted pact. So no. I kind of like the design of the card and this is one of the things
which make Hl such a great format. Playing cards no other format plays because you need to or because you want to. The powerlevel is in my eyes just fine and the deck which plays it
(4c blood) will not suffer by losing it, if that would be the idea behind a ban.

I am not sure if this wall of reason (pun intended) isnt already enough so I will stop here and dont discuss the other candidates for watchlist entries.

that was really entertaining. WHICH OPTION IS IT JOCHEN??? MHHHH???