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I for one need more time with this card. I understand your concerns and as I stated in my post, my opinion towards TNN changed over the last few months, so all I want is more time to see it in action. The reason it should stay at least for now is that banning cards because they are annoying but not hands down unfair is bad in my opinion. And wether it is unfair or not is something I am not totally sure about right now.

@berlinballz: I do not try to discard your whole argument but the style in which you argue is not helpful to me. You state your point and then say "prove me wrong". In a matter where local metas matter so much and opinion is almost everything we have, this does not work. This is not a mathematical problem where you can prove or debunk everything by a "simple" equation. Then you go on to dismiss other opinions and arguments as invalid and yet again want people to prove you wrong. That is exactly what they tried to do, you just do not accept their arguments. That is fine for some things but most people here really give a damn about the game. We can try to explain some things (like the decline of control decks in berlin) but if you do not want to hear it, then why ask?
As to you mocking me telling you about the quality of the players in Mannheim and Karlsruhe, this has nothing to do with bragging. Why would I brag with my opponents? I just see them playing and play against them and they are all great players. The fact that they do well outside of highlander should just help to prove my point which was that the results are not nothing. They are not that relevant either but they give you a slight hint at what is happening here. Although it would be much better if all decks were posted.

@tonytahiti: It was probably Tabrys winning tournaments, not control decks in general. And maybe after all the dominance of those archetypes people started to explore the new format and are fed up with all the control decks. That is just my guess.

In general I have to say it is true that most people either have an extensive highlander cardpool or they play "their" deck. I have always played esper because I do not want to or can not afford another deck. I have changed it greatly over the course of the last few years and I believe I can give a somewhat qualified statement regarding that topic.

I do not win with the esper deck because I still make about one or two unnecessary mistakes every tournament. It is an unforgiving deck because most of it's spells are answers. I usually play 2-2 which is fine by me because I know why I lost those two and that it was avoidable (soooo frustrating though). In the spoils era I usually also ended up 2-2. But it was for different reasons. The games hardly were long enough to punish the mistakes I made or did not even give me the chance to make them. Either I was curved out or lost to the random topdeck. There was not much magic involved. No decision making, almost no planning. You were just rolling with the punches and hoped your opponent would actually stop having gas. But because he played almost no lands but you still had to because of your 6 mana game winners it was you who ran out of gas. There was no time to play card draw or manipulation most of the times. One mana discard spells usually revealed the most insane of hands. This has changed a lot. Now those little guys pack a serious sting. If you did not have the 2 mana Counter you were dead. If you were on the play you usually were dead anyway. And topdecks mattered a lot too. You stablized the board and your opponent ripped the wasteland for the maze or one of his two swords for your wurmcoil engine. Because wrath effects were nearly unplayable back then (they were either too slow, the opponent still had a grip full of gas and was not drawing lands anyway or he had the random counter he could spoil into or away from) you were trading one for one all the time against a deck that played 10 lands less than you did.

It just was not fun at all. When I lost I usually were not even able to put up a fight. I was just pummeled around until I died. Now even when I lose, it was a nice and fair game most of the times. With the free mulligan games are just more fun because you actually do something, have to make decisions and get the chance to make good or bad decisions for the future turns. And yes, longer games tend to be decided by topdecks sometimes but if you look at the general development of cards in magic over the last few years, that is what wizards is actively pushing (worse players like swingy topdeck cards a lot and those make up most of the card sales). And it should not come as a surprise that this has found it's way into the highlander matches after all. The spoils mulligan just prevented most people from playing those game changing 5 and 6 drops wizards is pumping out at the moment. As much as I hate this policy or theirs, I hated those spoils era games a lot more. This did not feel like regular magic at all. Now it does.

With spoils you had your sick hand and you just had to play it. Now you have to plan and think and evaluate a lot more. At least to me it seems to have become more complex and therefore more fun.

I hope this helps.

Berlinballz tries to be quite cunning. He discards facts (tournament finishes) and he discards differing opinions as a sign of being unable to think outside of the box. What you are basically saying is that you have your evaluation (not backed up by hard facts but perceived occurences of events) and it is right and everybody elses opinion is flawed and he who has a different opinion can go suck it.

The post I made earlier is my thought process so far. I play Highlander once a week at a friends house and 1-2 times a month at the tournaments in Mannheim and Karlsruhe. And to be honest despite the small number of players showing up the people that actually show here are possibly the most brutal competition you can imagine. The level of skill involved is higher than almost any ptq top 8 I can imagine. There are several people with PT moneyfinishes and GP Moneyfinishes who have been playing magic and highlander for years. There is not a single "bye" amongst the players most of the time. The ones who can not bolster regular magic successes are very strong highlander players too. I doubt you can say that about the 30 man tournaments. If you win here you either were the luckiest of luckers or (which is usually the case) you have a good deck and play very well with it.
That being said I do not think that maqis post is irrelevant, as you try to convince us.

Maybe there is the occasional troll in this forum but most people present a short version of a very elaborate thought process they talked over with their peers for revision time and again. It is good that you explain the motives of the council so well but that does not make your post less opinionated.

[A]

I know this might not help a lot but I am going to explain my position:

On the one hand it is inherently unfair and unbeatable by some decks but on the other hand it is just one card in 100. There are way worse cards legal in this format and it does not hurt it either. UR Decks can not kill it once it resolved but they have counters. Other decks can not counter it but play sweepers of some sort. It is not that hard to have some catch-all plan against it in your deck. In my experience so far I feel like it is the deck constructors fault for not being able to beat it or making your other matchups so favourable that you can decide to ignore it. If you lose to Nemesis you likely lose to other cards too. Thrun and Geist of Saint-Thraft come to mind. They are slightly different and weaker because Geist can be killed by Pyroclasm and the like and Thrun can't even be countered yet both can be blocked.

At the GP I felt the card was overpowered and format warping. But now I had time to think about it and came to the conclusion that it is not so bad at all. It is a strong card that has to be considered when building a deck and it may be too swingy but I do not see a big enough problem that would call for a banning so far.

So for the time being I would vote A

It is strange how much W0lf's experience differs from mine. I hardly mulligan. Maybe your decks are designed badly? But one thing is true: redundancy is much more relevant now that you can not fish for your cards. On the other hand a mulligan to 6 is bad but not game over. Mulliganing to 6 in the spoils era was a gameloss most of the time.

The time it usually took for a person to spoil is longer than it takes to mulligan several times because either the hand has "it" or not. You do not have to ponder for half a minute or longer. Control decks take longer now because they do not lose to insanity draws early all the time. They take long because they are back in the format after all and you do not need to win by combo finishes or not have a chance.

I agree on the recovered playability of two or three color strategys. In the spoils era either you played 2 colors or 4. There was hardly any incentive to play three.

I also agree with the statement that it feels like a different format now. I for one think it is good. And I would suggest that we wait at least another year until we make a decision.

In my experience so far the spoils mulligan benefited two kinds of decks: Multicolor Aggro and Combo/Staxx-style decks. It made control decks almost impossible to play.

Why was that?
The Aggro decks could sculpt their perfect curve from their low range of cc (usually ranging from 1-3, sometimes to 4), they could "cheat" with their landcount because you could spoil for the right amount of lands and did not have to worry wether you drew too many or not enough lands later. You already mulled for the perfect land count and got away with playing less than 33% lands in an aggressive deck. You could increase your chances of having "that one counter" to counter the sweeper or disrupt yout opponents crucial comeback turn.

The Combo/Staxx decks usually need to either draw specific cards or suffer from "wrong-half-of-the-deck-syndrome" which can easily be evaded by spoiling your surplus cards.

The control decks still had to play a regular land count because they were dependent on drawing additional lands over the course of the game. They had to fight through the perfect curve almost every game and their opponents could pseudo sideboard with the spoils (but so could the control decks). The only thing they really were able to do with the spoils mulligan was to get rid of 4+ drops in their starting hand. But basically you had to fight through goddraws every single game.

So what has the free mulligan taken from or given to the archetypes?

Aggro: Clearly the biggest losers since they now have to play a more realistic land count and have to play more expensive cards because they can not rely on overpowering their adversary by curving out but have to play some stronger cards too. On the other hand their arch nemesis (staxx, combo) have to dig a lot more to get their interactions online.

Combo/Staxx: Now they are susceptible to the wrong-half-syndrom but because the format slowed down, they have more time to find their setup and since their opponents most likely will not play a drop every turn get the time to dig.

Control: The decks that were (almost) unplayable before hardly had to change to adapt to the new mulligan. The other decks will not try to resolve one devastating spell after another, so there is more time for card draw or own initiative. Games draw out longer, so a six drop on the starting hand is not automatically game (with spoils finding one after spoiling it was like having only 6 cards) because he is likely to still have impact despite lacking an option in the early turns.

The metagame seems to be diversified because now there are actually more viable control decks and the other decks are still viable in some form or another (usually with one less color).
As to the GP: The metagame was new and there was almost no testing done by most people. So they fell back to goodstuff lists that have an even matchup against almost anything and reward good plays. Those Blood decks did play absolutely fair magic. No unfair tricks or interactions, no silly curve or reliance on a special slot. And they now are absolutely beatable. The 4 or 5-color Aggro's of the spoils era produced games that were over after only a few turns. And having lightning fast games is usually the sign of an inherently imbalanced format.
The folks that anticipated those blood decks favoured the UR lists because they were actually quite good against a lot of decks and the perceived deck to beat. But now after the dust has settled the smaller tournaments are not overrun by either of those decks. They are just fair and beatable by adjusting to it. This was not the case before. You either howled with the wolves or got eaten. Now you can fight them and tell about it.

I hope this makes sense, as I typed it way too late in the night/early in the morning.

Because of its colorless nature it goes in almost every Deck. And since it repays its investment over a few rounds it is a card most control and midrange decks want. I have, from time to time, experienced that it leads to longer games but only when it is used by players that take forever anyway and/or do not know how to use it properly. A good player that knows his deck does not take much time with this little artifact and if the game happens to go into the extra rounds it usually is not the tops fault. Games are bound to go in overtime on big tournaments. Since there is only one big Highlander tournament big enough, the time factor is neglible. In Modern it is understandable, since a huge GP features many unexpierenced players and thus guarantees extraturns every round but I still think it should not be banned in those other formats. This might be a reason but most highlander players are experienced with the format and know their decks in and out, so I doubt it is a real factor. I went in overtime on the hl gp 3 times this year. And it happened because games were going back and forth so much once, nothing happening for rounds on end the second time and vazdru playing with glacial pace (which he usually does not) the third time. Top unsurprisingly had nothing to do with it. Maybe he might have kept me in the games longer or won them earlier. Has anybody even considered that you actually might win games faster by finding what you search with the top? I think the time factor is overrated.

Top is an imensely powerful card if used correctly and that for the meagre cost of one colorless mana. But other more degenerate cards are legal, so the powerlevel argument is invalid in my opinion. It initially costs you a card without providing any immedeate value. It only gets good over time, when you can get the right spell at the right time, save a good spell from discard or smooth out your curve. But that all costs Mana and you are -1 card for as long as you have it on the board. It can only generate quality advantage and then you will still have to draw those bad spells piling up unless you find a fetch land.

As a player whose top has been played in his esper deck from its printing in Kamigawa and has spun several thousand times I would hate to see him go, although he does not warrant the inclusion of trinket mage for his and needles sake alone. So his powerlevel is not that insane at all. If it gets the axe, so be it, but I vote NO BAN.

I am 100% with Tabris here. We hardly see any two color strategies because it is so damn easy to go for 4 colors. And without the hate red and blue have I am pretty sure there would be no incentive left to build 2 colored decks. As much as I hate to lose against a random B2B or Blood Moon, I am sure there is a dire need for cards that keep the 4c decks in check.

And as for Wasteland: In most games it is used to get rid of a pesky utility land. I accept the few games, where it is used to colorscrew or manascrew an unlucky draw because of it's upsides. Compared to most other constructed formats highlander decks have a ridiculously low amount of land cards. There are several reasons why this actually works:
a) the format has a load of mana-elves/birds to accelerate and fix
b) free mulligan/spoils mulligan make it easier to fish for lands
c) we have all the manipulation spells ever printed

I too think greed should be punishable.

I turned my poll sheet in at the gp but I thought about a card that I want to add to the ban list:

Blood-braid Elf: With the high amount of quality cheap creatures/spells our format offers her to flip and the extremely low amount of true control decks present, I do believe this card is one of the nails in the coffin of control decks. But I am not too sure about it. Maybe I just hate playing against that card.

The only thing thats nether new or format breaking is people crying about cards after every gp.the one thing you dont see is banning oath wont make you better at playing magic.

DEAL WITH IT!

This is probably the most stupid thing I have read in a while. I asked myself if such douchebaggery even deserves an answer, but I will feed the troll:

Beneath the fact that I told you I have won PTQs and played PTs, which should tell you that I am probably not a bad player (though not as good as I was back then because I took a break during Innistrad and Scars), I doubt that this is even a point in this discussion. Most of the posters before brought up good reasons why to ban/not ban Oath. I never played against Oath, I am surely not "butthurt". The card poses a problem and we discuss it. I do not see a person in this thread hating on it for the reasons you accuse them of.

And surely most of those people spoke out against Oath before that tournament. I sure did and I even tried to bring it up with Vazdru at our local Tournaments in Karlsruhe but that is not the place to have a lengthy discussion so we just had a little chat about it. Recent events tend to define the topics of discussion. That is perfectly normal. There is no surprise in the timing of Oath coming up as the subject "du jour".

If this was any other format I would invest some time to hunt down the relevant cards and learn how to play this oath deck to the highest possible extent of my abilitys. But this is not Type 2 or modern and it won't get me on the Pro Tour, so I do not. I do not know if it is the strongest Deck around but it sure is the strongest I have seen so far.

Believe it or not, I have neither played with nor against an Oath deck. I am not biased in any way. I do not need to flip several million coins to conclude that they will roughly come up 50/50.

In the end I may have made the wrong assumptions but arguing with results is a pretty shaky basis in this case.

You are right, I guess I was a bit harsh, but to me your reasoning seemed to only stress the less vital points of why oath is such a strong card. This led to me assuming you were defending a pet card of yours no matter what. I am sorry, if I got that wrong.

On the topic of slots and winconditions. Of course, once your Oath is handled, you have a tougher time winning with planeswalkers and such but after all, your deck is geared to buy time and protect your most vital cards. How likely is it for you to really lose it? What clock can your adversary put you under while being heavily disrupted? I have never played the Oath deck myself, so I may as well be wrong, but Krosan Grip aside, which card really handles oath definitely?

And the competetiveness surely is there, else this format would not appeal to me this much but contrary to a regular Tournament, where most people would play what they think is the best deck (or what they can afford) or the best deck suited to their playstyle, on the HL Cup and Tournaments the beloved pet Deck factor is much much higher.
Just look at all those foil, alternate art, signed and whatnot cards in most of the decks. A lot of the people there have put a considerate effort and a lot of money in hunting down unique/special versions. Do you think they change their decks at a whim?
Again, no one doubts the competitive nature of the format, but after all most players love their highlander as much as they would love their cat/dog and they even groom it to a certain extent. It is hard to just get another cat because the one you grew up with does not catch mice anymore. Maybe you get her eyes fixed, but you do not let her go easily.

I for one will probably always play esper highlanders. Of course I try to build a strong deck and I am sure I succeeded at that, but I know that a lot of archetypes out there are stronger. And I say this as a very competitive player with several PTQ T8s, three PTs and one top 16 PT finish under my belt. There is a soft spot in my heart for this 100 card pile. I can not just leave it at the side of the road like a dog before the holidays.

The Reason why I think that Oath is overpowered and should be banned is pretty simple and I think Tabris's arguments are off target. Neither is it relevant what people perceive as a problem, but what can be deduced from logic thinking nor is Oath's undoubtedly strong effect in itself the true problem. Its what the card allows you to do in terms of deckbuilding that really makes it too strong.

First off the main problem with oath is, that it allows you to commit as ridiculously few as 3 slots to actually winning the game with damage. This is about 20-40 cards less than any regular Deck that tries to win the old fashioned way. And it is pretty obvious that cards like Emrakul and Griselbrand are insanely good at winning by themselves. With fetches in the format it is pretty likely, that you just have to smash once to win.

Your best and almost instantly winning Card Oath costs a meagre 2 mana which makes it fairly easy to proect and since you only play 3 "combo pieces" and maybe 4-7 Planeswalkers which are far from weak, you can stuff your deck with all the control cards you want. You are probably always in control of the match since every card except for the lands, the walkers and the Oath package are answers, tutors or card advantage generating.

It is laughably easy to activate the "combo". There is hardly a Deck that does not play creatures and almost none that do not need one on the board to kill you. And for those few decks that actually do not need one, you have the means to give them one. It's a one card combo at that. There is no setup required, no digging for parts. Its just the one card.

There may be removal for your oath, but as mentioned before, in a Deck that plays almost every useful counter imaginable, you can not tell me that you will not have the one counter to save it that single turn.

Saying that you never pulled of the turn 2 oath is a non-argument. It's like saying you should be allowed to own automatic guns because you never used them on other people so far. Stoneforge Mystic was banned for the possibility to have it on turn two and its impact on the game later on. Oath does the same but even better. Sure you need to build a Deck around it, but that obviously is far from challenging.

And lastly I doubt your sincerity when arguing for Oath. You are a highlander writer and a resourceful one at that. All these facts can not be new to you. You are throwing out some decoys and false reasons that sound convincing but do not withhold on further inspection.
I understand that you want to keep the card in the format, you obviously figured out, that it is the best deck at the moment. But the reason it does not get played more widely is most likely due to the casual appeal of the format. Most people do not like lame control decks like that. If this was a really competitive format, there would be a ton of oath decks and everyone would pack hate. But this is not a competitive scene. This is still a fun format. People play whatever the hell they please and that makes the format so diverse, despite most decks hardly being tier 2.
Maybe the deck is even hard to play but everyone can figure it out with some pracitice.

So my conclusion is: Ban Oath, its a one card combo, that requires neither setup nor takes up some slots. Even the Hermit Druid Combo requires at least 7 slots (Druid, Dread Return, Mimeoplasm, Triskelion, the guy with the counters, Narcomoeba and Lingering Souls) and is far from fair in my opinion.
You can not turn a blind eye here.