Mystical Tutor: It basically is a 2nd copy of your best spell at the expense of discarding an additional card. The problem is that there are game-ending instants and sorceries (especially problematic: Price of Progress) which are worth the card disadvantage. Who cares if you have one less card, if your opponent is already dead. Terminus and Entreat the Angels did not convince me. Both cards are hilariously bad when in your hand early or drawn at a bad time. The thing happening the most is my opponent getting price and then "punishing" me for greedily having 4 non basics out of 10 lands... I dislike the unbanning.
Gifts Ungiven, Stoneforge Mystic, Natural Order: No... please no... Unlike other cards of that category, they do not require you to bend your decklist. You would play redundant spells, Batterskull or Green Creatures and Titan anyway. Having those "oops, I just won!"-buttons in a deck comes at virtually no cost. They are good in almost any stage of the game and allow for the creation of gamestates where one cheap spell creates a problem so big that it can only be solved by investing multiple cards and a lot more mana. They either are against the idea behind highlander times four (Gifts), are a two mana gamewin engine or a four mana cardadvantage and boardpresence machine. Just brutal and lame cards that are almost impossible to play around or outrace. TNN is in almost every regard a worse card.
There is a ton of pretty retarded cards out there. For me the question is wether or not it can be handled by various decks through various means. TNN seems okay to me. It is a silly card and pushed beyond belief but it still is easily beaten most of the time I see it in play. The decks just adapted. There are other crazy cards that most decks are absolutely incapable of handling even with changes. It is always hard to draw the line, but you have to draw it somewhere. And to me TNN is at the fringe of what is acceptable and I would not be sad to see it go but the cards mentioned above are just so game-breaking, that I would be really displeased to see them back in our format.
Gifts Ungiven, Stoneforge Mystic, Natural Order: No... please no... Unlike other cards of that category, they do not require you to bend your decklist. You would play redundant spells, Batterskull or Green Creatures and Titan anyway. Having those "oops, I just won!"-buttons in a deck comes at virtually no cost. They are good in almost any stage of the game and allow for the creation of gamestates where one cheap spell creates a problem so big that it can only be solved by investing multiple cards and a lot more mana. They either are against the idea behind highlander times four (Gifts), are a two mana gamewin engine or a four mana cardadvantage and boardpresence machine. Just brutal and lame cards that are almost impossible to play around or outrace. TNN is in almost every regard a worse card.
There is a ton of pretty retarded cards out there. For me the question is wether or not it can be handled by various decks through various means. TNN seems okay to me. It is a silly card and pushed beyond belief but it still is easily beaten most of the time I see it in play. The decks just adapted. There are other crazy cards that most decks are absolutely incapable of handling even with changes. It is always hard to draw the line, but you have to draw it somewhere. And to me TNN is at the fringe of what is acceptable and I would not be sad to see it go but the cards mentioned above are just so game-breaking, that I would be really displeased to see them back in our format.