Written by Paul W.
http://metagamemasters.eu/2020-an-early-retrospective?fbclid=IwAR10vDduNmrAAt3419GqgAY8kfi-aA7qJBAMyRqRN_-hzy3Sc7bUYGt7RRI
"The straight-up ban of Tolarian Academy made me sad for various reasons. First off, it severely reduces the overall deck diversity in the format. Apart from Academy Combo (which also had at least two main iterations), there were Affinity-Brews developing left and right that drew on Academy as a boost helping them to compete against more established decks. Their overall viability has now noticeably decreased.
I am also not an expert, but I don't think this ban has a large fall-out effect to constrain the Oracle-Breach deck, if this was an intention behind the decisions. Another factor is the apparent unwillingness of the broader playerbase to respond to the Academy deck, both in terms of expanding their knowledge of the functioning of the deck as well as their overall deck- and card-choices.
For how good Academy Combo was, it was always underplayed, and I wonder how the format would have adapted like if more people had picked it up. On a related note: structurally, decks that are generally weak to combo are now after the ban not better off than before. Yes, they have one less bad matchup, but their overall position in the metagame hasn't changed in respect to the balance between deck-archetypes.
I realize that the Academy deck was "unfun" to play against (whatever that means – too many nutdraws even if your deck is geared towards beating it?). However, if the council were to pursue a more visionary and structural approach in curating the banlist, we could actually decrease the amount of bannings we would need to force through (and trust me, under the current model, there will inevitably follow more bans as the format gets watered down more and more).
As of late, the strategy behind each individual round of bannings seemed a bit like banning the most oppressive cards in that respective timeframe. But if we do not tackle the structural issues inherent to the current banlist, we will remain trapped in this pattern of pulling the plug from entire decks by banning their centerpiece, and I think this is undesirable.
The solution I put forward is twofold: first to unban a few cards in order to make other archetypes more viable and attractive, and second to ban generically playable tutor spells (such as Demonic Tutor and Tainted Pact) to decrease the consistency of combodecks to a level where more decks can actually compete. Especially now where tournament play is not happening and people can test in controlled local environments with literally no competitive stakes, we could attempt such an experiment and create grassroot knowledge about the format."
This text seals many extremely valid points so well and clearly, that I wanted to share it on few places (like this) after i red it.
http://metagamemasters.eu/2020-an-early-retrospective?fbclid=IwAR10vDduNmrAAt3419GqgAY8kfi-aA7qJBAMyRqRN_-hzy3Sc7bUYGt7RRI
"The straight-up ban of Tolarian Academy made me sad for various reasons. First off, it severely reduces the overall deck diversity in the format. Apart from Academy Combo (which also had at least two main iterations), there were Affinity-Brews developing left and right that drew on Academy as a boost helping them to compete against more established decks. Their overall viability has now noticeably decreased.
I am also not an expert, but I don't think this ban has a large fall-out effect to constrain the Oracle-Breach deck, if this was an intention behind the decisions. Another factor is the apparent unwillingness of the broader playerbase to respond to the Academy deck, both in terms of expanding their knowledge of the functioning of the deck as well as their overall deck- and card-choices.
For how good Academy Combo was, it was always underplayed, and I wonder how the format would have adapted like if more people had picked it up. On a related note: structurally, decks that are generally weak to combo are now after the ban not better off than before. Yes, they have one less bad matchup, but their overall position in the metagame hasn't changed in respect to the balance between deck-archetypes.
I realize that the Academy deck was "unfun" to play against (whatever that means – too many nutdraws even if your deck is geared towards beating it?). However, if the council were to pursue a more visionary and structural approach in curating the banlist, we could actually decrease the amount of bannings we would need to force through (and trust me, under the current model, there will inevitably follow more bans as the format gets watered down more and more).
As of late, the strategy behind each individual round of bannings seemed a bit like banning the most oppressive cards in that respective timeframe. But if we do not tackle the structural issues inherent to the current banlist, we will remain trapped in this pattern of pulling the plug from entire decks by banning their centerpiece, and I think this is undesirable.
The solution I put forward is twofold: first to unban a few cards in order to make other archetypes more viable and attractive, and second to ban generically playable tutor spells (such as Demonic Tutor and Tainted Pact) to decrease the consistency of combodecks to a level where more decks can actually compete. Especially now where tournament play is not happening and people can test in controlled local environments with literally no competitive stakes, we could attempt such an experiment and create grassroot knowledge about the format."
This text seals many extremely valid points so well and clearly, that I wanted to share it on few places (like this) after i red it.