Banhammer Time!

NearSideMoon · Joined: 29 Mar 2012 Posts: 52

See, that's the thing. You still 'Have Fun' when playing against Delver. They don't do anything overly oppressive or terribly broken or unbelievably unfair if your deck is reasonably functional. Built properly, Delver will not be completely advantaged over your deck. This will mean games will be interactive, difficult affairs, that make you think and calculate and play your best Magic.

It still leads to fun games, which is what is the most important. It's not like Caw-Blade where nothing could beat it, or Affinity, or Academy, or Necro, where you have to play these decks and have to play the mirror match, which creates unfun environments.

Cards are banned, and as far as I know have always been banned, because they create unfun playing environments. Not because they are overpowered. Bloodbraid Elf and Tarmogoyf and Bitterblossom and Dark Confidant are all very powerful cards, which dominated their respective formats, but they were not banned because they did not force tournament attendance down like Affinity or Caw-Blade. That's the only consideration when it comes to banning cards; whether or not they encourage an unfun game. And Delver does not do that.

It has no reason to be near the banned list.

Engrishskill · Joined: 15 Jan 2007 Posts: 1152

It would probably cause Zack Hill to explode into a hail of jelly beans and gore, but the r&d team should just stop only printing very good cards that have "creature" in their text. Creature formats stagnate like nobody's business- there's been other factors too, so take this with a grain of salt, but Ravnica/Time Spiral Standard was awesome, then Time Spiral/Lorwyn pretty much started to stagnate on fae. Alara Came along and...yeah. Blech.

Maybe I am biased, but the omgcreaturesarefun regime coming in has been the biggest problem; not this card or that one.

Rather than eliminating or weakening longstanding archetypes, they should try to achieve some sort of equilibrium between them, which is easier said than done, but considering how dominant ux aggro control has been over the last few years, it seems like it is worth giving it a shot since the 2-3 fnm crowd will always be sour about bad beats.