Is it just me, or does it seem slightly absurd that Baneslayer Angel is given as one of the "good" examples, and it really does look pretty fair in this context? I weep for standard...
To their credit, both in Chapin's article and SCG article they seem conscious that these shouldn't be hard rules:
There is a sweet spot in between "Automatic Exclusion" and "Automatic inclusion." That's where the game is. That's where the parts that make up interesting formats come from.
There is frequently an instinct among hardcore gamers to always advocate flattening out the power. While this is poor advice the majority of the time, there are times and ways and places where it can be useful.
Maybe they could come out and be more clear about this, but the issue is more when design enters a positive feedback loop, having to become more and more extreme until it hits a point thats unfun. There is an issue that eventually arises with
too many baneslayers as well, but in a format thats become hyper focused around low-investment threats, baneslayer seems a shining beacon of enlightenment. In my format, I ended up triming the ETBs, and when I went to the extreme of banning them completly, the results were net worse. The trick was getting to the point that Chapin describes as between automatic exclusion and automatic inclusion, and which seems like a spirtual partner of the archetype design we've been doing (that sweet spot where the decks have approachable structure and identity, but it isn't overly stifling to the drafter's creativity), as well as reflected in our discusions on tapered power bands.
Once you enter that positive feedback loop, and things begin to shift towards ever more extreme versions of itself, distorting and bringing the rest of the format with it, is where you can have problems. Thats why Chapin's critiques of long-tusk cub within the context of standard where energy is overrpresented might be true, but it also might be true that its fine in Onder's formats, where energy might not be overrepresented.
Like you noted though, the baneslayer comparision does seem pretty absurd, but when was the last time standard really had baneslayers? Probably when Baneslayer was printed. Basically its something like SOM->Ponder/Titans/hellrider-> into lower powered conditional focused Theros/Khans (we had a whole fight on this forum about the power level drop with removal/sweepers during this era)->into this low investment standard with a more homogenized and stifling structure.
But thats where the analysis gets a lot more complicated, and where there are interesting holes in how the argument is presented. People always want to go back to OG RAV-TSP as an example of a well designed format (and you see shades of that in some of the CF articles), but they ommit that tournament attendence was down in that era, but the player base
grew tremendously during the hyper efficient SOM->ID era. For a lot of people, ponder, grave titan, and hellrider was the high point of their magic experience.
I've gone on this topic before, where I argu that a big part of standard's problem is that WOTC has to cater to both a core crowd, and a tournament crowd. Core players are going to love hyper diverse formats like Modern, but those are unacceptable for a player trying (frutlessly) to make a living off of magic. Chapin's point about the homogenization of cards (leading to more consistent matchups and interactions for tournament players) in standard is likely, at least in part, the result of a WOTC push to make the pro-scene more attractive. Its a natural outgrowth from years of articles from Pro players like paulo ranting about how much they hate modern as a competive format, and it being dropped from the pro-tour, even if by all accounts modern is the most popular magic format. This is why I advocated for too seperate card indexs, a large, more diverse core list for FNMs, and a smaller, more homogenized core list for high stakes tournaments. This way, you don't have to try to please everyone, and end up making no-one happy.
Which makes it funny that so many pro players seem to dislike this new standard, and I have to re-examine those positions somewhat. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that meaning seems to be trumping materialism again, and despite pro-player's rants, they would rather have a more meaningful experience with a
less structured, but not
overly chaotic standard. The problem seems to be that the excess levels of homogenization means that the unexplored terrority (in terms of
both decks and the depths of interaction between decks) is being too rapidly depleted, resulting in boredom. It also suggests something about people's actual motivations when playing this game.
Its also where Chapin's homogenization levels might provide the beginnings of a crude sketch. Modern seems to be too chaotic for pro-players, standared too stifling, but legacy seems to have a reasonable level of homognization (which is probably the
actual basis for people saying its the best format ever, so we can stop purely attributing it to brainstorm->fetch/wasteland). It seems to have enough cards to create form and structure, but not too many that it excesively cuts down on exploration: an outdoor playground, rather than an intimidating open wilderness or a familiar but stifling house.
Also if whats really motivating players is format/interaction exploration within an open but not too constrictive structure, than it kind of throws the entire idea of mere power maxing ($$$ maxing) out the window.
