landofMordor
Administrator
If a card is banned, is it really broken?
A frequent sentiment during Constructed ban discussions is "Card X got banned for Card Y's sins". In this stream-of-thoughty thread, I'd like to unpack the rhetoric of this statement a bit, to see what we can learn for our Cube designs.
Why does the Constructed metagame matter for my Cube?, I hear you asking. Bans are made in Constructed to change the decks and cards that are most powerful, thereby unlocking additional viable strategies. In the same way, the cards we include in our Cubes will subtly affect the dominant strategies in our Cube metagames, and critical thinking about bans can illuminate those dynamics.
Payoffs banned for the enabler's sins
The worst kinds of bans for Constructed metagames are those that do not actually address the heart of darkness. One of the most notable was the banning of Emrakul, the Promised End from Standard in Summer 2017 -- yes, Emrakul was terrible when cheated into play Turn 4 off of Aetherworks Marvel, but the problem was actually Marvel's mana-cheating ability. Emmy's ban did nothing to the strategy, which just switched to cheating in Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger.
(And even then, Marvel's ban in June 2017 led to the dominance of fair Temur Energy, which was due to the strength of its enablers -- Attune with Aether and Rogue Refiner lent the Energy deck unprecedented consistency and self-contained power in all its incarnations. It turns out these humble-seeming enablers were the problem with Energy all along.)
Another example was the ban of Agent of Treachery from Historic in June 2020. The Winota cheat deck was the undisputed queen of Historic, and the ban of its premier cheat target did... absolutely nothing to affect the deck's metagame share. WotC emergency-banned Winota, Joiner of Forces a week later.
Cube designers can learn an important lesson here: enablers are what determine a deck's power and play patterns. If a format's Reanimator decks are too strong, it's not the fault of Emrakul, the Promised End; it's the fault of Entomb+Reanimate. Replacing Emrakul with Colossal Dreadmaw will do less than replacing Reanimate with Zombify.
Payoffs banned for the staple's sins
A sub-class of the category above is when bans cannot target a power level offender because the offender supports the entire format.
The best example of this is the ban of Wrenn and Six in Legacy. Wasteland is not a fair or balanced Magic card. Contemporary versions of this effect typically involve card disadvantage (Ghost Quarter) or mana payment (Field of Ruin). However, Wasteland is also nearly synonymous with Legacy, in the same way that Mishra's Workshop is synonymous with Vintage. The best way to liberate the Legacy metagame from Wasteland locks is to ban the card that destroys nonbasic lands at a broken rate, just like the best way to prevent turbo artifact decks in Vintage would be a ban of Mishra's Workshop. For sentimental or corporate reasons, Wizards won't do that, and so they ban the next-best thing, the fair card that interacts in a game-breaking way with the broken format staple.
Cube designers can apply this insight to their own formats: If your pet card is causing problems in your Cube, how much are you willing to warp the environment around it? My own pet card, Balance, got the axe long ago so that I could continue to play cards which interact favorably with Balance, such as multiple cycles of fetchlands, but it was one of the harder cuts I've made.
Good bans leading to collateral damage
So far, I've argued that glue cards and enablers are the oftenest cause of broken play patterns. There are no better examples than Faithless Looting and Mox Opal in Modern. During their tenure in Modern, Opal and Flooting were the centerpiece of many, many, many Tier One decks -- Lantern Control, Mardu Pyromancer, about four different incarnations of Dredge and Dredgevine, Affinity, Hardened Scales, Whirza, and Hogaak, to name a few. Along the way, of course, they also allowed a wide variety of FNM decks and casual Modern decks to punch above their weight class, from Ensoul Artifact aggro to my homebrewed versions of 2014 Izzet Blitz (and no, this was never a real deck). This led to no small degree of outrage when Opal and Looting were banned, because of the "collateral damage" of the bannings which trickled down to casual players like myself.
Unfortunately, unlike the Emrakul, the Promised End banning, some cards deserve their bans. This is the case with the troublemakers of Flooting and Mox Opal; the former card allows the player to see their best cards extremely consistently in a color normally unable to do so, and the latter card cheats the fundamental mana system of the Magic game engine. (Most of Magic's healthiest bans target cards which violate one of these two axes.) Sure, casual players would steal fair wins with their janky decks, and some Tier 2 strategies were enabled by Flooting and Opal, but at high levels of Modern play, the cards choked format diversity and deckbuilding agency. In short, when these cards were dominant, it was a strategic error not to play or maindeck these powerful enablers (a wild overstatement offset in Constructed by metagame considerations, but this exaggeration will make the analogy to Cube more clear).
In Constructed and Cube alike, broken cards are the commonest build-arounds. Above-rate cards will get drafted earlier, maindecked more often, and will generally form the backbone of a Cube format in the same way FLooting did in Modern. It will lead to more win percentage t If you want to support a certain synergy in your cube, try giving it a few juicy power outliers for your format. It doesn't have to be the Power 9; it just has to be contextually strong -- in my Peasant cube, Nightveil Specter and Siege-Gang Commander serve this role quite nicely for their respective colors.
Cards banned for their play patterns
On the other hand, sometimes power outliers warp formats around them even when they're not broken. Oko, for example, is not a more busted card that Force of Will or Wasteland -- after all, it costs infinitely more mana than those two options -- and in fact singlehandedly enabled the resurgence of fair blue-green Legacy decks. Uro performed a similar role in Modern. However, the repetitious nature of their play patterns led to these cards' demise, simply because they weren't fun to see all the time, and they weren't fun to lose to.
This establishes a spectrum for the insight in the last section: power outliers can also lead to repetitive gameplay. This effect is exaggerated if the cube only has one bomb at the level of Oko, as opposed to running a full stable of bombs. Another factor is how large the power delta is -- Uro will be much more egregious in a Theros block cube than a power-maxing unrestricted cube. Still a third factor is how many deckbuilding costs are imposed by the broken card -- Lurrus of the Dream-Den decks will tend to feel much more homogenous than Uro decks due to deckbuilding constraints, thereby reducing the diversity of drafted decks.
In Summary:
- Enablers are what determine a deck's power and play patterns
- A payoff may seem broken, but it's just as likely the enabler's fault
- Power outliers are built around more frequently than other cards, but this can lead to repetitive draft/gameplay/deckbuilding decisions
- Power outliers can create collateral damage -- is it worth warping the environment around them?
I'm interested to hear your thoughts on how the concept of power outliers applies to your format. (For the sake of a mutually beneficial discussion, bear in mind that we Riptiders have variable definitions of what constitutes our formats' power outliers, and that's one of the strengths of this community.)
PS -- shoutout to Dom and Jason for sparking this thought in my brain during their latest podcast episode.
PPS -- Edits thanks to SirFunchalot, Dom, et al. Thanks for your thoughtful input!
A frequent sentiment during Constructed ban discussions is "Card X got banned for Card Y's sins". In this stream-of-thoughty thread, I'd like to unpack the rhetoric of this statement a bit, to see what we can learn for our Cube designs.
Why does the Constructed metagame matter for my Cube?, I hear you asking. Bans are made in Constructed to change the decks and cards that are most powerful, thereby unlocking additional viable strategies. In the same way, the cards we include in our Cubes will subtly affect the dominant strategies in our Cube metagames, and critical thinking about bans can illuminate those dynamics.
Payoffs banned for the enabler's sins
The worst kinds of bans for Constructed metagames are those that do not actually address the heart of darkness. One of the most notable was the banning of Emrakul, the Promised End from Standard in Summer 2017 -- yes, Emrakul was terrible when cheated into play Turn 4 off of Aetherworks Marvel, but the problem was actually Marvel's mana-cheating ability. Emmy's ban did nothing to the strategy, which just switched to cheating in Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger.
(And even then, Marvel's ban in June 2017 led to the dominance of fair Temur Energy, which was due to the strength of its enablers -- Attune with Aether and Rogue Refiner lent the Energy deck unprecedented consistency and self-contained power in all its incarnations. It turns out these humble-seeming enablers were the problem with Energy all along.)
Another example was the ban of Agent of Treachery from Historic in June 2020. The Winota cheat deck was the undisputed queen of Historic, and the ban of its premier cheat target did... absolutely nothing to affect the deck's metagame share. WotC emergency-banned Winota, Joiner of Forces a week later.
Cube designers can learn an important lesson here: enablers are what determine a deck's power and play patterns. If a format's Reanimator decks are too strong, it's not the fault of Emrakul, the Promised End; it's the fault of Entomb+Reanimate. Replacing Emrakul with Colossal Dreadmaw will do less than replacing Reanimate with Zombify.
Payoffs banned for the staple's sins
A sub-class of the category above is when bans cannot target a power level offender because the offender supports the entire format.
The best example of this is the ban of Wrenn and Six in Legacy. Wasteland is not a fair or balanced Magic card. Contemporary versions of this effect typically involve card disadvantage (Ghost Quarter) or mana payment (Field of Ruin). However, Wasteland is also nearly synonymous with Legacy, in the same way that Mishra's Workshop is synonymous with Vintage. The best way to liberate the Legacy metagame from Wasteland locks is to ban the card that destroys nonbasic lands at a broken rate, just like the best way to prevent turbo artifact decks in Vintage would be a ban of Mishra's Workshop. For sentimental or corporate reasons, Wizards won't do that, and so they ban the next-best thing, the fair card that interacts in a game-breaking way with the broken format staple.
Cube designers can apply this insight to their own formats: If your pet card is causing problems in your Cube, how much are you willing to warp the environment around it? My own pet card, Balance, got the axe long ago so that I could continue to play cards which interact favorably with Balance, such as multiple cycles of fetchlands, but it was one of the harder cuts I've made.
Good bans leading to collateral damage
So far, I've argued that glue cards and enablers are the oftenest cause of broken play patterns. There are no better examples than Faithless Looting and Mox Opal in Modern. During their tenure in Modern, Opal and Flooting were the centerpiece of many, many, many Tier One decks -- Lantern Control, Mardu Pyromancer, about four different incarnations of Dredge and Dredgevine, Affinity, Hardened Scales, Whirza, and Hogaak, to name a few. Along the way, of course, they also allowed a wide variety of FNM decks and casual Modern decks to punch above their weight class, from Ensoul Artifact aggro to my homebrewed versions of 2014 Izzet Blitz (and no, this was never a real deck). This led to no small degree of outrage when Opal and Looting were banned, because of the "collateral damage" of the bannings which trickled down to casual players like myself.
Unfortunately, unlike the Emrakul, the Promised End banning, some cards deserve their bans. This is the case with the troublemakers of Flooting and Mox Opal; the former card allows the player to see their best cards extremely consistently in a color normally unable to do so, and the latter card cheats the fundamental mana system of the Magic game engine. (Most of Magic's healthiest bans target cards which violate one of these two axes.) Sure, casual players would steal fair wins with their janky decks, and some Tier 2 strategies were enabled by Flooting and Opal, but at high levels of Modern play, the cards choked format diversity and deckbuilding agency. In short, when these cards were dominant, it was a strategic error not to play or maindeck these powerful enablers (a wild overstatement offset in Constructed by metagame considerations, but this exaggeration will make the analogy to Cube more clear).
In Constructed and Cube alike, broken cards are the commonest build-arounds. Above-rate cards will get drafted earlier, maindecked more often, and will generally form the backbone of a Cube format in the same way FLooting did in Modern. It will lead to more win percentage t If you want to support a certain synergy in your cube, try giving it a few juicy power outliers for your format. It doesn't have to be the Power 9; it just has to be contextually strong -- in my Peasant cube, Nightveil Specter and Siege-Gang Commander serve this role quite nicely for their respective colors.
Cards banned for their play patterns
On the other hand, sometimes power outliers warp formats around them even when they're not broken. Oko, for example, is not a more busted card that Force of Will or Wasteland -- after all, it costs infinitely more mana than those two options -- and in fact singlehandedly enabled the resurgence of fair blue-green Legacy decks. Uro performed a similar role in Modern. However, the repetitious nature of their play patterns led to these cards' demise, simply because they weren't fun to see all the time, and they weren't fun to lose to.
This establishes a spectrum for the insight in the last section: power outliers can also lead to repetitive gameplay. This effect is exaggerated if the cube only has one bomb at the level of Oko, as opposed to running a full stable of bombs. Another factor is how large the power delta is -- Uro will be much more egregious in a Theros block cube than a power-maxing unrestricted cube. Still a third factor is how many deckbuilding costs are imposed by the broken card -- Lurrus of the Dream-Den decks will tend to feel much more homogenous than Uro decks due to deckbuilding constraints, thereby reducing the diversity of drafted decks.
In Summary:
- Enablers are what determine a deck's power and play patterns
- A payoff may seem broken, but it's just as likely the enabler's fault
- Power outliers are built around more frequently than other cards, but this can lead to repetitive draft/gameplay/deckbuilding decisions
- Power outliers can create collateral damage -- is it worth warping the environment around them?
I'm interested to hear your thoughts on how the concept of power outliers applies to your format. (For the sake of a mutually beneficial discussion, bear in mind that we Riptiders have variable definitions of what constitutes our formats' power outliers, and that's one of the strengths of this community.)
PS -- shoutout to Dom and Jason for sparking this thought in my brain during their latest podcast episode.
PPS -- Edits thanks to SirFunchalot, Dom, et al. Thanks for your thoughtful input!
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twice, because it consistently overperformed compared to my other archetypes. None of the cards really were of notable individual card quality, neither enablers nor payoffs were power outliers, rather the archetype's density was too high. When trying to tweak the relative power of an archetype in your cube, whether you need to tone it down or crank it up, I think looking at the density is as important as looking at power outliers.
