As we watched the tournament unfold, and after we had many conversations with players both competing in the Pro Tour as well as attending MagicCon: Barcelona to play Modern, much of our concern subsided.
After talking to people still buying into and playing Modern. But people are quitting Modern over this card.
Very surprised to not see anything touched in Historic, but I guess they are free to make changes to that whenever and not on the same yearly schedule.
Historic also gets rebalances, meaning they don’t have to worry about banning/unbanning as much. If a card’s too powerful, they can just nerf it when they feel like it. For example, they could decide one day that [[Orcish Bowmasters]] should only trigger once per turn and cost 3 mana. This would pretty much only cost players the wildcards they spent on the cards, which they have historically shown they’re more than happy to effectively delete from people’s accounts.
I’m sure historic will see some changes over time. It has some answers to [[The One Ring]] that don’t exist in modern (like [[Fragment Reality]]), but no [[Urza’s Saga]] to fetch out a [[Haywire Mite]] or anything so you’re left with some pretty inconsistent answers.
I like the unbans, but this is about as close to “no changes” as they could get without explicitly making no changes. Really was hoping for more unbans at least!
The explanations are very thorough and it does feel like they have a pretty good handle on the current state of the formats, which is nice. I still think they’re wrong about [[Orcish Bowmasters]] and to a slightly lesser extent [[The One Ring]] though.
I think Bowmasters is not fine in Modern/Legacy and I still think The One Ring is just going to increasingly become oppressive. Yes it’s at their “4 mana threshold” and it’s not one archetype dominating with it, but I think its ubiquity is probably a downside and that we’re going to see it clogging up games everywhere. Really curious and interested to see how the formats evolve!
I’m happy to see some reconsideration of old bans, but it really felt like they’re sweeping LTR’s issues under the rug while the set remains in print.
I guess it’s possible that the metagame will shift to deal with these new powerhouses, but the Ring could still remain overly ubiquitous, being colorless and generically useful. It’s hard to read WotC’s wait-and-see approach as anything other than handwaving, given their track record this decade.
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