Because it’s incredibly confusing. I’ve been playing since 1995, and I personally love banding, but there’s no way it’s anything but confusing.
If nothing else, the fact that it does one thing on offense and an entirely different thing on defense already makes it unique among keyword abilities. And neither one of those things is particularly easy to explain.
What?! Banding is absurdly confusing! Can you think of any keyword ability from the history of magic that’s more confusing (no fair choosing “bands with other”)? It works differently when attacking than it does defending, and it interacts with evasion in nonintuitive ways, including having different interactions when attacking vs defending. Extra credit if you know the interactions when a creature loses banding mid-combat (of course, the answer varies depending on whether the creature is attacking or defending ;))
And I disagree that it’s subtle or low-power. Banding is absurdly powerful. Go play a limited format with banding in it and you’ll see this.
But the real reason Banding is best left in the dust is that it has a tendency to create stagnant and unfun game states. It is very rarely correct to attack into an opponent that has even a single 1/1 banding creature. Best case, you’ll get to trade your best attacking creature for their worst. Often, all attacks are chump attacks. If both players have banding creatures, you get long stretches of game where there are no profitable attacks for either player.
The reason you probably remember it as low-power is that creatures in general were low-power back then, and actual combat between multiple creatures was relatively rare. Most of the best decks didn’t even have any creatures, so who cared?
It’s been years since I played MtG. Is colorless a new color? I noticed a 5/5 creature that costs 4 colorless. Does that mean 4 of any type of mana, or 4 specifically colorless mana, like from Deserts? It also has Trample, Haste, and costs an additional card to target it with a spell. That would have been considered seriously broken back in the day.
You’re conflating two things. Reality Smasher costs four generic and one colorless. That mean that four of its mana can be any color or no color at all, but one of its mana MUST be colorless, so yes, from a desert or something along those lines.
Cards that must be cast with colorless mana as part of their cost are from the newest set, and (indications suggest) will NOT become part of the “Evergreen” mechanics that all magic sets use.
In the past, the (1) symbol meant different things if you were producing it or you were spending it: if you were producing it, it meant 1 colourless mana, and if you were spending it, it meant 1 mana of any colour.
What Wizards has done is cleaned this up, so that (1) only means 1 mana of any colour, and they created a new symbol (<>) that only means 1 colourless mana. So where a Sol Ring would once cost (1) (1 mana of any colour) and produce (2) (2 colourless mana), it now costs (1) (1 mana of any colour) and produces (<>)(<>) (2 colourless mana).
Sounds to this outsider like they could have fixed this whole kerfluffle by making these new cards immune to that Eye of Ugin card.
Can they do that retroactively? Or is Modern set up where the text on the card is permanently binding? Can they announce that a card has an extra restriction? Or can they reprint a card and have that change the rules on the previous cards? I seem to remember hearing of a game that does that. (Though I’d suggest changing the Eye of Ugin card in that case. Give it a minimum.)
True, but there’s not an obvious way to do that. Eye of Ugin reduces the cost of colorless Eldrazi, so once they decided to print cheap colorless Eldrazi in the new set, the die was cast. They could have made the new Eldrazi colored (like the old non-legendary Eldrazi were, but that’d nix the colorless-matters theme of the set. The developers faced a choice: break Modern, or not have a colorless-Eldrazi-themed set. They chose the former.
No, Magic no longer issues power-level errata. They can ban the card, but they can’t (under current practices) retroactively change the card text.
Though they have retroactively changed cards in the past. For instance, Orcish Oriflamme was originally costed at 1R, but later printings changed it to 3R to tone it down (ironically, in the current environment, 1R is probably slightly overpriced).
That was a printing error rather than a deliberate re-costing of the card.
Yep, the same set (Alpha) also had Cyclopean Tomb accidentally printed with no mana cost at all.
As an example of the power-level errata, Time Vault (which enters tapped, doesn’t untap on your untap step, taps to give you an extra turn, and can be untapped by skipping a turn) was errata’d to require a “time counter” to be on it to activate it, and skipping a turn both untapped it and placed a time counter on it. This was done because, even in Alpha, there were ways to untap artifacts (like Twiddle), and once Voltaic Key (which taps to untap an artifact) was printed, a Vintage-staple infinite combo was born.
To the matter at hand, I just returned from the Star City Games Louisville Open, and results were grim. 65 players made Day 2, and 31 of them were on Eldrazi. Of the Top 32, a stunning 19 were Eldrazi decks. As at the Pro Tour, the main foil to the Eldrazi menace was Affinity.
Y’know, this whole Eye of Ugin thing feels sort of like Affinity itself. What are the standard counters to Affinity, and do any of them work against Eldrazi?
Ancient Grudge, Shatterstorm, and Vandalblast destroy multiple artifacts. Stony Silence stops activated abilities of artifacts from being activated, and Kataki, War’s Wage gives artifacts an upkeep cost.
None of them do anything against Eldrazi decks, which either run a couple utility artifacts (Chalice of the Void, Ratchet Bomb) or none. There are no Eldrazi hate cards.
Also, Affinity has a lot of air in it - terrible cards like Memnite and Ornithopter that the deck has to run to have a critical mass of artifacts for its payoff cards. Conversely, Eldrazi cards are much stronger on average, and the only deckbuilding cost is running Eldrazi lands and Eldrazi creatures.
Yeah, this is kind of a disaster.
Trying to decide if I want to unload what staples I have now, in case there is an emergency banning.
Yeah, I can see that none of those would work. I was hoping there was something that worked directly against things that reduce casting cost. Or maybe nonbasic land hate?
There are cards that do these things (Painter’s Servant, for example), but they don’t apply retroactively - all the Eldrazi that have already been vomited onto the board before you turn off the tap are still there - and the Eldrazi maindeck 4 Thought-Knot Seers to get rid of your hosers on turn 2.
There won’t be an emergency ban (in my opinion), but they’ll ban something at the next scheduled ban & restricted update in April. If you have Urborgs, Eyes of Ugin, etc, I’d unload them before then. I sold my Urborgs at the Open for a nice profit.
Not that I am aware of. Painter’s Servant stops the Eye/Temple engine, but it’s a 2-drop creature that you must cast on turn 2 on the play to have a real impact, and it dies to Dismember & Path to Exile.
The non-basic land hate starts at 3 mana: Fulminator Mage and Blood Moon. This lines up fine with Tron, but terribly with Eldrazi. By the same you cast your Mage or Blood Moon, they’re attacking you for 10+ damage per turn.
Ghost Quarter can destroy a land as early as turn 1, but it replaces it with a basic land and sets you back an entire turn, so even if they don’t have a replacement Eye or Temple in hand, it sets them up to beat you honestly by casting their guys on curse.
Worship and Ensnaring Bridge used to be answers, but now the dominant Eldrazi build is blue/white, and it runs Disenchant and Stubborn Denial.
As it stands, the best tactics, in order of effectiveness, seem to be:
I wonder if the format is really broken or there is another deck out there but no one is even trying to find it because it is easier to just play the deck list you know works.
A deck that beats Eldrazi has to be one of two things: Either it has to have things in it that specifically work well against Eldrazi, but not against other decks in general, or it has to be able to kill so quickly that it can basically ignore Eldrazi. If the former, then the format is still being dominated by Eldrazi. If the latter, then the new deck will become the dominant deck (as soon as it’s discovered), and the format is still broken. I think the closest thing to an answer would be something that works well against creature decks in general, but which can still be beaten by non-creature decks, but I don’t think Wizards wants to push creatures back out of the spotlight again.
Yes, the format is broken. There are people who speak lovingly of Vintage and Legacy, but those are broken formats too. If turn 1 decides the game - if the game is lost because you didn’t cheat out Painter’s Servant and the game is won if you did - you have made a bad game.