Why does Wizards keep making cards they want to ban?
General forum
Posted on Dec. 10, 2019, 8:48 a.m. by capriom85
Wizards has been printing cards lately that are only playable for a few weeks before they get the axe. Do they really not see this coming miles before the card is made?
Once Upon a Time is Pioneer and Standard banned because it makes green too consistent.
Field of the Dead was too oppressive to control.
Veil of Summer for whatever reason. Green too good again?
Smuggler's Copter never even saw the light of day. This one was banned for seeing play on too many aggro lists. It’s a good aggro card. This one bothers me most. It not hard to deal with. It does nothing by itself. It’s not format defining or warping.
Why do they print new cards then say, “but don’t use them!”?
Last_Laugh says... #3
Corporate greed, bottom line. Hasbro pushes WotC to make pushed cards at the very least knowing it may get banned. Problem is WotC continues to see growth despite this and many other greedy shithead moves over the last few years... so there's no reason they would change their ways.
December 10, 2019 9:51 a.m.
Or... not corporate greed, but pushing the boundaries - you cannot know which cards are too powerful without actually breaking a few of them. And despite any playtesting a handful of people do at WOTC, testing done at the scale of millions will always provide better results.
December 10, 2019 10:06 a.m.
Last_Laugh says... #5
Hasbro has been feeling the financial hurt on every type of product except things like D&D and MtG. I agree that they're 'pushing the boundaries'... but it's not the boundaries of the cards though. It's the limits of what their customers will put up with.
December 10, 2019 10:21 a.m.
WotC doesnt ''want'' and of their cards to get banned. They know that super powerful cards will sell a set, and they can just fix their mistakes afterwards. Notice how they waited a little too long to ban oko, so that they could hit the numbers they want before nerfing. As stated before, there is pressure from hasbro to make share holders happy.
December 10, 2019 10:28 a.m.
So it’s as simple as making busted cards just to sell sets, knowing that they’ll likely get banned when it’s all said and done?
I still feel some of these are not ban worthy. Copter...not by a long shot. Once, maybe, but they didn’t need to make it castable for free.
December 10, 2019 10:35 a.m.
Last_Laugh says... #9
He's just saying they waited as long as they did to ban him until they made their money money money.
December 10, 2019 10:48 a.m.
Standard is not the only consideration when making a new set. Sure, the ideal is to have a playable standard environment, but you should still have a few cards in any given set that are playable in Legacy/Modern/Commander.
The problem? Those formats are all pretty well-established, so, for something from a new set to be playable it has to either be more powerful than existing alternatives or it has to do something unique that has never been done before. You'll notice that three of the four cards you listed tried to do something new--Once Upon a Time tried a new, cute, and flavourful free cast; Field did a powerful landfall ability on a land; Copter was an aggressively costed/crewed vehicle released in the first set with vehicles--before Wizards realized their immunity to sorcery-speed interaction was a problem.
In its explanation of Veil's banning, they explained why they made Veil so powerful--its predecessor, Autumn's Veil , had been rather lacklustre during its Standard run. In their effort to make VoS playable, they over-corrected--that's a perfectly reasonable mistake to make.
All told, it is really hard to both innovate and balance--no amount of R&D testing can make up for the ingenuity of thousands trying to break that card.
December 10, 2019 11:09 a.m.
seshiro_of_the_orochi says... #11
Regarding copter: Vehicles are a newer type of card. Copter was from the first set to ever include vehicles. Compare this to OG Mirrodin and Skullclamp . Equipment started in that block, and WotC had to learn about the rich interactions equipment has. They tried to weaken it by having it give creature -1 toughness. Today, we know that this is what makes the card powerful. This is true for Umezawa's Jitte as well. I mean, they even put it into a theme deck back then because they didn't properly estimate its power.
Regarding OuaT: It's an enabler. It would propably be fine if the rest of the current standard legal green cards wouldn't be as powerful as they are. That effect without hitting lands costed G in original Kamigawa in the form of Commune with Nature . As a rare, with higher printed cost and a basically narrow condition to cast it for free, it should be fine...weren't it for everybody's non-favourite Trickster Oko.
December 10, 2019 1:48 p.m.
I get Field, I get Veil, and I even get Once.
Why Copter? I don’t see how it’s overly powerful for both formats? I play it in Modern and it’s really not the game ended people think.
Caerwyn, can you explain that bit about sorcery speed immunity?
December 10, 2019 1:48 p.m.
StardustDragon11 says... #13
Copter edges out a lot of aggro cards and could contribute to a format that is too homogenous to be healthy.
December 10, 2019 2:37 p.m.
I should have been more clear in my language and said "immunity to creature-based sorcery-speed interaction." Vehicles are effectively creatures that cannot be hit by "destroy target creature" effects, including any such effects found on a planeswalker. Equally damning, vehicles are immune to the Wraths many control decks utilize to regain dominance over a situation. The immunity to wraths is particularly problematic with the crew cost of 1--the turn after the Wrath, Copter's controller could slam a 1/1 and immediately continue swinging for 3 with a loot.
Or, if you want to hear Wizards' thoughts on Copter:
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The strength of Mono-Black Aggro and other aggressive decks featuring Smuggler's Copter
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That Field of the Dead ramp decks are suppressing controlling and reactive decks
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The general prevalence and dominance of green decks as a group, with Once Upon a Time being a key common factor to those decks' success
As a result, we're choosing to ban Smuggler's Copter, Field of the Dead, and Once Upon a Time in Pioneer. We believe that these changes will result in greater diversity among aggressive decks, a clearer role in the metagame for reactive and controlling decks, and a push toward better color balance among competitive decks.
December 10, 2019 2:59 p.m.
Grubbernaut says... #16
Copter is completely broken with Teferi, Time Raveler . They're going to have to ban Heart, too. Or, better yet, give lil' Tef the boot. Way too good in Pioneer.
December 10, 2019 3:47 p.m.
Caerwyn, thanks for linking that.
Grubbernaut, I agree Teferi needs the boot in that particular instance. I see no Teferi decks in my LGS, so I wasn’t even looking at it that way. I just want to play my damn Cooters the way they were intended.
December 10, 2019 6 p.m.
ScionsStillLive says... #18
The reason Wizards makes cards that get banned later is because they don't know the cards are gonna be banned. They look at tournament results and see which cards are too dominating and overpowered.
Take Once Upon a Time for example.
Wizards didn't know how that card would give a huge boost. After some tournaments where literally every deck was playing that, they realized how impactful it was.
So basically, Wizards doesn't know what effects a card will have until it has been played.
December 10, 2019 8:53 p.m.
Magnanimous says... #19
capriom85 one way of looking at the Smuggler's Copter ban is to see how it warps gameplay, another is to see the impact it has on the meta. I think at the time they banned it a crazy high number of decks were playing it (like >50%) and it could just be slotted into any deck in the format as a card filterer, evasive threat, or resilient threat. In my opinion it would be perfectly fine if it didn't have flying or looting and maybe slightly too good if it had one of those.
December 10, 2019 10:09 p.m.
Magnanimous says... #20
I think corporate greed does play into this but there's another more interesting factor at play. The core elements of the game, the color pie, card types, card abilities, normal card effects (counters, burn, pump, etc.), and the trade-offs of mana for power are changing.
The color pie has always slowly shifted, but now I think they're having trouble balancing the colors within the new color pie. The weakest color, white, got even weaker with green taking some of its creatures matter cards, black getting nearly exclusive rights on removal, the loss of its lands matter cards, and the loss of its taxes cards (and the intense synergy that other colors needed to function previously). This, and generally busted cards, make green and black the big winners of the new color pie, so any cards that push those colors slightly can make much bigger impacts on the meta than a broken red, blue, or white card.
Vehicles were added recently and WotC recently started pushing planeswalkers much more as a regular part of gameplay, so it's understandable that they might run into trouble with things like Copy Cat combo or the Copter.
Also, cards don't interact in the same ways they used to. So many new cards say uncounterable, creatures are more resilient, evasive, etc. changing how much a blocker or removal spell matters. Veil of Summer gives green an ability that is broken because it can't be interacted with traditional blue or black interaction and would never have been printed even five years ago.
The other major force in this is breaking the cardinal rule of mana for power. The beginnings of magic stuck pretty strictly to the 1 mana for a 1/1, 2 for a vanilla 2/2 and so on. The middle period realized that higher costs come with greater risks, so 6 for a 8/8 isn't busted. Now we have things like Questing Beast . Additionally, they took cost reduction too far with OuoT, The Great Henge , and Ghalta, Primal Hunger . So they rely way too heavily on old ways of thinking believing that they can continue to slightly push the boundaries and it'll be fine.
December 10, 2019 10:38 p.m.
PepsiAddicted says... #21
years ago maro wrote all sets are designed with focus on draft and sealed, not constructed. and the FFD cant predict all combos and synergies that will be possible with older cards in different formats
December 11, 2019 2 a.m.
DemonDragonJ says... #22
I believe that the obvious answer is that WotC simply does not properly palytest cards before releasing them to the public, because I would like to believe that they would not deliberately print overpowered cards and then band them later as damage control.
SynergyBuild says... #2
Narset, Parter of Veils , Karn, the Great Creator , and Oko, Thief of Crowns should be put in this list too.
December 10, 2019 9:33 a.m.