SCG Opens and Standard (and Bannings and Card Pools and How Much R&D Knows and ... Stuff)

[Thomas David Baker]

There has been a lot of talk about the SCG Opens in relation to the bannings of Stoneforge Mystic and Jace, the Mind Sculptor.

 

See: http://www.starcitygames.com/php/news/article/22159.html and (especially) Aaron Forsythe on twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/mtgaaron/status/76769163279998976

 

1. The first idea I want to think about is, "good players are encouraged by SCG Opens to tinker with winning lists not innovate."  Is that true?  I would have thought that lots of players like to brew (and lots don't) and those that do would try and brew something that beat the best deck and play it if they thought there was a chance they had succeeded.  Is it possible that between MTGO dailys and SCG Opens there was not much innovation going on?  I don't give this idea much credence but I'm interested in opinions.

 

2. The second idea is the idea that, "given enough eyeballs/time all card pools yield a single best deck".  Is that true?  A lot of Magic players talk about rock-paper-scissors.  Within Legacy it seems that there are enough strategies and answers that the true best deck in Legacy is always metagame dependent.  Then again there is the blue core: 4 Jace, 4 Misstep, 4 Brainstorm, 4 Force of Will, possibly 4 Daze.  Perhaps there is a true best deck in Legacy and it just hasn't been found yet and started oppressing the format.  What would be the fate of a small card pool if infinite time were available to investigate it.  Does that differ for a large card pool?

 

3. How much do they know?  We have Aaron Forsythe saying:

mtgaaron Aaron Forsythe 
Q3 from @zombies: Was Deceiver Exarch a deliberate attempt to bring the Splintermite combo to Standard?
mtgaaron Aaron Forsythe 
A3: Nope. Like the Praetors, the Exarchs wanted mirrored pairs, so we used that one. If Splinter Twin + Exarch is a real deck, we missed it.

And they never had a deck in FFL with Jace and Stoneforge in it.

These seem like facts.  There is some slim possibility that they overplay their ignorance so that brewing and Magic in general seem more interesting.  But it seems like it is the case that they don't even find the best Standard decks in card pools comprised entirely of cards they have designed before shipping them.  Probably because there are hundreds of thousands (?) of Magic players and maybe 30 or 40 of "them".  It took a long time (and the right meta) for people to realize Jace was utterly broken rather than just very good, and only a few Japanese players played Stoneforge + Jace + Sword of Body and Mind at the first Pro Tour (Paris?) where that was possible.

 

4. What should they do?  I frequently find Standard oppressively boring.  I basically always like Draft.  That could be just me.  Is there anything they could (realistically) do to make Standard (or whatever Constructed format is played at FNM) better?  What if cards had a "blackout" and were not legal for September 2011 and also January 2012 but were otherwise legal for their whole time in Standard?  Too hard for judges and players alike?  What if cards had shorter runs in Standard?  Too expensive?  What if they went back to making sets bigger?  Possibly there are enough competing interests that what they are doing is approximately the best thing they could be doing, but the recent bannings have made me wonder.

 

[Louis Mackie]

They did have a Caw-Blade deck iirc. They had an awful Valakut list though.

[Thomas David Baker]

Some interesting info on what the FFL looked like for Kamigawa, Ravnica and Time Spiral standard in this four-part series: http://interestingchoices.com/?p=642