Hi All,
So our Brothers War stock has yet to arrive. But the Cards from down South are almost sorted. The cards from the big collection are all away now, and there's only 700 or so cards from general trading in Invercargill to go (other than the commons/uncommons under $2). On the topic of the big collection I made a rather large fuck up around it and it's stressing me out a chunk. But I don't really want to get into all those details here.
Instead I'm going to talk about something I had a conversation with in person a few days ago with a regular reader. Sometimes I hear the remark, "standard is so much worse than it used to be, there's so many more bannings these days"
This is a remark I strongly disagree with. The reason there are more bannings these days is not because of bad design, but because of Arena. What used to take formats months to figure out what the meta is (usually from a Pro Tour) and then another few months to figure out the best counter play (maybe as long as the next Pro Tour) is now taking weeks. With everyone on Arena simultaneously, Meta's are getting figured out in a week, and counterplay is figured out a week later. What might used to take 5-6months is now taking 2 weeks tops. I actually think modern Standard design is much better than it ever has been.
I've been playing since Onslaught, and I can think of maybe 1 Standard format between then and now that might not have a deck where bannings would have happened if that format was on Arena. That format is Kamigawa/Ravnica: City of Guilds.
Goblin Bidding, Affinity, Dragonstorm, Faeries, 5-Colour Control, Mythic Bant, Eldrazi Ramp, Caw Blade (and in fact I think Caw Twin would have been found much faster and actually been a real deck for longer), Thragtusk/Resto Angel, UW control, monoblue & monoblack devotion and Siege Rhino Junk all would have had something banned from them somewhere in their reign, and this I firmly believe.
When a Standard Meta on arena is good and balanced for multiple months, then I think that's something to give massive congrats to the design team on, as a format that's fair and nothing needs to be banned feels next to impossible with how fast Arena solves metas.
That's most of my rant, but I just want to note that this is the same with draft formats too. OG Rav block, triple ROE, and triple INN are some of my favourite draft formats of all time, with Neon Dynasty recently kicking our ROE. But really I have no idea how any of those 3 older formats compete with NEO. NEO's the only format of all 3 I was able to draft 3-5 times per day, rather than about once a week at FNM. I don't know how those formats compare if I could draft those 3-5 times a day as well (though boy would I like to, those formats were so cool).
Lastly, some of you may have seen the ads for the Black Friday sale on Facebook. The sale will start 12.01am the morning of Friday the 25th and finish Monday the 28th at Midnight. The sale code will be 20FOIL.
See you all next week,
- Rose Willis
