You make a fair point, that just begs how people will break it next. I do find it very funny that this happened in the first MH set with the summer of gaak, mh2 brought the invocations and monkey, and now the birds and the bees are breaking everything. I’d love it if they banned 3fucker, but I think he’s way behind the chopping block compared to the other combo pieces.
I dunno that getting rid of Shuko or En Kor would solve things, the deck would move to Lightning Greaves.
There's a problem and it's pointed out right here:
WOTC has gone out of its for the past eight years at least to make creature removal that isn't a straight sweeper bad against creatures. I remember it even back in Khans block against Abzan where it felt actively bad to kill the Siege Rhino because they still got an overcosted Lightning Helix to the face against you at worst. Single target removal is becoming worse and worse when the threats all get ETB value or are almost as cheap as the removal aimed against them.
Part of that is because Single Target removal has been power crept as much as the threats if not more, a Decade ago Unlicensed Disintegration and Vraska's Contempt were the best removal in the format?
Sure, but if their intent is to slow down the deck instead of banning it out like they attempted initially with Hogaak making their artifact cost twice as much and banning the alternate combo piece they can pull out with chord would help. Hell, they could ban Greaves too pretty sure the decks that want that kind of card for legitimate purposes switched to the 1 drop ward equipment that they can grab off saga.
I feel like Standard and Modern would be healthier with more Torpor Orb effects.
I remember trading in a couple of Vraskas contempt for a draft buy in.
Standard opinion: probably not, control is the only one who would run them and midrange/ramp are the only ones hated out by them and that match up is already leaning towards control pretty hard.
I mean if their intent is to slow the deck down then they should yeet Thoracle to make the actual Win itself take longer, IIRC Hogaak got stronger after the first couple of targeted bannings because the original iterations of the deck were kind of awkwardly built to work with Bridge from Below and when that got yeeted the deck re-tuned itself into something stronger by getting rid of that package.
I feel Standard would be healthier without 12 Large sets in it..and Modern would be healthier without all the mana cost cheating.
Make more inconstant, not slow down. The problem from the serious spike perspective isn't yet win rate it's that it's a non deterministic combo that can wiff and is able to shit up the stack (unlike Ruby Storm). You can't really scoop when they start going off and you have no answers because they can draw enough non-lands in a row to brick. If the deck doesn't deserve a ban for win rate they still might ban it out for shitting up match times like they did for Top and SUPPOSEDLY did for Yorion.
KCI that is all.
Speaking of...
"We designed a commander set and had an intern tell us it was ok to call it a Modern set."
The set being referenced is Assassin's Creed, not MH3. The consultants for MH3 were convinced by the lead designer of AC to look at the AC set in addition to MH3.
This surprises me exactly zero.
Universes Within where Jace has trooned out into Cleopatra because the new set everyone is a woman instead of a furry.
Yeah they are really bad about getting the universes within shit printed and distributed though.