The Extended format right now is a sad one. To put it simply, the format is too fast. There are many factors that pointed to the outcome of this fact, and simply
only a select few solutions.

In today's Extended, if you cannot kill or at least put yourself in a position to kill your opponent by turn 3 or 4 consistently, your deck is considered too
slow. This is done in a number of ways, although the core of these lightning-fast decks use the same cards.

Nearly all of the top decks at Pro Tour: New Orleans used the same cards. To clarify: By"top decks," I do not mean simply"making Day 2," but"making the Top 16 or better." Still, the majority of Day 2 used the same cards as well. These cards were:

City of Traitors
Ancient Tomb
Tinker
Grim Monolith
Chrome Mox

The first four were run in sets of four in seven of the Top 8 decks. They were run in both the Severance/Belcher decks as well as the various forms of Tinker. Even Psychatog builds ran Chrome Mox - that's card disadvantage in a control deck!

How could that happen? Because without it, Counterspell becomes too slow, thus resulting in countermagic itself being too slow.

Turn 2 activated Mindslavers are quite possible in this environment. All over the tournament, you would see a player watching helplessly as people were being
beaten by their own cards. In the Goblin Charbelcher decks, they could kill by turn 2 or 3 very easily. All of these decks are propelled by the same thing: fast
artifact mana.

This is bad because it takes away from deck innovation. Players will now be forced to play with these cards, or if not, be beaten by the players that do. Sixteen to twenty of your deck's cards are decided for you by the environment.

"How did it come to this?" you ask."Weren't all of those bannings and gigantic double set rotating supposed to slow the environment down? Why were some of the decks tier 1.5 at best last year, and are now so amazing?" The answers are a bit complicated, and when examined by themselves, are not necessarily such a bad thing. However, in this case, the problem as a whole is larger than the sum of its parts. These parts are:

1) Mirrodin is released.
This set includes several key culprits. Among them are Goblin Charbelcher, Chrome Mox, Myr Incubator, and on a lesser note, the artifact lands.

2) The banning of Entomb.
This leaves Black as one of the weaker colors instead of being one of the strongest. With less reason to play the color, hand disruption goes down.

3) The gap in between Rath Cycle/Urza's Block and the more recent sets.
These sets were not designed to ever co-exist. The older sets, are, granted, faster. However, there are many cards in the newer sets that are more powerful, just insanely costed.

How many decks include cards from Mercadian Masques, Invasion, Odyssey, or Onslaught blocks? Just a few goblins from Onslaught are being used.

All of these sets were designed to work with the previous block - not blocks created three or four years ago. R&D mostly focuses on Block and Standard environments when they test cards, so they probably never thought about Mana Severance and Goblin Charbelcher, or Myr Incubator and Mindslaver in Tinker. If they did figure them out, then they severely underestimated the consistency in which those cards could be played.

So this previously uncharted bonding of the old and the new has created an unhealthy environment. What to do?

Well, in the future - the newer,"neutered" blocks, so to speak - will become the only ones in Extended... But this won't happen until the season after next. Therefore, the simplest way to fix the problem is to go on a banning spree, much like was done after Pro Tour: Rome, the last time this super-speedy artifact mana got too crazy.

The cards I would suggest banning:

Goblin Charbelcher
Mindslaver
Grim Monolith
Ancient Tomb
City of Traitors
Goblin Recruiter
...and maybe Chrome Mox as well.

The cards listed are pretty obvious if you've been reading this article, it's probably the cards not listed that one might question. Metalworker, by itself, is only very good in an artifact deck, but a 1/2 for three is not exactly broken. If getting the sucker
out by turn 3 could be kept to a premium, he should be able to function as he was intended to do.

Tinker is very similar, if you take out the cards that make it playable by turn 1, along with the cards that make it so broken, then by itself it's not so bad. The
artifact lands if taken out slow all of the decks in Extended right now by a turn, which is the goal - to slow Extended down.

Goblin Recruiter can be combined in too many ways, and it is simply just easier to not let him play with the other kids anymore.

That pretty much sums it up. Extended is bad right now, so bad in fact, that unless you really think you have a chance of making it on the Tour, it probably wouldn't be very fun to play in PTQ's this season. Unless the DCI makes some changes this year, you can count this writer out of Extended PTQ's.

So please, R&D - just finish off the mistake that was fast artifact mana, and finally give us a fun, and diverse enough field that metagaming is almost completely useless. Pretty please, with whipped cream and a cherry on top?