I am one of the people who has, for a long time, been advocating the removal of Dark Ritual from tournament Magic - ever since Rath block saw the cheesy 'bad player makes Top-8 with Hatred AGAIN!' problems. When 6th Edition arrived without the Ritual, I jumped for joy, feeling that it signaled that it would not be reprinted and so rotate out of Standard in the fullness of time - its reprint in Masques kind of popped that little bubble. Now that Dark Ritual has finally been sanctioned I find myself feeling conflicting emotions:

- I'm glad to see that there is wide recognition that Dark Ritual is a problem card.
- This was not the right format to ban it in.

I have felt that the major problem with Dark Ritual is not that it is fundamentally overpowered, simply that it produces extreme design constraints on expensive black spells - R&D have to be very careful about printing powerful black spells which are offset by a high casting cost, because Dark Ritual can be used to negate that cost.

In the past, we have felt this with many cards, much feared at one time or another but which would have been neutered somewhat without the Dark Ritual (or similar mana burst cards). I'm thinking of cards like Nether Void, Necropotence, Living Death (in the '14 TurboDeath' deck), Hatred, Persecute, Yawgmoth's Will, Phyrexian Negator and currently I suppose you could even add Academy Rector to that list.

For this reason, I feel that there is a strong case for the removal of both Dark Ritual (and possibly even Grim Monolith) from Standard tournaments. And I would foresee that the immediate drop in black's playability that would result would rapidly be offset by new, more powerful, four and five casting cost spells finally being pulled from the folder marked 'Broken By Dark Ritual' and put into new expansions.

But Dark Ritual was not banned from Standard, and so it remains just as much of a restriction on card design as it ever was, there will be no new powerful black spells arriving, because they are still broken by Dark Ritual. Instead the Dark Ritual was removed from what is almost certainly the fastest tournament format currently available, and I fail to see why it was chosen.

- Hatred was not a dominant deck
- Necro-Control was not a dominant deck
- There were better cards to take from Necro-Donate, assuming that was the target of the bannings.

The only reasonable explanation would be a combination of wanting to kill Necro-Donate in the short term, and knock Necro-Control back a Tier in the long term. But in this case Donate could have been hurt by other choices, Necro wasn't a direct threat, and the choice of Dark Ritual has hit an innocent bystander - Hatred.

There HAD to be a better choice.

BUT

This is my secondary argument - this goes out to everybody who is currently shredding their Swamps because they will never be able to play black again once Dark Ritual goes out.

Black is not dead.

I say again - black is NOT dead.

We black players have to own up to the fact that black is Magic's problem child - it's basic abilities (Removal, Discard, Recursion) are so fundamentally strong that there will always be room for black in any field. As a result Black has always led the way in getting cards banned:

Mind Twist (Discard, first card banned for being overpowered)
Hypnotic Spectre (Discard, first and only?, creature banned)
Hymn To Tourach (more discard)
Yawgmoth's Will (Recursion, combo maker)
Recurring Nightmare (Recursion, combo maker)
Black is fundamentally the strongest color in Magic, it is certainly strong enough to survive the loss of a single card.

On a thread about the bannings currently running on The Dojo, J.Turiya seems to feel that the loss of Ritual is a killer blow to Black Weenie...

"Feel the anger of my third turn Negator...fifth turn Hatred! Ooh...scary!"

Yes, black weenie suffers but only to the extent that you have to take out the two cards that Mr. Turiya just mentioned because those cards were on the list of those I made earlier - cards made into a problem by Dark Ritual in the first place. For those of us who have recently been spoilt rotten by playing with Ritual it might come as a shock to learn that a 5/5 Trample creature is still pretty damn good for the third turn (second with CoTraitors). And having played Hatred.dec in two PTQs so far I have yet to cast a single Hatred.

Black weenie is still as fast, or faster, than White weenie.
Black weenie still has better removal than White Weenie.
Black weenie sure as hell still has better disruption than White Weenie.
Whichever way you look at it, black weenie is not about to give up and go home because it lost the Ritual.

There is a stronger case for the loss of Dark Ritual putting a permanent damper on Necro-Control. The loss of Dark Ritual effectively means you have to take Drain Life out of the deck, it also means the deck cannot simply Consult for a second turn Necropotence with Duress and Unmask backup when it plays against mono-blue. But having said that a few things are worth bearing in mind:

- A lot of people wanted to take Necropotence out of circulation, so few should complain.
- Necro-Control wasn't even the strongest form of black control anyway, Pox was much stronger.
- Pox doesn't need the Dark Rituals - it uses them, yes, but it can lose them and barely notice.

This is what a sample Extended Pox deck currently looks like. You can easily see that with few expensive spells - Unmask at B3 is the most expensive, but you would rarely cast it so the BBB of Pox is more accurate - the loss of Dark Ritual is not necessarily going to be noticed at all. It could easily be replaced by Mox Diamond if it became necessary, although the deck would likely have to play 24 land and three Moxes.

4 Duress
4 Funeral Charm
4 DARK RITUAL
3 Demonic Consultation
4 Mind Swords
4 Pox
4 Unmask
4 Cursed Scroll
4 Phyrexian Negator
2 Steel Golem
19 Swamp
4 Wasteland

Sideboard
4 Diabolic Edict
3 Perish
3 Spinning Darkness
3 Null Rod
2 Masticore

The loss of Dark Ritual is undoubtedly a metagame-shifting banning, but although I cannot support the decision to remove it from Extended at this particular moment (at least not without a matched banning in Standard) I do not feel that it will have the destructive effect on competitive black decks that many people have claimed.

David Sutcliffe
d_sutcliffe@hotmail.com
TEAM CAND!MAN
http://members.tripod.co.uk/candiman/index.htm
(but don't visit just yet because I'll be updating it in a day or two)