The new Extended is fast - terrifyingly fast. While doing coverage today, every reporter saw turn 3 kills that lost to even faster turn 2 kills. The olden days of Counterspells and Duress are gone - why waste time trying to disrupt your opponent when you can just kill him before he can do anything?
Let me repeat that: A two-mana spell that can stop anything is too slow.
With that in mind, we asked some of the top pros what they thought of the new format to see what they thought, and to see how they'd fix Extended if they disliked it.
The interesting thing? Almost all of them agreed that something needed to be banned.
Rob Dougherty: The bannings ended up mixing up what broken decks people could play, but it didn't really take away any of the brokenness. I understand banning Entomb - but the primary deck that you take away by banning is weaker than the other decks that get played now. If you're afraid of staring down a Verdant Force on Turn 2, fine - but now you stare down dead on turn 2.
The problem is that there are too many cards to ban, and when they ban I think they ban the wrong things. When you ban a card, you have to look at the cards and say,"What's too powerful for its mana cost?" - but what Wizards is doing is looking at decks and banning the key cards in popular decks, like Dark Ritual. They should be looking for undercosted effects and banning them.
StarCityGames: So what would you ban to make the format healthy?
Mike Pustilnik: Hermit Druid, Goblin Recruiter, Chrome Mox, Tinker, Goblin Charbelcher.
Dougherty: Mike's list, plus Isochron Scepter, Exhume, Life / Death, Reanimate, and any other cheap reanimation spell I missed. Basically, reanimation needs to cost four. But if you ban all of those things, you'd have to take a serious look at Psychatog.
Pustilnik: But Tog loses to Rock.
Dougherty: True. That's why I said you'd have to look at it, and not necessarily ban it. But then again, would that be a format that's better than this one? It may be that if you ban all of these things, you create a new Type II, and people wouldn't like it. Like, it just seems random to ban some of the broken cards and not others of the broken cards.
In Extended, a lot of the game is over by turn 3. I don't know if I like that.
Osyp Lebedovicz: It's very fast. It's funny that the three cards they banned are as not as powerful as Chrome Mox. The new Extended isn't as fast as I thought it would be - but it's still much faster than Extended last year or the year before. I kind of like it.
When they banned the cards, everyone went,"Oh yeah, good job," and now they're saying,"Oh, no, they f**ked up again." That's not fair. It's a work in progress.
Besides, when you're winning, every format's good.
StarCityGames: So what, if anything, would you ban?
Osyp: Right now I'd say Chrome Mox - but if you ban Chrome Mox, then Tinker just becomes too powerful; the combo decks can't possibly compete. I'm not sure what I'd do; R&D will have to see how powerful Mox is.
Kai Budde: I hate the format. Basically, if you want to win, you have to build a deck that wins on turn 2 or turn 3, and if you do that it always becomes really inconsistent.
Extended should be reduced to Magic Online's format, where you go back to Invasion and that's it - but whatever you do, you definitely have to get rid of all the broken stuff. Grim Monolith has to go, Goblin Recruiter has to go, Chrome Mox has to go...
Tomi Walamies: It's more versatile than I thought. Aside from artifact decks, I've seen a lot of decks out there. But there are too many artifact decks, I think. I'm pretty sure they didn't ban Grim Monolith because here they are, just having made this new all-artifact set, they want people to play with it. But other than that? It seems nice.
The thing that bothers me about speed is that you have to mulligan more, and then you draw less cards so it's more random. It was worse at Worlds. At Worlds, it seemed like the decks were taking more mulligans. Or maybe I'm just getting luckier. It seems to be healthier than Worlds.
StarCityGames: So what would you ban, if anything?
Walamies: If you ban Grim Monolith, then Goblins might go over the top. Goblin Warchief is probably what you want to do.
Gabriel Nassif: It looks terrible, but it doesn't seem that difficult to break. Everyone's playing Goblins and artifact decks, so I guess you can build something that's good against both. It's bad - but not that bad, I think.
My games weren't very long. I think all of my six matches were over by turn 5, making it really difficult to outplay someone. You just play the cards you have. I guess that there are lots of skills in the deck construction, but it's not in the game.
If I had to break this format and I knew that the metagame was going to be like this, I probably would try for... I dunno. The Rock seems okay, or maybe Land Destruction, or artifact removal. Somewhere like that. There was a guy at table one who was playing red LD with Tangle Wires - not Goblins. I think he's 6-0.
StarCityGames: So what would you ban?
Gabriel Nassif: Probably Grim Monolith or Tinker... That's what's everybody's saying, the artifact decks are too strong. And probably Goblin Charbelcher, too. But I'm not even sure about that, because you can just load your sideboard with Rack and Ruins and Uktabi Orangutans.
Mike Turian: I don't like Extended that much; I think Chrome Mox makes it too fast. There are a lot of degenerate decks out there, with ridiculous hands; I've mulliganed to four and won on the third turn, and I've mulliganed to four and almost won. My opponent went"Birds of Paradise" and I just killed him.
After sideboarding, though? That's when it becomes really interesting. It becomes this mental battle. Even though the games aren't very long, the challenge of trying to put the right cards in becomes the trick. I didn't really like Extended beforehand; I never liked it before the bannings, but and after... Well, who knows? Chrome Mox is just too good.
I think it's fine. It's Magic. I still enjoy playing Magic; even though it's not the best format I've ever played, but it's still good.
StarCityGames: So what would you ban?
Turian: If I was gonna ban something, I'd ban Goblin Warchief, I'd ban Chrome Mox, I'd ban Tinker... That would be a good start. I'd probably ban something else, too, but I'd really have to sit down and think about it.
I think it really needs to have the rotation. I think Tempest and Saga offer most of the problem cards, and just like Type One the format gets too big, with too must fast mana. I mean, Reanimate's a one-mana reanimation spell - no other spells like that exist in Extended!
The format just needs less combo. But at the same time, you don't always wanna be killing combo. Combo's fine; it's just not as fun.
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