Against The Dying Of The Light

You’re actually going to do it, aren’t you WotC? You’re actually thinking about banning Jace, just because someone dreamt up an ass-fuckingly brilliant deck that’s completely crushing everything in its path. And because no-one has been as equally ass-fuckingly brilliant to find the deck that beats it, you’re going to take away the best thing Standard has going for it right now, Jace the everloving Mindsculptor.
Sure, I can understand it. When something’s broke, you gotta fix it, and Kibler broke the format. You gave him the tools – Stoneforge Mystic, Mythic Equipment, a do-it-yourself army of birds and the best motherfucking card advantage machine printed since Necropotence – and now you’re thinking about packing up your toys and going home. Maybe even let us trade in those Jaces for a pack.

Don’t do it.

There are some people out there who like to win with creatures. A Wild Nacatl here, a Goblin Guide there, even the occasional Baneslayer Angel. Me? I think those people are fucking ludicrous. Why should I have to get into the cut and thrust of combat damage when I can end the game, right here, with a Storm count of 10 aimed at your head? Why the hell should I care whether or not your Mermaid is getting in for 2 a turn when I’m about to force you to draw your entire deck?

I want to win with non-creature Spells, goddamnit, and you’re pushing me in the other direction.

I get it. I understand that you need to sell your product and people smooshing critters into each other seems like a load of fun to newer players. Players who haven’t played a Turn 2 Painter’ Servant into a Turn 3 Grindstone. So you’re upping the level of critters constantly and dialing back the power level of everything else.

Well fuck that.

You know what I used to like in Standard? Playing a Bitterblossom and screwing my opponent with a well timed Cryptic Command. I used to enjoy laying down a Vivid land and finding my path to resolving that Cruel Control. Hell I really, really liked casting a Mind’s Desire for watching my poor, deluded, creature playing opponent scoop.

But you still keep toning it down.

Give me a Dream Halls any day. Give me a Mind Over Matter, a Tendril of Agony, a High Tide, a Time Vault, a Necropotence, whatever. And don’t just shove one out there, like you have with Jace in Standard.

That’s right; instead of dialing back the power level of non-creature spells, goddamn ramp them up! Let a thousand overpowered flowers bloom! People love the older formats, Vintage and Legacy, and the least restricted format Commander, because they get to do crazy, overpowered things all the time. Why has Splinter Twin combo become so popular? It’s not a reaction to Caw Blade – ok, it’s partly a reaction to Caw Blade – but it’s mostly because people want to do broken things, and hitting your opponent for a zillion damage in one turn is broken. Gimme more broken.

The problem has been that Jace has no competition. You’ve leveraged so much power onto creatures – Survival of the Fittest onto Fauna Shama, Enlightened Tutor onto Stoneforge Mystic, Donate onto Bazaar Trader, even Cabal Coffers on Nirkana Revenant – that the other spells are hurting. You went and printed Baneslayer Angel, and people asked whether creatures could get more broken, so you printed the Titan cycle next. Jeez. Give an enchantment a chance – in a world of creatures, where the hell is my Abyss, my Moat (Norn’s Annex is not it), my Ensnaring Bridge? We’ve got one reasonably costed non-creature spell to compete with these, and his name is Jace, and you’re thinking of taking him away.

What a fuck.

You want to balance a format then print multiple spells of the same power level that take radically different approaches to winning the game, rather than a bunch of motherfucking creatures suffering from perennial power creep and one good non-creature spell. Gimme back the option of winning the game without ever worrying about the red zone. Make me wonder what the hell the strategy is on the other side of the table. Is he going to burn me out? Mill me? Take infinite turns? Take my turns away from me forever? Stroke me? Storm out? Or even bash with dumb, dumb creatures. I don’t care, so long as there are options. Powerful options.

Mind blowing, holy-shit, did-that-really-just-happen options.

There’s this moment in a Magic game where, just for a split second, I feel like I’m actually slinging spells. It doesn’t happen in every game, well certainly not the ones where I lose. But these moments happen when you pull off the incredible act, where suddenly your opponent realizes you’re not even playing the same game as them, you’re on some completely different level that they didn’t even know about, and they’ve already lost.

I haven’t felt that moment in Standard for a long time.

I don’t know what you’ve got in store with Innistrad and M12, but M12 currently looks like beater heaven. Not a hint of a Fastbond, or a Flash, or a Tinker. I’m crossing my fingers but things aren’t looking too crash hot. People were just starting to get interested in Legacy when you came along and homogenized the format with Mental Misstep. Slow the format down? Why the fuck do that? I want the Turn One kill. Hell, I want the Turn Zero kill. If there were a way to kill your opponent before we’d even shuffled I’d accept that too. Just to be part of that experience.

I love it when you print cards that are busted. I love starting at a card and knowing that this is what playing Magic is all about. Vintage quality power. I loved the idea of Mox Opal until I saw the execution. Great, yet another nerfed non-creature spell. Fuck yeah.

So don’t make just one card that’s busted. Make a stack. Make it so they have little synchronicity. Allow ‘em to attack the game from different directions. Make ‘em so you have to donate a kidney to a starving kid every time you play one. Make ‘em cheap, and reliable, and fucking awesome. You’ve done a great job making creatures stupid-good at the expense of every other card that’s not called Jace The Mindsculptor. Time for the other cards to play catchup.

So what of Jace. Are you really going to pull that trigger? You printed a two-mana tutor on a bear for the most powerful equipment perhaps ever printed (alas, poor Jitte) and you’re going to place the blame for Cawblade on Jace? You printed a two-mana Ancestral Recall tutor for 1/1 flyers and it’s Jace who has to take the bullet? Those creatures you printed, those creatures you upped the powerlevel of, are going to be the reason that the best non-creature permanent in the game is going to be banned?

Seems like a pretty fucking poor outcome to me.

Ok, he’s ridiculous. You stuck four effects that never cost a drop of mana again to activate on the one card. You gave him, of all things, Brainstorm-on-a-stick. Fateseal for benefits. Unsummon for protection. And then added a way to win the game as well. Absurd. But he doesn’t need banning. If you’d given Tezzeret some extra toys to play with we wouldn’t even be having this discussion. If there was a single Enchantment of the same power level of Moat or The Abyss to help, Cawblade might not even be a deck.

We need answers, not bannings. We need power level on all manner of permanents, not just creature creep. We need variety, not mono-redzone-solutions.

There will always be the best deck. Before Cawblade there was Valakut. Before Valakut there was Jund. Before Jund there was Five Colour Control. Before Five Colour Control there was Fae. And so on, forever more ad infinitum. Affinity. ANT. Miracle Grow. Full English Breakfast. Sligh.

There will always be a best deck. There doesn’t always have to be a best card. And if there is, for fuck sake don’t make it a creature.

I can’t stop you from banning Jace. Well, maybe I can bust into the WotC offices and distract you with dick jokes until you commit suicide, but that seems unlikely. But I can encourage you to stop and think about where you’re taking Magic, and what options you’re cutting out of it. Because, at least for me, that moment I talked about, that moment of pure, unadulterated awesomeness, that moment in Standard doesn’t exist, and I’m not sure how long it’ll be until it comes back.

Killing Jace might just be the signal that it’s not.