Can We Fix the Banlist Announcement Schedule?

what's up guys Doom M here and welcome back to another discussion video on the channel I saw in the comments and the content and just the overall numbers that the discussion videos that we did last week really overperform so you guys seem to like that and I think that we are going to be mixing some more discussion style content in the mix cuz the gameplay is good for what it is but I kind kind of like having these discussions CU I feel like it really gets more people engaged now as far as what today's discussion topic is all about if you guys didn't hear this past Tuesday there was a weekly magic stream and Blake had specifically mentioned one particular thing about the band list editor roll the clip first I want to be very clear we are not changing our date or issuing any kind of off cycle ban our announced date for the next BNR is August 26th and we firm believe that sticking to our announced date and not surprising people with random dates uh is the best for magic and the best players we tried living in a world a few years ago if you may remember uh where bands could happen at any time and it it didn't work for a variety of reasons it didn't work we want players to have confidence uh in their testing in their deck choices and to have firm known dates when things can change that isn't shifting that is our philosophy for tabletop now that's said the results of pro tour modern Horizons 3 and the subsequent timing of the rcq season have caused us to start taking a look at the timing of our BNR announcements in relation to our play season so right so Blake mentions a couple of things in this particular announcement regarding modern ban list philosophy and the history so first and foremost one of the important things that they said is they tried doing banss at any time or off-cycle bands and it didn't work for whatever reason now I went and did a little bit of research because I wasn't exactly sure on the timeline and from what I found it looks like the off cycle or not scheduled band announcement started in about January of 2020 and ended in May 20123 let's take a look at some of the cards that were banned during that time oo thief of crowns from thron of el drain MOX opal not from thron ofel drain but largely banned because of cards from from Throne Andor mh1 MOS sylus again not a new card but was only really banned because of War of the spark K Once Upon a Time from Throne Arkham's astrolab from mh1 field of the dead from Magic 20 Mystic Sanctuary from Throne of Al drain Simeon spirit guide tibal trickery oo Titan of Nature's Wrath lurus of the dream Den yoron the skynad and that was the last band prior to when they went back and did their scheduled band announcements into May of 2023 now if you look at all these cards they kind of have something similar in common a lot of these bands are from a period of time where magic was just designed a little bit differently and they needed to have these weekly bands to be able to keep up with all of these cards that were being problematic and they realized that and that's why they did that I think the general philosophy is that when they stopped doing fire design they didn't have to go back to schedule weekly or uh off cycle beta announcements but the reality of the fact is with some of the cards that they're printing in these Horizon sets and other universes Beyond supplemental products I really think that with those sets specifically we need to take a more in-depth look and potentially have ban announcements more frequently than we would like to with sets like that another thing that Blake mentions is that they want players to have confidence in their testing and deck choices well if the general consensus is that natu is going to get the on August 26th the people who are preparing for rcq in the first 3 weeks prior to August 26th how can those players have confidence in their testing or deck choices when they're preparing for a format that likely isn't going to exist part of the way into the format and also it's very difficult for people to purchase cards right now because again you don't want to be buying cards for a Nadu deck that you assume is going to not be legal after August 26th which to be frank is not that much of the rcq season but it's enough to cause an annoyance for me personally I think when I checked the spice rack website there was about seven or eight scheduled rcq prior to the 26th I don't know if I'm going to play any of those I have a deck ready to go I have boros energy which I was planning on playing for most of the Season anyways but my card choices are going to be extremely different versus Nadu world and non- Nadu world so it's really tough for me to justify potentially going to one of these rqs when I'm playing a format that is likely not going to exist and not only do people not want to invest in Nadu it's actually difficult just in a general sense the format is so warped around natu as of right now where if you look at all the top decks they all have very specific signboard plans for it like a ton of hate cards and just the metag game as a whole has shifted so much more to the lower end of the curve to be able to make up for the fact that you're going to be playing against natu x amount of times and you really need to build your deck so much more aggressively and not just in cyboard cards but also in the way that you are structuring your deck if you're playing like a Jun mid-range deck stuff like normal mid-range can't compete and you see the mid-range deck of the format in boros energy is playing 8 to 12 One Drops up up to 8 to 12 one drops and they're lowering their curve so much just to make up for the fact that they need to kill the NAU player before they establish the combo another thing Blake mentions is they want to look at at the timing of the BNR announcements so as of right now they have the announcements specifically tied to set releases now I think the reason that this particular BNR announcement is being so heavily scrutinized is just the timing of it all modern Horizons 3 came out 2 weeks after mh3 that's their scheduled band window and I think that's a reasonable time frame if you have a tournament that ties with a release of it say maybe the week after but the problem with modern Horizons 3 is the Pro Tour was three weeks after the set came out so the ban announcement maybe people don't even realize this was actually the Monday before the pro tour and a lot of people were questioning prior to the ban announcement they were going to say oh well if something is a problem are they going to ban anything 6 days before the proor and they explicitly came out and said no we're not going to do that and I think that's great I think that banning a card 6 days before the pro tour especially when you have these pro teams who have spent multiple weeks testing and if you're going to say well we're actually going to ban a card 6 days before the tournament haha go find the new deck that's unfortunate for those players so I understand their choice to make the ban announcement and not until after the protor the problem with that is what happens when you have a situation like Nadu you don't really have a good window again it's just very unfortunate the timing of all this where the ban announcement was a week before the pro tour and then then the next scheduled ban announcement is not until Bloom bro which just happens to fall a couple of weeks into the aru season it's just everything about it is very very unfortunate another comment that they made on the live stream was that they want players to know what changes are going to occur well in advance of things actually changing it's really difficult to do that and honestly it's kind of funny that we're in the situation that we're in right now because even though they haven't explicitly stated that natu is going to go I mean if you look at the you the public perception on Twitter everybody assumes that for example there was a tournament that just happened this past weekend scg Baltimore where spoilers there were five copies of natu in the top eight four in the top four hm tell me where I've heard that before and the person who won the event was misplaced Ginger shout out to misplace Ginger great content creator but if you look at this tweet from displ Ginger he said natu is miserable I thought it would be easy do the thing not a chance deck is insane play pattern is bad I played so badly but it didn't matter I felt bad at some points obviously it should be Bann but I didn't think I'd have the opportunity to play a broken deck like this and I get that sentiment I was somebody who when hak was a thing I played a lot of hak when alrai was a thing I played a lot of alrai and it does feel good to play Broken decks like that but it's almost like natu is different where it doesn't doesn't actually feel that good to play natu the combo itself takes forever so Cory bowmaster did some coverage of the event this past weekend and I was watching a match it was Steve Stillman on mono against his opponent playing natu and I want to say his opponent took at least a 15-minute turn and then ultimately just ended up passing the turn anyways because I think there was some Miss sequence of lands or didn't have enough blue to cast thos orle whatever it's stuff like that it makes the tournaments take way too long it's too similar to stuff like Casey in second Sunrise but yeah even the people who are playing the deck and winning the tournaments with the deck still say that it's not that fun and then another tweet that I want to point you to is one from Ari lox who did play the same event this past weekend I believe Ari ended up going seven- two for I think a top 32 finish don't quote me on that but he said if you plan on attending a modern rcq before September just don't instead and then follows that up with if you say oh I'll just play NADA and win it will also be bad the actual decisions are uninteresting most of your day will be taken up by meaningless game actions to avoid a 4% fail rate you will want to be done and gone but the deck will not let you lose and leave so with all of that said I know we said a lot of words about natu and I don't want to keep harping on the subject I know I say that but I'm still making these videos but this was supposed to be a video about specifically just the structure of the ban announcement so let's get back into that now a lot of people are very upset at watsi for not making an emergency announcement because we all assume what's going to happen the question is how do we fix that well there's a couple of things which Blake did kind of address this so the first is to schedule the ban announcements right after the PT now the question is do you remove the set release ban announcement window and just swap that with a PT or do you just add a couple more ban announcement Windows there's a couple of positives and negatives the biggest negative is if you just add a couple of band announcements throughout the year maybe there's too many and maybe there's too many opport for formats to change but is that even necessarily a bad thing I don't think it is and the other issue is if you only do it after the PT maybe there's a set release like I think Bloom bur is a great example of this because bloomo I believe it or not I found this out the other day doesn't have a protor attached to it the bloom set is coming out the next big event is not until worlds which is going to be after dusk comes out so if you had a situation where oh will say we'll only have a ban announcement after the pro tour and there was FL and behold an issue from bloomo you couldn't actually fix that for another 2 to 3 months which is definitely a downside another potential change is to specifically have scheduled banned and restricted announcements before an RQ season starts now I don't know exactly what the time frame is because Blake did mention they want people to know about changes well in advance what exactly defines well in advance probably somewhere between 4 to 6 weeks it's usually about the time that it takes to get cards in the mail for some people so if you have a specific ban announcement window right before the rcq season if you know you're going to have a problem then you can just get rid of it there and then people can go about their testing prior to rcq season starting a lot of words were said today and lo and behold at the end of the day personally I think that more band and restricted announcements are better than less right now and I say less even though there is technically one attached to every set window and with the amount of sets they're pumping out maybe it's more than I think there is and I also believe that the only reason that we're having this conversation is just the timing of the BNR announcement and I correct me if I'm wrong let me know in the comments I don't remember the BNR window regard like the the last Pro tours that were this year I don't know if the BNR was before the pro tour and I don't know if that was just specifically this one pro tour that they decided to the scheduling a little bit off I don't know if they wanted to give people more time with modern Horizons 3 before the tournament but at the end of the day very unfortunate timing I personally believe at least I think the best for this is probably to just have specific BNR announcements attached to RSQ Seasons rather than the the sets themselves because there's just a lot of churn and if you have a specific window with the set itself you say okay two weeks after the set we're going to talk about bands and then 3 weeks after somebody finds oh here's the geological appraiser combo deck that's just to use an example then you run into some issues there so honestly I think we just need to have a couple more scheduled Windows keep the ones that are for the set releases but just attach some that are specific to rcq Seasons and I think that would fix a lot of the issues but I would love to hear from you guys let me know what you think in the comment section down below let me know your thoughts on the announcement or the announcement of no announcement that the announcement is going to happen on the announced date let me know which you think would be the best way to fix this I would love to hear from you guys thumbs up subscribe to the channel and I'll see you in the next one adios